paulraphael

Due to that alone I would say back off that 300mm knife. Yeah, 300mm is enormous. I know some people with knives this size, but no one who uses them as a main chef's knife. With decent skills and a reasonable board size 270mm is a great mix of capacity and useability. You can use a 270mm knife on a 12 x 12 board, but you're going to be spending a lot of time on board and counter management. You will need a lot of free counter space around the board for prep containers and for the knife tip to have breathing room ... and if you have that, it would be worth considering a bigger board. As far as which knife, the hiromotos are excellent. The blazens probably perform a little better by virtue of their thinner blades. But the blazens aren't the great deal they were once upon a time. Every year or two prices go up and a new wave of price / performance leaders come onto the scene. Togiharu and Sakai Takayuki Grand Chef have been getting a lot attention these days. I'd also check with the guys in the more knife-centric forums for current advice. Keep in mind your general preference as far as blade thickness / weight. A lot of guys (myself included) have been moving to anemically thin, high performance blades. But these require some adaptability with technique, and compromises on versatility. For perspective, by contemporary standards Shuns are battleaxes. You want to figure out where your preference is on the spectrum between shun and the lightest blades. Carbon vs. stainless is a religious issue for some people. Nowadays there are great steels of both persuasions. The biggest objective advantage of carbon is that you can get ridiculously high performance for reasonable prices. Other advantages involve sweeping generalizations that don't hold true in all instances. these include somewhat easier sharpening, and abilitiy to take a slightly sharper edge. The biggest disadvantage of carbon steels are their tendency to discolor or add off flavors to certain acidic ingredients. Acidic ingredients also reduce their edge holding ability somewhat. Personally I like stainless in gyuto and paring knife, and carbon in knives that only (or mostly) cut protein.

The best bevel angles depend on both the knife in question and the user. Some knife steels can handle much thinner edges than others. So can some cooks. It's best to thin the knife gradually and see what you can get away with. If you start rolling or chipping the edge, it's either time to refine your skills, or else fatten up the edge with a microbevel. A few thoughts ... It's difficult to know the exact bevel angles of a knife. An edge pro gives you approximations; freehand sharpening gives you wild guesses. Asymmetry is another factor. A highly asymmetrical edge (like one ground 90% on the front side, 10% on the back, will have the performance and fragility of a symmetrical edge ground at more obtuse angles. In these conversations, make sure you're not confusing the total (or included angle) with the angle of each individual bevel. A typical German knife is ground 20 to 22 degrees on a side, which gives a 40 to 44 degree included angle. A typical Japanese knife is ground 15 degrees on each side, for a 30 degree included angle. These factory angles give you very durable edges. People with high end knives sometimes go as low as a 15 degree included angle, with lots of asymmetry. But you can not use a knife like this without very careful techniques. No rock chopping, no pushing hard, no lending the knife to riffraff.

Some people use a gyuto just like a western chef's knife. Others sharpen to a more acute bevel angle than you can use with western techniques; they use techniques that are a hybrid between western techniques and Japanese usuba techniques. The advantage to the first approach is that you already know how to do it. The advantage to the second is that you will have more control, will make better quality cuts, do so with less cutting effort, and have better edge retention. The disadvantage is that you have to learn new skills, and you'll have a knife that's too fragile to lend to the average joe.

Ok, I'd want pans of varying thicknesses for different purposes. Bottoms can be thicker than the sides in most cases. Smaller saucepans can be thinner (2.25mm or so) on the bottoms for responsiveness; larger pans like saute pans, which need to distribute heat farther and retain heat can be thick (3.0 + mm). I'm making up numbers ... an engineer working with serious cooks could pin this down better. Since you're plating and not using the pre-made laminated material, you should be able to make pans with varying thicknesses like this. Definitely not brass for the handles ... to conductive. A cast stainless handle, that's easy to grab with or without a side towel, and that's solid but no so massive that it takes forever to cool down, would be ideal. Tradtitional iron also seems to work fine. I'd also want the selection of pans to be limited to (or at least focus on) pans that make sense for expensive copper. There is no reason besides being a sculpture collector for having a copper stock pot. Saucepans (including a sloped or curve-sided range) are most important. Frying and sauté pans are also nice. A copper rondeau is a great luxury (i don't have one, but if I ever find myself weighed down with currency ... )

I imagine most platings would be so thin as to have pretty negligible thermal properties. I'd be curious about the longevity of the plating in actual use. I've found the anodized layer on aluminum to be less durable than I'd like (I believe aluminum oxide is comparable in hardness to tungsten carbide but I don't know about the other relevent properties). The anodizing is very abrasion resistant, but it's reactive over time, and the soft base metal makes the pans susceptible to pits and gouges, which lead to the anodizing coming off. What are the reactive properties of tungsten carbide? It's cool that it's shiny like that ... I assumed it would be dark. I much prefer bright metal to dark surfaces for most pans ... at least ones that will be used for browning food or reducing sauces.

