paulraphael

Hmmm, starches? This hasn't come up. I've never made ice cream with starchy ingredients, and haven't seen anything written on the topic. Did you have something in mind? Regarding stabilizers, I tried to give a sense in the stabilizer article of how the different ingredients work with each other, and their various qualities. In order to go much deeper, I'd have to do the kinds of experimental trials that I just don't have the resources to do. There are just so many variables, and they all interact. Even testing and comparing commercial blends ... that's a lot of work. And I'm not especially interested in them. It's so easy to roll your own, and then not terribly difficult to make a variation here or there to tweak your results. It's a fair amount of work, to do this—to experiment to get the results that YOU want. But a monumental amount of work to try to create a guide that tells everyone how to get what they want. I'd suggest using the standard blend on that page as a starting point. Then one variable at a time you change the proportions, or substitute ingredients.

I wrote a review of ice cream books, if anyone's interested. The intended audience is people who have already been dragged in deep. Hello My Name is Ice Cream is one of the top picks.

I got a weird 5lb bag of KA AP a few years ago. I wrote to them and they just sent me a coupon for a free bag. They didn't seem curious about what was wrong. Otherwise I've always found it consistent.

Mitch is right, you're doing something different, however good it might be. It's also worth noting that sautéing / deglazing / making a pan sauce is one particular set of techniques among countless others. It happens to be central to how I think about cooking and sauces, but that just reflects my background. The world is full of brilliant cooks and chefs who hardly ever use these techniques. They might have different opinions about pans than I do. You're doing your own version of a pan sauce. I trust you that it's delicious. I'm also pretty sure it tastes different from ones made from fond. I staged at a high-end sea food restaurant several years ago, one that was especially known for its sauces. I didn't witness a single pan sauce being made in my 2 days there. They cooked about half the fish on teflon, half on spun steel. A couple of dishes they cooked on a cast iron grill pan. Different visions, different styles, different tools. You're bringing up money ... I haven't shopped for pans in ages, but I see perfectly good looking disk-bottom stainless pans, and even some clad ones for cheap. There's used to be a decent looking line of pans exclusive to K-mart. Another possibility is commercial aluminum pans (just bare aluminum). These work as well as the best ss pans, as long as you're not cooking with very acidic ingredients. And they're cheap and nearly indestructible. The cheaper ss pans probably wouldn't hold up too long to abuse, but you've said that's not an issue for you.

I've never used those pans, and maybe I don't know what they are. I've used plenty of other non-stick pans (teflon, by many names) and mostly prefer other surfaces for almost everything. Teflon is great for egg cooking (which I almost never do) and it's great for delicate fish with the skin on (but even for this I usually use stainless, mostly just because it's a test of craft ... one I sometimes fail). You keep mentioning fond. In traditional usage, this is juices that have dried onto the bottom of the pan (stuck) and then browned. Does this happen with your pans? The only time I've gotten a fond with non-stick pans, it's been after the pan was already wrecked and didn't have stick resistance anymore. With healthy teflon, the juices don't stick. They mingle with the fat in the pan. How do you separate them and make a pan sauce? There's nothing magical about stainless. It's just useful and useable for just about everything. I've also got cast iron, and spun steel, and some old hard anodized aluminum. But when I'm making a pan sauce, I prefer the stainless, largely because that bright shiny surface makes it easier. I can make a pan sauce on cast iron or anodized aluminum, but I won't really know how brown that fond is. Just because the surface is dark. For expediency I do it all the time; it's just not the best tool for the job. I just looked at the t-fal site to see if they're using some alternative coating. They don't seem to say (which suggests teflon). And they say not to cook with high heat, and that the pans are oven-safe to just 350F. That's not sauté temperature. I have a pretty anemic range, which means pre-heating a pan is more important than if you have 25,000 BTU/hr raging out of a burner. If I'm sauteeing anything substantial, that pan will be around 475 when the food goes in. But even if you've got a powerful range and careful technique, you're probably going to preheat a pan above 400 for a good seer. This breaks down teflon over time. It's why most people's non-stick starts to stick. I think you can make anything work. And with enough experience, you can develop techniques around your cookware. I'm just not sold on non-stick pans as the best choice for general purpose use, especially sauteeing. The technical reasons people like Mitch and me saute on sticky pans aren't just hot air.

There are two basic complaints about teflon pans for traditional sauteeing. One is that you can't really preheat the pan enough to get good browning, without risking damage to the surface. And the teflon does a worse job browning even at the same temperature, because it's a strong insulator, and so slows the transfer of heat to the food. The other is that the fond doesn't stick to the pan. You get a mix of oil droplets and pan juices floating around together, sizzling and emulsifying. So if you want to make a pan sauce, it's a pain in the ass. What do you do with that glop? Stainless makes it easy. The fond sticks so you can pour off the extra fat. The bright surface makes it easy to see if the fond is browned adequately (but not burnt). And the deglazing both makes a delicious sauce base and cleans the pan.

