paulraphael

That's the law in New York, too. I'm sure any NYC chefs can give you an idea what's involved.

Yes, I use xanthan gum in all my ice creams and sorbets. I've experimented with a bunch of stabilizing ingredients, and the combination of gelatin and xanthan has worked best for me. use it in minute amounts ... generally around 0.3g xanthan and 1g gelatin per 1000g of ice cream. This allows me to use less egg. I only use 2 yolks per 1000g. Eggs give great texture but I don't like tasting them in ice cream, ever. The xanthan and gelatin also help prevent ice crystal formation, and together they help tailor the mouth feel of the ice cream, both when frozen and melted. Carageenan supposedly has even better ice crystal suppression than xanthan, but it's more difficult to use. I haven't played with it yet.

This whole business is very strange. Usually this kind of fearmongering comes from someone with mostly imaginary credentials. This time it's by an MD PhD with a legitemate research background in nutrition and endocrinology. But I did a PubMed search for his published papers, and found that none of them supports his public conclusions that sugar is somehow toxic. He's published a few papers that show that (surprise!) way too much sugar is bad, and that it can be bad in some previously unconfirmed ways. But there's nothing about it being some kind of evil substance, like plutonium, or even trans-fats ... and this is the thesis he's put forth publicly. It often seem suspect when a scientist seeks a public audience in a non-reviewed forum. It's not unlike the pundits who spread their climate science denial messages on youtube and in public lectures, but who have no publication record (or even publication attempts) in legitemate peer reviewed journals.

Precooked slowly (sous vide, steam oven, or low oven), then cut into steaks to order and seared?

Scrub sponge and detergent. The lore is wrong; if you're not cleaning the pan then it will just be dirty. A properly formed seasoning will not be harmed by normal scrubbing. You'd be surprised what it would take to damage it. That said, the seasoning is porous, and it will hang on to some odors. This is why it's traditional to have a separate spun steel pan for omelettes. Eggs are especially susceptible to absorbing odors from their environment. Cast iron is a wonderful material, but it has many limitations. Retained odors is one of them. Poor conduction and very slow response to temperature changes are others. It doesn't make sense to use it for everything. Use it for its strenghts, and avoid its weaknesses by using something else.

Please tell me this is a temporary glitch.

What temperature are you cooking to? This is really more about time and temperature than method. The only way grilling is going to render off a significant amount of that fat is if you're overcooking the meat. My guess is that when cooking sous vide, you're somewhat undercooking it. I always order this kind of meat rare at restaurants, which made me assume 49°-51°c would be right for these steaks, but I greatly prefered them cooked to 54°C ... what a lot of chefs would call the low end of medium rare. That's the point at which all the marbling was effectively melted. I suspect this is because with conventional cooking methods, there's always some gradient, so only the meat at the very center will actually be as cool as your target temperature.

That's the standard Poly Science circulator that you'll see a lot of people using. They go for about $1000, which is why I don't have one. There are other options, though ... quite a few people here have a Sous Vide Supreme. I'm sure someone can comment on its suitability for a project of this scale. I used a 20 quart stock pot for a container. I might have been able to use a somewhat smaller one. I brushed the meat with this formula: -100g water or water plus pan drippings. -1.5g dextrose (or 2 to 4g corn syrup or glucose syrup) -0.5g baking soda A light coat of this on dried meat before browning should theoretically help. Its real benefit is to allow better, faster browning with less heat (it's ideal with a 400°F pan temperature). I haven't experimented enough to have a verdict. I got this idea from conversations here and from some techie research. Possibly the best way to brown this meat would be with a deep fryer. It would be so brief that you would need no breading; the meat wouldn't have any fried qualities. Short of that, it would probably have helped if I'd used a pan instead of a griddle, and poured in a thicker layer of oil. It would have allowed crust on the whole surface of the meat, including indendations. A circulator would be great in a small NYC kitchen. Cook for an army (while you're doing domething else) and then hide it when you're done.

