paulraphael

I see both sides of this issue, and am divided on it. For the most part, like the Dude in The Big Lebowski, I'm "a man in whom casualness runs deep" ... and side with Anthony Bourdain who feels the food had better be mind blowing if he'll be coerced into a noose just to get in the door. On the other hand, I appreciate the need for occasion. We don't have much of it anymore so it's nice to have something, once in a while, to rise to. That actually might be the distinction: I like dressing up for a sense of occasion, but I'm repelled by any sense of stuffiness. I don't want to feel that the restaurant needs my jacket and tie to elevate it ... I want it to be so inspiring that I'll happily remember how to iron a collar and tie a tie. The other diners? I'm less bothered by casualness than by slovenliness and repellent social habits, but those can't be fixed by a dress code. Of course I'm not thrilled by the woman in the sweat suit spilling out of her chair. But I'm not thrilled by her in my neighborhood bodega either. There is no dress code that can keep her in Jersey. Ultimately, if the food is amazing, I'm not going to pay attention to the other diners, whether they look like royalty or lepers.

I don't know why I never asked this question. Toothbrush has been added to the shopping list. I have the same chinois, and discovered the hard way that banana seeds are the perfect size to install themselves permanently between the wires. Perhaps the tooth brush will be a worthy implement of demolition.

Thanks for reminding me. I still think of that as George Perrier's recipe, but looking back at his version, there's little resemblance anymore besides the poaching. I uploaded it here.

My list would make me sound like someone's grandma. The things I've taken the trouble to perfect are almost all simple ... bread and butter type recipes, heavy on the fundamentals and light on sleight of hand. I don't have the time/talent/resources to perfect anything complicated, so I rarely try. Maybe I should say "apparently simple," since I'm talking about foods that are simple in concept and presentation, though not necessarily execution. Over the last few years I've incorporated a lot of contemporary "molecular" techniques, but I don't draw attention to this. I just want my diners to think the food's surprisingly delicious. They don't have to know that grandma's got a chemistry set, a miligram scale, and a blowtorch. I'd have to include roasted chicken, chocolate chip cookies, a handful of chocolate desserts (cake, brownies, marquise), simple ice creams, and coulis-based brown sauces.

Yeah, no comparison. I get all the spices whole whenever possible (i still buy ground cinnamon because grinding it's a pain). For small quantities I like a mortar and pestle. For bigger ones I'll use an old coffee mill. I find the machine only saves time if I'm doing a big pile, because it's harder to clean.

Ok, I might have have found the holy grail. At least I'm done monkeying around. In an earlier post, I suggested 2/3 chuck and 1/3 brisket. I tried replacing the brisket with hanger steak. Holy god. These were great burgers. Makes sense ... I can't think of a beef cut more flavorful than hanger. I'd been experiementing with sirloin in the mix, but it wasn't adding much. Here's what I liked best, by weight: 66% chuck (ideally chuck eye) 33% hanger (remove the connective tissue in the middle) 0.75% salt 0.25% black pepper I'm finding it easiest to salt and pepper the meat before grinding. If you do this you don't have to physically mix it into the ground meat and risk overhandling it. Just be sure to clean the grinder right away, since salt is corrosive.

If there's a lot of butter in the ganache, you can sometimes avoid problems by letting it come to room temperature slowly before reheating it. But you probably won't have any troubel either way.

I think you can hone in your generalization better by looking at the qualities of wine that get lost during cooking vs those that get intensified. Alcohol content makes no real difference, because all but trace amounts boil off. Most subtle flavors and aromas will be gone. You're left with the broad strokes: acidy, sweetness, fruit. Weather you want a fruity wine or an austere one depends the sauce. For something like a beurre blanc, you want leanness and acid, not fruit ... like a muscadet. But often you'll want the opposite, like in a big brown sauce with red wine and truffles (sauce regence). Here's you probably want body, fruit, and some residual sugar. I'm not convinced the old world / new world thing really holds up anymore.

Often if you're a member of a co-op you can get whatever you want. Then you're technically a farm owner and not a consumer, so if you die there's no one to be sued.

Chocolate ice cream is tough. It's the cocoa butter ... if you use a lot of chocolate, the ice cream will be too hard when frozen and too hard when melted. Making it with cocoa powder is easier, but I don't think as good. I've been experimenting with a blend of both. I'm not 100% there yet but it's getting close.

Ok, I reread your post and think I see where you're coming from. Sure, I think we all fundamentally like some foods more than other. Or respect that some are more decadent, luxurious, or special than others. But, if in your personal heirarchy foie gras is above a hamburger, does this mean that even with unlimited resources you'd ALWAYS choose the foie? Would you eat Thomas Keller's or Masa's food three times a day, and your mom's food never? I think most of us like variety--not just in types of ingredients, but in the style and formality of their preparation and presentation. Even if practical concerns didn't impose this variety on us, i think we'd insist on it. I share your taste for the thick, super marbled rib eye. I just don't want it every day. Sometimes I crave a roasted chicken, and I want it to be a good one.

The dichotomy isn't all that clear to me either. But if a great Neapolitan pizza makes you yawn, I'm left wondering if you've ever had one. Maybe sex at zero gravity would be better ... but I cant say; I've never had THAT.

thanks so much! just don't assume i'm right ... I just don't like it. I have yet to find an application for shortening where I don't feel that another kind of fat would be better. Possible exceptions are greasing baking pans and making decorative spackle for gingerbread cakes. Major exception is frosting for cakes that have to survive outside in hot weather ... but this frosting is functional, not delicious. Two issues: shortening's melting point is higher than body temperature, so it always gives a greasy mouth feel. And it's flavorless. The high melting point makes it easy to work with. But butter is perfectly workable if you know how. Some bakers say there are applications where you want neither the flavor of butter nor the savory flavors of leaf lard, suet, etc... I suppose there could be such cases, but i could never think of any.

