paulraphael

We've put together the wine list for the evening: with the hors d'oeuvres Marquis de Perlade Crémant d'Alsace blanc de blanc with the soup Feuerbach Halbtrocken Riesling 2007 with the lamb Chateau de Candale Haut Medoc 2003 Chateau du Moulin Rouge Haut Medoc 2003

I love seeing waiters with the handheld POS deals. Before this discussion, it hadn't crossed my mind that it would improve accuracy, but the speed advantages were always obvious. There's no waiting for the waiter to shuffle all the way across the dining room, past annoying distractions (like other tables full of hungry, attention-hogging diners). I know that before the waiter asks what I want for dessert, my dumpling order has been zapped to the kitchen at the speed of light. Bliss.

Exactly! The waiter may end up impressing me by not making any mistakes. But in the mean time, I'll be worrying that he will. I'd rather have the peace of mind.

270mm gyuto and suji. both about a half inch too long for the 10" knife safe.

If you like these, it's best to try them in person at the store. I did and they don't fit my most used knives.

Which isn't what I said. Straw man arguments are becoming a bit of a sport around here. This particular tempest is all about a second hand quotation. Even if the words were ever said, we have no context. As far as we know (and this strikes me as likely, considering everything else we know about Ripert), he was mocking some old French folk wisdom.

If you're in an environment where you worry about theft, and want to use a roll, then I'd consider something besides basic black. A lot of the companies make them in colors and patterns. Neon cammouflage and hello kitty are both waiting for you if you're man enough! For edge protection, I think these edge-mags are great. Easy to use, easy to clean. I've heard the tape eventually wears out, but that should be fixable. If you use any traditional Japanese knives, then the best thing is a wood saya.

We have eight seats remaining. The sooner they fill up the sooner we can buy the wine!

I've been reading good things about ultimate edge bags. Similar to Koobi but people say they don't fall apart. I like this simple, indestructible no-name bag. It's good if you cary very little. Korin sometimes has it discounted for $17.

Professional kitchens often overflow with sexism. And a million other -isms. They're relics of a very different era. Things are changing there, but not as quickly as they've changed just about everywhere else. Many of the beliefs and practices in pro kitchens that are worth taking offence over. The comment about mayo, if it was even uttered in the first place, doesn't strike me as one of them. It's either 1) a joke, 2) an urban legend, or 3) a bit of regional kitchen folklore that predates the term "urban legend." I think it's also worth cutting some slack to people who trained in France or other countries with highly authoritative apprentice-journeyman systems. The spirit of education doesn't involve any questioning of authority. You're taught that "this is the way, this is how it is, this is how it's done." If Chef says that gypsy women mustn't uncork wine during the full moon, the correct response isn't "Why?" ... it's "Oui Chef!" And so, folk wisdom, ever durable, is especially durable in authoritative cultures. As an example: the idea that searing meat seals in the juices. McGee didn't discover that this was a falacy; it was discovered and published by a food scientist, in France, in the 1930s. Yet the myth lingers on, even among French cooks. Reading too much into something like the mayo comment reflects either a loss of perspective or a desire to take offence over anything. It's also worth noting that Ripert's boss is a woman, he has at least one female sous chefs, and he has a reputation for running one of the most respectful kitchens in New York.

-4°F is pretty cold for a home freezer. If yours goes colder, you might get results that are as good or better (at the expense of higher electric bills). Certainly worth trying. I've found a lot of people's freezers to be in the 10 to 20 degree range, especially if they have old models or crappy ones supplied by a cheap landlord. Colder is better because it freezes the ice cream faster, leading to smaller ice crystals. This matters when you harden the ice cream (after spinning it in the machine). And if you're using an ice cream maker that uses a freezer bowl, it matters for the spinning. Ice cream that's too hard for serving is a completely different issue from icy or grainy ice cream. Any freezer cold enough to make a good, smooth ice cream is going to freeze it much colder than serving temperature. Most ice cream reaches ideal serving consistency between 6 and 10 degrees F. A half hour in the fridge before serving is usually about right.

I'm chiming in a few months late on this, but will say I had the exact same experience, with a version of the same dish last summer. It seemed like an almost supernatural achievement to dry out a pork confit to the extent they did (and I think ours was prepared with duck fat .... even more impressive). The plate appeared to have been sauced with an eyedropper, as a form of psychological torture. This was the same dish that Frank Bruni raved about, which made us suspect it had been an execution disaster.

