paulraphael

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.

No answers for how to use the microscope, but I look forward to reading whatever you discover. I've read that lighting is hard ... easy to make the edge look much better or worse than it is. Rotus's idea of some tape on the blade to protect it from the vice should work great. You could also just pad the vice with a thin towel.

Not really. Chef's choice does a compound bevel, where you get a fairly acute main bevel for performance, and very small, more obtuse microlevel (maybe a mini-bevel?) at the tip, for durability. It's a standard way to sharpen and can give good compromise between performance and burliness. Thinning happens along the couple of centimeters above the edge, where the chef's choice and other sharpeners never touch. As you gradually wear down the knife through repeated sharpenings, the edge will move up to fatter and fatter parts of the blade's taper. Performance will gradually decline if you don't periodically thin up there. That's thinning for maintenance. People also sometimes thin new knives, just to fine tune them to their own preferences. This is hard work, done with coarse diamond stones and a bit of masochism. Fortunately there are enough thin knives available nowadays that there's less need for these shenanigans.

Even a powerful countertop blender makes slush, not ice cream. A paco jet has a very sharp blade that shaves ice into fine enough bits to have a smooth texture (which is surprisingly fine) and aerate it the right amount. It's also designed to do it without heating it up significantly.

Best button in our house.

No one would make fun of that gadget if they've seen it at scale.

Interesting. I haven't cooked Wagyu, but have been told by just about everyone to cook it at a higher temperature than the equivalent American beef. Typically 58°C. The idea is to fully melt the fat, which doesn't happen 55.

This is often the problem with consumer brands. You typically have no way to know exactly what you're getting. And since they don't tell you, they're not under any obligation to keep it consistent from batch to batch and year to year. Even with products labelled for commercial use, you don't usually get all the information. They may tell you the DE but not what's actually in it (what saccharides and in what ratios). There are many ways you can get to the same DE value. You can assume that that something labelled DE 42 will be sweeter than something labelled DE 15. But you can't assume that it will be exactly as sweet as something else labelled DE 42. Or that it will have the same water content, or the same freezing point depression, etc. To the original question, I suspect Karo is sweeter than typical DE 42 corn syrup. But I'm not positive. And on another note, I just heard from someone in the ice cream industry that there's a global shortage of corn sugar. Like with everything else. So prices have been rising.

The place I see pros use smaller knives is during service, when they don't have lots of room to work, and they aren't moving through piles of prep. But don't think I've ever seen 6" chefs knives. Small knife usually means an 8" chef / gyuto, or or a 6" petty. I've seen knives like these use for prep by the sorry folks who work in liliputian NYC-style galley kitchens. They sometimes have work surfaces and cutting boards that are less than a foot deep. It gets awkward to use a longer blade. I've read that it's a Thomas Kellerism that you should use the smallest knife you can get away with. No idea why, or what counts as small, or if it's even a true story!

Right ... things will only flame if the alcohol percentage is high enough to create the right blend of alcohol vapor and oxygen above the food. Once the alcohol level gets too low to provide this, the fire goes out. It's a little more complicated than this—a flamed sauce will keep burning past the point where you'd be able to reignite it, because heat from the fire will boil the surface and liberate more alcohol vapor. But you're still not coming close to burning off all the booze. The USDA chart is super useful. It's just rough guidance, though. The shape of the pot will make a big difference in evaporation rate.

The standard western pinch grips (along with techniques like rock chopping) were also invented to help you apply more cutting force. They're techniques for knives that aren't very sharp. This isn't a dig at western chef's knives; it's just a fact that in terms of their design, edge geometry, and metallurgy they're traditionally made more for toughness and versatility than pure cutting performance. We compensate with the grips and the techniques we use. If you're using thinner, sharper blades, these grips and techniques no longer make sense. The whole idea of balance becomes mostly irrelevant, because the knives are lighter. You don't need to apply a lot of force, or create shearing action through rock-chopping (and if you try, you might damage the blade). So the grip is all about control. More like a violin bow than a hatchet. I sometimes use a modified sort of pinch grip when cutting with the tip of a long, lighter knife. But it's a very loose grip. It's just to choke up a bit to get closer to the food, like for slicing garlic. Or it's to let the knife pivot easily, like when doing rapid chopping with the tip. Otherwise, the best grip is often the one that European cooking schools tell you never to use: holding the handle, with your forefinger on the spine of the knife. Forbidden in France, but the Japanese work magic with it. The chef who taught me Japanese techniques took this a step farther—he let his index finger kind of hover above the blade. He held the handle very lightly with his thumb and middle and ring fingers, and used the tip of his pinkie against the side of the wa-handle to counter any rotation and keep the blade cutting straight. Looked silly, but his cuts were perfect ... looked like they'd been made by a robot with a mandolin. I never got the hang of this technique in its pure form. I personally don't understand the point of a small chef's knife. The western chef's knife is for cutting with power, and for being crazy-versatile. A small one is neither burly nor versatile. If you want something for precise tasks, there are many choices that make more sense.

On a gas range, you have those hot gasses spreading out under the pan. They have to go somewhere, and they deliver some energy out to the edges of the pan through convection. So even if you have a big pan sitting on a small flame, you're getting at least a little help from something besides the pan's conductivity. And that steel you're using is probably thicker than a skillet, so it could do a somewhat better job of spreading the heat.

I use ear plugs when making nut butters in the vitamix. That takes long enough to be a real hearing loss threat. The little bamix is quiet. My girlfriend uses it in the same room when I'm on zoom calls.

I like them for small tasks, especially things like make vinaigrettes. Of course you're the one person here with a rotor-stator homogenizer, so I can already hear you laughing at my Bamix. They're also handy for whipping a single egg white, or sticking into a pan on the stove to puree something to a somewhat finer texture. I use it more as a monster whisk than a mini blender. The smaller sized Bamix models are great for this use, because they're nimble and they spin very fast. They're probably not the best as a blender substitutes ... I've heard they're mediocre at things like pureeing a whole pot of soup, etc., which I use the vitamix for. Your stick blender died because it stripped a sacrificial plastic pin or gear. This is a part that's designed to protect a more expensive part if the thing gets overloaded—but it's a pointless feature here, since consumer stick blenders aren't designed to repaired anyway. It makes sense on a Kitchenaid mixer—whenever some genius throws a frozen stick of butter into the bowl (it happens somewhere on Earth every 15 minutes), the plastic gear strips, which feels catastrophic in the moment, but you're only actually out a $5 part and a greasy afternoon. I don't think the Bamixes are built this way—they're transmissionless, so the only part that could break is the very accessible pin that holds the blade in place. It would take a serious commitment to abuse to shear that thing.

This is my favorite. Addictive, and it keeps for weeks. It's all about the vinegar: if you don't have a local source for great sherry vinegar I recommend ordering from Despaña. To make ~360g / ~12 fl oz 180g neutral oil 5g garlic clove 5g dijon mustard 1.5g salt 1.5g black pepper 0.2g xanthan gum (optional) 35g Pedro Jiminez sherry vinegar 35g Palomino sherry vinegar ~60g Water (to adjust consistency) Blast it together with a stick blender. I recommend adding all the solid ingredients to the oil, blending until it's pureed, then blending in the vinegars, and finally blend in water just until the consistency is right. If you use xanthan, it probably won't separate. You could use 100% pedro jiminez vinegar if you like, but that makes a bit too sweet for my tastes. The 50/50 blend is just right.