paulraphael

Yeah, that's my impression too. Acidity seems similar to salt in that it does two things that may be related but are different: it balances flavors, and it also brings out other flavors. In this second sense, it's often conspicuous by its absence. Something might taste flat or off or dimensionless, but it won't cry out to be more tart. Unless you've trained yourself to recognize the problem, you won't necessarily know it needs acid ... just that you want it to taste more like itself, or more alive.

Yeah, that's basically slicing with the tip. It's great for anything sticky. The knife doesn't even need to be at that steep an angle, and it doesn't need to contact the board all the way through. There are two components that make this efficient: knife speed, which keeps the food from grabbing, and the simple fact that by the time the slice is fully separated, there's very little blade in contact with it to stick. Probably just the tip, which flying full speed out the back door. Anyone who suffers from sticking starchy foods and contemplates getting an unecessarily thick knife with grantons should really try this technique.

I still use the term "push cut" more broadly than this, because the amount of slicing motion is typically so much less than what most people would associate with slicing or shearing. The closest thing most cooks do to pure push cutting is woodpecker-style shopping near the tip of the knife, for small things like garlic and shallots. But even this has a small shearing component. Just not nearly as much as the classic shearing motion you get from traditional European rocking. It's true that there are only a handful of basic knife motions ... what sets apart someone with excellent knife skills is their mastery of the slight variations and their ability to apply them apropriately to different cutting situations. You'll see two cooks using the same basic skills, but one whose herbs never turn brown, whose cuts are consistent, who seems magically immune to starchy vegetables sticking to the blade and falling under it, and who finishes in half the time. Some of this might be years of experience, but a surprising amount is just the practice of more efficient techniques.

That's a good point. In my experience, things rarely get to that point. The freezer is the only place I might forget food for a period of months, but well wrapped in that environment food takes a lot longer than that to go disgustingly rancid. Nuts and oils and butter are the most common culprits. They usually don't get much past the iffy stage before they get tossed. One counterintuitive tip: salt speeds rancidification. Even though it acts as a preservative against microbes, it speeds oxidation of fats.

No, rancid has a specific definition ... it's a particular kind of spoilage. In general the effect of rancidity is less dramatic than the word, so people consume rancid stuff all the time. Rancidity is spoilage due to oxidation of fats. It has nothing to do with microbes. The process is slowed but not halted by freezing. Polyunsaturated oils rancidify most quickly (fish oil, canola oil); saturated fats least quickly (pork fat, butter). Monounsaturated fats are somewhere in between (olive oil, etc.). If you've ever noticed cooking oil or butter that smelled a bit like stale nuts, that's rancidity. It won't usually taste so bad that you spit it out; it just won't taste good. It won't make you sick, at least not accutely. Rancid fats are high in free radicals, which may have bad longterm health effects, but you won't get any kind of food poisoning from them.

That's true. I think we usually call it chopping or push cutting when the horizontal motion is very small compared with the vertical motion. It's there, but much less so than with traditional slicing. These terms and definitions are far from standardized. I always like to add some description to words like chop or slice or push ... people have assumed that I meant the opposite more than once.

The concept is simple, but I have a hard time believing it. All the efforts to improve braises by getting them to self-baste strike me as dubious. Does this process really hold in the aromatics? Has this been demonstrated? And if not, do you gain anything besides slightly less moisture loss (which is never really an issue with the braises that I've done)? Considering that the inside of a braising pot should always be hovering around 100% relative humidity, I don't see how it matters where the water condenses and drips. I've never been sold on the idea of water-based basting. Has anyone actually experimented with the self basting concept?

It works better with a knife that's anything less than very sharp. And by very sharp I mean sharper than what many euro-trained cooks use over the course of their careers. Those who get any kind of Japanese cutting education (which usually goes hand in hand with sharpening education) find that a whole range of different techniques actually work better than the old ones. But much of it has to do with tradition more than knives. It's been taught in French kitchens that you should cut silently. This means slicing and rocking. Push-cutting is noisier, and chopping with the tip of the knife sounds like a woodpecker attacking the cutting board. The noise is a bit obnoxious, but the benefit is about three times the speed of the fastest slicing, and also higher quality cuts with less sticking and ripping.

