paulraphael

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.

The board works if I'm making a couple of sandwiches or something similar that's going to finished right there and that doesn't take a lot of prep. Otherwise, there isn't enough room, and there's no convenient way to move the mise to and from the fridge, the stove, etc. etc... What size board do you guys have that holds all your prep? My main board is 16x22, my protein board is 14x18, and i have a couple of smaler ones for this and that. My kitchen would be unworkable if I had piles sitting around on all of them. I use 16oz deli cups with lids for small quantities; 32oz and 64oz glad/ziplock containers for medium quantities (these are great, because they're square, so they take up very little room, and they're cheap); metal mixing bowls for large quantities. My 2nd fridge is a lifesaver for big meals that can be pepped in advance. I keep a couple of shelves empty, so it's easy to slide in up to 4 half sheet pans full of prepped food whenever i need to.

Beard's method is really old school. If you're making sauce for one of the kings of France, just take it a bit farther: poach another chicken in the resulting stock. And then another. What to do with all those chickens? Feed the staff. Or the dogs! His majesty's picking up the tab. The method gets economical for restaurants by substituting good quality trimmings from any butchery you do. At home, if you don't want to be up to your eyeballs in poached chickens, you can substitute some meaty, well de-fatted roast chicken carcasses, and maybe a package of chx thighs from the supermarket. A lot of chefs are exploring the possibilities of sous vide bags for sauce making. You can slow poach something like duck thighs or a capon in some stock in a vacuum bag. The juices that fortify the stock will make it amazing. I don't have the toys I'd need for this, but I'd like to give it a whirl.

I think the best thing you can do for traditional brown sauces is to abandon using highly reduced stock as a sauce base. I've heard people argue that this is the classical method, but it's not. Originally, glace de viande (veal stock reduced about 10 times) was used as a supplement, largely for texture and savor. The Nouvelle Cuisine movement substituted glace de viande for demi-glace, but not directly; it was part of a rethinking of sauces, whereby sauces were made with stocks and very flavorful essences, and were thickened with reduced cream and mounted, and rounded out with glace de viande. Today in many mid-level restaurants, people are taught that glace de viande IS demi-glace, and as a result they make sauces that have all the trappings of a great sauce ... deep color, rich texture, good clarity, good roasted flavors ... but that lack the essential, three dimensional flavors of meat jus. This is because long reduction, while concentrating large flavor molecules like sugars and acids, boils off all the aromatic molecules that give a sauce depth, dimension, and character. Many chefs today are getting away from overreduced stock in interesting ways. A way I like, which Alain Ducasse has taught to many chefs, is to start with a veal bone stock, and slowly reduce it while adding multiple immersions of meaty bones and meat trimmings, using meat of the type you'd like to use to flavor the sauce. Beef, vennison, lamb, or whatever. It's a hybrid technique, part 19th century classical, part 21st century scientific and frugal, part 18th century exhorbidant. It makes the best brown sauces I've tasted, although i haven't yet managed the level of clarity I've gotten from other less tasty approaches.

I'd seek specific, qualified medical advice.

It should be recycleble, so you don't have to feel all that bad about tossing it. Another possibility is keeping it around as a wrecked pan, for anything that you're afraid might wreck a pan. sanding it and turning it into a plain aluminum pan would be fine if you have the time and need a project. wear a dust mask! There's nothing toxic in the nonstick coating, but fine dust, including aluminum dust, will do bad things to your lungs. If you replace it, the restaurant supply store will be your best friend. Commercial versions cost $25 or less for 10" fry pans. They're less pretty than calphalon, so you won't feel as bad when the inevitable happens again.

I've had good results from a microwave with small quantities ... like reheating part of a braised dish for one or two people. For larger quantities, doing slowly on the stove is probably a little easier and better. I think the best would be in a sous vide bag in a waterbath, but purists of the simple art will chase me out for suggesting it ...

You could probably summarize some personality types by their knife/car price ratio. My current chef's knife cost 3/4 what I paid for my last car. I finally sold the car this summer. Public transportation gets me where I need to go--crappy knives don't!

If anyone wants to be a guinea pig, I've been curious to know how that releasable foil would work in place of parchment ... especially if could be re-used for more than one pie.

What temp is your oven?

What I find easiest is to measure and mix all the dry ingredients together, and then scoop out 1/4 of them and set that pile aside. Then add all the water, roughly mix, and autolyse in the fridge for 40 minutes or so. Then, mix this very wet dough for a few minutes. This is gluten development on steroids because there's so much water. Then add the dry ingredients you scooped and mix briefly, to bring the hydration level down to where you want it. Here's Jeff Varasano's description. Here's my version (uses commercial yeast instead of starter; is a few thousand words shorter than Jeff's)

I used to be obsessive about the heavy copper pans. I don't obsess over them as much, but I still chase other people away, because the prices have gone crazy and I'll never be able to replace them if anything happens. I'm more obsessive now about my small assortment of knives and sharpening stones. Not a collecting obsession as much as a technique obsession.

another option would be to use dextrose powder. or fructose. no mess. you'd want to use a bit less because it's pure glucose (no water).

There's some controversy around the importance of mixing. According to one school, any method that distributes the ingredients and allows enough gluten form is as good as any other. According to another, the amount and type of mechanical mixing will affect how the dough handles, even if it's high hydration and has days to ferment. I find myself leaning toward the former with regular bread and the latter with pizza. The best pizza doughs I've made have been with mixing methods similar to Jeff Varasano's, which include autolyse, wet mixing (at about 100% hydration), and enough final mixing after the rest of the flour is added to produce a smooth and springy dough. Long retardation follows. My comparisons of mixing methods are hardly scientific, but in general I've gotten much better results with the intensive methods than with the more minimalist ones I use for bread baking.

Could be that all that bench flour stuck on the bottom of the crust and hardened. Anyway, congrats on managing to slide dough that wet into the oven at all. Especially on your first attempt. The parchment trick would let you get away without any bench flour. I also suspect you hydrated the dough more than you wanted to, because it didn't seem adequately hydrated when you first mixed it. An autolyse step can take care of this, and also allow you to get away with less mixing. The idea is to throw the dough together just enough to make a shaggy mass, and then let it sit covered in the fridge for 30 to 40 minutes. This gives the flour time to hydrate. Afterwards, you can finish mixing it, and you'll get to the texture you want with little work.

Question about the baking soda: will it have the same effect in an acidic environment, or does it work spefically by raising the ph?