paulraphael

I just don't trust CI on this kind of thing. Their ratio of self-assuredness to actual knowledge is just off the charts. It leads them to making sweeping, unquestioned judgements that end up 180° opposed to those of more knowledgable cooks and testers. A rare example of them getting called out was their 2006 olive oil tasting embarrassment, in which four of their top-picked oils were labelled "defective" by trained tasters. Full article here. Sauce pans are easier to test, but I'm still skeptical of everything in the magazine. Since they're so often wrong on things I know about, how could they be trusted on things I'm learning about. Here's some advice on sauciers: if you're using them as intended, for sauces that require rapid stirring and whisking (emulsified egg sauces, etc.), then the most important thing is low thermal mass. You want something that will cool off quickly when you turn the fire down. Good heat distribution is helpful, but by far the best way to ensure that is to use a burner / heating element that's the right size for the pan. Generally for pans this size, hot spots aren't an issue unless the pan is terrible and the burner is badly mismatched. And you want a stainless steel interior so you can see what you're doing. That's it. Something like an all-clad laminated pan with thin walls is perfect. There are lots of similar pans. Stay away from any kind of cast iron, or anything with a very thick disk on the bottom.

Chris, the way I secured the plastic wrap is exactly like what you did, only instead of bagging after the first layer of wrap, I added a second one. Take those pigtails of plastic and fold them parallel with the roll, and then put the second layer over this, to keep it all from unravelling. Dave Arnold demos this method at cookingissues.com ... it's their way of sous-viding anything tube-shaped. I don't remember needing to do anything to secure the roll in the water bath. It looks like you're getting a nice sear without any added glucose. If you want to try it with the enhancement but don't want to buy powdered glucose/dextrose, you can use any reducing sugar. This would include corn syrup, invert sugar, honey, or fructose. Unfortunately table sugar won't be as effective.

That s.v. method should work fine for frozen scallops. I'd expect a bit more moisture loss. And I'd make sure to include the brine step. Here's a good starting point for time: 1” diameter: 40 minutes 1.5” diameter: 80 minutes 2” diameter: 120 minutes 2.5” diameter: 40 minutes (don’t roll. ziploc bag with space between scallops) Here's a more exact formula for the brine: Water 100% ice 20% salt 6% (will be 5% after ice melts) sugar 4.2% (will be 3.5% after ice melts) -disolve sugar and salt into room temperature water in a plastic container -stir in ice and add scallops -cover and hold in refrigerator for 30 minutes -drain and replace brine with plain icewater -soak for 10 minutes

Never had that but am pretty sure I've read about it somewhere. Would be amazing with some very fresh, floral telicherry peppercorns.

Not really what the OP was asking, but the best scallops I've made/had were cooked sous-vide, after briefly brining in a 5% salt, 3.5% sugar solution. The brine helps firm their texture so they hold their shape—I use this step on a lot of seafood, especially before cooking s.v. Roll the scallops in a couple of layers of plastic wrap (don't use the commercial PVC type that stinks). Cook at 50°C. Time varies by size of the scallops. Chill in an ice water bath (still wrapped). this improves texture and keeps scallops from overcooking when you sear. Dry them. Optionally, dust very lightly with a 1:1.5 baking soda/glucose mix to speed browning. Get a pan very hot. Right before searing dust scallops lightly in wondra flour (also optional). Browning should take 15 to 20 seconds per side. The texture is absolutely insane with this method.

"Best" is hard to assert, since there are so many kinds. For rustic ones I leave the skin on and use a masher. For insane Joel Robuchon-style puree (which some call a butter sauce thickened with potatoes(!)) I use a method (probably like what Btbyrd links to). It involves retrograding the starch, which is easiest to do sous-vide, extracting flavor from the skins, and then whipping the potatoes with butter. I use about half the butter Robuchon specifies in his version (which gives me a stomach ache to read). I haven't actually done this in years, because for a very smooth puree I like the flavor of celeriac more. And pureeing it is much easier.

