paulraphael

Link??

This is definitely a thing. If you buy a culture from Sourdoughs International it comes dried. I also dried some of mine later to keep as emergency backup. I think I spread it thin on a Silpat, and then broke it off and sealed in a plastic bag. There are probably better instructions online.

I find it takes close to no effort to keep a sourdough culture alive. It might vary from one culture to another, I don't know. I bought the Ischia Island starter from Sourdoughs International (popular with Neapolitan pizza people), and it's basically indestructible. I've neglected it for 6 months and it's bounced right back. What I've discovered is that if you keep it in the fridge it goes dormant. To wake it up, bring it to room temp, feed it, and it's lively again in half a day. If you keep it dormant without feeding for more than a week or two, it goes extra dormant. More like comatose. It will still bounce back, but takes a couple of feedings over 24 hours. Another approach people use for mock sourdough is to use the culture as a seasoning ingredient. It doesn't even have to be active. This is a good use for portions that you're planning to toss during the usual feeding cycle. For this purpose, if you use 100% hydration like I do, you just treat the culture as a substitute for equal parts flour and liquid in your recipe. Maybe keep it to 20% of the recipe weight at first and see how it goes. When you do this, you'll need to some other form of leavening. Commercial yeast for bread.

That is too kind. At the end of the day I'm a food nerd, not a James Beard award winner.

I wouldn't use it on a roast. But it's a revelation for slaying a watermelon.

I've had really good ones. Just don't know how to make them (but I don't know much about deep frying).

I get it. I happen to like the intense seriousness, especially when the subject is "bon bons." I'm similarly a fan of Werner Hertzog, when he talks about ... anything. But seriously, Chef Laiskonis has taught me a lot over the years, and has been unreasonably generous with his knowledge and time. The way he applies encyclopedic technical knowledge to creative thinking is a model that I aspire to.

Michael's got more of an intense, post-punk demeanor. "It's important that it's really clean. Which is why I use a blow torch."

To my dismay, my girlfriend bought one. Took up almost as much space as a chamber vac or commercial ice cream machines (things I deny myself, because there's no room to spare). Her dream was to make crispy sweet potato fries. That project failed, so she sent it back, thank Bezos.

Looks like it's for slaying and butchering some kind of mythical creature! Never seen anything like it. No surprise that it's good with bread. That kind of reverse scallop is the best for bread knives. Looks just the edge on the fantastic Mac version. They are very difficult to sharpen. I've been able to awkwardly maintain mine a bit by touching up the the tips of the scallops on regular stones, and the indentations on a smooth steel. But it's not great. There are professional sharpeners who specialize in Japanese knives that can handle a scalloped edge. I've never sent mine out. Fortunately, even though my Mac is 15 years old, it still cuts well. I only use it on bread and watermelons, and it doesn't get worked hard against a cutting board, so there isn't that much to dull it. It's just not quite as impressive as its virgin self. Those finer serrations might not be sharpenable. Do you use them?

You must be from Albany.

Dipping dirty cookware in sanitizer is strange behavior. You can't sanitize dirty stuff, for one thing. Organic matter competes with the sanitizing chemicals (whether it's bleach, quaternary ammonium, or whatever). And you'd be stirring sanitizer, drop by drop, into your sauce. For a spoon rest I use a pot lid, a quarter-sheet pan, or just the countertop. No need for a special doodad. There's no risk of cross contamination, because whatever I'm using I'll wash and sanitize or replace over the course of cooking. Sometimes more than once. People should talk about this more. Just tonight I sautéed some chicken thighs. For the first half of cooking I set utensils on the sheet pan that I'd used to prep the thighs. After they were browned on both sides, the sheet pan and all the utensils went to the sink for washing and sanitizing. Otherwise, I'd have just kept recontaminating the surface of the chicken. That pan and those utensils didn't get used for anything else until after the chicken was browned and the tools and surface sanitized.

My experience 100%. I still consider this "neat." It's much less water than you'd get if you ordered a whiskey and water. And the effect is the opposite of what anyone would intuitively expect. More flavor, not less. I don't understand the chemistry either.

I gave up on making neapolitan-style pizza in a home oven (although I haven't had a chance to use an oven with a top broiler yet, which should help at least a little). Even at 500° and with a 1/2" steel preheated for an hour, cooking times were over 5 minutes and the crust turned into a cracker. Other styles don't interest me. So the whole project just turned into a workshop in making sourdough bread (sometimes with some Modernist Cuisine tweaks). And the pizzerias get to keep my business.

I've never understood why people are trying to make coffee less acidic. The acids are where half the flavor is. Maybe if you're dealing with poorly roasted coffee, there's an advantage in muting its natural character. I've had some cold brew that tasted fine. But there are a couple things people should be aware of: cold brewing is less efficient at extracting flavor, so you need more coffee beans for any given amount of water (it's expensive). But caffein is highly soluble in cold water, so this higher ratio brew will much more caffeinated than hot-brewed coffee.

