paulraphael

don't you mean the floor's the limit? i second the idea of pork. even exotic pork, like berkshire, or other heritage breeds, is a complete bargain compared with most other meats. and it's so delicious you should be able to come up with some true delicacies at bargain prices. off the top of my head i'm thinking of the pork buns they serve at momofuku noodle bar. steamed dough, braised berkshire pork belly ($5 or $6 a pound?) something for texture, and some sauce. they cost next to nothing to make but they're so good no one thinks twice about paying $12 for two.

my all time favorite fall dessert is roasted pears with a cream pan sauce. it is incredibly simple. it's plated, so i'm no sure if it would work for you. but it could probably be prepared in advance, reheated, and sauced by anyone. you just roast the pears (bosc work well for this) cored peeled and halved, tossed with generous amounts of butter and sugar. use a hot oven and a pan that works on the stove. when the pears are soft and the sugar at least partially carmelized, set the pears aside, put the pan on the stove and deglaze with cream. strain and add a bit brandy to taste (cognac or poire william work well). i serve one or two pear halves on a warmed plate or shallow bowl, with a small pool of the sauce. it's one of those dishes where the natural flavor of the main ingredient and the simplicity give you everything you could ask for. here's a more involved recipe that's always gotten rave reviews. http://recipes.egullet.org/recipes/r1993.html you could interpret the creme anglaise with all kinds of fall-friendly seasonings. some that i've liked are grand marnier, pear and clove, and lapsang souchong tea. this could also be made in advance and then plated and sauced by anyone.

I've always wanted a whole house like this. The main hangup in my mind was always the upholstery, but now with all the new Sunbrella fabrics I think it might be feasible. You could just keep all your books and electronics in cabinets that would be sealed off. But then if I'm honest with myself, the problem is not keeping things clean, it's keeping them tidy. I would still have to put all the books and magazines away before pressing the "power wash" button. I've obviously spent too much time thinking about this. ← There was a Simpsons episode about this. The house did everything, and spoke in the seductive voice of Pierce Broznan. Unfortunately it fell in love with Marge, spied on her in the bath, and tried to kill Homer. But that was version 1.0.

I believe they're traditionally made with no salt. There are a lot of tales about where this tradition came from, including the one you mention. I'm inclined to think it's because they're traditionally eaten with all kinds of things that are high salt!

I have a low BTU stove too. I find myself more limited by pan size than pan material. I can run out of capacity pretty easily with big pans no matter what the material (cast iron, heavy copper, heavy aluminum, spun steel) but always have plenty of power to brown mightily in the smaller pans

I don't think that the necesary responsiveness of can't be achieved with heavy aluminum. I've never felt like my heavt aluminum cookware was holding me back. But I find that for sautéing and making pan sauces, a more responsive pan (copper or lighter clad aluminum) makes the job easier and more enjoyable.

has anyone compared neapolitan-ish crusts made with natural yeasts to ones made with commercial yeasts, but with Peter Reinhart's delayed fermentation techniques?

but making the pan sauce often does!

with aluminum it's a good idea to pay attention to the thickness, but don't be seduced into assuming thicker is better. A thicker pan will heat very evenly, and will have excellent heat retention, but the thermal mass can become so high that it will take a long time to heat up, and you'll sacrifice responsiveness. i like my old calphalon pieces for larger pots (a rondeau and a medium stock pot) but i've replaced the 10" fry pan with a thinner, lighter all clad. The all clad comes to temperature about twice as fast and is way more responsive. The physics suggest that won't heat as evenly, but for a pan this size, especially one that's usually in motion, I can't tell the difference. I prefer the stainless cooking surface to plain or anodized aluminum. I also find that a light pan in this size is better balanced for tossing food than a heavy aluminum or copper one. for a large saute pan, i haven't found anything that performs as well as heavy copper.

here's an old menu from Una Pizza Napolitana in NYC (just went there for the first time ... amazing!) that explains their dough making technique. supposedly this is the traditional neapolitan way, and uses no commercial yeast: http://slice.seriouseats.com/images/Menu_UnaPizza01.php

you've never had a dab of alginate on toast? you're missing out!

potato starch? that's one i haven't used. any reason you prefer to arrow root, or one of the others? butter i understand!

in On Food and Cooking harold mcgee suggests that stock and glace making processes are actually well suited to industrial production techniques. hadn't occurred to me, but makes some sense.

are you looking specifically for pastry shop type desserts, or do you do plated desserts too? for the latter, one of my favorite fall desserts is pumpkin tarts. hardly a radical idea, but i think it's a nice change from the traditional deep-dish pumpkin pie. you could also make them as individual-sized tartlets that can be eaten out of hand. i have a lot of good plated desserts for fall that i can send along if you're doing that kind of thing too.

