paulraphael

It would be a good enough reason for me ... I just got a pasta roller and it's not designed to be taken apart for thorough cleaning, and it can't be soaked in anything. Best to keep salt away from it.

I think the problem is just too little heat for the quantity of onions. All these other factors make small differences, but no matter what they're not going to brown if you stew them ... at least not before they've cooked off all their moisture and turned to mush. You just don't want to go TOO hot ... if you do they'll blacken on the outside before browning all the way through.

Kinda like a starter, but it doesn't usually substitute for the yeast. One of the English names for the technique is just "old dough." It serves like a bigga or poolish or any other kind of preferment to enhance flavor. Dough that's been kept around for a long time develops more flavor than fresh dough, thanks to enzyme action in the flour.

Thanks Daisy, I'm using a burr grinder (barazza maestro) and french press. I weigh my beans (generally 80g beans for 1400ml water with a medium roast). Filtered water 203°F, 4 minutes brewing. The Guatemalan you mentioned is another of the staff picks. So was the Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Grade 2 (is that worse than grade 1? better?). I'll try one of these next time. Interesting about the seasonality ... I hadn't considered that. Maybe I'll start with africa.

The "third wave" coffee revolution of the 1990s has recently found its way to New York, and among other lofty participants, Stumptown is roasting their own here. I had a pretty convincing blind tasting when I ordered coffee at the brick oven pizza joint that recently opened in a semi-legal industrial shack in my neighborhood deep in brooklyn. One sip into it, I hollered for the waitress to come back. "What IS this?" ... It was the best cup of joe I'd had in years. Stumptown, of course. I forgot to ask what variety. So I finally made my way to their stylized storefront in the lobby of the Ace Hotel, and after reading all the flowery descriptions and then getting advice from the staff, chose their one Indonesian coffee. What can I say? It was lousy. I'd asked for something full bodied, earthy, and spicy (I'm generally a sumatra fan). What I got was thin and spicy and metallic. Nibbling on the beans gave the same flavor profile, so I don't think it's anything I'm doing in the brewing. Anyone have a favorite stumptown variety? I'm especially interested in the big body, spicy, earthy kind of flavor profile.

I use britta-filtered NYC tap water. The filter makes a difference, primarily because the water hear has noticeable amounts of chlorine in it. Sometimes in the summer, they put in gobbs of chlorine (like when they detect cryptosporidium, or other such things) ... then the water makes ghastly coffee and tea. In general the water here is quite good, besides that, and a humble britta removes enough to make it undetectable. Some people in the city have nasty pipes ... their water tastes strongly of rust and other minerals. Brittas work well for them, too. I would not trust a britta if I thought there was anything actually hazardous in the water. It's not purifier ... not even close. Boiled water tastes bad because most of the disolved air has been driven out. You can make it fresh again just by shaking it up. Try a side-by-side test. It's pretty cool.

I wouldn't say you did anything 'wrong,' but by messing with more than one variable at a time you made it a lot harder to figure out what did what!

The 3000 has the same flame shape as the other torches I've used: narrow. The shape is helpful for touching things up, and a pain for browning large areas. If anything the flame is too hot. It's tricky to brown food without scorching the surface texture. I'd love a torch with about half the BTUs, and a flame that can adjust from narrow to wide. In practice the 3000 is fine for the way I use it, though i can imagine a more perfect torch finding more uses in my kitchen.

Seems like it would be a smaller issue, but there's no way to know for sure without testing. Some of the tests of other kinds of can linings gave results that surprised the manufacturers. I'd assume that a small piece of material makes less difference than a big one, and a lid makes less difference than the walls ... but those are just assumptions.

I'm trying to figure out when they started lining metal cans with epoxy ... it's possible that we've been chugalugging BPA since the 1930s. In one sense this is scary; in another sense it's reassuring. If we've been heavily exposed for that many decades, then it would seem the real-world risks aren't so apocalyptic.

i'm interested that the glucose is helping ... since it's less sweet, you generally use more of it, so you get a softer texture. i thought maybe fructose would be promising.

I mistrust this information even more. There is no science here, not a single citation of any kind. Statements like "All plastics can leach chemicals under certain conditions" are pointless. All known substances can leach certain chemicals under some conditions, so where does this leave us? I looked for studies that showed polypropylene leaching anything harmful under any reasonable kitchen conditions ... this is what my storage and takeout containers are made from. I found nothing. Doesn't mean it isn't possible, but it does mean that it appears to be safer than, say, most stainless steels, which can leach nickel (toxic in solution) into acidic foods. Not that I'm afraid of stainless; I use it for food in a million ways. Just trying to put things in perspective. I think it's as foolish to casually dismiss all plastic as it is to casually embrace all metal, glass, or ceramic. The world is full of glass and ceramic formulations known to be toxic, known to leach metalic compounds, etc. etc... The smart rule is the same for everything: know what you're using. And if you're going as far as pitching your lexan nalgene bottle, you really should consider banishing canned foods: that's where most of your BPA is lurking.

I'm not convinced the petroleum content is an issue. is the amount of petroleum used to make a polypropylene takeout container as much as what's used to manufacture a glass or stainless steel one? I think it's unlikely, especially if the plastic container has recycled content. The amount of energy that goes into steel and glass fabrication (even if the raw materials are recycled) is huge; and you can bet most of that energy comes from fossil fuels.

