paulraphael

This post in the Cooking Issues blog shows how different pressure cookers effect the outcome of stocks. Dramatically, it seems: Arnold found that pressure cooked stocks were better than conventional ones when he made them at home, but worse when he made them in the kitchen at the French Culinary Academy. A bunch of sleuthing turned up differences in the pressure reguators between the Iwatani type, the Fagor, and Kuhn Rikon. In his tests the Kuhn Rikon was superior, which saddens me ... they're expensive.

My butcher sells a lot of dry aged beef ... some that he ages himself in the walk-in, some aged by a contractor with real aging facilities, and some that's a combination of both. I've noticed huge inconsistencies. For example, the most intense aged flavor I've ever tasted came from a 42-day dry aged strip steak I bought from him a couple of years ago. I then had him age a rib section for 70 days (he warned me that this might be too much for the guests) ... but the aged flavors were much less pronounced than in the 42 day beef. He and I agree that the issue is likely temperature, humidity, and airflow issues in his walk-in. But exactly what, we don't know. Too much humidity? Too little? To warm? Too cold? Too inconsistent an environment? Even the experts disagree on ideal conditions. Some guidelines I've seen: -According to F.C.Parrish, Jr., Ph.D., dept. of animal science at Iowa State University: 32-34°F, 85-100% humidity, air velocity of 0.5 to 2.5 m/sec -According to Harold McGee: 34°–38°F / 70 – 80% relative humidity, no airflow given -According to chef Rick Gresh at Primehouse: 34°–40°F / 65% relative humidity, no airflow given That's a pretty big range of numbers. Most likely all these approaches will work, but you can bet they'll give different results. I'd love to see a comparison done in a controlled environment. And I'm not volunteering for the task!

Even here, it's temperature control of the sabayon, not of the heat source that matters. The best hollandaises aren't made over long stretches of time in a 160F pan ... they're made over fairly high heat, quickly, with rapid whisking. Temperature control comes from having a responsive pan, and taking it off the flame as soon the foam starts to stabilize. I can't imagine a PID helping you here. Precise temperature control matters in low temperature cooking (defined as cooking temperatures that are very close to the final cooked temperature of the food). FWIW, I wouldn't worry about evenness of the laboratory hotplate. It's probably more even than most range burners. Good cookware is designed to heat food evenly even when on a spotty heat source.

If I got a job or a stage at some mid-level place where I didn't fully trust my coworkers, I'd buy a togiharu gyuto for $60 or whatever they cost now. It's not state of the art but is thin, will take a good edge, and hold it reasonably well. And no one's heard of it ... it's unglamorous looking and attracts little attention. The rest of my knives are fairly cheap ... I'd keep them right in my bag. Everyone wins. At high end places, expensive knives (and the requisite respect) are commonplace. If a chef there had a lapse of judgment and let me in, I'd be perfectly comfortable bringing an expensive knife. I'd mostly worried about wrecking someone else's expensive ingredients.

I think it's mostly a question of technique, and basic care. In this sense, the appropriateness of a good knife depends on the type of food being served, and even moreso on the culture of the kitchen. In a kitchen where everyone's obsessive about technique and organization and careful handling of the food, then a delicate knife won't require attention beyond what's afforded everything else. In the kitchen at Denny's, you'd be nuts to bring in anything you cared about. Really not my experience. My main chef's knife is sharpened to around 7 degrees on a side, very asymmetrically. And while it chips all the time, in general the chips are only visible with a jeweler's loupe (my softer knives generally have MUCH more ragged edges). The chips have to get extensive before they're noticeable while cutting, and then a quick touchup on a strop or finishing stone gets the performance back. The chips don't have to be completely removed. I only have to do a serious sharpening once a month or so. Guys I know with similar knives who work in high end, high volume kitchens sharpen once a day, after their shift. But they're fast; it's a 10 minute operation from start to cleanup. And they don't have to do any maintenance at all during the shift. How much money is too much is always subjective. But I don't see how spending the kind of money or your main tool that a carpenter spends on his drill is such a strange concept. Especially when these days, the cost of entry for a high performance knife is so low. And I think the time argument plays strongly to the good knife. An example: I recently cooked in a 24 hour-long underground restaurant event. It was literally 24 hours from the beginning of prep to the end of service. In that time we put out 24 courses, each of which had between five and twelve elements on the plate. Total madhouse. Of the eight or so cooks and helpers, which included a couple of chefs with much more experience than me, I was the only one who showed up with sharp knife. The others had some good blades (there were togiharus, tojiros, shuns, masamotos, and nenoxes in the room, along with the usual european suspects) but all were at fat bevel angles and maintained on steels. I was able to prep many things faster and more precisely than anyone in the room. I could do things well ahead of time that they had to do last minute. And over 24 hours, I didn't have to do any maintenance at all. Everyone else was stopping every several minutes to steel their knives, just to keep them serviceable. At the end of the night, my knife was definitely not performing as well as it had been at the beginning ... but it was still outperforming the other knives in the room, even though those had been getting steeled constantly. For me, the only real time investment was learning how to sharpen ... which I admit was a pain in the ass. And I'm still learning. The payoff seems more than worth it.

