paulraphael
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Posts posted by paulraphael
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Microplanes, all day. In the past I had a few of the flat ones (rectangular grater with a handle). Mostly marketed for home use. When I wore those out I got one of the long skinny ones, because everyone I know who cooks professionally uses them. I think you can go with either. The main advantage of the long ones seems that they fit easily in a knife roll. The flatter ones are easier to use one some things. Their protective cover design annoys me.
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Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm interested in the Penzy's that everyone likes, but will try that later. Very expensive right now. For the near term I grabbed some spice Lab tellicherry from Amazon for a good price. Probably not as good by I'm hoping it's decent.
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Around 10 years ago I bought some tellicherry peppercorns on Amazon that were amazing. Spicy, floral, pungent, 3-dimensional lingering flavor.
After that pound ran out, I looked again, couldn't find the same brand, and tried another that looked similar. It tasted like ... plain old boring pepper. I've tried a few others in the ensuing years; some were better than others, but nothing great.
What have I been missing? What's available that you love?
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18 minutes ago, weinoo said:
Oh, man, I didn't realize they replaced the Rivington location with that. Too bad. I'm in that neighborhood more often than the w. village.
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On 5/23/2025 at 7:56 AM, weinoo said:
I'm sure it's (V L) good (though I've never tried it), and I can walk around the corner to one of their shops, but if I were to walk to their shop on Ludlow Street, I'd just walk another 1/2 block and have Il Laboratorio's gelato.
My problem with Van L might be encompassed by this:
Both McConnell's and Il Lab are still basically small company held.
Although Jo likes ice cream that aims for 110% milk fat, so VL might be more her style.
I'm with you on Il Lab. But also Morgenstern's a few blocks away. Seriously good stuff.
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17 hours ago, gfweb said:
I'm putting my money on an enzyme from one of them acting on the other to make bitterness.
It tasted OK initially, but after storage didn't.
You might argue that it was kept in the cold, but some enzymes work in surprisingly low and high temps, and bitter is one of t hose tastes where a little bit is very potent.
By one on the other, you mean the different types of berries? I hadn't thought of that.
It definitely spent enough time at warm temperatures for enzymes to go to work. Takes a while for 1kg of goop to drop from 70C.
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12 hours ago, Duvel said:
Not sure where Whole Foods sources their berries, but at least in Europe the sloe bug or hairy shieldbug (dolycoris baccarum) is known to impart a bitter, astringent flavor to the berries it infests. Unsually you can sort the spoiled berries out, but one “surviving” berry per batch is enough to render the product inedible. My mom makes raspberry marmalade very often and every once in a blue moon a batch of her marmalade tastes off …The thing is, the berries weren't bitter on their own. The ice cream mix wasn't bitter in the hour after the berries were added. The bitterness showed up the next day in the finished ice cream.
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8 hours ago, oli said:
I bet this would be great with Huckleberries.
Or to punish children.
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Here's a head scratcher. Hoping someone with fruit science background has an idea.
I made a batch of strawberry ice cream to test a recipe. Calculated for 300g strawberries / 1000g mix. I was about 45g short on strawberries, so made up the difference with raspberries. Both kinds of berries were medium-quality ... from Whole Foods, pretty ripe, pretty fresh, tasted fine but unremarkable.
Berries were added to the mix after pasteurization and homogenization. I washed, cored, thickly sliced, and froze them. Then blitzed them into the freshly homogenized mix with a vitamix for 30 seconds. Idea was to use the berries to start the mix cooling, and do so without cooking the flavor out of the berries.
I chilled the mix down to about 13°C in an ice bath. At this point, my girlfriend and I both tasted it and thought it tasted good. LIke strawberries. My only concern was textural; the viscosity was higher than normal.
I refrigerated it down to 0.5°C overnight, and spun it today. It hasn't hardened yet. We both tasted it right out of the machine and almost had to spit it out. It's like when you try to hide a crushed pill in the cat food, but all you do is make the whole meal too bitter for the cat, and he's pretty sure you're trying to kill him.
