paulraphael

It gets even more complcated than that. I talked to a high end rancher in the northwest who said he only produces choice beef, because of the feed type and schedule. I thought this was curious, because I've seen his beef on the menus of some upper end restaurants. What happens if a carcass gets graded prime? He said it gets dumped in with the "commodity" meat, along with the carcasses that only meet the Select grade. In other words, they don't get sold under his brand, they get piled in with the cheap meat that goes to discount grocery stores. I asked him WTF??? He said only a small percentage of his carcasses grade prime, and it just costs too much to stop the line and officially change the grade. Also, for some bureaucratic reason, he can't label things "choice or higher," which is an option in some cases. So the moral of that story is, you might get lucky with ungraded meat at the supermarket. And I'm buying from someone who isn't as hamstrung by bizarre constraints.

I think it was more than just holding. There were issues with the proportions of the components, and their flavor/texture relationships to each other. I still don't know if these were dud recipes or if they were just poorly executed by the staff.

Every year I say I'm going to start gardening. I have a garden ... over 400 square feet of outdoor patio, filled with containers, that most new yorkers would kill for. And since my green-thumbed housemate left, it's been slowly returning to nature, except for the two strawberry plants that come back magically (but in worse shape) every season. I just have no idea what to do. What I need is a gardening support group. Anyone else interested in this? I'd probably want to start small. Herbs, and maybe some tomatoes.

Depending on the rat's diet, what falls out of his butt could absolutely be labelled organic. Don't be fooled into thinking organic = good. Looking at the issue from another perspective, a label like "70% organic" isn't 100% useless. it means that a chunk of your dollar goes to organic farms, which might be a cause you like to support.

I put the recipe for my plain flourless chocolate cake here on recipe gullet. I haven't tried making a lava version, but if you're willing to experiment, I can tell you what I'd do, and maybe you can let me know how it went? First, you'd want to divide into small ramekins. Then prepare ganache, about an ounce per person. My instinct is to use about 1:2 chocolate to cream, and to refrigerate it until firm. But I'd also take a look at the Michael Bras recipe referenced earlier in the thread, which includes water, and freezing. I would pour the mix into the ramekins and plop a round scoop of the refrigerated ganache into the middle of each one. I would dispense with the immersed cheesecake style baking of my recipe if doing a melted center. I think just putting it in a 300 to 325 oven until only the center jiggles would work. Personally, I've always made it without a melted center because I've had so many lava cakes at restaurants that the novelty wore off. What I really get into is a cake with an amazing melting texture.

Well, I didn't mean to imply that there was spoiled cream involved, or bugs running around on the plate. But I stand by my appraisal of "terrible," having eaten a lot of good desserts, including ones at similarly experimental spots. We also specifically ordered the two recommended by the house. I'm betting you wouldn't have liked them. The one that stands out most was a warm date cake soaked in rum syrup with creme fraiche, rhubarb, and kumquats. If it had just been a country style date cake in soaking syrup, and made well, it would have been great. But there were two problems: it was made poorly, and then the attempts to make it more interesting took it nowhere. Worst problem was that the cake depended on soaking syrup for moistness, but there was about 1/4 the amount of syrup required for this, all of it pooled at the bottom. So save for a couple of good bites, the cake was as dry as an old shoe. Then there were the secondary components: creme fraiche (a good, conservative choice ... but such a tiny smear on the edge of the plate that it was useless); rhubarb (tasty, but very similar in texture and even flavor to the two or three moist bites of the cake); and kumquat (the only part that was interesting and that worked). This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. The other dessert we had (also recommended by the staff) was better but only a little. You can see how I'm left wondering if the problem was with the recipe or the execution. The recipe might have been written with these proportions, or it might not have. I haven't been bold enough to try recipes from the book, because I don't want to spend an afternoon of my life only to end up with such a disappointment on my plate. Instead I've been playing it safe, thumbing through the book looking for general ideas to play with. And I'll be following this thread closely, looking to see if there are recipes people love.