I haven't shopped from this site, or used Myweigh scales, but both have been recommended to me: http://www.oldwillknottscales.com/ .1 gram resolution is easy to find. (as is .01 and .001 ... which I doubt you need). The issue is that if you have fine resolution AND a reasonably high capacity, the scale will be very expensive. I use a .1g acculab scale that's been borrowed from my darkroom. It works fine, but, its weight limit is 300g. Which is a serious limit for cooking! I'm thinking about getting a 1g resolution mywiegh that can hold several KG for the routine stuff that I do in the kitchen. If you just need one for the molecular stuff, a low capacity, high accuracy one like mine might be the best buy.

no interest in using them for steaming, but i wonder if they could be used as low-tech sous vide bags or for making stock (as in the current thread on making stock with a small amount of liquid in a sealed bag). are these things sealed or vented?

a couple of thoughts on gelatin ... the height of popularity for gelatin-rich stocks was probably the 1970s, when nouvelle cuisine made it fashionable to substitute meat glace-based sauces for demiglace based ones. it seems that using lots of gelatin has since gone out of style, since it has its own drawbacks. too much and you can get a kind of stick mouthfeel (gelatin is a traditional glue, after all ....). and it congeals when it cools, so you can have some issues with getting food to the table hot, and hoping people like it enough to gobble it up before the sauce gets gluey. i treat gelatin as a nice byproduct (of the cheap, bony cuts that supply some roasted flavor, and keep the price reasonable compared with an all-meat stock). but i don't like to use so much that it can thicken the sauce by itself. that strikes me as too much. i've never seen the need to add refined gelatin to a stock or sauce.

I love the Mauviel 2.5mm. Falk and Bourgeat make pans out of the exact same material. It's all stupid expensive right now, unfortunately. aluminum has excellent cooking properties. I have pans made of heavy copper, heavy aluminum, and thin aluminum clad in stainless. They all work well. Copper seems somewhat nicer for saucepans and for large saute pans. But the other materials work well ... I never feel that they're holding me back.

very interesting. it must be delicious. i wasn't actually asking about cooking steaks sous vide; i was wondering if you did anything just like what you described (making jus with the sous vide method). i don't have a real sous vide setup; i'd like to investigate the possibility of doing something like this with less specialized gear. i'm still curious about quantities. about how much meat and stock would you use to produce a quart of jus with this method?

Thanks Mike, that's all really interesting. I'll take a look at Ducasse's method also. It seems to me that your approach actually shares some fundamental qualities with Escoffier's. He also starts with a bone-based stock. Then he makes a sauce espagnole by creating a meat stock by cooking roasted meat in the bone stock, reducing, simmering with mirrepoix (and usually adding tomato) and thickening slightly with roux. Then the espagnole is reduced at a low simmer, with its volume being compensated by adding fresh stock at several intervals. The biggest structural differences seem to be the roux, tomatoes, and other details specific to the sauce espagnole. Does this sound accurate to you? With the chicken you mention just using the juices from the sous vide bag. Does this strike you as similar to what's being suggested in the other thread on chicken stock? It seems like a great idea if you're going for an intensity of flavor, which I'm more likely after with beef jus/glace than with chicken stock. Have you ever tried the sous vide approach with beef?

i doubt there's an official definition, since it seems to be the kind of thing that artisan bakers don't always agree on themselves. chefpeon's definition is pretty good. a more prosaic one might be any bread that's made with some kind of preferment or delayed fermentation or soaker ... a major extra step to make it extra good.

i would relish an opportunity to be proven wrong, if the evidence is truly delicious. next time i'm in memphis!

Mikeb19, if you don't mind, i have a few questions about the methods you describe. roughly what quantities would go into making a quart of the final glace (for both stock and meat scraps)? were your chefs partial to any particular kind of stock (a meat-rich stock or a gelatinous bone-based one)? did you use any roasted bones in with the scraps? did put use any aromatic veggies or garni in the glace at any point, or were those all reserved for the final preparation of the dish? was the procedure based more on a particular amount of time of simmering (adding however much stock was needed to make up for evaporation) or was it based on however much time was required to consume a certain amount of stock? and finally, do you know if anyone has written much about methods like these? i remember seeing something about this here on egullet (maybe from you) and they seem like a natural outgrowth of some of the older techniques peterson discusses, but i haven't yet seen anything exactly like what you describe in print.

Mikeb, what you're describing does sound like an excellent approach (and I was specifically referring to what passes for glace at most non-world class restaurants, so it wasn't a dig at what you're doing). When I hear someone talk about modern methods, I think of the most common ones: extreme reduction of stocks made from bones. These are the shortcuts on shortcuts; the ones that pale in comparison to classic methods. What you're describing sounds almost like a return to pre-classic methods (coulis and double and triple stocks) which were abandoned for the classic methods on grounds of expense (when i talk about a shortcut on a shortcut on a shortcut, the first shortcut is actually the classical technique!) I'd be curious to hear more about what chef's are doing today in very high budget kitchens.

seasoning black skillets and manufacturing oreos are the best justifications for the stuff i've heard so far! (i won't comment on some uses suggested on adult websites).