Underbelly, a supper club in a rustic, Civil War-era Brooklyn brewery that's been taken over by artists, will launch with a recession-friendly dinner to raise money for egullet. We've been working hard these last few months sourcing ingredients from the Hudson Valley and Pennsylvania, and making special arrangements with our friends and local purveyors. The menu will include: assorted hors d'oeuvres corn chowder with porcini cream roasted rack of Jamison Farm lamb, lamb coulis with lapsang souchong, hen of the woods mushroom celeriac and fennel purée salicornia with lemon butter home made bread with farm butter by Saxelby Cheese chocolate marquise with ginger banana tart with black sesame, brown butter cognac ice cream, caramelized banana, salted butterscotch a succession of four wines selected by our sommelier to make you very happy. (details may change subject to ingredient availability and last minute tinkering) To make a reservation, please send an email to dine@under-belly.org. There will only be fifteen seats so please reply soon. The dinner is being announced on egullet first, so society members will have the first opportunity. The suggested donation is $70. (The wine alone would cost more than this at a restaurant!) More details will be posted soon on egullet and on our blog at the Underbelly site. THIS EVENT HAS BEEN ORGANIZED THROUGH EG FORUMS BY MEMBERS BUT IS NOT SPONSORED BY THE EGULLET SOCIETY FOR CULINARY ARTS AND LETTERS OR EG FORUMS. YOUR PARTICIPATION IN ANY EVENT OR ACTIVITY ARRANGED ON OR DISCUSSED IN EG FORUMS IS AT YOUR SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE RISK. BY USING AND PARTICIPATING IN THE FORUMS YOU AGREE AND UNDERSTAND (1) THAT IN CONNECTION WITH YOUR PARTICIPATION IN ANY EVENT OR ACTIVITY, YOU MAY BE EXPOSED TO A VARIETY OF HAZARDS AND RISKS ARISING FROM THOSE ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS; (2) TO THE FULLEST EXTENT ALLOWED BY LAW, YOU AGREE TO WAIVE, DISCHARGE CLAIMS, RELEASE, INDEMNIFY AND HOLD HARMLESS THE SOCIETY, ITS AFFILIATES, OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, AGENTS, AND OTHER PARTNERS AND EMPLOYEES, FROM ANY AND ALL LIABILITY ON ACCOUNT OF, OR IN ANY WAY RESULTING FROM INJURIES AND DAMAGES IN ANY WAY CONNECTED WITH ANY SUCH EVENTS OR ACTIVITIES. YOU AGREE AND UNDERSTAND THAT THESE TERMS WILL BE BINDING UPON YOU AND YOUR HEIRS, EXECUTORS, AGENTS, ADMINISTRATORS AND ASSIGNS, AS WELL AS ANY GUESTS AND MINORS ACCOMPANYING YOU AT THE EVENTS.

Periods of laziness/spaciness have led to clusters of burns and cuts. I'll go months without any, and then subject myself to multiple abuses over a period of days or weeks. I find the old addage that a sharp knife is safer to be true, up to a point. A dull knife is disasterously unsafe. But an obscenely sharp knife is not without issues. Case in point: when my main chef's knife was a heavy German one, kept respectably sharp on a steel, I went over five years with only one cut ... and that was done while washing the knife, drunk. To this day that knife hasn't cut me during prep. Then I started using thin Japanese knives, and sharpening on stones and with a strop. I got addicted to the kind of edge that fillets arm hairs, but found myself bleeding, often inexplicably, all the time! I realized that sometimes it was just from bumping into the edge while it was sitting on the cutting board. Other times I have no idea what happened. I'd just look down and see a trail of blood leading from the cutting board to ... me. I've worked out an accord with these knives, but it's tennuous. One lapse into inattention or overconfidence is all it takes before the veggies get seasoned with a briney, sanguine splash. Now I keep cots and band aids in my knife bag, and have gotten pretty good at closing wounds with super glue.

Any ideas? I've heard they exist but haven't seen at Whole Foods or other groceries. edited to add: I realized pasteurized whole eggs are a more likely product. These would be fine too.d

And easier to scale. Quick: what's half of 1-3/4 cups flour? A third of 1-1/4 cup sugar?

good point! that's for roughly a quart of frozen ice cream. the base i'm using typically has 1 cup cream / 2 cups whole milk. I get less than a quart of ice cream out of this, but a higher overrun machine would give about a quart. sample recipe is here.

