Torrilin

Like everyone else suggests, get an oven thermometer. I'll also second or third the suggestion of quarry tiles or a pizza stone. My oven is not very good, and the pizza stone helps a lot to take it from useless to functional for baking. Also, get religious about preheating. A solid preheat with the pizza stone in will let me bake bread and get decent results, produce evenly baked brownies, and turn out flourless chocolate cakes that haven't burnt. I also can roast things and get tasty end results. Without the preheat and pizza stone, things get very iffy. If you're still having issues after improving your equipment by cleaning it, getting accurate temperature readings and adding more thermal mass, I'd do some diagnostic tests. Baking a batch of sugar cookies without rotating the pans and with enough pans at once to fill the oven to the edges should give you a "map" of how heat distributes within your oven. Don't take them out until every cookie is at least done, it's ok if some are burnt. The burnt ones are your oven's hot spots, the ones that took the longest to cook are the cool spots. There are suggestions for other tests in the pastry and baking forum. Emily

I stick with the instructions in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It sounds like those instructions are a fairly straightforward version of Escoffier, which makes sense given the authors' training. Hollandaise techniques are also very handy for getting a smooth avgolemono emulsion. If you're careful, you can get the soup to reheat without getting grainy. Emily

There's a lot of schools of thought on fried potatoes (by which I mean raw cubed potatoes seasoned with salt and pepper, fried in a frying pan, possibly seasoned with other ingredients if you feel like it). Here's how I do it: Start with a well seasoned heavy skillet that browns well. Cast iron is ideal, because it has *very* good thermal characteristics for this purpose. Preheat the pan (with fat if you're using beef dripping, lard, bacon grease, peanut oil or other oils with a high smoke point, or without fat if you're using something with a low smoke point). I usually preheat on medium to medium high heat on most stoves. Scrub and cut up your potatoes, do not remove the skins. Don't rinse the cubes or do anything else to them before putting them in the frying pan with the hot fat. Season liberally with your seasonings and get them lightly coated with fat. Now for the hard part. Let them sit. Don't touch them. Don't mess with them. Just leave them alone until you smell that they're so deeply browned that they're on the edge of burning. *Then* you may turn them. Now, leave them alone again until you get that smell. Turn 'em. This is a good time to test for doneness, so poke a few cubes with a fork or a spatula or whatever to see if they're soft. If they're soft, you can eat 'em. If they're not soft, let them sit until that familiar browned aroma shows up again, turn 'em and check for doneness again. If they're not done after 2 turns, knock the heat down some to slow the cooking down. You might have to go 4-5 turns or even more if the pan is really loaded up with potatoes. If you've got fine dice, it might take less time. Figure this process will take something like 1-1.5 hours with a 12" cast iron skillet and a stove that puts out consistent low heat. This is *not* a quick meal. If the heat is too high, the potatoes will burn. If the heat is too low, they'll suck up fat like sponges and taste greasy. The idea is to balance out high heat early so you get a nice crust started and don't end up with greasebomb taters, and low heat later so you get potatoes that are actually *cooked*. And if you ever have the chance, do 'em at least once with well rendered beef dripping. They *almost* don't need salt then. Emily

Get a big slab of beef to roast at night when things have cooled down. Grill will work too. Scale big to the number of people you're feeding. Roast it til it's on the medium rare side, then stick in the fridge and let it cool. You now have solid gold for summer meals, since you can have cold roast beef sandwiches, salads with roast beef, just barely warmed slices with veggies... All manner of options are open . The other thing to do is roast a couple of chickens and treat in the same way. Same kinds of ideas work. Basically, you're mass prepping the meat so you don't need to cook as often, and cool or cold meat with a lot of summer fruits and veggies is better than hot meat. Emily

