paulraphael

Why not take this argument to the logical conclusion and say that as a human being, your only responsibility is to your own needs and desires-- and all else is sheer vanity. It could be so, but then I'm grateful to all the obscenely vain charlatans who stroked their egos by making the world a better place ... like Ghandi, Mother Theresa, Lincoln, M.L. King Jr., the Dalai Lama .... Looking at mere chefs, we risk being blinded by the vanity of someone like Alice Waters, who works as hard to improve the food people eat in inner cities as she ever did at her restaurants.

A nonstick pan is probably the worst choice for searing a big piece of meat. The coating is an insulator and slows the transfer of heat. Also, this is the one application where you really risk heating the pan up so much that the teflon breaks down. Not only will it kill the pan, but the gasses that it liberates are not good for anyone. You don't need nonstick. Properly seared tuna will release from any metal. If you have a high BTU stove, any pan with a plain metal surface will work. If you have a typical home stove, you want to use a pan that has enough heat capacity to store a lot of energy. In other words, it should be heavy. The idea is that it should stay hot enough to brown the meat even after the initial loss of heat from the cold meat going into the pan. Cast iron works well, as does heavy aluminum or copper. On a home stove, you want to preheat the pan on highest heat for a good five minutes. With something as heavy and non-conductive as cast iron, you might need to go longer. Water splashed into the pan should leap out of it, or form little beads that skitter around on the surface. If the water just hisses and turns to steam the pan isn't hot enough.

Sweetened brisée is usually called pate sucrée. Sablée means "sandy" ... it's usually a whole different animal. I guess you could debate if a traditional sablée is even really pastry. It's more like a cookie dough. Sablées are made like you describe, with creamed ingredients,or at least thoroughly mixed flour and fat, and a texture more like a sugar cookie or a fig newton. The sablée recipes I've seen have eggs in them, but I'm not sure if they all do. Eggs are an optional ingredient in brisée and sucré doughs.

I didn't consider that part of the definition because it strikes me as a bit contrived. I've never heard genius defined by that standard before. You could be describing "a person of greatness." But I don't believe that geniuses, in the conventional sense (who in many cases seem to be socially awkward computer programmers, with off-the-charts cognitive abilities and bad personal hygiene), are generally obligated to be a great men or women. In this case the dictionary captures my sense of conventional usage: genius |ˈjēnyəs| noun ( pl. geniuses ) 2 a person who is exceptionally intelligent or creative, either generally or in some particular respect : one of the great musical geniuses of the 20th century. That standard here is "exeptional" ... which can be interpreted pretty broadly. Ok. End of semantic droning. Back to food.

If we accept this definition of genius, it still leaves a lot unanswered. How do you quantify complexity? How complex is it to arrange different patterns from the twelve musical notes in the western scale? How complex is it to play chess ... a game with just six kinds of pieces and 64 squares? How complex is it to arrange different colored paints on a canvas? With these questions in mind, both gastronomy and neuroscience strike me as vast landscapes ... ripe ground for discoveries of genius proportion. On another note, some of the attacks on people's originality strike me as equally unhelpful. Sure, Adria didn't invent spherification. Likewise Dali didn't invent paint, and Mozart invented neither the chromatic scale nor the piano. But all three used their chosen media to create things that are (at least in some important ways) unlike anything people have experienced before.

Good info here, but I disagree that there's no benefit to letting the hanger age in the bag. As with any meat, enzyme action will tenderize it a bit. This has nothing to do with collagen in the cut. I wouldn't go crazy; there's a risk of spoilage if you don't have the temperature low enough or if you go too long. A couple of days would be reasonable. You won't get any of the flavor benefits of dry aging. As far as I know, hanger isn't dry aged, but this is because it's a small cut, independent of any bones or larger primals. If you dry aged enough to make a difference, there'd be nothing left after you trimmed the dessicated meat! Also, someone mentioned mixing oil and butter to raise the burning point of the butter. This is a kitchen myth; it doesn't work. The milk solids in the butter will burn at the same temp no matter what you cut the butter with. For buttery goodness with seared meat, you can use clarified butter, or better yet, sear with a high heat oil and then finish with butter on lower heat.

