paulraphael

Good pasta is flavorful. You won't taste it if it's slathered in marinara sauce, but it definitely makes a difference if you're having a more minimalist preparation. I have to make a special trip to get the best pasta, and so usually reserve it for dishes where the flavor will shine through. Think of it like pizza crust. With a good neapolitan pizza, the edges of the crust are often the best part. The part with the sauce and cheese is more like the appetizer.

I haven't, and I apologize for not noticing their names here. I'd only noticed mention of barilla, de Cecco, Ronzoni, and Muellers, which are all pretty flavorless and generic stuff.

Jo, I'm looking forward to your report on the KA heated bowl. I mention it as a possibility in my ice cream series, but you're doing the original research. Also, please advise re: 'well deserved zombie' and all repercussions

I think we've been conditioned to not expect flavor from pasta because we've gone our whole lives eating flavorless pasta. The first times I heard people talk about delicious bread, I had no idea what they were talking about. I'm convinced this is why we think of pasta as kind of neutral substrate for sauce. I'd encourage everyone to mail order a package or two of the Setaro. Cook it and just toss it with a little olive olive oil and black pepper, maybe some fresh parm. It should become clear why the Italians think of sauce as a condiment rather than the main event.

Dan Aykroyd had that idea 40 years ago!

Yes, Jo, we all envy your homogenizer! Re: pasteurization ... for most non-industrial purposes we can just call it cooking. There are several reasons to cook the mix. When making ice cream at home pasteurization is not usually an important one (assuming you're starting with pasteurized milk and cream).

That's a good question, and the answer is yes, you'd lose the benefit. But ... the benefits are very small, and the milk solids in the cream are a small portion of the total milk solids in a well designed recipe. For example, in a recipe that's half cream and half milk, if you add enough nonfat dry milk to get the milk solids up to 10%, then the milk solids in the cream are just 23% of what's in the recipe. That said, I haven't tried it both ways and compared side-by-side. My guess is that the differences would be very small.

Absolutely. It's apples and oranges. I like making fresh pasta from scratch; it's marginally better than what I can buy from specialty shops, although I don't have the tools / patience to make anything besides lasagne or paparadelle. So I'm perfectly happy to buy really good fresh pasta. And sometimes even halfway good versions. As far as dry pasta, I don't think any of the brands mentioned here is very good. None has much flavor. Of the brands available at supermarkets in NYC, there's occasionally something that looks like it's made from quality durum wheat and extruded through rough bronze dies. One is DeLallo, which Whole Foods carries. I forget the others—but these are just halfway decent. They differ from De Cecco and Barilla and Ronzoni etc. by having real flavor, and texture that's more satisfyingly pasta-like. The only great pasta I can find comes from specialty shops. There's a brand called Setaro available at Buon Italia in Chelsea Market. Fortunately you can order online. This is as good as any I've had. Everything I've bought from Eataly has been first rate also. I can't remember what brands I've had there—I usually go for what looks good and isn't too stratospherically expensive. It's a drag that you have to go such lengths for f'ing noodles in this country. At list the internet exists!

The only issue with cooking prime rib s.v. is the size. The process suits itself better to rib steaks. If you try to s.v. a large roast, by the time the center reaches final temperature, the meat on the outsides will have been cooking long enough to lose moisture and to get mushy. For a cut this tender, you generally want to cook until done and hold for as little time as possible (or until pasteurized). I think 10 hours is way too long for optimum texture. This cut doesn't want to be sv'd for much longer than 2 or 3 hours. What size cut are you talking about? Is there a possibility of cutting it down to more steak-sized portions (under 2")? If it has to stay whole, I'd be inclined to roast. You can't get the perfection of s.v., but doing in two stages ... long and low, followed by browning at 500 or 550, you can come quite close.

I've started work on a whole series of ice cream posts on the underbelly blog. Just the beginnings right now, but over the next few weeks I'd like to get into the nitty gritty of recipe design, including proportions of sugars and designing a stabilizer blend. If you catch any mistakes or if anything's unclear, I welcome your feedback.

In my experience, if you oil a pan before preheating it, you'll fill the house with smoke and end end up with a coating of polymerized oil ... which will encourage food to stick and be very hard to get off.

