paulraphael

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.

A good (and delicious) test for glutamate sensitivity would be to eat a hunk of parmesan cheese. It has the highest known concentration of natural glutamate. My casual suspicion is that "Chinese restaurant syndrom" is a reaction to consuming a week's worth of salt at one sitting.

My research corresponds prettly closely with emmanth's. Here are my notes, which at the risk of oversimplifying the issues, are a bit easier to follow: Recycling Symbol Type Hazard 1 PET / PETE Don't Reuse (porous / hard to clean) 2 HDPE No Known Hazards 3 PVC May leach various plasicizers 4 LDPE No Known Hazards 5 PP No Known Hazards 6 PS Can leach carcinogens / endocrine disruptors 7 Other Many plastics with many characteristics. Some contain BPA; some are forms of PVC It's certainly possible that closeer scrutiny will find more and more trace compounds with potential hazards in any of these materials. But this isn't limited to plastics; stuff leaches out of glass, ceramic glazes, and stainless steel as well. This is in fact the case with everything in the world: the more closely we look, the more potentially scary stuff we find. The trick is evaluating the risks, which requires educated (or wild) guesses. Bear in mind that we're all gonna die from something.

If a steel is improving an edge after you've sharpened on stones, then it's working by deburring. It's the only way that a steel could improve a freshly sharpened and polished edge. And there are better ways to deburr. Knives that past a certain hardness or that are sharpened more accutely than a certain angle will actually be damaged by steeling, so I'm not a big fan of the steel for my better knives. I'd rather use something like cork or felt for deburring, and a strop for touch ups between sharpening sessions.

That's true. And some will use it even for the final sharpening, on certain knives. Last I spoke with him, Dave Martell at japaneseknifesharpening.com uses a belt sander and nothing else on European stainless knives and on Globals. On Japanese knives with better steels, I don't know whether or not he uses the sander for reprofiling and repairs. But on these knives he does the regular sharpening and polishing on a long succession of waterstones. I had him do some work (repair damage and grind down the bolster) on my German Schaaf chef's knife. He did the whole thing on the sander and the work was perfect. As good as can be expected for that type of steel and for the kind of abuse I give the knife.

From what I've read, a brita filter removes all kinds of contaminants, including particles, metals, and organic compounds ... but you can't count it doing an especially thorough or consistent job. Its ability to filter will change as it ages and clogs. And even fresh, it's not up to the standards of higher end filters. I use one, because it takes the chlorine out and makes my water and tea and coffee taste better. It's also comforting to have another line of defense against any unknowns in the water. If I were actually afraid of something like lead or campylobacter, I'd use something more heavy duty. Btw, it just crossed my mind that a carbon filter could be taking the fluoride out of the water along with everything else. Anyone know about this? I'm curious, since the only cavities I ever got in my life came during two years in France, where they don't fluorinate the water supply.

I'd assume that the chance of contamination is almost zero. But there is a possibility of chemical reactions that happen very slowly. Compounds break down into smaller ones, smaller ones sometimes recombine into larger ones. I think the most likely risk is that the stuff would taste a little off. I'd be very surprised if there was any health hazard. My inclination would be to buy a new can and taste them side by side. There are some black beans in my pantry that might predate the condensed milk. Maybe we should pool our resources and have an antique food potluck.