I think it's mostly a question of techniqe, and basic care. In this sense, the appropriateness of a good knife depends on the type of food being served, and even moreso on the culture of the kitchen. In a kitchen where everyone's obsessive about technique and organization and careful handling of the food, then a delicate knife won't require attention beyond what's afforded everything else. In the kitchen at Denny's, you'd be nuts to bring in anything you cared about. Really not my experience. My main chef's knife is sharpened to around 7 degrees on a side, very asymmetrically. And while it chips all the time, in general the chips are only visible with a jeweler's loupe. They have to get extensive before they're noticeable while cutting, and then a quick touchup on a strop or finishing stone gets the performance back. The chips don't have to be completely removed. For what it's worth, my softer knives generally have MUCH more ragged edges. I only have to do a serious sharpening once a month or so. Guys I know with similar knives who work in high end, high volume kitchens sharpen once a day, after their shift. But they're fast; it's a 10 minute operation from start to cleanup. And they don't have to do any maintenance at all during the shift. How much money is too much is always subjective. But I don't see how spending the kind of money or your main tool that a carpenter spends on his drill is such a strange concept. Especially when these days, the cost of entry for a high performance knife is so low. And I think the time argument plays strongly to the good knife. An example: I recently cooked in a 24 hour-long underground restaurant event. It was literally 24 hours from the beginning of prep to the end of service. In that time we put out 24 courses, each of which had between five and twelve elements on the plate. Total madhouse. Of the eight or so cooks and helpers, which included a couple of chefs with more experience than me, I was the only one who showed up with sharp knife. The others had some good blades (there were togiharus, tojiros, shuns, masamotos, and nenoxes in the room, along with the usual european suspects) but all were at fat bevel angles and maintained on steels. I was able to prep faster and more precisely than anyone in the room. I could do things well ahead of time that they had to do last minute. And over 24 hours, I didn't have to do any maintenance at all. Everyone else was stopping every several minutes to steel their knives, just to keep them serviceable. I didn't once reach for the strop that I'd brought, just in case. At the end of the night, my knife was definitely not performing as well as it had been at the beginning ... but it was still outperforming the other knives in the room, even though those had been getting steeled constantly. For me, the only real time investment was learning how to sharpen ... which I admit was a pain in the ass. And I'm still learning. The payoff seems more than worth it.

The catch is, most cheap knives won't get sharp ... or at least sharp and useable. Most medium priced knives won't get sharp and stay useable, either, but there are exceptions to this (I named a few in my post a few days ago). If you try to sharpen a Wustoff or Henkels or Dexter Russel knife to a sub-10 degree per side bevel angle, the edge will fold the instant it touches a cutting board. If you try to put a 5000-plus grit polish on one of those knives, you won't get anywhere; the carbide size and grain structure of the steel are many times too coarse to hold the polish for more than a couple of cuts. The best you can get is a serviceable knive, but not a sharp one. People tend to not believe this until they've used a sharp knife ... and I've met many European trained chefs who never have. Here's an example of something you can do with most brand-x knives, even sharpened to their limit: That's 3 lbs of apples, cut to 1mm slices. This took just over 2 minutes, and I was able to do it several hours before using the apples ... they did not turn brown. The knife could have done 30 lbs of apples just like this without any need for a touchup. It just isn't possible to put an edge on cheap steel that can do this ... the exceptions being some of incredible bargains available in thin, carbon steel blades. You don't have to spend tons of money to get a knife that will get truly sharp. But if you spend cheaply, you have to spend wisely. The German knives won't do it. Forschners come a little closer. Dexter Russels won't even approach sharp. But knives like Tojiro will, and the Togiharu knives will do it at a bargain price. Carbon blades like Fujiwara and Kanemasa will. To get a kinfe that will get this sharp and keep its edge all day, you have to spend more money, but you're also asking a lot. All the problems you describe about expensive knives in the kitchen sound like management issues, not knife issues. I can assure you that there are many, many restaurants in the world where cooks are using expensive knives, and where people besides the chef de cuisine are handling expensive product, and where whining about their knives is pretty low on the list of crises.

