paulraphael

a 4% sugar solution would be a bacteria extravaganza. My guess is that precision isn't all that important and you could wing it easily. 1/4 tsp of honey or glucose syrup in a shot glass of water will get you in the ballpark.

No!

Garlic does keep ... but that doesn't mean kept garlic is as good as fresh. And it's not really like a dried herb. It's an aromatic vegetable, just like an onion or shallot, and not dried in any way. I can't speak to the issue of pre-peeled vs. fresh flavor. But i know that food scientists consider the flavor of garlic to be incredibly complex. The aromatic compounds in garlic are volatile, and many of them are created by chemicals in the garlic clove reacting with enzymes or with oxygen. These reactions involve many compounds ... they're triggered or accelerated by any damage to the garlic's flesh, and mostly halted by cooking. It wouldn't be hard to imagine that peeled or storing garlic would cause changes. To get a practical answer, a blind test would make the most sense.

Jeffrey's regular aged beef in completely off the hook. If he had the reputation and could handle the volume I think he'd steal all of Lobels' customers. For grass fed beef, he's going to be the only distributor in the region for Hearst Ranch, in Southern California. Here's something to consider with grass fed beef from northern climes: much of the year there is no green grass. In some cases the cattle get fed grass silage in the off season, but mostly they get hay. Hay gives neither the marbling of grain nor the flavor of grass ... in a sense it's the worst of both worlds. This is why there's so much expensive but mediocre beef in places like the farmers' markets in NYC. I've had a sample of the Hearst beef. It's excellent. Being a marbling guy, I was skeptical, but both the texture and flavor were nice. An interesting alternative to the grain finished meat.

A tart's ability to be unplated and moved around gives it a killer advantage. Pies and tarts are notoriously hard to crisp up properly on the bottom. But you can heat up a tart on a skillet or griddle right before serving; it warms the tart, adds more browning to the bottom, and brings back any crispness it might have lost from sitting around. No mess. No more of that mushy pastry on the bottom that most people take for granted.

Yup. As a result there are some practical differences. A pie is usually served in the pie pan; a tart is usually served on a plate. The crispness of the crust and the lighter amount of topping allows it to be moved. A slice of tart can also be picked up and eaten like a crisp crust pizza, if your manners are no better than mine. Pies have more topping relative to the crust. Basically, pies are like deep dish pan pizza; tarts are like neapolitan pizza.

Do tarts count? I made an out-of-season apple tart to try some new ideas. This one has very little puréed apple in it ... just enough to carry the seasonings and hold the thing together. Most of the the filling is layer upon layer of paper-thin apple slices. Seasoning is primarily cardamom, with some lemon, corriander, and a couple of background spices. And calvados. And a ton of butter. The glaze is calvados and simple syrup gelled with pectin.

Here are some other videos. Some are supposed to be instructional, others just for fun. They all show good technique and are worth mimicking. Itasan18's deba techniques. (this guy has mad skillz and puts up new videos all the time ... worth subscribing on youtube. Scroll down for demos of various fish. KCMA's technique videos. (these are great demonstrations of Japanese knife technique with a gyuto) , of Top Chef fame (showing tip chopping, forward push cutting, and usu-zukuri on a flank steak with a gyuto, and also some basic cleaver techniques) making lunch with / worshipping his mizuno gyuto. He does a surprising amount of what looks like rock-chopping, but if you look closely you can see that the front of the blad is just kissing the cutting board.

What other hydrocolloids do you guys like for sauces? Is there anything that mimics the mouthfeel of gelatin, but that doens't congeal when it cools? How well does methycellulose work (in conjunction with natural gelatin)? I've heard of people using this because it thickens at higher temps, thins at lower ones ... so it balances the natural tendency of the gelatin. And--if you had to pick a colloid that gives similar qualities to an egg custard, what would it be?

Mutton got a really bad rap decades ago. I'm not sure about the reasons. But it seems like a lot of chefs are trying to bring it back. It's worth bugging local butchers about, or sending requests to online sources and farms. Let them know there's interest.

I wish we could find a teacher with Japanese and Western fine dining experience to update the EGCI knife skills course. That article is seriously long in the tooth.

I might play with this too. It saves some measuring and makes dissolving the stuff easier. Have you tried a 1% solution? to get your 0.08g, it would take 8ml of solution ... easy to measure with a baby doser, and not so much water added to the recipe.

I'm visiting family in Chicago, and my cousin who's an executive chef from Wisconsin is here. We're both broke bastards, but interested in grabbing a bite. Any thoughts?

There's no simple answer, because collagen breakdown depends on how much time the meat spends at a given temperature. The higher the temp, the less time the meat needs to spend there to get the consistency you want. How long did it take at 170? That would be a sensible starting point. The advantage of lower/slower approaches (to a point) is the ability to tenderize the meat while drying it out less.

This is something I've been wanting to test with regular milk. I've been following that general advice, but I assume that 170°+ cook doesn't do the milk flavor any favors.

Ok, good to hear. That's something that drives me crazy, but it's hard to judge when coming at it from the other side. Craftsteak is definitely not our model. We're looking at a couple of things that they do well. But we're aiming for a lower price point. I haven't seen that much dry age at any restaurant personally. We're not going to be entering the "my beef is aged longer than yours" contest ... it's kind of like the recent trend among brewmasters to see who can make the hoppiest IPA, or the ancient trend among backyard chefs to see who can make the hottest chili. I'd like to aim for a good balance between fresh and aged flavors. There's bound to be some debate on this topic ... everyone seems to have a different preference. I'm thinking 2 to 6 weeks, depending on the cut and the source of the beef. This is also something we'll likely have to test with the actual customers.