I designed this mango sorbet recipe for a client, who was originally using alphonso mangos: 750g Mango—Alphonso 70g Water 40g Inulin 50g Sucrose 35g Dextrose 50g Atomized Glucose DE30 4.0g Sorbet Stabilizer 1.0g Salt He's had better luck using a commercial frozen mango puree, and then eliminating the water. I haven't tried it myself (not a huge fan of mango sorbet). If you're willing to roll your own stabilizer with CMC, guar, and lambda carrageenan, and if you have access to erythritol and trehalose, you can improve it beyond what's written here. This was the best I could formulate within constraints. You won't get great results just substituting mangos in a peach recipe. Mangos are much sweeter than peaches and will throw everything off.

I don't know about all that. I do know that deglazing a stainless steel pan cleans it up!

Yeah, I wouldn't buy it just for eating. I certainly eat it straight, like when I've chopped some up for a project ... it's fine. But it's not the same kind of treat as Valrhona, and definitely not the same kind of acid trip as Cluizel. One of the things pros like about it is the huge variety they make. Lots of different cocoa %s, milks, whites, and specialty chocolates. I usually just got the 60% or 70% and sometimes the 100%. This opens the possibility that you got something odd. Whole Foods often has know idea what they're ordering. And temper? I don't pay much attention to that in bulk chocolate. The stuff I've gotten usually seems crisp enough. It doesn't have the velvety melt in the mouth of some higher end chocolates.

I wonder if you got something that was either old or mislabelled, or maybe an odd variety. What was wrong with it? Their chocolates are mostly unexciting, but I've never heard anyone find fault with them. It's a standard workhorse brand for bakers and pastry chefs who aren't able to charge top-tier prices.

I've always had good luck with the basic Callebaut bulk chocolates for everyday baking. They're a bargain, and in many recipes you wouldn't see much benefit from fancier chocolates. You may be able to buy these in bulk at Whole Foods, if you have one. This was always an option in NYC. Typical price was around $8 or $9 a pound. For recipes where you can tell the difference, my main chocolates were Valrhona Guanaja 70% and Manjari (64%?), often blended in varying proportions. They complement each other well. These used to cost around double the price of Callebaut. Not sure what they are now. These were also sold in bulk by Whole Foods. These days for high-end stuff I order from Worldwide Chocolates (better shipping policies than Chocosphere last I checked). I get Michel Cluizel single origins, which are insane. Ones to try are Los Ancones, Vila Gracinda, and their (surprisingly edible) 99%. I think if you try these, you'll understand what the fuss is about. You don't need that much sophistication to hold on to your chair while these flavor bombs blow the top of your head off. But that doesn't change that they're too expensive for most routine baking. I used to fear that the flavors would be too distinctive and weird in most desserts, but this hasn't turned out to be the case. I've used both the Ancones and the Gracinda in chocolate ice cream, and both were amazing. These would be $20 pints if they were commercial. Fortunately they're just a non-profit fetish. I keep mine in the same strong box as my most important documents, so my girlfriend doesn't get to them. Please don't tell her.

One detail to add to Hassouni's excellent explanations: up / straight up drinks are usually stirred or shaken with ice, then strained into the glass. Drinks on the rocks may either be strained off of ice or "built" in the drinking glass.

The Tawny Orange Negroni: 1. Find some Wilikin & Sons Tawny Orange marmalade. Slather it on toast and bliss out every morning. 2. When you hit the bottom of the jar, resist the urge to lick it clean with your aardvark-like prehensile tongue. Save jar for later. Or just get on with it ... 3. Stir up a Negroni. I like 1-1/2 oz each: -Campari -Cocchi Vermouth di Torino -Ford's gin 4. Strain into dirty marmalade jar with a big ice cube or two. Sip. Forget for the next 5 minutes that we're in a pandemic and the world is on fire.

I'll try making a Brooklyn cocktail to see how well it plays with others. If that doesn't work out, maybe I'll see if anyone in NYC wants to do a booze swap!

We just got: -Rittenhouse Rye (starting to learn why people like rye in cocktails) -Ford's Gin (my new favorite for Negronis, which means my new favorite) -Cocchi vermouth di Torino (my BFF) -Campari -Luxardo Maraschino (an impulse buy. I see it in so many cocktails. First impression: really disgusting. Maybe 1/4 ounce of it does nice things?) Edited to add: We also recently got a special bottling of cask-strength single-barrel Knob Creek bourbon. The owner of our favorite pizza restaurant in the neighborhood needed to pay his bills, and realized he was sitting on a goldmine of booze at the bar. So he's been selling it a bottle at a time and delivering it with chicken soup. This is wonderful stuff ... made the best Old Fashioned I've ever had. He only asked $50. I'll miss this when it's gone. (Pizza restaurant is scheduled to open again soon ... great news, but I hope he doesn't ask for his booze back).

