paulraphael

Maybe I need dinner guests with more interesting saliva. I did find one reference to someone doing what I'm trying to do, but it involves liquid C02. Seems like a more reasonable project in a commercial environment (my brief flirtation with LN2 ice cream at home turned into a spectacular waste of time and ebay resources).

I forgot about that place, thanks. something like this looks promising. I think I want to go with glass instead of plastic; I find that fine powders often stick to the sides of my plastic containers. Maybe because of static. For labels maybe one of those label makers, or else graphic arts tape and a sharpie (and my serial killer handwriting).

Those look cool but I need much smaller ones. I don't stuck that kind of quantity of any of that stuff (and if I did, I'd have a different storage problem altogether).

They make small ones? Are they clear and airtight?

Lately, many of us have experienced a multiplication of white powders in the pantry ... xanthan gum, locust bean gum, pectin, agar, dextrose, tapioca maltodextrin, isomalt, other refined starches, sugars, enzymes ... You gotta put them somewhere. Mine are mostly in plastic bags sitting in a darkroom tray on a pantry shelf. I'm wondering if anyone's come up with a better solution. Legible labels are key ... most of these things are practically indestinguishable from each other.

I should have added that it's going to be wet to begin with, so something besides moisture needs to release the gas.

Any thoughts on a chemical that would make bubbles on contact with saliva? I'm trying to figure out how to make something seem carbonated when it can't be. Already investigated pop rocks ... aparently they have C02 embedded in small bubbles in the candy grains ... not something that will work for me.

Seems to depend on the oven. Commercial convection ovens work fine with very little space around the pans; my home oven (conventional) needs a lot of space or heat is uneven and hard to predict. Some of this is because of impaired air circulation, and some is about keeping food away from hot spots near the oven walls

Your stock should be fine ... what matters is how concentrated the gelatin is in the final dish you prepare with it. You just need to make sure that your final sauce isn't over-reduced. Check by sponing a bit of your final sauce or jus onto a room temperature plate. Check the consistency after a few seconds. If it's gluey, you've gone too far and need to cut it with liquid and maybe also fat.

Veal bones contribute more gelatin, and a more neutral flavor. The flavor of veal sits in the background more than the more assertive flavor of beef. If you can't get veal bones, there are some alternatives that can be good even if not identical. You can use beef bones without much meat on them, and get additional gelatin from fairly neutral sources like pig's feet, chicken feet, chicken or turkey wings, or even packaged gelatin.

Saltshaker.net maintains a pretty exhaustive list. Some are just listed under "New York City" ... you might have to contact the individual supper clubs to find out exactly where.

The stick blender is fine most of the time, but some extra virgin olive oils (especially very flavorful, unrefined ones) can turn bitter when overworked. If you're using one of these, you want to avoid the machines. Whether you're using a machine or not, it's probably a good idea to combine the water-based ingredients and the emulsifying ingredients before adding the oil. You want to make sure you end up with an oil-in-water emulsion and not the reverse. Aioli and mayo should be creamy, not greasy.

Yes, precise, although one thing I like about Laiskonis' esthetic is the mix of precision and imprecision ... something I didn't get when I fist started assembling things. He'll plate a dessert with a mix of perfectly geometric shapes and chaotic, organic ones. Some of the deliberate imprecision takes the form of saucing and garnishing (sauce may be applied perfectly, even with a template, but crumbled nuts will just get tossed in a heap). And sometimes it will take the form of a specific element, like the sponge cake he makes in a cup in the microwave; he tears off amorphous, sea-creature looking blobs and uses them like a tuile on top of a geometric arrangement.

Whose results? Whenever i've seen fish filleted by someone with good deba skills, the cut flesh is as smooth as glass. I've never seen similar results with western technique. Maybe it's possible, but not common. You certainly don't see examples of it in that how-to-fillet fish website.

The "don't cut a silpat" rule seems like corporate paranoya. My silpats are a full sheet pad cut in half. I've seen this approach in commercial kitchens too. I'm surprised to hear about all the cleaning and discoloration problems. I wouldn't a silpat for anything besides tuiles, chocolate work, etc.. Mine rarely even see the oven. Parchment works so much better for baked goods (the silpat is too strong an insulator). For roasting ... why would you bother? It's a lot easier to clean a sheet pan than a greasy silpat.