Sure. Who the hell *wants* to waste a perfectly good carcass by tossing it? For home use, a stock is meant to use up trimmings that are still perfectly good and would otherwise be wasted. Technically, for the whitest possible stock, you want uncooked bones and meat. That doesn't mean don't make stock with the cooked stuff tho, just don't *mix* it with your most pristine white stock. In most very classical French cookbooks, you'll see recipes for white veal stock, brown veal stock, white chicken stock, brown chicken stock, and possibly a few more. The brown stocks are made with browned or cooked bones and meat, the white stocks are made with uncooked bones and meat. Since I'm not going through anything like enough beef or veal on the bone to make even the most debased meat stocks (only 2 of us), and I don't have an infinite grocery budget, I stick with one stock: "brown" chicken stock. It actually comes out about the same golden yellow as the whitest chicken stocks I've made, and I can't tell the difference in flavor. If I were really on the ball, I'd also keep an onion/carrot/leek sort of veggie stock on hand. Emily

Depends on what you want to use it for. If you want aspic, then it's a problem if it doesn't gel. If you want it for thin soup, it probably doesn't matter. For purposes in between those two extremes, it's somewhat a matter of taste. I use the whole bird's bones because it seems to produce better results. That way I get wing bones, neck bones, leg bones etc. I just have to save the carcasses after we have roast chicken . Around here, it's not cheap to buy wings or necks for stock, and the normal "of course you get the bones with your boneless chicken" that I'm used to doesn't happen since you're not dealing with the farmer/butcher. Emily

Huh, when I use butter on a chicken, I use salted *g*. I prefer salted butter. Keeps better. Emily

I've got a ~16 qt stockpot. I would not expect stock made in it to gel unless I used something like the bones of 3-4 whole chickens to make my stock. I *get* perfectly servicable and tasty stock with the bones of a single chicken, but such stock would need to be very much reduced before I'd expect it to gel. Emily

I haven't seen anything about changes like that. The big issue with changing from age to weight is that not all poultry breeds mature at the same rate, and they don't all have the same size at maturity. Having lots of poultry breeds is to our advantage, since it means that we've got lots of different kinds of poultry genes available. That cuts down on the chance of a sudden epidemic killing most of the chickens in the US (as well as making sure that those who want can buy chickens based on taste rather than how fast it grows). It's not really to the industry's advantage to switch either. The last thing they want is to be unable to sell birds in a given category because consumers think they're too tough. Emily

The classification of a chicken is based on age, not weight. I've had 8 lb birds that made lovely tender roasts before. Given that this bird got nuked, may have been partially frozen, and may have been steamed a bit, I'm not surprised it got tough. If it wasn't particularly fresh to begin with, any one of the errors would have been disasterous for a roast chicken. Microwaving produces noticable toughening of any meat, even when reheating leftovers. Actually *cooking* meat in the microwave is worse, you end up with rubbery hard meat. Unless chicken is flash frozen immediately after it was killed, freezing the bird will toughen it slightly. A partial freeze is really bad, because it alters part of the meat but not the whole bird. Steaming can make chicken rubbery and tough, which is why I don't usually use water when roasting. If you start with a nice fresh chicken (the ideal is it was just killed) and use sensible tricks to slow down the breast cooking and focus heat on the thighs, you'll end up with a lovely roast. I never do get ideal birds, but if you make friends with your butcher, you can get birds that are in good shape. Emily

Chicken Noodle Soup 1-2 quarts chicken stock (low sodium canned is ok, very very blank homemade is better) 1/2 pound rice noodles lemongrass or lemon zest (use lemon zest if you can't get fresh lemongrass) 1-2 star anise petals 2-3 cloves garlic, minced 1-2 slices of ginger salt and pepper to taste Heat the stock to a simmer, and add the seasonings. When they've scented the stock, you may strain them out, or leave them in, depending on your personal taste. I usually make this when I'm feeling sickly, so I tend to strain out all but the garlic and ginger. For best flavor, soften the rice noodles in boiling water while you're infusing the broth. If you're feeling too ill to manage that, just add them directly to the stock and bring to a boil. When the noodles are soft, devour. Flavoring the stock in this manner gives you a pretty standard Thai/Chinese stock suitable for most dishes. Egg drop soup gets pretty easy from this, as does congee. The star anise adds a nice richness of flavor that you don't get with regular chicken stock. Emily

