dougal

I think you'd be wanting the bran to be very finely milled - which it usually isn't! You might try sieving out the coarsest bits of bran, which should leave you with some (fairly fine) bran, but more importantly all the flavour and nutrition of the wheatgerm. I don't know whether you'd want to add back more bran (I suspect you'd end up with rather heavy-when-cooked pasta), but you could try blitzing the coarse stuff that you have sieved off (blender, food processor, ... ?) and sieving it again to get some more fines to add to your pasta dough. I like sieved wholemeal (ie 100% going into the sieve) as a bread flour. And its always astonishing to see the quantity (or rather volume - there's not much dry weight) of the bran flakes removed by an ordinary (not specially fine) kitchen sieve. There's a couple of other things maybe tenuously connected here. Indian Chapati flour is often wholegrain with finely milled bran (but its usually pretty low protein, so maybe not ideal for pasta). And French bakers use a magic ingredient, for example on their peels, which is called "remoulage" - finely (re)milled bran. Oh, and an English millers' word for sieving off the bran is "bolting".

Its not rocket science. The idea is to keep them damp, but to prevent the growth of mould. So the normal method is to wash them frequently, while excluding house dust and the majority of mould spores. A clean, lint-free cloth 'lid' to the jar can be left in place from start to finish. You can fill and empty the jar of water WITHOUT removing the lid - the water flows easily through the cloth. The damp cloth should provide some air filtration and help to regulate the humidity inside. You want the temperature to be comfortably warm and fairly steady. No need great precision! You need lots of empty space in the jar when you start. A couple of spoonfuls of beans in a one litre jar would be a good starting point. Beans need lots of headroom! You'll discover that you can sprout all manner of food-grade beans and other seeds. I've even heard of people sprouting supermarket-shelf dried peas - ostensibly one of the most inert of foodstuffs! (Whole) Lentils need relatively little headroom. Yes, the whole thing, seed and 'root' as well as the little sprout and leaves, is edible and good (especially raw - for example as a salad component in sandwiches). But beware 'sprouting' garden-grade seeds - they can have been treated with preservatives. There are very few 'sprouts-from-foodstuffs' that aren't good to eat. Potato is one obvious no-no. (Any others?) Have fun experimenting. Just be aware that you are trying to grow (mechanically and environmentally) delicate seedlings, and apart from maintaining regular watering and comfortable temperatures, the enemy that you should be watching out for is mould.

Yeast or sourdough (natural yeast culture). And what sourdough. And what yeast. (If you want a taste of yeast, use active dry ...) Fermentation time and temperature. Long time low temperature, more flavour. Choice of flour, milling and flour content - about 1% rye flour brings out a lot of good flavours. Presence of wheatgerm, or not. Even French 'traditional' bread flour has a couple of percent bean flour and a bit of maize IIRC ... And of course the oven conditions will also influence the amount of flavours developed by Maillard, caramelisation, charring... Plenty of scope for variation!

Although a highly respected teacher of practical baking, weren't all Calvel's professorships (2 Japanese, 1 French) honorific titles?

If Amazon UK actually had it listed, you'd probably have a couple of pre-orders already!

You need a little bit of ventilation, but not a vast amount. I think that combination units are an excellent use of space, and a multi-function tool gets used more ... But a major differentiator between products is the "user interface". Someone I Used To Know was frequently confused by a Panasonic that ALWAYS reverted to pure microwave whenever its timer reached zero. That meant that giving it 'five more minutes in the oven' needed resetting it to be an oven, AND THEN setting the temperature, as well as punching in 5 minutes. That's dumb, not 'smart'. Its not trendy, but I prefer switches that stay set until you change them, and simple analogue controls ... The more complex the functionality, the simpler it needs to be to use.

The Lidl £1/bunch stuff that I've had was really pretty damn good on the taste front. Better than I expected from its slight floppiness when raw - which I think is probably due to an excessive effort to to stop it drying out. But very good cooked. Generally, the veg in my local branch isn't exceptionable - either way. But this might vary from branch to branch. When things go on silly cheap special offer, they sell out fast. And as with a market, the time of day that you shop may make a significant difference! I'd advise being very selective when shopping at Lidl. You simply cannot generalise. There's some best-of-breed stuff, and some real dross. But at least its hard to make an expensive mistake !

