paulraphael

What about something consumeable? People are picky about their tools, and you never know if they already have the thing you're picking out. Who wouldn't like a nice bottle of wine or scotch or something? I wanted to get a thank-you present for a pastry chef, and thought maybe wine, but I knew he worked at a place with one of the best wine cellars in the whole country. So I got him a bottle of Belgian Lambick. They go with desserts, and I knew there was nothing like it on the restaurant menu. It wasn't hard to find advice on a great one in my price range.

I have a pyrex 2 and 4 cup, and a professional stainless 2 and 4 cup (formerly from the darkroom). I use the pyrex more. It's nice being able to see through it, and 4-cup is wide enough for mixing things, which streamlines some simple stuff. It's also handy that they can go in the microwave for melting butter etc.

The only reason I can think of is the hints they're dropping of a an even better version.

That's funny ... sounds like the kind of law we'd have in the U.S. that the French would scoff at. A box cutter is would also work fine. I have no idea what kind of tragic accident could be precipitated by a razor blade ... except maybe some goofball baking one into the bread. Were there really accidents and is this really a law? I can't find anything online.

Razor blades work especially well for that. Probably better than any knife, because they're so thin.

Thanks Mitch. Those Bleecker butchers were my faves before discovering Jeffrey. I'm going to snoop around and see what's available in Brooklyn. Food culture out here is in high gear, and there are a lot of artisinal butcheries. They lean in the direction of local beef, which has not made me real happy yet. I don't think New York State is great cow country.

I've done it a lot for making financier batter. Either whole or slivered almonds, it doesn't matter. I like to toast them lightly in a skillet, and then grind them as fine as possible in whirley-blade coffee or spice grinder. I always have to do it twice. After the first grind, I pass through a regular coarse-mesh kitchen strainer, which stops all the larger chunks. These go back for a second grinding. After straining a second time, the volume of big chunks is usually too small to worry about. Just toss them. This has worked fine in every recipe I've tried. Just be aware that the flour will be nowhere near as fine as commercially milled almond flour. So far this has not added a coarse texture to the finished product, in my experience.

I've read that it's easier to get a crust in recipes that have a high sugar content. I couldn't confirm the science, but it sounded plausible. I don't like overly sweet brownies, so I experimented with a simple technique. I withold a half ounce or so of sugar from a recipe (one that would fit in a 9x13 pan) and then add it back at the end, by sprinkling on top. This creates a high concentration of sugar right at the surface, which is all that would matter. I like the results. It gives a crisper crust. The look and texture aren't identical to a conventionally crusty brownie, but I'm ok with it. For sprinkling the sugar, I find it easiest to use a spoon, and just tap the edge of it while going over the whole surface. A small strainer with superfine sugar might be even easier.

Jeff, what can you tell us about LCD longevity issues? I wasn't aware of any. What have you encountered in your testing? I like the looks of LCDs but would be bummed if something as solid-seeming as your circulator crapped out after a couple of years. I like to buy equipment with the expectation of more longevity than that. One of the things that attracts me to your unit is that it's designed to be easily maintained. Along those lines, updateable firmware would be a huge selling point for me.

If you did have an egg crack open, would gum up the Anova in any serious way? I've just looked at pictures, but it looks like there's no enclosed anything that would be hard to clean (iike the pump assembly on a Poly Science). Just a free-hanging impeller and a washable housing, yes? Not that a broken egg would be super fun, but it doesn't seem like a disaster.

Clarified butter unfortunately lacks a lot of flavor of whole (obfuscated?) butter. There are a couple of tricks. One is the long, medium-low Ducasse method. Which seems to work, although I'm not convinced it offers enough advantages to justify the added time. The other is to do a high temperature sear, and to finish at low temperature. When you do this, you can sear in a refined oil like canola or safflower, and then after you've turned the heat down, add butter to the pan and continuously baste the meat. The butter will brown and foam, and get more delicious, but if you manage the heat reasonably well it won't burn. Regardless of the method you use, it's beneficial to flip the meat often. Ideally once every 15 to 30 seconds. I've experimented with this since reading the science behind it, and find that it does indeed improve the crust and reduce the thickness of overcooked layer below it. It basically lets you cook the surface in short bursts, with evaporative cooling between them. It mimics the kind of intermittent high heat experienced by meat turning on a spit in front of a fire.

Very delicate. The edge is just tapping the board. In many cases he's using less force than the weight of the knife. Contrast with Western rock-chopping, where you push the blade down and forward against the board with a shearing action ... using enough force that cooks get calluses on their knuckle.

Me too. KC could get away with it, I can't. We had the same knife and he sharpened to an even more fragile angle than I did. I cringe whenever I see the edge scrape the board. I think he just had an incredibly light touch.

Yup. That's why chicken breasts are white (for bursts of power to flutter into tree limbs, etc.) and duck breasts are dark (for endurance for migrating). I don't know how or if this translates into the colors of pork. There are a lot of pigmented chemicals in meat, and I believe many of them are unrelated to this light/dark fiber type. Some of the heritage porks, like berkshire, are pink, even bordering on beef-red. The same cuts that are white on modern breeds. This corresponds with a huge difference in marbeling, but I don't know if these factors are related.

