paulraphael
-
Posts
5,072 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Store
Help Articles
Posts posted by paulraphael
-
-
On 3/4/2019 at 10:29 AM, boilsover said:
The original induction hobs introduced were designed to be placed under stone countertops. So if that can still be done, why would anyone want their hobs to hang on a wall?
The idea is that your workspace is adaptable to whatever you need. If you need to cook something, grab a hob. If you don't get it out of the way.
As the article says, this is how they've done it at Alinea since the beginning, and it works brilliantly for them. I'm not sold 100% substitute for a home range, for a few reasons. I use a range enough for it to justify some permanent real estate. And those hobs aren't going to be very powerful. Pretty sure at Alinea they'd be using 220v models that can equal the real world heating power of a commercial range. These aren't those.
But as additional burners, that can be put anywhere or stowed, I'm down with the idea. Maybe not this exact product (I don't care about hanging on the wall ... sticking it on a shelf is fine) but the portable hob concept is great. I can see this reducing the temptation to buy a big 6+ burner range.
-
2
-
-
On 3/3/2019 at 1:36 PM, LWB said:
Not sure - I always have both in the pantry and milk has both proteins. In theory they denature differently and so perform slightly different jobs, but I have not reliably tested this and suspect the differences are subtle.
The differences are significant, but complex. Most of the research on this seems to be behind closed doors at companies like Haagen Dazs. I think that unless you've found some particular insights on how to work with these proteins separately, and have a strategy in mind, you'd make your life much simpler just by using dry milk powder.
-
If you want it to look like new (which I wouldn't ... I like the age showing) I'd check with Dave Martell at Japanese Knife Sharpening and see if he'd like to take it on.
If you want to keep the battle scars but make it useful, it probably won't be too much work. I'm guessing it's carbon steel, and not terribly hard, so it should be pretty easy to sharpen and work on. If you already have a full set of water stones you're pretty much ready to go. The first step would be removing the active rust (anything red or brown) with Barkeeper's Friend and a scouring pad. This will take off all the patina, too, but it will come back. And don't forget to take care of the wood with some conditioner, like the beeswax / mineral oil blends used for cutting boards.
After that it's just going to be about repairing edge damage with your coarsest stone, putting on a new edge with a medium stone, and then polishing with finer stones, if you like. None of us can tell you how fine a grit to sharpen to. That's going to depend on what you like, and on what the steel will take. If it's a soft or coarse-grained steel, going much beyond 2000 grit will be pointless. Depending on how you use the knife, and how you like to cut, you may not want to go past a toothy 1000 grit.
FWIW I go to 1000 with my German chef's knife and anything I use for butchering, boning, or ripping open packages. My gyuto and slicing knife I take to 6000–10000. This gives a polished edge similar to a straight razor, but doesn't really make sense for a butchering knife like this.
I believe one traditional use of scimitars is butchering meat that's hanging from the ceiling. The curved blade makes it useful when cutting overhead. Another use is slaying your enemies when they're on foot and you're on a horse.
-
4
-
-
I've experimented a bunch with hot chocolate over the years. There's a spectrum from intense chocolate flavor to high richness, and you need to find the sweet spot. So to speak. Tastes will vary.
The most intense hot chocolates I've had are dairy-free, and are closer to the way cocoa was originally drunk. It sounds like a ripoff ... just chocolate and water. But the chocolate intensity is bonkers. I find it a bit too much, for anything more than a demitasse-sized chocolate dessert. But it's worth trying. I use it as a starting point, and add a bit of whole milk to mellow it out. But I generally like the water / milk blend more than pure milk.
If you prefer richness to chocolate intensity, you can go all the way in the other direction and use ganache. This is a handy formula for restaurants, because the ganache is basically an instant hot cocoa mix. Just stir it into hot milk or hot water.
Overall I prefer bittersweet chocolate to cocoa powder. Not because it's inherently better, but because in practice it's better. Very few companies make cocoa powder that's as good or as interesting as their chocolates. With a handful of exceptions, it's a byproduct. There are some signs that this is changing. For the time being I use a blend of both. Chocolate for the interesting flavors, cocoa for added intensity with less added fat.
Here's a version I've enjoyed:
360g / 1-1/2 cups water
60g / 1/3 cup sugar
120g / 4-1/4 oz Bittersweet chocolate
24g /1/4 cup dutch cocoa
1g / 1/8 tsp salt
240g / 1 cup whole milk
-Heat sugar in a saucepan.