There are tradeoffs in everything, sure, but better edge retention doesn't automatically mean greater brittleness. There are many factors in knife metalurgy, and edge retetention / edge stability are as dependent on carbide size as they are on hardness. Some steels are just better than others. If you took a blade made with good steel and sharpened it to relatively obtuse angles, you'd have better edge retention and better durability than with a cheaper, softer blade. The importance of knives also depends on the quality of food being cooked. A few swipes on a butcher steel will give you a working knife, but not a sharp one. You cannot cut sashimi with a knife sharpened or maintaned this way. You cannot cut herbs without damaging them. You cannot cut apples or pears without them turning brown. You will not leave a glass-smooth edge on any food that you cut. If your ingredients and cooking style are well suited to more workmanlike cuts, and you're willing to use techniques that work around their disadvantages, then sure, knives make very little difference. I think this is really the crux of the issue. In the U.S. and in Europe, at least, we don't have a kitchen culture that pays attention to sharpening or knife skills. In fact, the knife skills they teach in school and perpetuate in most restaurants are really just an adaptation to dull knives. With sharp knives ... and with the techniques that they allow ... things like durability become minor issues. I don't think a $100 knife compares in a meaningful way to $1000 plus piece of bling. At any rate, it depends on the restaurant. If I had someone prepping $10,000 worth of high end product every day, you better believe I wouldn't want him shredding it with a $20 Dexter Russel. A $100 knife, with the appropriate sharpening and cutting skills, seems a lot more appropriate to the task. $100? I know of restaurants that lose several times this is broken china every day!

You'll probably like the edge pro. It's not the quickest to use, but the Chicago knives are soft and sharpen up fast compared with many others.

the turkey I got from Bo Bo Farms had that thick fat layer too. I don't remember it from the heritage bird I got last year (don't know the breed but it came from Amish country). I'm not sure if I like the fat cap; it probably helps with juiciness, but I use cooking techniques to handle that. The fat makes the skin itself less appetizing to eat, for me anyhow. I want something thin and crisp, not a big mouthful of turkey fat.

Maybe we should be looking to countries that have both excellent restaurants and excellent health care. France? Spain? Italy? Great Britain? Japan? How do they do it?

Really impressive, baron. I don't know if i've ever had a meal quite that classical.

The best bargain in cheap knives I've found are the Forschners. Widely available, comfortable wood handles, and the same basic alloy used in the mainstream German knives. Their heat treatment seems to be on the harder end of the range for European stainless blades. They're a mainstay among butchers and a lot of cooks, and I'd be lost without my $25 forschner boning knife. For true high performance knives at budget prices, I haven't found a better bargain the Korin's Togiharu brand ... if you want stainless. If you're open to carbon steel, then there are many great bargains, some coming from companies that have only recently become available in the U.S.. Some of thise include Kikuichi Elite, Kanemasa, Hiromoto HC (not positive this is still available), and Fujiwara. All these companies make chef's knives that will ouperform Wustoff / Henckels, at anywhere from 1/3 to 2/3 the price. But most of them aren't as pretty.

Can you say a little more about the bar menu? Some of us have food lusts that excede our bank balances. Also, if you'll be looking for any slave labor, give me a holler.

I may not have posted: http://cgi.ebay.com/Lot-of-Two-2-100-Micron-Nylon-Mesh-Filter-Bags-WVO_W0QQitemZ370289561526QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item5636fa4fb6#ht_1142wt_1055 they have lots of others. And here's a regular retailer with similar things: http://www.mcmaster.com/#catalog/115/378/=4pf5wn

I got they bags and they look great. Don't anticipate any durability problems. But they're coarser than I'd been led to believe. The 250 micron bag is barely finer than my chinois (it filters out some additional stuff but doesn't visibly improve clarity). The 100 micron bag provides some clarification but not a lot. I've ordered a 50 micron bag to try out. $13 for a pair, free shipping. Very good ebay seller ... I'll be able to try them all the way down to 1 micron for about the price of one authentic superbag. By the way, I'm most impressed by how easy they are to clean. I was worried that this would be a major catch. I find it easier than cleaning a chinois, since the fabric is much thinner and less textured than the mesh on the metal strainers.

