paulraphael

What, huh, who? I've missed the idea that salt can aid extraction of anything in a stock. I'd like explore it (or see if it's explored elsewhere). I don't recall seeing anything about this in Modernist Cuisine or in the old James Peterson Sauces book (a gem). As far as skimming, those days are long over for me. Ever since Dave Arnold and Nils Noren posted their pressure cooker experiments (and Mhyrvold & Co continued the thread) I've been all PC all the time for chicken and meat-based stocks. My reduction days are mostly over too. When I want to make a glace or coulis, I start with proportions pretty close to what I'm hoping to end with. Why lose all those aromatics? The Carême and Escoffier methods seem very dated now. They're about throwing in a whole barnyard full of meat in in the beginning, knowing that most of the flavor will go out the window. You can do better even without a pressure cooker.

2 stacked sheet pans work great. I have some insulated sheets, but the stacked pans work equally well. I mostly just use the insulated sheets as baking peels ... they're pretty rigid and don't have rims, so things slide off of them easily.

Exactly. In the middle of those extremes you'll find the polyunsaturated cooking oils. They'll build up a coating faster than bacon grease will, but it will be durable.

Maybe, but it's also meant to be gentle on your skin like other handwashing detergents. Chemically it's not that different from shampoo. So it's not going to be the most effective thing for getting machine oil off of spun steel. I bought a steel stovetop griddle that got some bad reviews because people said it took an hour of scrubbing with dish soap get the factory coating off of it. I used BKF and it took 2 minutes. I won't use BKF as shampoo.

There's a bit of lore in that video that I don't trust. The internet seems obsessed with Dawn detergent, but it's just plain old mild detergent, chemically similar to shampoo. If you want to get manufacturing oils off of a pan, save your elbows and use Barkeeper's Friend. Or Bon Ami. Something that will do some work for you. Flaxseed oil looks good on paper but testing shows it to be not the best choice. It evidently leaves a brittle finish. Other standard cooking oils do a better job. You want something high in unsaturated / polyunsaturated fat. Safflower, sunflower, and canola oils all work well. Flax is even higher in polyunsaturated fat but for some reason doesn't work as well. I can't remember my source for this but, but it was based on experiment and looked credible.

I am so not interested in coffees that cost as much as precious metals. What would happen if I tried one and liked it?? Sadly, with climate change, coffee is all creeping in that direction.

It changes all time. This last year he's been doing a lot of blends for espresso, I think as a concession to most customers ordering milk drinks. I almost always prefer the single origins. But his blends aren't traditional espresso blends. They'll typically be two, or occasionally three different varieties, and they're all beans that he sells as single origins. So it's not about balancing out shortcomings. The site isn't always completely up to date with what he has at the store. He had a washed Ethiopian a couple of weeks ago that wasn't up on the site. It's mostly been central America lately though.

Hearty recommendation for Coffee Mob in Brooklyn. They happen to be a short walk from me. I was happy with Stumptown, Toby's Estate, Joe, 9th St., etc., and then walked in to this place. I saw with some skepticism that they roast their own, and didn't like the high prices, but felt compelled to try. Damn if it wasn't the best coffee I'd ever had. So now I suck it up and pay whatever they ask. The owner, Buck has become a friend. I went with him once to the roasting collective in Red Hook where he works his magic (turns out to be the same place many other boutique NYC coffee shops do their roasting). The selection is always small. He's been doing mostly central American coffees a lot lately ... I love the honey process Guatemal Finca Medina. But my favorites are his Ethiopian and Burundian coffees, especially when he gets in a natural process. He roasts on the light side, and I generally find that the beans are at their peak 1 to 2 weeks after the roast date. Easily 2 weeks if you're making espresso. They lose flavor very, very slowly.

Yeah, they have a good reputation. I've never bought from them. This is the one I have. I'd recommend borrowing a knife in a similar style before taking the plunge. Some of us love these super thin gyutos but not everyone.

That's interesting about "wa." In the tunnel-vision world of knives all those deeper connotations get lost. I was likewise taught that "yo" means "western" .... I wonder if it more literally means "philistine."