I was going to deny it, but then I went to make dinner, which involved slicing beef and onions. Sure enough, the motion I make has a distinct lateral component: I am definitely slicing, at least for both of these items. Just imagining the motion I make was not enough, I had to actually watch myself cut things before I noticed it. ← You're both describing Japanese-style push cutting. The motion is primarily a chop, but there's enough of a forward/slicing component to allow the blade to cut effortlessly. Typically, the sharper the knife and easier to cut the food, the less slicing motion you find yourself using.

Interesting. Is that because a dull knife/faulty technique ruputures more cells or something? ← Yes. A clean cut from a sharp knife weilded skillfully does profoundly less damage to the cells at the surface. It can spell the difference between chives that turn brown in 20 minutes vs. chives that will stay bright green for days, until they eventually start fermenting. Here's a post where I demonstrated with a picture.

The answer depends on what you're cutting and on how sharp your knife is. Slicing will always allow a less sharp knife to get through something with minimal effort and damage. But with a very sharp knife, it's not always the most efficient technique. Japanese trained cooks probably do most of their cuts with a hybrid motion: a kind of push cut that's mostly chop, but has a small amount of forward motion, just enough to allow the blade to drop through the food under the weight of the knife. Cutting anything starchy or sticky requires more specific techniques that prevent sticking. Either pull-slicing with the very front of the blade, or woodpecker-style chopping, also with the front of the blade. This type of cutting makes use of speed, which is often overlooked by knife skills teachers. A blade moving fast will cut cleaner, all else being equal. Chopping/push cutting motions, while not appropriate for everything, move the blade more quickly through the food. The conventional wisdom is wrong about how to preserve the edge of the knife. chopping or push cutting will preserve a knife's edge many times as long as slicing against the board. The traditional French rocking cut (where the blade slides forward on its belly on each cut) is the hardest of all the edge. The shearing motion abrades the edge agressively. Check out the knives of any euro-trained cooks after a long shift. Typically the belly of the knife will be dulled dramatically compared with the tip and the heel. A good test is to cut herbs like chives or basil, or chop fruits like apple or pear. Leave the cut food out on the counter. If it turns brown, your cutting technique or your sharpening technique needs refinement.

I don't know about "better," but I'm sure it would be different. Usually, herbs are used as a source of infused flavors, like tea; they're intended to release their flavors over time into a stock or sauce, which acts as a solvent. When you're preparing herbs for this kind of use, the goal is to damage the cells of the leaf as little as possible. Cuting exposes more surface area to speed extraction, and allows the herbs to be a less obtrusive presence in the food (if they won't be strained out). But generally you want to do the cutting carefully, to minimize oxidation, enzyme reactions, and the evaporation of aromatic compounds, all of which deaden the flavor if the herbs won't be used immediately. Careful, skilled cutting with a very sharp knife allows you to prep a pile of herbs for your mise en place and use them later. Brutish cutting, where herbs are squeezed between a blade and the cutting board, causes crushing and tearing, and forces you to use the herbs instantly (or to get disappointing resluts). This is the only kind of cutting possible with a mezzaluna. But it is not as brutal as the total the crushing of the herbs that you get from a mortar or processor. This treatment has an advantage when you're making a sauce like pesto, which is an unconventional use of herbs. In a pesto the herb IS the sauce. Pesto has a structure more like tomato sauce (where the body of the sauce is actually cellulose from the pureed ingredient) than like a typical herb infusion, where the presence of the herb isn't even important in the end. Some of the flavor in a pesto gets infused into the olive oil, but since the bulk of the pesto is actually made of chopped or ground leaves, most of the flavor remains there. The intensity of that flavor will depend on how easily the aromatic compounds can escape during the brief time that you're chewing your pasta. So in this case, thoroughly crushed or pureed herbs will deliver a greater intensity and immediacy of flavor than ones that are cut carefully. A mezzaluna will do a job that lies somewhere between the extremes of careful cutting and total crushing or pureeing. You probably won't get the intensity of flavor that you'd get from a processor or mortar and pestle pesto. The texture will likely be different too. Which you like better, or which one is more "authentic" probably depends on who you ask.

