paulraphael

This must come up in commercial pastry kitchens. Do the pros handle the eggs differently if they're not going to be cooked?

What's the prefered way to separate a whole lot of eggs, if they're going to be used raw? I have to do a bunch tonight. Normally I'd just strain them with my hands, rather than doing the housewife method (with the egg shells) or straining with a skimmer. But this recipe has a ton of raw yolks in it, and I'm thinking it might be best to keep my paws off of them. I could also quasi-pasteurize them over heat, but I've never done this and I'm afraid of cooking them by mistake. Thoughts?

Data like mortality rates can only make sense if you break it down to more specific populations than whole countries. For example, in a country like the U.S., if rates of infant mortality, diabetes, and asthma are way up among extremely poor populations, this can have a pronounced effect on the numbers for the total population. But it will actually tell you nothing about the average health of other demographics. If those numbers are actually down for the middle class, then it's unlikely that you can peg those high disease rates on foods or environmental factors that are shared by both groups.

The advantage to this method is that you'll get a crisper char, because the surface won't spend time in the warm oven getting steamed by the underlying meat. The advantages to browning first are that it's easier, and that it kills bacteria on the surface of the roast, so you don't have to worry as much about them if you go really low and really slow. One low and slow approach is to sear first, and then put the roast in a cold oven set to 200 or 250 degrees. This allows the meat to spend a lot of time in the 70 to 140 degree range where the meat's enzyme activity is highest. Time spent in this range accomplishes many of the same effects on flavor and texture as aging, but very rapidly. It's also a favorite temperature range for pathogens, so it could be unwise to go this slow with meat that hasn't been sanitized first on the stovetop.

Oh, yeah, all my bread gets salvaged this way. I don't run it under the faucet. I wet my hands and use them like a paintbrush to dab the water evenly on the outside of the bread. Works really well even for bread that's a couple of days old. The heat of the toaster evaporates the water ... it steams the inside of the bread, and then once the water's gone from the surface the surface can get toasted.

I usually use a copper egg white mixing bowl for melting chocolate. Its conductivity helps the chocolate cool down quickly. But it just crossed my mind that chocolate is somewhat acidic. Does anyone know if it's so acidic as to disolve enough copper ions to interfere with flavor (or good health)?

I think people are quick to jump on simplistic ideas about what kinds of refinement are bad, and what kinds of chemicals are bad. While there's plenty of scientific evidence showing that wheat germ and bran can be beneficial, there is no evidence suggesting that flour is somehow made harmful by sifting those things out. There is likewise no compelling scientific evidence suggesting that refined sugars are somehow harmful (agit prop blogs and books based on annecdote really do not count as evidence). Nutritionists would rather have us look at diets as a whole rather than at individual foods or ingredients. A diet too high in refined sugars often correlates with either too high a calorie intake, or too low an intake of more important nutrients. This is not the same as saying that refined sugars are harmful. In addition, the folk wisdom of "avoid anything with scary sounding chemical names" can be misleading. There are plenty of wholesome seeming natural plants that are harmful (most obviously hemlock, and a whole range of mushrooms, less obviously foods like fiddlehead ferns). And there are plenty of scary sounding chemicals that are the stuff of life. Consider this ingredient list: Cyclohexane, methylcyclohexane, hydrocarbon, dimethylcyclohexane, ethylcyclohexane, 1,1-diethoxyethane, ethanol, alpha-pinene, 1-methylpropan-1-ol, toluene, alpha-fenchene, camphene, hexanal, an ethyl butenoate, butan-1-ol, beta-pinene, sabinene, xylene, car-3-ene, myrcene, alpha-phellandrene, 3-methylbutan-1-ol, limonene, beta-phellandrene, gama-terpinene, para-cymene, alpha-terpinolene, cis-hex-3-en-1-ol, 2-furfural, ethyl octanoate, alpha-copanene, beta-caryophyllene, ehtyl decanoate, sabinyl acetate, alpha-humulene, ethyl dodecanoate I know people who would fear contracting cancer just from reading a list like that. But it's actually just a partial list of the naturally ocurring flavor compounds in a mango. As a broad generalization, I think it's smart to choose minimally processed foods when the choice makes sense, and to likewise avoid chemical additives and food substitutes (fake sugar, fake fat, etc.). But it's important to recognize the limitations of any generalization. It's better to actually learn about the ingredients involved, rather than to leap to simple conclusions on a topic that's by its nature complex.