There are minor differences, but nothing to worry about. It's easy to just make it yourself. You can make a few ounces at a time; it lasts a few months in the fridge. But I actually don't use it in ice cream anymore. Dry sugars are easier to use and eliminate any variables. My newer variation on the coffee recipe uses fructose powder. The end result should be the same, but it's easier to work with: For 1000g: 65g granulated sugar 25g dextrose 15g fructose Pastry chefs typically prefer invert syrup because they have it around for a million other things, while fructose is not a common pastry ingredient.

For anyone in Brooklyn, I just discovered a great local option. There's an unassuming little bodega down near the corner of Windsor Terrace / Park Slope / Sunset Park. Reyes Deli and Grocery. 532 4th Ave. They make tacos, burritos, etc., and have a seating area for 2 very slim diners. We stopped for an emergency lunch yesterday, and were blown away by the red hot sauce that they served in a little plastic ketchup container. Really full-flavored and smokey. Like a mole, but not really. We asked, and it turns out the owner's mom makes it from scratch down in the basement. They sold us 2 jars for $5 each. Highly recommended!

I'm glad to hear you had success with that method. And yes, it's too time consuming. I still think of that coffee method as a work in progress because there's no practical way to scale it. I'm hoping for an opportunity to work with a pastry chef who might have some ideas on how to streamline and scale it without compromising the flavor.

I've used essential oils, especially mint. The flavor profile seems about the same as mint extract—super heavy on menthol. So you get mostly candy cane / mouthwash flavors. I've sometimes added just a touch to an ice cream base that has infused mint leaves, just to for some extra flavor. Probably the hardest thing with the essential oils is measuring them. Unless you're doing commercial-size batches, it's hard not to overdo it. A drop can be too much.

I don't think seasoning really survives 700F. The pan will stay black from the carbon, but the polymerized oils will burn. Effective seasoning is a mix of both. I'd estimate that seasoning starts to break down somewhere north of 500, depending (maybe?) on the kinds of oil it's made from. FWIW, I was in a restaurant kitchen once that used a grill pan for a few dishes. They kept on a burner on high all the time, so it would always be ready. Probably a ~25,000 BTU/hr burner. That pan was silver-white. Not a hint of seasoning anywhere on the thing. The cooking temp was too high for it to form or survive.

Yeah, it gets confusing! Hardness and abrasion resistance aren't quite the same thing. All else being equal, a hard steel will be more abrasion resistant (and harder to sharpen) than a soft one. But when steels have a lot of alloying elements that create a high volume of hard carbides, they become very abrasion resistant. And this added resistance comes regardless of the general rockwell hardness of the steel. You can think of steel as being like concrete ... the base metal is like the cement, and the carbides are like the sand and gravel that the cement holds together. "Simple" carbon steels, like the Hitachi white and blue paper steels, are like smooth concrete with tiny pebbles in the mix. Even at high hardness, they're relatively easy to sharpen. High hardness and high carbide content are both antithetical to toughness. If you want a blade that can be sharpened to a very acute angle and support a fine edge without chipping, you need a steel that isn't too hard and that doesn't have too high a carbon content. But it can't be too soft, either, or it will collapse! Knife steel is a balancing act. If you want to nerd out, this article on edge stability and this one on edge retention can take your mind off the world for a while. The latter has interesting charts on the toughness-to-hardness ratios of different steels.

That's true ... but you have to be pretty good at sharpening to know if your edge retention issues are the result of the steel vs. your sharpening technique or geometry. It gets complicated. High-alloy tool steels and super alloys can have lousy edge retention if you sharpen them to too acute an angle. They have terrible edge stability and will microchip. AND they're challenging to sharpen, because these steels were specifically designed to resist abrasion. And some steels are tricky to deburr. They'll seem sharp straight off the stones, but dull very quickly. It's not intuitive that it's a technique problem, made worse by a quirk of the steel. Edited to add: lots of restaurant cooks like the simple carbon steels that you like. They just sharpen after every shift.

What Mitch said. I found the Victorinox link hard to navigate; it led me to a whole page full of knives. This is probably the one you want: (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) You've had a lot of restaurant meals that were prepped with that, and it's priced like it's still the 20th century. You'll need to think about sharpening no matter what you buy.

Yeah, I find that strawberries get kind of sour and astringent, and with a bitter aftertaste if they aren't at least pretty good. We only have a good ones in NYC a few weeks out of the year most years, and you have to go to farmer's markets. Then I'm usually more inclined to just eat them than to make sauce or sorbet ... Tell us more about cloudberries. I've never heard of those.

Absolutely. It's the sharpening process that leads to the strong opinions about steel. I finally sharpened the cheap carbon steel Vietnamese knife I mentioned upthread, and have to admit it's getting me to rethink some things. I've always gone with low-alloy stainless steels for my main knife, on the theory that onions and garlic and all the acid stuff would quickly dull carbon steel. But this hasn't been my experience with this thing. And it's SO easy to sharpen. The ginsan stainless on my Tadatsuna is pretty easy, but this a whole different level.