I've never experienced this before. Something introduced seriously bitter compounds into this brew while it chilled overnight.
ChatGPT thinks it could be polyphenol oxidase reactions, which I would have inadvertently allowed by keeping the berries out of the pasteurizing step. It also suggests that there can be polyphenol oxidase reactions that are affected by milk proteins. I'd never heard of this (or anything) turning berries into bad medicine overnight.
Thoughts?
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On 3/20/2025 at 12:44 PM, Tan Can Cook said:
I still have and use my i1 unit from Xrite. It is still working after all these years.
I had to retire mine, because it drifted too much, and Xrite's calibration fee was rather insane. Mine has the Greytag-Macbeth branding, so is probably quite a bit older than yours.
After some research I settled on a Calibrite Color Checker Display Pro. As a colorimeter it has some advantages over a spectrophotometer (more accurate in shadow areas, much cheaper) and a big disadvantage (can't calibrate printers). I don't like the industrial design as much as the i1's. But so far it works well in an art photography printing workflow.
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On 8/31/2020 at 7:47 AM, teonzo said:
I bring some milk to the boil, add the fresh mint leaves, wait for about 1 minute, blitz with an immersion blender, then strain it, weigh the remaining flavoured milk and proceed with the recipe.
Cooking the mint for 1 minute is long enough to avoid the oxidization problem and quick enough to avoid the "cooked" flavour. Blitzing the leaves with the immersion blender helps you to extract more flavour, then you strain it to discard the fibers (which lost most of their flavour).
This is my favourite way both about taste and consistency. Personally I can't stand peppermint oil, it tastes "fake".
Teo
Teo, 5 years later I've finally had a chance to experiment with this method. It's excellent—the best of the many methods I've tried. It succeeds at getting that fresh herbal flavor, without any of the grassy, woody, or vegetal overtones that come with the more common methods.
A friend dropped off bushels of herbs from her garden, so I've been experimenting. The spearmint flavor is perfect, with 18g leaves / 1000g base. I skipped the peppermint because it lacked flavor.
Anyway, thanks for the excellent tip. I haven't encountered this method elsewhere.
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Most of these kettles sold in the US are 1500 watts, so they'll mostly boil water in the same amount of time. We had one that a couple of hundred watts more powerful, and you noticed the difference. It broke for unrelated reasons. Manufacturers avoid doing this, because if you plug them into a 15 amp circuit, and use just about anything else on the same circuit, the breaker trips.
In other parts of the world the wiring standards give a higher ceiling for powerful gadgets.
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Once in a blue moon Facebook shows me something good.
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It would be cool if you vacuum seal in bags that have a release valve for CO2.
This is what my roaster uses. I don't actually know how big a difference it makes ... but seems like a good idea.
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I've never noticed any degradation from freezing. The important point is that freezing is for bulk storage, not for the beans you're using every day. The beans you freeze should be sealed, frozen, and then allowed to come up to room temp before unsealing. And then they stay at room temp for however many days it takes you to use them. This eliminates the one problem with frozen beans—that they take on moisture from condensation every time you open the cold bag.
This is pretty standard practice in the 3rd wave coffee world. The only pushback I ever got was from someone who was trained at Starbucks and thought he was an expert.
I do think people need to reconsider what fresh means in coffee beans, especially now that we have higher quality beans and roasts available. I used to assume that fresher is better. Now that I'm mostly buying lightly roasted single-origin beans, I can say with certainty that this isn't the case. Beans like this that are too fresh off the roast give poor results. You get huge blooms of CO2, which lends a carbonic acid acridity to the coffee, and interferes with the aromatic flavors.
For brewed coffee, results seem ideal between 5 days maybe 14 days after roasting (I'm not talking about freezing here ... just room temperature storage in a sealed back, preferably one with a relief valve). For espresso, it's more like 7 to 20 days. Espresso is more sensitive to CO2.