My understanding is that the grain mill attachments for mixers don't work too well with oily materials - like nuts. And whole almonds may be way too large to get into the 'jaws' of the grinder - these things are designed for grains the size of maize corns and smaller. Kenwood have long suggested using their rotary grater attachment (slow speed slicer and grater, now "roto food cutter") for nuts. Its basically a mechanised version of the traditional tool http://www.kenwoodworld.com/en/Products/Kitchen-Machines/Attachments/AT643/ They have recently introduced a new 'rasping attachment' (which fits onto their grinder) supposedly for even better grating of nuts and chocolate. http://www.kenwoodworld.com/en/Products/Kitchen-Machines/Attachments/224000/ - I haven't seen one yet. The Electrolux DLX has long had grain mill, rotary grater and rasping attachments. Pleasant Hill suggest using either of the other two (but not the grain mill) for nuts. http://www.pleasanthillgrain.com/magic_mill_dlx_mixer.aspx

"Best" is whatever is best for you and your cooking. However yolk colour only indicates how much of the colouring compounds there were in the feed. And yes, just like farmed salmon, producers can use a colour chart to select the feed - here to give the yolk colour they want. Personally, I think a modicum of good animal welfare practice should be there. Take a look at this http://www.woodlandeggs.co.uk/ And that the colour should be from natural food, rather than dye-rich processed waste from elsewhere. Other people might want other assurances, such that the feed was gm-free. Some people even get fussed about the aesthetics of the shell colour ... which inevitably leads you to comparing the claims of different breeds of hen ... you did know there are lots, didn't you? Some examples http://www.wylyevalleychickens.co.uk/Breeds.htm In the UK, egg-coding and package info legislation ensures that you can see how fresh commercially-packed eggs are. The "Best before" date is four weeks from laying, and the "Sell by" date is three weeks from laying. So, buying eggs with two weeks of sell-by or three weeks of best-before life would ensure that they are less than one week old. When frying an old egg, the white really runs out across the pan - with a fresh egg it stays much tighter. Its easy to tell. Why not ask around and see if any friends of friends are keeping a few hens at home? Hens make great (and productive) pets, and the eggs from 'pet' hens can be among the best you'll taste. And sometimes hobby-hens produce a glut of eggs ... In the UK, there are organisations re-homing 'spent' battery hens, as still-productive pets. Is there anything like this http://www.bhwt.org.uk/cms/re-home-some-hens/ in your neck of the woods?

If anyone in England* is looking for a heated waterbath for sous vide, they should get themselves to a branch of Lidl at opening time next Thursday, 10th June. They will be having a 27 litre (say 7 US gallon) waterbath with drain tap and 1800 watt heater (non-exposed element, I think) for just £40. http://www.lidl.co.uk/cps/rde/xchg/lidl_uk/hs.xsl/index_11364.htm (*Maybe throughout the UK, maybe not - I don't know.) I'm sure the thermostat would need to be maxed and control handed to a PID. Nevertheless, I'd expect it to be a great improvement on a big rice cooker - bigger, dumber and cheaper. Its tall rather than broad, hence natural convection from the bottom heater supplemented by a bubbler should be effective at equalising temperature. And it looks as though the lid is plastic - easing customisation for airline, temperature probe, Pedro's hangers, etc. 1800 watts should be more easily tamed (by the PID controller and an SSR) than the 3000 watt elements commonly found in tea urns of this capacity. I think it looks like a useful bit of kit. And as a £40 item, it bears an astonishing similarity to a £150/£160 item sold to homebrewers http://www.leylandhomebrew.com/item595.htm Because this is being touted for jam-making, and its obvious appeal as a homebrew beer mash tun or boiler, I suspect it may sell out quickly - hence the importance of being there at opening time next Thursday! I don't expect there to be any usefulness to a recommendation after trying it out - because there's almost no chance of continuing availability (at least before June next year). Lidl's very amenable policy on returns and refunds is another reason for grabbing one while the opportunity exists. Normally, Lidl's offers are near simultaneous across Europe, however this one doesn't seem to be happening in France in the next week or so. I haven't checked elsewhere. It might be worth anyone inerested from mainland Europe keeping an eye open for this product showing up in future - maybe nearer to harvest time?

The Kenwood mixers have had (for about 50 years) an optional attachment called the "Collander and Sieve" http://www.kenwoodworld.com/en/Products/Kitchen-Machines/Attachments/AT930A/ which allows the machine to do the work for you. I have to say that it has always seemed to me to be total overkill for sifting flour ... one of the touted uses for it. Making coulis from soft fruit would seem to be a better use for it. And it should work extremely well for extracting fibrous bulk from veg purées ... Its basically a powered tamis. But there are other tools that will do this sort of job. There are "fruit" presses - like Kenwood's new attachment http://www.kenwoodworld.com/en/Products/Kitchen-Machines/Attachments/AT644/. These often attach to the front of a grinder body, but Kenwood's fronts the new version of their roto cutter. Another approach is to use a centrifuge, like Magimix's (food processor) juicer attachment http://www.magimix-spares.co.uk/Magimix-juice-extractor-juicer-for-food-processor-17361/product/17361/17361/ - which is suggested in that link as being useful for consommé and in the processor manual it is recommended for getting the 'bits' out of fish soup. However that item is quite a fine sieve, and only available in the single 'mesh' size. But I somehow suspect that Keller wouldn't dream of doing the job otherwise than entirely by hand ...

