paulraphael

One reason I use melted butter is that it's browned, and I brown it as part of the cookie making process. I'm also making the cookies on a small scale, so I don't have a problem with the burly exercise of scooping the chilled dough. If I were making them on a commercial scale, I might try browning the butter separately, and keeping a supply in the fridge. Then your idea of making the recipe with softened (and not creamed) brown butter would be more practical. I'm guessing it would work fine, but haven't tried it.

Vanilla Ice Cream (really good!) Serves 6 as Dessert. I wanted to create an ice cream base with the smoothness, body, and stability of an egg yolk-ladden, very rich, custard-based ice cream--but without the strong egg flavor or the greasy film that these ice creams can leave in your mouth. I turned to some of the tricks used by my favorite pastry chefs. There are two yolks per quart, instead of the usual six or more. There are also added milk solids, and very small amounts of gelatin, starch, and alcohol. The recipe is a bit more complex than typical homemade ice cream, but I think it's worth it. It has a full body, a natural and creamy melt, and it will last several days in the freezer without deflating or getting icy. It will be a bit too hard to serve when it's at freezer temperature, but not rock-hard like typical home recipes. This recipe will work best with a slow-turning machine that doesn't introduce a lot of air (overrun). It will give you between 3/4 and 1 quart of 15% butterfat ice cream. You can replace the vanilla with the seasoning of your choice. You can also increase or decrease the amount of fat by changing the proportion of milk to cream. I like to use less fat with fruit flavored ice creams, and much less fat with chocolate. 1-1/2 c Whole Milk* (367g) 1 tsp Cornstarch (2.8g) 1 Vanilla bean (I like Madagascar, but Mexican is also good) 3/4 c minus 1 TB Granulated Sugar (128g) 2-1/2 T Nonfat Dry Milk** (25g) 1/3 tsp Powdered Gelatin (1g) 1 pinch Salt (1g) 2 Egg Yolks (36g) 1-1/2 c Heavy Cream* (358g) 2 tsp Vodka or alcohol-based vanilla extract (10g) -Make slurry with cornstarch and a small portion of the milk -Add cornstarch slurry to 1/2 of the milk and bring to a light simmer in a saucepan. Stir until it thickens. -Add the rest of the milk. Stir and heat just until it steams (about 180 degrees F). While it's warming up, split the vanilla bean lengthwise and scrape the seeds into the milk with the tip of a finger or paring knife. Add the bean pod to the milk. When the mixture reaches temperature, remove from heat. let it sit covered for 30 minutes. -Whisk yolks until pale (optional—to diminish yellow color of base) -Remove vanilla bean from milk and set aside. Thoroughly mix the dry milk, powdered gelatin, and salt into sugar. Whisk this mixture into the milk. -Temper yolks with a portion of the warm milk and pour the milk / yolks back into the saucepan. -Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly and scraping the bottom and corners with a spatula until the custard thickens (about 180 to 185 degrees).*** Turn down heat and continue stirring vigorously for 15 seconds, then remove from heat and stir another 15 seconds. -Pour the custard into the heavy cream. Stir in the vodka or extract. Put the vanilla bean back in. Chill thoroughly, at least 8 hours. If making a large quantity (more than 1 quart) chill in an ice bath before refrigerating. -Strain with a fine strainer or chinois (important). Rinse and reserve vanilla bean for something else. Freeze the mix in your ice cream maker. With a mulitispeed machine, start on slowest speed. At end when ice cream firms up and begins to expand, raise speed until you get the volume you want (this recipe works best with a low overrun). -Harden for several hours (ideally overnight) in a cold freezer. If you can set your freezer to -5 degrees F or lower, you'll get better results. Ice cream will have to warm up several degrees before serving. 20 to 30 minutes in the fridge works well. Ideal serving temperature is 5 to 10 degrees F. *Use the best quality milk and cream you can get, ideally from an artisinal farm. Avoid ultrapasteurized cream. Unhomogenized milks and creams are ok, but may lead to a slightly icier texture. **Dry milk needs to be high quality and it needs to be fresh and properly stored. There should be no off odors either when it's dry or when it's mixed. Better to leave it out than to use substandard dry milk. If you leave it out, increase sugar to 140g and increase vodka to 1TB. ***The starch and gelatin will have pre-thickened the custard, making it a bit trickier to tell when the yolks are properly cooked. However, the starch also offers some protection against curdling. Keywords: Dessert, Intermediate, Ice Cream, Ice Cream Maker ( RG2135 )

I've learned more from Peterson's Sauces than any other source, with the possible exception of McGee's On Food and Cooking.