Officially, the danger zone is from 40F to 140F. These are the guidelines used by the FDA and most local health departments. Realistically, there aren't any foodborn pathogens that reproduce above 131F, and all the common ones stop about 5 degrees cooler than that. You can actually pasteurize food at 131F ... which means more time at this temperature actually makes it safer. I believe 165F is a temperature at which most active pathogens are killed within a few seconds. I would be careful with this number, though, because the exceptions are important. In certain kinds of food, like sweet and high-fat dairy products (ice cream bases) it takes a few minutes at this temperature. And bacterial spores will not even flinch. To kill some of the more common spores you need a rolling boil for 15 minutes or so. Spores are one reason cooling on the stove can be trouble. When conditions are tough for certain bacteria, like botulinum, they make spores. These can survive most environments, and then incubate when conditions are better (anaerobic storage, or the gut of someone who's immune-compromised).

The Modernist Cuisine crew believes working muscles in general have more flavor ... Fat is plentiful in many inherently tough cuts of meat. That's obvious to the naked eye . But there is a more elusive reason that tough cuts tend to be the most flavorful : their bigger and stronger muscle fibers contain a lot more of the molecular condiments that excite our taste buds. Dissolved salts, sugars, and, crucially, savory protein fragments and nucleotides from these big muscles become dissolved in the meat juices during cooking, with potent flavor-enhancing effects. With so much more of all these substances to contribute, tougher cuts create more intense flavors that keep our saliva flowing and the meat succulent to the end. I wonder how they'd address the apparent exceptions to this (I think rib-eye is at least as flavorful as chuck, and hanger is at least as flavorful as brisket, for example).

What do you mean by the threshold being 165F?

True enough, but it's still considered unsafe practice to cool soup or stock covered. You lose the mechanism of evaporative heat loss, so the soup will spend much, much too much time at temperatures that promote rapid bacterial growth. It's important to cool the soup uncovered, and if it's a large enough volume that it will take more than a few hours to get it from 130F down to 40F, you need to play an active role in the process. This may mean transfering to a few smaller, shallower containers, stirring in a water bath, or an ice water bath, or with an ice paddle. At home I'm rarely dealing with more than 8 quarts or so, so I try to get it down to 50F within a couple of hours, and then I'm pretty comfortable putting in the fridge. Winter is easiest. If it's really wintery out, I'll put the whole pot out in the snow and wind. This is one of the few times a covered pot is ok. Old man winter packs way more convective cooling power than a fridge.

Anywhere else? DeBragga has lots of good stuff, but no interest unless they open a retail location. I'm not having meat shipped from 4 miles away.

Checking in after a few years. Jeffrey's is indeed gone. End of an era. Mr. Silva, his #2 butcher, is working at Heritage Foods market, which opened up in Jeffreys' space at Essex St.. Their meat is very good, with an emphasis on meat of known provenance, especially Piedmontese. To my palate, the meat is similar qualitiy to Jeffrey's (unknown) meat, although they seem to do a more consistent job with the dry aging. Prices are higher than J's but still pretty good. Silva tells me Jeffrey is working at a butcher shop somewhere in Brooklyn. I haven't been able to track him down. The outgoing message on his phone says "Do NOT leave a message." Any other great finds in NYC meat?

Most of the techniques I use for vegetables put the knife edge on the board. Not agressively, like in Euro techniques, but enough that it takes a delicate touch to prevent edge dammage. I'm pretty good at this but not 100% consistent. My chef's knife has a very thin edge and it doesn't take much to get a chip or flat spot. I learned a lot of my technique from KC Ma, a Japanese-trained chef who's generous about sharing his skills. Mostly the hybrid techniques Japanese chefs use when preparing Western food with double-bevel knives. He posted some demo videos before he died last year. I think the chive video is the most impressive. If you can learn to cut herbs like this, you'll be able to prep them 10 hour in advance and they won't brown or lose any percepible flavor. It's harder than it looks, and you'll need a serious knife and sharpening chops, and if you're a pro your chef will probably have no idea what you're doing and will make you do it his way.

The only chamber sealer I've used was a borrowed $4000 unit, which was nice, but its superpower seemed to be a massively powerful vacuum pump. It went down to 1 millibar, which (correct me if I'm wrong) is way more powerful than you'd ever need in the kitchen. What's the strongest you need for various compressions, speed-pickling, etc? Certainly for sous-vide, a sealer that's a fraction as powerful would be sufficient, and would still do away with the problems of Food Savers.

I learned to sharpen with wet/dry sandpaper, because the cost of entry is low. But I found that the paper clogs pretty quickly, and I was going through it fast enough that it was an expensive and frustrating longterm solution. So I got a set of entry-level waterstones, with the expectation that when I wore those out I'd be competent enough be merit an upgrade. This approached worked pretty well. I still have my medium-grit beginner's stones, but finish on a Naniwa 10,000 grit stone (really nice), and touch up on a strop that's just a sheet of paper spray-mounted to flat board, rubbed with some 1-micron abbrassive powder. The strop is just quicker and easier than a waterstone, because no water is required. It gives as fine a polish as any knife steel can take, and lets me put off the stones for a week or so longer I could otherwise. With sharpening, there are many different tools and techniques that are ultimately capable of getting you to the same place. The choices are mostly about ease, efficiency, and economy. The better you are at sharpening the less it matters how you get from coarse to fine. This isn't to say that all tools are equal. Diamond stones and wheels, oilstones, and ceramic rods will not come close to waterstones, automotive sandpaper, or abrasive powders. Their abrasives are just too coarse.

Ha. I don't even cook daily. I mean "everyday" in the sense of routine, ordinary, quotidian ...

Arrowroot may be worth trying if the mousses will be non-dairy. If there's milk or cream, it gets slimy. Agar, gellan, or some combination of gums might be ideal.