While you are in Monaco/France, you really should try and take the opportunity of having a go with induction, and maybe talking with a user or two -- its much more commonly found in France than the US, I believe. There are various induction threads here, but your present location should offer more (or easier) scope for some 'hands-on' personal experience before what can be a significant purchase. I actually think that an electric induction hob is pretty good to live and work with. Absence of the prospect of a gas supply should no longer be an automatic deal-breaker in choice of dwelling.

Since one would have expected the new pan (if only that one) to be OK for induction, I have to wonder about the testing. It is ONLY the pan base that contacts the stove that you should be testing. Magnets will not stick to the sides of many "induction-friendly" pans - and that doesn't matter at all, as long as the base takes the magnet.

Actually, it was Ray who mentioned it in this context. The way I read his post he was saying "the Jaccard punctures the surface, it'll leak through the holes and searing won't seal them up". However, with plain (unmarinated, unbrined, not "Dutched") steak, juices simply don't "leak through the holes". So any discussion of sealing them (or not) is way off target.

I can understand the "not messy" bit, but "very accurate" sounds wrong for an IR thermometer. They can read to a high precision, but that doesn't equate to accuracy. Even if the emissivity is set correctly, the accuracy is rarely quoted as being as good as ±1°C, even though the display routinely gives a result to 0.1C. (And the real cheapies still display to 0.1, but have no emissivity adjustment and only quote an accuracy of ±2C.) I would expect that these devices should be quite consistent. If it gives the same reading (for the same chocolate) the next day/week it'll be very close indeed to the same temperature. Which I can recognise as being very useful. However, are your instruments accurate enough that you work to the chocolate manufacturer's recommended temperatures -- OR do you use "your temperatures" (as indicated by your thermometers)? And does white chocolate really have the same emissivity as dark chocolate? I'm thinking of starting exploring chocolate, with the aid of a book like this one, and while I clearly see the advantage of a mess-free thermometer, I worry that using an inaccurate thermometer could be very confusing to a n00b.

Its the tiny holes in the blade guard that concern me. The blades 'wipe' through those holes on every stroke, as they come out of the meat. Washing it 'tied up' (to expose the blade tips) does nothing about the blade guard holes - they are still almost full of blade! I think its better stripped out. And then the holes probably should be 'flossed' somehow. (Or do the blades do that for themselves?) While the temperature in the dishwasher should sanitise the thing (as in killing bugs), I'm not at all sure that it would do anything about removing any tiny bits of meat debris in the holes. And that could be a wonderful culture medium before the next use. Perhaps the protocol should be to clean it before and after every session of use?

Forget "the surface" when it comes to juices -- that is not what its about. Jaccarding does "what it says on the packet" - it reduces the 'tightening up' of the meat on cooking. And that does reduce the amount of those juices squeezed out. Despite the holes in "the surface". Personal experience, not theory. Reduced tightening, does also mean reduced resting to relax that tightening. Certainly the effects are most dramatic on cheaper (inferior) materials. But the effect is a whole lot more subtle than hitting it with a hammer ... Personally, I remain unconvinced as to the food safety wisdom of encouraging wider adoption of the sous vide method to ANY comminuted meat, including jaccarded meat. AND, especially in that regard, I too have my concerns about efficient home sanitisation of Jaccard tools. Is a strip-down and wash after every use the only (or even an adequate) means of ensuring food safety? The hygiene aspect still concerns me, but make no mistake, the tool does work.

Performance? A Ferrari is a stunningly high performance vehicle. But it uses lots of fuel, has negligible luggage space, no room for family and friends, is hard to park, you really wouldn't want to use it in winter, or for a fishing or camping trip, and you'd be forever concerned about it being damaged or stolen. Sometimes "performance" needs to be considered as "usability". Otherwise a tool turns into jewellery. Specialist tools are indeed wonderful things, but they are most useful to specialists! Take seriously the comments in Dakki's 'rules' post "Fragile" means sufficiently delicate that you need to consciously consider being gentle with it. Always.