The most cost effective approach to scales is to have a high capacity scale witn 1 gram resolution, and a low capacity pocket scale with 0.01 gram resolution. The little one is for gums or leavening or anything else that requires precision in small quantities. The big one is for everything else. This funny place is the best source for scales I've found.

I'm not convinced by the wear argument. A thick end-grain board should last anyone a lifetime, unless you're doing heavy butchering on it with a bone cleaver. If you find reason to do that kind of work at all, you shouldn't be doing it on your main cutting board. Doing regular cutting, especially if you have sharp knives and good technique, you'll hardly even leave marks on the board. The knife edge's contact with the wood should be light and brief with each cut. Round boards just make terribly inneficent use of space ... this is true whether you cut on all corners of the board or if you use the board to arrange piles of cut and uncut food.

The serious eats article echoes McGee: one reason to rest is to allow the center to finish cooking through conduction, but another reason is to allow the meat to cool slightly all the way to the surface, ideally to 120°F. With the temperature drop, the meat structure becomes firmer and more resistant to deforming while being cut; also, the muscle fibers relax a bit and are able to re-absorb some of the moisture that they've expelled. It's the cooling that keeps the meat from bleeding juices when you carve it. So yeah, a thermometer will help with this, but the final temperature is more important than the change in temperature from peak ... this is why a roast cooked rare by sous vide will not need any rest, but one cooked in a hot oven will need lots. Ideally after rest, the temperature should be fairly consistent from center to edge.

Because it's interesting. And possibly challenging and illuminating. Sometimes I want comfort food, sometimes I want something that I can learn from and be surprised by. Just like with movies, music, literature, visual art, etc. etc...

Sure you can. Slavery and ritual sacrifice have been deep-seated traditions in many cultures, often dating back centuries. And predictably, historical entrenchment / tradition has routinely been used as an argument against reform. I'm NOT trying to draw a parallel between foie gras and slavery ... just rejecting the notion that Tradition can somehow exempt a practice from ethical examination.

What premise is this based on?

My argument didn't address historical outcomes; it simply noted that "to each his own" moral arguments (ones based on trusting the individual's moral compass on issues that have impact behond the individual) have been used to protest amost every kind of reform. I believe such arguments, in contexts like the current one and the historical ones I mentioned, are logically indefensible. Maybe you should reread my posts? I support PETA only in the most general sense (I believe we need stronger rules against animal cruelty). But I'm sharply critical of their actual positions and tactics (both political and rhetorical) on this and most other issues. If my earlier posts didn't make it clear, I'm against banning foie gras. If there are in fact cruel farming practices used in foie production (a question I can't answer with certainty) then I support banning those practices. But there's nothing unique about foie gras informing this sentiment, and I've never suggested that this is PETA's position. Rather, it's one that I'd like to see adopted by an advocacy group.

The unitasker thing strikes me as fine advice, but hardly a rule. It shouldn't depend on how casual you are, but on whether you'll use the thing often enough to justify its price and kitchen real estate. If you plan to make fresh pasta twice a week, get a pasta machine. If you plan to make it twice a year, use the rolling pin you already have ...

I think we're saying more or less the same thing. Their cause is anti-cruelty / animal rights, but their definitions of cruelty and animal rights are stupefyingly broad.

Yes .. althogh peta acually stands for a good cause (anti-cruelty). Unfortunately their approach to advocacy is fanatical, and therefore entirely self-defeating. They make enemies with people who could be their friends; they alienate majorities in order to embrace likeminded minorities; they take extreme and unwinable positions rather than reasonable ones that could succeed. It's too bad. I wish there was an animal rights group that stood for animal husbandry and humane raising of livestock, and that based its positions on reason rather than hysteria.

This sounds to me like a gentle way to express cultural relativism ... a version of the arguements that have been used (and continue to be used) to morally justify phenomena like apartheid, oppression of women, ivory trafficking, whaling for endangered species, child prostitution ... We're not talking about people's moral rights to behaviors that don't affect anyone else. This isn't about what consenting couples do behind closed doors. It's about something has a concrete impact on someone / something besides ourselves, so an argument based on moral relativism strikes me as a deeply specious one. It's akin to saying, "well, if you don't believe in torturing, don't do it, but don't tell me what to do." I'm not using this as an argument for or against foie ... it's a meta-argument for the notion that issues like cruelty to animals are a perfectly reasonable candidate for top-down legislation, rather than being left to personal choice.