I'd be hesitant to try that ... hot water added to bones/meat, or vice versa, tends to disperse tiny particles of protein and cloud the stock.

I don't thoroughly thaw my bones, but I have them cut into very small sections, which speeds both thawing and extraction. I rinse them in cool water and let them sit out in roasting pans while the oven preheats. By the time they go in they seem thawed enough. If there's any difference in the final product from doing it this way, I haven't noticed. Magictofu, I don't understand that chef's method. First, do I understand correctly that the bones aren't browned? If that's the case then this is technically a white stock, not a brown stock. I'm also not sure what "bitter" flavors the method is avoiding, exept ones that could be introduced by burning the pan drippings during sloppy roasting. The more conventional way to make a white stock from bones is to just blanch the bones first. This removes stray proteins from the surface that tend to disolve in very small particles and cloud the stock. The roasting step eliminates the need for this when making a brown stock.

This is the same stuff that's used to make Epicurean cutting boards, as well as the handles for Shun (and some other) knives. I've used these boards while teaching; while I prefer wood, the impregnated paper has a number of advantages. It's tough, colorable within a limited range, and dishwasher-safe. I think it's a good choice for countertops. ← wait ... when I said "on paper" I was talking about the technical specs for the quartz/epoxy composite counters, like durcon. Not about actual paper composite counters. Those paper counters look like an ok idea, but they don't have the heat resistance that I'd like. All of them would get scorched by a very hot pan. I'm still curious about the subjective hardness of the quartz/epoxy materials ... if they feel more like rock or more like plastic when you set down a glass. Or knock one over.

I can see using a mezzaluna for piles of parsley ... but that's it. It's a poor choice for other herbs. Most are damaged by any cutting action that crushes them against a cutting board. Everything you've read that says to use herbs immediately after cutting, or else! is a an attempt to compensate for poor tools and techniques. In the rare cases where you actually want to demolish the herbs (like pesto) there are more brutal tools that do the job better. Like a mortar and pestle, a processor, or a blender.

finally got a pic ...

Does quartz fail these tests? I don't know where they get the quartz, but I'm guessing it's from sand. Which doesn't have the same kinds of ecological impacts as quarried stone. I'm also curious about how forgiving it is ... is it closer to rock, or to other solid surfaces like corian? On paper I'm sure it flexes much more than granite, but the issue is what it's like in use.

I've been working with my butcher (Jeffrey on Essex) to get more artisinal farm products. Right now he sells what's basically the best from the standard wholesale distributors. But he doesn't have any direct farm sources. Lately he's had some issues with the quality of Berkshire pork loins ... but it's hard to know what to do other than complain to his distributor (who buys and sells boxes of sub primal cuts). He's been hoping to have more direct sources, which I think would benefit everyone. Can anyone recommend farms that deliver goods to the city? Ideally ones that do their own processing for retail, because Jeffrey isn't going to be selling enough of this stuff to be able to buy whole animals. Right now I'm especially interested in lamb, but a farm source for amazing pork and pasture-raised beef would be great.

Yup, it's the cocoa butter. The alternatives include switching to a lower cocoa butter percentage ice cream, or increasing the ratio of cocoa to chocolate. If you do this, you'll also have to up the sugar, and probably also the cream. Chocolate ice cream is tricky. I'm working on it now. The nature of the chocolate presents a huge variable.

sometimes it's the obvious that eludes me ...

Here's a test that shows off some of the less expected benefits of a sharp knife. I'm sure all the knives in Steven's arsenal would do well at this, but most of the knives I've seen in home kitchens and even pro knife bags would fail miserably. All I did was slice up a pear. I didn't eat it, because it was mushy and flavorless (is anyone else having a hard time finding good ones this season?) Instead of tossing it, I spread out the slices and let them sit at room temperature, to see how long it would take them to brown. Back before I learned to sharpen knives, pears would start to brown in under 10 minutes. These are my slices after 36 hours: They're drying out, and have just started browning around the edges. They're only really brown on the inside at the top and bottom, where I did a less than delicate job of coring. The moral of the story is that sharp blades do less damage to your food. You'll serve meals with better texture, appearance, and flavor. Some foods, like herbs, require excellent technique in addition to a sharp knife, but a monkey can slice a pear. This was all about the blade. The knife used has a carbon steel edge sharpened freehand to around 9° per side, and thinned to a very accute angle behind the edge. Last sharpened a week and a half ago. It did all the prep for the holiday meals, and was touched up lightly on a steel afterwards.

