paulraphael

FG, do you want to include crepes in this discussion?

Yeah, right? I can't understand why it's so hard to find un-ultra pasteurized cream.

The way to know for sure is to check the ingredients. "Cocoa processed with alkali" means dutch process. I agree with the posters who say fat percentage is an important variable, and this can be harder to find out. It could make a difference in recipes that use a lot of cocoa. It also makes a difference in shelf life; the higher the fat content, the more perishable.

No. There are a lot of techniques for making pancakes more tender ... they include low protein starches like these, or cake flour, or sour cream, or buttermilk. I stay away from them in general (with ocassional exception of buttermilk), because for my tastes they make the pancakes too tender. I don't like pancakes that deflate or disintegrate after soaking up syrup or having fruit tossed on top. It might come down to mixing methods. If you're at all agressive while mixing the ingredients after they've been moistened, you're going to develop extra gluten in the flour. This can result in tough pancakes. But if you mix gently, pancakes stay tender even if made with unbleached AP flour. I use a rubber spatula, and after pouring the wet ingredients into the dry, I mix by scraping down the sides of the bowl and basically folding the dry and wet ingredients together until they're all moistened (but not homogenous). It's important to thoroughly mix the dry ingredients by stirring, before adding the wet ones, because they won't be properly distributed otherwise. If I'm looking for extra lightness and airiness, then in addition to the chemical leavening I fold in a whipped egg white. The resulting texture is great. The batter tends to sit pretty tall in the pan if you do this, so you'll need to cook with lower heat.

Two more from the Simpsons ... Moe (on his first date in years, at Springfield's snottiest French restaurant): "Give me the best thing you got and stuff it with the second best thing you got." Homer (at a protest against animal testing at a cosmetics company, he sees pigs that have been tarted up with lipstick and mascara): "So sad. Yet so sexy. Yet so delicious!" And my favorite food quote of all time, from Alain Ducasse (spotted a while ago in someone's eGullet signature): "Desserts are like mistresses. They are bad for you. So if you are having one, you might as well have two."

Interesting that that's all there is in bisquick. I wonder if it just has more salt than what I'm used to in pancakes, and that gives it the KFC bicuit flavor I'm noticing.

That's curious. I've had a number of carbon steel and cast iron pans, all well seasoned. I love them ... in many ways more than non-stick pans (which bug me, because of their disposable nature). But the non-stick pans have always been way more slippery, at least before they started getting destroyed.

I'd be interested in trying this method if I ever encountered an oven that could be set to 140 (and reliably hold the temp). Mine doesn't go lower than 170, and it's not terribly stable at taht setting. No matter what, I pull the meat way before 135 ... that's hotter than I want it to be after resting. For what it's woth, if you use a really high temp, like 500, you do not end up with an inch of well done meat. maybe a quarter inch ... a tiny fraction of the whole thicknes of the roast.

