paulraphael

You have it about right. 746 watts equals one horsepower. 1000 watts equals 1.34 horsepower. It still amounts to a lie. Wattage is can be used to measure power consumption or output power. Horsepower is ONLY used to measure output power. Until this ridiculous move by KA, I've never seen an appliance company try to fool people by measuring power consumption in horses. KA and the other should do what the commercial manufacturers do, which is give the actual, sustained horsepower output. For a mixer like this, it would probably be about 1/10 hp. Which is plenty. A Hobart N50, which has a form factor closer to an atom bomb, is rated at 1/6 hp.

It's nice to see a horsepower measurement instead of a wattage measurement; horsepower generally means actual output power while wattage means power consumption. Unfortunately, Kitchen Aid is lying. Just ridiculously so, and I hope someone takes them to task on it. For reference, here's what a 3/4 (real) horsepower mixer looks like. This particular KA mixer may in fact be a good mixer, even a great one. But for obvious reasons I wouldn't trust KA's marketing to tell me so. I'd wait until some people can put it to the test. You can always buy from W.S., knowing that their warranty is forever, but you pay a huge premium buying there. I'm more inclined to wait things out, let the thing get field tested, and buy a KA factory refurb. The pro 600 is a plenty good mixer assuming you use it intelligently, and assuming you don't get a lemon. The artisans are good for cakes and light duty use but have a poor track record with breads.

Knives don't stay sharp for 20 years; they stay sharp for 20 minutes. A good knife will stay sharp enough for several hours of hard use.

One of the reasons for the variety of responses is that people have different ideas of what sharp means. Very few western-trained chefs had any idea of what a sharp knife was before they started mingling with their Japanese-trained brethren. If you use a European style chef's knife and maintain it on a steel, you're accustomed to a very versatile and efficient tool that does a huge range of tasks reasonablly well—but it is not a sharp knife. Not by a long shot. It simply can't be. Five minutes with Japanese knife that's been thinned to an accute bevel angle, and sharpened on water stones to high polish, will demonstrate the radical difference a sharp blade makes. Like all good things, it comes with tradeoffs. Such a knife requires a much more delicate set of techniques, and a refined set of sharpening skills. And you gotta sharpen it fairly often. If you do prep at a restaurant, you'll be able to go a whole shift without touching it up, but you'll have to hit the stones for a few minutes each night. You'll also need a different knife for working around bones, chopping chocolate, rock-chopping woody herbs, hacking into hard cheese, etc. etc.. For serious sharpness, the only choices are waterstones, or other abrasives like wet/dry sandpaper mounted on glass or something similar (the sandpaper method is a pain). Waterstones can be used freehand, or with the assistance of a system like edge-pro. The edge pro takes the manual skill out of it, but gives less flexibility and is slower. No matter what you do, if you want a very sharp knife, it will require practice and maintenance.

Sounds to me like recipes are the least of your worry. As far as I know they are not protected as intellectual property. The precise wording of a recipe can by copyrighted, but that's worth nothing. You can sell the whole thing and still use your recipes. All the other things people are mentioning are more important.

There's no need for alcohol. The dry ice is added directly to the ice cream base. It evaporates as the ice cream freezes. A small percentage of the C02 goes into solution in the water in the base, carbonating it, where it will stick around for several hours, gradually diminishing. There are other ways to use dry ice that won't carbonate the ice cream, but I don't see the point. There are much easier and more economical ways to make ice cream. Keep in mind that while dry ice is very cold, it does not have an especially high specific heat. The cooling potential for a pound of dry ice may actually be less than the cooling potential of a pound of water ice, in terms of the number of calories it can remove. It's probably much less compared with the fluid that's in ice cream machine canisters. So you will need lots of it.

That's the way to do it. I don't move the knife at all. The paring knife is very sharp, and I can just turn the berry against it like wood on a lathe. You should get a cone shaped section from the top of the berry, and the cuts should be glossy smooth. It's a very fast process ... a couple of seconds per berry.

The killer property of dry is that it will carbonate your ice cream. Think about the possibilities ... I've come up with a champagne sorbet that's actually bubbly. The catch is that the carbonation dissipates. Unless you have some kind of pressurized ice cream carton (I don't) it will keep it's bubbles for 24 hours at most, and the fizz will dissipate steadily from the moment it's frozen. Best to crush the dry ice in a blender or food processor before using. The procedure is the same as LN2, but you're working with a solid.

