paulraphael

It works ok, but you won't have much control over the anges of the edge. The edge will be convex, and it's easy to round off the edge completely by pushing too hard. If you want to sharpen with sandpaper, mounting it to glass is more popular. If you do a google search for "scary sharpening" you'll find a lot of info on that. The advantages are that it's cheap to get started, and you can experiment with many grades of sandpaper to find what works. The disadvantage is that longterm it's more expensive than stones (you go through a lot of paper). And changing paper all the time is a hassle. A variation is to get the scary sharpening system from handamerican.com. They offer a pretty cool kit with all kinds of abrasive options. And a strop, which works brilliantly.

When I was a senior in college I led a student trip into the Rocky Mountain National Park ... a group of about a dozen freshmen who for the most part had never been backpacking or climbing before. On our first night out the menu was pasta. You might wonder if it's a good idea to make pasta at 11,000 feet elevation, where water boils at the temperature of a mild bubble bath. But pasta was the only thing I knew how to make at any altitude. And the price was right. So as we gathered around my sputtering MSR stove, bundled against the fall air in our fleece and poofy jackets, I took the opportunity to teach a masterclass on both cooking and energy conservation. God knows what I tried to teach them about cooking, but the energy conservation part involved my first culinary innovation: reuse the pasta cooking water to cook the second batch.On paper it seemed like a great idea, especially since the pasta took over 20 minutes to cook (maybe "cook" isn't the right word. "Start to disintegrate" is more like it). Anyway, the kids who got the first batch were not too impressed by the tomato covered mush I ladled out to them. But no one was prepared for the second batch. It seems that at those long, lukewarm cooking times, the water leaches a lot of starch out of the pasta. The second batch contributed enough starch to turn all the contents of the pot into glue. By the end you could just barely make out the shapes of individual noodles. We were all stunned by the pale, amorphous globs that I had to cut with a spoon and slide into people's bowls. Worse, this was not a situation where we could laugh about it and call domino's. This was dinner. And these kids were hungry. I made a lot of enemies that day.

Thanks, K8. My question is actually very specific; it's about incorporating the cocoa. And it's a recipe that I developed, so i don't have to follow it! My questions are 1) would incorporating the cocoa earlier (with the butter) release more of its flavor, and 2) would doing this hurt the cocoa's ability to contribute structure?

Maybe I haven't expressed myself clearly enough; you seem to be misconstruing what I'm saying. It's two simple points. 1) when sharpened to the angles that give it a performance advantage that I can detect, my gyuto is more fragile than my german knife. 2) at these angles, in my experience the gyuto does some thing exceptionally well, and some things not at all. the german knife can do everything, and do it all acceptably well. this fits my criteria for the difference between specialized and all-purpose. as soon as I start hearing things like "you can sharpen it at different angles if you want to do that," or "that's what a deba/sujihiki/honesuki is for," it reinforces my impression of specializaiion. If you look at a french text on knife skills, you the classic chef's knife being used for virtually everything. Different approach, that's all.

I don't sharpen the knives to the same angle, because the whole point of the Japanese knife is to be razor sharp. I sharpen each knife to the sharpest angle that I think the steel will hold. About 18 degrees per side on the german knife, 12 degrees on the japanese. They both hold their edge about equally long. An important difference is the failure mode. The japanese steel is brittle; the german steel is resilient. I have ocasionally put barely visible ripples in the edge of the german knife, which would likely have been chips in the japanese knife. Octaveman, do you think I should be using my gyuto (RC-62-63 carbon steel edge) to hack up chickens, chop chocolate, and cut heads and tails off of fish? (I don't own a knife that I'd use to crack veal bones, but I use the german chef's knife routinely for all these other tasks).

I Can't Believe it's Not I Can't Believe it's Not Butter. It's amazing.

I'm not talking about a crap German knife; I'm talking about a great one. It's one that I happily used for 100% of my chef knife-type prep work for about 6 years. I love my Japanese chef knife as well; my point is that it doesn't actually replace the all-purpose workhorse. It's more specialized. If I had to have one chef's knife, it would therefore have to be the German one, as much as I like the Japanese one. FWIW, with a couple of more specialized knives (bread and paring) my Japanese knives have completely replaced their predecessors. Just my personal experience.

Interesting. I imagine this would hold true for cookies and brownies that use cocoa? I have a brownie recipe that has some cocoa in it in addition to the chocolate (it provides a bit of structure and added intensity, and lets me get away with less flour). Right now I incorporate the cocoa at the end, with the flour. It just gets stirred into the batter right before baking. Do you suppose I'd get more flavor out of it by incorporating it with the buttter and chocolate, in the beginning? Would there be any drawbacks to this (like losing the structural qualities of the cocoa)? Right now I melt the butter, whisk in the sugar until it melts, then melt the chocolate into the butter/sugar mixture, all on direct heat. I'd be inclined to whisk the flour into the butter/sugar before melting the chocolate, but I'm open to suggestions.

Looking way back at the original post, if I had to have just one good knife, it would be German. I love my Japanese knives, and use them about 75% of the time now, but none is a do-it-all knife. My Hiromoto gyuto is fabulously sharp and holds its edge well, makes prep work fun, and guts with precision. But there's a lot I won't use it for. It's fragile. I don't use it to chop up chickens, chop blocks of chocolate, cut the heads and tails off of fish, or cut pineapples. My 8" Schaff Goldhamster does all of these things without blinking. And it does everything the gyuto can do, just not quite at the same level of performance. It's my desert island knife. Luckily I haven't been forced to move to a desert island, so I can enjoy both ... the Japanese (which I use most of the time) and the German (which I used to use all the time, but now mostly grab for the rough stuff).