I'm not Chad, but I can tell you what I do . I've got a smallish pizza stone on the top rack of my oven at all times. I bake bread directly on it, and most other baked and roasted items have the pan directly on it when the oven is preheated. I'd like some quarry tiles to get more thermal mass in there. This helps a lot to moderate the effects of having an older home gas oven with a poor thermostat. The current result is not as good as a modern gas oven with a good thermostat, but it's no longer so bad that setting the oven to 500 degrees and roasting a 5 lb chicken results in an unbrowned bird after an hour. Emily

This is a very thoughtful and kind idea . Shortbread cookies do not have eggs in them. Pate sucree does not have eggs in it either in most versions. Both of these are excellent bases for dessert items, and a plain shortbread cookie is IMO the perfect thing to serve with tea if you're not having tea sandwiches. If you want to cut down on your work, simply make some fruit fillings for the phyllo triangles or pastry pinwheels. You could also make some sweet tea sandwiches by using thin sliced fruit breads, cream cheese and preserves. I think most sorts of pastry cream involve eggs. If you poke around tho, you might find some cheesecake or cheese danish style fillings that *don't* and that would add some nice variety to your desserts. The other thing you could try is use some sweet/savory ideas. Say, melon and ham. There are a lot of classic combinations in this vein, and they tend to feel a bit more dessertish to an American. Kalli

Rehovot, that's how my broiler is set up. We've got an old (tho not old enough for my taste, has electric ignition) Hotpoint home gas range. The broiler is also gas, so it's fairly powerful and useful within its limits. It *can* get a good sear on meat, tho it's not powerful enough to get a good sear on all sides while leaving the interior rare. I find it works best for searing a beef tritip. It does a wonderful job on toasting bread or making openfaced toasted cheese sandwiches, but you have to watch it like a hawk. If you're not careful, the bread incinerates. It is not tasty or pleasant to have to extinguish your toast before you eat it. I wouldn't try creme brulee in it. I'm a lot more comfortable with the blowtorch method there, because you can see what you're doing. My biggest concern with it is it can be awkward to get the broiler pan out of the broiler. Make sure you have good quality oven mitts with no holes, because pretty much anything else is risking burns. As far as the math goes, my broiler's heat source is best modelled as a loop, not a point or a plane, and you can *see* that the squared behavior applies when toasting large quantities of bread. And you don't necessarily have the option of moving the food a given percentage closer with a home broiler. The food may be thick enough that moving it that close causes it to touch the heating element, or the broiler may not have sufficient adjustment options to let you move food that close to it. Emily

If it's crunchy, it's Not Right. That means the rice didn't get anywhere near fully cooked. If the rice has a soft but definitely there texture, it's the way I like it. Good rice in risotto has a pleasant and chewy texture that's a lot of fun. If the rice is mushy and half melting into the sauce, it's overcooked. I don't like it as well overcooked, but I'm not gonna kick an overcooked risotto out of bed for eating crackers. There's also the sauce texture to consider. Some risotti are fairly firm, some are bordering on rice soup. I don't think there's one perfect texture for the sauce because different ingredients and uses for the risotto tend to require different sauce behavior. I tend to think of risotto as the perfect one pot meal because it's so variable. Homemade stock makes it especially lovely, but you can get a nice risotto with plain water. Good flavored bullion can make a decent risotto too. Fresh veggies can be great in a risotto (try it with broccoli), or you can use frozen. You can use meat or fish or shellfish cooked in the risotto, or you can warm up pre-cooked meat in the risotto at the end. It likes having shallots, or onions, or garlic, or pretty much any other Allium family veggie, but it can get along fine with none too. Emily

Check the registry. If they don't have a steel and at least a whetstone on the list, ask them if they'd like those tools and some lessons in how to use them. A less expensive knife that's kept up properly will cut just as well as a more expensive one. That way you're giving them the option of a really useful long term tool, *and* giving them the chance to have the sharp knives they deserve . Emily

