paulraphael

I think that's why we make pan sauces. They're the ultimate clean-as-you-go invention. Yeah, sure, they're also tasty. yeah, that's how I deal with the sink also. Definitely true. I only use bowls when I need something huge (and then it's tall -profile mixing bowls). Otherwise it's takeout containers, for small stuff, or square ziplock and gladware containers for medium stuff. These are my favorites ... they're not only great for leftovers, but they're the most efficient shape of all for mise. They fit right up against each other without wasted space. They're also easier to sweep food into from the cutting board, without sending half of it onto the floor.

I don't have one either. I don't even think they're much help to the cooking process, unless you have one of the commercial machines that sounds like a jet taking off and works just as fast. Regular dishwashers hold your stuff prisoner for nearly an hour. I'm going to need that stuff! It takes 10 seconds to wash something in the sink.

sure, same here. But with meals simple enough to let me get away with this, I don't find it takes much effort to keep the place clean. My comments apply more to the knock-down, drag-out multicourse bouts that can turn into disasters if you lose control of the kitchen.

I've been using quats (quaternary ammonium compounds). bought a gallon jug from the resto store; a capful in a quart of water makes a working solution. It's odorless, doesn't corrode knives or eat sponges (as bleach can) and doesn't need to be rinsed. The stuff I got also has a wetting agent in it, so when you use it as a final rinse for glassware it doesn't leave spots. My only hesitation is that quats are among the sanitizers that leave residue (unlike bleach). The residue itself isn't harmful, but there's some evidence that leaving low-concentrations of the stuff around can eventually breed bacteria that are resistant to it. I don't know how serious a concern this is, but at least one organization has recommended against dish soaps and hand cleaners containing triclosan for this same reason. So I'm open to finding a better solution. If I were just cooking for myself, or a few people with strong constitutions, I might dispense with sanitizer entirely. But I got in the habit of using it when I started throwing bigger dinner parties and underground events. Someone at the table could be immune-compromized, or pregnant, or god knows what. Best to be paranoid.

Yeah, that's what my butcher's gotten for me. Emma Hearst is a chef right around the corner, and she's getting him to be the NYC distributor. If there's better grass-fed beef to be had, I'd like to know about it ... this stuff beats the pants off of everything I see here at the farmers' markets.

Working clean ... my holiest grail and pettest peave. It's how I know who's good and who's not; who's helping and who's banished. The rest of my life looks like a Superfund site, but I'm OCD in the kitchen. First tip: start clean. Organize up front. If your kitchen is also playroom, office, warehouse, and kitsch museum, you've lost the race before the gun. Get the crap out. Don't squander precious surface. Second tip: learn excellent board management. This alone can distinguish cooks trained by world class chefs from ones raised by wolves. It means keep your prep space clean and organized. Have your cleaned food ready and in order. Have your mise containers ready and in order. Stop and plan how you'll use every section of the cutting board. After each task, stop and clean the board. Don't let vegetable ends, peels, crumbs, and puddles accumulate. This is a running theme: stop and clean. Bad cooks think they don't have time to clean; good cooks know they don't have time not to. Third tip: keep your sink clean, so you can keep everything else clean. If you have multiple sinks, then organize them like restaurant dishwashing sinks: an empty one for scraping, one filled with hot soap water, one filled with cold, clean, sanitizing rinse. If you have one sink or two, do your best, but always keep one empty and clean. Use it to clean every pan and utensile the minute you're done with it. The sink, your surfaces, and your tools need to be ready to go all the time. This lets you keep to your schedule; you won't hit a wall because the pan or knife or widget you need is at the bottom of a pile, caked with squid effluent. That theme again: stop, clean. Fourth tip: have a pile of side towels ready. Or two piles. You need dry ones for grabbing hot pans, and one or two soaked with sanitizing solution so you can wipe down your knives and boards and prep surfaces constantly. Change out the wet ones often. If you can work like this, you will FLY. Doesn't matter if you're scatterbrained, klutzy with a knife, or walking with a limp. I'd much rather work with a meticulous newbie who takes 5 minutes to dice an onion than a ninja master who leaves a trail of destruction. Slow is fast. (Fast is faster, but only if it's clean and fast ...)

I'd assumed southern Cal ... I looked again and the ranches are in central and south central ... Cholame and San Simeon. No idea about their irrigation practices, but I know the grass is green and snow-free.

