paulraphael

I believe sour cream is traditionally made with lower fat and at lower temperatures.

I'd be curious to see of show of hands from people who find that celery makes stock bitter. I've never found it to be true, but know at least a couple of people who are adamant about it. I wonder if something gets extracted from celery that some people are more sensitive to than others. One option is using celeriac instead of celery stalk ... similar flavor profile, but mellower and earthier. I doubt it would be as likely to release any kind of bitter flavor.

I use two kinds: a big one and a small one. Both the most conventional shape. Sam's analysis of the specialization thing sounds spot on. In contemporary kitchens, I think mixers have taken over most of the duties traditionally given to a balloon whisk. And immersion blenders are taking over many whisking duties and even changing basic techniques used in some kitchens (for making foams, emulsified sauces, etc.)

One of the benefits to using something like grapeseed is that you can go a lot hotter. That is, assuming it's a fairly refined grapeseed oil ... one intended for high heat sautéeing and not for tasty salad dressings. The former tend to be much lighter colored, and not at all cloudy. Some companies are nice enough to print the smoke point on the label. If it's a light, refined oil, you should be able to put it in at 450 degrees or so. It's not a big deal if it smokes a little. I find it helpful to use a really light coat of oil. If it's at all heavy, the oil will thin out from the heat and rund down the sides of the pan making drip marks and puddles. After 45 minutes or so, you can pull the pan out, and with the pan still hot, brush on another very light coat of oil with a paper towel. Obviously taking care not to burn yourself. If you repeat this three times or so, you should end up with a nice, shiny, plasticy glaze. As you go along, use your intuition to adjust the oven temp, cooking time, etc... I don't know any firm rules for how to determine this, other than a temperature around the oil's smoke point seems to work well.

The ideal oils to use are ones highest in polyunsaturated fats ... canola, sunflower, safflower, etc. etc... These oils will season a pan much, much more quickly and efficiently than anything else. This thing we call seasoning is nothing more than polymerized oil, which is oil that has oxidized and turned to plastic from heat. The fewer hydrogen bonds (meaning, the less saturated the fat) the more quickly and effectively the oil will polymerize. It's conventional to use veg oil or bacon fat. But it's also conventional wisdom that it takes years to get a good seasong going. If you use the right oil, you can do a great job in two hours. A killer job in a couple of two hour sessions. The conventional wisdom about how carefully you have to handle the seasoned pans is greatly exaggerated. Those polymerized oils are tough. And they're not soluble in much. You can use detergent and a scrub sponge to your heart's content. That stuff isn't going anywhere. I'd draw the line at using steel wool, or soaking in any kind of concentrated cleaning solutions. But you shouldn't feel the need to ever do this ... these pans tend to clean up easily.

Bridgedale and Patagonia socks are even nicer ... will last longer without flattening out. Something that would help almost everyone's feet--not just foot abusers like cooks--is a good set of orthotics or supportive insoles. There are few off the shelf shoes that have any significant arch support. I like the ones made by Sole. I bought them for hiking and climbing boots, and now use them in every piece of footware i have. For a step up, there are stores that fit people in running shoes and ski boots that can mold firmer insoles to your exact arches. A step up from these (if you still have problems) is prescription orthotics.

I've been reading about chefs at high end restaurants like Alinea making their own versions of liquid smoke ... doing things like smoking water (doing it in a way that I trust results in something tastier than bong water) and incorporating it into sauces or braising liquid. They like the control this process gives, and the way it allows the smoke flavors to be used subtly. Another option is to use smoked ingredients. Dried chilis like anchos, chipotles, and guajillos are a popular option. I served roasted lamb recently that was dry rubbed with lapsang souchong tea, and I used the same tea as an herb in the sauce. This tea is dried over pine smoke and has a deep, layered smokiness. This process let me get those layers of flavor into the dish, but as a subtle accent, rather than an overwhelming smokiness. I suspect options like these will all taste better, in their own ways, than any over the counter product.

You already have enough to craft a beautifully narcissistic menu for a dinner party.