That's right, the USDA grade reflects basically one characteristic out of many. It gives you some clues about the qualities of the meat, but leaves many questions unanswered. By chemicals I assume you mean growth hormones and antibiotics, because, as slkinsey says, the word chemical is basically meaningless. Every bite of food you've ever had was 100% chemicals. But no, the USDA grade tells you nothng about this. The term "all natural" tries to tell you something about this, but it's not a phrase with an official definition. If you see someone claiming "all natural," read more and find out exactly what they mean. "Organic" covers many bases, including freedom from hormones and antibiotics. Unfortunately, it's very restrictive, and as a result much of the best beef in the country isn't rated organic, and much of the organic beef isn't among the best. I've spent the last two months talking to ranches, farms, and meat distributors, trying to source the best beef in the country. What I've learned is that beef is complicated! There is no buzzword that can guarantee you great beef. The differences in breeds, husbandry, and (most importantly), feed and finishing, are enormous. You end up not only with a huge range of quality, but a huge variety of styles at any quality level. I've been looking at cattle from three different breeds, raised several different ways, with many different approaches to feeding. And I'm in the process of narrowing it down to four or five finalists for my butcher and me to try side by side. We expect them to all be excellent but very different. Our personal tastes will be the final arbiter.

The desserts were badly made. They seemed like good ideas in terms of flavor combinations, but proportions and plating and all kinds of other details defeated them. I don't know if the issue was the recipes or the cook who assembled them.

I've seen pictures of that thing and it looks fantastic. I think food processors do a better job at making most pastry doughs than mixers, but are no good at small quantities. That cutting blade would likely dethrone the food processor. I believe hobart used to make them for the huge mixers. It seems like something that a machine shop could make out of an old dough hook or flat beater and some springy stainless steel. It would also be a great after market product for someone like beaterblade.

I bought this book based on reputation, but then had dessert at p*ong. Execution was so terrible (on everything) that I've been afraid to make any recipes from the book! So far I've just used it as reference for flavor ideas.

Business is bad. I want a piece of it. Is there any kind of online information clearinghouse for restaurant auctions?

All the consumer mixer manufacturers are expressing input wattage. All of them. None publishes output power. In the Physics textbook, yes, but in appliances you can't extrapolate anything about output power from input power. Why? Because marketing departments ask the engineers to make machines that draw stupid amounts of power. The evidence is everywhere if you compare specs of home machines to commercial machines. All commercial machines are rated for output power. Rating in the U.S. is given in horsepower.

Beyond that, the pro mixer manufacturers advertise LOWER wattage as a selling point. And why wouldn't they? It means efficiency. Who sells a car by bragging about worse gas mileage than the competition? I laugh when I see ads for viking and Cuisinart mixers claiming 1000 watts. That's more than the power consumption of a 20 qt hobart that could purée both of these mixers at the same time!

I think it's great that the schools teach classical technique (like Espagnole based demi that hardly anyone makes anymore). It gives you a lot of foundation and technique, and if you work in a restaurant that calls reduced veal stock demi glace (one of my biggest pet peaves in the world), you'll know enough to jump in. What seems missing is the techniques used at many of the best restaurants, which often blend pre-classical techniques (meat coulis) with contemporary methods of extraction. These techniques are just more advanced that what Escoffier was doing, and I think it sells kids a bit short to send them out into the world without awareness of them.

Which is perfectly reasonable. In fact badly made roux-based sauces are a big part of what sent them so radically out of fashion in the '60s. Any technique can be abused or misapplied. Keeping this in mind, I'd discourage you from generalizing too much from the gluey slurry-based sauce you tried. I'm pretty confident I could make sauces that you'd strongly dislike using any liason! I'm not sure what can be generalized from a bad example of something. It would be more educational to try a sauce made with purified starch by someone who's a wizard with those ingredients (as your chef no doubt is with roux). This would give a much better point of comparison.

I'm not questioning that definition of slurry--only the generalizations about them leading to Chinese restaurant-style sauces. And for that matter, any other generalizations you might make about slurry-thickened sauces. The point is that each of these starches is different. They each have their respective strengths and weaknesses (just like roux), and a good saucier knows how to work the strengths and minimize the weaknesses. As far as categorizing, it might be more sensible to label them refined starches, since you could make a slurry out of any kind of powder, and you could incorporate these starches in ways besides slurries if you wanted to. The main thing that sets them apart from wheat flour (roux, etc.) is their relative purity. Wheat flour is full of protein, which tends to cloud the stock and so requires hours of skimming. The protein also adds strong cereal flavors which are brought out by cooking and then reduced only through extended cooking. Refined starches avoid these limitations.