Picture quality isn't great, but here you can can a sense of the fundamental difference between the European and Japanese techniques. Final sea bream fillets from filleting-fish.com: And final sea bream fillets from Ittasan 18: Ittasan is definitely slowing things down a lot for the camera. Nevertheless, someone with similar skills will be faster with a western fillet knife. It's just a faster technique. Which is why Western techniques (or similar ones) are ubiquitous in high volume places like fish butcheries. Even in places like the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo. But the results are never as clean. Is this important? For fish eaten raw, very much so. For lightly cooked fish, it makes a difference. Chefs debate if it makes any difference when fish is fully cooked.

This is how I do it. I like it without eggs. 5 garlic cloves 1/4 tsp coarse salt 1/8 tsp xanthan gum (optional, to stabilize emulsion) 1 – 2TB vinegar or lemon juice 1 – 2TB water (enough to bring the total water + acid content to 3TB) 1-1/2 cups extra virgin olive oil (all quantities are approximate) -roughly mince garlic and put with salt in mortar and pestle -crush until it's a smooth paste -in a bowl or plastic container, mix acid and water. sprinkle xanthan over the top. allow to hydrate for a few minutes,and whisk until disolved. -scrape garlic paste into container with acid and water. whisk. -genlty whisk in oil (in small additions at first). be careful to let each addition to emulsify before adding more. -if emulsion breaks, it's because there's too little water to accomodated the amount of oil. try whisking in a bit more water or acid. If this doesn't work, get a new container with 1 TB or so of water (or more acid if you want to adjust seasoning) and gradually whisk in the broken aioli.

Most recipes include egg, but it's unnecessary. Not sure if they're traditionally part of aioli or not. Garlic has enough emulsifying power to make a stable concoction all by itself, as long as there is some water present (plain, or in the form of wine, vinegar, etc).

Ack! Reason may be early senility. Thanks for the catch, and for linking to Ittasan ... that's exactly who I had in mind. (and apologies in advance to anyone who gets Ittasan's theme music permanantly lodged in your head)

If you have a restaurant supply store handy, you can usually get good ones for cheap. The standard ones are simple; aluminum with a heavy wire in the rim. The only differences are in weight. Heavier is better and a bit more expensive. The lincolns and volraths that Mitch mentions are among the heavy ones, but there are others (mostly no-name) that are as heavy. Ones that cost $15 to $20 at the fancy kitchen store typically cost half that at the restaurant store. And if you're lucky, you can get used ones for next to nothing. They'll probably be well beaten and ravaged by commercial dishwashers, but perfectly functional in the oven. I have some lincoln sheet pans (and no name equivalents). I also have a few Chicago Metallic pans. These are aluminized steel, which conducts a bit more slowly. Generally i use them interchangeably, but for some things that I want to brown less on the bottom, I'll grab the steel pans. I also have a stack of battered, used sheet pans picked up for $2 a pop. I use half sheet pans for practically everything, so I'll pick up more cheap ones whenever I see them.