Last fall I needed to serve steak to a dozen people. I had four burners and no help in the kitchen, so the Ducasse method (and other methods I've used) weren't going to work. The solution was both obvious and trendy: sous vide and relax. I borrowed an immersion circulator from a friend and bought test meat to run some trials. I was interested in how to get some of the butter overtones from the Ducasse method. I was also curious to discover what my actual favorite internal temperature is for beef. Here's the winning methodology: My butcher hooked us up with some very prime, 8-week dry-aged beef. Five from the loin, one from the rib. I salted and peppered the steak and sealed each in a ziplock bag with about 1.5 oz melted, cultured butter. The butter was for flavor and also to help evacuate the air (I don't have a vacuum machine, so I get the air out by immersing the bagged food in water). The winning combination was 2-1/2 hours at 54°C. This is below the pasteurization temperature for beef, so going much longer isn't adivseable. The results were also so tender that I'd be afraid of a longer cook having excessive tenderizing effect. I then trimmed the meat from the bones, dried it, and brushed lightly with a weak glucose / baking soda solution to boost the maillard reactions. I seared it on a very hot griddle, flipping a couple of times. Total sear was probably less than a minute per side. Everyone got a a few slices of strip, and a bit of tenderloin and rib. I served it with a sauce made from beef coulis, wild mushrooms, and sage. The moral of the story is that returning the circulator broke my heart. This method allow the steaks to be cooked perfectly, and also absolutely consistently from steak to steak, and with just a few minutes lag between the first steak coming off the heat and the last one landing on the table. It's always a challenge getting rare / semi-rare meat to the table warm, since it isn't more than warm to begin with. In addition, this required NO SKILL. Once I'd worked out the method, it could have been executed by monkeys. Compared with the Ducasse method, I'd say that the crust wasn't quite as thick or as buttery. But the gradient was smaller and the doneness was more reliably perfect, and it was much easier. It should be possible to increase the crustiness with some refinement, if that's your goal. There are many variables to play with when searing.

I've used meyer lemons for sorbet and have had good results using 5 lemons per quart of base ... juice from all five, zest from two of them. Avoid the pith at all costs. The dairy in ice cream mutes fruit flavors a lot, so you could probably go to six or seven lemons, with zest from more of them, especially if you're making ice cream with more than 10% milk fat.

I don't understand why you'd want actual foil and pachment stuck together, but releasable foil has been around a while. I've wanted to experiment with it for pizza making. I generally cheat with my high-hydration pizza doughs, and roll out the dough on parchment so it can slide easily into the oven. But parchment insulates a bit and reduces the char. It also incinerates. Releasable foil sounds like just the thing. Bizarre that the box says "aluminum insulates." It's extremely conductive, much more than parchment, which is why I'd be interested in the Reynolds product.

Can you post your dough recipe? KA's guidelines for flour capacity are completely useless. Your mixer should be able to handle much more than 11 cups of flour at high hydrations, but it might choke on half that much with certain stiff doughs. I'm suspecting the problem is either very difficult doughs, or else there's something wrong with the thermal shutoff mechanism. It could be a defective 50 cent part. Does the mixer sound like it's staining? Does the back of the chasis feel hot to the touch? The mixer is designed to get uncomfortably hot for short stretches of time. I've hammered on my Pro 600 mixer with bread dough and pizza dough for years and the thing has never gotten more than warm to the touch. But my dough recipes tend to be pretty high hydration and therefore loose.

Chocolate ice creams are especially tricky because of the cocoa butter. Different chocolates have different amounts and it can take some experimenting to get a formula balanced. I'd try a simple flavor (no chocolate or fruit or anthing that introduces lots of variables) first to make sure the machine and your basic methods are working.

I've never tried it, but Rose Levy Barrenbaum says they're ideal for baking cakes. The convection fan is gentler than the ones in a commercial convection oven, and the turntable (intended for the microwave) helps guarantee even baking.

Chef Ripert doesn't do much prep at this stage in his career. My guess is that his knives mostly come out when he's doing public events.

I would love for an SSB to weigh in on this. My mom has a small non-stick frying pan she uses to fry eggs. She only uses the non-stick spray in it as opposed to oil/butter/fat. It is now an "everything sticks in it" pan. What gives? Is there something in the non-stick spray causing the sticking issue? She leaves the pan on the heat for a bit before cooking anything. Is this causing the sticking problem...heating it up without anything in the pan? Most of those sprays just contain some kind of refined oil and a propellant. Nothing terribly high tech. But the oils tend to be of the polyunsaturated type (canola, etc.), which are the quickest to polymerize. Your mom is getting the same result she'd get if she put a film of caonla or saflower oil on the pan and heated it long enough to cook solid. This turns a nonstick pan into a permastick pan. This kind of polymerized oil is the base of what makes cast iron and spun steel stick resistant, but in those cases, the oil is heated enough for some of the oil to carbonize (burn to a black crisp). The carbon particles embedded into the plastic-like polymerized oil help keep the pan from sticking. But it doesn't do as much as teflon. and this process happens at temperatures that would wreck the teflon coating completely.