I make pancakes every weekend. It might be the only thing I'm really an expert on. Over the years I've analyzed and tried just about all the major variations, and have developed my own basic forumula. I only sometimes make the basic formula; usually it's some minor or major variation. Sometimes I'm looking for thinner, or thicker, or some kind of flavored version. I grew up on bisquick pancakes, but they don't taste like pancakes to me anymore. They taste like KFC biscuits. Not in a bad way, but they're not what I'm after. I want pancakes to taste like butter and lightly toasted cake. I sometimes make buttermilk pancakes, but find them to be too tender most of the time unless I can eat them right out of the pan. If I'm looking for the tart flavor of buttermilk, I just make my regular recipe with cultured butter. Here's my basic recipe: 1-1/2 cups AP flour 1/3 cup sugar 1-1/2 tsp baking powder 1/2 tsp salt 1 whole egg 1 separated egg 3 TB butter 1-1/8 cup milk -melt butter and set aside -stir together dry ingredients in a mixing bowl -whisk egg and egg yolk into another bowl, until frothy -whisk in melted butter -gently stir liquid ingredients into solid ingredients -whip egg white to soft peaks -fold egg whites into batter This is leavened both by baking powder and the whipped egg white. The result is a light, fluffy texture that still has enoug body to hold up to syrup, fruit, and a bit of handling. It can be made with a single, unseparated egg, or with both eggs separated and the whites whipped (for thick, light, almost cloudlike pancakes). Here's a flavored variation that I especially like (also on recipe gullet): Ligurian lemon poppyseed pancakes 1-1/2 c all purpose flour 1/3 c sugar 1-1/2 tsp baking powder 1 T poppyseeds (approx) 1/2 tsp salt 1-1/8 c whole milk 1 whole egg 1 separated egg 1 lemon, zest and juice 1-1/2 T unsalted butter 1-1/2 T olive oil -lightly toast poppyseeds in a small, ungreased saucespan, until they release their fragrance. -add butter and let it melt. turn heat very low and cook for a few minutes. -set aside 1TB of the sugar for the whipped egg white. mix zest into the remaining sugar in a mixing bowl, with your fingers, until moist and fragrant -add other dry ingredients to sugar/zest. stir to blend -separate one of the eggs and set the white aside, preferably in a copper mixing bowl -in separate bowl whisk the yolk and the whole egg into milk -whisk in melted butter/poppyseed slurry and continue whisking until frothy -stir in the olive oil -gently stir liquid ingredients into solid ingredients until eveything is moistened. do not beat. do not worry about lumps -start preheating pan or griddle -with electric mixer or baloon whisk, whip egg white to soft peaks -add tablespoon of sugar, and continue whipping to firm peaks. don't overwhip; they should still be glossy and moist. -stir lemon juice into batter -fold egg whites into batter (This recipe inspired by Pierre Hermé)

well, i'm sure it's more nonstick than a worn out teflon pan (like any pan that's seen year or so of real use), but not a new one. the nice thing with carbon steel is that the seasoning can be renewed easily and they last basically forever. i'm sure the idea of a dedicated omelette pan comes from seasoned iron retaining strong flavors and odors. before teflon came along, moste omelette pans and poelles were made of seasoned carbon steel; you didn't want to cook todays eggs with the pan that cooked last night's bluefish.

I've had great results with high temp roasting. A tenderloin is so thin that it takes very little time for the inside of the meat to come up to rare/medium rare temps, so I see little need to slow down the process. the point of very low/verys slow roasting is to encourage the enzyme activity that takes place between 70 degrees and cooking temps, but with a piece of prime tenderloin, I haven't felt the need to do it. What I've done is this: -Preheat the oven to 500, with the roasting pan in the oven, while the meat comes up to room temperature. pat the meat very dry after trimming. -take the roating pan out and put in on the stove on high heat. coat it with clarified butter. -put the tenderloin in the pan and lightly brown it on three sides. -with the fourth side down, put it in the middle of the oven. -cook til the internal temp is 110 to 115 degrees. -pull it out and tent it lightly with foil. let it rest in a warm place for at least 15 minutes.

The fast method should make a lot of sense for rich or semi-rich breads ... anything with added butter, milk, and especially sweeteners, herbs, etc.. These breads don't depend as much on the enzyme-developed flavors you get from long fermentation. In my own limited experience, I'm not even sure I can taste the benefits of long fermentations with bread that has a lot of stuff added.

Some good sources of info on this are On Food and Cooking, by Harold McGee, who goes into the science of soluble flavor compounds, and any Indian cookbook that delves into technique, like the ones by Madhur Jaffrey and Camilia Panjabi. The Indians are the herb and spice rocket scientists of the food world. They've figured out the different flavor profiles of any given spice when cooked dry, in oil, in water-based liquid, and for varying amounts of time when cooked all these ways.

I'd like to hear from a metalurgist on this, but my impression is that clad metals don't present any galvanic corosion issue. You need more than just two "dissimilar" metals. They need to be dissimilar in a way that one behaves like an anion or cation relative to the other, and you need some kind of electrolite between them. When you have this kind of condition, the whole assembly turns into a battery, and the metals deteriorate pretty quickly. I remember this being an issue with some early generation carbon fiber bicycles, that were made by gluing carbon fiber tubes into aluminum lugs. There's a relative charge between the carbon and the aluminum, and the epoxy being used functioned perfectly as an electrolyte. The bikes performed beautifully, and then in a few weeks spontaneously fell apart. Kasumi style knives, with various kinds of stainless and carbon steels clad in various kinds of iron and other stainless steels, have been around for a long time. And if there were issues with galvanic corrosion, you'd expect to see it between the clad layers, resulting in the knives delaminating. I wouldn't expect it to express itself as rust on the cutting edge.

