paulraphael

Seems there's an opposite trend in England: added service, large print at the top of the bill, and no charge whatsoever: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england...ire/7253002.stm

Thanks, Devlin. Anyone have tips on how to find auctions and liquidators in NYC? It's been a while since I've shopped seriously for anything on the Bowery. Not sure if that's still a place to go for bargains.

I consider cast iron pans to be pretty specialized. They have high heat capacity and low conductivity, so they respond very, very slowly to changes in heat. This makes them great for some things (browning, blackening), and borderline useless for other things (any time you need control). The surface is also great for some things, borderline useless for others. Copper is indeed great, but completely different. It's the responsiveness champion of cookware materials. It makes sense to have both, but not to substitute iron for copper (or vice versa). Restaurant pans come at diffferent price points. The low end are typically unfinished heavy aluminum (lincoln, volrath, generic). They work well and have a good blend of heat capacity and responsiveness, but the aluminum surface isn't the best. It's actually probematic with more acidic ingredients. The midrange and higher end pans are typically stainless with an aluminum disk bottom (Sitram, etc.). They work well also, and have an ideal cooking surface. They tend to have a seriously heavy bottom, which emphasizes heat capacity over responsiveness. This is good for some things but less so for others. In many cases the disk doesn't go all the way to the edge of the pan; if you're not careful with the position over the flame, you can burn food around the edges. These pans seem to cost about the same as Allclad. The AC pans are thinner; they emphasize responsiveness over heat capacity. Personally, I like this more responsive design for things like a 10" fry pan. The disk-bottom pans might be better for a large sauté pan or a stockpot. There are also some higher end restaurant pans (Bourgeat, Demmiere, etc.). These have a range of constructions and cooking qualities, and all cost considerably more than AC.

If you're on a budget, there are plenty of used Hamilton Beach commercial bar mixers out there. They can be had for cheap, and are serious workhorses. I bought my first one after destroying three k-mart level blenders in one month. It had been replaced by a restaurant, presumed worn out, and left for consignment at a restaurant supply store for about $40. It lasted me 16 years. When the bearings finally died (and they were on the verge of death when I bought the thing) I found a newer, more powerful motorbase on ebay for $7. I think this one will outlast me. I have a small (about 1.5 quart) stainless carafe and a large (about 2.5 quart) glass carafe. The motor is heavy duty enough to run continuously while blending heavy mixtures without getting hot. Only complaint is that it struggles to move stiff mixtures through the blades. Things like puréed celeriac and pesto and harissa often have to be thinned more than I'd like to get them moving. Maybe high end blenders like the Vita Mix are better in this regard. But as far as power and durability, I can't imagine needing anything more.

Every year or so I consider getting a stand mixer, and start researching choices. It seems like just a couple of years ago, you could find a used Hobart N50 on ebay for less than the new price of a top-of-the line Kitchenaid. Not anymore. The cheapest I see see them now is over $600, even for one that's taken a beating. While I'm open to the idea of KA pro 600 refurb (around $240, when they're available), they seem like a pretty ratty design compared with the hobarts. The whole idea of electronic speed control instead of shiftable gears is an unfortunate compromise. And I think it's telling that the KA sounds like a chainsaw while the Hobart barely whispers. I'm wondering if there are any lesser known commercial brands worth checking out. I'd be looking at the 5 to 7 quart range. Flipping through restaurant supply websites, I see many different brands that seem to undersell Hobart, but reviews and details are hard to come by. Thoughts?

I checked them out at the store. They look nice; the rectangular ones I was shopping for were a lighter gauge metal the the similar Magic Line pans (which cost a bit more). I went with magic line, but might consider the Dadio's if I had to buy a ton of pans and needed to save money.

stock, glace, soup!

I find the bakers percentage system really useful for understanding recipes. In some that I've developed, I've used the nontraditional approach of using things besides flour as the 100% ingredient. Usually chocolate. In something like a flourless chocolate cake, a mousse, or even brownies, chocolate makes the most sense to me, and I've used it in my recipes. I've gone to the trouble of converting other recipes to this system, so i can compare them and see what's going on.

Well, when you make a roux thickened brown sauce, typically fat rises to the surface along with white scum (which includes, among other things, milk proteins). The only way the fat can get dispersed in the liquid is if it gets emulsified. Maybe if you're making something like a gumbo, with things like file powder or okra, they can serve as emulsifiers and bind the fat into the liquid. With sauces like bechamel the milk or cream is an emulsion and can bind smoothly with the butterfat. But with a brown sauce, it typically only happens if the stock is allowed to boil, in which case the fat can be broken up into tiny globules and stay bound up in the liquid, along with small protein particles. The result isn't richness ... it's a muddy, cloudy, greasy stock. So it's customary to bring roux thickened brown sauce to a very light simmer, and to skim them constantly to remove the scum and the fat from the top. One reason that non-roux brown sauces (made from reduced bone stock) have become popular in restaurants is that they need much less skimming while they simmer away.

Yeah, I don't think I'd want to use arrowroot get anything as thick as a traditional gravy. It would be kind of strange (gelatinous in the way cathrynapple describes). I like it to add just a bit of thickness, to get a brothy sauce to cling to the food. Or else in conjunction with a non-starch thickener, like the gelatin in a moderately reduced stock.

They will give different appearances and different consistencies. Brown roux adds toasted flavors, depending on how much you brown the flour (the thickening power of the flour declines the more it browns). Blonde roux doesn't have any significant flavor. Roux is a lot more time consuming to use, because fat needs to be rendered out and skimmed. But it's a more stable thickener; high heat will break down the corn starch much faster than the flour starch. You can also add flour at the end (beurre manié) by kneading flour into an equal weigh of butter and stirring it in right before serving. This is fast, but the mixture can't be cooked after it's added (flour is flavorless when it's raw and when it has all the cereal flavors cooked out of it; but when it's cooked a little, it tastes bad) Arrowroot is another option; I use it more than the other starches. Flavorless, works in small quantities, can be added at the end, and is more temperature stable than corn starch. Will give a slightly different texture/appearance than other starches. Just don't use too much ... it can get a little too glossy and slick.

MyWeigh sent me an ibalance 5500, which will probably be the foundation of the baking percentage scale. It's pretty close to ideal for a serious kitchen scale. -5.5kg capacity -0.1g resolution -simple interface -easy to clean -professional quality components It also fixes my major gripe with the i5000: the auto-off feature can be disabled. I have two minor gripes: -the bubble level built into this particular scale is completely wrong. But it doesn't seem to matter ... the scale has been accurate on every surface I've tried. -the display backlight actually makes the display harder to read (in some cases impossible), depending on viewing angle. But it doesn't matter much, because the backlight can be disabled. This scale is otherwise perfect for anyone who has the budget ($180 to $200) and who doesn't need higher capacity. It's great to be able measure all ingredients by weight, right down to salt and leavening.

I had ok results with the oxygen bleach. Got much of the coffee smell out, but not all. worked GREAT for de-stinking sponges, though. And everyone, please be wary of using newspaper on any food surface. Newspaper ink isn't the toxic soup that it used to be, but it still transfers easily, contains any number of organic compounds that weren't meant to be eaten, and there's no telling what kinds of oils and toxic metal dust can be picked up from running through an industrial press.

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.