To make me and my Christian Dior spatula caddy feel inadequate?

I think this is a fairly generalized statement. I would suggest that there are a lot of tasks nonstick is good for and it all depends on your level of cooking skill. Plenty of restaurants use inexpensive nonstick pans exactly because of their qualities. Sure, they're easy and allow for a certain amount of slop. This can be a great advantage, not just for unskilled cooks, but for skilled ones who have a hundred things to juggle. I was surprised to see nonstick pans in use at Le Bernardin; they use them mostly for fish with the skin on it (I think they had one black bass dish that they served like this when I was in the kitchen). I do this on a stainless surface at home, which I think gives even better control and better browning, but I saw why the sauté cooks there used nonstick, in spite of being much better cooks than me: they had orders flying in and out at twice the pace that I've ever seen a short order cook handle. pans were thown from counter to stove to oven to pass in a total blur. used pans ended up in a pile in the corner, still hot enough to char side towels with their handles. No one had time to pay attention and get the release time exaclty right on every single piece of bass, and be extra delicate with a spatula. But at home I do ... I'm making one or two fish at a time. I like the results I get when I'm not contending with that insulating layer of teflon. I also like my pans to last more than a couple of weeks, which is probably their lifespan at Le Bernardin. And for less delicate foods? I don't see any advantage to nonstick, but many disadvantages. They rule the omelette word, that's about it.

Well, I think they're somewhat specialized too. They respond very slowly, heat unevenly, and the dark surface makes it almost impossible to see the difference between browned and burned pan drippings. And the seasoning holds odors/flavors, making it inapropriate for more delicately flavored sauces, etc... Cast iron is great for browning the bejeezus out of things, but not for cooking where control is important. A good cast iron primer at Cooking Issues.

I treat them the same as any other pan, but watch them more closely. For sauté, preheat on high heat, then fat, then food. You need to have everything ready, because it may be well under a minute between the ideal preheat temp and thermal breakdown of the teflon. You should not under any circumstances put oil in a nonstick pan before preheating it, or put oil in it before putting it away. That oil can polymerize on the surface of the pan and will be impossible to remove. This is the same process as "seasoning" a cast iron pan, but what is essential treatment for iron will basically wreck a nonstick surface. I'd suggest that there are very few tasks in the kitchen that a nonstick pan is actually good for. They are overused. Nice for eggs, and delicate fish ... but even with fish, if your technique is good, you can do everything on stainless. If you keep one as a specialty pan, it will last a long time and not be such an annoying burden of fussy cooking and disposablility. FWIW, pans like Swiss Diamond are teflon pans just like any other. They don't use DuPont's trademarked version, but they use PTFE, just like everyone else, and the thermal properties are identical. There's no free lunch.

The question is how high is high? The range Will mentions goes to 23K BTU on each of the burners; that's the highest by far for any residential range I've seen. The Viking and Wolf residential ranges I've used are in the 16K - 17K range, which, while better than the thing in my kitchen, still feel like sheep in wolf's clothing. If you've ever cooked with a Garland or Wolf Commercial range or anything similar (typically in the 26K - 30K range) you'll know what I mean.

It depends on what's available, and also on any current obsessions. I almost never make bread anymore, because great bread is available for not that much $$$ all over NYC. But when I got into making it, it was more for fun and because I wanted to learn than for any practical reasons. Same with Pizza ... I was obsessed with it for a couple of years, but a wood oven pizzeria that's a 10 minute walk from me got better and better. Not just better than me but better than any other pizzeria in town that I've tried. So I surrendered. Ice cream? Not a chance. I haven't bought it in years. Nothing I can buy equals what I can make, and I wouldn't want Breyers if it were free! I've been spoiled.

In a perfect world I'd want them all the same, all able to go from a low simmer to rocket launch, and to have grates that can handle a butter warmer or a stock pot. In reality, this is rarely an option, because home range makers need to limit total BTUs to make up for residential gasline constraints. They may also be limited by some residential codes. So mighty burners have to be compensated for by small ones. Commercial ranges don't have these constraints, but they often suffer from grates that could swallow anything smaller than a 1qt saucepan. The quasi-pro ranges that use burners of all equal power don't impress me that much; their maximum output suffers. Having burners of unequal power is probably a good compromise.

Thanks for the heads up about the petition. If anyone else wants to sign, it's here.

Please help Jeffrey. He's possibly the best, definitely the most awesome. He's got big financial troubles and if you don't spread the word and shop from him he may be gone for good.