But why is that? "Pastry" seems more limited than "Dessert." Granted, there are savory pastries served with other courses (quiches, amuses, pastry-wrapped meat, etc.) but those often aren't the domain of the pastry chef. Dessert covers a lot of ground. Cakes, ice creams and sorbets, souflés, mousses, sweet terrines, cookies, merringues, puddings, quickbreads, custards, candies ... none of these things is pastry. All are dessert.

Exactly! How is "dessert chef" more limiting than "pastry chef?" Most of what these guys make is dessert; a small fraction of what they make is pastry. Right?

The fridge was too cold when I left town, and a pint of cream was a block of ice two weeks later. Does this wreck the emulsion somehow? Can I thaw it and make ice cream with it? Anything else I should know?

Exactly. The average AP flour has a level of protein smack in the middle of cake flour and bread flour. If you want a bit more protein than your AP flour has, you could just as easily use AP and add just a touch of bread flour. The only other differences with cake flour are that it's chlorinated, has an especially fine grind, and has cornstarch added. As far as I can imagine, none of these things is an advantage in a cookie, unless you're trying to make a very light and fluffy one. On a related note, you don't want to develop gluten in a cookie, either. Unlike with bread and pasta, the protein content of the flour isn't desireable for its ability to make gluten. It's actually a liability, forcing you to use extra care to avoid gluten development (and the resulting tough texture). The reason you might want higher protein is for its ability to absorb moisture, which helps create a moist, chewy cookie and one that's resistant to drying out. One of the reasons oatmeal is a popular ingredient in cookies is that it has a very high protein content (higher than bread flour) but produces essentially no gluten. This lets you up the moistness and chewiness without worrying about toughness. I use some oat flour in my chocolate chip cookies for this purpose... enough to help the texture, but not enough to make them taste like oatmeal cookies.

Sorry, that should just be written more clearly. Keep the dough chilled as much as possible. The instructions are just letting you know not to bother making perfectly smooth balls, since the dough will be too hard.

Would anyone be interested in testing the NYT recipe with all purpose flour? My bet is that it would end up the same as with the cake/bread flour combo. I suspect the author of the recipe copied Jaques Torres's use of the two flours, but Torres torres likely only uses that combination because he doesn't use AP for anything in his shop.

I originally made them with dark muscovado; they worked fine but were just a bit too dark and molassesy (is that a word?) for my tastes. I felt that it overwhelmed the butter a bit. Some might prefer it with the dark sugar; the only way to know is to try. I suggest substituting the sugars by volume instead of weight.

Some helpful definitions here: http://www.baking911.com/pantry/sweeteners_brown.htm My abbreviated take is this: Muscovado sugars (light and dark) are partially refined, very flavorful brown sugars. They can substitute for regular brown sugar when you want a more 3-dimensional molasses taste. Turbinado sugar (also called sucanat or sugar-in-the-raw) is a paler partially refined sugar that tastes much less like molasses Demerrara sugar is a partially refined sugar with a bit more molasses than Turbinado, and large crystals. It's usually used undisolved, so the crystals can contribute texture (like coarse salt).

Does anydrous butter contain milk solids? That would be a big difference. In clarified butter the solids (and therefore much of the flavor) are removed; in ghee the solids are browned (adding toasted flavors) and then removed. If you remove the water but leave the solids alone you'd have a different product.

I'm intersted in experimenting with the extended aging also. I have to admit that I've chilled the dough anywhere from a few hours to 48 hours (just out of convenience), and haven't noticed any difference in taste. The sprinkle of sea salt sounds like an interesting addition; if I did this I might cut the amount of salt in the recipe (which in my recipe is abundant) I don't at all like the idea of the huge amounts of chocolate, or of using dark chocolate. In most chocolate recipes I like to use the best, darkest chocolate possible, and to use as much of it as possible. But I found with chocolate chip cookies, when I arrived at a cookie dough that really tasted good, using lots of dark chocolate just competed with the flavor of the cookie. So with a really tasty base recipe, I cut back on the chocolate chips and use ones in the 50% to 60% cocoa solids range. If I'm using chopped couverture, I try not to get the crumbs and small pieces into the dough. They melt into the cookie and turn it into something else (Jacques Torres says he goes for this effect; I don't like it with my recipe).

