paulraphael

I'm only saying the the EP can't remove the wire edge.* If you believe that it's doing so, then I'm betting you you've just grown accustomed to cutting with a wire edge. Which is pretty common, even on much easier to sharpen knives. All my knives are easier than Globals, and still, the removal of the wire is the hardest part of the job to do reliably. I'd been sharpening with a reasonable sense of proficiency for about five years before this was pointed out to me. When I realized there was this other frontier to cross, I was fairly quickly able to create knife edges that performed better and that lasted about four times as long. Waterstones don't do a good job of removing it either, but they allow for some steps with a slightly steeper angle that can help a bit.

Edgepro just takes the manual skill out of the equation, but it doesn't do anything about the wire edge issue. It can't. You're knives could actually retain their edges a lot longer than they do now. It's just no picnic getting there. Plenty of other knives are easier to sharpen, will get sharper, and will stay sharp longer.

Ruben, I've been reading your site and am especially interested in your experiments on cooking temperature. I've thought of doing similar experiments, but I use a stabilizer blend that contains locust bean gum, which needs to hydrate at 90°C. Your work has convinced me to mess with this. I plan to do an experiment with my formula, with a new stabilizer blend, cooked sous-vide at 72°C. My inclination is cook for 40 minutes, to guarantee that all the mix in the bag gets to temperature and can stay there an adequate amount of time, but I'll reconsider if you different ideas about this.

I do basically the same thing. Felt does a pretty good job on my knives. Some people use a soft piece of wood or heavy cardboard. The sharpener / co-owner at Korin uses newspaper or a circular motion on the finest stone. But I don't know what might work on Globals. If you shoot an email to Dave Martel, he's usually generous with advice. His giving up doesn't mean it's impossible on globals; just that he finds it too time consuming to be profitable.

You can get it sharp. Ish. The trouble is that the steel is gummy and produces a wire edge that's very difficult to get rid of. This means that you're left with a very fragile false edge that will be prone to rolling or chipping.

You can certainly "season" stainless steel the way you can an iron pan. But the coating of polymerized oils will be much more fragile because it won't have much to grab onto. And you'll be undoing some of the biggest advantages of stainless steel: that it's non-reactive, durable, and that its bright color lets you easily see the color of pan drippings as they brown, so you can deglaze at the right time. I've seasoned a raw aluminum griddle. It works pretty well. But the polymerized surface is likewise a lot more fragile than the equivalent on an iron pan. Very easy to flake off. The problem would be worse on stainless.

Stainless steel doesn't cause food to stick; bad cooking technique causes food to stick. Happily this problem can be cured for free.

The problem with Globals is that their peculiar alloy makes them very difficult to sharpen properly, while offering no advantages over the better alternatives. A knife is only as good as your sharpening job, and you need to be a master sharpener to get a decent edge on a global. By decent edge I mean something that a reasonably skilled sharpener can achieve on good steel using Japanese waterstones; a lot of chefs spend their whole careers using sub-decent edges. But these days there's no reason to. If you talk to Dave Martel at japenesknifesharpening.com, he can go into detail about global's steel. The short answer is that he doesn't have the inclination to mess with it anymore. If you send him a Global, he'll sharpen it on belt sander the way he does European knives. He reserves the waterstones for knives made out of the better Japanese and Swedish steels. Questions of knives come up on eGullet often. It's really impossible to make a recommendation without knowing someone's commitment to sharpening, and to modifying their cutting techniques for a high performance knife. For many cooks, a jack-of-all-trades Western chef's knife is going to remain the best choice. They are versatile, nearly indestructible, and can be maintained on a steel with very little skill or effort. Others want to go all-in and are willing to relearn everything. For them the highest performance knives are a reasonable choice, although it can make sense start with an inexpensive version so you don't have to be nervous about making mistakes. And there's a whole world of knives between those extremes.

I like it with really good spring asparagus. I haven't tried with onions, shallots, leeks, etc., and would like to hear more about it. I'm also intrigued by corn on the cob. I assume you'd need a pretty heavy weight to keep it from floating.

I heat pans to 500F or more all the time. It's a matter of storing up as much energy as possible to compensate for a weak burner (I have a typical home range ... probably not much more than 12,000 btu/hr). It takes several minutes to preheat a pan, then the oil goes in, and within a few seconds the food goes in. The food drops the temperature of the oil and the pan dramatically and almost instantly. All that loud sizzle is water turning to steam, pulling gobs of heat energy into the air. The extreme pre-heat is a hedge against the pan temperature dropping too much, turning your sear into a stew. You can't do this with teflon. I'll preheat a teflon pan till it's pretty hot, but I try not to go above 400F or so. The teflon won't break down until much hotter than this, but there's also the concern of cooking oil polymerizing on the surface. Depending on the oil this can happen at temperatures not much higher than 400. If oil polymerizes on stainless steel, you can scour it off with BKF. If it happens on spun steel or cast iron, you've added to the seasoning. But you'll never get it off of teflon. The resulting polymer is tougher than the teflon itself. A non-stick pan with cooked-on oil goes into the recycling. I consider non-stick pans specialty cookware. They're good for eggs. They're good for fish that has the skin on, although I prefer to use stainless steel and good technique. If you're putting a hard sear on something, there's never any reason to use teflon, so this limitation shouldn't be an issue.

