paulraphael

But restaurants can make excellent tea and coffee, and many do. Are we talking about areas where restaurants often slack off, or where they suffer some fundamental disadvantage compared with a home kitchen?

I think these points are the crux of it. A restaurant's limitations come from the nature of the a la carte workflow. The home kitchen's limitations have more to do with facilities, number of hands available, and the impracticality of making certain preparations on a small scale. Home cooks get dismayed by haute cuisine recipes that involve half a dozen components on a plate, each one requiring many sub-components. Cooking like this for a dinner party is martyrdom, but at a restaurant with dozens cooks, each of whom preps for several hours, the result is an efficient workflow that allows last minute assembly of extremely complex plates.

True that. The only homemade ice creams I've had that rivaled the best at restaurants were made at home by pastry chefs (or home cooks who have trained under them). Yes, at the high end. And I've been to some lower end places that have a kid cranking out tortillas to order. I'm no tortilla connoisseur, but these places made better ones than I ever have.

Agreed. The term "additive" is essentially meaningless, and "chemical" is completely meaningless, at least with regard to food. All food is 100% chemicals, just like our bodies. I think this kind of effort just preys on consumers' uninformed fears. The trend among many of the best chefs lately has gone, I'm happy to say, in the opposite direction: they are embracing ingredients and techniques once known only to industry. Their goals, however, rather than being about cheapness or infinite shelf life, are centered on quality of flavor and texture.

I'd suggest using zest from the lime and not just the juice. That's where you'll get more of the distinctive lime flavor.

All good advice. A few more thoughts: -check your freezer temperature, both for when you chill the canister and for when you harden the ice cream after spinning. The colder the better. Below 0°F is ideal. If you can get the canister this cold, you should be able to spin the ice cream in well under 15 minutes, depending on the quantity you're making. This will help keep the ice crystals small. -check the temperature of the ice cream when you're done spinning it (the drawing temperature). This should be around 23°F. -try your luck with a simpler flavor, like vanilla. Make sure you can get this right before venturing into fruit. Fruit flavors throw unpredictable amounts of added water and sugar into the mix, both of which can mess with your results from batch to batch. If you want to get serious, you can measure the brix of the mix ... basically the percentage of disolved solids. This will help you compensate for variances in your fruit. -try some stabilizing ingredients, like commercial ice cream stabilizer, or gelatin, or a mix of gelatin and corn starch or gelatin and xanthan. These help improve (and adjust) texture and prevent ice crystals from forming during spinning or storage.

Exactly. Anyone using a paring knife in place of a chef's knife, either because they feel safer or more efficient, should think about getting some chef knife skills. The wee knife is both many times less efficient and many times more likely to bloody your prep!

I use peelers a lot, but find that things like corers and mellon ballers are just too dull to give a clean cut. If I core an apple or pear with one of those it will turn brown in just a few minutes. It will also leave a a mealy texture. A sharp knife leaves a glass-smooth finish that feels better in the mouth and that won't turn brown for hours.

Depends on what you do. If you're chopping, slicing, etc. with a paring knife, then you don't need one ... you'd be much better served by a chef's knife / gyuto. It will do all these tasks many times better and more efficiently. If you do things like hull strawberries, core pears, tourne anything, or do any of the cuts that require hand-holding the food (not counting Japanese usuba cuts), then a paring knife is borderline essential. You can do these things with a boning / utility / petty knife, but a paring knife makes the tasks much easier. I don't see much reason besides knife fetishism to spend big bucks on a paring knife. Mine cost $40. Some cooks I know who cut better than I do won't use anything besides the $5 Forschner.

Sure. For one thing, there are no magical ingredients used in store-bought ice cream that you can't use in your own. For another, home made ice cream doesn't need to last for weeks in the freezer, so you face fewer challenges when formulating it. Depends, depends. A very high end compressor machine will outdo anything. A cheap one may or may not be any good at all. Canister machines can be great or terrible, depending on the size of the canister and how cold you can get it.

I can't speak for the new formulation of nalgene bottles, but the older polycarbonate ones don't impart any taste. I'd put money on any blind taste test. Polycarbonate is one of a number of plastics that's been used for years for food storage and prep, all the way up to the highest levels of restaurants. I suspect added flavors come from water getting brackish, and maybe from slimy residue from bacteria clinging to the plastic. At least the wide mouths make them easy to clean. Like most people, I probably don't clean mine as often as I should. Most food grade plastics are much less reactive than aluminum (though I doubt you'd have trouble with metallic flavors in oil, unless the oil is particularly acidic. I wouldn't dismiss the importance of an easy to clean bottle, especially since you seem to like nice quality olive oils. Oil residue in any bottle will eventually go rancid and spoil the flavor of whatever new oil you pour in.