My suggestion would be to invest some of your budget in good sharpening kit. (I'm still delighted with my EdgePro Apex, but hey, there are other methods, or so people say.) And only after your sharpening is set up, review what you have left to spend on your next knife. That way whatever knives you have can be kept in perfect condition, absolutely all the time. An ordinary knife that's sharp, works better than any knife in need of sharpening, however much it cost.

Maybe I exaggerated (memory playing tricks?) - he uses it in Appetite for some meaty things, and generic veg. And he describes it as his first 'essential' bit of kit in the (fairly basic but very true) discussion in the first part of the book, talking of using it for meat, fish and veg. I'd bet he uses it for fruit too somewhere - probably the imminent Tender v2.

He's more about ideas than recipes - and consequently his recipe quantities are far from standardised (even within the same section, let alone book). I'm going to suggest Appetite, as giving a great explanation of what he's about - which I'd say was breaking away from the ideas of a recipe as being a straitjacket or bully and of home eating with 'styling' - its about oral gratification! His ridged grill pan gets a lot of use in Appetite, but there are pasta/noodles, veg and rice sections. But for seasonal veg-led stuff, see Tender vol 1, that's what its about. Appetite is the very antithesis of The French Laundry Cookbook. To read it is to feel hungry, not in awe. I see Real Food as being its companion volume, more on the same lines. Real Cooking is slightly different, a more conventional, and quasi-international, cook book. As ajnicholls indicates, Appetite is a great way to start cooking. And to start Nigel. My second suggestion is the (essentially unillustrated, cheap paperback) Real Fast Food - its fizzing with ideas for good, simple and quick (half hour total prep & cook) eating -- mainly for one or two people. "The 30 minute cook" is almost a vol 2 of this, with consciously cosmopolitan inspirations. And then Real Fast Puddings rounds off that group. I've actually liked Kitchen Diaries the least. Why? Because too much of it (for my liking) is about how Nigel felt on a particular day and his domestic minutiae. Yes, its about the connection between the food and the weather, moods, needs, seasonality, practicality, etc. That's fair enough, but I got tired of it pretty quickly, a month or two. I don't need twelve months to get the idea that what we might choose to eat is shaped by how we feel, and that, in turn can be shaped by all manner of things. Nice concept for a book, just that my interest was more in the food and less (barely at all) in his emotional journeys. Maybe its a Mars/Venus thing, but I prefer his other stuff. No, I'm not interested in his autobiography (review of "Toast") either. Hope some of that helps!

I would expect that most food processors should be able to make marzipan. Isn't the question about how big a batch it can handle? And Steve, which model from the Waring line-up are you recommending?

Magimix is the consumer brand of Robot Coupe. The 3200 is at the small end of the range. Magimix provide a 12 year warranty on the motor - because the "shaft" (its actually a cover over the real shaft) IS made of plastic and DOES indeed deform if the user ever overloads the machine. HOWEVER, the very important thing to understand about this "mechanical protection fuse" is that the replacement part is pretty cheap (£10 ish in the UK but just €6 in France) and can be quickly and straightforwardly replaced by the user. Two more points on the shaft. If you use the thing with a chewed-up shaft, you'll chew up the inside of the blade, where the shaft drives it. Than means replacing the blade as well, and its HARD to get a chewed up blade off a chewed up shaft - so replace a chewed up shaft immediately! And all food processor users should realise that the "dough blade" has got shorter arms by deliberate design - to limit the torque and impact forces on the shaft! The machine's capacity for stiff mixes is reduced if you use the long 'cutting' blade. Obvious to a scientist/engineer, less so to cooks, it should be spelled out simply in the manual. The 'pro' solution to abuse and overloading by kitchen staff is to de-rate the power, limit the bowl's physical capacity (see the R2 spec below) and strengthen the shaft. If anything has to give way, its the blade unit - very easily (if expensively) replaced. The Magimix bowls are made of (clear) Polycarbonate, and supposedly dishwasher-safe. However, it seems to me that dishwashing does have a long-term deleterious effect, and so I wash mine by hand. The problem isn't strictly "fatigue", but over a period of years the plastic becomes 'crazed' and embrittled. Takes a few years in household use though. Should mention that Magimix/Robot Coupe are excellent at supporting older machines. The 1800 or R1 "Magimix by Robot Coupe" is over 25 years old, yet many spares are still available. http://www.magimix-spares.co.uk/Magimix-by-Robot-coupe-grand-chef,-1800,-R1,-parts-stocked-/products/1083/ Interestingly, the spec's of the R2 and 3200 are rather similar. R2 550 watt motor, 2.9 litre bowl. 3200 has 650 watts into a 2.6 litre bowl. In the UK the prices (from the same catering supply co - Nisbets) are 3200 £176 R2 £857 (with stainless bowl) So the R2 is almost five times more expensive ... Sure, its much more tolerant of abuse, but the capacity is broadly similar. I think the first candidate should be the basic (white) version of the Magimix 5200. It costs £225 at Nisbets, less than 1/3 more than the white 3200, and offers almost double the capacity of that little 3200. The motor is 1100 watts and the bowl is nominally 3.7 litres, but importantly the bread dough mixing spec is up from 600 grams to 1300 grams. I think it should handle double the 3200's safe quantity of marzipan. The 5200 is much stronger and more capacious than the 3200 for very little extra cost. The even more cost-effective option here in the UK is to get an old 5100 for well under half the price of a new 5200. And then get a couple of extra new bowls for it (and maybe a couple of spare spindles). I absolutely agree with Edward J that extra bowls are VERY useful. But a spare Stainless Steel R2 bowl and spare blade is going to cost about the same as an entire new 5200 ... The Magimixes are pretty bulletproof. One would have a hard job damaging any part of the motor/base unit in use, except for that sacrificial shaft! Perhaps its worth noting that the shaft cover for the 5100 and 5200 has the exact same part number - it has not been improved or uprated. Thus the older 5100 has exactly the same torque capacity as the current model. Magimix pricing can be hard to understand. Seemingly made in France, most of their stuff is significantly cheaper in the UK. (I can get new discs for half the French price.) But in France, you can find a new 5100 bowl+lid combo spectacularly cheaply, actually cheaper than you can buy the same bowl on its own, anywhere.