I've been corresponding with Michael Laiskonis, Le Bernardin's executive pastry chef, for over a year. I found him through his blog, where he explains his approach and techniques with unusual eloquence. There are other pastry chefs with James Beard awards and three Michelin stars, but Chef Laiskonis is the first I've encountered with a combination of great vision, deep technical curiosity, and the ability to speak easily about both. Like many creative titans, and all of my friends, Chef Laiskonis is a poor judge of character; he invited me to work in his kitchen in spite of my obvious lack of credentials and housbreaking. Such a rare opportunity demands preparation, which in my case consisted of a full week chanting, "don't knock anything over." I've had a chance to study Chef Eric Ripert's book, On The Line, which details everything backstage at Le Bernardin, including the 10 by 14 foot pastry kitchen that cages up to six pastry chefs and production people, who craft individual pre-desserts, desserts, tasting menus, and petits fours for up to 300 guests a night. The possibilities of elbowing a chef in the eye, stepping into a bucket of glucose, or capsizing an entire speed rack of tuiles and spherized pear nectar seemed almost infinite. Happily, the training worked; drama seekers will have to wait a little longer for posts about self-inflicted palette knife wounds or kitchen evacuations. The greatest barrier between the average schmo and the kitchens of Le Bernardin may not be their standards but their architecture. Finding the kitchen required trips up and down different stairwells, U-turns through basement catacombs, and conflicting directions from a cook and an elevator repairman. I thought of the scene in Spinal Tap, where the band wanders the bowels of the venue in search of the stage. At one point Maguy Le Coze, co-owner and co-founder of the restaurant, stormed passed me in a subterranean passageway before pushing through an unmarked door. She looked appropriately sleek, intense, and French; as one would expect, she didn't look up at the hapless stranger wandering the stairs. When the kitchen doors finally appeared around a corner, it was only a matter of minutes before I'd been introduced to the crew and handed a chef jacket and propane torch. There was some mention of a tour, which never materialized (when I got home, 12 hours later, I realized that I never even saw the bathroom). Instead, production went into full swing. It was a slow night; the restaurant was somewhere around half capacity, but still every guest gets a pre-dessert, a dessert and a plate of petits fours, and at least one table had arranged for a special dessert tasting menu. I spent most of my day working on the petits fours, which consisted of a round financier with pistachio and a macerated cherry in the middle, a chocolate cup filled with praline cream and sprinkled with ground toasted almonds, a beignet, and a wafer of white chocolate topped with a duo of gummy cubes (mango, and ... something red). My accuracy on some of the ingredients may be off; I only nibbled on broken ones and that was during the tunnel vision of production and assembly. While the plate of petits fours comprises 4 bites, there are actually 10 components, each of which has to be prepared separately, sometimes in several steps, before final plating. The morning production crew had already prepared many of the ingredients and components for us to assemble. By the time you pop one of these scooby snacks in your mouth, it's probably been worked on by five or six people over the course of many hours. The work requires some precision, but perhaps not as much as I'd first assumed. Ricardo, the sous chef, would typically show me one example and then cut me loose to do the rest. In my effort to perfectly duplicate his, I occasionally resorted to using tweezers where he'd used a plastic spoon. I loosened up a bit when I saw him laughing at me. We cranked out the fours in waves, stopping when we ran out of plates, starting up again when a fresh stack came back from the dishwashers. I spent much of my downtime observing others plate the main desserts—a skill I would like to acquire, and one I'm ecstatic that I didn't have to fake in that setting. Every dessert has multiple components, some of which are delicate tuilles or disks or other brittle constructions. The saucing is a mix of geometric precision and loose brushwork and squeeze-bottle painting. The overall effect conveys sophistication and a bit of playfulness, and remarkably avoids the over-constructed, self conscious displays that were in vogue in the 90s (and never quite went away). I have philosophical issues with some kinds of saucing (like small dots of sauce, or piles or smears of dry powder), but when Chef Laiskonis uses these techniques he does so with restraint and to such great esthetic effect that I found myself wanting to steal some of his designs. I spent some downtime watching the hot kitchen. Compared with some high end kitchens I've seen, Le Bernardin's is austere; it's about as small as imaginable for the size of the brigade (slightly smaller, actually ... the canapé station is a pair of wheeled carts with portable burners, tied to the end of the pass). The equipment is all solid and immaculate, but traditional and decidedly un-fancy. I saw no hint of induction hobs, immersion circulators, anti-griddles, or rows of chefs plating microgreens with surgical tweezers. It looks like a restaurant, in the most traditional sense. The line cooks moved with a higher adrenaline swagger than the pastry cooks. Their kitchen may demand it; the chaotic environment feels like a war room compared with the pastry kitchen's operating room calm. All the cooks I watched handled the onslaught easily. There were no losses of control or focus or communication. Based on a few minutes' observation, my one negative surprise was the level of knife skills in some of the cooks; I saw some brutality inflicted on herbs and fruit that seemed out of place in such a shrine to refinement. On the line, however, everyone performed like a rock star. I have doubts if my wee brain could handle such simultaneous demand for volume, spontaneous organization, and perfection. Back in the pastry kitchen, I handled some miscellaneous jobs like unmolding frozen goat cheese hemispheres (which would then be spherized in sodium alginate), and unmolding and cutting to size small logs of corn custard that had been formed with various hydrocolloids. Whenever I found Chef Laiskonis taking a break from running the ship, I pestered him with questions, on everything from his opinions on the Michel Cluizel chocolate varieties they use, to ice cream theory, to the finer points of reverse-spherification of fruit purées. His loyal lieutenants, Ricardo and Jesus, were able to shut me up a few times over the course of the evening by handing me a beautifully plated dessert and a plastic spoon. Of course, after indulging in such a creation I only had more to talk about. There are maxims about keeping one's eyes open and mouth shut; alas, there are also compulsions that keep one's life interesting while keeping one mostly unemployable. One unexpected surprise was Chef Ripert's visit to the pastry kitchen. He was as gracious and charming in person as he is on television; he seemed like a boss who wants to create an environment where his workers feel comfortable and motivated to do their best work. I don't know how many chefs of his caliber spend as much time as he does in the kitchen ... I suspect not many. I didn't see him micromanage, but I saw him observe, and check in many times with the heads of various teams. When introducing us, Chef Laiskonis said, "Paul's been stalking me for about a year now." Chef Ripert replied, "I understand. I had to stalk Michael for two years to get him to come here." Our final plates went out around 11:30 pm. We had already cleaned up most of the pastry kitchen; an easy task compared with the near-demolition going on next door on the hot side. Six pastry technicians making tiny sculptures just don't make the same scale mess as forty pirates slinging a thousand pounds of fish through a million BTUs of fire. And the line cooks are denied the most rewarding cleanup task of all, which fell into my hands: putting away the ice creams and sorbets. I first knew Chef Laiskonis as a long-distance ice cream guru. Having my hands on all dozen flavors of his daily stockpile felt like some kind of industrial espionage (except, of course, that I am without anything resembling an industry). I came away with two flavors I'd like to shamelessly ape (crème fraîche sorbet and praline citrus ice cream) and a much more rounded sense of what my guru's up to. We said our goodbyes after Chef led me through the catacombs and back to the real world. I don't think I expressed enough gratitude to Ricardo and Jesus for their patience and friendliness in the kitchen; they helped make a potentially nerve-wracking experience both comfortable and educational. I may have an opportunity to do a similar stage on the hot side of the kitchen ... If so, more will follow. The full report, with links and pictures, is posted on the underbelly blog.