David, I'm not sure why you think bones can't contribute flavor if they've been separated from the meat. I suppose it's possible, but it's not intuitive, and I'd like to witness a side-by-side comparison before subscribing to it. There's one good reason I can think of to leave the bones attached: if you plan to serve the meat on the bones. This is a delcious option, but whether or not you choose to depends on your esthetics, and also on logistics. You're pretty much stuck with serving a huge bone-in rib steak per guest if you do this! Maybe it's a good option in the midwest. There are two reasons to split the cooking of a roast like this into a low heat and a high heat session. The first should be evident from the pictures. Notice on your roast that there's a band about a half inch to an inch thick along the top edge that appears to be cooked past medium. Compare with pictures of the roast that was cooked with low heat and then browned: no gradient. The entire interior is just barely medium rare. And the exterior is browned and crisped to an even greater degree than on the single temperature roast. Having a gradient isn't a bad thing, but some of us (especially if we're starting with a remarkable piece of meat) like to chase the holy grail of rare or medium-rare throughout. Split cooking temps can get you closer. The other reason is more subtle, and actually makes a much bigger difference on an unaged or wet aged roast than on a dry aged one. The enzymes resident in the meat that tenderize it and develop the flavors during aging are most active between 70 degrees and 120 degrees F. The more time the meat spends in this range, the more complex flavors will develop. This phenomenon can be exploited in braising as well. I am very skeptical of using time or weight to determine doneness. The thickness of the roast, not the weight, is what matters. Whether your roast is from the loin end or the chuck end will effect the time more than whether it's 3 ribs or 6. And as Tim predicted, dry age can greatly accelerate cooking time. If I had followed conventional wisdom on time per pound, I would have incinerated a once-in-a-lifetime piece of meat!

This is exactly the kind of thing it takes some time to figure out. It's not just about the steel, but about how the manufacturer forged and heat treated it. Also, what angles a knife will take depends on who's using it (and a bit on who's sharpening it). There are some who sharpen knives like my gyuto to 5° on a side. They must have flawless and delicate cutting techinque. I have a feeling that I'm too hamfisted to get away with it. I also doubt my sharpening skills are good enough ... if my margin of error is plus or minus a couple of degrees, then aiming for 5° is bound to be a disaster. Trying to balance caution and adventure, I go a little thinner and a little more asymmetrical with each sharpeinging session, and wait to find out how far I can go.

I think a couple of German knives are definitely worth having. When it comes time to chop chocolate, whack the head off of a trout or bronzino, bone a chicken, etc., a tough knife is a good friend. There are specialized Japanese blades for all these things, but unless there's a task you're doing all day long, there's little disadvantage to a single go-to chef's knife that can take all kinds of abuse. It's also really nice to have a chef's knife you can hand to a guest if they want to help out. Hardly any of my friends with pro cooking experience know how to use a really sharp knife without destroying it. None of my amateur friends has a clue. The solution is to have a tough knife that you don't have to hide. It sounds like you've discovered the problem with knife comparisons. The only way to really know a knife is to live with it and use it for a while. With repeated sharpenings you'll find an edge geometry that works best. And with repeated use you'll find a set of techniques that works best. Any attempt to use a new knife the same way as the ones your used to, or the same way as the ones your testing against, sets up an artificial situation. Of course, some knives will immediately reveal themselves to be crap, either through use or through attempts to sharpen them. But the good knives are more often separated by subtleties. I said in a recent thread that a knife is really just a medium for your sharpening and cutting techniques. It's not much on its own. I traded up to my latest 270mm gyuto about three months ago. I liked it immediately, but its real value has been the continuing education it gives me in cutting and sharpening. Every time I take it to the stones I push it toward a higher performance geometry. And every time I cut with it I work to refine my technique. In a year or so it should be a pretty good knife, and I should be pretty good at using it! Then I'll be able to compare it to something else.