"Wa" just means Japanese. They call any handle in the traditional style a wa-handle. They call western-style handles yo-handles. (I believe "yo" literally means "western"). Wa-gyuto means "Japanese cow-sword." But what they really mean by cow-sword is a western-style chef's knife (because westerners like to eat cows?). So it's a Japanese-style western-style knife. Try not to think too hard about it when there's something sharp in your hand. Mine is by Ikkanshi Tadatsuna. They make it with either carbon (white #2) or stainless (ginsan ko / silver #3) steel. I had the carbon for a minute but traded for the stainless, and have had this one for 12 years. It's not easy to find now, and the price has gone up. But there are knives by other makers that are almost identical. Probably the best known is Suisin (their inox honyaki wa-gyuto) which might be the first knife in this style. If I were buying a gyuto today, I might go to Japanese Knife Imports and get the Gesshin Ginga. Jon the owner says the performance between these knives is mostly identical (I trust anything he says). I just weighted them ... the wee-looking goldhamster is 308g. Almost double the tadtsuna's 163g. Here's a choil pic. Shows why it's so light and why it cuts the way it does: The spine on the tad is about 2mm thick. The spine on the hamster is 3.5mm.

The hamster's handle always felt comfortable to me, but I wasn't using it for hours of commercial prep every day. Mine is like every other Schaaf handle I've seen ... a double bolster, with fat, squared-off scales in between. The newer versions (the brand has been taken over by Solicut) have a wood scale option, but mine are bog-standard black plastic. I'm not really a stickler for western knife handles. They all feel pretty comfortable to me, as long as there aren't sharp edges along the spine or bolster. My gyuto has a wa-handle, which is now my favorite for a chef's knife. At least for a light / thin one. If I hold the hamster like a woodsman's axe, I hold the gyuto more like a violin bow. Very different styles for different techniques. I never, ever push hard on the gyuto. It's more like you glance in the direction of the food and let the knife do its thing. My Chinese cleaver is basically a piece of scrap metal that's been cut into the shape of a cleaver. I tried sharpening it once ... a tedious, completely pointless exercise. I keep it hidden away so no one uses it to turn one of my nice cutting boards to kindling. I suspect a santoku wouldn't be the thing for you. That style is for home cooks in tiny kitchens. They seem designed mostly to be unintimidating. I find them extremely frustrating to use. A very light and thin gyuto would be a good complement to your burly German knives. Even a long one will feel smaller and more nimble. I grab my 270 even when I'm just mincing garlic.

Greetings fellow keeper of the Golden Hamster! I have an 8" Schaaf Goldhamster. It was my first "serious" knife, and I used it for everything for years. I love that no one's heard of it, and that somehow the little hamster silk-screened onto the blade has survived all these years. It's also got a mightier blade than other German chef's knives I've used, for better or for worse. My main knife now is a very lightweight 270mm gyuto (actual blade length about 10-1/4"). It's much longer than the Schaaf but feels like it weighs about half as much. It runs circles around its German partner, but is too delicate for many tasks ... so the Hamster comes out when I need the burliness. Chopping chocolate, cutting hard squash, anything with bones, or even things that might have grit that could chip a razor-like edge (leeks etc.) ... all this goes to the hamster. I went too far once ... tried to hack through a turkey neck with the thing. Left a big dent in the blade. Dave Martell at Japanese Knife Sharpening in Pennsylvania fixed it, and also ground down the bolster to make the thing easier to sharpen. I now use a $5 Chinatown cleaver for extra dirty work.

Just a general thought ... we should be careful about generalizations regarding knives and countries of origin. There are great knives made many countries, and there are crappy knives made in Japan (including some of the more famous brands). "Japanese knife" is generally shorthand for "good knife that's been made with certain important Japanese knifemaking conventions." By these standards there many small knifemakers in the Americas and Europe (and probably every other part of the world) who make "Japanese knives." And I'd say that brands like Wasabi and Global are not really Japanese knives. Not in the same sense.

