paulraphael
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Posts posted by paulraphael
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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.
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imprtnt thinks too say but halving technical trough
Sent from my connected smart skillet
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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.
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On 3/23/2022 at 7:14 AM, rotuts said:
I roast my own coffee.
however , if push comes to shove
Ive tried Peet's and Starbucks
and found coffee's ( whole bean of course )
lacking from each vendor.
consider Trader Joes .
its not going to be quite like the $ 200 / lbs mentioned above
( Blue Mountain ? Bait&Switch ? )
but its decent coffee at a fair price.
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.
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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.
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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.
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21 hours ago, gfweb said:
I love refinishing. Nail holes add character.
And drainage!
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23 hours ago, donk79 said:
My brother has a 200+ year old house with heart pine floors that he and his wife had refinished. There are people who specialize in this type of thing, but they probably will be more pricey than your standard floor contractor. It's almost more of a restoration trade than a refinishing trade. That said, I think my brother just had a contractor with experience in old houses.
I think you will want some sort of new finish, unless you are really into a weathered look. Otherwise, it sounds like you can expect pretty swift staining around the sink and stove. A lower gloss option might give what you are looking for, or maybe some sort of oil finish. I am definitely not one of those expert contractors I referred to above.
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.
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On 8/23/2022 at 1:24 AM, JoNorvelleWalker said:
I chose cherry as it is the softest wood offered. Not to mention, the least expensive. The board is quite attractive. Searching eGullet I find no love for Brooklyn Butcher Blocks? I wonder why this is.
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.
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On 8/23/2022 at 7:36 AM, weinoo said:
I'd seriously never heard of them - when I was shopping for a wood block years ago, The Boardsmith was what I chose - and it gets love here.
And when we renovated our kitchen, I wanted a butcher block portion of countertop - for that I went to a different manufacturer altogether...https://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/
These boards look very nice.
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.
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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?
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On 8/26/2022 at 10:45 AM, lindag said:
@paulraphael How easy is the Ode to clean? I've had the Encore for about six months and it's clogged and I can't get it cleaned out. I need my coffee!
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.
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13 hours ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:
I now have my new USB microscope delivered and set up. What should I look for and what should I be seeing? What type of lighting is best for judging the quality of an edge? What angle to the lens? I have seen random micrographs of knife edges on the internet, but does anyone have a link to a tutorial? I couldn't find more information on eGullet.
Perhaps most importantly, what's a good way to secure the blade to lessen the chance of an eventuality? I have a vise, however I don't want to damage the handle or the blade.
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.
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On 8/24/2022 at 1:52 PM, JoNorvelleWalker said:
Thank you for the video. I believe I now understand what thinning behind the edge is and what it is supposed to do. However, unless I am missing something, this is exactly what Chef's Choice purports to accomplish.
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.
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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.
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5 hours ago, palo said:
I see you're a Breville fan as well - how's that "a little bit more" work for you?
p
Best button in our house.
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On 7/22/2022 at 5:26 PM, weinoo said:
Some might think that one of the gadgets I've bought over the past year or two is dubious.
But I love it, and it works great. (eG-friendly Amazon.com link)
No one would make fun of that gadget if they've seen it at scale.
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17 hours ago, weinoo said:
So the small steak my friend picked up also got bagged. Both the rib eye and the strip were sous vided at 55℃, as I wanted to make sure not to over cook them. It wasn't a worry; as a matter of fact, after slamming them in a screaming hot cast iron for a minute, we decided we wanted a little more fire on the rib eye, and back in the pan it went. The wagyu was another story, as we definitely cooked it more than it needed - though it was still delicious, cause it's basically like eating crispy, beefy fat. But I think there are better ways to cook it - like maybe slices and then just feeling the heat from a torch, or 15 seconds on one side in the pan, and done. Next time! In the meantime...
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.
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On 7/6/2009 at 10:41 PM, mrose said:
I was finally able to get some 42/43 corn syrup. It was actually cheap through a bakery supply store. I know that this has a lower water content than what you can purchase in the grocery store (Karo). Is there a difference in sweetness? Do you use it in the same amounts as I have been using "Karo"?
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.
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8 hours ago, btbyrd said:
I don't think anyone has anything against small knives. It's just small chef's knives that are kind of weird. A santoku or bunka or nakiri or petty or whatever, sure. But a 6" chef's knife is nonideal, if what we're referring to as a chef's knife is something with a classic big-bellied, rock-chopping German profile. In a former life, I had a 6" Wusthof in a set I was gifted, and that thing *never* saw action.
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!
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On 7/7/2022 at 5:09 PM, weinoo said:
James Peterson, a cookbook writer who studied chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, stated in his encyclopedic cookbook called Sauces:
You need to cook a sauce for at least 20 to 30 seconds after adding wine to it to allow the alcohol to evaporate. Since alcohol evaporates at 172°F (78°C), any sauce or stew that is simmering or boiling is certainly hot enough to evaporate the alcohol.
Alcohol Burn-Off Chart from USDA
The USDA actually gives this data in chart form. 2Note that various other conditions are given. Most noticeable is that different values are given for baked items where alcohol is used but not stirred into the mixture. Also, you’ll notice that the alcohol evaporation for flamed dishes is lower than you might expect. You find out below why this is so.
Typically, to make a Marsala, the wine is added to a pan that something else has been sauteed in, such as chicken, onions, mushrooms, etc. and used to deglaze the pan, whereupon chicken broth or other broth is added. Even if you were to make a large volume of sauce for four people, you’d probably not use more than 3/4 cup of wine. Let’s be generous and say you use a cup of wine. And let’s also say your Marsala wine is 20% ABV, meaning the wine you use in the dish contains 1.6 ounces of alcohol. This means that one ounce of it contains 0.2 ounces of alcohol. You would then, typically, add the same volume of broth, if not a bit more. So we have two cups of liquid, plus whatever other moisture is already in the pan. This means that the alcohol is diluted by the same amount of liquid. One ounce of this mixture would contain 0.1 ounce of alcohol.
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.
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On 7/10/2022 at 5:15 PM, btbyrd said:
I don't think the standard pinch grip is especially useful when using smaller knives. Typically, you pinch at the balance point of the blade to give you better control of the tip of the knife, but since the blade of short chef's knives are so much shorter and lighter, the balance point is usually much farther back -- typically at the bolster or even in the handle. So I often end up holding the bolster on my shorter knives. It's still a pinch grip, but it's non-standard because I'm pinching the handle/bolster/ferrule and not the blade itself.
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.
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On 12/27/2020 at 12:49 PM, weinoo said:
I get pretty good, even heating on a gas range. Using the smaller, square reversible baking steel I have...
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.
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1 hour ago, weinoo said:
I actually wear ear plugs when grinding coffee; don't use the mini prep much, but the Blendtec also is noisy enough for me to pop in a pair of high quality plugs.
These are my concert ear plugs...https://us.loopearplugs.com/
And these are my kitchen ear plugs...https://www.etymotic.com/product/er20hd/
They pop in and fit much better than the foam junk.
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.
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Low carb ice cream that isn’t rock hard
in Pastry & Baking
Posted
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.