Interesting! If I could make a suggestion, you might want to seek out advice on liaisons from someone who learned about them more recently than the 1960s. A lot of that information about slurries is dubious. "Slurry" is a description of how certain starches are incorporated. Beyond that, you can't make any of those generalizations about them. Arrowroot is not cornstarch is not potato starch is not agar is not alginate is not tapioca starch is not anything else ... Chef is just revealing his biases toward the methods he initially learned. Escoffier didn't use arrowroot, and it sounds like Chef never really bothered to learn much about it.

Maybe you're talking about a different knife than the one I thought? The Shun utility knife I've seen has about a 6" blade. Which for obvious reasons won't be of much help with a 9" boule. As far as tomatoes (or any fruit or vegetable) if you have a serrated knife that cuts as cleanly as a non-serrated knife, it's because the non-serrated knife is dull. You might think it's sharp, but this test is proving otherwise!

I'm waiting for someone like Grant Aschatz to serve actual caramelized onions, for dessert.

Well, there's little practical use for a bread knife that's under 10" long. Unless you only eat mini boules or sandwich loaves ... then you can get away with 8". Anything shorter will require you to saw with so many strokes that you won't get clean cuts. And ... what use is there for a serrated knife besides crusty bread? If your answer is 'tomatoes," that means your chef's knife is dull. I mean really dull--it only takes modest sharpness to slip through even the most delicate tomato. Some people use reverse-scallop knives like the Mac to cut crusty protein, like seared tuna. But careful technique will allow you to do this with a non-serrated knife, and to make better slices. And in any case you'd want a long blade for this ... 8" minimum; 10" or more prefered.

Probably a rant for another thread, but is anyone else annoyed by the rampant wrong use of "caramelized?" It wouldn't be so bad, except, 1) the biggest offenders are chefs, who should know better, and 2) it's a whole lot easier to just say "browned."

I would do a bit of both ... a luscious flourless chocolate cake recipe, and then pop a ball of ganache in the center. Lava cakes seem really cheesy to me (not in the good way) when they have a firm cake consisteny and then a sudden transition to molten goo. They just seem like some kind of hostess product that's been injected with chocolate sauce. I like the illusion that the middle of the cake has actually melted. There's a spectrum of flourless chocolate cake recipes. On one extreme are baked custards that are made without any egg whites at all. These are generally used for the underbaked style cakes where the center is just melted. At the other extreme are baked souflées, which have structure from whipped egg whites that are folded in. These emphasize airiness. For your purposes, I think what would work well is something closer to the baked custard end ... not entirely without egg whites, but with a proportion of around one whole egg to egg yolk. And of course lots of butter. This will give you enough structure for the thing to hold together, but you should have a nice, smooth transition from solid cake to melted ganache. I can give you a recipe that I love ... something I worked on for a long time to get it to straddle the fine line between solid and melting. It should adapt well to a dolop of ganache thrown into the middle of a ramekin.

Interesting. I've gotten off flavors many times doing the same thing. Burnt oil issues can be minimized by quick timing, but i don't see a reason to use a more expensive, fuller flavored oil, just for the opportunity to kill most of its flavor and to race againt the clock to prefent burning. I find life simpler if there's a big cheap bottle of refined sunflower, safflower, or grapeseed oil to grab when the pan is blazing hot.

The phenomenon you're describing applies to anything technique-intensive, not just cooking. When I first started taking music lessons my teacher was elated that I wasn't self taught (I was un-taught). He knew how hard it was to get someone to un-learn bad techniques. Much easier to mold a completely fresh piece of clay. Same thing in anything athletic. I struggle weekly to improve as a rock climber. Half of what I do is force myself to use less comfortable, less familiar techniques, knowing that the new ones will be better when I eventually learn them. In cooking I'm always discarding things I've learned and practiced. It's really annoying, but much of the time it's the only way to improve. I labored to learn all the traditional Cordon Bleu standard knife techniques, and then threw half of them out when I saw that there were better ones to be learned.

Any thoughts on how it compares with their "Culinary Artistry?" ... also on my wish list based on recommendations.