Nah, I rest a chicken for 10 minutes or a bit longer. By large I meant something like a turkey or a prime rib. Often I rest for however long it takes me to make a pan sauce, not according to any theories of what's ideal. Haven't done any formal testing.

I've seen various rules of thumb based on cooking time, but I'm suspicious; they fundamentally don't make sense. A 1" steak can cook in just a few minutes under a salamander, 20 minutes in a medium skillet, or several hours by low temperature sous vide. In these cases, the ideal resting time is in fact inversely related to the cooking time; the low temp steak won't require any rest; the very high temp steak will require the longest. I don't know any good formula, but in general the higher the cooking temperature and the thicker the meat, the longer the ideal rest time. I've gotten good results with 7 to 10 minutes for steaks, and up to 30 minutes for large roasts.

Both sides of this arguement are frought with logical faceplants and sweeping assumptions. I think we need to take a step back from all the loaded language. There are really two issues here: cruelty, and freedom of choice. "Factory farming" is not the issue. It can't be. The world needs factory farming to feed even half the current population, so zealots need to drop the pastorial utopian fantasies of going back to traditional farming as soon as possible, lest they pollute this argument into an even darker pool of nonsense. We are stuck with industrial agriculture, period--so the question is, how can we do it better? How can we be efficient without torturing animals and polluting the environment? This is the only line of questioning that's going to get us anywhere. As far as foie goes, we should first consider that in a world full of major farming issues, this is a minute one. A tempest in a teapot. That said, there are live geese in that teapot, and paying consumers, so we might as well address it. A question that needs to be answered without bias is if foie production is inherently cruel. I personally doubt it, but don't claim any authority. A separate question is if it is often or sometimes cruel in practice. This seems likely. If we are cruel to chickens and steers, we are probably also cruel to geese. I would like to see this cruelty abolished, and I'm willing to see higher prices as a result. But this in no way constitutes a logical argument against rasing these creatures for food, or even against doing it with industrial efficiency. It's simply a call for standards of animal husbandry. Feedom of choice? We have gobs of it when it comes to food, but we don't have any guarantees of it, or reasons to expect it to be limitless. We are not allowed to eat endangered animals. We are not allowed to eat the neighbor's children. And so on. I'm a lot more comfortable in a world where standards besides our senses of entitlement exert force on the market.

I don't think that is a fair criticism. PETA does go after factory farming operations. In a big way, too. Not in a parallel way. They are hoping ban production of foie, yes? I don't believe they're trying to ban the production of chicken (even though it's likely their wish).

My general sense is that the "ridiculous luxury goods" sentiment is exactly what peta's tapping into. As with most farming operations, there are probably good, humane foie farms and piss poor / cruel ones. But such distinctions are uninteresting to a group that's interested in raising outrage to strengthen its support. If it weren't for the unsympathetic luxury goods factor, peta would be going after run of the mill chicken operations. Purdue tortures more birds every five minutes than all the foie farmers in the country lay their hands on in a year. But it it would be harder to get the the populace in an uproar over their own eating habits instead of the habits of the "overprivileged.'

A while ago in a thread about cast iron cookware, someone asked about seasoning bare aluminum pans, and posted a picture of one that was already well spotted with polymerized fat. Consensus was that this was just a dirty pan, and that she should wash it properly and drop the subject. I started wondering why, and when recently confronted with an aluminum griddle that was turning brown and black, decided to experiment. I scrubbed it, covered it with a thin film of safflower oil (high in polyunsaturated fat, smoke point listed as 440F) and cooked in a 500F oven. Every ten minutes or so I pulled it out and wiped on another thin layer of oil with a paper towel. After about five coats, and close to an hour's buildup of smoke in the kitchen, the griddle had a deep, glossy, brown-black coat. A perfect seasoning. It's practically bulletproof; it won't scrape or scrub off, is reasonably stick resistant, and water beads up on it as if it's greased. Sticking is rarely a problem on griddles, but I'm finding it much easier to clean than when the metal was bare. I can report back when I've put a few more miles on it. At any rate, I don't see any downside to this treatment. Makes me want an aluminum skillet that's 1/4" or more thick ... it could replace cast iron for many things.

I'd look for one for $10 or so. The WS price is unsurprisingly ridiculous. I once dated a dane who had an inherited aebelskiver pan hanging on the wall. Raised a lot of eyebrows. I remember the things being tasty, too, but that was ages ago. We probably made them once a year.

For bigger ones the Kunz spoons work well.

[quote name='GNV//PDX' date='14 April 2010 - 05:03 PM' timestamp='1271278985' post='1739119'If I was to try and stabilize it, when yould I add the stabilizer?