I tried a batch of carnitas using the guidelines in this thread. Yum! This is the closest I've come to taco stand carnitas yet. I used OJ, tequila (bf and I have since concluded that the tequila I selected was perhaps *too* good for carnitas and that I should try a cheaper tequila next time), espazote, chilli powder and kosher salt. Last night, they were amazingly good, but seemed a bit off. The orange flavor was a bit strong, and the green flavors from the espazote and tequila were overpowered. I snitched a couple cubes for a quesadilla for lunch, and the overnight rest in the fridge worked wonders. The green flavors are coming out much more, and the whole thing is much closer to what I'd been hoping for flavorwise. The texture was already dead on. My gut feel is that adding some onion and lime juice to the braising liquid would work work wonders. Alternately, I could do them about the same way and add a squeeze of fresh lime juice to whatever I'm making with the carnitas. A friend has suggested a blend of lemon and lime juice, tequila and similar flavorings as well, so I'll have to try that. Emily

Since a steel is for straightening the edge of your blade, it just needs to be hard enough to deal with the steel of your knife. Ridges along the steel do not improve performance, and can damage your blade if used incorrectly. A whetstone is used for actually sharpening the knife, and there you'll want at least a fine and medium whetstone. Sharpening is the process that actually takes time. IMO, it's best to start off with inexpensive, well made knives and good quality sharpening and honing tools. If you know what you're doing with a whetstone and a steel, you can keep any knife in good shape. And *all* knives will perform badly if they're not kept after properly. Since a high end chef's knife can easily go for $100 or more, and a lesser (but still functional) knife and the tools to keep after it will be $80-100 it's a pretty easy choice to me. If you're serious about your knives, start out by checking out the eGCI courses on knives and knife care. I don't always agree with the recommendations, but they're good starters for learning about sharp pointy things. Emily

Is there a particular reason why you didn't use a hot water bath to maintain temperature while preparing the bars? In an industrial setting one wouldn't do that, because of the danger of water getting in, but in an industrial setting you're working with much saner batch sizes from a temperature control standpoint. A large casserole dish with at temperature water should give you much more thermal mass without being deep enough water that you run the risk of the chocolate seizing. Alternately, if you've got adaquate storage space, I suppose you could use a cocoa butter bath. Cocoa butter doesn't have a very high specific heat tho *ponders*. Further, is there a reason why you're measuring in primarily in ounces rather than grams? Most scales sold in the US handle both, and the gram measure is more accurate. It's a much bigger deal on such tiny batch sizes to have accurate measurements. You're definitely right to go for a more accurate thermometer (or ideally a setup that can handle multiple more accurate probes). The "refining, mixing and conching" stages aren't as separate as you make them sound in commerical production. Essentially, a large producer is starting from granulated sugar, cocoa beans, vanilla beans and (optionally) milk. So the refining step is take a portion of the cocoa beans, extract the cocoa butter and end up with the "waste" product of cocoa powder. The mixing of the cocoa butter and chocolate liquor typically happens as a separate step, because it's easier to build your factory with a single step where you join the production lines. At commercial levels of production, it would probably double or triple the conching time if the conchs were also serving as mixers. Since Hershey's chocolate is conched for 1-2 days, that would be a substantial cost for them. Emily

Wood is (somewhat) flame resistant, like most natural materials. It definitely gives off hazardous materials when burned, but some plastics give off *really* hazardous materials when burned (whee, chlorine gas...). Not that I've *ever* left a wooden cutting board near the flame on a gas stove... I've been cutting up fresh chicken on wooden cutting boards all my life. The times I've had food poisoning were almost always traceable to cafeteria style meals, not my cutting boards. Salt and water clean up a wooden cutting board admirably, and if you're feeling *very* nervous, bleach works well too. Ideally I'd have a bread board, a meat board and a veggie board, but a meat and not meat board works ok too. Emily

I've been keeping an eye on those in my local Target. It's very busy, but the floor models have gotten *very* chipped (last one I looked at had a chip on the handle the size of my thumbnail, with bare metal exposed). The enamel seems to be around 1/16" of an inch thick. The local Sur la Table is not as busy as Target, but they keep far more Le Creuset and Staub out for inspection... and I've never seen a chipped piece. So yes, the Target pieces may be ok, but I'd really worry about their durability if you have children or butterfingers. And I may not have kids, but my SO and spills seem to go together... Emily (who really wanted the Target knockoffs to be sturdy enough to be worth buying)

