paulraphael

As much of a bombastic Napoleonic autocrat as Escofier was, he acknowledged that better ways would be discovered. Most famously, he predicted that we'd come up with beter thickeners than flour and roux. Every high-end contemporary source on my shelves recommends making white sauce the way Mitch (and the ancient Chinese) do it—by blanching the carcases before making the stock, to get rid of stock-clouding impurities and nasty flavors. It's obviously not the only way to do it, but considering how many people consider it superior to the alternatives, I think it's worth noting. Personally, I only make brown stocks (except with fish, which I do sous-vide) so I don't have my own experiments. I

I just dusted of my Escoffier, and you're right, he doesn't mention anything about blanching the white stock. It must be a later 20th century refinement. Literally every source I've learned from has included the blanching step, so I just assumed it's been canonical forever.

I experimented with brining chicken for about a year, and found that results were consistently worse than when not brining. A brined chicken will absolutely retain more water. This is only a benefit in cases where you're protecting yourself against drying out the bird from overcooking. If you don't dry out the bird from overcooking, you'll have a bird with a subtly altered, slightly cured texture, and less intensely flavored juices (at best) or salty juices (if you're not careful). I find it much easier to just cook the bird well. This requires manipulating some physics, because the dark meat needs to be cooked 5 or 6 degrees F hotter than the breasts, but the breasts are more exposed to direct heat. I protect the breasts with foil for about half the cooking time when roasting. This tweak is usually enough to get all the meat to come to the right temperature at the the same time that the skin browns. I'm typically aiming for white meat temperature of 140–145F, dark meat 148–153F. At least a few high end chefs disagree with me on this. I haven't heard their exact reasoning. Also, I haven't experimented with equilibrium brining, as described in Modernist Cuisine.

I'm pretty sure every culinary textbook advocates this. For white stock. If you don't blanch the bones, you'll have hazy muck. If you're roasting the bones there's no need. If I recall, Thomas Keller blanched the bones more than once at the FL.

Still a mystery. I don't like liver, and if I tasted it in my stock it would go down the sink. But I've been doing PC stock exclusively for the last 4 years.

It's possibly an issue with the design of the Hawkins cookers. Have you read this post on Cooking Issues? This information gets glossed over by just about everyone, including the Modernist Cuisine team.

I wonder if there's something else going on. I've never heard anyone describe this before.

That's peculiar. Does that mean blood flavor? I associate that with metalic / iron taste. Never experienced this in any chicken or turkey stock from the PC. I don't use the PC for fish or vegetable stocks. I get the best results doing these sous-vide at 85°C. Precook the garlic or leave it out; use about 1/3 the onions/shallots and carrots compared with conventional stocks.

Has anyone compared flavor / texture of potato puree made with retrograded starch methods vs. single-step cooking?

A pressure cooker adds some maillard flavors to a stock. Used correctly, it also keeps the stock below a simmer, so fats are less likely to emulsify and you get more clarity (visual and flavor). And if you can keep the pc from venting, it holds in more of the aromatics. I've never used an IP ... isn't it a pressure cooker too?

Cool, thanks. How do the Sasso birds compare with the Bobo "black plume" birds that Jeffrey used to sell? I thought those were great, and only about $4/lb at the time. Do you recall what Lapera charges for the Sassos?

I think the issue isn't so much Brooklyn as the particular lay of the land around your garden. My old BK patio got too much sun for a lot of plants. Now we're in the shadow of buildings all around.

The MC chapter on smoking talks about the importance of surface moisture. When they smoke after SV cooking, they do an intermediate stage in a warm oven to get rid of excess moisture. You want the surface to be slightly damp / tacky. More moist than that, the smoke will likely get trapped by surface liquid that drips off. Drier than that, too little smoke will be adsorbed onto the surfaces. I gather that the SV / warm oven / smoke is their favorite method.

All in the freezer. When my freezer had shelves in the door, I put the bottles there. Now we have drawer-style freezers. I found plastic organization bins (Container store?) that fit the bottles fairly well, though not as convenient as the door shelves. between buying whole spices whenever possible and keeping them in cold storage, they stay much fresher. I alsways have a small mortar/pestle and microplane handy.

Yeah, I have a couple of pieces of nearly 30 year-old Calphalon that are similar. Back when it was just the Commercial Aluminuminum Cookware Co. of Toledo, OH. The stuff is totally burly .. 6 or 7mm thick throughout, riveted iron handles, commercial lids. Much of the anodizing has vanished from the interior of these pans, and I don't love anodized cookware generally. But these pans still work, and will probably outlast me. I've occasionally thought about replacing the 5qt beat-to-hell rondeau with a heavy copper one, or an induction-ready clad stainless one, but then sobered up and realized that the old war horse is more than good enough. In a perfect world I'd prefer old beat-up All-Clad MC or stainless.

