paulraphael

I think the best thing you could buy from japaneseknifesharpening.com is their sharpening video and a couple of stones. "catch me a fish and i'll eat for a day ..." etc..

Do you have a video camera? I think a cheerful instructional episode on maki casserole would make an amazing pilot for food channel.

I just grind the meat once, but I like to add the salt (1% by weight or a bit less) to the meat before grinding. the grinder mixes it up nicely. Just be sure to wash the grinder immediately afterwards. Salt is corrosive to carbon steel and aluminum and other metals used in most grinders.

Yup. The one time I was sure I had food poisoning, the symptoms matched staph intoxication. Knocked me off my feet for two days. Another issue is that the temperature required to reliably kill bacteria would mean overcooking many types of fish. I'm not so interested in tuna or salmon that's cooked through to 160+ degrees. And yet another set of issues is non-microbial spoilage. These include oxidation of fats (rancidity), and enzyme breakdown, with byproducts like trimethylamine and ammonia (all of which makes fish stink). Cooking tends to make the off-flavors and odors of these processes worse, not better. All these issues are much more pressing with cold water fish than warm water fish. edited to add: the biggest health hazard with old sushi is probably the rice. The fish will likely spoil quickly and get too nasty to eat before any serious pathogens have a chance to take over. But that starchy rice is basically a petry dish, and it spends its entire cooked existence at danger zone temperatures.

Chikalicious has been a big success in NYC. I'd take a close look at what they do. p*ong did something similar (in addition to being a full service restaurant). It failed, but I suspect this had to do with execution, not the idea itself. Some other spots to look at are WD-50 and Taylor in NYC, and Providence in LA.

I've infused vanilla successfully into melted butter, just by splitting beans, tossing into the butter, and holding over low heat for 5 to 10 minutes. The flavor is excellent, even when it's the second use of the beans. Chocolate is probably a good enough emuslfier that you wouldn't have to worry about breaking the butter. If think breaking will be an issue, you could infuse the vanilla into a beurre monte ... it would just take a bit of effort to keep the temp below 180 or so, to keep it from breaking.

I don't assume that, because we have no way of knowing who actually makes it for them. What seems fishy is that a brand like Setaro gets burried ... and this is a pasta I only know about because a lot of (real) Italian chefs like it. I don't know anyone who's been swayed by Setaro's marketing, because I don't know anyone who's seen any.

Doing a few different shapes from each maker, and doing more than one trial of each should also be a minimum if the results are to have much weight. It's a lot of work ... testing anything with scientific riggor is hard. The most basic elements of experiment design usually demand much more attention than these magazines ever commit. slkinsey hints at some issues when he mentions different pastas requiring different amounts of cooking. A typical, oversimplified experiment design would call for cooking everything identically, to level the playing field. This obviously gives useless results. But the alternatives make it harder to design the test: exactly how and how much do you cook each pasta? How do you decide? There's a simple control that I'd like to see implemented in all taste tests like this: some samples should be doubled. in other words, if you're being asked to taste ten different bowls of spaghetti, some of those bowls might contain the identical product (but it's a blind test, so you wouldn't know). If if you give different judgements of two tastes of the same pasta, then the weight of your judgements is diminished (a statistician can even determine how much).

Really impressive, especially the Cecil and Lily cake. Looks like hand lettering done with a wide-nibbed pen. How do you pull that off?

I really don't know how much of the backlash (when it's substantive at all) is aimed Waters' actual policies or at caricatures of them. Does she have any core mission statements or manifestos that can be linked to?

How do you plan to apply typography to a cake?

I haven't heard anything as bizarre as some of these. What's common, though, and always annoying, is when the question is asked in a way that coaches you to say everything's great. I want the server to express genuine interest. The best servers make it clear that they're on your side if there are any problems ... they want your meal to be great and they'll fight on your behalf to make it that way. The smiling, nodding variations on "is everything super???!!!" coax us into smiling and saying "yeah, great" even when everything isn't. The subtext is that the server wants approval more than the truth.

I don't follow Ms. Waters very closely, but I can't help suspecting there's a lot of straw-man arguing going on here. Does she really scold people in inner cities and in northern midwestern states for not eating local organic food? Or is she trying to reform food culture in a way that allows people in these situations to eat local organic food? There's a big difference. As strident as her tone may seem to some, I have trouble believing she's stupid. And everyone arguing that she didn't invent the organic food movement .... please. The civil rights movement existed for decades before MLK Jr. was born. Does this make him irrelevant? It's clear from this thread that her tone rubs a lot of people the wrong way. That's too bad. What's worse is if people dismiss a message purely because the messenger bugs them.

Pasta for dinner is the old standbye. Fruit smoothies (especially if you goose them whey or soy) are a new age classic. Really easy: bananas! I always ate pancakes the morning of a race. Not sure how popular this is. And when I toured on a bike through hot places, my friends and I always craved iced tea. If you really think you might get serious cyclists coming through, you could pick up a couple of cartons of Hammer Gel or Gu or Cliff Shots and sell them POS. About as anti-gourmet as anything in the world, but if you're busting out a lot of miles, they are the nectar of the gods.

