paulraphael

maybe this would look too nasty, but what about blondies died brick red (using whatever they use for red velvet cake)?

Clarified butter is one approach, but not the only one, and not always the most desireable. Anyone who wants to learn hollandaise well enough to improvise should consider learning all the basic methods (whole solid butter, whole melted butter, and clarified butter). Each gives a different result; each is appropriate in different situations.

Pureed celeriac is my new favorite. But the first question is why avoid the starch? If it's a diabetic issue I wouldn't worry ... mashed potatoes have a very low glycemic index if made with a reasonable (or unreasonable) amount of butter.

Here's a way of using your thumb muscle that I think is a little more accurate ... Muscle relaxed = raw/black and blue Muscle stretched (puling your index finger and thumb apart) = rare/medium rare Muscle flexed hard = medium / well done it's accurate, but a pretty rough guide ... I still haven't figured out how to use touch for anything more precise than this.

The puree was phenomenal. I made it with a bit of garlic: 2 celeriac knobs 6 cloves garlic, unpeeled 2 cups milk 1-1/2 quarts water 1/2 cup cream 2 to 3 oz butter 1 to 2 teaspoons salt White pepper I boiled the celeriac and garlic in the water and milk, peeled the garlic, and them mashed up the celeriac and garlic a bit to soften. They went into the blender with the cream, and with enough of the cooking liquid to let the blender process it. once it got going smoothly, I dropped in the butter and blended 4 or 5 minutes. Seasoned with salt and white pepper right before the end. It was a little on the thin side (my blender doesn't have an easy time with thick mixtures) but after I held it for an hour on a bain marie it lost a bit of excess water and the texture was perfect. It seems pretty foolproof ... next time I'll try the apples or something else. Thanks for all the tips!

I've had these for a while now and have made a few tarts with them. They're perfect! Absolutely even browning of the tart shell; there's no visible color change between where the shell is covered by the pan and where it's open to the air. Why aren't these more popular? Am I the only one who has issues with the tinned steel pans? Thanks again for the tip.

Nope. Just made a batch this morning, and was actually a little scared that I'd have all the problems mentioned in this thread, just by virtue of having read about them! But there was no appreciable difference between the first and last batch. It might help that I'm using a commercial aluminum griddle that weighs six or seven lbs. (I get similar results with a big copper saute pan, or commercial weight aluminum fry pans. But the griddle's bigger. Also, I preheated for a solid 5 minutes. By the time I started pouring the batter, it was evenly heated edge to edge, but the butter, which had just gone in, had barely started browning.

I don't think there's any major problem with food science or food scientists. The problems--the 'nutritionism,' the sophistry, the fad diets, the nutrients-of-the-week--come from journalists and manufacturers and diet book authors. These people at best don't know how to interpret the science, and at worst use it deliberately as a source of half-truths from which to spin their sales pitches. Scientists aren't fools. They unerstand the challenges of their field and the limits of their studies. A scientist studying the effects of grape soda on mice knows that her results are applicable, within a certain range of statistical certainty, to mice. To mice consuming a certain amount of grape soda under certain circumstances. As far as the applicability of the results to rats, or monkeys, or people, the answer is usually no more confident than "further research appears warranted." Trouble starts when the journalist, with no scientific education beyond senior year of high school, skims the data. Or when a diet author, or Pepsico marketing ace, sees right past the conclusion to the dollar signs. Then we see it: Grape Soda Prevents Colon Cancer! Buy Grape, Live Longer! Lose Half Your Bodyweight on the Grape Soda Diet! So are the people who buy into the hype without any skepticism victims, or are they fools? Further research appears warranted.

At the home made ice cream place where I worked, I discovered that one of the employees (who later went on to divinity school) was an absolute master of the prat fall. He would fall off of anything, completely convincingly, bringing down piles of plastic and stainless containers, tongs, milkshake cups, bins ... anything that could bounce, fly across the room, and make an incredible racket. He was willing to risk injury for his art, and many times ended up with cuts, black eyes, and shredded clothes. I was manager of the place, in charge of ice cream making and FOH, and probably should have put an end to this. But life is short, so instead I became his apprentice. It was like Karate Kid, with him teaching me tricks with increasing degrees of danger (and glory). The crowning achievement was to get on the highest rung of the step ladder that we used for changing flavors on the dry erase board, reach for something, and tumble off--bringing down the ladder, the markers, and all the loud containers and other props that we'd laboriously set up on the counter below. The customers, it seemed, didn't like this. They didn't know if they should laugh, politely look the other way, or run for an ambulance. The employees who scooped the ice cream dreaded it (it made them nearly jump out of their skin, and then they had to pacify the customers). And the owner HATED it. But he somehow felt powerless to stop it. Maybe he thought we'd quit if we lost our only creative outlet. Another game that tortured scoopers and customers alike was pioneered by a brilliant, filthy-minded ice cream maker. He staged mock dungeon proceedings in the kitchen. He loved the deafening noise you could make by slapping two of the long, plastic spatulas against eachother. He'd be alone in the kitchen, and suddenly the calm would be violated by a loud SMACK!!! followed by "Ow!!!" and then (through gritted teeth), "Thank you sir, may I have another!?" This would be repeated fifty or sixty times, while the scoopers up front blushed and tried to pretend they don't hear anything.

Wow, I think there's something wrong with your water.

Are you asking if you'll have useable vanilla extract a couple of days after putting the beans in the vodka??