That scottish site is brilliant! Here's another take ... my butcher hamming it up on the Gourmet magazine site.

How did you put the mint into the mix? There was a thread somewhere (cocktail forum?) about mint. Aparently most of the good flavor is right near the surface, so you want to mash up the leaves very, very little. The mixologists call it muddling. If you go too far crushing or pureeing it, you end up with vegetal flavors that aren't so terrific.

The setting and curdling temp for custards depends on a few factors. The ones I've figured out are the concentration of egg yolks (the more yolks per quart of what you're making, the lower the set point and the overcooking point), and the presence of certain starches. Flour, and also probably corn starch, in small quantities will prevent most custards from curdling at any temperature. I haven't tried this, but i've been told that a fraction of a percent of starch can allow you to boil a custard. I make my ice creams with as few as two egg yolks per quart; these set up a little over 180F. That would be way too hot if there were 6 yolks per quart. i'm guessing that for that number 160 would be closer to ideal.

The key is cold, especially if you're using butter. And I'm of the camp that believes butter is the only option for a sweet pastry. For savory tarts, leaf lard, goose fat, or suet are excellent options, in ratios of about 1:3 with butter. There will never be any vegetable shortening in my kitchen. The reason butter is great, besides flavor, is that it melts a bit below body temperature, and therefore melts in your mouth. It's luscious and never greasy, but his also makes it a bit more challenging to work with. The key is to keep the butter solid, always. If it melts, you lose the structure of the pastry, and water can liberate, which will develop gluten and tougen the crust. Lisa's tip on the chilled marble slab is traditional and works great. I don't have one, so i roll out the dough on some lightly floured plastic wrap on the counter or cutting board. At the first sign of stickiness, the whole thing slides onto a sheet pan, gets covered with another layer of plastic, and goes in the fridge. Pull it out and continue in 20 minutes or so when it hardens up. You can repeat this as many times as you need to. Obviously life is easier if it's cool in your kitchen. There are lots of good pastry recipes ... most are functionally close to each other. Quality is determined primarily by technique, followed by the quality and quantity of fat (butter is better than alternatives; good high fat farm butter is better than generic, etc.), followed by the quantity of water or other liquid (less is generally better). Traditional baker's percentage for Pate Brissee / Sucree are: Flour 100%, Fat 66%, Water 33%, Sugar up to 10% (optional), Salt 1%. There's a lot of room for adjustments for personal preference. Don't believe people who tell you not to improvise with pastry. I have some recipes and a short tutorial online here. The recipe as written produces a texture somewhere between a flaky american pie crust and a crumbly french tart. There are notes on how to control the texture to get what you like. It's all about the size and shape of the butter pieces in the final dough.

Yeah, that kind of thing. They work well when I find a surface that has absorbed odor. but I don't know where the general stink is coming from.

Um. That would be me. Hoping to get the sentence reduced to time served.

Ha. Bushwick means a lot of things to a lot of people, but I don't know if any of those things is appetizing. Maybe Bushwick style means you eat it with a shank?

I came home from a weeklong trip to discover my storage fridge unplugged. It didn't help that I'd left for the hottest week of the year. A lot of food went out the back door in body bags, including defrosted veal stock equal to one of the slimmer nephews of the Gambino family. Needless to say, the fridge did not smell good. But cleaning and disinfecting it didn't take long. The real problem is the room. The smell remains, and I've tried just about everything. I've scrubbed the floors, sprayed down the walls and all fabric and cardboard with both disinfectant and enzymatic odor killers. I found one remaining source of stink it the fridge's drip tray, but that's been emptied and bombed with bleach. After 24 hours of all the windows gaping and a big fan blowing air through the space, the smell went away ... for a while. Now it's coming back. The inside of the fridge is the only clean smelling part of the room. Any ideas, besides arson?

You can also use a bit of gelatin or other colloids. I prefer custardless ice creams when making fruit and chocolate flavors. I don't know if my recipes can be called Philadelphia style (Mitch would probably say I mess with them too much) but for these flavors I like lower milk fat levels, and I find any taste of egg custard intrusive. I make my fruit flavors about 12% milk fat and my chocolate flavors about 10%. Both are improved by additions of nonfat dry milk and small amounts of stabilizing ingredients.

Too single-purpose and way too expensive, but it looks like it would work fine. I don't need it to rotate. And I like that it's horizontal and not vertical. Just seems like you could get the same results with a small, cheap stand that sits in the bottom of a regular roasting pan. It could be made out of bent bar stock, stainless or chrome plated.

It didn't occur to me that braising in the summer was weird until a week ago when my girlfriend told me it was. I guess I don't mind being hot in the kitchen, so I never thought twice about it. I've even been experimenting with dry braises, which are basically like barbequing in the oven. I have a little grill outside, but it's so much harder to control than an oven that I often don't find it worth the trouble. I can set an oven 250 degrees or so and walk away for hours at a time. For normal braises, I go very long at low temps, and do it overnight. It's only way I find practical no matter what the season. Of course my stupid oven likes to shut itself off after several hours of baking, so I have to turn it off and on again right before bed, and then wake early, do it again, and go back to sleep. Learned this the hard way.

A friend of mine who's a sous chef believes the key to speed is "board management." If you keep your board and mise clean and organized and logical, no matter what, you can cook circles around people who are actually moving much faster than you.