I bet that records of mortality rates and food-borne illness would show that we're a lot safer.

Enough with all the health food. How about a Chocolate Marquise? http://recipes.egullet.org/recipes/r1993.html

My short answer: stop thinking about it.

They're great braised; it's also my favorite cut for soups. Practically impossible to overcook. I make over and over again based on a James Peterson recipe ... a Moroccan tagine-style lamb soup with tomatoes and dried apricots. Shanks would be perfect for any lamb soup.

My girlfriend is in her fist year of medical residency at a hospital in the Bronx. If you're not familiar with the life of a resident, look up "indentured servitude" on Wikipedia, or just read some of the letters written by Russian soldiers at Stalingrad At any rate, she loves food, but has little access to good food of any kind, and virtually no time to cook. Anything more complicated than heating something up on the stove or in the microwave will probably be too much, although she's ok with preparing some things a day or two in advance, like rice. Some things I've been considering are those chef-made, frozen sous vide meals (expensive ... I'd get them for her as presents), and those ready-to-eat indian meals (by companies like tasty bite). One catch is that she's a ravenous meat-eater, and would only be satisfied by something like the tasty bite meals if she was able to add some pre-prepared meat. Any ideas?

This was a recent thread about probe thermometers: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showto...0entry1499788 There were some interesting suggestions, including one that sent me to scientific websites looking for other options. It might take some snooping around to find the best deal, but there are some products that compete well with the thermapen, which seems to be a repackaged scientific thermometer. Here's just one option: http://www.bestlabdeals.com/CheckTemp_4_Fo.../haninmp019.htm

So far, Bar Keepers Friend hasn't scratched anything of mine. But I've seen lot of scrub sponges labelled "safe for all surfaces" scratch stainless steel. All my pans are at least a little scratched from years of using these things without really paying attention, but I've switched to using much softer ones, like the scotch bright domi pads, or other similar ones that just have fabric on the outside. Plain sponges work also.

I think the issue is less hardness of the food than a kind of toughness that could grab the edge of the blade. If the blade catches in something of certain consistencies, and you torque it one way or another, you could chip the edge. After a certain degree of hardening, kinfe steel takes on a brittle failure mode, so it chips instead of bending. I have some softer knives with faint ripples in the edge; those would likely have been chips if I did whatever I'd done with my gyuto. I don't cut a lot of pineapple, so I don't have much sense of it. I read elsewhere that by "pumpkin," JCK might be talking about some heavier duty kinds of squash or gourds.

I'm trying to cultivate the habit of using as many cues as possible simultaneously. It's easy to get in the habit of just using one (visual, feel, time, thermometer, etc.). The nice thing about using several, beyond getting multiple opinions, is that you get to learn more about what each cue really indicates. You start to get a sense of how something feels when the center is 140 degrees, and how long it takes for that cut of meat at that size to get to that temp, etc. You also get a better sense of when one of your indicators isn't trustworthy. For example, when I was experimenting with roasting chickens, I used a probe thermometer (placed in the section between breast and thigh) to monitor doneness. I became a slave to the thermometer, and didn't pay attention to other signs. A couple of times, the reading was way off, and I ended up pulling the bird out ten degrees over- or undercooked. It turns out that with a chicken, thermometer placement is really tricky, and there can be a range of over ten degrees between the thermometer tip being in flesh, in an air pocket, or against a bone. This issue is separate from the accuracy of the thermometer, which is pretty good ... it's more along the lines of the difficulties with using them that you mentioned. Now i might use a thermometer, especially in an unfamiliar oven, but I don't obey it without looking at other indicators, like surface browning and the looseness of the hip joint.

Even regular pastry flour is tough to find. Most grocery stores have next to nothing. Whole foods has everything but what I need. Thoughts?

Most herbs freeze pretty well in a ziplock bag, so I don't mind buying a little extra. My gripe is that the price per ounce they end up charging for the individual packages. I'd be afraid they'd go even farther if the packages got smaller. Parsely is a real exception. It's always sold in bunches that are bigger than my head. I'd need a restaurant to find a use for all that. I wonder what would happen if I snapped off a few stems of it and brought it in a bag to the register.

