paulraphael

Globe is in a whole different category. Those have commercial motors and heavy transmissions, and once you get past the smallest size they have multi-gear transmissions. They're more like bargain Hobarts than like fancy Kitchen Aids. The newer KA 7-quart mixers, which have big motors and planetary gears would probably do really well as a light-duty commercial machine. They're built better than any previous KA machine, notwithstanding all the they-don't-make-em-like-they-used-to nostalgia. Your mom's KA wasn't built like this. I'm pretty happy with the previous generation Pro 600. It's not built like a commercial machine, but it's built well, and all the inner parts are metal and cheaply available and easy to replace. I've had it 14 years and had to replace gears and regrease the thing once. The main thing I'd prefer about the burly new one is how quiet it is.

Sharpening a knife with that many curves sounds a bit ... advanced! Have you practiced on a more boring knife? Getting the basic moves and feeling with a regular chef's knife, including the ordinary curve at the tip, is the important part. I think once you're comfortable with that, the adjustments you have to make for an oddball knife will be more intuitive. That said, I don't really understand how you'd sharpen a blade that had a really concave belly on a regular stone.

The earliest historical accounts say that coffee was first cultivated in Yemen. But the history is spotty, and Ethiopia is practically in the same place, so no one really knows. As far as coffee available today, all you can really do is make generalizations about a country or region. Nowadays we can get such amazing single-origin beans that have unique or even idiosyncratic characters that it's best to talk about the individual farm or co-op. Many of my favorite coffees have been Ethiopian. I have less experience with Yemen, but imagine that the range of coffees isn't too different. If there are differences, then they'll probably be because of economic or political differences. I've been especially crazy about natural process coffees from Ethiopia and Burundi. These tend to have big, dark, fruity flavors that are unlike any other coffees I've had. The washed versions are also great. My coffee roasting guy and I have both noticed that his Ethiopian coffees have been less fruity than in previous years. He's not sure why.

This has become one of my favorites. Our local food coop has had really fresh hazelnuts lately . A vitamix does a great grinding them. I'm sure a mill would be smoother, but I'm sure there'd be a difference in the ice cream. 120g toasted hazelnut butter (65% fat) (make a larger batch so it will blend easily) 570g whole milk (3.3% fat) 120g heavy cream (36% fat) 75g skim milk powder 60g granulated sugar 45g dextrose 20g fructose 2g soy lecithin (get really good quality stuff that's super bland, or leave it out. Willpowder's version is good) 1.5g pre-blended stabilizer or: 0.86g locust bean gum 0.43g guar gum 0.21g lambda carrageenan 1.5g salt The idea here is lots of hazelnuts, balanced by reduced milk fat and zero egg fat. Also the sugar combination is jiggered around to compensate for the hardening properties of the hazelnut oil. Total Fat: 14% Milk Fat: 6.2% Total Solids: 42.1% Solids Nonfat: 28.1% Milk Solids Nonfat: 12.4% Stabilizer/Water: 0.26% POD: 118 / 1000g PAC: 223 / 1000g Absolute PAC: 509 / 1000g Rel. Hardness @ -14°C: 75

Sharpening on water stones is a skillset, just like using knives. It's hard to master. But it's pretty easy to become competent, and if you're competent you'll have sharper knives you will with a sharpening machine. And you'll have sharper knives than you had when they were brand new, and you'll have sharper knives than most pro cooks ever use (outside of Japan). I don't think it has to be such a daunting process. Just start with 2-sided combination stone (say, 2000 and 6000 grit or similar) And a beater knife that you don't mind scratching up—ideally carbon steel, because it tends to be faster and easier to sharpen. It's a longer learning curve than using gadgets, but you'll get so you can touch up a knife really quickly. I also keep a big butcher's steel around for the western knives that I want to keep a fat toothy edge on—my German chef's knife and my Forschner utility knife. Those knives only see the stones once every few years. If you get obsessive, you can end up with a big collection of stones, but this is absolutely optional. I'm a fan of a strop for finishing and quick touch-ups. It's a flat block with a strip of smooth hide that sticks on with a magnet. You treat the hide with a bit of very fine abrasive compound, and it puts a wicked finished edge on any knife you've sharpened to a mirror finish. A few seconds of stropping gets the edge back to crazy sharpness. I only hit the stones when this doesn't work anymore. The strop takes less skill to use than a finishing stone. I can get a better edge with it than I can with a stone. The guy who taught me to sharpen can get a better edge with a stone, so it probably has to do with your skill level.

I've used a paddle on VERY high-hydration doughs, like when doing an autolyse stage, or in the earliest mixing before the gluten gets going. But as soon as the dough gets thick you absolutely risk overheating the motor breaking gears. You also risk overworking the dough, which basically means ripping the gluten strands apart and killing the dough's strength.

Any idea why comparative reviews online often give Bamix lousy scores? I find it confusing. Lot's of people I trust swear by them, but then I've seen at least a couple of reviewers say they were outperformed by much cheaper consumer brands. Just curious. We have a god-awful cheap stick blender that will need replacing in the next few months. I'm not dying to spend Bamix money, but will do so if they merit the hype.

Yeah, good point. A few times I almost bought something from them and then just got mad. They do sell some of their products through Amazon. Sometimes it's a better deal.

Good stuff at Cocktail Kingdom. https://www.cocktailkingdom.com/all-barware/ice-accessories/anvil-ice-pick https://www.cocktailkingdom.com/pitchfork-ice-pick

Many years ago I had the bright idea of sending knives to a local sharpening service ... the kind of place that butcher shops hire. Luckily these were cheap Chicago Cutlery knives. The place just threw them on a bench grinder. They all came back with several millimeters of steel gone, and a concave bevel. They were basically shop knives at that point. Beware!