We may have a prototype in 2 months. They'll send it to me to test, but I'll want to pass it on to someone working in a pro shop who can really beat on it with big volume use (preferably in the NYC area). I'll be asking for guinee pigs if/when it arrives.

Here's a commercial Warring for $60 ... http://www.yourdelight.com/waring_immersion_blender.htm I think these are 100 watts. Would these be in the same league as the Bamixes, or more like the home blenders?

I've found that the strength of spices depends a lot on how they're incorporated. Spices mixed dry into a batter don't give up nearly as much flavor as spices infused into oil. When I started infusing cinnamon, allspice, cloves, and ginger into the butter of a pancake recipe, I had to cut the spice quantity in half to maintain the same strength of flavor.

For most things just a towel. But for a hot oven (450 degrees or more) I reach in the drawer for the Orka silicone mits. They're great. They give a solid grip, insulate well, and unlike any fabric (nomex included), I don't have to worry about dampness insta-steaming my hands on contact. They're also easy to clean. The company says they're only good to 500 degrees, but I've occasionally grabbed roasting pans out of a 550 degree oven with them. No damage to the mits. This was pushing what my hands can take, though. Even at 500, if the pan is heavy, I start to feel the heat in a hurry. It's important to to have a path cleared and get the thing out of the oven and out of your hands pretty fast. Some silicone spatulas have a 900 degree plus melting point, and are rated for continuous use at over 600, so I doubt a few seconds at 550 degrees will damage the mits. I still don't like reaching deep into a very hot oven with the things. they don't have enough coverage. I have some 16" tongs that I can use to pull out the rack, or reach in and rotate pans, etc.. I only need the mits for picking up and putting down.

I would forsake any god that demanded eating margarine.

You'd want an attenuation button in a kitchen scale?

just checked their site ... it does. but it costs close to $200, which seems to put it out of the kitchen category. they call it a jewelry scale, though it looks great for the kitchen.

That should be a given ... the current My Weigh scales toggle with a button on the front. Some have the added feature of remembering the last unit you used, so you don't have to always reset to your preference.

I like Stubbs also. Mostly for the packaging ("ladies and gentlemen, i am a cook.") I haven't done a real side by side comparison with others.

In this thread http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?act=ST...60#entry1528456 I lamented that no one made a scale that worked directly with bakers' percentages. It seemed so obvious that a scale should allow you to establish a 100% weight, and then have it give you the weights of all other ingredients in percentages. Chris Hennes pointed out that some scales have a "count" feature that can be used to this effect, though it isn't really their intended use (and I don't know in practice how well it works). So I wrote to the good people at My Weigh, and they want to design a scale that does this. They want to know exactly how the percentage feature should work so they can explain it to the programmer. I told them my idea, but wanted to solicit the ideas of experienced bakers and cooks. What food related functions are missing from current scales? And are there common features that you don't use that could be eliminated? My assumption is that this would be a serious production scale, so it wouldn't have an interior-design look or features like calorie counting. So ... How would you like to see bakers percentages implemented? What capacity would be most useful? Is 1gram readability enough? Do you need 0.1 gram? How much more would you be willing to pay for 0.1 gram readability? What else? Maybe I could talk them into giving an eGullet discount as thanks for your input.

Chris, I believe you are a genius.

I've had a chance to use the My Weigh i5000 a bit. It's a great scale ... fast, repeatable results, good capacity, good display, easy to clean. The 5kg capacity is great. I can measure out anything in any container (my old lab scale topped out at 300g). The company says the scale uses higher grade load cells than many of their scales, for improved accuracy and durability. My one complaint is the auto power-off "feature." The thing constantly shuts down while I'm in the middle of using it. The power up cycle is fast, and it will automatically tare any weight that's sitting on it when you turn it on. But still a nuissance. i wrote a note to the company asking if there's any way to disable it. Only other potential issue is that the platform is small, so if you need to weigh a large container it might hide the display from you. But I'll mostly use it with mixing bowl or saucepan-sized things, so I don't anticipate trouble.

You have a scale that translates percentages? What is it?

That's interesting. Especially because I've had issues with some of my mom's ceramic dishes that have designs done in metallic glazes. They arc like crazy in the microwave, and the glaze actually gets pitted. I've assumed you'd have the same kinds of problems but worse with big pieces of metal. I'd be curious to see more details of the study, and to know if it was subject to peer review, since it (and an earlier, similar study) was funded by metal packaging manufacturers.

One of the main reasons I throw dinner parties is to experiment on the guests! The only times I've had major failures, I was the only one one at the table unhappy with the dish. Seems I've been blessed with hungry, undiscriminating friends. There was one time I probably went too far. For Christmas a couple of years ago I gave my parents a gift certificate for a big, home cooked meal. I decided to pull out all the stops, and planned a six course menu, of all original recipes. Only one of the two desserts was something that I'd made before, and this was a new variation. Looking back, this was just an act of hubris. I am not a good enough cook to pull off something like that! It all turned out ok, but I think most of the courses could have been much better (and would have been, if I'd made them several times and refined them). I might do something like that again for close friends who know what they're getting into, but for a meal given as a present, I should have made something that put the emphasis on good food and not on invoking the stress of a Top Chef episode.

Some cancellations knocked the group down to 8, so we stuck with Kampuchea. It was great. The long tables worked well for a big group. We would have been fine with 10, too. 12 would have been pushing it, but that's a lot of people for any table. We ate off each other's plates and ended up ordering about half the menu. Food was great all around. Though we wish they served dessert. Service wasn't so hot. Our waiter was a bit pushy, and brought us a couple of things we didn't order (and left off a couple of things that we did). The place wasn't busy; we sat down at 6:30, and it didn't start hopping til near the end of the meal. I'll definitely be going back. The food more than made up for any rough patches. Total came to around $50 per person, including tips but not drinks.