What do you know about their chickens? Their site doesn't have much info.

They seem to be turining this problem into a business model. There's always another set of specialty volumes to create ...

I'm looking at the chart. And yeah, you're right, the high and low end are dominated by LAB. I'm not paying attention to anything below 45F or so, because the resolution of the graph is too low there to really make anything out, and because all activity is quite low generally. I realize many people like to to delay fermentation in the fridge for convenience, and that that's the best temp control in the house, but I think to really know what's going on down there we'd need a higher resolution graph. I'm also pretty convinced that the organisms in my own starter just go to sleep by 40F or so. I don't see any activity. Edited to add: I just noticed that the chart has ratios in the righthand column. At 40% it shows a very high ratio, but follows it with a question mark, which suggests that this is extrapolated data. There's a guy on the pizzamaking forum who's well-pickled in all the sourdough science, and in response to questions about refrigerator fermentation he just says the science isn't there—the studies focus on temperature ranges where the littel bugs are most active. So for now we may have to settle for empirical evidence.

I've never tried it. What do you find are the shortcomings of higher temperature SV pseudo braises?

Speaking of which ... it looks like they're trying to to make the book(s) encyclopedic. They want to cover every known pizza style. Which makes me wonder (as someone who's happy to throw down in an arcane pizza taxonomy fight) who wants this? Anyone who cares enough about pizza to invest in this tome will know, with absolute certainty, that the only true pizza is the one descibed on pp 2783–3299. The rest is a waste of trees!

It's also unclear to me if a more sour starter necesarilly results in a more sour bread. Unless you use an enormous proportion of starter in your recipe, most of the fermentation products of the yeast and LAB will be created as the bread itself ferments. It seems to me this would be more a function of temperature of fermentation than of the amount of acid present in the starter. Although perhaps the condition of the starter will significantly effect the relative populations of yeast and LAB, and maybe this could persist while the bread ferments. Here's a chart showing time/temperature curves of C. milleri yeast and L. sanfranciscensis yeast, two of the more common organisms in starters. It suggests that that LAB is more active than yeast, except in the range of 70–75°F, where they're about equal. Highest relative activity of LAB is around 50–55°F (where overall activity is quite low) and 80–90°F (where overall activity is very high, but yeast activity progressively drops off. I like some sourness, so I ferment mostly at room temperature (for rise) and then put the dough in the oven heated by pilot light (which is around 92–94°F) in order to get more LAB activity. It's important to realize that the bread dough has a lot of thermal mass, and so over the 2–4 hours it spends in the warm oven, it takes a long time to warm up and doesn't ever get all the way up to the oven temperature. Evaporative heat loss probably has something to do with this. I keep the dough loosely covered with cloths. My results with this approach are hard to evaluate, especially since I'm always monkeying with other variables (intentionally or not). The bread is always good, but sourness varies, and not always predictably. One issue is that I have no idea what organisms are in my starter. I use a culture from Ischia Island, off the coast of Naples, that's popular in the Neapolitan pizza world. It makes delicious bread, and has many other attractive properties, but has some distinctive qualities that make me think the organisms are different from the ones in the chart.

I can't speak for All Clad or SLT specifically, but the problem that people generally run into with nonstick pan warranties is that the coating is warranted ... but not the performance. It's not enough that eggs stick to it. You'd have to show that in spite of your following every letter of the insturctions, the coating flaked off. It's certainly woth trying. Just don't be surprised if they give you the classic brush-off.

I would bet it's completely different. They have different formulations at many cocoa levels. Le Noir Amer is blend that's been around a long time. Valhrona doesn't publish where the chocolate comes from, as far as I know. I was guessing Abinau was a single origin, but it looks like a blend from plantations in a particular region in Africa.

Apologies if this has been posted already... here's a big collection of FREE historic cookbooks. Includes La Cuisine Française. French Cooking for Every Home. Adapted to American Requirements, published 78 years before Julia Child's book.

My only experience is with the 3-ply stuff. The MC series always looked like serious and capable designs. Agree that the copper core and 5+ layer pans are dumb gimmicks. I knew one west coast chef who bought AC for his restaurant largely for the handles. It's definitely illuminating if you pick up one of the original-handled ac pans with a side towel and do the same with anything else in your kitchen. Y Nevertheless, it surprises me that the design has lasted so long. Every home cook I know dislikes it, and the whims of home cooks seem to dictate all AC's other decisions.