The cleanest fillet jobs I've seen have been done with Japanese technique and a deba. The caveat is that it's more technique intensive, and different types of fish require more radially different techniques when using a deba. This guy has posted dozens of videos showing technique for different fish. There's a lot to learn. Western style is easier to learn and also faster (and the knives are generally cheaper). I'd like to get a deba and put in some time learning to use it ... but I happen to enjoy this kind of geekery.

Just to clarify, when I said ask the Boardsmith, I didn't mean ask your friend, I meant ask David Smith, who posts here from time to time. He's done his research on wood and glue and construction choices for cutting boards, and gets a lot of feedback from the chef and knife nut communities. He's also been generous with advice for masochists who want to make their own.

Thicker = heavier (less likely to move around), less prone to warping, and longer lasting (eventually you'll have to sand out knife grooves). I think 1-1/2" is probably minimum for an endgrain board. But you don't want it to be too thick; it effects the height of your work surface and unless you're tall the added height can become a problem. You also want it light enough that you can move it to your sink easily for cleaning. Rubber feet are important. Without them, the board will trap water underneath and warp. The Boardsmith can chime in on prefered woods, and also on how to align the grain to prevent warping. Maple is always a safe choice. People I've know who did this as a home woodworking project said that it's a LOT of work!

Beer pairing is easier. Wine can work fine but depends on the condiments. If you're putting anything very acidic or pungent on the burgers (hot mustard, etc.) that makes wine tough. If you're going easy on the condiments, you can pick just as you would for other beef dishes. My beer preference would be for something that doesn't go too far either in the sweet/malt area or the bitter/hops area. Anything light to medium bodied with a good balance.