paulraphael

All Clad is annoying because their basic clad stainless line is very good. I have a couple of the 10" fry pans from this series, and for responsiveness and tossability they're as good as any pans I've used. Whenever I've used the saucepans in other people's kitchens, they've given me nothing to complain about. It would be great if they feld they could thrive just selling the simple stuff that actually works. People complain about the handles, but I think they're exceptional. It gets overlooked that that they were designed for professional kitchens, where no one ever grabs a pan without using a side towel. Grab one of those funky AC handles with a towel, and then grab any other kind of handle, and I think you'll get it immediately.

It's easier for me to think of white chocolate as something separate from chocolate. Letting it be its own thing, I can enjoy the smoothness and the clean flavors. My top priority is that it isn't too sweet ... this is the flaw that kills most of the ones I've tried.

What happens if you step on a non-stick pan with your culinary non-slip shoes?

Well, I played around a bit with the Chef Watson site (still no account required). It gave a big thumbs-up to some of my favorite flavor combinations, but then we came to bit of an impasse. I put in Gin, Campari, Sweet Vermouth. Chef Watson said: zero synergy. Interesting. So I've been liking the wrong drink all these years. I asked Watson for suggestions; he ditched the gin and substituted salt cod. Who's coming over for cocktails?

You're lucky enough to to be around people who care about learning. I don't know if anything would surprise me anymore. But it depresses me when companies like All-Clad turn cynical, and let themselves be driven by their marketing departments. They end up pandering to the whims of people who don't care to learn anything. It's the commerce version of populism.

Interesting. Do you like the Cluizel? I usually find it an upgrade from Valrhona ... although some of their chocolates are so distinctive tasting that they're not appropriate for everything. No idea about their white chocolates.

I haven't made hash browns since before I knew what I was doing, but in theory the technique should be the same as with protein. 1. Preheat the pan. Hot. 425-450°F on the highest heat your range can pump out 2. Have your prepped potatoes ready and pat them as dry as possible with a paper towel 3. Pour enough oil into the pan to generously cover the bottom. Ideally a refined oil with a high smoke point. 4. Put the potatoes in the pan in a single layer. Don't crowd the pan ... Give them room so steam can escape. The weaker your range, the fewer potatoes you want to put in. You don't want the food to suck so much energy out that the temperature drops too far. 5. Don't touch anything. Let the potatoes cook in place. When they're adequately brown, they should release. 6. Turn them. They're more likely to stick on subsequent sides, because moisture may have come to the surface and the pan may have lost heat. But it shouldn't be too bad. 7. If anything sticks, you'll just end up with some crispy browend deliciousness that you can eithe scrape off with a spatula and toss in with the rest of the potatoes, or deglaze as if you're making a pan sauce from meat drippings.

You should be able find Valrhona for less money that Cluizel. Have you tried Chocosphere or Worldwide Chocolate? I'd be curious about the Cluizel ... everything I've tried from them has been amazing.

I think of cast iron and spun steel as being in a separate category from teflon pans. The seasoning on iron/steel does offer some stick resistance, but with everything I ever cook besides eggs (which is rare) sticking is a non-issue. If stuff sticks to stainless steel, 99 times out of 100 this is a technique issue, not a pan issue. You should be able to cook the most delicate fish, skin on, on a stainless steel surface. It's not a mindless exercise, like it would be on teflon, but that's kind of the point: if you can do it on bare steel without sticking, you know your technique is solid, and the chances are decent that you'll cook the fish well. Teflon doesn't enforce discipline like that, and it offeres no such assurances. Unlike teflon, cast iron and spun steel excell at high heat cooking, where thermal mass and getting a good sear are priorities. This is what teflon pans do worst. Other materials are better than both of these for some kinds of cooking.

This SeiousEats article says they picked Valrhona in their blind tasting. I'm planning to order some to check out, but don't have any 1st hand opinions yet.

I can get my oven to about 540°F. But it has no top broiler. Even with a 1/2" thick steel, pizza is not good enough. I live in Brooklyn, 40 minutes or less from a half dozen of the best pizzerias in the known universe. So I'm not going through the trouble. I gave up, but in the process learned how to make sourdough bread, and am now addicted. So that's a bit of a consolation prize. I wish they'd just included pizza in Modernist bread. It's hard for me to believe that they'll come up with more than 50 pages of new discoveries on this one topic. And it's delaying Modernist Pastry!

Anyone know if there are any basil varieties that would taste better than others when grown in too little sun?

Yeah, soap! Detergent! Scrub sponge! Don't baby it.