I hope you're planning to document this adventure.

Yeah, I thought the cuisinart mixer looked pretty cool in pictures. In person it looks absolutely ridiculous. So many things to break in so many ways, and a glowing, shimmering aura of cheapness. It really seems to have been designed by a marketing team and a photo stylist. Strange, because I've generally had good experiences with the company's products. I'm pretty well sold on KA, as long as I have easy access to their service (anywhere in the U.S., really) and have a chance to do some serious torture testing during the 6 month warranty period of the refurb mixers that I buy. I returned one a few weeks before the warranty ended. No catastrophic failure, but it seemed to be missing some kind of internal retaining ring, which led to all kinds of free play and odd noises. They cheerfully replaced it after it had powered through many batches of bread, pizza, cakes, cookies, ice cream, and ground meat. The new one seems like a keeper so far (knock on die-cast aluminum). For what it's worth, if a current model KA 6 quart model is failing at something that an old 5 quart was able to do, then there's something wrong with it. Quality control is all over the map; some mixers just run way too hot. If you have one of these, and KA doesn't get that it's a problem unit, hurry up and break it so you can try another one!

What do you like the kiritsuki for? What does it do better than the longer gyutos? I mean, besides look so much more badass.

How about ditching the spinner and just using a bunch of towels? The spinner takes up space and doesn't get greens completely dry.

About a year ago I bought a 240mm gyuto (about 9-1/2 inches) by Hiromoto. It's a great knife that I've enjoyed using. But a funny thing happened. Gradually the knife started training me to use different cutting techniques, and partly because of this, it started to feel too small. I never imagined this would happen, since I've used 8" chef's knives happily for years. I decided to try a 270mm (10-1/2 inch) version of the same knife. I was worried that it would be poorly balanced or that it would be unwieldy for tip work ... I want to be able to use use it for garlic and shallots and other small things. Well, I picked it up, started to cut with it, and couldn't believe how great it was. Where had you been all my life?? It was the perfect size. No unwieldiness. And the extra blade made me so much more efficient. I also realized that I like a slighlty heavier knife. The 270 in this model is 2 oz heavier than the 240 ... not much, but it just feels better in my hand. Many people love the lightness of a thin gyuto, but the 240 was so light that it always felt like it might fly away. The result was that I overgripped it. With the 270, I'm comfortable holding it lightly. The knife does the work ; my hand is just along for the ride. On saturday I made 3 quarts of salsa by hand, gratuitously brunoising the tomatoes. I wanted to do more! It was over too quickly. I don't know if how many people would have the same experience, but I'd urge anyone to try a knife in this size. I couldn't believe the difference it made.

One of the most misunderstood things about this topic is that your body responds to the glycemic index of the sum total of the contents of your stomach. You might read that a baguette has an incredibly high GI. But if you slather some butter on it, it drops dramatically. And if there's already a bunch of fat and protein in your belly, the slice of bread will hardly matter at all. That's good news for pasta, which is usually coated with very low GI fats and proteins. Endurance athletes look at this from the opposite side. How can I get these calories into my blood as quickly as possible? The answer is often some kind of long chain carbohydrate gel, but if there's already a ham sandwich in your stomach, you're out of luck. You'll be waiting a long time for those calories.

Interesting. I also wonder if it's going for a general skewering of traditional Japanese customs, and that the sushi bar is a perfect vehicle for this. A young generation mocking the old generation kind of thing.

I suspect if you went to Tokyo and followed any of the advice in the video, the result would be some kind of international incident. (Except for ordering panda sushi, and eating the salt out of the saucers in the doorway ... I'm pretty sure everyone does that).

Hate it? It's what they DO! James Peterson said his favoriite compliment was a cookbook customer saying "I love your _______ recipe, but I made my own version of it, substituting this and this and that, and it was delicious." It lets him know that the person made the leap from the recipe to really learning how to cook ... which is what he's trying to teach more than anything else.

