paulraphael

The Times' timely 2¢ ... http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/dining/1...dpc&oref=slogin

ahhh, ok. that's what I thought you meant but I wanted to make sure. Does anyone have experience with the sauce James Peterson calls "chocolate butter sauce?" It's just chocolate melted with a fairly large quantity of liquid (water, liqueur, brandy, whisky, etc.) and then enriched with butter melted in at the end. I assumed it was a standard sauce, because along with ganache and chocolate creme anglaise it's one of only three chocolate sauces in his whole epic book. But I haven't seen anything by that name or recipe elsewhere. It's a great ganache alternative (easy to flavor, and to make to whatever consistency you like) but I've suspected it would be more fragile than ganache, especially with regards to reheating, since butter usually makes more fragile emulsions than cream. But I haven't tested this. Any thoughts?

Are you saying DON'T let it come to room temp slowly, or DO?

I took the plunge yesterday, and and of course am horribly impatient and wishing that I started months ago. Anyway, I got a bunch of beans from the ebay guys ... 10 grade A madagascar beans for desserts, and 20 grade B madagascar beans for extracts, etc. I went with the bourbon beans because of a taste-off we did at the ice cream store where I once worked. All of us prefered the madagascar ... but that was in ice cream. Maybe i'd prefer other kinds in other uses. A creme anglaise I made with one of the grade A beans was almost overpowering ... i'm not sure if those beans are just unusually strong, if they have odd flavors, or if I'm just not used to the potency of good quality vanilla. I'm curious to hear the impressions of more experienced pastry people who have tried beans from these guys. So, I found an almost empty, green, half liter bottle of Jamesons, and emptied it the only way I know how. I split 12 of the extract grade beans lengthwise, choped them into 1 inch bits, and then covered them with some Svedka vodka that someone left at my house after a party. And being impatient, I shook it for a couple of minutes, and started tasting and smelling it immediately. At first it tasted and smelled like vodka, with a hint of vanilla. After about 5 hours it tasted like really good vanilla flavored vodka. After 12 hours, it actually smelled like a weak vanilla extract, though I could still detect the vodka smell, and it hasn't taken on much color. From what everyone here suggests, I need to find some new distractions and just walk away for the next few months.

As you discovered, it won't work. Beurre blanc is unique because the butter itself is the only emulsifier ... most other butter sauces use an additional emulsifying agent, like an egg sabayon. Butter works as an emulsifier only because it is an emulsion itself, between butterfat and water. The emulsifying agent in the butter is the milk proteins. When you clarify the butter, you remove the water, and more importantly, the proteins. So trying to make a beurre blanc with clarified butter is trying to make an emulsion without an emulsifier. It IS possible to make a hollandaise family sauce with clarified butter. Some sauciers do this, because it results in a thick texture (more mayonaise-like) that's appropriate for some uses. But it loses some of the complex butter flavor in the process. And you won't be able to get a light, airy sauce unless you use whole butter. Broken butter sauces can be made with clarified butter. So can compound butters.

Here's one: How bad (or good) an idea is it to freeze meat? I've almost never done it ... usually just get what I can cook. But lately I've been braising large cuts, and I rarely have the need for 9 lbs of cooked meat all at once. It seems to me that freezing meat in a home freezer (slowly) is bound to cause cellular damage that leads to lots of extra fluid loss when the meat is cooked. But I've never done side-by-side tests, and I know a lot of people freeze meat with impunity. Thoughts?

I'm sure someone like Thomas Keller will have something on the menu sometime soon ...

Just to set the record straight ... copper pans don't "need" to be polished. You might feel the need, but everyone doesn't. Mine look like old pennies (or like pans that get used!) ... personally I preffer this to the gleaming, show kitchen look. I'm also too lazy to even consider polishing them. The closest I come is ocasionally removing the tarnish from the inside of my egg white mixing bowl.

And there are no issues with food sticking to stainless steel, at least with most kinds of cooking. With correct technique, the only thing that will stick is the pan juices as they brown, which is what you want. For really sticky food, like fish fillets with the skin still on, or eggs, you'll have sticking issues with both surfaces. Any difference between tin and and SS will be minor in this regard. Tin will definitely limit what you can do in the pan. at least when it comes to high heat techniques like roasting and sautéing. I like the idea of a replaceable lining, but it seems the cost and hassle of gettting this done outweighs the benefits. My stainless steel interiors will probably outlive me.