Post mortems, anyone? Hits: -Great big free range turkey from Bo Bo farms in New York, poached and roasted -Madeira sauce made with duck coulis -Stuffing made from mixed wild mushrooms browned in duck fat, ground duck leg, toasted almonds, dried cherries -Apple tart with many layers of thinly sliced apples and cardamom, cognac vanilla ice cream Misses: -sunchoke and fennel puree. I meant to puree celeriac, but couldn't find any at the last minute. Guests liked this; I thought it tasted like burned milk. Maybe I don't like sunchokes?

I'm going to banish the duck press from my kitchen, because how can I trust people not to use it for cracking quail's eggs or filleting hamachi?

Trying to keep it down to earth this year. I've delegated a couple of dishes so there will be time to sleep in and screw off on the internet (like now!) -crudite (someone else will make!) -roasted butternut squash and garlic soup -poached and roasted turkey (a free range, half-heritage bird from bo bo) -stuffing with duck, wild mushrooms, almonds, and dried cherries -madeira sauce made with duck coulis -celeriac and sunchoke purée -a green vegetable (someone else will make!) -apple "mille feuille" tart with cardamom -cognac vanilla ice cream -mystery dessert (someone else will make!)

If you're shopping for a chef's knife, especially one with a thin profile that will wedge less in hard veggies, check out the Togiharu knives from Korin. This is a house brand, not available elsewhere. In the entry level line in that link, you can get a gyuto in the $60 to $90 range that will outperform anything by Shun or Global. The steel is very good and the blade geometry is much thinner than anything offered by those other companies. It's also easy to sharpen compared with some other knives.Their higher end lines offer similar geometry, but in steels that have better edge retention. (that descriptiption suggests the blades are carbon stell, but they're a stainless alloy) Korin's having a holiday sale right now. If you live in or near NYC, stop in for a drool fest.

Why, what's the superbag made of? The industrial filters come in quite a few materials. One of type I bought is nylon, the other is polysester. Both are monofilament. Polypropylene is also available. I assumed the superbag would be one of these materials. If the ones I got turn out to have a short lifespan, they'll at least let me test the concept for cheap.

Forget OXO ... get a Japanese Benriner cutter. Under $50, often under $30, and they will outperform anything else on the market, by a lot. Only caveat is that they're less adjustable than the expensive euro models. I think there are a few different models available; maybe someone who's used a few can offer pointers.

Well, there's a line of un-clearness that you never want to cross. It leads to a greasy, muddy mouthfeel. This happens when very small protein particles get bound up with emulsified fats. You may be able to fix it with some kind of filtration (gelatin, agar, something physical that's finer than a chinois) but I don't know if the result will be ideal. I agree that anything below that level is just about esthetics, and may not matter. However, I'm never making stock for a single purpose. I make a pile of for many uses. I'm happier if it looks good enough for the uses that highlight it.

That's exactly what I was talking about. Copying dishes is lame. I don't even like to do it at home! But there are only a handful of chefs in the world who are putting menus together based even largely on techniques they've invented. And, of course, what they're doing is exciting, so a lot of people copy them, even when their ultimate goal is to be the same kind of pioneer. What I think has given molecular gastronomy a bad name (besides the bad name) is people copying techniques without understanding the vision behind them ... they take the superficial aspects of someone's cuisine but are unable to justify to their diners and critics why they've done so. They're all about surface, not substance.

Someone clever at the Cooking Issues website suggested that the superbag might actually be a repackaged (and marked up) industrial filter. I did some searches and found similar filter bags all over the place; I ended up scoring a pair of 100 micron bags and a pair of 250 micron bags on ebay for a total of $27, shipped. No way of knowing if these are as good as the haute cuisine variety, but it seemed like a good way to dip my big toes and test the concept. I'll let you know how it goes. And ... to answer my own question, the Superbag people say that 400 microns is just a bit finer than a standard chinois. So 250 microns is for significantly finer filtration, and 100 microns is for clarification.