paulraphael

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.

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.