I’m just about done with a bag of a Burundian peaberry by my favorite NYC roaster. It’s good coffee—not my favorite flavor profile, but I’m not sure this has anything to do with it being a peaberry. It tastes to me like a washed East African bean that has some peach a melon notes. The guy who roasted it says cherry and honeysuckle, and he’s got a much better palate than I do. are peaberries known for any distinctive characteristics?

New coffee grinder (for brewed coffee only). Fellow Ode. A nice step up from my trusty old Baratza, that just broke for the 2nd or 3rd time. The great thing about Baratza is they sell all the replacement parts, and post all the DIY videos. But the gizmo I need is out of stock for a few weeks, and we need coffee now! My friend who owns my favorite coffee shop (and does all the roasting) recommended this one. He roasts very light, which is a challenge for grinders that don't have burly motors and burrs ... possibly why my grinder kept breaking. I plan to repair the Baratza and give it to my mom, who has a Capresso that doesn't work right (and that company doesn't sell parts).

I came in 2nd! The winner followed the rules.

The contest is tomorrow. This will be a test of some architects' sense of humor. They sent us all a prefab gingerbread house kit which I didn't find inspiring enough to open.

Here's how it turned out. Basically, if Grandma was Le Courbussier. The royal icing, plus 1 drop of black food coloring, plus my ham-fisted icing skills, gave some pretty realistic poured concrete. Crumbling, delaminating, post-Soviet looking concrete, but those are just fancy words for rustic charm.

If you're using truly hot wok burner, then I don't think there's any point to seasoning it ... those things will incinerate any seasoning just like a self-cleaning oven. If you're using the thing at more normal sauté temperatures then you can treat it just like a cast iron skillet. The sunflower oil you're using is fine; it's got a lot of unsaturated oil that will polymerize nicely. But it will take quite a few coats (preferably very thin ones like Scott says) before it really helps. And you have to cook them on at a temperature that's past the smoke point by a little bit. A good coating is not just polymerized oil, but also partly carbonized. That means you need to make some charcoal.

Tara gum is a galactomannan similar to guar and locust bean gums. Supposedly its properties are somewhere between those of the other two. LBG has strong ice crystal suppression, and relatively little noticeable effect on the ice cream's thickness or chewiness. Guar is weaker at ice crystal suppression, but has a strong thickening effect. The two are superadditive; using them together allows you to use a lower total quantity than using any one of them alone. I imagine tara gum is a pretty good single-gum solution based on this. It wouldn't offer the flexibility of mixing and matching guar and LBG.

Excellent question. I like the idea of it being edible, so it doesn't go to waste. But this is all going to happen on zoom. So we could get away with faking it. I have to leave town the next day so will probably try to give it away, preferably to friends with kids. My partner and I are not going to eat a whole concrete bunker by ourselves.

This sounds like a great idea for the icing. Skipping the icing and doing a concrete-like dough does look like the most pro option. I just don't have enough gingerbread experience to improv this and have confidence that it will work. A structural collapse would ruin Christmas. So unless you know of a tried and true recipe ...

Yes, I don't need actual rebar in my cake ... poured reinforced concrete is just how an architect would describe a structure, and tells you a bit about the esthetics. Here's a typical brutalist building ... My gingerbread house won't be this awesome, because I'm not a genius, but it's something to aspire to. BTW, I'm working for a company that's involved in architecture, and we're having a gingerbread house contest for our holiday party, so I just thought this would be funny. Photo: Arch Daily https://www.archdaily.com/963115/brutalism-in-european-schools-and-universities-photographed-by-stefano-perego/60b42c1cf91c81fb8200003d-brutalism-in-european-schools-and-universities-photographed-by-stefano-perego-photo?next_project=no ©Georges Adilon

If you were to make a gingerbread house in the brutalist architectural style, and wanted the icing to look like poured reinforced concrete, and if you wanted the icing to be easy to make and easy to apply (because you're not much of a cake decorator), and you wanted the icing to have good longevity (because people might not be in a huge hurry to eat a brutalist gingerbread house), what kind of icing might you use?