Lollol, that's kinda how the real shelling machines work. I've seen em demoed at restaurant conventions. They look kinda like upright washers. You dump in a whole cube of shell eggs. Let er rip. Liquid eggs come out of the spigot into your bucket. The busted up shells are retained in the drum for you to empty. Yeah, seriously, it may be lazy but it also sounds smart. What's wrong with this?

I wouldn't spend a lot of money on steak knives. They're in the business of taking abuse: people cut directly on porcelain plates with them. And if you want to use a dishwasher, there's really no way for an expensive knife to be reasonable. One route is serrated knives. They tear up the meat, but are maintenance free. They'll last a bunch of years of occasional use, and then you can consider them disposable. Another route is something easy to sharpen. I haven't used the Forschners, but considering their other knives, they're probably great. Cheap, nice (especially with the wood handles, but really keep these out of the dishwasher or they'll crack), and generally a breeze to sharpen.

A regular freezer isn't suitable for making ice cream, even if you make it exceptionally cold, because air just conducts heat too slowly. Canister machines have a liquid within their walls that has a lot of themal mass and that melts at a very low temperature—an endothermic physical reaction that draws huge amounts of heat from its surroundings. Notice that it takes many hours in the freezer to suck the heat of the canister and get it ready to make ice cream; the canister will then suck the same amount of heat out of your mix in 20 minutes or so. Salt and ice work on a similar principle to the melting fluid in the canister. Ice draws heat rapidl when it's melted by brine, and can drop the temperature of the brine well below 0°C.

Bourdain talks about this as a perennial conversation among chefs. As in, "yeah, he's a good chef, but can he cook?" The idea being, I think, that cooking involves skills that take continued practice, and that too many years in offices, at construction sites, at fund raisers, and on t.v. can dull those skills. Chefing and cooking are remarkably different skill sets, after all. One has to be a good cook in order to become a chef, but not to remain one.

I've read that they produce the smoothest purees possible, at least for things that you don't want to work in a blender. They're probably great, but I've never used one. There used to be a couple of veterans of Thomas Keller's kitchens who posted here. Maybe you could track them down. I'm pretty sure Keller is a drum sieve believer.

The biggest challenge when sharpening just about any knife is getting rid of the wire edge, which is basically the remains of the burr ... a very thin, weakly attached bit of fatigued metal that's an artifact of the sharpening process. If you have a wire edge, the knife can be extremely sharp, but the edge will be fragile. You'll typically find the knife losing much of its performance with the first several minutes of use. This is from the wire breaking away and leaving a poor edge in its place. The mystery steel global uses is notorious for hanging on to the wire edge. It has a kind of gummy quality that makes burs and wires especially tenacious.

I've never seen those. What's the story with the unusual looking mesh?

The two I use all the time are a medium coarseness dime store type strainer, and a fine chinois. My chinois is a not the fanciest or finest mesh one available; it's more of a cone-shaped strainer with a very tight weave. It's fairly small, so I can use it over prep containers and small sauce pans. For heavy duty stuff I have a coarse chinois (a big one that fits over a stock pot). For the occasional ultra fine straining I have a series of generic superbags from 200 micron to (I think) 50 microns. These are polyester filter bags that you can get on ebay ... much cheaper and in a wider range of mesh sizes than actual superbags.

Loupes can be useful. I don't have a very powerful one ... the 4X Schneider loupe I use for photography actually gives a good look at what's going on. It lets me know how close my sharpening has come to the edge (when thinning) and it shows if there's any residual burr or wire edge (I suppose a higher magnification loupe would be even better for this). You don't need a loupe, but since I'm at best a journeyman knife sharpener, every bit of input helps. Of course, the ideal test is to cut whatever food you're most concerned with cutting well. But this is not practical most of the time when you're sharpening. I find tomatoes to be a pretty poor test. Any halfway sharp knife slips right through a tomato. And a toothy edge (like one sharpened only to 1000 grit or so) can sometimes cut the skin of a ripe tomato more easily than a sharper, more polished edge. I don't know what the best generic test is, but I've had pretty good luck using firm apples (like Granny smiths ... can you easily make slices that you can read the phone book through?) and the phone book pages themselves. A sharp knife will push-cut phone book paper with virtually no pressure and make virtually no noise while doing so.

