paulraphael

yeah- I would second that. One of my housemates got me one a while ago and its worked like a charm. Sincerely, Dante ← But have you tried the Messermeister? I have both. The Messermeister mops the floor with the Oxo and costs about the same.

I've noticed most pros using ones like that one in the picture ... with the blade perpendicular to the handle. I've always used ones with a parallel blade, that you hold like a paring knife. The all time champ of these is the Messermeister serrated peeler (don't fear the serrations ... they're so small they make little difference). It's similar to the oxo but better. You can use this thing to cleanly peel a ripe tomato, or even a ripe peach. Ever since it got a couple of rave reviews it's been in stock at most cooking stores. You can pick them up retail for $6 or $7. I've given about 10 of them as gifts.

It's interesting that the idea of human milk gives almost everyone the heebie jeebies ... even thought it's the milk we were actually intended to drink. I admit it weirds me out too. I just don't understand why. There doesn't seem to be any logic to it--so it's from the breast of a strange woman. How is that more revolting than the breast of a strange cow or goat? Meanwhile, most men (and a whole lot of women) have a pretty strong affinity for the breast itself. While there may be a few "udder men" out there, I have yet to hear from any (or see any fetish websites devoted to their special needs). Where do you suppose the revulsion comes from?

Yeah, the KA attachment does a really good job, especially if you can turn the temp down really low in your freezer when chilling the bowl. My freezer is gets the thing between -6F and -10F. I've been able to freeze a pint of ice cream in as little as 4 minutes and a quart in as little as 12 minutes. The result is a very smooth texture. LN2 is obviously going to be faster and smoother. But the real test, I think, is the texture after the ice cream hardens in the freezer. Ice cream continues to metamorphose indefinitely ... small ice crystals merging with larger ones, etc.. So past a certain point of initial smoothness, I suspect the stability of your mix and the stability of your freezer make a bigger difference than the freezing method.

The only thing I'd be concerned with if you're using the dry ice in the manner of an ice/rock salt machine is that the frozen ice cream could build up on the sides so fast and so hard that it would defeat any attempts to scrape it off ... either stall your machine or stall your arms. That's where the elegance of blumenthal's methods come to play. Maybe you could do some research on the purity of dry ice from the supermarket. My guess is that it's considered food grade. I gave up on LN2. Too big a hassle if you're not working at a lab or restaurant that stocks the stuff in bulk. Expensive, too. Every supplier had a minimum order. And you need quite a bit of it. I reaized it would double or tripple the cost of my ice cream. And then there's the hassle of driving to go get the stuff. And the money I already spent on a tank (been too lazy to photograph it for ebay!)

At any rate, putting a pinch of salt on your tongue won't tell you anything. Except maybe which salt is better to eat straight!

I would follow Dougal's advice with sea salt, too, before spending extra money to use it in cooking. I saw a blind test of chefs a few years ago. The results were that everyone could tell one salt from another when sprinkled on food at the table, but no one could tell the difference between table salt, kosher salt, regular sea salt, or fleur de sel when in solution. The strong suggestion was that the textures and sizes of the crystals, and not the chemical compostions, were responsible for the differences.

Cool, thanks. I might have just browned the butter too aggressively. I split the last batch in half ... baked one after a day and the other after three days. I didn't notice any significant differences in flavor or texture. Which is fine with me. It's nice to have the flexibility to bake them whenever.

Great, I'm glad you liked them, Isomer. Did you make them with the added dry milk? If so, I'm curious to know if you noticed any kind of bitter aftertaste. I noticed this in a couple of batches I made lately, and am thinking the recipe might be better with a little less of the dry milk. Or maybe with the butter browned a bit less than what I've been doing.

I'm far from an expert sharpener, but I'll add the observation that everyone I've seen who sharpens Japanese knives for a living (Dave Martell, the bladesmiths at Epicurean Edge and Korin), and everyone I've seen who makes these knives by hand, uses waterstones. Many of them seem to like the diamond stones in the coarse grits for repairing and rebevelling knives, but for sharpening and polishing they're all about waterstones. And strops, but that's another story. One option that seems to work equally well is automotive wet/dry sandpaper mounted to a piece of float glass or ceramic tile. You can improvise your own setup with scrap materials and gluestick. This method is popular with some woodworkers as well. The advantage is very low cost of entry, and it's cheap and easy to experiment with lots of different grits. Also, no water or flattening needed. The disadvantage is that the longterm cost is high, and switching from grit to grit is a pain. It's a good way to learn, though, because the techniques are the same as with stones. People have as many opinions about stones as they do about knives. I decided to get an inexpensive Norton set. It comes with a 220/1000, a 4000/8000 stone, and a flattener. Total cost was about $120 delivered. I figure that by the time I wear these out, I'll have gotten my money's worth and will then know enough about sharpening to figure out what stones to buy next. These inexpensive stones are probably less efficient and less nice to work with than top stones like the Shaptons, but they're capable of doing a good job ... right now I'm the weak link, not the stones.

I've got a big kitchen and I'd be lost without a pot rack and wall mounting. I love the idea of the magnets from the hard drives. Those things are mighty. I've mostly used them as toys, but this post has the wheels turning ...

Here's an idea for anyone who likes experimenting more than they like math: Get a cheap hygrometer (or improvise one). Drop it into milks and creams of known fat content. Put your own marks on the side with something indellible. If you have marks for 0, 2, 4, 20, 30, 36, 40 percent (or whatever you come up with) you'll be able to estimate reasonably well for cream percentages that fall between the lines.

I wonder why it wouldn't. Cream has a pretty low proportion of milk solids, right? So by far the most important components are water and fat, which have very different densities. Why wouldn't a density measurement at least get you within a couple of percent (once you figure out the formula)?

