paulraphael

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.

I like shallow; I don't like using a rack, and find that high sides impede airflow and radiant heat. Small things roast best for me in a skillet; big things on a sheet pan. But sheet pans are horrific to deglaze on, so I found a roasting pan that's about 2" deep. Mine is made by demmiere and sold under the viking name, and was expensive. You can probably find a similar shape in heavy aluminum from a restaurant supply store. If you use a rack for most things, a more conventionally deep pan works well. Stay away from dark colors or brightly polished (light but dull is ideal). Definitely stay away from nonstick. Makes proper pans sauces next to impossible.

Oh, no ... I hardly ever even drink soft drinks. I'd love to taste test someone else's attempts though. The recipe actually looks tasty.

Umm, they're like night and day. HCFS has a hard, bitter aftertaste and the sugary taste takes a brief instant to develop in the mouth. On the other hand, cane sugar is 99.9% sucrose; it is immediately sweet with no aftertaste. Less refined cane syrups are another creature entirely, with all sorts of secondary flavors depending on the syrup. Have you done it as a blind test? I'm not doubting that they could be so different, but it's curious, since sucrose and the type of HFCS used in soft drinks are chemically almost identical.

Has anyone done a blind taste test of HFCS vs. cane sugar syrup?

Printed here. These surface every once in a while; Coka Cola's official response is always that they're innacurate, and are the result of people crafting immitations. I'm curious if anyone thinks today's coke is actually the same recipe as the one concocted in the 1880s. Doesn't it seem likely that it would have been streamlined and economized, at the very least? At any rate, I'm much less interested in reverse engineering today's coke than in discovering something that might be similar but more interesting. Could there really be this many flavors layered in a plain old contemporary coke?

I haven't used their handheld bottles, but Platypus is probably my favorite of all the backpack/hose hydration bladders. Very few failures over the years.

I've got piles of water bottles and hydration bladders that I use for hiking and climbing. Not a single metal sigg-type bottle among them, because the small mouth makes these too hard to clean, and the opacity makes it imposible to see if they're full or empty, clean or septic. I just think the Nalgene bottles are superior in every way. I personally don't find any of the evidence against BPA (in a bottle used for cold water) to be compelling, so I prefer my old lexan bottles. They're completely indestrucible, and this is worth a lot to me. If BPA worries you (which might make sense if you want to carry hot drinks or if you're pregnant) the newer, non-polycarbonate ones are fine. Just don't drop them onto rocks when they're full. I have two of the polycarbonate lexans that have been used steadily since the mid 1980s. One of them recently needed a new lid. Otherwise they're scarred but good as new, and have never retained flavors of any kind.

We served Dead Dates. Bitter, dubious looking, and popular. And easy. Added a splash of bitters for good measure. Thanks everyone for the ideas, and happy un-anti-valentine's day.

These suggestsions are all amazing. We may have to have a pre-party to test cocktails. The winner will likely be something we mix by the pitcher, since we are not merely bitter but lazy.

This if for a party called Slaughtered Hearts Klub Massacre and Dance ... theme will be anti-valentines. Everyone will be as unatractive as can be, will flaunt their loneliness, and be asked (probably unconvincingly) to observe the no-hookup rule. I'm thining it should be -red -sour -bitter It shouldn't actually be disgusting, but it might have ingredients that sound questionable. Like Godiva liqueur. Except for the last part, I'm a big fan of the Negroni. But we're open to trying something new or inventing something. Any ideas?

I've handled the knives and don't like them at all. The craftsmanship and the metallurgy seem good, but the designs are gimmicky, and don't reflect any knowledge serious cutting techniques (either European or Japanese). The edge geometry is also really thick and heavy, which makes a knife durable but compromises performance. A thick, handmade knife makes as much sense to me as a Ferrari pickup truck. I played with a few of them at Brooklyn Kitchen. That store has a knowledgable knife buyer, who has stocked the shelves with some much better (and cheaper) choices, including a couple of Japanese brands I'd never heard of.

I think that accounts for most of it. Also, some pastry items require more precision than others. Some offer as much room for improvisation as soup; others, especially certain cakes, will collapse if you look at them wrong. The better pastry chefs I've met have great improvisational skills. If they don't use them at work, it's because of the need for consistency. You see this in the professional hot kitchen too; as an extreme example, Thomas Keller has his cooks weigh out mirrepoix vegetables to the gram.

Chocolate ice cream. If you're talking about manual skills and not just theoretical complexity, I doubt I've done anything especially impressive.

I'd recommend a restaurant supply store. If you don't have one local check out places like bigtray.com. You should find plenty of plain aluminum pans, with a light (but unpolished) finish. I can't suggest a particular brand, but look for one with low sides. Most of the commercial pans are only medium weight, but they're heavy enough to go from oven to stovetop for deglazing. These pans aren't as nice or as easy to clean as expensive clad pans, but they will roast your food 100% as well. I cook with both and can promise that. Should be easy to get one for $50 or less.

A bit off topic, but as an experiment I tried seasoning an aluminum griddle. It's an old, heavy (almost 1/4" thick) aluminum slab with a slight lip. It always orked well but was a pain to clean. So I seasoned with safflower oil in the oven, using the method I outlined above. It took about five coats, and now is gloss-black and fairly stick resistant. Subjectively I'd say the coating is more fragile than the same coating on iron, but it holds up well to spatulas and scouring pads. I don't see any downside.

I've suspected the PUR systems were higher quality than Brita. I use Brita because it's so entrenched in NYC that I can get the filters just about anywhere. But PUR seems to be getting a bigger presence. Any sense of the price difference between the two company's filters?

I've heard that a lot ... the theory is that a polished edge doesn't have spindly, unsupported teeth that bend or break easily. Seems plausible to me but I wouldn't know how to test it in a meaningful way. On the other hand, knives made from softer steels don't stay sharp long no matter what, so they may do better with a toothy edge. An aggressive edge can cut reasonably well even when it's lost much of its sharpness. This is why few people bother to go past 2K or so on German knives.

If you were convinced of the evils of BPA, you'd want to eliminate canned foods. The amount of bpa leached from a polycarbonate cambro container is trivial compared with what leaches into canned anything. >> Should I not use the plastic take-out / doggy bag containers in the microwave? Most takeout containers are polypropylene. I microwave them without a second thought.

Some people disagree with me on this, but my limited experience playing around with grits suggests that sharpening to somewhere between 4000 and 6000 grit gets into a nowhere-land where the blade doesn't have enough tooth to be aggressive, and doesn't have enough polish to be refined ... so it does't do a great job at anything. But once you take above 8000, to a mirror finish, the blade starts slipping through the food. That said, my boning knife is a cheap forschner, sharpened to 1K or 2K, and banged into shape on a steel. It gets used around bones (and for cutting sandwiches, opening packages, etc) so it needs to take abuse without a lot of fuss.