All the clad copper pans I've seen use three rivets. Not that two wouldn't be just fine, but that's an oddball claim nevertheless. I don't know exactly how Falk phrases their preheating recommendations. For any kind of high heat searing you'll burn the oil if you don't preheat the pan dry (then add the oil, and then add the meat quickly. You've got just a few seconds before the oil smokes and breaks down.) This is just standard searing technique that you'll see used in any restaurant. The very high heat is especially important if the meat is thin, or if you've cooked it sous-vide and don't want to create a gradient. I also don't know the maximum temperature that's safe for clad copper pans, but I've used them in a 550°F oven, and know that they can take the full output of a 17,000 btu/hr range indefinitely. In either case you'll probably see some blue oxidative discoloring on the stainless, but this wipes off easily with some barkeeper's friend. I've never seen this material warp or delaminate. FWIW, I got rid of my tin-lined copper because the tin melted on the fry pans even under what I consider moderate heat (on a not very powerful range) and I wore through the tin in the saucepan with my whisk. I had no interest in retinning this stuff that couldn't handle the techniques I'd bought them for.

It's not such a big deal. I'm sure the consumer brands are fine for most purposes. If you're working with laboratory precision, and demand perfect repeatability from batch to batch, that's another story. I haven't used any commercial stabilizer blends. Every pastry chef I know uses them, so clearly they're good. I mix my own partly as a vestige of my darkroom days, when I learned that dependence on a commercial product sets you up for disappointment when that product gets discontinued or "improved." And also, I wanted to learn about these magic ingredients in a way that I couldn't if someone else was doing the experimenting and keeping the results secret. Because of this, I'm starting to feel like I'm in control enough to vary my blend for different flavors, which feels pretty cool.

Like most gums, guar and xanthan are synergistic, which means they're more powerful together than separate. In other words, you'll get a stronger effect from 1g of each mixed together than from 2g of either of them used separately. This is a feature, not a bug, as long as you're aware of it. It's one reason you usually see two or more gums used together in ice cream or anything else.

Absolutely. This is why chefs often specify a brand. So far I haven't noticed the differences, but I haven't been using gums for the kinds of things that would be sensitive to the most subtle changes. And I haven't done strict a/b tests on them. Right now I have a couple of brands of locust bean gum on the shelf, and in ice cream they seem about the same. For critical stuff, you can also probably expect better consistency from one batch to the next if you buy from the more technical companies, like CP Kelko and TIC gums. These guys publish elaborate specifications and quality guarantees. I bought my last bach of xanthan at the supermarket ... Bob's Red Mill. I would not expect this stuff to be so tightly controlled. Which isn't to say I've ever had a problem with it. I definitely appreciate being able to buy it right down the block.

I hear you. I've got the cool oven blues also. My dough is the best I've ever made, and I love the big hunk of steel, but have reached the limits of my dumb little oven. I'm tempted to burn a pile of wood in there just to see what happens ...

It works fine, but it's not the best. Other gums and combinations suppress ice crystals better, and offer better flexibility with textures. Manufacturers dislike xanthan because it's relatively expensive. A big problem I have with xanthan is that when used in combination with locust bean gum (which is the best among natural gums for suppressing ice crystals) it forms a gel. So after aging, the mix is as thick as pudding. You have to blend it to break the gel and get it thin enough to spin in an ice cream machine, and even then it's thicker than what's ideal.

Manufacturers will give a hydration temperature for their gums that may differ from the generic temperatures you'll read elsewhere. Gum molecules are heterogenous; from any source there will be different versions of the molecules that will hydrate at different temperatures. The gum companies make their formulas by carefully selecting the source and refining for a particular range of molecules for each product. But the hydration temperature they give is still most likely a recommendation. The locust bean gum I use is supposed to hydrate at 80°C. When I asked the manufacturer what would happen if I only cook it to 75°C°, the rep said that probably 90% of it would hydrate. Which is easy (and maybe even unnecessary) to compensate for. But probably at 50°C it would be completely inneffective.

putting it in the fridge for 20 minutes or so should work better than softening it on the counter. Less will melt on the outside. Starches and gums don't suppress the freezing point of the water or effect the hardening properties of the nut oils. These things have to be addressed in other ways.

It is, but there's a lot of room for confusion, because pastry people use glucose in different forms: glucose syrup, atomized glucose (basically the dried powder form of the syrup) and anhydrous glucose (the powder form that's usually sold as dextrose). These all behave differently and so are not interchangeable. I usually specify dextrose, because that's most likely to be understood as the anydrous powder that I prefer in ice cream.

Oat flour does taste like ... oats. Not powerfully so, but it's perhaps most useful in something that has a lot of flavor, or something where the oats are welcome.