It's hard for me to generalize about he quality of recipes, as leaving well enough alone isn't one of my favorite kitchen activities. In terms of the quality of reference information in books vs. online, that's a different story. I have a small selection of books that are like bibles. I lean on them for techniques, science, ingredient information, etc., and would feel a bit stranded without them. But more and more, I'm finding the internet to be a deeper well to draw from. Harold McGee's book might have a paragraph on a certain kind of starch, for example, but some tenacious googling might reveal a research paper, or page-long blog posting from a chef, on the same topic. These resources may or may not substitute for the book in every case. But they've become an invaluable supplement. The net also makes me lazy. More than once I've found myself searching online for a recipe or article that I knew was in my bookshelves right across the room. ALL THE WAY across the room.

I see your points about the limits of culinary education for this kind of thing. But on the other hand, just having someone show you stuff like "this is the correct texture" is invaluable. I had to learn that on my own, and it took forever. As you said, you have to practice a lot to get good at it, but now you KNOW what you're striving for. Priceless. All the little details and dictums he threw at you will either show their importance (or irrelevence!) if you decide to practice more. One dictum that falls by the wayside is that pastry must precise and there's no room for improvisation. In fact, most pastry recipes are incredibly malleable. Even if consistency is your goal, it's more important to judge texture and correct things on the fly than to stick to recipes. Your chef seemed to demonstrate this even without acknowledging it! Other things, like cakes, are more like lab work.

Chadzilla chimes in. "Slow cooked spaghetti is freakin' awesome. I've begun to adopt it as my main cooking method of pasta at home. Also, if you think that's good then try slow cooked elbow macaroni tossed in just a little whole butter." I might have to actually try it one of these days.

Unless you can contact the cookbook author, and find out what conversion they used. Most cookbook authors (and virtually all chefs) developed the recipes using weights, so this simple step will let you reverse engineer all the recipe weights. The only conversion you really need is for flour ... that's the wildcard. Sometimes if you dig into the book's appendix, the information will be right there. Ocasionally, the author will have developed and tested the recipes using volume measures. If this is the case, you should at least be able to find out how they measured their flour (sifted first or not, dipped, scooped, spooned into the measure, etc. etc.). This will get you much closer. And in this case the scale won't improve accuracy, but will work wonders for consistency. And sanity.

Cool. I might experiment with super ripe bananas. Any thoughts on how you'd go about retrograding starch in bananas that you wanted to roast / brown?

Are you sure about this? This primer suggests it's all about starch (see section on potato puree and retrograding the starch).

I'm working on a tart made with roasted bananas. For the first version I pureed the bananas with a food mill. It left a slightly grainy texture. So for the second version, I put the roasted bananas and the milk and cream from the recipe in a commercial blender and went to town for several minutes. Same way I puree celeriac. The mixture that came out had a very strange consistency. smooth, but slightly sticky and elastic. Some of this quality persisted in the final tart. Not great! Any ideas on what's going on here? Do bananas have starch issues similar to potatoes? If so are there tricks I can use to get a silk-smooth puree of a roasted banana without making glue?

i think you're looking at an optical illusion ... those aren't giant wings, it's a picture of 3 sheets arranged in an unfortunate way! they're just like the volrath sheets ... flat, with a small bent up rim on two sides. haven't used those either but have seen them in the store. they look like they'd work fine. expensive, though. the magic line pan you linked is cheaper and looks nicer. I have some insulated sheets. There are very few things that they're good for baking. Things that you don't want to brown at all. But for this kind of thing, you can just stack a pair of regular sheet pans and get the same amount of insulation. I keep the insulated sheets around because they make great baker's peels. I'm always using them to slide things in and out of the oven. They're flat and rigid. You could also use flat cookie sheets like the ones K8 linked for this. The ones with a single bend edge would be better. I don't have any of these because the ones I see at the store always cost too much. I just use an upside down sheet pan for cookies. Not as easy to use, but the results are as good. If I were baking mountains of cookies I'd spring for some good flat cookie sheets, use them for baking and also as peels, and give away the insulated things.