paulraphael

If you're looking for more intensity and a more "chocolate-forward" sauce, it's hard to beat a water ganache. There's no dairy to mute the chocolate flavor. This is one I adapted from James Peterson (he calls it "chocolate butter sauce.") It takes a bit more care in reheating than ganache-based sauces. Use chocolate in the ~70% cocoa solids range. If the sauce will be featured in a dish, use a good one. 120g / 4 oz bittersweet chocolate (if liquid used is sweet, you can use 3-1/2 oz. bittersweet and 1/2 oz unsweetened) 90g / 3 oz liquid (water, strong coffee, liqueur, fruit brandy, fortified wine, whisky, etc.). Mix 'n match to taste. 45g / 1.5 oz butter, cool, in small pieces -melt chocolate in the liquid over medium-low heat in a saucepan. keep liquid well below a simmer. -lower heat or remove from heat, and swirl in the butter. if you do it a few chunks at a time and keep the temperature moderate, the butter and chocolate will stay emulsified, and you will have a glassy-smooth texture, like ganache but with a greater sheen. notes: -amount of liquid can be varied to control consistency -this is a more fragile emulsion than ganache, so be careful if you need to reheat it. let it come to room temperature slowly, without disturbing it. then heat in a water bath over water that's below a simmer.

I haven't compared. Just relaying the method Mhyrvold recommends. I suspect he'd say that you lose smoke flavor to the bag juices if you smoke first.

Would be best to take it out of the freezer before cooking. 😛 But yeah, SV followed by smoking is a common practice. Nathan Mhyrvold suggests that when doing this the most important thing is getting the moisture content of the meat's surface right. If it's too dry, the aromatic molecules in the smoke won't adhere. If it's too wet, the molecules will adhere to the juices ... and then drip off. You're aiming for a surface that feels tacky. His trick is to go from the SV bag to a warm oven. Maybe 200°F? Just long enough to achieve that tackiness. Then into the smoker. If you do this, you should be able to get a deep smoked flavor with very little smoking time.

I just use a pan under the pan. For a very small saucepan, my 6" cast iron skillet works perfectly. For a medium saucepan, I use a 10" frying pan underneath. Either an iron skillet or all-clad. If you really need to keep things mellow put some water in the outer pan.

Here's what we decided. No idea yet if these were good decisions; we're still waiting for the electricians to finish their upheaval, and we'll have to wait for some of the fixtures to arrive and then install them ourselves. The kitchen's about 12 x 12.5 feet, with a small island in the middle. We're planning to build a bigger island as the next minor renovation. In a year or so we want to do some bigger renovation, but keep the lighting and island. We're going with 4 6" recessed fixtures, inset from the room corners. These will be on their own dimmer and will house Philips bulbs that get warmer when they dim (like incandescents). In the middle of the room we're putting in a 6 foot track with minimalist fixtures. We'll try Soraa 25° spot lamps in these. 3 for the island, and up to 2 more for whatever needs it. For under-cabinet lighting, we're still doing research. There are some usable lights there for the time being. The ongoing debate is about dimmers. The kitchen has 3 entrances, and we'd like a switch at each. To hook up dimmers in a 3-way situation like this requires smart dimmers with wireless remotes, and unfortunately we dislike all the options. The top choice in everyone's book Lutron Caseta. But the remote dimmer looks like this: My partner and I are both involved in design and UX, and find this jaw-droppingly awful. I mean, imagine staggering into the kitchen late at night for a glass of water. You reach around the corner for the general area of the switch, and ... you have to decipher this horror show by feel. This would enrage us many times a day, every day. Lutron seems to have very good engineers, but they never thought to hire a UX designer. And so the world suffers. We're open to suggestions on something better. We may try this. So far we haven't found reasonable alternatives. Many thanks to everyone in this thread, and to James Blair, who's very helpful post was removed by moderators for technical reasons. He got us thinking about emphasizing adjustability and adaptability.

I can't even wrap my head around all the rum raisin hate. The flavors make such a natural pairing that it seems preordained. If you are against this flavor, which objectively embodies goodness, I will assume you're a foreign bot, created to sow discord and undermine democracy. Prove me wrong.