Consider all the wattage claims meaningless. Like, 100% meaningless. Either it's a good motor, well matched to its electronics and transmission for its expected use, or it's not. The only mixers that will give you full power at low speeds are commercial mixers with a geared transmission. All of these that I know of have three speeds, selected with a lever. You have to bring the mixer to a full stop to shift gears. The motor always runs at its optimum speed, where it's capable of putting out full power. This is why a hobart k5, that draws maybe 300 watts at a rare peak, can spank any 1000 watt consumer mixer. But the best consumer mixers are still good enough for anything you're likely to throw at them, if you can overlook the Russian Roulette factor imposed by all the companies' notorious quality control debacles.

I'm not familiar with the brand. Personally, i wanted to go hardcore with mixing, I'd keep my KA for 90% of tasks, and then for the heavy stuff get a 10qt or 20qt countertop Hobart. These can be had for reasonable amounts of money on ebay, assuming you live close enough to pick up in person. Shipping is a bitch! Hobart has the widest availability of parts, accessories, and service in the industry. I don't think the commercial mixers are a 100% substitute for home mixers, because they're less convenient to use. The big ones are really big. The smaller ones have much narrower bowls than the KA pro models, which makes it messier to add ingredients. And the geared, 3-speed transmissssions, while superior in terms of performance, are a lot less convenient to use. I think most people would end up using their KA for most tasks, and then stepping up to the big mixer for things like large scale bread and pizza production, wedding cakes, or making 4X and 6X batches of cookies.

The all metal hobart grinders attachments (vintage KA) are readily available on ebay. They cost more than the new plastic ones, but less than what the elecrolux ones cost on the site linked above. The plastic ones are popular because many people prefer a tool that can be put in the dishwasher over a tool that works I have a metal one ... no idea what year it's from. It's a workhorse. I've ground many lbs of meat in a single session and it just hums away. Mixer gets slightly warm. With any meat grinder it's important for ingredients to be prepped properly, otherwise they can gum up and jam the machine. Meat should be very cold ... partially frozen. This keeps it stiff and keeps the fat from melting and turning to goo from the machine's friction. The disks and blades on these are carbon steel and need to be washed and dried well immediately after use. A light coat of oil is a good idea if you don't it often.

That's just awesome. And Emeril, no less!

I've had nothing but good luck with a KA pro 600 and bread dough. BUT--I make only very slack, high hydration breads ... ones which are a nuissance to handle but easy to mix. And my mixer is a post 06 model with a metal (injection molded zinc) transmission housing. At any rate, I've done back to back batches of bread and pizz dough without the thing getting more than luke warm. For stiffer doughs, especially ones that need to mix for a long time, I can imagine it would be a different story. You wouldn't want to use it in a production environment for that. A hobart would be a much more reasonable choice if you like to use a stand mixer. Carp, based on some snooping around on the forums at the KA site, it seems that the grain mill is responsible for more mixer failures than any other single cause (besides maybe wanton abuse). For whatever reason, that attachment seems to strain the mixer more than anything else. A huge number of people with the old, plastic transmission housing had their failures when milling flour. Caveat emptor!

is that a good thing? I think it's silly when people are secretive about recipes ... especially for things like this. Maybe someone could have gotten acclaim for a flourless chocolate cake recipe 30 years ago, but today they're older than old news. It's like trying to patent slightly reshaped cast iron skillet. Anyway, if that recipe is close but not quite what you're looking for, let me know. These things are easy to tweak and almost impossible mess up, as long as you don't overcook.

I tried your trick on an aluminum griddle that has thick and thin patches of polymerized oil on it. Didn't make a dent. Seriously ... before and after pictures would show no difference. I think you're using it on burned on food and juices. Completely different stuff, and not nearly as tenacious. Also, when I was talking about how hard it is to remove earlier, I meant it as a benefit, not a problem! In the context of cast iron skillets, you want the seasoning to be tough. I was pointing out how it's a lot less fragile than many assume.

Recent topic.

Flourless chocolate cakes are among the simplest recipes you'll ever work with. The trick to picking one is deciding what texture you want. A light, fluffy, souflée? A dense, melting ganache? Something in between? If you narrow it down, it's easy to pick recipes by category. And also important to use the best chocolate you can get your paws on. My favorite is on the dense / moist side ... it has enough air to feel cake like, but then melts almost instantly in your mouth. (this recipe specifies a chocolate blend that I like; you can use any high quality bittersweet chocolate. you may want to adjust the amount of sugar accordingly)

have you tried this on fully polymerized oils? like on a stainless or aluminum surface? Or worse ... a non-stick one? I've used much more abrasive cleaners on my aluminum griddle ... the polymerized oil seems more abrasion resistant than the aluminum itself.

Dougal's explanation is excellent. The part of the equation I've always missed is the importance of the carbon you get from smoking the oil. I've gotten my best results when the oil gets hot enough to smoke at least a bit, but didn't know why this would be. Makes sense, because the unblackened polymerized oil that I've accidentally gotten on other pans is anything but nonstick. It's also next to impossible to remove. This stuff isn't fragile.