In his Pizza Blog, Jeff Verasano says he has to use foil to keep his stone from getting too hot relative to the top of the oven. I think he says puts the foil loosely on the stone, shiny side-up, until a few minutes before popping in the pizza. He uses a stone instead of a steel, since he's rigged his oven to heat to 900. But I imagine a similar tactic would work with a steel at a lower temperature. One question: how much room is there for air flow around the edges of your steel? Is it possible that it's blocking the flow to the roof of the oven?

That's not as bad as some of KA's suggestions. It's about 1300 grams, 57% hydration (taking into account the malt powder). A lot of bagel dough is 50% hydration; a recipe this size would break any small planetary mixer. But at 57% it should be more pliable. A workout for the machine, but it probably shouldn't overheat it or break it. My guess is that you're kneading it much more than necessary. That recipe uses the old-school approach of throwing all the ingredients into the mixer and letting it work until the dough is perfectly formed. This requires many times more work than more modern approaches. If you're committed to using this method, I'd suggest cutting the recipe by about a third. If you want to make it this size, try the following: 1. Add an autolyse step. This means, when you first mix the ingredients together, leave out about a third of the flour. Mix it together with your flat beater, and only until it forms a loose dough. Cover it and let it sit for at least 20 minute. Preferably 40. This allows the starches and proteins in the dough to hydrate, and allows the gluten to start forming. These processes take time whether the dough is being mechanically mixed or not. There aren't advantages to working the dough before it's hydrated. So you and your mixer can just kick back and watch a movie. 2. Wet mix. Still with the flat beater, work that soupy dough on low speed for a bit. It will be very wet and, and will quickly get sticky. You don't want to mix too long, or the gluten will start to break down. I'm guessing that with this dough a minute will be enough. If you see it starting to look less elastic, stop. The dough is so wet that even with the flat beater, this is very easy on the mixer. But it works the bejeezus out of the flour proteins on the molecular level. A minute of this is like 10 or 20 minutes of dry kneading. 3. Switch to the dough Mix in the rest of the flour, only until it's well incorporated. You'll probably have to stop a couple of times to scrape the sides of the bowl. cover the bowl and let it sit again for another 20 minutes, so the new flour can hydrate. Share a cocktail with your mixer. 4. Knead with the dough hook. At this point, 90% of the work is done. Use speed 2, and watch closely. If the dough is really stiff, the bowl can be forced off the supports. Mix only until the dough looks smooth and homogenous. This should take at most 4 minutes. The mixer should barely get warm. 5. Lightly flour the counter and finish off with a couple of hand kneads, just to make sure the texture is right. This method adds time, but greatly reduces the work for you and the machine. It will generally give better results, because you're not overheating or overoxygenating the dough with too much mechanical mixing. It's not KA's fault that these stiff doughs are hard on the mixer. It's KA's fault for pretending otherwise. For reference, here's Hobart's capacity chart. The N50, on the far left, is their small countertop mixer. It costs over $2000, and is powerful enough to puree a Kitchenaid mixer. Notice that for "Heavy Bread Dough—55%" and for pasta dough, and pizza doughs of any hydration, they don't recommend the mixer at all. They're saying, if you want to do this tough stuff, get a 12 or 20 quart mixer and pay up! I think Hobart's being overly conservative. But then again, you never hear the complaints about Hobart that you do about KA. You're getting what you pay for from each company. But one of them promises too much. FWIW, you can overheat or break a Kenwood or Delonghi or Cuisinart as easily, if not more so. They're all wimps compared with the Hobart.

How big is your batch size (by weight)? (I'm asking because I suspect many—maybe most—of the problems with these mixers are the result of KA's insanely optimistic recommended capacities)

I’ve only experimented a bit with nut ice creams. My first attempt used nut butters (100% nuts, pureed in a high-powered blender—basically, nut paste without the added sugar). The trouble with this is that in order to get a vibrant nut flavor, you have to add so much nut oil and solids that the texture suffers. My ice cream was almost peanut-buttery. In the future I plan to use much less nut butter, and to make up the rest by infusing nuts into the milk (steeping crushed nuts for 30 minutes or so at around 85°C). Pistachio paste is the traditional method for gelato, but I question if it’s still the best. The old reason for using it is that it was once the only way to get the best pistachios, at least outside the Mediterranean and the Middle East. There were one or two brands coveted by every pastry chef. But I’ve read that these brands have gone downhill. Meanwhile, you can get better raw ingredients almost everywhere now. I’d explore getting your hands on the best possible nuts first, and then work on getting the best flavor extraction.