The darker the roast, the sooner the coffee will be ready to brew and the sooner it will lose quality. Degree of roast corresponds with increased porosity of the beans ... darker ones lose CO2 faster, and take on oxygen faster.
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On 1/4/2025 at 6:05 PM, JeanneCake said:
Food Safety News is a periodical published primarily for the food industry; and has a "bias" (if you will) toward making sure that the readers (people in the industry) are aware of potentially hazardous practices that could impact the incidence of food-borne illness.
Exactly. And the food service industry needs to be paranoid about immune-compromised diners.
And in the industry, the math is very different. If you read that in the US, 1 egg in 20,000 is tainted with salmonella, that might be close enough to zero for your purposes. If you're running a chain of restaurants that serve brunch to 2000 people every weekend, that number starts to sound like a problem.
On 1/4/2025 at 6:05 PM, JeanneCake said:The article specifically calls out iced tea. In a great many facilities, iced tea is served from a large (gallon+ size container), especially self-serve at a buffet style restaurant. The 8 hour limit is likely referenced because you're supposed to make sure things (work prep surfaces, etc) are cleaned and sanitized AT LEAST ONCE every 8 hours. One of the health inspectors at a facility I rented from routinely checked the cleaning schedule of the ice machines because people are notorious for forgetting to clean them and that's what she was going to ding the facility for. She didn't count on the caterers being exemplary practitioners of food safety
and she even commented on it!
Anyway, as mentioned, as long as you're brewing the tea properly (with boiling water) and using a clean vessel to boil the water in and a clean storage vessel (to store the brewed tea in) you should be fine.
I think it's a good reminder for anyone who's got an immune-compromised person at home. I personally drink tea that's been sitting out all night pretty regularly. I've seen it get moldy over the course of a weekend (trying not to make a habit of that).
The good news from the article is point #1: there's no record yet of tea being a problem.
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8 hours ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:
Metric lids are standardized.
Is this true? I just jumped through so many hoops to find a lid to fit my 2.5L Mauviel saucepan. Do you have a good source for metric commercial pan lids?
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I asked Cargill, the overlords that make DC salt, how to be sure I'm getting the actual kosher salt and not the new imposter version. They write:
We have updated our packaging but the product inside the box has not changed.
We are really excited about our new brand Diamond Crystal Salt Co. and the new look for our favorite Diamond Crystal Kosher salt packaging.
So, we are all imagining that there's anything wrong with our salt, and furthermore, we should all be really excited about the new packaging.
Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.
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5 minutes ago, KennethT said:
The same type, but the most efficient stirrer has a raised line that runs radially in the middle. But also, for sv stuff, it spins for a lot longer than pasteurizing ice cream base.
Mine have that little raised line also. I'll take a closer look at my pan. Surprising that teflon could ever scratch steel.
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49 minutes ago, KennethT said:
The reason I bring it up is that my stirrer bar etched some small circles in the bottom of my All Clad LTD stockpot after just a couple of uses.... So I got a 3"x3" 1/8" thick glass plate to put under the stirrer bar which works fine in protecting the pot bottom from any further damage.
I was worried about this, but the stirrers I'm using don't leave any marks. They're standard lab things, shape like pills and covered with teflon. What were you using?
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After a couple of years of shopping and foot-dragging, I got a lab hotplate with magnetic stirrer. The main use will be pasteurizing ice cream, which for various reasons I like to do at a moderate temperature for a long time (usually 30 minutes). I've been doing this sous-vide for many years now, which is imperfect; there's no simple way to know the actual temperature of a blob of thick liquid in a bag. It's also a little cumbersome, and you waste a lot of plastic.