Some more from the John Train book: Chicken Bowels Swerds Cherde with Anals Dreaded Veal Cutlet Limpid red beet with cheesy dumplings in the form of a finger Roasted Duck let loose Half cooking moose meat Baked scaly ant eater Lao sauce water cockroach Water pies Beef rashers beaten up in the country people's fashion

Silicone will also eventually dry out and crack if it's subjected long enough to roasting temperatures. I agree that it's pretty much a non-problem. Most of my cookware has heavy, riveted cast iron handles that stay cool for a while, then they get warm, then they get hot, and then they stay hot. I'm just used to it. I do have an all clad 10" pan with a skinny stainless handle, and it's convenient that it stays cool longer. But it's not a big deal. I like the pan for its cooking qualities, not its handle. I use towels when the handles get hot, but I keep a pair of those giant silicone oven mits in a drawer for when I have to grab a heavy pan out of a 500 degree oven. At those temps a towel often isn't enough, and I appreciate having protection against accidental brushes with racks or oven sides.

I'm pretty new to braising ... please don't take this as gospel. My one previous attempt at this dish did not match my expectations, which came from some outrageously succulent berkshire pork served by a couple of Japanese restaurants. This first attempt was cooked following Molly Stevens' methods. Most people here seem to agree that they're too hot and too fast. That version was perfectly edible, but not terribly juicy or tender. It was also mostly gray on the inside. The slow version (actually the other half of the same shoulder) was more tender, juicy, and flavorful. It also retained its pink color in the middle, in spite of being cooked to 180 degrees. This is an artifact of bringing meat very slowly up to the collagen breakdown temperature. As I said before, the pork wasn't uniformly great. Parts of it dried out, especially parts that weren't as well marbled. It might be that the quality of meat varies quite a bit within a single shoulder. An interesting test would be to compare a regular low temperature braise with one that also uses the very slow, cold oven technique.

Sapphire is actually oxidized aluminum. Maybe we can get a French or Swiss watchmaker that makes sapphire watch crystals to team up with Creuset. I'm sure the price would be reasonable.

This is my experience, too. I think of the cast iron and the carbon steel as being totally different animals (with the exception of their nearly identical surface). The cast iron has a ton of thermal mass, takes a long time to heat up, a long time to cool down, and can brown a big piece of meat or fish without much drop in temperature. The carbon steel and cools much more quickly. It doesn't have the same rock solid browning ability for big pieces of meat, but it's fine for smaller things that don't suck so much energy off the pan, and it offers quicker temperature control. Adjusting the temperature of a big cast iron pan feels like racing an ocean liner through a slalom course.

Harold McGhee suggests we should be more concerned with surface bacteria, which the browning takes care of. I don't know what the health dept. says about this. It was his suggestion to put it into the cold oven set to 200°. He said the goal was to be around 120 degrees (the maximum temperature for the enzymes) after 2 hours. He nailed it ... mine was at 118.

Here are some pictures of the braised Berkshire pork shoulder I made for my parents. It's the second round of my experiments with this amazing pig. In my first attempt, when I used Molly Steven's methods, everything seemed dry and overcooked. I researched braising in James Peterson's books and in Harold McGhee's On Food And Cooking, and decided on a very low heat, slow method. The meal included an appetizer of braised fennel with prosciutto and vinaigrette; corn chowder with honey-caramelized black trumpet mushrooms; the pork with a brown sauce of apples, red wine, demiglace and thyme; baby greens salad with toasted almond-encrusted baked goat cheese and golden raisins; mixed iced berries with sea salt and warm creme anglaise; flourless chocolate torte with port wine-infused chocolate butter sauce. After quickly browning the meat, I deglazed the pan and put the meat in with the sauce ingredients (red wine, apple cider vinnegar, demiglace, chopped apples, onions, and thyme). It went into a cold oven, partially covered, set to 200 degrees. After 2 hours the internal temp was approaching 120 degres. Time spent between body temperature and 120 supposedly increases enzyme activity, leading to improved flavor and texture. It also helps the meat stay pink even when it's well done (this turned out to be the case). The meat was then covered and the oven set to 250 degrees. I used a probe thermometer, and started checking the texture after the internal temp went above 170. I also turned the meat a couple of times. Total cooking time was around 4 hours. Parts of the meat were succulent and pink and delicious. Other parts (especially the large end, which was less well marbled) were dry and less flavorful. I meant to photograph the meat after it was sliced and plated, but got too preoccupied wiith eating! In the future I might turn the oven down late in the game, to slow the cooking time above 170 degrees. The sauce required mimimal reduction and seasoning. I finished it with a bit of butter. The sauce was my favorite part.

Years of refinement have led to my current system: a few more towels than will comfortably fit, crammed onto the oven handle. They are in various, ambiguouse states of filthiness, and hung in a way to ensure that they drag on the floor when the oven opens, and that grabbing any one towel willl cause all the others to fall into a heap. It's anyone's guess as to which towel (if any) is clean enough to dry a plate, or dry enough to grab glowing-hot pan handle. Why mess with perfection?