If loving rum raisin is a crime, then let me be guilty. Definitely macerate the raisins in rum for a good while to keep them soft. And rummy. As for the base recipe, it's a good idea with booze recipes to adjust the sugar blend so they don't get too soft. This lets use lots of rum (only a problem if you're selling commercially). Here's some tips. A little out of date, but the basic ideas are useful.

Most sources I've seen recommend against adding any kind of secret sauce to a starter. The reasoning is that you'll start selecting for strains of yeast and bacteria that thrive on these other ingredients. If those ingredients don't make up a significant part of your bread dough, then your culture will be out of its element and probably won't perform as well as one that evolved for that environment. It's why you should generally use the same kind of flour for the culture as for the bread. As a practical matter, there's probably no way to know if you'll like the bread better or worse (or like the process better or worse) without trying it. But this would be a very time-consuming experiment ... not one I'm interested in taking on. Sourdough is complicated enough for me even when I keep it simple.

Then again, you might think my ice cream is terrible!

Our electrician strongly recommended using a pair of 4" cans for the island if we didn't want to use pendants. He said that in his experience trying to use 6" cans (floods) or trying to use a single light gave poor light quality for this purpose. I don't know how to judge his judgment, but he's clearly a lighting enthusiast, and has strong opinions about the topic. Meanwhile, this is the first time we've thought about it. Edited to add: ceilings are 9-1/2 feet, so a pair of spot lights will probably have plenty of dispersion.

Sad to hear about this also. When I wrote to them about new feet for my Boardsmith board I thought it was his son who replied, but I might be mistaken. I just wrote again to see if they'd do a top for a 32x50 island. I'm sure just the shipping from texas would blow my budget, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

What about Island lighting? The current setup is a couple of pendant lights. I see this is trending everywhere. I can't stand the visual clutter. Currently going with the electrician's recommendation to put a pair of 4" cans directly above the island, while using 6" cans for more ambient lighting around the room's perimeter. This plus an undercounter solution. Am I missing something by dismissing the pendants?

3000K is my preference too. It looks bright relative to standard incandescent lighting, but is still warm and doesn't look clinical. I also use 3000K-3200K as print evaluation lighting in photography, so I'm used to how things look at this color temp. These days for much of the house we use Philips Hue lighting, so everything is whatever color we want it to be. Much more fun than painting, and you can do it from the couch.

Can you say more about the LED strips? Hard to tell what they're showing in the product listing. Looks intriguing.

I'm popping the popcorn right now. Please tell!

No trouble getting the light to all the places you need? Do you know what kind of fixtures they are?

What do you love, hate, wish for? We're about to embark on the fun project of having all the 120 year-old wiring ripped out of a house and replaced with more useful / less deadly equivalents. It's an opportunity to replace fixtures while we already have gaping holes in the walls and ceilings. Currently the kitchen has a couple of quite ugly track light fixtures, plus some DIY under-counter lighting. All put in by the previous owner. The quality of light is pretty good, in terms of useful work lighting plus plus pleasant ambient light. We'd like to have cleaner, better looking fixtures, along with counter lighting that's easier to use. But we want to make sure we don't end up with something that looks good while creating worse lighting. Our electrician is suggesting recessed lighting. He can install it for around half his usual price since he'll be all up in the plaster anyway. We have no experience with recessed fixtures, other than in other people's kitchens with old versions, where the lighting seems bad (dim, and not where you want it). Is modern recessed lighting better? I'm open to track lighting also. Just not the current fixtures.

Here's my first new knife in over a decade. I've been splitting time between two kitchens ... the new one is unrenovated and being used kind of like a camping kitchen. We've just minimally equipped it. But I realized I needed a knife. Seemed like an excuse to finally get a good beater knife ... something that performs well enough but is cheap and demands no pampering. I was about to just get a Victorinox chef's knife on Amazon. Can't go wrong with those, especially for $40. But they're so boring. I really like a wa-gyuto. I knew the days of sub-$100 Tojiros and the like are long passed, but maybe the internet knows some new tricks? Yes, it does. This is Dauvua 240mm gyuto. Made in Vietnam. As the story goes, the maker is a blacksmith who works barefoot, and who only recently started making knives. Uses steel from truck axles and leaf springs (probably something similar to 52100 steel). Charges next to nothing. He got picked up by Chefsknivestogo.com, and they gave him some design advice, and tips on how to clean up the workmanship, at least a little. This is the version-2 after CKTG's feedback. Might be made in a factory now, by people who wear shoes. It's pretty nice! Well-made hardwood handle (made from the side panels of old station wagons??) and pretty rough workmanship overall, about what you'd expect from a country-style kuroichi knife. I won't get a chance to sharpen it and clean it up until it's in the same city as my stones. So no real review. But out of the box it cuts as well as my German knives do when sharpened. I think I'll enjoy it. Incidentally, I bought from Tokushu Knife, which I hadn't heard of before. They had it for $65 ... a bit less than others. Great service, but even more important, they shipped it in this box, which I will cherish forever:

