paulraphael

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.

With both the Globals and the German knives, the biggest challenge is deburring. Both types of steel a very "gummy" and tend to form tenacious burs. If you sharpen well down to a fine grit, it's possible (likely) that the burr will remain as a microscopic wire edge. This edge will be sharp but fragile; you'll find the initial sharpness of the edge deteriorating much faster than it would if you'd managed to get rid of the wire. There are many ways to get rid of a wire edge, all with their advocates. And all take practice. I have a very hard felt pad that I strop the edge on after each successive stone. Also, after polishig on my finest stone, I make a couple of long strokes parallel to the blade, with very light pressure. Both of these techniques help, although I don't think I ever do a perfect job of getting rid of the wire (and my knives are made from steels that hang onto a wire edge less agressively than either global's or the german's steels). Another trick is to draw the edge through a piece of soft, end-grain wood, or a wine cork, after each stone.

It will improve most ice cream recipes. You can also improve most brown butter recipes by whisking a small percentage of it into the melted butter before browning (it's the milk solids that brown and give the flavor; dry milk is 100% milk solids).

The trick to finding your ultimate hot chocolate is figuring out how much dairy you like. Pure, traditional hot chocolate has none. This creates the most intense chocolate flavor possible. It's amazing, but you might find it to be too much. Dairy (especially cream) actually mutes the chocolate flavor. The question is how much of this richness / muting you like. If serving hot chocolate as an intense dessert, in a demitasse, I'll sometimes make it dairy-free, with excellent chocolate in the 70% cocoa solids range. If it's more of a fun drink, served in bigger cups, I'll add whole milk. But I generally don't use a lot of it, and I don't use cream, because I want a fair amount of directness from the chocolate. Using some proportion of cocoa powder is also a way of upping the intensity. It has less cocoa butter, which also mutes flavors somewhat. But I keep the proportion of cocoa fairly low, because whole chocolate generally has better flavor overall. Here's a recipe I like. It steals liberally from some of Pierre Hermés ideas. You can vary it any way you like. Cinnamon/Caramel Dark Hot Chocolate 1/2 to 1 cinnamon stick 360g / 1-1/2 cups water 60g / 1/3 cup sugar 120g / 4-1/4 oz bittersweet chocolate 24g /1/4 cup dutch cocoa 1g / 1/8 tsp salt 240g / 1 cup whole milk -Heat sugar and cinnamon, undisturbed, in a heavy saucepan. -boil the water separately -when sugar starts to caramelize, stir vigorously until amber -pour water on sugar/cinnamon, and keep stirring and heating until clumps liquefy -whisk in cocoa -stir in chocolate, continuing to stir until melted -stir in milk -keep on heat until the first bubble pops on the surface -remove from heat and whip (with a whisk or a stick blender) until slightly frothy I generally use Valrhona Guanaja and either Valrhona or Pernigotti cocoa powder.

They are actually significantly less sharp than a well sharpened steel knife, and significantly less thin than the thinnest. And there's nothing you can do about it. It's impossible (or at least wildly impractical) to sharpen them and I don't think you could ever thin the blade like you can a steel one. The advantage is that they hold an edge for a longer, but still very finite time. Then what—send it back to the company once a month? Other disadvantage is that, yeah, it will shatter. The non-reactivity thing is just smoke. Any decent stainless is non-reactive enough for anything you'll do in the kitchen. If herbs are turning black, that's from a dull knife, not a reactive one. You can prove this by trying an expertly sharpened carbon steel blade.

The Michel Cluizel chocolates have been a revelation. They knocked Valrhona (my previous fave) off its perch. I'd try baking with it, but it's so expensive that I've made excuses to avoid trying. Would hate to get hooked on that habit. Valrhona's pricey enough. I recently tried Mast Brothers chocolate, made artisinally by a couple of backwoods-looking hipsters right here in Brooklyn. I was hoping to hate it, since their prices lie on the hazy border between comedy and insult (more than DOUBLE Michel Cluizel, which is close to double Valrhona, which is close to double Callebaut ...). Tragically, I liked it a lot. Not sure when I'll be buying any more, though. For good chocolate, great value, and surprising accessibility, I'm a fan of Lindt 70%.

The other issue is that carbides are there to provide extreme wear resistance ... but it's been shown that abrasive wear is not an important process in kitchen knives dulling. Wear resistance does make a knife hard to sharpen, as Dakki says. For a knife to get sharp, do so easily, and stay sharp in spite of of an a thin / high performance edge geometry, it needs a steel with excellent edge stability. This requires, among other things, a relatively low carbide content. Carbides are big compared with iron molecules. A high volume of carbides gives you a very weak, brittle edge that can't be made very sharp. Putting a coating of carbides on the surface would gurantee from the get go that the blade isn't sharp by any serious knife standards.

You can categorically assume that any knife sold with the claim "never need sharpening" or "10X sharper than ________" or "stays sharp 10X longer than_________" —or anything similar—is going to be utter B.S. Usually these claims are associated with cheap informercial knives, but in this case it's a $200+ rip off. Never mind that it's not even in a useful chef's knife / gyuto shape. For that money you can buy an excellent chef's knife, a decent set of sharpening stones, and some books or instructional videos to get you started. In practice, becoming a competent sharpener is the only way you'll even have sharp knives (at least for more than a few days at a stretch).