That's funny ... I use my Forschner filleting knife (cheap!) on watermelon and squash even more than on fish. The paper-thin blade is perfect for not getting wedged in the thick rinds of that stuff. Often the knife just slips through. Mine is much too small for the initial butchering of a big mellon (a thin Japanese bread knife works nicely here). But for making slices once the thing is sectioned, the fillet knife is great. I consider using it for a lot of things where the food is hard and rigid, and so the main impediment is the blade getting wedged.

The most compelling reason to replace eggs is if you don't want the ice cream to taste like eggs. Even then, you can do fine by reducing the number of yolks—which is generally what I do. I wouldn't consider all those ingredients egg replacements, though. Most pastry chefs use some kind of stabilizer blend, even if they're making a French-style ice cream with a ton of egg. Such a blend might contain all those ingredients, or everything except the emulsifiers (the gylcerides). While the stabilizer blend looks like a lot of stuff, its advantage is that it works in minute quantities. By weight you'd use between 1/10 and 1/30 as much as you'd use egg yolk. So you can get the texture modification of egg without the interference in flavor release, or the egg flavor itself. Some people look at modern ingredients like these as "additives." But if an additive is an ingredient that doesn't contribute anything you want toward flavor, I'd consider egg yolks additives in ice cream. Then it becomes a simpler question ... which additive to I prefer? The yolks or the powder?

Point being, boilsover, for every restaurant in a given category that uses copper cookware, you'll find many more that don't. So, correct, there's no correlation. You're grabbing all the restaurants that use them, and saying "see? They're used by good restaurants!" I'm systematically looking at restaurants that meet a particular criterion and seeing what they use. I'm also considering work by the best saucier in NYC who's food I've sampled. This was in 2011 when I staged at Le Bernardin. I don't know what kind of evasees he had, but they looked like all clad. Everything else there was spun steel or disk-bottom aluminum. I know for sure chef Ripert would buy the guy a couple of copper pans if he asked! So out of the 6 3-star restaurants, I see one with a closed kitchen that uses copper. Out of the 10 2-star restaurants open or closed, only Daniel. I saw one picture of the Momofuku Ko kitchen (open) where a single copper pan hung among the others. Maybe it was someone's lucky pan.

There may also be a French nostalgia for copper. At bistro DBGB Daniel Boulud decorates with so much of it I wouldn't put it past him to use for planters and umbrella holders.

Sure, some restaurants use them. I don't think you'll find much correlation between the quality of the restaurant the use of copper. You'll see a strong correlation between open kitchens and the use of copper. When the pans become a design element, the criteria change. And obviously you won't find copper at restaurants that use induction, but this technology is still a rarity in restaurants due to costs. Although it's likely more restaurants will start using the El Buli / Alinea model of not having a range at all, and just using little induction hobs that can be stowed when you're not using them. Right now among the Michelin 3-star restaurants in NYC, only one of them with a closed kitchen seems to have any copper cookware (11 Madison Park). Le Bernardin, Per Se, and Masa use shiny stainless whatevers. Jean Georges and Chef's Table have open kitchens and copper pans.

Back in the days when all milk was raw, most recipes called for "scalding" it for various reasons, including killing pathogens, denaturing some of the milk proteins that can interfere with gluten development in bread, and who knows what else. Scalding meant bringing it to a simmer. If you wanted to add eggs right away to make a custard, you had to temper them first so they wouldn't scramble. These steps have long outlived their original purpose. Nowadays there's no need to scald the milk in the first place. Even if you were using raw milk, we know that there are benefits to pasteurizing the ice cream mix as a whole, after everything's been mixed, and that this can be combined with the custard-making process. So you might as well just add the eggs when the milk is cold. Easy peasy. mono- and di-glycerides are emulsifiers that you'd have to buy as a specialty ingredient, like from Modernist Pantry. I haven't used them, but some pastry chefs do when they want to avoid using eggs entirely. Here's a stabilizer / emulsifier blend used by Francisco Migoya, who was Thomas Keller's pastry chef and who will be collaborating with the Modernist Cuisine team on their dessert series. This blend is stored and used as a single ingredient. He recommends using it in eggless ice creams at 0.35% by weight. 100g Xanthan Gum 175g CP Kelco Unflavored Locust Bean Gum 175g TIC Gums Pretested Flavorless Guar Gum 50g Mono-glycerides 50g Di-glycerides FWIW, I've tried using this stabilizer formula in an ice cream with eggs ( minus the emulsifiers), and did not care for the texture. I've eventually come to believe xanthan gum isn't the best choice in ice cream stabilizer blends. But that's just my opinion ... I'd encourage you to start by taking Migoya's advice over mine.