It might be a Mauviel, rebranded for a store. Several of the copper pans I bought in the '90s from Zabar's have the store logo stamped on them, right next to a "Made in France" stamp that's identical to yours. One I bought years later from Bridge just had the regular Mauviel logo, but the pans are identical construction.

It's not rocket science, but it's a workaround. I'm living part time with an electric range now ... waiting for the market to come out of its death spiral before renovating the kitchen. This is one of those flat-top radiant things. One thing that makes me crazy is that it regulates temperature by cycling on and off. And it's a slow cycle. So you get zero meaningful feedback about the heat by looking at the thing. And if you're using responsive cookware, temperature goes up and down and up and down all the time. There's no good way to control this. I wouldn't use 5mm aluminum for a hollandaise either. But I've happily used All-clad trip-ply (aluminum and stainless) saucepans for this. I prefer my copper because of general awesomeness, but the thinner laminated aluminum gives just as much control. At lease within my ability to notice or care about it.

Falk makes their own laminated material, and they also sell it to Mauviel and Bourgeat. Exact same stuff. This arrangement explains why Falk is often a little cheaper. I love my copper pans. They feel great to use. But the real-world performance advantage is very, very subtle. On an electric cooktop I can't imagine it would be noticeable at all. Because copper's biggest advantage is responsiveness, and electric ranges (with the exception of induction, which won't work on copper) are very slow and imprecise to respond. Other things that copper does well, like spreading heat evenly, other materials can match. 5mm of aluminum heats every bit as evenly as 2.5mm of copper. But on most electric ranges, you don't need evenness from your cookware, because the burner has even coverage. So get copper if you're salivating for it. But don't expect it to improve your cooking.

If anyone's interested in vegan / dairy-free / plant-based / whatever you want to call it ice cream, I've just come back from a rabbit hole I thought I'd never go down. New article, including gripes, theory, practice, and a sample base recipe. Key takeaways: -Vegan ice cream usually has a greasy mouthfeel or an insubstantial texture -The problem is that vegetable fats don't match the lipid profile of dairy fat. And you also don't get the benefit of the dairy sugars and proteins. -The solution is to start with a sorbet approach, not an ice cream approach. Add some plant-based fat, but the right kinds, and very little. -Use cashews. They're effective, easy, and if they're raw, they can be almost completely bland. They don't interfere with subtle flavors. -Get your richness from inulin. It suffers none of the problems of plant-based fat. -Get your added solids, if needed, from big sugar molecules (atomized glucose, low-DE glucose syrup, tapioca syrup, etc.) -Use an emulsifier. You're getting no help from milk proteins or egg proteins. -Use a really good, cold-soluble stabilizer blend.

Check out the sugars chart on this page. It doesn't show all the options, but shows many that proven useful. Focus on Erythritol, Trehalose, and Glycerol. POD is relative sweetness; PAC is relative freezing point depression. For both, table sugar = 100. The rightmost column includes comments on glycemic index and absorbable calories. For more precise info on calories / GI you'll have to do some research, but this should get you started. In general, sugar alcohols like erythritol can work very well, and in many cases have more freezing point depression per unit of sweetness than table sugar. But you need to go easy on them if you want the ice cream to taste good and not cause gut problems for people.

We were in Vermont last summer and picked up some aster honey from a berry farmer in Rochester. This might be my personal favorite. It tastes piney, even hoppy. An unusual flavor that my girlfriend and I found addictive. I couldn't say if this was better or worse than anyone else's aster honey. But I've discovered that it's not a common variety. In most places your only option is mail order it from someplace expensive.

imprtnt thinks too say but halving technical trough Sent from my connected smart skillet