There's a lot of romantic hogwash about cleaning cast iron. Just grab a regular scrub sponge and some dishwashing detergent and hot water and scrub until it's clean. If this does any damage at all to the seasoning, then the pan wasn't really seasoned. To get seasoning off, you need chemicals the equivalent of dishwasher detergent or oven cleaner, or abrasives the equivalent of sandpaper. I've removed seasoning from manky old pans ... it took two days soaking in a cocktail of dishwasher detergent and draino. That "seasoning" is a matrix of polymerized oil and carbonized oil. Polymer=plastic. Tough and nasty stuff. Which is why you want to apply it in nice thin even coats in the first place, because you'll suffer trying to get any off. Incidentally, this is one reason to be careful using teflon pans on any kind of high heat, especially if you're using an oil that's high in unsaturated fats (canola, safflower, sunflower, etc.). If any of that oil polymerizes on the teflon, you may never get it off. I don't know if there's anything that will attack the polymerized oil that won't attack the teflon coating harder. If anyone knows, please share. One problem I've discovered with using non-stick pans solely for what they're do best is that I end up using mine about twice a year ... the rest of the time it's on a wire shelf, where, thanks to my terrible range hood, it gets a mist of airborn oil every time I saute something. When I looked at it the other day, the oil had oxidized to the point where it wouldn't come off with hand washing detergent. It eventually came off off after soaking for an hour in a solution of dishwasher detergent. I don't know if this is harmful to the coating. Luckily, it's a $15 pan (see above!)

Interesting. Maybe it's not the variety, but inadequate sun? FWIW, the plants thrive. Just not the flavor.

2 in our party. All the rest is negotiable.

I was able to use it without creating an account. It wouldn't let you?

One of those sample combinations, coffee and carrot, is explored in another book I'd like to check out: The Art of Flavor. I listened to an interview with the authors, and they used this as an example of an entirely new flavor being created by an ingredient combination; one that doesn't seem to reference its constituent parts. So I can imagine that some of the other pairings, like strawberry and mushroom, might be similar. This could be the exact value of a book like this—the discovery of combinations that no one would think of because they sound terrible. Art of Flavor is a more conventional book, in that it's the product of a chef and a perfumer finding overlap in their creative processes. They then attempt to systemetize a process of combining and balancing flavor. I have and enjoy The Flavor Bible, which is probably the most conventional (conceptually) of all these books, but is useful for its rigor. It doesn't attempt to discover new possibilities; it just catalogs combinations that have been discovered by hundreds of chefs around the world, and ranks these combinations based on how standard or harmonious they are. All these approaches seem useful, but I find the one explored in the Matrix the most exciting. Edited to add: the Flavor Matrix team has a website which gives access to their flavor pairing engine. I haven't played with it yet, since last I checked you needed a paid account. But it looks open now. The project is a collaboration between IBM's Watson AI team and some chefs, including the book's author.

We grow herbs in our little container garden, and for the last few summers have been happy with everything but the basil. It's mostly had a sharp, thin, not very basily flavor. No idea what variety it is ... we've just been buying seedlings from a local farmer's market. Seems like we need to shop more carefully. What should we look for? Our garden gets maybe 5 hours of sun during the summer months, and we'd like something that isn't too bothered by casual caretaking (read: benign neglect).

Not really. An electric range tends to minimize the differences between pans. It heats pretty evenly by design, and changes temperature slowly. Also, the pans people are recommending from places like Ikea I think are pretty similar to what you'll find at restaurant stores.

A solid, cheap one from the restaurant supply store. Something like this. Or if you insist on a stainless exterior, this. Don't think of it as an investment. If you take good care of it, it will last a few years, but it's eventually going into the recycling bin. Teflon coatings just don't keep their performance forever. The difference in durability between the cheapest ones and the fanciest ceramic /diamond studded ones isn't what you might think. Those additives help protect against physical abuse, but not against the gradual breakdown from cooking and washing that all the nonstick surfaces suffer. I cry when I see things like $500 copper pans with a teflon interior. The pans will last by far the longest if you use just for what they're good for, which is eggs, and other things that are genuinely sticky and that don't ever cook on high heat. Don't use the pans for things that need a hard sear. Doing so is bad for the pan and bad for your results. Edited to add: I'm talking purely about teflon, not anodized. Anodized surfaces are not non-stick.

As far as the science goes, I'm not sure what difference it makes to feed a dormant starter separately, vs. feeding it by just adding it to a bread recipe. I haven't yet heard a good argument for why this would matter to the yeast and LAB. It would extend the bread's fermentation time at any given temperature, as you did ... this would seem to cause more enzymatic development relative to yeast / LAB. I'd love to hear a microbiologist/breadmaker's thoughts on this.

Has anyone played with CO2 / N2O blends?

It's interesting because it illustrates how easy it is to remain oblivious to racist tropes when we're not on the receiving end of them. I doubt you'll find find any African Americans who grew up during the Civil Rights years who aren't intimately familiar with the implications of watermelons.

Exactly. You can't just ignore 100 years of minstrelsy and ridicule and disenfranchisement by saying "who doesn't like watermelon?"