Believe it or not, there is never a reason to temper egg yolks. It's a vestigial tail of old kitchen thinking. It doesn't offer anything. There are many substitutes for eggs as emulsifiers. I haven't heard of people using pure lecithin, although it should work. The preferred non-egg emulsifier is usually a mix of mono-and diglycerides, probably because it's effective in minute quantities. Lecithin probably requires a bigger dose. Some people just use partially denatured milk proteins. This is what they do at Haagen Dazs and at Jeni's Splendid. It usually means having a higher than normal percentage of milk solids (you can just add nonfat dry milk, but the industrial people use reverse osmosis to drive water off of raw milk). Then while cooking / pasteurizing, they keep the temperature at 75°C or a bit lower and cook for a much longer than usual time. I've experimented with this and haven't observed any textural changes, although it's possible that I'm not using as much milk solid content as they are. Most of the ice cream I make uses 2 yolks per quart, which works well for getting the emulsifying benefits of egg without any intrusive egg flavor.

Those look nice, Mitch! Baking this style of pizza (the ONLY style, dammit) is tough, because you've got to manage the heat at the bottom of the pie and at the top of the pie separately. Mitch is hitting the bottom with a very conductive, high-heat-retaining slab of steel, and the top with radiant heat from the broiler. Getting the exact results you want requires a dance between the preheat temperature of steel, the distance from the broiler, and the timing. Fortunately it's a lot easier to get it right in home oven with an oven-broiler and moveable racks than in a wood oven. I believe a wood oven ultimately can give the best results, but getting a wood oven to work at all can take endless trial and error. I lived a few blocks from Roberta's when it opened in Brooklyn, and witnessed their pizzas rise from ok-but-inconsistent to consistently-the-best-I've had. It took about 2 years!

Me too. A lot of comments (fewer here than elsewhere) look at restaurants like this as some exclusive thing for rich people, and so: who cares. Which is understandable, but I think the other side of the story is that this kind of cooking is an art form, which for reasons no one knows how to fix, is expensive. Like giant sculptures. Like opera. Some of the people who buy expensive art are just rich douchebags. Some of them are true lovers and patrons, using their money to support something they value. Others are regular Joes who happen to love it and are willing to save up and indulge once in a blue moon. But if no one patronized these restaurants, this kind of cooking would die out, or at least become diminished. This should be of concern to anyone who cares about cooking, whether you eat at high end restaurants or not. We're in an unprecedented age of information sharing, in which chefs publish their ideas rather than hoarding them. We're all in a position to learn from Thomas Keller. Or to learn from other chefs who have learned from him. I'm willing to bet that everyone here has benefited from his work already, whether knowing it or not. Keller is a titan in this world. And by the accounts of people I know who have worked for him, he's one of the hardest working visionaries in a world practically defined by hard working visionaries. For his restaurant to have slipped like this, something bad has happened with him, either personally or professionally. I don't see this as a cause for schadenfreude, just because I can't afford his tasting menu. I'm wishing Keller and his team the best, and for fair treatment from the press and peanut gallery. I'd like to put Per Se back on my list of restaurants to maybe possibly someday indulge in.

In the comment thread there's some interesting speculation by a former Keller bar manager.

That copper wok has got to be someone's incredibly cynical joke on tourists. But more on point, you'd be wise to read Myhrvold's full text on the topic before arguing with him. You've got no reason to take my word for anything, but if your knee-jerk reaction is to dismiss the findings of Myhrvold's team, you'll make a monkey of yourself.

The Bowery shops aren't the bargain they used to be (the Bowery isn't the street it used to be ... ) Definitely still worth visiting, and still a convenient repository of all-things-pro-kitchen in a walkable radius. If you're looking for the very best values, there are enclaves of restaurant supply stores in Brooklyn (Flatbush Ave) and, I believe also in Queens.