Any idea where to find it?

Another idea. I just saw this on the baking 911 site. Funny thing is, it's exactly what I used to do, but stopped because it was nonstandard and seemed unrefined: use foil instead of parchment, and pennies instead of beans or rice. i'm also considering preheating the pennies while the oven preheats ... so they're already hot and can contribute to baking when they go into the shell. foil is a little easier to work with than parchment, molds to the shell better, and conducts much better. pennies dense and conductive. total cost of equipment: mere pennies.

It goes against some of the conventional wisdom, but I find that a steel works really well on my Japanese knives. The effect is the same as with Euro knives; it restores the feeling of a freshly sharpened edge after the knife has seen some use. If you already use a steel very delicately (which I believe works best on any knife), you won't have to adapt much. Especially with harder steels, you want to wipe out any images of t.v. chefs holding a steel in the air and swiping wildly. The steel goes vertically against a cutting board, and you restore the edge with just a few very light, even strokes. Maybe a couple on each side. It's best to use a smooth steel like the Hand American borosilicate glass steel or their metal version. While I don't think it's at all true that a grooved steel acts as a file or creates a "toothy" edge (if used correctly), it does concentrate much more pressure and is probably too agressive to use on brittle knife edges. When the steel doesn't work any more, I go to the strop, which is loaded wtih abrasive compound. It actually polishes away a bit of metal. It's faster and easier than the stones, but not as fast and easy as a steel. When this no longer works, I go to the stones or abrasive papers, and the cycle starts over again.

Thing is, if the sides have a tendency to collapse, I don't see how the saucepan lid will help. It will hold the bottom down, but won't support the sides. Of course, if anyone else wants to play guinee pig ...

I think there's some truth to this ... A dull knife is flat out dangerous because it's more likely to slip on the surface of food, and it also urges you to use bad technique, like leaning on the knife with a lot of force. These two things together lead to knife disasters. A razor-sharp knife discourages this kind of thing, because you learn to use gentle pressure, and it rarely slips anyhow. But they seem to like cutting you just for blinking at the wrong time. In the five years I used my German knife (sharp, but not ridiculously so) as my main knife, it only cut me once, and it was while I was washing it while drunk. But I've lost count of how many times my new Gyuto has cut me in the last couple of months. But to be fair, much of this has been from learning to sharpen on stones (ha! back to the original topic) and unfamiliarity with such a light blade. Luckily the cuts have been minor, and have healed fast. Sharp and dull might just be dangerous in different ways.

Do you mean putting another tart pan on top of the shell? I've thought about that, and about just using the circle, but they're just too big. The dough is too thick, so there isn't room for anything that size in there. If your pans had a lot of taper it might almost work, but the top pan wouldn't sit all the way down on the bottom of the shell. I don't like the idea of there being insulating air space there. The freezing idea is interesting. Does Dorie recommend this for any kind of tart dough? What's the foil for?

I've been reading old threads on blind-baked shells, trying to find a solution to a couple of common issues: getting a crisp bottom when you're filling it with something dense and wet, and dealing with the nuissance of beans/rice/weights. I've gotten big improvements by switching to some blue steel tart pans made by bourgeat. My old tinned steel pans just reflected too much heat, so the bottoms and sides didn't brown as quickly as the top edges, no matter what else I did. But I'm still finding that things like apple tarts lead to soggy bottoms. And the whole routine of lining with parchment and filling with beans is annoying. It also seems countner productive, since it shields the whole inside of the shell from heat. I use an egg wash, but I'm just not convinced it makes much difference, considering how little time the inside of the shell gets direct, dry heat. I'm curious if anyone has ides (or good guesses) about any of these possible alternatives: 1) don't line the shell with anything. if it starts to poof up, reachin with a skewer and let the steam out. would this work? or would the sides of the shell collapse? 2) get one of those stainless steel pie chains 3) just drop an aluminum saucepan lid that's roughly the right size onto the bottom of the shell. 5) use the beans, but then brown the inside of the shell with a propane torch. i'm sure this would work, but it's clearly the most annoying solution of all. Any thoughts? (FWIW, the tart dough I like is similar to a traditional 100%/66%/33% pate brisée.)