paulraphael

-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.

I used to have multiple sets of volume measures. When I got a scale, I de-accessioned all but one set of stainless dry measuring cups, and my single set of cuisipro measuring spoons (these rock ... in addition to being a cool design, they're actually pretty accurate, which couldn't be said for any of my others). I still find use for a few liquid measuring cups ... small and large pyrex, and 16oz and 64oz stainless. These get used for lots of things besides just measuring. For mise, an assortment of stainless mixing bowls from 10oz up to a few quarts, a pile of 16 oz deli cups, and what might be the most useful: 32oz and 64oz square-sided cheap plastic containers by ziplock and gladware.

Gelatin doesn't float to the top. You're skimming fat, and odd bits of protein and impurities (anything that shows up as froth and skin). Besides skimming like you've got OCD, one of the best things you can do for your stock is turn down the heat. Most books don't emphasize this enough. They say "simmer," but that's easy to interpret as a more vigorous bubbling than the ideal. Any stream of bubbles that you see indicates too much agitation. It's a recipe for fats and impurities getting churned into an emulsion and clouding the stock, instead of floating to the top. The French have an expression for a low simmer where the surface just barely shimmers, and a bubble rises once in a while: "making the pot smile." That's what you're looking for.

The m'cook pans look nice, but I wonder just how much nicer they are in practice than all clad. JB Prince has the lowest prices I can find. For a 10" fry pan they want practically double the price of a typical discounted all clad equivalent. In fact, their prices are about what I paid for Mauviel's copper pans just a few years ago!

Yeah, my dad was a victim of that ... he needed his hip re-replaced. But the point I was trying to make still stands. The implant issue is about physical wear, and debris becoming a physical irritant. It has nothing to do with chemical toxicity.

My take on this is similar to Slkinesy's, with a few shades of difference. I think there's reason to be more cautious with PTFE pans on high heat than with other pans. I routinely preheat my stainless lined cookware to temperatures that would incinerate food if the food itself didn't act as a heat sink, lowering the temperature of the pan on contact. With seasoned iron or steel cookware, I don't go quite as far, but almost. The biggest risk there is damage to the seasoning, which is renewable. But I never heat PTFE like this. Not just because foods suited to nonstick pans rarely require it, but because it will damage the pan. At best it will shorten the already short useful life of the coating. At worst it will kill it in one session. And the breakdown products of radically overheated PTFE ARE more toxic than the breakdown products of cooking oil. Take a look at the sources I linked above. The 1950s FDA study that was mentioned specifically sites temperatures of 482 degrees F. This is considerably lower than the temperatures a pan might reach when preheating for an aggressive sear. Even DuPont's current FAQ is based on the assumption that 500°F is a higher temperature than a pan will encounter outside the broiler. Not in my house! Above 530°F, significant quantities of organic gasses, of the types you probably don't want to be huffing, start liberating into the kitchen. So my habits with PTFE pans are significantly different from my habits with anything else. If I owned pans lined with tin, which melts a bit below 500°, I'd treat them similarly. As far as the comment on birds being more sensitive to airborn toxins, yes, that's true. But toxicity is ALWAYS a factor of dose. The world is full of chemicals that are harmless or even beneficial at one dose, and deadly at another. In fact most earthly substances could be described this way. Birds, not just because of size but because of their exceptionally efficient respiratory systems, suffer from many airborn toxins and irritants at radically lower concentrations than we do. The sensible conclusion isn't "don't expose the bird to anything you wouldn't expose yourself to." Rather, it's "keep the f'ing bird far away from the kitchen no matter what kind of pan you use." Because there all kinds of airborn vapors and particulates in the kitchen--ones we can breathe deeply if not happily for a lifetime--that can knock birds off their perches in short order. Click.

I'm not sure where you're getting this. Thermal breakdown products of PTFE include toxic gasses such as perfluoroisobutene, octafluoroisobutylene, and tetrafluoroethylene. (And I'm using the term "gaseous" because it describes the physical state of the chemical in the situation we're talking about). Some more info can be found here and here. But again, this isn't a panic alert, just an addtional reason beyond common sense to avoid incinerating your teflon pans. Significant pyrolysis doesnt occur until 530°F or so ... well past the point where any oil in the pan would be turning into clouds of smoke.

The safety issues with PTFE have been wildly exagerated (and sometimes fabricated) by the online pseudoscience community. Here's all you need to know: 1) PTFE is chemically inert as far as your body is concerned. You could eat a pound of it. And you'd poop out a pound of it. There isn't a single known solvent in your body that can absorb PTFE. This is one reason that it's routinely used in permanent implants in the body, like artificial limbs and heart valves. 2) The gaseous chemicals produced by overheating PTFE to the point of destruction are poisonous. Exactly how harmful they are is a subject of debate; they're known to be very harmful to small creatures like birds. Kind of like the canaries in coal mines that would die from methane gas before any people were effected. However, this is just one reason not to overheat your teflon pan to the point of destruction. If you're reaonably careful, and don't preheat the pan on high heat for a long time, and don't use it for aggressive browning of foods (which these pans are lousy for anyhow), you'll be fine. This destruction won't catch you by surprise. You'll actually see the coating smoking and deteriorating. If this happens, take it off the heat, open a window, and when the pan cools down, pitch in the recycling. 3) You probably only need one or two of these pans anyhow. If you consider them specialty items, for cooking eggs and delicate fish, then you'll never have to worry about heating them past the point of no return.

Is all Durum flour created equal, or is some higher in protein than others? Also, what about the mixing techniques, water temperature, used in manufacture, etc.? I wonder if any of these factors can have an effect on the way the pasta cooks. It seems to me that some durum pastas hold their texture better than others. Some crappier ones I've used are a bit tricky to cook properly while the better ones seem almost invincible.

Great explanation! At first I was going to assume that baking soda would come with the same considerations as baking soda. But since double acting baking soda actually produces additional gas in the oven, I can see how it might be different. So it seems like an open question.

It all depends. If you're dealing with a pan that actually needs deglazing, then you're right; a soft spatula will have a hard time scraping hard things off the pan. In those cases I like flat bamboo spatulas. For stirring things that don't brown onto the pan, silicone is a bit more efficient. It works like a squeegee and really keeps food moving off the surfaces. Nancy, where do you get these? They sound pretty deluxe.