I think a 0.1g scale is great for most applications. It lets you weigh all standard ingredients, including leavening. Most people get by with 1.0g resolution, but that usually means measuring things like salt and baking powder with spoons. Unless you're always making commercial quantities. If you're getting into products like gums, I think a .01g scale would make a lot of sense. Many of these chemicals work in minute amounts, and accuracy is important. Especially if you're experimenting and want to get consistent results. The trick would be getting something like a pocket scale ... a low capacity scale that you use just use for these ingredients. The price of a scale is mostly determined by the number of divisions--meaning, the capacity multiplied by the resolution. A scale with a 1kg capacity with 1g resolution has 1000 divisions. It's a way of saying that there are a thousand possible increments from its lowest to its highest reading. You'd expect to pay about the same for a scale with 10kg capacity and 10g resolution, or a scale with 10g capacity and .01g resolution. They all have 1000 divisions. So you can keep the price down on a high resolution scale by choosing one with a very low capacity.

These people tend to be grinders, not sharpeners. They will put a butcher-shop quality edge on a knife (serviceable, but not high perfomance) and in the process remove a lot of metal, greatly shortening the life of your knfe. And if the knife has a full bolster, they won't be able to reach the heel, so you'll soon have a blade with a concave cutout that won't ever meet the cutting board. If you're lazy and have beater knives that you're willing to replace in a couple of years, this isn't a bad solution. If you have nice knives then it's just destructive. The only skilled sharpening service in New York is the knife master at Korin. But it's better to just learn how to sharpen.

I'd try it with some cheapish wine. My guess is that would effect the flavor for drinking, but not for cooking with it (cooking radically transforms the flavor of any wine). Your idea of freezing in individual portions is key. If you tried to do a whole bottle worth, it would tend to separate, so parts of it would be too high in water or alcohol or solids. If your freezer is in the right temp range, the wine should freeze into easily managed slush.

We just put up some pics of the dinner here. The ones in the top and bottom row are courtesy of Jothan Cashero.

"use a little heat" / "a la minute service" ... you're paraphrasing what I said!

Mitch tells me the next event needs two secret ingredients: -a huge table for plating -funds to pay the staff

Well, my friends like to tell me something most egulleters probably hear all the time: "you should open a restaurant!" But I know a bit about the restaurant biz, enough to suspect this a horrible idea. So my tongue-in-cheek response has always been, "sure, I'll open a restaurant. But it's going to be open for one or two nights a month, it's going to seat no more than 10 or 15 people, most of them my friends, and I get to decide who comes, and I get to decide what everyone eats." My intent was pure snark, but then last year an ex girlfriend got in touch with me to say she was researching a book. She was traveling all around the country checking out underground restaurants and supperclubs, which I'd never heard about. It meant people were doing the exact thing I was joking about. And their guests were loving it. Out of curiousity I went to dinner with the author (at Whisk & Ladle in Brooklyn) and bought her book when it came out. It all seemed like a great idea. Besides the enormous amounts of work involved (something I have a natural aversion to) it's a whole lot of fun.

Sure! The marquis de perlade is just a great dry sparkling wine. a fantastic value in a method champenoise starter. I like it more than any prosecco I've had. The Riesling is a halbtrocken that has a fair amount of sugar, to hold up to the sweetness of the corn, but drinks like a dry wine. It emphasizes earthy notes over floral ones ... a nice match for the porcini mushrooms. And it has a great label: a beautiful nymphette hanging out with a lion. The two Bordeaux are both from the same area and the same year. Both are big, complex reds with plenty of dark notes and tanins, to hold up to the lamb and the smokey sauce. The Chateau de Candale is the more basic of the two, described by our wine consultant as a crowd pleaser. We had eight bottles of that. The Chateau du Moulin Rouge is more complex, darker, and with more character. I had just three bottles of that, so everyone could have a taste of something different. The idea was to please any wine sophisticates in the room. Both Bordeaux are on the young side and needed time for the flavors to develop; our consultant recommended uncorking the Candale an hour before serving and the Moulin Rouge two hours before. We served the reds at about 60 degrees F. There were not a lot of big people in the room, but still our guests managed to pack away about a full bottle per person.