That Ming Tsai recipe looks like a cruel joke. The butter is replaced by two completely flavorless ingredients. This is what I think of as the cuisine of self-punishment.

That's a great point. Instead of "medium rare," get a description out of the customer. "warm but bright pink in the middle, brown on the outside." No room for confusion. On the larger issue, I think a lot of confusion would vanish if the resaurant decides exactly what business it's in. Is it primarily in service to the food and the culinary arts, and to the vision of the chef? Or is it in service to the customers? I don't mean this as a rhetorical question. Both anwers are equally valid (but if your answer is the first one, you'd better be f'ing good, or people will stop coming). If everyone in the resaurant is clear on this question, then there won't be any awkwardness when the customer orders the tuna well done. The quick answer will either be Yes Sir or No Way!

I would aim for making it intensely flavored, with very high quality butter. Then just use half as much of it. Notice that the French were all skinny before mcdonald's showed up.

What a drag that none of these things is available there. It's surprising. Is it just because the bakeries are so plentiful and so good that no one bakes at home? I think there was talk about more of the KA line becoming available in Europe. I don't know why it would take more than just addapting the motor and curcuits for different voltage, but they make it sound like a big deal. Maybe it's because of CE regulations and things like that.

I haven't heard of that particular defect in a KA. But heavy mixing, like pizza dough or pasta, can put stress on the the lock tha holds the head down. If you're working much with dough, I'd strongly suggest going with one of the bowl lift models. I thought they'd be less convenient than the tilt heads, but I find the opposite to be the case. The big mixers have a much wider bowl, which makes it easy to add ingredients while the machine's running. You never have to worry about the lock on the tilt head ... there isn't one.

We used to make up to 120 gallons a day, using three white mountain 5 gallon rock salt and ice freezers. It wasn't pretty, and a day rarely went by without a couple of broken gears, but the ice cream was good. The shop used a commercial base that was customized for us by a local dairy. It used egg yolk for the emulifier and the usual natural gums for stabilizing. The key to good texture was the hardening cabinet ... I think it was about minus 60 degrees F. We emptied the soft ice cream from the machines into 5 gallon tubs and stacked them into the hardening cabinet. After 24 hours in there they were hard as granite. Then they rotated into the walk-in freezer (probably around zero degrees) and after a day or two in there they rotated into the scooping cabinet (probably around 5 or 10 degrees). We also sold pints, paked by hand right out of the machines and hardened in the pint containers. These were retailable. I don't know how long the shelf life was supposed to be. In general the ice cream didn't last long. We dated the tubs and didn't like anything to stick around in the store longer than a week, but I don't know if it would actually get icy a few days past that.

Has anyone done a blind taste test to see if they can really taste iodide or anti-caking agents? I think the way to do it would be with non-sea salt (so there aren't other minerals confusing things) and with the salt disolved in water (so the texture can't be an influence).

That shouldn't be hard to arrange

The other night I cooked dinner at a friend's house and brought my 270. One of her cutting boards was made of glass (Ack!), and the other was wood, but measured about 5x8 inches. Which was actually ok in one sense, because there wasn't room for anything bigger on the counter. To my surprise, it wasn't all that hard to work on the wee board. Lack of counter space was a worse problem than the big knife. My only concern was trying to keep the blade from banging into things like the dish drying rack and the coffee maker. I didn't need to do anything like mince a big pile of herbs, luckily. But basic things like chopping an onion were easier than they'd have been with a small knife. Just being able to make the horizontal cuts with one slice instead of sawing back and forth ... that kind of thing.

That's the poetic name for sodium ferrocyanide

Not a non-sequitur at all (maybe what you mean is that it's a specious argument? But it's not that either). The general premise of a question like the one this thread is based on might be summed up as this: your greater responsibilities as a human being are often best realized through the skills and opportunities afforded by your profession. So what are you going to do about it. I don't want to speak for Alice Waters, but I'm willing to bet she considers her public service work as integral to her career as chef, not as anything extracurricular. And I think a big part of her mission is to get other chefs to think similarly. It should be obvious that the question implies responsibilities beyond the most basic contract of the job, and ones which are likely to be the subject of some debate. No one host a seminar on a question that could be answered by one sentence.

I've done some research on this topic. So far I've never come across a sablee recipe that's similar to a sweetened pate brissee, but many sucree recipes that are. The recipes that describe pate sucree as being made from creamed butter and sugar are essentially identical to pate sablee. This is likely the original definition of pate sucree; traditionally there may have been no such thing as pate sablee ... I'm not sure when the term first arrived. Looking at Larousse Gastronomique (1st english language edition), there's no mention of sablee, but sucree follows the creaming method. Looking farther back, to Escoffier, basically all the pastries (including brisee) are made by this method. The ones that don't fully incorporate the butter into the flour are the truly laminated pastries (feullettee, etc.). So, it seems that there's been some evolution not just in the terminology but in the pastry itself. What used to be called sucree seems now to be called sablee. Which means that sucree has at least in some cases morphed into something else. The usage I've seen that isn't redundant with sablee, is basically a sweetened version of pate brisee. Does this make any sense? The real conclusion is that the methods and names have not stayed consistent over the years. Nowadays they mean different things to different people. But if you're looking for a distinction between sablee and sucree, I've found that sablee always refers to sugar and butter getting creamed together, while sucree sometimes refers to the same thing and other times refers to a sweetened brisee. Some of my recipes and notes on different pastry doughs for tart shells can be downloaded here. Edited to add: Mary Elizabeth is adding to the confusion by showing sablee recipes that aren't creamed! I'm aware of Herme's recipes, but haven't included them in this discussion because he's usually doing his own thing ... I generally assume his recipes aren't examples of anything traditional.