I'd be inclined to try flash-chilling by plunging into ice water right after cooking sous-vide. How you reheat for service would depend on how thick the fillets are. I think all your technical challenges will be in the reheating. If the fillets are thin, you could throw right back into a water bath. Or if you're searing them (I'm guessing you're not) the searing itself might be all it takes. But if they're thick, it will be be more time consuming to reheat them by any method, and more challenging to do so without overcooking / drying them out.

I had Uigeadail for the first time over the holidays this winter and absolutely loved it. My dad got two bottles of nice scotch as presents and so we did a very informal blind tasting. I knew one was a special bottling of Lagavulin, and one was the Uigeadail. I liked one of them and was floored by the other. I'd assumed the winner would be the Lagavulin, since I like plain-old Lagavulin more than I like plain-old Ardbeg. But damn if my fave wasn't the Ardbeg. This was especially good news because the special Lagavulin was a really expensive bottle. The Uigeadail is pretty reasonable, and is available every year. I haven't treated myself to a bottle yet. For pandemic season I've been drinking cocktails, not fancy scotch. Maybe in the fall or winter.

If I read that right, you used skim milk powder plus reduction. They're both ways of increasing the solids. I'm suggesting you could make life easier and have quite a bit more control of all the variables if you you used milk solids and skipped the reduction entirely.

Have you tried using skim milk powder instead of reduction? If you get a good brand, it will be low-temperature spray-dried, so basically it will come pre-reduced, but done in a controlled process. You can then choose your cooking time and temperature based just on getting the level of protein denaturing you want. I suspect you'll find the denaturization makes a very small difference—especially in a high-fat, high-solids, high-egg formula. I'm curious to know what benefits you're seeing from the polysorbate when you've got 4 egg yolks in there. FWIW, I don't pay any attention to the different flavor profiles of the dominant sugars (sucrose, fructose, dextrose—besides relative sweetness). It's detectable, but I'd really be surprised if anyone would volunteer that they like the taste of 100% sucrose more than, say, 60/40 sucrose+dextrose, if sweetness levels are well balanced. In a food science study, people are probably being fed unflavored, very sweet ice cream, and then being told to choose. The differences are subtle, especially with something cold. Add flavors, and the differences go away. The ratios of sucrose / dextrose / fructose are all over the place when you compare one kind of fruit to another. I think this is a very minor part of why the fruits taste different. When it comes to choosing sugars, I'm interested in getting the sweetness right (which I think should be lower than just about anyone else who publishes recipes) and getting the hardness right (which varies with preference and your chosen serving temperature).

That sounds great.

We have sweet potatoes roasting in the oven right now, and whiskey is the one thing we hoarded for the pandemic. I'm tempted. How were they?

Why don't I see more people doing this? It's delicious and seems kind of obvious.

I hadn't read the OP ... thought this was just another what-cutting-board conversation. What kind of dough are you rolling? I don't find the poly boards to be especially slippery with dough, unless it's very low hydration. They are slippery on countertops though.

I like this Oxo: It's a lot smaller than the picture. I started by shopping for the cool commercial timer they use on Top Chef. I found it and was about to pull the trigger when I read the reviews. Mostly, "this is great, but it's made for loud commercial kitchen, and the alarm will make you jump out of your skin. There's no way to turn it down." Deal breaker. The Oxo isn't as cool, but is good enough—and it's loud enough without being crazy. It has a quite decent UI with real buttons, so I can usually set it without looking, and while doing something with my other hand. For anything beyond 3 timers, or if I need more features (like labelling what each timer is for) I have kitchen timer app on the phone. The oxo handles things most of the time. Only 2 complaints: it's not at all water resistant, so you could wreck it by spilling on it. And it's a little wobbly. You have to hold it down while pressing the keys or it will tip. It could stand to be heavier and to have the little feet closer to the corners.

Bamboo is one material I won't consider for cutting boards. They're all composites, with a high proportion of glue. You'll never know what they use for glue, or how hard that glue is. But the result is that most bamboo boards are extremely hard on knife edges. The whole point of a cutting board is to give you knife-friendly, technique-friendly, sanitation-friendly surface. Most bamboo boards fail at the first point, and there's no way to tell in advance if you've found a board that's an exception. In terms of esthetics, I like end-grain wood boards. These are beautiful, and relatively easy on knife edges. The hype is that they're super gentle on edges, but that's not really my experience. My beloved Boardsmith maple butcher block dulls my knives somewhat more quickly than my crappy ugly poly boards. But I enjoy cutting on it much more. Rubber boards like Sani-Tuff are probably the most edge-friendly. Opinions are mixed on the cutting experience. They are ugly and don't smell good, but can go in the dishwasher. Poly boards are almost as ugly, almost as gentle, equally dishwashable, lighter, cheaper, more slippery, less smelly. There's no perfect board. My personal choice would be my big (22 inch?) maple butcher block, and a couple of sanitufs in small and medium sizes. My girlfriend doesn't like the heavy weight of the STs, so we have poly boards instead. I also have a couple old wood boards that are used for bread, and for carving. I like them because they're pretty, and I've had them around almost forever.