The final word! All questions are definitively answered by this educational video. With subtitles, and remarkable precision:

Ok, the Taylor 9306 is really cool. I should suspend judgement until it's lasted a year without breaking (no other digital thermometer has ...), or at least til i've cooked with it. But after a solid half hour of playing with it, it seems like the coolest thermometer I've used. Found for $84 online; a lot steeper than than the $17 model it replaced. But it's got a thermocouple, an infrared sensor, pretty good ergonomics, and it's waterproof (or so they tell me). My only complaint so far is that the max temperature the IR sensor can read is 482 F. I would love it if it went higher. The probe measures over 600 degrees, which is absurd. "Would you like your tenderloin well done, incinerated, or turned to glowing gasses?" The probe seems accurate: I measured some boiling water and it was dead on. The IR sensor is harder to test. Details here: http://www.partshelf.com/taylor9306.html It was delivered to me at work. Within minutes I was pointing it at people and telling them how hot they are (within .5 degrees!)

I'm mostly dealing with small, non-flat fish, so I'm picking up a $25 forschner flexible fillet knife. Much more appealing than a deba that costs 5X as much. We'll see how it goes.

Thread back from the dead. Because my CDN quicktip thermometer joined the dead. Has anyone tried the Extech? Amazon has it for $36. And despite some warriness of Taylor, I'm close to making the move on this: http://www.comforthouse.com/cuissmarblen.html Some sources have it for around $83 ... a chunk less than thermapen, plus a decent looking IR feature. Edited to add: i'm too impatient to wait around for sage advice. i ordered the taylor probe/ir unit. will report back.

I was lucky enough to exchange some ideas with Michael Laiskonis (pastry chef at le bernardain) about brown butter ice cream, and a light bulb went off. I realized you could intensify the flavor of brown butter by adding some dry milk to the melted butter before browning it (it's the milk solids in the butter that brown and release the flavor). A little goes a long way. I adjusted the cookie recipe, and think it's an improvement. Not a radical difference, but the flavors are deeper.

Thanks Chad, that's a much better study than any of the ones I've been able to track down. I'm still interested the idea that wood somehow weakens the action of chlorine bleach. Do you remember your source for that? After looking into this topic a bit, I'm realizing that it's a very young body of research. Which means we should all keep an open mind about it and pay attention to new discoveries. There are bound to be some revisions and surprises as more specific research gets done.

How are you lining your mold with dough? Shrinkage often comes from stretching the dough to fit ths sides of tart pan (or whatever you're baking in). When I learned the way around this it stopped being a problem. Are you rolling out the dough larger than it needs to be, and then pushing down to compress it into the mold? I put a tutorial on tart shells up on my web server: www.paulraphaelson.com/downloads/tarts.rtf It's basically all my notes from the research and experimenting I did a couple of years ago. It includes pate brisee, sablee, sucree, and Pierre Herme's recipe, which is a hybrid. There are bakers' percentages and notes on achieving different textures and a lot on method. Some of the method is non-traditional (I have a wacky system of using preheated pennies for pie weights, to help brown the bottom of the shells) but the rest is textbook. I have another one on chocolate tart shells if anyone's interested.

I've been hearing more than a few cooks talking about applying Japanese knife techniques to western cooking. But there seems to be precious little information on the techniques themselves. Chad Ward mentioned this site: http://www.tsuji.ac.jp/hp/gihou/Basic_Techniques/index.html which is interesting, but the pics are small and it's stingy with details. One thing I've been wanting to learn is basic fish butchery ... at the very least filleting small fish, like trout, branzini, snapper, etc.. This is one area where I've heard people claiming the superiority of Japanese techniques, including japanese style knives instead of western style fillet knives. Does anyone know about this? Or about good sources edumacation?

I'm going to try some safflower oil, since no one seems to have much experience with it. Only issue is that the high smoke point comes from highly refined oil, and I'm not sure if that's indicated on the label. I'll let you know what I figure out.

I like grapeseed a lot too, and when I used it, searing meat was a more leisurely process. But it's pretty expensive. I've gone to using inexpensive olive oil for all my stovetop use. It's not as robust. I was thinking about trying canola oil again, but then safflower caught my eye with that high smoke point. I'm guessing it's cheaper than either olive or grapeseed oil. But I've never tried it.