paulraphael

There are a couple of fundamentally different low and slow approaches: one is basically a dry braise (or a smokeless barbecue). And one is a roast, typically of something large, that you're trying to cook evenly from edge to edge. The difference is primarily the internal temperature. The former style requires breaking down the collagen, and depending on what you're after requires internal temps from 140 to 180 (at the low range, the temp has to be held for many many hours). The latter style is generally for meat that's rare to medium rare. Obviously you'd choose different cuts and dishes for these approaches. Both approaches lend themselves to a high-heat sear, which I think works best at the end, right before serving.

shoulda said: won't be deadened by cooking. the issue is chemical reactions from the heat, not the phyical state change.

Bud, where did you get your steel plate? how thick is it?

I hope some will play with it. The possibilities are interesting. The resulting liquors might taste especially fresh and three-dimensional. And all kinds of interesting things might be done with the stuff left behind, sinci it won't be deadened by boiling.

Oh, but he has plenty of fancy recipes. The ones I've stolen use real chocolate. The most amazing ones don't use any dairy. If you haven't tried a dairy-free hot chocolate, it's a revelation. Supposedly this is how chocolate was served thought most of its history ... milk is a more recent addition. The water and chocolate based drinks are like crack. The sensation is that there's nothing between you and the chocolate; it seems to pass straight from your mouth into your arteries and your brain. Incredibly intense. So much so that I make this style of cocoa mostly as a dessert shot ... something you can have by the demitasse and not need anything else afterwards. For a regular beverage, I soften the intensity a bit with milk, but only a small amount. Here's one that I like, adapted from a couple of Pierre Hermé Ideas. Not truly dairy-free. Medium-intense. : Caramel-Cinnamon Hot Chocolate 1/2 to 1 cinnamon stick 360g / 1-1/2 cups water 60g / 1/3 cup sugar 120g / 4-1/4 oz Bittersweet chocolate 24g /1/4 cup dutch cocoa 1g / 1/8 tsp salt 240g / 1 cup whole milk -Heat sugar and cinnamon, undisturbed, in a heavy saucepan. -boil the water separately -when sugar starts to caramelize, stir vigorously until amber -pour water on sugar/cinnamon, and keep stirring and heating until clumps liquefy -whisk in cocoa -stir in chocolate, continuing to stir until melted -stir in milk -keep on heat until the first bubble pops on the surface -remove from heat and whip (with a whisk or a stick blender) until slightly frothy

If you shape the dough and build the pizza on parchment, you don't need to use all that added flour, because the dough won't have to be handled and won't have to slide. You'll be able use higher hydration with less trouble ... or if you have a super hot oven and don't need such high hydration, you won't risk the bitter tastes that come from bench flour overcooking. parchment's hardly essential ... I consider it a cheat. But I'm not a ninja when it comes to handling gluey dough, and the cheat improves both my success rate and my mood.

I don't think the porosity of the stone makes any difference. I've slid pizzas onto my stone on a sheet of foil and it doesn't seem to affect the crispness or char at all (it does tend to stick, so I've stopped doing this). My hesitation with skillets isn't the metal, but the sides. I think a plate of steel or a big griddle would be much better.

Cast iron doesn't absorb moisture, so it isn't exactly ideal for dough. People who use metal report great results. A stone doesn't actually absorb moisture; nothing absorbs moisture when it's above the boiling point. Any water that comes in contact with the oven deck (stone, metal, or whatever) flashes off as steam instantly. A stone is just the traditional way getting a lot of thermal mass. A chunk of iron could have at least as much, with the advantage of higher conductivity. This could get you a quick cook and char on the crust at somewhat lower temperatures than a stone. And it could improve cooking in smaller ovens or grills where you don't have much temperature differential between the deck and the top of the oven.

Ok, Stumptown has opened in Brooklyn, and has a café in Chelsea; Intelligentsia has opened their training lab in wherever. Neither company has info on their websites about retail locations for beans. Has anyone found them around town?