Don't give up on it! Almost all the repairs it might need are quite inexpensive, and you'll be able to make it better than new. It can sometimes be tricky figuring out what the problem is. I broke the same pair of gears 3 times before figuring out the real problem—during the first repair, I bent the gear housing while reattaching it. Once I replaced it again, with less of a ham-fist, the thing worked perfectly.

I've used oat flour in many things. It has a very high protein content. I'm not sure of all the ways it might alter texture. It will almost certainly require more liquid, and might help things stay moist longer.

Making ice cream's easy. The hard part is getting it to do what you want it to do.

That's an interesting old study. I actually had a copy in my pile of digital papers. It's one of the more thorough published papers on this topic—along with some of the earlier papers that it tries to refute. It's important to consider specificity in science. This paper looked for specific effects under four different combinations of time and temperature. The earlier papers that came to different conclusions were looking at somewhat different effects, and were looking at different combinations of time and temperature. It's not surprising that they came to different conclusions. I pasteurize at 75°C for 30 to 45 minutes; this is outside the range looked at by these researchers. Commercial ice cream manufacturers have become quite sophisticated at manipulating time and temperature. Jenni Britton Bauer uses protein denaturization to get custard-like textures without eggs. Haagen Dazs uses it to make retail ice cream without stabilizers. There are many possibilities. The sad part is that most of the ice cream-specific research has been done by manufacturers and is proprietary. Haagen Dazs publish in science journals; they keep secrets. Britton-Bauer said she figured it out with the help of some hints from university researchers—probably ones who had worked on commercial projects.

I'm working for a company that helps people with renovations. A thing to keep in mind with flippers is that they're mostly motivated by profit, and they also tend to have a lot of experience. So they'll feel comfortable acting as their own general contractor—which means hiring tradespeople, doing some work themselves, ordering and scheduling materials, dealing with all the permits and inspections, scheduling and managing the crew, and drawing up a reasonable budget. This saves them money but it's real work! And if you've never done it before on a major project you can easily get in over your head. As far as the return-on-investment of renovations, it varies quite a bit with location and the type of work. Kitchens and floors sometimes make financial sense. Exterior stuff like decks and garage doors can be profitable. Bedrooms and closets and bathrooms often have lousy returns.

How much effect is going to depend on the quantity of milk solids, and also their starting condition. If you're making a typical home recipe that has no added milk solids, and your milk is ultra-pasteurized, there won't be many proteins and they'll have already been cooked past what you'd want. So monkeying with your lower-temp cooking times will be a bit futile. Re: soap in ice cream ... don't forget the advantages of easy cleanup.

It's the fructose in the invert. Glucose binds a little water, fructose binds a lot. I suspect fructose isn't used more in kitchens because it's expensive.

The only word I'm reading is "yet."

Dave Arnold has cracked the nut of mint flavor in cocktails, also with cryogenics—in his version, liquid nitrogen and a vita-prep. I haven't found a way to translate this into ice cream, even if I had LN2. I'm curious about your thinking with the cryo-alchohol. Have you done this?

Soap is a really good emulsifier. It would would be a popular ice cream ingredient, if it didn't taste like soap.

So interesting. I've had many annoying bread handling problems, but not this one. My bread's a bit higher hydration than yours. I do autolyse by mixing halft the flour flour and the water with a spatula. Once it's hydrated, I can add the rest of the flour and the starter, and the dough hook mostly brings it together. I'll have to stop and scrape down the sides once or twice in the first minute or so.

Re: lavender—I haven't tried it yet. We've got a lavender plant, so I've been meaning to. I think it will be a tricky one to get right, because of the soap issue. You can't use too much. Cardamom is similar, but I've got a pretty high threshold for cardamom flavor, and that's really easy to get into ice cream. Lavender might be kind of delicate, in addition to being easy to overdo.

I like commercial mint ice cream, too, but I think of it as a particular mint flavor—mouth wash or candy canes. I like candy canes! But they don't taste like mint from the garden. And candy cane flavor is really easy to get—just throw in some mint extract or mint oil. My project over the last few years has been capturing all the dimensions of a flavor ingredient. I want to get all those bright and fresh garden mint flavors, just like I want to get all the nuances of single-origin coffees and chocolates. We're used to ice cream that has a generic coffee ice cream flavor, or a generic chocolate ice cream flavor, or a generic mint extract flavor.

Herb flavors are special to me because of a single formative experience. I'd just finished working for a couple of years managing a homemade ice cream shop in Colorado ... a typical local shop that buys a base from a dairy and adds flavors. We thought it was great ice cream. Oreo and chocolate chip cookie dough and "rocky mountain road" ... that kind of thing. I then took a trip to Paris and got invited to dinner at Taillevent. This was way back when it was considered one of the great restaurants. One of the desserts (by pastry chef Gilles Bajolle ... I've been cyberstalking him since) was a single quenelle of thyme ice cream. It blew my head off. It made me realize I'd never even tasted good ice cream, much less made it. Since then, herbs have been a kind of obsession.

I've had great luck with thyme, and also done pretty well with basil (although I haven't tried the latter in years. The basil I've been growing tastes terrible). My current thinking is that different methods work well for herbs with small sturdy leaves (thyme varieties, lavender, rosemary) compared with bigger more delicate leaves (basil, sage, parsley, sorrel). Herbs like mint and basil that oxidize quickly may pose special problems, but I've found mint to be the hardest. I wish I had a bunch of interns to test multiple versions with controlled variables. I