For me non-clarified butter works brilliantly for pancakes. It's all I ever use (except for the recipe I listed earlier that uses olive oil. If used properly, the butter will brown (giving you nice beurre noisette flavors) but won't burn. The trick is to use just a little butter, spread it quickly as it's melting, and add the batter immediately. At most I have to rebutter the pan or griddle once when making a single batch. What seems to happen is this (based on pure speculation): the water evaporates off of the butter and the milk solids brown. They don't burn because the cold batter spontaneously cools the surface of the pan enough. The butterfat clings to the pan, leaving it greasy, while the browned milk solids get mostly carried away with the first pancakes. But just like with ghee, the browned butter flavor lingers in the fat in the pan. I love it. Never crosses my mind to use flavorless oil. By the way, when I mentioned walking away from the pan for five minutes, I was talking about preheating it. Not suggesting that anyone incinerate their breakfast.

Brilliant, thanks.

Cool, thanks, that's helpful. Do you like to blend before or after adding butter/cream? And are there pros/cons to the oven over boiling?

that's strange ... none of my plates get at all warm in the microwave (unless there's food or something on them to conduct the heat).

so no issues with the starches getting gluey?

no metal? what's up with that? do you get a fluffy texture when you do it this way??

According to my books, a hint is three times as much as an inkling, but only half as much as an innuendo. Are you on a diet? Maybe the chef can use light cream. Or cut the amount to two inklings.

I just fell in love with this after having it at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant. Some friends are coming over dinner this weekend to be my guinee pigs ... any tips on how to make this perfectly smooth and fluffy? Does celeriac share any issues with potatoes (turning to glue from overprocessing, etc. etc.)?

I'm a fan of brown chicken stock; I use it more than any other. For everyday cooking I use it more often than demiglace or veal stock or its equivalents, because it's cheap and easy to make. Anything with beef or veal bones requires major life sacrifices to make, so I use it more selectively. It's possible that white chicken stock is more versatile than brown (I wouldn't use the brown chicken stock with most fish, for example, but in some cases white might work). But I like the roasted flavors and the color. It's simple and cheap to make if you roast a lot of chickens and keep the carcasses. I leave the back meat on, so there's little extra meat I have to buy to make the stock. In the future I may start adding feet, in order to get some more gelatin. If anyone thinks I'd be better served by white chicken stock, now's your chance to convert me. I need to make a batch in the next week or so.

My sense is that up until the 1960s, French style cooking was was more or less dominated by flour thickened sauces. All the sauce Espagnole and demiglace recipes from the Careme and Escoffier eras were thickened at least partially with roux. It was the chefs of the Nouvelle Couisine era that reacted against this, barring flour, and thickening sauces with highly reduced gelatin and reduced cream and butter. And cream. And butter. And did I mention cream? Part of their genius was in garnering a reputation for a lighter, less rich cuisine. It's interesting that Escoffier predicted that flour would fall out of fashion, but I'm not sure if he had ideas about what would take its place. I'm interested that they used arrowroot back then; I had assumed it was a more recent discovery. When I thicken with starch, it's often my first choice.

I love a well made brothlike sauce ... there's something about the freshness and directness of flavor that gets muted when a sauce is thickened (by any method). It's definitely a different mindset. The right kind of plate/bowl makes a big difference. And of course, a SPOON. I've noticed a trend of restaurants making me ask for a spoon. Even thick sauces are hard to sample with a fork, and I've never liked to sop up sauces with bread. It deadens them with starch. Gimme a spoon, and gimme sauce. It's the only utensile I need 90% of the time. Rant over. Back to broth-like sauces, I think it's helpful to think of thickness as a continuum. You can find some great consistencies in the range between creamy traditonal sauces and watery broths. Sometimes just 1/4 teaspoon of arrowroot in a quart of sauce, or little bit of reduction of gelatinous stock, can give some of the best qualities of both broth and traditional sauce. But don't forget the spoon.

Depending on the pans and stove you use, the batter can have a pretty negligible effect. (except on butter ... butter will burn without pancakes on the surface to cool it. I can imagine that with lighter pans or an amemic stove this would be an issue. A pan won't just keep getting hotter ad infinitum. It always reaches a point of equilibrium, which is the temperature at which it's radiating heat (into the air, the room, the food) at the same rate that it's taking it on from the stove. What's at issue is the difference in rate that batter absorbs heat from the pan vs. the air alone. It sounds like in your experience there's a big difference. In mine not so much. I can walk away from the pan (either a 5 lb copper pan or a 6 lb aluminum slab griddle) for five minutes and throw some more batter on it and not have any issues (except maybe some burned butter). For whatever reasons, the pan/stove combinations that I've used don't see that much difference between batter and no batter.

Next time you make your stock, it would be helpful to put some more gelatinous bones in the stock. If you can get some chicken feet, and maybe even a bunch of wings, that would help a lot. So would pigs feet. And being more generous with the meat/bones in general would help. Be wary of over-reducing. It's a way to get a nice consistency from gelatinous stock, but there are prices to pay. You lose a LOT of flavor, especially the subtler, brighter, more aromatic flavor compounds. And too much reduced gelatin can be gluey; it can stick your teeth together, and congeal on the plate before you're done eating. It's worth while to look into other ways to thicken and enrichen stocks, so you're not dependent on reduction alone. I like simmering some meatier cuts in the stock at the end for enrichment. Arrowroot is one of my favorite thickeners, as long as you don't overdo it. James Peterson's Sauces book is the best resource I've seen.

Steve, your hypothesis fits my experience exactly. Which I hope doesn't mean I'll start itching for an infra red thermometer anytime soon. There is one other complication: the ideal temperature depends on the nature of the batter. If you're always playing with different recipes, you'll end up with batters that loft to different heights, and sometimes only trial and error will find that perfect temperature. Even when I'm not changing recipes, I find the batter changes from one batch to another. I'm not sure why. Maybe because I'm not weighing ingredients, or maybe it's humidity, or the gods expressing displeasure. But I find on the occasions when the first ones bomb, it has to do with funky batter and not any kind of karma with the pan.