That's why they age full primal cuts, and not individual steaks. By the time it's cut into a steak, all the nastiness should be gone (part of the reason you pay so much per pound is the amount of meat lost to desication and spoilage). 7 weeks is a long time; I'm used to 3 or 4 weeks. Some of the very expensive butchers go 6 or more (like Lobels in NYC). I've heard that the extra time leads to very pronounced changes in flavor. Please let us know how it is.

They're my new favorites. I ran out and rented Shaun after seeing Hot Fuzz. And I just found out that they did the "Don't!" trailer in Tarrantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse. Genius!

I don't have any problem with you stating your opinion like this. You're telling us your subjective experience and letting us draw our own conclusions. It's important to understand the difference between this kind of experiment and a scientific one. "This seems to have worked for me" doesn't let anyone else draw firm conclusions, because the sample size of the experiment is 1 (you), there are no controls for the many other variables in your diet and your life, and so no way to absolutely separate the change in sugar consumption from other factors. And there's no way to control for any influence brought to bear by your expectations of the result. This doesn't mean what you experienced isn't true, only that it's impossible to draw any conclusions that would have scientific weight. If someone did a study on a hundred people, including a control group that received a placebo treatment, did it double-blind (so neither the researchers nor the subjects knew who was in the placebo group), and changed only one variable in the diets and lifestyles of the experiment group (refined sugar consumption) and then measured both objective results (like blood lipid levels) and subjective results (how they subjects feel), you'd have the basis for solid scientific evidence. There are mountains of such evidence showing negative health effects from even moderate quantities of trans fats. There is no such evidence, that I can find, against moderate amounts of refined sugar. And none that I can find showing important differences between refined and unrefined sugars.

My girlfriend works in a hospital in the Bronx. She's had patients who are obese. huge, huge people, and often with horrible related problems like diabetes and heart disease. More than once, when asked about their diet, they've said "I don't eat anything." Since this sounded suspicious, she'd press them on it, and discover that they really did eat next to nothing. But they drank coke by the 2-liter bottle. It didn't cross their minds that they're getting a bajillion calories from this diet (and nothing else). They were completely mystified by their health problems.

The NY Times did an interesting series on obesity in the u.s. a year or two back. They pinned a lot of it on opportunity, in the form of huge, cheap portions, made possible by the incredibly low price of corn, made possible by Nixon's butchering of the country's farm subsidy program back in the '70s. Short version: the government used to pay farmers not to produce surplusses in glut years, so the food supply stayed stable. Now they pay farmers to produce no matter what, driving prices down, encouraging more overproduction, leading to a permanent glut. When you go to McDonalds, you are surrounded by corn. The beef is essentially cow-processed corn (it's what they're fed); the 72oz soft drinks are mostly corn syrup; the fries are fried mostly in corn oil. It's all practically free, so the portions are huge, and we're raised on "value meals" the size of a wheelbarrow. And this is the second time we've had a corn glut in the U.S. The first time was in colonial days, but back then instead of turning it into junk food they turned it into cheap booze. European travel agents organized corn liquor tours of the colonies, for tourists who wanted to slum a little and get wasted all across the new world.

No one made such a claim. Although it wouldn't be hard to find a diet that includes a reasonable amount of white sugar that's healthy. If you're looking for research to support this claim, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. This could be true, but now you're talking about diets, not ingredients. It's a more productive kind of discussion. Without getting into the politics of the ban, I believe that artificial trans fats are as deserving of demonization as any ingredient could be. Because 1) their negative health effects, even in relatively small quantities, are heavily documented (their ability to raise ldl cholesterol levels is several times higher than regular saturated fat); 2) if you didn't make the food, you don't know if they're in there unless you're actively asking or inspecting labels; and 3) there are reasonable substitutes. The same can't be said for sugar, which is one of the body's primary nutrients. As with anything else, too much is too much, but there's nothing fundamentally harmful about it (if you can find actual evidence that "refined sugar" is processed by the body in ways significantly different from the sugars in fruits, I'd love to see it. Hint: I've looked.)