-boil the water separately
-when sugar starts to caramelize, stir vigorously until amber
-pour water on sugar, and keep stirring and heating until clumps liquefy
-whisk in cocoa
-stir in chocolate, continuing to stir until melted
-stir in milk
-keep on heat until the first bubble pops on the surface
-remove from heat and whip (with a whisk or a stick blender) until slightly frothy
notes:
-you can make it with all milk, if you want less chocolate intensity.
-you can make it without the cocoa, if you want to mellow the chocolate flavor. if so, reduce sugar to 1/4 cup.
-you can dispense with the caramelization (if you don't caramelize, it will be a bit sweeter).
-
3
-
-
The moisture content of roasted coffee is so low that I doubt frozen beans are especially tough. They're also not immune to changing. Freezing and vacuum packing slow down the changes but don't stop them.
There's a new trend at the super high-end ... freezing green coffee beans in sealed bags, for storage and shipping to the roaster. Some are arguing that this will preserve more flavor. I have no doubt they're going to charge us for it!
-
A few thoughts ...
-Probably the chef pre-hydrates the xanthan not because it's hard to hydrate the stuff, but because it takes a while for it to fully hydrate. A blender or homogenizer will disperse it in a hurry, but it can still take a couple of hours to fully hydrate. This means that you can easily overshoot with the concentration. Pre-hydrating would take the guess work and the timing out of the picture.
-I'm not convinced he told you the full story. Anything thickened to that consistency with pure xanthan gum would be disgusting. It would basically have the consistency and mouth feel of snot. My guess is that that stuff (whatever it is) was naturally thick, based on whatever was pureed, or else it had some other ingredient that acted as a hydrocolloid. The xanthan could then be used to add a bit of viscosity, cling, and stability.
-If you have to get a thin liquid to that viscosity, a couple of suggestions:
-a 3:1ratio of lambda carrageenan and xanthan. Use at a concentration 0.4% to 0.6%. Doesn't have to be cooked, but should be dispersed with a blender to prevent clumping.
-a 10:1 ratio of arrowroot starch and xanthan. Use at a concentration of 0.5% to 1%. Needs to be cooked to hydrate. But pretty easy to disperse just by making a slurry and whisking.
-Maybe the green is chlorophyl. Or maybe it's a Shamrock Shake™®©
-
3
-
-
On 1/9/2019 at 6:48 AM, weinoo said:
Not necessarily true. Some roasters offer that their beans are at peak (note, not "freshest") 7 - 10 days out from roasting.
Yup. Freshly roasted beans are so full of CO2 they make terrible coffee. Some of it goes into solution, forming carbonic acid, which adds metallic bitter and sour notes. The rapid off-gassing when the hot water strikes also interferes with espresso extraction.
Exactly how long the beans should rest (and the maximum time they should be allowed to rest) is quite variable. Generally speaking, if you're making espresso you should rest longer than if you're making brewed coffee. And with lighter roasts you should rest longer than with darker roasts.
My favorite coffee shop generally aims for 7 - 14 days off roast, in keeping with what Mitch says. They specialize in espresso, and roast on the light side.
-
1
-
-
On 12/30/2018 at 12:43 PM, CanadianHomeChef said:
Stir-fry has morphed into an acceptable noun in a lot of North American dialects. Linguistically, this is known as nomilization, and stir-fry isn't the only instance of this in the English language. E.g. "A change would do you good", "The increase in crime has me worried", "The murder happened at midnight" or "French-fries/french fry instead of french-fried potatoes". This conversion can also happen in reverse (e.g. noun --> verb :"let me Google this"). English, like any other language, is a pretty versatile and has lots of regional variation. But I get it that in Chinese it may sound very awkward.Likewise ... having a roast. A stew. A braise.
-
1
-
-
Someone wake me up when the designer of this thing and Gray Kunz collaborate on a spork.
-
3
-
2
-
-
Food sticks to stainless because the food is too wet or the pan isn't hot enough. Sticking is always a technique issue. You should be able to cook fish with the skin on in a stainless pan, with no sticking.
I still don't think stainless is a great material for traditional wok (one you'll use for real stir frying). It's less conductive than spun steel, and more expensive. And while you could probably get some seasoning to build up on it, it will be fragile, so you'll probably end up cleaning off any polymerized oils. Which means you'll need more perfect technique to keep things from sticking, so it won't be as casual to use.
We have a vaguely wok-like pan ... a flat-bottomed, curved sided thing with a conductive disk bottom. I kind of like it. Is this the sort of thing people are talking about? I see these as a hybrid between a wok and a sauté pan. They're nice for sautéing vegetables, because they hold a lot of them, and make tossing them nearly effortless. But this isn't real stir-frying. You're not using the kind of heat that could set the ceiling on fire.