Another possible approach: take advantage of the honey's properties, and develop a moist, chewy cookie. I haven't done this, but I've created cookie recipes that use other hygroscopic or moisture-retaining ingredients. They not only last a long time, but in some cases get better with age (up to a week or so).

Now that you mention it, I think the CI proportions are different from the ones I settled on. When I first did it with their proportions, I got a very soft, wet dough that was easy to handle ... but I didn't get much change in the final result. So I adjusted ... the proportions I posted give a typical dough texture, but much less moisture in the final crust (which explains the crispness and also the shrinkage). I think the CI technique is popular because it makes dough easier to handle. It also reduces the chance that you'll develop gluten and get a tough crust. However, decent pastry technique makes both these points irrelevent. I experimented with the concept to see if alcohol could give any other benefits, like crispness.

In most cases I find KarenDW's method best ... not just because it's labor-free, but because there's a lot of flavor in the stems. I almost never bother with a tea bag or cheesecloth. Either I toss in the sprigs, or tie them up as a bouquet garni. I only ever strip the leaves if they're going to be part of the presentation.

It works fine. My standard recipe uses 190g flour and 60g water. I've substituted 20g water plus 40g vodka (80 proof). The results are a bit crisper, but the shell shrinks more. I find it to be more of an interesting option than a necessary improvement.

I've been interested in using gelatin (and possibly xanthan or other gums) in mousses ... not for moulding, but to let me get away with less egg. The idea being that eggs work in much larger quantities and so dilute the chocolate more. I have a recipe for chocolate marquise that I've already modded this way and served. It got good reviews, but I think it has a way to go before the texture is where I want it. I'd be curious to know if anyone else has played with this idea.

I take "eat local" as a very general good idea that's bound to have a lot of exceptions. Especially since I live in neither Northern California nor Southern France. Even here in New York, which has bountiful Hudson Valley and Pennsylvania for a back yard, eating local only takes you so far. We don't have citrus fruits. If someone tried to grow them, I'd probably pass. We have winters that go on a lot longer than i'm willing to endure with canned food and root vegetables. And I hate to point it out, NYC locovores: our local grass fed beef gets green green grass for at most 2/3 of the year. The hay and silage they get the rest of the year adds neither fat nor flavor. You just can't compare that stuff to grain finished beef, or to beef from Southern California that dines on green pasture year round. I'm willing to pay the cow's bus fare.

Probably through misunderstanding, just as many terms from philosophy, physics, or other specialized disciplines enter popular culture. They enter the mainstream mostly stripped of their original meanings. However, I'm open to the possibility that chefs like Adria and Achatz actually do some things with food that nod in the direction of Derrida. They certainly go beyond taking dishes apart, and I think they also go beyond ripping a dish from its traditional context. In Philosophy, deconstruction is a kind of meta-approach, in that it addresses existing philosophical arguments, rather than the subjects of those arguments (being, knowing, ethics, etc. etc...). Deconstruction is an attempt to critique and also discover alternative, latent meanings within the philosohical texts. Likewise in food, some approaches address an existing dish or tradition, and rather than just putting a new twist on it (or disassembling it), they discover or illuminate new relationships and possibilities within the existing ingredients and techniques. Naturally, I can't think of a concrete example while I sit here at 2 a.m. ... something about the mention of Derrida's name divorces me from concrete reality or any ability to say something helpful. Maybe someone who's eaten at El Buli can find an example that supports what I'm saying (or just tell me to go to bed). But yeah, "deconstruction" as practiced on Top Chef looks like the brainchild of the kid who showed up stoned every day at Philosophy 101. Please, chef, I'd like my burrito assembled.

I don't think there's anything besides a major defect that could cause this kind of break. There are many, many ways that you might inadvertently mess up a knife ... this isn't one of them!

Uncooked pirepoix freezes fine. Which is great, considering the smallest size bunch of celery most places will sell you.