We had a great dinner on Sunday. Everything came together more or less at the last minute, and the guests all had big smiles on their faces as they staggered out the door a bit after 11pm. The outlandish amounts of wine we budgeted for everyone surely helped. Despite alll the steps I took to avoid chaos during service, we had our share. I underestimated the differences between a family-style dinner party for 15 people, and a multicourse, plated meal for the same number. One of my goals was to delegate the plating entirely, since my plating skills are about as refined as those of a typical ruminant animal with cloven hooves. But when I showed the crew how I wanted things done, they stepped back and said something like, 'dude, you'd better do it.' None of the plating was elaborate; I think the subtext was along the lines of 'we're not getting paid and we're taking no responsibility for what these plates look like.' So I did most of it, digging myself a bit into the weeds for the following courses, and hoping the generous pours of wine and moody lighting might compensate for any attrocities I commited with a squeeze bottle. My apologies to the first few who were served, who had to look at plates that resembled first grade art projects. Aside from some of the esthetics, and a soup course that I think was underseasoned thanks to my palate going numb from days in the kitchen, I was ecstatic about the food. We sourced our lamb from one of the most renowned farms in the country; it was succulent with bright, fresh, herbal flavors. The sauce, made over three days from lamb coulis and lapsang souchong tea, might be the best I've ever made. And the two desserts represent a culmination of experiments I've been working on for months; the versions served are the first that have made me happy. I've posted some more commentary and a few pics of the meal at the Underbelly blog. You can see the final menu here. One of our guests has blogged about the meal at The Scout, and another guest, a baker and caterer from Barbados, has started a blog entry here. I couldn't have pulled it off without help from our own Mitch Weinstein (weinoo) who took care of the hors d'ouevres and a million other things, and our butcher Jeffrey Ruhalter, who helped with service, lamb carving, and clowning for the guests. The dinner was rewarding and also exhausting. The next one might be scaled back a bit, both in complexity and price. We might do a few collaborations with Jeffrey the butcher, like combining a hog butchering class with a pork tasting menu ... that kind of thing.

But without heating (to cook the proteins) it takes some brute force to make a foam from milk, or any other very low fat emulsion. The idea is that you're using the high speed of the machine to make a large number of very small bubbles, rahter than a smaller number of big ones. This puts the surface tension of the liquid to work for you, and means that it will take more time for the small bubbles to find each other, merge into bigger bubbles, and pop. It's still not as stable as a high fat whipped cream, but it's usuable for some things if you can serve right away.

You can whip just about any emulsion into a foam. Something as mighty as a bamix makes it easy. The result in this case is going to be different from a traditional whipped cream; it will extremely light (mostly air) and have virtually no stability. You can expect it to deflate almost like soap bubbles after you plate it. This is different from a high butterfat cream that will whip into a stable foam easily without much effort.

Bingo. The issue may from using artisinal cream from a small dairy. They may work with methods that are less consistent from batch to batch. Or they may even separate the cream "naturally," meaning with gravity, instead of a centifuge. This is the old fashioned way, and it's why the old fashioned way of whipping cream required herculean endurance and a lot of luck. It's just very difficult to produce cream with butterfat levels over 30% with the old methods. But this is all conjecture. I'd check with the farm.