-
2
-
-
I'm just looking quickly at your formula and don't see anything obviously wrong. Just a couple of quick observations ...
- You're down below 8% milk fat. This isn't crazy; it's within the range of a lot of Italian gelato. But it's low, and it's the fat that makes the foam structure.
- There's a whole lot of complication going on with your blends of sweetening ingredients, including things like polydextrose and glycerin, which I don't know anything about.
There's a possibility that something in there is interfering with foam structure, either by preventing the the emulsifiers from de-emulsifying the fat globules, or by interfering with the partial coalescence, or by who-knows-what.
-I didn't do the math, but total solids looks low. The recipe would benefit from a bunch of nonfat milk powder. This would let you reduce or get rid of the protein powder, because milk powder is full of whey and casein.
I really doubt the problem is with the stabilizers or emulsifiers. That part of the formula looks completely standard and should work fine.
My suggestion would be to make a batch of really basic ice cream. 50/50 cream and whole milk, around 4% egg yolk, enough milk powder to bring total solids to 40%, and ordinary sugars ... try something like 8% sucrose, 3% dextrose. Cook it 75–80°C for 30 to 60 minutes. Flavor it with something that won't mess with the structure. Vanilla, or matcha powder, or herbs.
If this won't whip up, then the problem's with your machine. If it whips up fine, then you'll need to figure out which of those variables is causing the problem. I'd start by testing the fats and solids levels. And if those aren't the problem, then start trying out the other ingredients.
-
1
-
-
That method looks like it's intended to hydrate and swell the cocoa to make it easier to disperse. I'd be surprised if it made any difference in the end result, especially if you've got a blender and a cooking stage in your process.
-
Whole foods often has bulk selections of Valrhona and Callebaut. The Italian grocery shop at Chelsea Market has bulk Domori and Callebaut. I haven't seen any brick and mortar shops that can compete with Chocosphere in variety or higher-end chocolates.
-
1
-
-
It should be great for deep frying.
If aluminum were bad for you, we'd have a problem, because the biggest dietary source of it is leafy green vegetables.
-
1
-
-
There's interesting information on cookingissues.com. Do a search for Dave Arnold's experiments in sous-vide turkey.
His best browning/crisping results came from "pour-over frying," which basically means ladling hot oil over the skin of the cooked bird.
All attempts at using very high dry heat (torches etc.) failed. I think the oven got rejected on grounds that it would overcook the meat.
-
1
-
-
To the OP, it doesn't sound like you're really talking about espresso, so these are general guidelines for any coffee process.
Coffee beans:
darker roast = more bitter (and up to a certain point, also more sweet)
lighter roast = less bitter, more acidic, more coffee origin flavors and aromas
Extraction:
Hotter water = more bitter (and up to a certain point, also more sweet)
Cooler water = less bitter, more acidic
The acceptable range is 90°C to 96°C. For brewed coffee, I like 93°F for the lighter roasted beans I favor. With some natural process beans (often my very favorite) I get the best balance as low as 90°C.
Finer grind (drip) or longer extraction (press pot) = more bitter
Coarser grind (drip) or shorter extraction (press pot) = more sour, weaker development of flavors
Larger dose = heavier body, stronger flavor (if you go too far, subtler flavors will be masked, and it will be hard to know what you're tasting. It might not be obviously too strong).
Lower dose = lighter body, weaker flavor
The acceptable range is around 5% to 7.5% coffee relative to water (consider water to be 100%, so 7% means 7g coffee to 100g water)
I use 6.4% with a press pot.
My advice would be to leave the water temperature and dose (brew ratio) alone in the beginning, and play with grind size. 93°C will be reasonable for any good coffee. As will a 6% brew ratio).
If you're using a press pot, grind size will be coarser, but really doesn't have to be as coarse as some suggest. Somewhere between the coarsest setting people recommend and drip-size works well. 4 minutes total brew time will give good results.
But first make sure the coffee is good. If it's overroasted, it's going to be bitter, and it's going to suck no matter what you do. There will be no way to balance bitterness and sourness or insipidness with it. This describes 90% of the coffee available at stores and everyday coffee shops in the US, so don't assume your coffee's ok just because it cost a lot or is convincingly branded. Coffee roasters should be presumed guilty unless proven otherwise.
-
2
-
-
On 11/20/2018 at 10:23 AM, rotuts said:
my home-roast espresso , of all types , rests for 2 days after roasting.
peaks at flavor @ 5 days after the roast , and at 7 declines.