Just sounds underbaked to me. If the top was cooked properly and the crust wasn't, then (as you suggested) you need to have the dough on a much hotter surface. People seem to do well with a stone, quarry tiles, or slab of metal right down over the firebox of the oven, where it can be blazing hot compared with the top of the oven. You should get some char on the bottom, or at least some deep browning. If the oven is hot enough you'll achieve this without turning the crust into a giant cracker. There should be a lot of rise ... generally if I don't stretch the dough out to well under 1/4" thick, it poofs up more than I like. Oven temp / stone temp is probably the first variable to play with. There are a million others ... pizza takes a lot of practice. If you're working from my recipe, I'd encourage you to think of it as a template. The method described is a basic one, and a good one. The exact proportions of ingredients, the hydration, oven temperature, etc.. can be monkeyed with to suit your tastes.

It would be interesting to do a blind taste test ... hot chocolate made with cocoa vs made with chocolate ... if you used similar quality chocolate and cocoa, and if you kept the fat percentage the same in each (say, by adding cream to the one made with cocoa). I bet it would be harder than people assume, unless they're intimately acquainted with the flavor of the paricular chocolate or cocoa powder.

Yeah, this one bugged me enough that I actually wrote a comment at the site. Overdone, obnoxious, pointless food that gets called molecular gastronomy ... yes, I've had enough of that too. But the concept, as misunderstood as it is? I try to learn everything I can about food science, and rarely with the goals of impressing guests with magic tricks and lab equipment. I want to know how to make my food better.

So, those of you with sous vide cookers in this price range ... what are you using for a vacuum sealer? Has anyone come out with one at the right price / performance point? Betty Crocker E-Z Suck Cryovac?

I haven't tried one. Seems like a reasonable use of ceramic, since a peeler isn't something I even know how to sharpen. The peelers I like most are the harp-style kuhn-rikon (for thicker fleshed things) and the straight messermeister (for everything else). The messermeister works like magic. Only drawback is that the serrations leave fine grooves in whatever you peel.

I've tried sirloin in the mix and found it added a lot of expense but not much flavor. I was trying to figure out why some of the better restaurants include sirloin in the mix; Mitch (Weinoo) guessed that these restaurants all do their own butchery and use their trim for the ground beef. That's as good a guess as any of mine. If you don't happen to have a bunch of sirloin trim around, I wouldn't buy it specifically for burgers. I'd say there are three factors in a burger blend: fat, flavor, and price. -Burgers need 15% to 20% fat, depending on cooking method, level of doneness, and personal preference. You need to work it out so any leaner ingredients get balanced out by the fattier ones. -Flavor is of course the whole point. Some cuts have much, much more than other. Some have flavor that we traditionally associate with burgers, others less so. -Price: don't grind up expensive meat! As soon as you catch yourself walking toward the grinder with a dry-aged, prime ribeye, it's time to find someone to talk you down. There's a reason we love chuck so much ... all by itself it fits all these criteria. It tastes good. Good quality chuck tastes like a good quality burger. It has the right amount of fat. It's cheap. Something like tenderloin fails all three. It's too lean, has too little flavor, and costs too much. When we add meat to the chuck, it's generally because we want MORE flavor. This should narrow things down quite a bit. What cuts have more flavor than chuck? Which ones would taste good in a burger? Which ones are fatty enough to hold up their end of the bargain? Which are cheap enough? As I said before, my personal holy grail is hanger steak, but I think these questions could lead you in a few other interesting directions. Especially if your butcher ever has anything special on sale, or if you find yourself with a bunch of trim.

Oh, yeah, I wince when I hear "vegan dessert." Usually what kills it for me is the lack of butter. And I've had the same experience with weird textures from the egg substitutes. But while I haven't had a great eggless brownie, I'm convinced that any pastry chef fluent in the language of texture ingredients could do an amazing job. I've been working on removing the eggs from my chocolate marquisse recipe ... not because I'm averse to eggs, but because I want less stuff between me and the chocolate. It's been a tricky project, because I'm still learning my way around the various gums and related ingredients.

Pomegranate seeds are a new fave.

You may be right, but eggs aren't in the recipe to taste like anything. They're just structural additives. I'd be all over this thread with wisecracks if someone were looking for a chocolate substitute! Or even a butter substitute. But the truth is, pastry chefs and chefs in general have become such wizards with texture that I believe almost any traditional texture can be duplicated. Sometimes even improved upon. For example, if someone can find an ingredient that gives the texture of eggs, but in much smaller quantities, this would allow you to make much more intensely flavored brownies ... there'd be less structural stuff diluteing the flavors.