[quote name='Edward J' date='12 January 2010 - 08:25 PM' timestamp='1263345942' post='1723415' Callebaut and Belcolada are fine, but methinks the Belgians have a monopoly on chocolate in N.America. ------DON'T GET ME WRONG!!! They make good stuff, but it's kind like saying that: "only _______ (insert name of a wine making country) makes the BEST wine"...You'd have every other wine making country after you begging to differ!!!

Not my field, but the info in the chart corresponds with what I've read elsewhere. The format is user-friendly. Seems to me the real elephant in the room is canned foods, which may be the biggest source of BPA in most people's environment. Cans are lined with epoxy that leaches the stuff during the canning process. There are currently no regulations governing it, and since consumer fear has been directed at plastic containers, the industry hasn't been forced to make changes. Link

I wish someone would make an onion peeling machine. It takes me about 3 times as long to peel an onion as to dice it.

I support procrastination in all its guises.

I've gotten a lot of great technical help from Michael Laiskonis's blog. He's a wizard with frozen dessert and is one of the few people I've found who can talk articulately about why he does what he does. At the very least his recipes serve as great examples. Your comments made me realize that the most processed ingredient I ever work with is chocolate! The number of steps between the bean and your belly is pretty dizzying. And the technology to make it as smooth as we're used to didn't exist until the 19th century, even though cocoa has been consumed for thousands of years. As I'm sure you gather, i'm not trying to suggest that processed food is always good. I won't be suggesting that you make gelato out of twinkies, or butter-flavored shortening, or I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-__________

Would this kind of motion / effort hurt your hands? This is what's possible with a sharp knife and good technique (it's my friend KC who has Japanese training). If that would be painful, then by all means avoid knives .... though it seems to me like it could be less stress on joints than doing things like twisting the lid to food processor on and off, or repeatedly whacking a chopper.

I bet I could take ANYONE, and with a single combined hour of instruction / practice, have them dicing onions with a knife so quickly that they'd never even consider using a gizmo. Up to a few pounds of onions you can be faster than a food processor (if you include setup and cleaning time), and the results will be vastly cleaner and more even. Once you get it down, dicing onions is FUN! And if your knife is sharp, arthritis is a non-issue and tears are generally minimal. In fact, you'll release much more eye-burning vapor with a blunt-edged instrument like one of those dicers. If tears are still an issue, there's a fail-safe, if dorky, solution: lab goggles.

Everything I mentioned is 100% natural. Many are just 99% unfamiliar in a lot of people's kitchens. Even the word "processed" is tricky. For example, cane sugar is much more processed than dried milk. Cornstarch is no more processed than white flour. Products like locust bean gum and gelatin have been made by artisans for thousands of years. Glucose and Fructose are not so far removed from table sugar. I think you're smart to start simple and try the ingredients your most familiar with first. Then if you find you want to tweak things, you can experiment with new ingredients / techniques one at a time. And I agree that dried milk would be a good place to start. It adds what ice cream gurus call "nonfat solids," which improve creaminess and stability. I resisted using this for a long time, since I had such bad associations with dry milk. Then I saw both Pierre Hermé and Michael Laiskonis used it in their ice creams and decided I was being irrational!

The blogosphere is filled with hysteria these days over food being poisoned by contact with murderous plastic. I've met people who have banished plastic from their kitchens and only use glass or metal or crockery containers now. This kind of reductive thinking annoys me (all plastic is bad? all glass is good? how do you know there's no lead in the glass? how do you know there's no cadmium in the pottery glaze, or soluble nickel in the metal?) But good, unbiassed resources are scarce. I had to search through a lot web clutter before concluding there's no damning evidence against the polypropylene used in my prep and takeout containers. I doubt most people will bother looking this hard. Does anyone know of a well researched clearingouse of information on plastic toxicity?

I think the problem would be salt leaching into the water during cooking. This wouyld be fine if the manufacture could get everyone to use the same volume of water, but that's probably not going to happen. So people boiling a pound of pasta in a gallon of water would likely find the pasta undersalted; people boiling it in a quart of water would likely find it inedible. This is just a guess ... there may be no problem at all and it's just done as it is out of tradition.

I think you nailed it when you assumed the restaurant made batches of each of these side dishes daily from scratch. It's not that big a deal for a restaurant that's going to be using these sides with several dishes that they're churning out all night. Doing the same thing at home to garnish two plates is just a lot of work. If you're cooking every night, you might find some sides (rice dishes, potato dishes, roasted vegetables) that you can make in big batches and keep reheating for a few days. This way you'll only have to make some of the meal from scratch each day.

Something to consider is that the most traditional gelatos (at least the ones made in the style that you describe) are intended to be eaten very shortly after being made. They don't have much stability, and will get icy fast. So unless you're planning to make these for people the day they'll eat them, it's going to take some ingenuity; you'll have to use ingredients beyond milk and sugar and flavorings. Some things to familiarize youreself with are nonfat dried milk, alterntive sugars (glucose, fructose, either solid or in syrups), and starches, gums, or other stabilizers (cornstarch is traditional in Southern Italy; ingredients like gelatin, xanthan gum, and locust bean gum work in much smaller quantities and i think work better). You can also buy a prepackaged stabilizer mix ... this is what most pastry chefs do, but I like to know my exact recipe so I'm not bound to a manufactured product. You need to decide if you'll incorporate egg custard or not. If not, you'll have to rely more on these other ingredients for texture and stability. Also, the lower the milkfat percentage you want, the more you'll have to worry about texture and stability. Your machine calls itself a gelato machine, so it's probably designed to incorporate very little air. That will help.