1. I make no claims to being the Emperor of Ice Cream! 2. My latest, post-colonial recipe is here: www.under-belly.org/recipes/vanilla_ice_cream.pdf (sorry for not using the link function ... for some reason HTML is not working)

Books are tough; I don't have any that are particularly educational. David Lebowitz's is great for flavor ideas, but the techniques and base recipes are very simple homestyle ones, and there's no technical information on how to manipulate textures and adjust formulas. There's a professional book that came out a few years back that got glowing reviews, but last i checked it was very expensive and only in Italian. I'd be curious to hear other people's recommendations. I haven't had a chance to check out the CIA frozen desserts text. I've gotten my best information from online sources, including chef blogs, and by bugging pastry chefs. And of course, from finding excuses to experiment and then eat the data. I am beyond flattered to be anyone's ice cream hero. But my hero is Wallace Stevens: The Emperor of Ice-Cream Call the roller of big cigars,
 The muscular one, and bid him whip 
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. 
 Let the wenches dawdle in such dress 
 As they are used to wear, and let the boys 
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. 
Let be be finale of seem. 
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Take from the dresser of deal, 
 Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet 
 On which she embroidered fantails once 
 And spread it so as to cover her face. 
If her horny feet protrude, they come 
 To show how cold she is, and dumb. 
Let the lamp affix its beam. 
 The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Hi Mostlylana. yes, I've changed the recipe a few times since then. I'm always learning new tricks (I'm on version 16 right now ...). Where did you find that one? I don't even remember making it quite like that. I'm still using dry milk powder (it's a revelation) and 2 yolks per quart. No more corn starch (using gelatin and xanthan, as described earlier) and no alcohol (controlling hardness through the sugars ... now use a mix of granulated sugar, dextrose and trimoline). I'm away from home right now; I'll try to check soon and see if my latest version is online somewhere.

Ok, so it's a smidgen of rumor, not a smidgen of evidence. But it probably deserves the same conclusion as much of the published research: "further research seems warranted." Luckily, quite a few volunteers have emerged through this thread, proposing methods as widely varied as rolling pins and croquet mallets.

Here's a post I wrote last fall. Sous vide let me serve perfectly done meat to a whole room full of people, with no real effort. These were from 8-week dry aged, very prime loin and rib sections. Definitely worth it.

Sous vide gives enormous control. You can get a huge range of effects. You can even get a gradient from well done to rare if you want to (there's no law saying sous vide needs to be a low temperature technique). I personally never want this ... I like a crisp crust and then the remainder to be a perfect pink, but you can get whatever result you want. The "airplane food comment" is probably base on tender cuts that are over-tenderized by excessive cooking times at low temperature. This is a variable that can be controlled like all the others. The only thing I haven't figured out how to create is a VERY thick, crisp crust when browning sous vided meat. This doesn't mean it can't be done; I just haven't figured it out the couple of times I've borrowed a circulator.

Whoever said "bad food" nailed it. I have a lot of personal markers for someone who I wouldn't want to collaborate with in the kitchen ... they mostly have to do with organization and OCD cleaning habits. These are typical markers that make or break a pro kitchen, and they make a huge difference at home, too. But I've had wonderful meals prepared by people who are disasters in all these regards (Mom, are you reading?)—a kitchen that looks like a war zone minutes into prep, dull knives, horrible pans, clutter, drawers clogged with gadgets... My solution is to let them do their thing while I mute any lingering sense of horror with alcohol. Then enjoy the delicious meal that emerges like Phoenix from the ashes.

The primary purpose of the oil in the pan is browning the fish properly. Food has an irregular surface that doesn't fully contact the pan. Oil provides even conduction to every indentation and allows the fish to brown more quickly and evenly. In order to get these benefits, you need much more oil than is required to prevent sticking. Keeping fish from sticking is 100% about technique. You can cook a fillet with the skin on it in a stainless steel pan if you do it properly. The secret is that the proteins will stick while they're cooking, but will release on their own after the maillard reactions are complete. You have to place or slide the fish onto the hot pan quickly and accurately, because it will adhere in just a couple of seconds. Then you LEAVE IT! That's the hard part to get used to—doing nothing. The fish spat isn't used as a scraper to tear the fish off the bottom of the pan. If it doesn't slip under the fish, you just have to wait a bit longer. This does require accurate modulation of the pan's temperature. If the pan isn't hot enough, you'll risk overcooking the fish before it's ready to release.