Haven't, but it should work great. I'd use a heavy pizza stone, or if you can find one, a slab of iron or steel, so you don't have to contend with the sides of the pan. The only issue I can imagine is that the toppings might cook too fast. managing a wood fired oven is a kind of balancing act between the temp at the floor of the oven and the temp at the top. I don't know what the situation would be like inside a weber grill.

Here's the dough recipe that I've been working on. It's intended for a home oven; I bake at 550F, but people get good results at 500. Results are a bit crisper and chewier than traditional Neapolitan. I don't think the flavor is as good as the best doughs made with starter, but it's the best I've had from commercial yeast.

100% manufacturing defect. A some kind of forging or heat treating mistake. Time bomb waiting to go off. Even if you'd used the knife to pry open a vault, I doubt it would have broken in that spot. I've seen spontaneously snapped knives before, but never quite like that, south of the bolster. Maybe it's time to let go? You might be able to get Wusthof to replace it, but it wouldn't be your baby anymore. And there are many knives that perform much better for the same or less money.

Evilchef's recipe is completely dependent on a blazing hot oven ... he says 400C, but I bet that's pushing it on the low side. 46% hydration will give you a crust like shoe leather in a home oven, where baking times are more like 6 to 8 minutes. And 00 Italian flour works especially poorly at low temps / long times. Here's a tip on the tomato sauce: Use good quality canned tomatoes (the genuine Italian ones are often good but not always) ... remember any brand that you like, and TASTE the tomatoes, every time. I don't think any brand is consistent. Unless you're very lucky, most canned tomatoes have a bit of bitter / metallic taste to them that needs to be handled. Here's a method that I find works with a range of tomatoes (provided they're basically good): - pass tomatoes through a food mill using the fine disk. this should remove any stray skins and most of the seeds. - pour into a very fine strainer or chinois that's set over a bowl. do not force through the strainer. allow liquid to drip through for 10 minutes or so. Pour this strained liquid back into the strainer, and allow to drip for another 10 or 15 minutes. The liquid that drips through the strainer this time should be mostly clear. -taste the liquid that has dripped through. if it's not bitter, you're done. If it IS bitter, discard the liquid. add a few ounces of water to the puree in the strainer, and wait 10 or 15 minutes for liquid to drip through. Repeat until liquid that drips through has lost its bitterness. -pour puree from strainer into a bowl. Taste and carefully season. The traditional seasoning is salt and nothing but. However, canned tomatoes are often presalted and may not need any added. Depending on the quality of the tomatoes, they MAY need a bit of added acid (like red wine vinnegar) and in rare cases a bit of sugar or honey. I'm also partial to black pepper. Add herbs at your peril; the neopolitan police may kick down your door.

Cool ... that's perfect. I wish I had that one. The trick now is to make sure you buy from someone who has the new version in stock. Some web stores are unclear about this.

How about an eGullet-sponsored petition to the cookbook publishers? Maybe we could get a thousand signatures? Might not change anything, but it couldn't hurt.

Dorie Greenspan presumeably has a fair amount of political capital, as authors go, and she only seems to win this battle once in a while. I asked her why one of the Pierre Hermé books had no weights while the other did ... she said, "I tried!"

I've never heard of a case of recipes being protected as intellectual property, with the exception of copyright protection being extended to the wording of a written recipe. The ideas themselves seem to be a free for all. While I haven't heard it put just like this, I think the solution of most contemporary chefs is the opposite of secrecy: they publish their recipes freely. This guarantees that they get credit for their ideas, since there's no practical way to stop other people from copying them.