Hrm, my usual version is: 1 lb dried beans, soaked overnight ~1 tbsp kosher salt 1-2 tsp cayenne or chilli powder (I'm extravagant with it because the stuff I have is *very* mild, use less if yours is very spicy) 2 tsp ground sage (again, extravagant because I don't have fresh sage) ~1/4 c olive oil 6-8 smashed cloves of garlic cooking liquid is either a blank chicken stock (prepared with no seasoning and kept frozen) or plain water Put ingredients into an oven safe dish, heat oven to 200-250 F, cook until beans are tender. Start off with the beans just covered by your liquid of choice, and check frequently to make sure the pot hasn't gone dry. If the liquid level gets too low, add some more. Will be done in 4-12 hours, depending on how fresh your beans are. The stock tends to produce a thicker bean soup due to the natural gelatin, the water produces a thinner one. I find a puree works better when at least some stock was used. You *will* need to add additional liquid to turn it into bean soup, but a pound of cooked beans will produce enough soup to serve as a meal for a *lot* of people. I'd start with about 16 servings as an estimate. It's perhaps wiser to make the beans up, and use perhaps 1/4 for soup, and do other things with the remainder. I like the beans smashed onto bread as a spread , or dressed with a bit of vinegar. Emily

Most candy recipes will get unreliable at small batch sizes, with temperature dependant candies being the worst offenders. This can be an "attractive feature" of homemade candy, or it can be frustrating. My dad worked for years in candymaking, and he tends to consider a batch suitable for a 6 qt Kitchenaid mixer to be the smallest it's sane to attempt. Emily

I find it's easier to taste chicken flavor in stock form. That way, texture doesn't get in the way as much. Perhaps comparing a homemade chicken stock with chicken bullion from a cube and a commercial canned or aseptically packaged stock might make it easier to pick up on the flavor (as opposed to the texture). Oh, and chicken is very sensitive to how it was kept, both before and after it died. A bird that was fed a healthy diet and had healthy living conditions will taste better. A bird that died quickly and with no pain will taste better. A bird that died recently (ideally just before it was cooked) will taste better. I know *what* it tastes like, but I don't have good words to describe it :-/. FWIW, while chicken's flavor may not hit you over the head, there's a lot of the flavor compounds in one chicken. You get much more chicken stock from a single chicken's worth of bones and meat than you do from a comparable amount of beef bones and meat. Emily

My usual recipe for brownies is cocoa powder based, using Hershey's cocoa. Some cocoa powders contain a great deal of fat, but the Hershey's is around 1%. I'd tend to describe brownies as having cakey (visible crumb, may crumble a bit, cake or bread like mouth feel), chewy (may or may not have visible crumb, tends not to crumble, mouth feel related to taffy) or fudgy (minimal visible crumb, may flake, fudge candy-like mouth feel) textures. If I follow the recipe as written, I end up with a texture between cakey and chewy, with the edges being crisp. This is good, because I prefer that texture . The flavor is chocolatey, but definitely leaning towards milk chocolate, which suits my taste as well. I like milk chocolate best. I always double the recipe and bake in a 9*13 baking dish. They're pretty much impossible to screw up, even if you measure the ingredients rather than weighing them. I also do a more intense version, based on baking chocolate and cocoa powder. I haven't settled on a preferred baking chocolate as yet. Where the cocoa based recipe has you melt the butter, it's pretty easy to melt the butter and 2 oz of baking chocolate. This makes the recipe a lot more uncertain, and I haven't pinned down why (tho I strongly suspect it has to do with overheating the butter and chocolate mixture). However, when it works, you get a much deeper, dark chocolate leaning brownie for only a small increase in the fuss. When it doesn't work, you get an inedible chocolate brick :-/. I've done melted chocolate only brownies, and I feel they're far too dependent on the quality and kind of chocolate used, and the techniques used to get the chocolate into a form where it can become part of the batter. If you use a good chocolate, you get a good chocolate flavor. If you use an inferior chocolate, you don't get a good chocolate flavor. If your technique is poor, you end up with lousy brownies. My chocolate handling is often poor, so I tend to end up with lousy chocolate based brownies. Someone who is better with chocolate would of course have different results. Any fool can handle cocoa powder and get an edible result (and a chocolate fix!). That's what's kept me going with making brownies, and I'm learning to handle chocolate better, one batch at a time. Emily