I therefor roast , when i remember , one a week.
only takes 7.5. minutes to roast one heaping cup of green beans.
This will vary tremendously with different roast levels, and to a lesser degree with different coffees.
A rule of thumb is that the lighter the roast level, the longer it's going to take to offgass, so the longer it will be before it's ready (and before it's no good anymore). My favorite roaster roasts on the light side; his beans are ready for brewed coffee after about 7 days, and for espresso after about 10. They stay fresh-tasting for a good 10 or 14 days after this, although the flavor profile changes.
Darker roasting makes the hull of the bean more porous, so gasses leave faster, accelerating all these processes.
Natural process vs. wet process coffees differ here as well. The natural process beans may do better with a slightly longer rest than the more common wet processed beans.
-
On 11/18/2018 at 8:34 PM, Lisa Shock said:
@LWB would you mind posting your formula? It would help us to know what exactly you're using and in what amounts.
This. Your machine should be giving you some overrun unless there's something really funky with the basic formula. I doubt this has to do with process or with stabilizers.
-
1
-
-
On 11/14/2018 at 5:59 AM, ccp900 said:
Does anyone have any information around how many grams of water the different stabilizers can absorb per gram of the gum?
I tried googling but cant seem to get any leads
Thanks
There won't be data on that because it's not how stabilizers work. They form a loose (or tight) network in suspension in the water, which slows the motion of water molecules past one another. They increase the viscosity and change other rheological properties of the water, but don't technically absorb it.
So there's no absolute formula. You have figure out the concentration of gums based on empirical observation ... your own or someone else's. It gets a bit complicated with blends, because all gums are synergistic to one degree or another. Using two gums will have a stronger effect than an equal amount of either one. And sometimes the synergy will radically change the behavior (by creating a gel, for example).
I always suggest starting with stabilizer formulas that have already been tested (which it looks like you're doing). You can tweak to get the specific textures and other qualities you're looking for.
-
1
-
-
On 11/3/2018 at 5:08 PM, weinoo said:
There are a few 3rd wave" coffee spots in Paris, and a few more 2nd wave. You can get decent beans.
You just gotta know where to go to get a decent cuppa, or brew it at home or in your air BNB. Or not drink it.
I don't doubt there are a few good spots. My point is that it's not like Rome, where almost every cafe will do a pretty good job, or Portland, where almost every one will do a pretty great job. In Paris you'll either need coffee-nerd knowledge very, very good luck.
In Rome, it's not even 3rd wave-style espresso. It's super traditional, and not particularly interesting. But it's made well, it's familiar and satisfying, it tastes good. What I had all over Paris was just poorly crafted.
-
That David Lebovitz article is from 2007, and describes acceptable espresso from that era. If you're looking for really good, though, most of what he says is obsolete. Good coffee is a very young idea (relative to good wine, good booze, good beer, good tea, which have all been pursuits for over two thousand years). We're learning about coffee in leaps and bounds year after year. Illy's idea of coffee got left behind by the 3rd wave.
-
2
-
-
What did you like about it? When I was in Paris for two weeks a couple of years ago I had uniformly terrible espresso everywhere. Not Starbucks terrible but definitely leaning in that direction.
-
1
-
-
I'll check them out when I'm in the neighborhood. Always seeking good espresso. I've been striking out in Manhattan lately. It's been around 2 years since I've found a good espresso in any of my old haunts, or any of the new ones that have been recommended.
O's website is all fluff. Nothing about the coffee. It will be interesting if it was Brazilian coffee you had, since most coffee from there is usually more big and chocolaty than bright tasting. But if it's a single origin it could well go against the regional expectations.
-
I checked out the kickstarter. It looks pretty cool. I would prefer it worked more like a stirring hotplate that allowed you to use the vessel of your choice on top. Or at least if the vessel were plain stainless steel. I can't stand everything being gratuitously coated with teflon that's going to scratch off in a couple of years.
-
2
-
Best places to purchase couverture chocolate
in Pastry & Baking
Posted
It seems to be up to the whims of the local Whole Foods manager whether or not to put more specific labels on the chocolate. The ones where I've shopped usually let you know the cocoa%, which gives enough of a clue as to which Callebaut product it is. Sometimes it just says "bittersweet" or something similar, in which case it could be anything.
I like most of the 70%+ callebaut chocolates I've bought there. They aren't special ... just solid workhorse chocolates for making cakes and things. The prices are excellent. Quality-wise they're a step below Valrhona and few steps below Cluizel and some of the other smaller production SO chocolates you can get these days. People still love the stuff in baked goods.