paulraphael

basil goes wonderfully with lots of fruits. my favorite pairing is with peach, but apples can be delicious, and so can berries. and people mentioned chocolate. basil is a natural in a creme anglaise. if it's the main ingredient, what about a sweet pesto? basil, pine nuts, mascarpone, and olive oil (or butter, if olive oil will clash with what you put it on).

I'd definitely agree with the decision to not get the cuisinart. I checked one out thoroughly at the store, and was extremely disappointed in the construction. It appeared to be designed by a marketing department in order to photograph well. the machine also has no track record; i don't want to be a beta tester. I'd avoid delonghi, too, since they have a record of problems similar to KA's, but they don't have KA's extensive repair and replacement policies. I think KA is the only game in town unless you upgrade to a true commercial mixer at several times the cost.

I think the only serious issue is flavor. Tuscan bread formulas show what yeast proportions work in bread without salt. You could start by buying some tuscan bread and seeing what non-salty seasonings work with it to get rid of the flatness. also, this is an academic point, but it's been shown that salt does not significantly affect the action of yeast in bread. But it does help strengthen the gluten structure, limiting rising.

i find that too. i don't worry about it much because it's just cosmetic (and the dark finish hides it pretty well ....) i was talking more about how well the finish itself holds up.

your experience with the vinaigrette echoes my own. i'm finding that the quality of the vinegar makes a much bigger difference than the quality of the oil. i now use a good tasting but not fancy or expensive olive oil for vinaigrettes.

I have a bunch of 17 year old calphalon, and the cooking surfaces have gotten beaten to hell ... knicks, dents, dings, and faded anodizing. But the outside surfaces, including the parts that get banged and scraped across stove grates, have held up beautifully. It's curious. In general, I much prefer stainless as a cooking surface. Only drawback is it's easier to scratch, so you have to be careful what kinds of chemicals and scrubbers you use. I don't really care what the outside of the pans look like. If my stainless all clad pan gets scratched and discolored on the bottom, great ... people will know it's been cooked with!

The sommelier I called with a roar, "There's a fly in my Chateau Latour!" He said monsieur Keller has more in the cellar, but each glass gets one fly, never more!

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.