I believe that the word 'mirguaz' (spelling variable) just translates as 'sausage'. (Same for the word 'chorizo'.) Hence there can be no one definitive recipe, any more than there is a definitive US recipe for 'pie'. Nevertheless, isn't it true to say that cows have been a rather rarer sight in North Africa than sheep and goats ... ? The recipe I cited above is a simplified version of that given by Sam & Sam Clark in 'Casa Moro', and would seem to be of Marrakesh origin. Its "simplified" in that it glosses over details like the use of dried rose petals and the specification of lamb kidney fat, etc. Even so, hopefully it should meet consumer expectations of the sausage style conjured up by the use of the name Merguez. Anyway, I'm sure that recipe is much closer to the style's muslim roots than the Ruhlman & Polcyn ("Charcuterie") version which uses pork fat and wine ... And I do rather like the idea of using the length of the sausage to indicate its potency - the shorter, the hotter!

Starting with syphoning off from between crust and sludge sounds like a good starting point. I don't think the source of the hose matters VERY much. Clear tube is very much easier - you can see how you are doing and whether you are sucking up crud. At the end, you'll be tilting your tank to keep that inlet in "deep water", and constantly tweaking to stay between crust and sludge. Narrow bore clear plastic tube is sold for car screenwashers, etc. Wash it out, soak it in your sanitiser, rinse thoroughly, and I strongly doubt that the few seconds it'll be in contact with the product could do you (or your product) any harm. You need to sort something for the inlet end, so that it does not instantly suck crud. Use something to make the last several inches of the tube straight and stiff(er) - like a bamboo skewer. And double back the last inch or so, such that the open end points up and cannot get within half an inch or so of the bottom of the tank. Food-grade (if possible) rubber bands might be one method of attaching tube to stick. Hopefully that will get your liquid away from most of the muck, and you can think about 'fining' it. My understanding is that one egg-white, after being mixed with an approx equal quantity of cold water to a solution (or sol) -- but not to a froth, is at least enough to be added to a gallon of wine, stirred and left for a day or two or three to clear. The haze should be flocculated by the protein and thus settles out, allowing you to rack (syphon) off "bright" product. I'm a n00b brewer and winemaker, so I'm not the one to explain why/how/what difference the choice of fining method may make to the qualities of the product. I'm sure I've read somewhere that gelatin(e) followed by Bentonite (a specific clay) is the most powerful clearing treatment. I can't see why one shouldn't repeat the fining process as often as required. Apart from the fact that every time you leave some sediment behind, you leave (and thus lose) some product... A Buchner funnel is a common laboratory filtering apparatus, using air pressure to accelerate filtering of solutions where the fine solids clog the filter paper. Using the filter paper flat and not folded maximises its working area, minimising the clogging. http://www.creative-chemistry.org.uk/activities/images/buchner.gif Elderflower pollen (in particular) clogs coffee-filter papers very effectively, making that means of filtering a real test of patience! I recall the Buchners in the school chemistry labs using a tapwater venturi as the vacuum pump, but one of those ideas at the back of my mind is the possibility of using the accessory hose from the FoodSaver vac-packer ...