One thing I liked about Pyrex (back when I had a self-cleaning oven) is that you can restore it to brand new condition by leaving it in the oven on the self-clean cycle. Completely effortless. And very much not recommended for most metal pans. The other issue with Pyrex is that it browns the surfaces that face pan very rapidly. This is probably why it's popular for things like cornbread, where people go for extra crisp edges. For other things this can be a problem.

Nathan Myhrvold and company, in Modernist Cuisine, Vol. 2: Contrary to what cooking-store marketers would have you believe, the least important component in sautéing is the pan itself. Only a few general features matter for making great sautéed food easily, and they are widely available in pans of modest cost. Yes, it is undeniable that copper heats and cools faster than aluminum, which in turn is more responsive to heat than the iron-based metals. but does it really matter if one pan responds twice as fast as another to an adjusted burner? We don’t think so. An expensive copper pan doesn’t save you if your burner is underpowered for the amount of food you’re trying to cook. And a cheap steel pan heats more than fast enough if your burner is up for the job. As proof, consider what happens when you use a wok to stir-fry, which arguably represents the ultimate form of sautéing. Woks are made from inexpensive, thin, uncoated iron or steel. Put one in a race for the quickest sear against a $400 pan if you like. Our bets are firmly on the humble wok. There's much more on the topic in these books; I'm quoting the section on sauté pans as an example. For anyone not yet familiar, this 7-volume collection is the most thoroughly researched body of work on cooking and food science ever assembled. It doesn't flinch from recommending a $15,000 piece of equipment, if nothing else will do as well.

Yeah, that can be an issue with a lot of these pans. My favorite cast iron skillet was a gift ... my godmother bought it at a flea market upstate, took it home, and realized she couldn't lift it. One of my friends has an 8-quart 2.5mm copper saucepan. He weighs 250 lbs. No one else in the house goes near that thing. I think that's the main reason he like it.

How? I've owned every kind of pan in question. I've used them side-by-side. And I've done the math (which supports my experience). I still use heavy copper, and I still think it's awesome. My point is that its real world benefits over other materials—when they exist—are wildly overstated. And that the benefits of tin over stainless are nonexistent. If anyone wants to contact me offline about this, I'm happy to chat their ear off. Anyone in NYC ... come by with some food. We can do a comparison with some controls..

That's an interesting approach, but why would you get a teflon coating if you're going to layer polymerized oil on top? You can "season" bare aluminum just fine. The oil won't adhere as well as it does to iron, but it should make a more even and durable layer than it would over over a commercial nonstick coating.

Rate of conduction will be lower with thicker metal. Thicker metal will heat more evenly, which is a non-issue. See post on evenness. I'm going to stop responding here, boilsover, because I'm just seeing a miasma of cognitive biasses*. We all want to feel good about our purchases, but there's no need to take this anxiety public. Your pans are awesome and they make you happy. They just don't happen to objectively better in the ways you're claiming. No amount of pushing information around can change that. *See 1, 2, 3

Yeah, evenness is rarely an issue in the real world unless you're trying to make esthetically perfect crepes. Most good pans, with the exception of cast iron and its variations, heat pretty evenly. My heavy aluminum aluminum cookware is the most even, followed by heavy copper, followed by thin clad aluminum. But these are differences observed during tests, not cooking. The cast iron / spun steel / enameled iron are the only ones that require any kind of consideration. Copper is about a mix of responsiveness and heat retention ... two qualities that are at odds, but that allow for surprisingly good compromise if you have the conductivity, high mass, and low specific heat of copper. The reason this benefit doesn't make more real world difference is that there aren't many cooking situations that require both responsiveness and retained heat. Retained heat is for searing. Responsiveness is for fine temperature control. The stock answer is sauteeing a lot of meat and making a pan sauce ... but you don't need fine temperature control to make a pan sauce. You'll have every bit as easy a time with a heavy aluminum pan, or a disk-bottom pan, or whatever. This stuff just isn't rocket science. I love my copper saucepans, but to be perfectly honest, I find my friends' all-clad saucepans to be equally responsive. They won't heat as evenly, but you'd need to conduct tests to prove it. There's no task in saucemaking that benefits from greater evenness than what these offer.