Yeah, I'm convinced it's nonsense. I think it's a mix of what Colicchio said, and the deeply ingrained prejudices in kitchens, and the negative psychological environment this creates for a lot of women. I have female friends who were line cooks. I never heard a peep out of them about the hard work, long hours, heat, or chaos, but I got an earful about how they were treated by some of the borderline cro-magnon men in the kitchen. As an aside, my passtime besides cooking is alpine mountaineering, which often involves 24 hour-plus days, covering multiple thousands of feet of vertical elevation in technical terrain, with nearly constant fear of rockfall, storms, and the ill effects of gravity. These are days that would leave any of my macho cook friends unconscious and with poop in their pants. But I've had my ass kicked--hard--by more female climbers than I care to count. It's true that at the elite levels male athletes in most sports edge out female ones. But I don't believe any of these line cooks who say the girls can't hang are operating on anything near an elite level of athleticism.

How about "Boil-In-Bag" ...? Chris has it exactly right; the vacuum pump in sous vide isn't about pressure (as a pressure cooker is). It's about getting rid of the air, plain and simple. So the title is silly. Unless it refers to trying to cook with Thomas Keller looking over your shoulder. Obviously it's not a deal breaker. Having to buy lots of big, expensive equipment is probably a deal breaker, but that's not the authors' problem.

Can anyone recommend a Chinese kitchen store in Chinatown in NYC?

I made a lapsang souchong creme anglaise a couple of times (once for a chocolate dessert, once for a pear tart). Not sure how I feel about it. I think the idea was better than the execution. Worth trying again, though. I love that tea.

I decided to try it again in spite of the bad memories ... there are lots of compelling reasons to add it to most ice cream recipes. So I bought some Organic Valley brand, in a resealable plastic bag. Hardly any smell at all! Either when dry or when mixed. Just slightly sweet. Not at all like my previous experiences (like attempting to bake with the stuff on backpacking trips). It will be interesting to see how long it lasts in the pantry.

I've had my eye on that recipe. Would definitely like to try it. Smart idea browning the cream; it has a higher concentration of milk proteins than butter.

Actually, it does. Just less per unit than milk. I wouldn't be surprised if lower fat cream has more per unit than higher fat cream, although I don't know for sure. The purpose of hardening isn't to freeze all the unfrozen water; if it were, the ice cream would be an unscoopable brick. The idea is to freeze enough of the unfrozen water in order to get the right consistency. Different percentages of the water will be frozen at different temperatures, thanks to the curious, selective freezing point suppression properties of the disolved solids. The main reason hardening needs to be done as a discrete step in commercial ice cream making is that the quantities are large, so it's difficult to harden the ice cream quickly. If you're making a quart at a time at home, a regular freezer will harden it fast enough to give you small ice crystals (and a smooth texture). You can just pop the fresh ice cream into the same environment you'll use to store it and it will turn out fine. Not so if you're trying to harden a stack of five gallon tubs. So ice cream shops typically have a hardening cabinet, which is just a freezer set somewhere between -40 and -80 degrees F. After 24 hours at these temps, the ice cream is indeed 100% frozen, although this is just a byproduct of the process. It then goes into a regular walk-in and gradually warms to storage temperature, and will eventually end up in a scooping cabinet which is even warmer (serving temperature). I assume all the same considerations apply to sorbet.

They're having a moving sale. For a while it was just minor discounts on their crappiest products, but now it's pretty compelling. 50% of list price on all Mauviel copper, for example. Discounts might get deeper as the final hour approaches.

I thought of that, but strawberries are listed (along with peaches) as very low pectin fruits.

I made some strawberry sorbet, using David Lebovitz's recipe (really simple ... berries, sugar, a bit of lemon juice and salt). Not only was it delicious, but it was much smoother than I expected. And it stayed smooth. It seems like there's something in the berries stabilizing the mixture and preventing ice crystals. Very much unlike my last batch of peach ice cream, which got icy right away. Does anyone know what it might be in the berries that has this effect? And more to the point, is there a good source of information on which fruits are likely to need help with some other stabilizing ingredient and which aren't?

The trouble with chlorine bleach is that it pretty quickly disintegrates sponges. Are you guys using peroxide or something similar? And what's the best way to microwave sponges without filling the air with cooked nasty sponge aroma?

I had a less stellar meal than U.E.'s last Sunday (and wrote a brief review on Yelp.com). His review adds to my suspicions: that we were there on an off night, and that the tasting menu is probably the way to go (we had the regular 3 course prix fixe). We really didn't love the large plates.