I think trussing makes sense for roasting chickens on a spit in front of a fire; that's what the technique was developed for. Everything I've read in favor of trussing an oven roasted bird fails in terms of physics and logic (and in comparison to an untrussed bird done the same way). I think the chefs that insist on trussing do so for esthetic reasons; a trussed bird is prettier. The rest is rationalization.* Here's why: the challenge to cooking a whole bird lies in the different cooking temperatures of the white and dark meat. The white meat is leaner and is actually a different muscle fiber type; it's done at round 10°F lower than the dark meat. But the dark meat actually comes to temperature more slowly, because the folds of the leg against the torso create the thickest section of flesh on the bird. Trussing pins the legs against the torso, effectively making that part of the bird even thicker. It eliminates airflow between the legs and torso, and covers a fair amount of surface area, making browning there impossible. Sometimes I'll have a bird that's so floppy that legs will hang against the edge of the pan and tend to scorch there. If that's the case, I'll do a very loose truss ... just enough to get the legs to behave a bit, but not enough to disrupt airflow. Incidentally, there was a practice developed for spit roasting that we've discarded, but shouldn't have: barding. Birds used to be covered with a thin layer of fat (like pork belly or bacon). Smart chefs then figured out they could get perfectly cooked birds by barding just the breast meat, and removing the barding around halfway through cooking. This technique works as well in the oven as it does on a spit, and has resulted in the only perfectly cooked birds I've ever had. If you don't want to go all out with bacon, a trippled sheet of foil works as well, if not as tastilly. *Julia child said that untrussed bird looks "wanton." Maybe it's the generation gap, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

Working great. No complaints. It might even be on the original batteries. There may be a newer model that has an IR thermometer with a higher maximum temp; this would be a big improvement. I'd like to use it to check the oven when making pizzas, but my version tops out at less than 500 degrees.

You could par cook whole chickens sous-vide (ideal) or poached in something like court bouillon, then finish to order in 500+ degree oven, with foil or barding over the breasts for part of the roast time. put butter or stock in the sous vide bags. birds done this way are phenomenal. parcooked birds that don't get ordered can be used in braises, stews, or for stock. If you poach, the poaching liquid will be the foundation of your stock.

I know a few people who prefer cakes from mixes to cakes they've made from scratch. I think it's because the mixes use food science that makes it easy to get good results without good technique. A cake made from scratch with better ingredients and good technique would be better than the mix ... but this isn't the point of reference for these people.

Opening packages, mostly. They're also great for snipping the wing tips off of chickens and the bony fins off of fish. For most of the other things mentioned I prefer a knife.

Not exactly to the point, but I think we're mistaken in blaming things like preservatives and additives ... whatever an additve may be ... for making crappy commercial products crappy. Usually they're crappy because they're cheap, or because so many recipe compromises have to be made to give them long shelf lives. Sometimes they're crappy because it's hard to make great things in factory-sized batches, but I think this is only occasionally the case. You mentione ice cream earlier. It's an interesting case. The better industrial ice creams, like Haagen Dazs and Ben and Jerrys, achieve textures that most pastry chef's would be happy with. And they manage this with frighteningly long shelf lives and durability in the face of temperature swings and other kinds of abuse. But the flavors are typically only so so. They manage the great textures because the technology is available to stabilize ice cream just so. But they struggle with flavor because great, intense flavor is expensive. To make a pint of commercial ice cream with a deep, three-dimensional vanilla flavor (or fruit flavor, or chocolate flavor ...) requires expensive ingredients, and in many cases careful handling. I suspect it would just put the price out of reach of their market. Homemade ice cream typically flips the equation: great flavor, challenges with texture.

Absolutely. My reasoning in this case: IF we assume that benzoate is especially harmful to people (I'm suspicous of this but open to the possibility), we're still dealing with a preservative used in minute amounts in pectin, which itself is used in minute amounts (fractions of a percent by weight) in jams and jellies, which themselves are usually served in small portions and eaten only occasionally. So if we were going to crusade against preservatives in general, or benzoate in particular, pectin would be close to the bottom of my list of battles worth waging.

I'm going to try a rosemary ice cream. About how much do you use per 1000g? Does it infuse well into milk? Any other thoughts on it?