I'll try it if there's only a small cost premium, and if there's some other advantage, like longevity from the way it's packaged. But speed? Really, if it's a chore to peel the garlic, you just need to learn some better skills. It should always be way way way quicker than peeling a stubborn onion. With or without a bang from the side of a knife. If the peels are the only things keeping 20 cloves of garlic out of your dinner for 2, maybe a little inconvenience is a good thing!

I know of some restaurants that use the pre-peeled garlic. What's the price difference? I think you have to factor in more than lost quality when evaluating these timesaving products. There's price, and also, an honest look at if there are better ways to save the time. For a Mediterranean restaurant that goes through 2 cases of garlic a night, the 3 seconds that it takes to peel a garlic clove add up. At home, how many cloves do you peel at any one time? And chopped garlic? If it takes more than 20 seconds to microbrunoise a garlic clove, or 10 seconds to roughly mince it, the real time saver will be learning better knife skills. Nothing could justify the lost freshness. With the pre-peeled, whole garlic, I wonder if there are some advantages like longevity (if it's refrigerated in a jar) vs. whole heads of garlic sitting in a pantry.

Another possibility is the kasumi grade house brand deba sold by Korin, but I don't think this is as good a value. A bigger question is what length to get. This is a subject of some contention. I'd be inclined to get a 180mm, but I know some people advocate getting a longer (more expensive) one, and putting a back bevel on the few inches of the blade closest to the heel, for chopping through bones.

You can get great traditional knives in all the shapes for reasonable prices. The real trick is developing your cutting and sharpening techniques. All these knives will require a ton of hand work out of the box to flatten the bevels and polish the edges. If you've never done it, there's a lot of oportunity to completely jack up the knife ways that are difficult or impossible to repair. So I'd put at least as much attention into learning these skills as you put into chosing the knives.

Western yo-deba or Japanese wa-deba, single or double beveled? ← A Yo Deba is really just a fat, brutish chef's knife. It's not for any traditional Japanese techniques. A Wa Deba is traditional and for butchering and filleting fish, although it's also sometimes used to mince herbs and to to a few non-fish butchering tasks. You can get a great one for under $80 at Epicurian Edge. It's their house brand, called (confusingly) Hon Kasumi (it's not a hon kasumi style knife). I've heard from pros who use this knife butchering in restaurants ... it gets a big thumbs up.

This could be a DIY project. It probably just requires drilling a hole. The spigot might come with the washers, gaskets, etc.. If it doesn't, that's all basic plumbing hardware. I'd look for silicone gaskets, so they can take the heat.

I've done this with lapsang souchong, to infuse that smoky flavor without doing any actual smoking. It also worked beautifully as an herb in the sauce. I've tried lapsang souchong with less success in desserts. Green teas of course work in all kinds of desserts ... I prefer herbal tasting ones to the stronger, grassier ones.

I'm going to push hard for the dry age! As far as artisinal meat sources, that's an idea we're playing with. My guess is we're going to start out with some wagyu on the menu, at least as a special. But the main sources will probably be unnamed ranches. I've been investigating the artisinal providers for my own use in the underground restaurant world. The meat is amazing but so is the cost premium. And my butcher's standard sources, while lacking pedigree, are really, really good. The chef and restauranteur tasted my butcher's meat against DeBragga and Spitler's finest offerings, and it was a clean sweep. DeBragga is out. So our baseline is already high. I think it would be dangerous to start out with meat that's marginally better but that comes at a 30% to 50% price premium. If the venture takes off, then it might be able to afford adding more high end / high priced options.

I'm on the periphery of a new steakhouse venture in NYC ... it's going to be run out of a hotel restaurant, and built on the meat of a well known local butcher. The idea is to revive the restaurant in an all-too-hip hotel, which can't seem to get anyone in the door on a non-clubbing night. I've been consulting with them on the menu. My feeling is that they should not to go head-to-head with the city's traditional steakhouses. Those do what they do reasonably well, and it seems to me that they're specialized almost to a fault. For the most part, you don't go there for a great meal that includes some great meat; you there when you want a gagantuan steak on your plate, and are willing to suffer terrible side dishes, terrible service, and often terrible prices in order to get it. The approach I'm pushing is more more along the lines of Craftsteak, in that it would be based on a small plate / medium plate / large plate model where you can construct a meal. Not to the radical degree of craftsteak, where there's often nothing on each plate but the main ingredient ... but each plate is minimalist. So you could, for example, choose a large plate that would be a giant steakhouse steak including a couple of sides. Or you could get a couple of medium plates ... one that has 8oz of steak and a (good) vegetable, another that has something like a wild mushroom plate or a leek salad or a celereac purée. That kind of thing. There would be at least one non-steak main (in large and medium version) and non-steak special all the time. The menu would be simple, fresh seasonal. The meat will be the equal of what you can get at Craftsteak, and significantly better than what's at Peter Luger or the equivalent. Prices will be on the low side for this kind of restaurant. I'm pushing for a significant amount of dry age on the steaks; the chef is afraid people won't like that. I'm interested in people's thoughts on this. The goal is a steak-centered restaurant that will appeal to the big eating steakhouse type, without alienating a more typical NYC restaurant sophisticate who likes more moderate amounts of meat (or maybe even something else) and who wants the whole meal to be good. As a general concept, does this sound like a take on the steakhouse you'd like?