paulraphael

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

I've been wanting to start a blog called Design Crimes. As if there isn't enough rage on the internet. What bugs me is that often, a simple, well-designed option exists. But it's 3 times the price of the complex, terribly designed thing that was created by marketers for suckers.

Peet's and Starbucks both sell burnt coffee, so they don't have to care much about origin, processing quality, or consistency. I don't have experience with Trader Joes. In general you're not going to get great coffee from mass-market operations. One reason is that is that they're limited to buying coffee that's available in mass quantities, which means bigger, industrial-scale farms. These days you can get amazing coffee through the mail from dozens of roasters. The problem is you have to add shipping to the already high cost of the beans. I'm not talking $200/lb, but $30/lb is becoming norma. This isn't something I can live with for a daily brew. It's good for the occasional gift or splurge though. I'm curious to see prices from some of the shops mentioned upthread.

Saltless bread should come with a big printed warning label. Unless you're planning to cover it with prosciutto or aged cheese, it's the most disappointing thing ever invented. I find most food needs around 1% salt in order to taste like anything at all. This includes salts naturally resident in the ingredients (meats and dairy already have a salt content around half of this). I use a small amount of salt in almost every dessert. And always on green vegetables. You won't taste the salt ... it just brings the other flavors into focus. Rice is an exception. I stick with tradition there. And it always gets eaten with other things that bring the seasoning with them.

I haven't tried this, but you could try either 1) adding a little invert sugar (trimoline or some honey), or 2) adding a little acid to the sugar before you cook (citric or cream of tartar). Added acid will split some of your sucrose molecules into invert syrup. Either approach should reduce crystallization.

And drainage!

Yeah, I think we want some kind of urethane that can take abuse. I actually have no idea how the floors in the house are finished now. Could be anything, depending on what decade they were last finished. The ones under the vinyl in the kitchen are probably quite beaten up.

Cherry's an interesting choice. I asked Dan at the Boardsmith if he thought it would be better for my knives. He believed that the end-grain construction was the most important thing, and that the wood's hardness didn't matter much as long as you were within a certain range (which includes all the woods they use ... cherry, walnut, mahogany, maple. So I went with maple, the most standard choice. But subjectively, I don't find this board to be especially gentle on my edges. While I much prefer cutting on it to cutting on poly boards, I find poly to give me more edge life. So maybe cherry would have been a better choice? This maple board will outlast me by a couple of hundred years, so I'll never find out.

I bet they're nice. Just be aware that you're subsidizing Brooklyn real estate. My endgrain board was made deep in the woods in South Carolina (Boardsmith, like Mitch). It's bad enough paying my own rent in Brooklyn. I look for a bargain when paying my woodworker's rent.

We just bought a house, and this topic newly relevant to us. We've got 120 year-old wood floors (probably northern white pine) that seem to have their full 3/4 inch thickness. In the kitchen there's a hideous vinyl floor, glued to an even more hideous layer of some kind of cement board, that was aggressively nailed down to the original wood floor. My inclination is to rip up the vinyl and the cement board and have those wood floors refinished. Quotes are coming in at $2-$3 for this. Comments in this thread (including my own from years back) seem to support this, but I'm wondering if there's anything I should know when discussing with flooring contractors. We don't want the floors to look too pristine (they'll look strange alongside all the other wood floors that we're not refinishing anytime soon). And we want them finished in a way that will best hold up to use in a busy kitchen. I am not gentle with kitchen floors. I wear non-slip shoes, and am usually followed by rivulets of dishwater and oil. There is no subfloor. the pine planks are attached directly to the big old basement joists. Which at least means there's no place for water to get trapped. There's nothing immediately below in the basement that would be damaged by a bit of soap or pasta water. Is this common construction? Does the lack of subfloor / underlayment add any concerns for a kitchen floor? Anything special I should ask the flooring people?

It's pretty easy to clean. Not as easy as the grinders that come apart without tools. Much easier than my old Baratza (which I cleaned about once every 5 years, whether it needed it or not!) Despite fellow's attempts at anti-static engineering, the thing is pretty staticy and retains some grounds. You can solve this with a couple of popular tricks. The first is to add a bit of water to the beans before grinding. Either a spritz with a small atomizer bottle, or just wet your finger and swirl it around the beans. This dissipates most of the static. People use this technique with many grinders. The 2nd trick is to wait about 10 seconds after the grind cycle is done. Most of the static will dissipate. Then hit the knocker a few times. I have no idea how staticy my Baratza was, because I never thought about it and almost never looked inside there. You need a screwdriver to actually get into the burr chamber. The nice part of the design is that you can do this without messing with the calibration settings. Just pop the whole front plate off, take out the rotating burr, and then it's wide open. You can get in with a brush and clean everything. Only trick to reassembly is making sure you get the grounds off of all machined surfaces, so you don't mess with the alignment.