You might want to take a look at bladeforums (for knifemaking in general, or knifeforums or foodieforums for kitchen knife communities. The steel choice and heat treatment are important ... you can't do anything without good choices here. Steel used in a saw blade is likely to have huge carbides for abrasion resistance, which make it a poor choice for knives. People will talk your ear off about the pros and cons of different alloys.

I like the nalgene bottle idea better than the aluminum bottle idea, just because those aluminum bottles (originally designed for fuel) are practically impossible to clean. The opening is so small. You definitely won't get off flavors from a nalgene bottle. Nor will you get them from the small polypro bottles (for what it's worth, every restaurant kitchen I've seen, including high end ones, uses polypro squeeze bottles for oils and vinnaigrettes). None of these options should leak, although I try to remember to put my oil bottle in a zip-lock just to be on the safe side. I'd consider nalgene if you need a big volume, or a generic pp if you don't.

They probably have the most obvious choices, so I'm looking for something a little more esoteric (but useful). Already got them What to Drink with What You Eat. Any thoughts?

I read the book and liked it. I think the thrashings voiced here are for the most part innacurate. Calling him a windbag or asshole is one thing ... that's just opinion. But saying the book is just the same old crap leads me to think the critic didn't read it closely, if at all. The book is a collection of essays, some covering old ground, some not. The ones covering old ground in most cases offer a revision of his previous views. He mentions a lot of factors, including expanded experience and diminished crankiness, behind his newer feelings. He also respects that he now has a broad audience, while he wrote Kitchen Confidential under the assumption that it would interest only a handful of derelect insiders like himself. His criticisms of topics like vegetarianism and Alice Waters are nuanced. And I agree with them, for the most part. And if you haven't read the essays in question, you don't know what those opinions are. My biggest criticism is that quality of writing seems uneven. There's evidence of the old Tony, and some sections where he betters his old self, but others where the prose falls flat. Some essays, like the very interesting one on David Chang, would benefit from some serious editing.

A few years ago I had a cucumber gazbacho at café boulud ... one of the rare times I couldn't stop myself from pulling out a notebook and trying to reverse engineer the thing at the table. I ran home and cobbled together my own knockoff. Mine wasn't as good as Daniel Boulud's, but it was pretty tasty ... I don't think you could go too wrong with any combination of these ingredients. They included: cucumbers red onion shallot garlic yogurt olive oil mint smoked salmon vinegar or lemon

I don't think polypropylene has any effect on the taste. Most of the whitish squeeze bottles and capped bottles are made out of that (look for the recycling symbol ... should say 5 and PP). I've seen them at outdoor stores and at restaurant supply stores. If you use one of the squeeze bottles, forget the little red cap on the tip. Just put some plastic wrap over the opening and screw the large cap over it. I always bring olive oil on climbing / backpacking trips, especially in the winter. A big dollop does wonders for a freeze-dried climber's entré. I'm not interested in having a glass bottle in my pack.

Really? I thought rum was made with molasses or cane juice. Will it still taste rum-like when made with refined sugar?

Here's a Times Magazine aritcle on Jake Godby, who puts us all to shame ... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/magazine/04icecream-t.html?pagewanted=1&emc=eta1

My current kitchen has pine plank floors dating back to the civil war. No idea how they're finished, but I doubt they've been refinished in the last ten years. They take a lot of traffic, the gallons of dishwater and cooking oil I routinely spill on them, and they look great ... not pristine, but i doubt they looked pristine when brand new. Their basic rustic nature conceals most damage quite well. If I were building a new kitchen, I'd take a good look at the bamboo options. I like the sustainability, and how well they likely do in wet environments.

What would you call booze fermented from simple syrup? And what would you call it if you distilled it?

This would mostly have to do with the thermal capacity of the canister. The one I'm used to is pretty massive, so I don't have that issue, but possibly some smaller / lighter canisters would have limitations. You could compensate by making smaller batches of ice cream. Simple Philly style ice cream is easier to freeze because there are fewer nonfat solids in the mix supressing the freezing point. The flip side of this is they tend to be hard as a brick at freezer temperatures. A properly balanced recipe, whether it has custard in it or not, should be the right texture for scooping at eating at around 9 or 10°F ... and any such recipe will place equal demands on an ice cream machine.

A simple way to adjust is by adding nonfat dry milk.

The berries need to be really good, intensely flavored ones. And the recipe should be fairly low fat ... I'd aim for 10% to 12% milk fat, and as little egg custard as you can get away with. Fat strongly mutes the flavors of fruit. It's why so many pastry chefs make sorbets for their fruit flavors.

I haven't done this with grilled chicken, but an option is to par cook by poaching in a flavorful stock. Even an easy court bouillon that you can whip together one or two hours before cooking the bird. The stock can serve as your cooking medium and your marinade, and can then be saved as the foundation for your next batch of chicken stock. I think it's best to keep the poaching liquid just below the simmer. Dry the surface as well as you can before grilling.