Tri2Cook mentioned it in another thread but in case you didn't see it, dry milk powder disolves completely. Once in solution it will be as smooth as ordinary milk. It's one of the ingredients that tends to clump when mixed. You can avoid this by stirring it together with your other dry ingredients (including the sugar) before trying to disolve it. Another solution is mixing in a blender, but unless you're making very large quantities I think this is just extra work. You'll notice most pastry chefs using some portion of dry milk in their recipes. It's a killer ingredient.

It can also be difficult to get good texture without a high enough proportion of nonfat solids, either with ice cream and sorbet. The solids, more than anything else, provide freezing point suppression; they help keep the recipe from freezing hard as a brick. In sorbets the solids typically come from the fruit or other flavor ingredients. In this recipe they only come from the soy milk and the arrowroot ... probably not enough. Vanilla is so concentrated that it essentially gives you none. You want nonfat solids to be around 33% by weight. The traditional ingredient to boost solids is nonfat dry milk, but if you're making a non-dairy recipe you'll have to try something else. Soy protein powder? Might work. Flavors with more stuff in them (fruit purees, etc.) will make the job easier in this regard. There are also stabilizers that will work more efficiently than arrowroot, like gelatin, xanthan gum, and locust bean gum. Or you can buy a commercial sorbet stabilizing blend. Counterintuitively, fats don't influence ice crystal suppression or freezing point, so adding oil probably won't help solve this. Fat obviously influences texture in other ways, though.

Trimoline is different; it's sugar syrup made from sucrose, with a significant amount of the glucose and fructose dissociated from each other. So you have a mix of off glucose and fructose (both monosacharides) rather than sucrose, in which those smaller molecules are bonded to each other into a larger (disacharide) molecule. You'd have something similar if you mixed glucose syrup and fructose syrup. But pure glucose syrup will have different properties. As far as how much glucose there is in glucose syrup, that just has to do with the particular syrup you're using. I don't think there's any standard. Generally the glucose syrups I've seen sold for pastry purposes are more concentrated than corn syrups. There are so many different variables to consider. What invert sugar were you using (was this just concentrated glucose syrup?), and in what proportions? Generally trimoline substitutes for about 10% of the total sugars in an ince cream. And the results are the opposite of what you describe.

Are you sure they're not just talking about fondant sugar? It's like confectioner's sugar but finer. I see it used in a lot of high tech pastry applications.

I've made stiff doughs. Just like with any mixer you have to pay close attention and use your judgment. KA's guidelines are useless; they don't take into account actual dough stiffness. Listen to the machine, feel how how warm it gets, be wary of burning smells. With any dough recipe, start with a smallish batch and work up to bigger ones. You just have to get a feel for what the thing can handle. I find the capacity to be quite a bit higher than KA's recommendations with some doughs. And quite a bit lower with others.

Mine looks like what you see at the chef eddy link ... more clear than white. Not sure why it's different from the commercial product. I suppose there's a chance the commercial product is better. Apparently only a certain portion of the sugar "inverts," and so it's possible that it's harder to invert as much with the home process than with what's done industrially. Just speculating. Homebrew seems to work.

It's a staple way down south, but I don't see it anywhere that I shop. Thoughts?

Right, that's the 11 (i think) tine whisk. You can buy it and it's worth every penny. Not just because it works faster and whips in more air, but because it lets you whip small quantities. You can easily whip a single egg white with it. Forget about trying this with the original whisk ... maybe you could do it but would take half a day.

Aparently there's a little light bulb or LED inside the 610 that accounts for the 15 extra watts. Draw your own conclusions ...

It's sweeter if you you control for the water content. But if you're just comparing trimoline to sucrose, gram to gram, sucrose will be slightly sweeter. Corn syrup or glucose syrup will be much less sweet.

I'd try substituting alternative sugars. Dextrose (glucose powder) can substitute for a portion of the table sugar, as can trimoline (invert syrup). Both will supress the freezing point much more than sucrose (table sugar). Trimoline will also improve shelf life and may actually increase chewiness. You'll probably have to play with proportions and quantities; dextrose is is less sweet than table sugar, and trimoline is slightly less sweet (by weight). I don't think any cookie dough will freeze at 32F. They all get stiff because the butter hardens, and maybe a small percentage of the water freezes. I suspect having a smaller quantity of butter, or substituting liquid oil (especially one high in polyunsaturated fat) for some of it, would help ... but I hate to advise this because the cookies won't taste as good. If this is for an ice cream sandwich, you should aim for good texture around 10 to 15F ... this is the range where properly made ice cream is the best texture for eating.

Sure, it's always been there ... and I think this is one of the reasons people most associated with molecular gastronomy have disowned the term. I have to agree with them. It really doesn't mean anything, if you try to apply it to a style, or even just to techniques. There is no one style (or even ten), and new techniques have been introduced all through culinary history. An immersion circulator is no more hi-tech today than an oven with a thermostat was 70 years ago. Today we have chefs and food technologists who are informed directly by science. This is new ... but the discoveries are applied to old techniques as well as new ones. When Hervé This and his partner first coined the term, they were referring to the research, not to the results. I believe their working definition was "the science of deliciousness." And their first lectures focussed (I believe) on the science of decidedly un-modern cooking techniques. I think it's hard to find any modern techniques that are more dependent on complex scienctific principles than wine, bread, cake ... I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but it seems to me that the most technically complex food, even taking into acount the post-modern pyrotechnics of Adria and Achatz and Dufresne, is ice cream.