THe major downside in the U.S. is the almost complete lack of customer service available here. Delonghi seem to have similar quality control issues to K.A. ... I've heard of them dying early deaths for no known reason. The difference is that K.A. has a quick, no-hassle replacement policy (for warranty repairs) and a wide network of service centers for out of warranty repairs. These things aren't cheap, so I think that's a serious consideration. A blurb from consumersearch.com" "Reviewers say the DeLonghi DSM5 (*est. $350) is on par with the KitchenAid Professional 600. Cook's Illustrated says, "Watching this compact mixer expertly cream butter and sugar into a uniform consistency was a thing of beauty." Like the wide-width bowl of the KitchenAid Professional 600, the DeLonghi's bowl helps keep ingredients "low in the bowl" which cuts down on the need to scrape, say editors. The KitchenAid Professional scores a notch higher because the DeLonghi shimmied and made loud noises while mixing heavy ingredients. Customer reviews at Amazon.com are mixed. A few reviews say the DeLonghi mixer is better than a KitchenAid but others complained that the machine is simply average in overall quality. The DeLonghi DSM5 also has a streamlined modern look which is in contrast to the more traditional-looking KitchenAid machines." http://www.consumersearch.com/www/kitchen/mixers/review.html

I don't know if this counts ... but I was looking for a way to reheat a braise of berkshire pork shoulder, and found that the oven and the microwave tended to dry it out. So I improvised a quasi-sous vide method. I filled an oval enameled cast iron pot with water, heated it on the stove, and then moved it over to an electric hot plate. I adjusted the temp with a probe thermometer sitting in the water. I got it to stay between 145 and 150. I then put the meat in a ziplock bag, squeezed out as much air as possible, and tossed into the soup. The first time I did this it worked great. The second time I tried to hold it longer at temperature, and discovered the limits of the ziplock bag. There was enough air in there that the fats started to oxidize, giving the ends of the meat a gross white/gray color and a stale, warmed-over smell. But the insides were still moist and succulent.

I made a big dinner for my parents this weekend (delayed christmas present) ... I served two desserts simultaneously, because I have a hard time settling on just one, and I thought it would be fun to have two that played off each other. The first was a bowl of mixed, iced berries (raspberries, blackberries, blueberries), lightly sprinkled with sea salt, served in a pool of warm creme anglaise. The second was a dense, warm flourless chocolate torte, served with a chocolate butter sauce made with port wine. The course was preceded by a card printed with my all-time favorite line from Alain Ducasse: "Desserts are like mistresses: they are bad for you. So if you are having one, you may as well have two."

I wonder what the effects would be of cooking stock significantly below a simmer for the extraction part, not for reduction. Simmering and boiling are convenient markers, but I've learned from both braising and making coffee that they're not necesarily the best temps for the food. Has anyone tried a long extraction at 160 or 180 degrees?

Pierre Hermé says the secret to crisp bottoms of tart shells (especially when you have soggy contents, like fruit) is to lay down a thin layer of crumbs inside the shell. He always keeps crumbs from stale genoise, ladyfingers, or sugar cookies around. I haven't tried this yet, but I plan to.

I saw an interesting product at whole foods last winter ... it was high quality, powdered chocolate from south america. not cocoa--it was complete with sugar and cocoa butter, and ground in some way that kept it from glomming together. This, melted directly into hot water, hot milk, or some combination would be an excellent and easy starting point. Pierre Herme's chocolate dessert books has some great cocoa recipes. Nice as is, or use them as starting points. The only thing I don't like about using high end chocolate for this is the price. But there are many options ... Callebaut bought in bulk costs just a bit more than Baker's nasty chocolate, and around half what you'd pay for Valrhona. At any rate, it seems to me that using a finely chopped or ground chocolate instead of cocoa, and if you need it, using a finely ground sugar (not powdered) would get you well on the way to something that would disolve easily.

The book Crazy Quilt by John Train has a whole chapter of butchered menu translations. Most are English menus in foreign countries. The one that stuck in my mind was "Lao Sauce Water Cockroach." Mmmmm mmmm! http://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Quilt-Remarkab...75275343&sr=1-3 I'll post some more when I find my copy. I've also noticed some unfortunate items on local chinese menus, with Strange Flavor Chicken always topping the list. I wonder how much of that they sell?

Replacement Knob? I've never had a problem with the phenolic knob on my Creuset pot, but it obviously bugs some people. Has anyone just replaced it with something else? The lid has a simple hole in the top. Seems you could go to a hardware or cabinetry shop and have your pick of brass or aluminum or bronze knobs, with whatever finish you like. You could get a lion head, with a ring through his nose, if that's your style.