What Grant is really talking about is the double-edged sword of novelty. Everything is new once. Some new things are startlingly different from what's gone before them. But if their primary value lies in that newness, then they have an automatic expiration date. Ultimately only history can separate revolution from mere novelty. What people in the culinary avant garde are discovering is that truly revolutionary discoveries are a rarity. Another thing we're witnessing is chefs embodying the role of artist in a more pure form than in the past. And they don't have much sense of how to do it. I can tell from Grant's essays that he hasn't really absorbed the structure of 20th and 21st century art history and how he fits into it (he fits into it cleanly). But he hasn't yet even found the vocabulary to express it. For instance he's calling his cuisine "modern," when that would be a better description of Nouvelle Cuisine 50 years ago. Grant and Adria (and to a certain degree Keller) could be described, at least partially, as postmodernists. Their blurring of boundaries, affinity for deconstruction, and their embrace of both pop culture and high culture references is textbook 1980s postmodernism. But I think even that misses the core of what they're doing. Goofy expressions like "molecular gastronomy" miss it by a mile. What strike me as the key is their commitment to reinvention. Alinea tries to never repeat dishes on the menu. El Buli tries to reinvent their entire approach to cooking every season. Given this commitment, I think the most fitting art historical term for this kind of cooking is "avant garde." It's not a stylistic description; it's a position statement regarding your relation to tradition. What's avant garde today will be "garde" tomorrow; that's why Adria and Achatz won't be doing the same thing tomorrow. Grant is just discovering that a certain category of techniques, ones mostly gleaned from food industry and mostly concerned with textural manipulations, aren't new anymore. The ones that were interesting because they were new are obviously no longer interesting. But even the ones that have lasting value are going to be of limited interest to an avant gardist ... because he's been there, done that. I suspect what's troubling Grant is ultimately that he's been defined by a certain style of cooking (and possibly even participated in that definition), while his avant garde inclinations actually require him to be free from any stylistic constraints.

Darienne, fresh peach ice cream is a highly worthy endeavor. Just be prepared to work for it. Improvising fruit based ice creams is tricky. There are many competing factors, and two of the biggest ones (the amount of added sugar and the amount of added water) will vary even from batch to batch of the same kind of fruit. Without getting into all the theory I'll suggest a general strategy. First, don't put any sugar in the mix. Reduce the total sugar in the recipe, to compensate for the sugar that comes with the peaches, and set that sugar aside. Then, cut up the peaches to the size you'd like in the ice cream. sprinkle the sugar all over these, seal them in a container, and refrigerate overnight. You want them to soak up the sugar, which will act as antifreeze and keep them from turning to solid ice. In the morning, the peaches will be sitting in a lot of syrup ... sugar water that's been drawn out of them. This is ok. Puree half the peaches (including all the syrup) and add to the mix before spinning. Then, about 2/3 of the way through spinning, add the solid peach chunks. This should get you in the ballpark. There could be a lot of tweaking before you get the flavor and texture just right. And every batch will be a bit different, because the peaches are always different!

maybe i should keep it to myself, but i reheat pasta all the time. and i like it! never have issues with it getting mushy. it dries out if you keep it too long is the only issue. what's worked best for me is warming it a bit in the microwave, then tossing with very hot sauce. wouldn't do it for guests, but home alone, with no one looking ...

Peter Reinhart shocked quite a few traditionalists when he wrote all the artisinal recipes in the Breadbaker's Apprentice for instant yeast. I wrote to him about this and his reply included a fair amount of what dougal said. He also explained that artisan bread baking, in his view, is about getting as much flavor as possible out of the wheat (or in the case of naturally fermented breads, the bacterial cultures). Anything else that might effect the flavor, like gobs of dead yeast, is to be avoided. So instant is a logical choice. He also encourages people to make identical loaves with the three kinds of yeast (portioned accordingly) to compare for themselves.

Assuming you figure out the right conversion, the results should be basically identical. It's all the same strain of yeast, and the yeast you put into the recipe is only getting the culture started. That original yeast will be long gone, replaced by its great great great grandchildren, by the time your bread goes in the oven. A biologist would probably have a hard time figuring out if the origin of any of these organisms was a packet of instant yeast or block of fresh. There's one significant practical difference. Fresh yeast contains a huge percentage of dead yeast organisms. This is one of the reasons you need to use proportionally more of it. In some cases, the quantity of dead yeast you're adding will be high enough that the bread will have a noticeably yeasty flavor. Artisinal bakers generally consider this a flaw, but some people seem to like it. The same effect can be produced by adding brewers yeast (which is also inactive).