I do like that a sous-vide bag is sealed, to keep in any aromatics. The most challenging part of moving to a hot plate was finding a lid. My old stainless-lined copper saucepan is a perfect vessel—non magnetic, so it will let the stirring rod spin. But my only lid for it is an ancient Calphalon one, which I don't want to drill for the temperature probe, and which i can't find any more of online. These French copper pans are non-standard sizes. And I'm not getting a 2nd mortgage to buy a Mauviel copper lid, just to drill a hole in it.
Restaurant supply store to the rescue. I brought my measurements and a tape, and just dug through everything. This Chinese glass lid was so close I was afraid it would be too tight. It actually fits like it was made for the pan. It has a little metal-rimmed vent hole that's exactly the right size for the probe. Score! Only $10.
The lab hotplate works well. It's a cheap Chinese model that cost $180 on Amazon (the serious ones that they use in serious labs cost many times this). It feels solidly built and all the controls are intuitive (except for the programming features, which I'll pretend don't exist). The only shortcoming is the power. It's not listed anywhere but I'm guessing it's just a few hundred watts. Great for holding a big pot of stuff at temperature, but too weak to get it there in a reasonable time. So I start out on the stove on high heat and move to the hotplate when it gets within a degree or so.
The stirring motor / magnet is also not very powerful. It struggles to get a strong vortex in 1kg of ice cream mix. This may be because I've been using supermarket cream that has added gums—my mixes have been more viscous than usual. When I get a better source this may stop being a problem. Nevertheless, the company says this hotplate has a 5 liter capacity, which seems hugely optimistic. It's adequate for my purposes. I'm also looking forward to keeping things warm with it at dinner parties.
[Edited to add:] This thing is forcing me to be disciplined about adding a straining step. I really don't want to serve—or blend—a magnetic stirring rod.
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It looks like a cool idea.
How powerful is it? What's the stirring mechanism you're proposing?
I just bought one of these, at the upper end of the price range you mention. On the plus side, it has a magnetic stirrer, which is important for my purposes (pasteurizing ice cream). It lets it cook with no chance of scorching or unevenness, and minimal evaporation. And it's very precise. On the minus side, it's probably not repairable, and it's underpowered. Wattage isn't listed anywhere, but I'm guessing it's around 200W or so. I bring a pot up to temperature on the stove and use the hot plate to hold it for 30 minutes or so.
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2 hours ago, sverreef said:
In the past, I've had some success with adding elderflower infused water to the Chefsteps Creme Fraiche ice cream recipe, but it's been a challenge to maximize the elderflower flavour as much as I would like. Therefore, I got really excited by the result I got with strawberry juice and Paul's sorbet recipe, and now I've finally had the time to test it:
112.5g Cultured skim milk (0.4% milk fat)
498g Elderflower infused water (sweetened to 8 Brix)
25.5g Inulin (Sosa inulin hot)
33g Dextrose
57g Glucose powder DE42
22.5g Erythritol
1.5g CMC
0.75g Guar gum
0.75g Lambda carrageenan
0.75g Salt
2.5g Citric acid
Spun two cycles in the Pacojet, and the result was close to spot on. Smooth and creamy mouth feel with a bright and clean elderflower flavour.
Next time I'll try to double the amount of salt to see how that impacts the flavour. The milk also floated to the top of the beaker during the freezing process, so I'll probably add some flaxfiber in an attempt to stop that from happening. The separation isn't really a big issue as long as I spin the whole beaker, but it would be nice to have a stable mixture, so I have the option to spin only a few portions at a time.
That looks great. Would you consider it a sherbet, since it's got milk?
Is cultured skim milk a common product in your corner of the world? I haven't encountered it.
And what does "hot" signify in the inulin?
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I wrote to Diamond Crystal, and while they refused to acknowledge that they've lost their marbles, they did send me a coupon for a free box of salt. Just have to remember which one to look for.
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Cocktail Parodies
in Spirits & Cocktails
Posted
Not new, but classic: Portlandia / Mixologist
It's got egg white, egg shell, egg yellow ...