As an adendum, this is specifically the kind of thinking that I'm at war against: Hitting google and looking at encyclopedia articles doesn't count as examining the evidence. It counts as looking at other people's interpretations of the evidence (or of rumor, fad, heresay ...) If you want evidence, get on the NIH PubMed database, and see the actual state of the research on the subject. The first thing you'll discover is that there are far fewer simple answers than what most people assume. The second thing is that most fad diets, health kicks, knee-jerk fears are based on next to nothing. If you know anyone who does research, they can help you understand the format and some of the lingo (my girlfriend is an MD PhD, so she's been able to walk me through some of the clinical conventions). Just beware that research is very specific; forming generalizations based on a particular result can send you down the slippery slope encounted by well-intentioned but misinformed journalists (if lab mice get brain tumors from eating half their body weight in chocolate every day, you shouldn't assume you're going to die from a hershey bar. that kind of thing). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/

I made the mistake once of making an infused syrup with blackberries in a copper pan that had most of the tin lining worn away. The result tasted more like pennies than blackberries! Berries are more acidic than chocolate, but I don't know the chemistry involved ... how strong an acid has to be, or what particular types of acid, before you start leeching signinficant amounts of ion into the food. I'm wondering if the bowl could be effecting the flavor of the chocolate in some subtle ways ... and hoping to find some conventional wisdom on the subject, so I can avoid doing yet another science experiment.

The Healing Daily article is the kind of agit prop that I'm railing against. If the claims are based on any scientific research at all, I'd be willing to be bet that they are based on interpretations of the research not shared by the researchers themselves. This kind of discussion makes me insane because it testifies to the horrible state of science education in this country. We have journalists and bloggers writing on scientific subjects who don't understand how science is done or anything about its abilities or limitations. And we have a public that salivates for the latest, hipest, unssupported pseudoscientific claims. I would have to write fifty pages to refute every point in that article. I'm not going to do it, but as a simple example I'll speak to one of them. Glycemic index is a new favorite. The statements that get made about g.i. and thrown around as truths these day, don't make any sense at all. There's a general assumption that eating high g.i. foods is bad. In fact, there are situations (recovering from exercise, for example) when they are the ideal thing to eat. It's also been shown that the body's blood sugar stability and tolerance for high g.i. foods is highly individual. There is no one-size-fits-all data for what g.i. is ideal for all people under all circumstances. Research showing detrimental health effects from from high g.i. foods is not demonstrating that these foods are bad, but that TOO MUCH of these foods are bad ... just as too much fat is bad, too much protein is bad, too much salt is bad, and even too much water is bad. The difference between a beneficial nutrient and a toxin is often a matter of dose and context. There's also a general assumption that simple sugars have a higher g.i. than complex carbohydrates, and that among simple sugars, refined ones have a higher g.i. than unrefined ones. In practice this is not true. For example, here are the glycemic indices of some "bad for you" sweets made with refined sugar: pound cake 54 chocolate cake 38 sponge cake 46 danish pastry 59 Here here are the glycemic indices of some fruits, representing unrefined, natural sugars: raisins 64 pineapple 66 watermeellon 72 And here are the glycemic indices of some complex carbohydrate foods, including whole grains and a root vegetable: rice cakes 77 brown rice pasta 92 parsnips 97 Is this surprising? If so, it's because the science behind g.i. is complex. Finally, there's the idea that you can look at the glycemic index of an individual ingredient and know ANYTHING about how it will effect your body in the context of an actual meal. You can't. Your body doesn't process the food in isolation. Pure sucrose has a pretty high g.i., but when you have it with fats, the total g.i. of the meal plummets. Hence the low g.i. of chocolate cake. Is this an argument for eating piles of refined sugar, or seeking out a high g.i. diet? I hope not. My point is that you need to beware of the pseudoscience (and we drown in more pseudoscience than we do high fructose corn syrup, in my opinion) and respect the complexity of the issues. There are few individual ingredients that desserve demonizing. Almost anything that occurs in significant quantities in natural foods is probably ok--in some proportion--as a part of a good diet.

Might be good shaved really thin, so it melts instantly in your mouth. On top of fruit? with some kind of liqueur?

I've seen that warning on a lot of pans. I bought some calphalon pans back when they were just repackaged commercial pans, and the sticker said the same thing. Probably they assume their customers don't know how to cook, and figure they'll do less damage with less fire.