Splenda, instant coffee, Smart Balance Buttery Spread. I accept these items out of love for someone who uses them to torment me (the last item, for instance, she now insists on calling by its full name: "can you pass me the Smart Balance Buttery Spread?")

I buy boned chicken thighs from the local food coop that come vacuum packed. I don't completely trust the packaging to hold, because it's been made "easy opening" on one of the corners. So I just put the whole thing into a ziplock and evacuate the air by immersing it. The ziploc is just backup. If the inner bag doesn't leak I reuse it.

That Tojiro looks excellent. It looks identical to the Mac, which I have. The Mac's the nicest I've used. I got it for around what the Tojiro costs now, but the price has gone up 50%. My girlfriend has the Forschner, which is also quite good. It has pointy serrations, so it's messier. And it isn't curved, so it's not as easy to use. But I use the thing a lot and it's good enough that I don't notice it.

Copper vs. Stainless isn't really the question ... besides cheap pans for camping, there's no cookware that uses stainless as its conductive layer. Stainless is used as the layer that you cook on. It's great for this. It's sometimes also used as outside cladding, to make cleaning easier. The actual heat conduction in stainless pans is done either by a layer laminated between stainless claddings, or a disk attached to the bottom of the pan. The conductive material will usually be aluminum or copper, or some sandwich that's mostly aluminum or copper. The questions are more likely copper vs. aluminum vs. iron or steel, and thick vs. medium. A lot of us cook on pans that are copper clad with stainless. These are great, but the prices have gotten insane for the thick ones. The thin one's aren't any good, as others have said. Personally, unless you're interested as a collector, I'd forget about copper unless you have specific needs. If you're a serious saucemaker, a copper evassée type pan somewhere around 1.5 liters is a great luxury. But for most pans and most types of cooking, the differences between copper and the right aluminum pan aren't going to make a difference in your cooking. Plenty of Michelin 3-star restaurants use aluminum pans.

I'd think of xanthan as much more than a stabilizer. It's true that you have to go easy on it. This often means using it in combination with other things. I make a really nice, easy last-minute sauce thickener with a 1:10 blend of xanthan and arrowroot. If it's well mixed you can make a slurry with it and stir it in. The xanthan hydrates instantly; the arrowroot needs to be heated to around 140F to thicken. On top of this, xanthan is synergistic with many other hydrocolloids, including guar, carrageenans, methylcellulose, and locust bean gum. This means the combined effect is greater than (and sometimes different from) the sum of the components. So you can use less of everything, and in most cases minimize or eliminate their negative effects. The drawback to some of these blends is that you have to precisely mix minute quantities, and some of the ingredients are less convenient to hydrate (you may need a blender and / or a lot of heat).

There are some good things about this, but really, it's just a smart feature integrated into an induction hob. To quote Steve Jobs, "it's a feature, not a product." With this in mind, I'm inclined to first comapare it to the existing products, which are induction hobbs: The GE thing is 1) bigger, uglier, clumsier, and 2) underpowered. I'd love an induction hob with the same power and sleek form factor as other 1800W versions, but with a built-in and well-deisgned PID controller. It wouldn't substitute for a circulator most of the time, but would be great for many things. It could be a spare cooktop. It could reheat and hold anything, including cook/chill S.V. meals. It would be a champion chocolate melter. And it could be a second S.V. water bath for when the circulator is busy doing something that needs more precision. The GE thing would handle this stuff reasonably well, but the industrial design is too hideous, and 1400 watts is a bit on the anemic side for searing things or heating big stock pots. I suspect Anova could develop a better version on a Sunday afternoon.

If fat represents a distinct taste, it wouldn't be the fifth ... it would be the tenth or twelfth, and counting ... Sensory research is a hot field right now, and they constantly discover more tastes. At a recent lecture I attended with Hervé This, he discussed the discovery of at least two distinct types of umami, at least two distinct types of bitterness, a distinct metallic taste, and a distinct alkaline taste. All this research is quite young, so we can expect more even more complexity in the future. Re: the weird flavor of distilled water ... this is because our sense of "neutral" is keyed to our own saliva. To truly taste neutral, water needs to have the same acidity and mineral content as saliva. Tap water and mineral water are likely to come a bit closer to this than distilled water.

When I've bought salted butter by mistake, I've calculated the salt content based on the sodium listed in the nutrition info. For recipes that use a lot of butter, this adds up to a lot of salt. In some cases more salt than you'd intentionally put in the recipe. In any case, it would be bad news to neglect these calculations and add the usual amount of salt on top of what's already in the butter. Since the only thing I ever use salted butter for is buttering bread, and I do this only rarely, I don't buy the stuff. It's not worth the extra work and the lost flexibility.

The wondra flour trick works for any pan-seared seafood. As with any dredging where you don't want the food to seem breaded, dry the scallop carefully, and dust with the flour very lightly (I use a small chinois) right before putting into the pan. Doesn't matter when you salt, as long as you dry the food right before dusting and cooking. I'd skip the clarified butter. You lose too much butter flavor through clarification. Use a refined, flavorless oil for the sear, and then if you want butter flavor, add some whole butter and baste over the top as it browns in the pan. At this point the scallop will have cooled the pan enough to keep the butter from burning.

A surprising place to get good fish in Brooklyn: an unassuming looking Korean grocery on Flatbush by the 7th Ave. Q stop, called DNY Natural Land. They have good everything, but be sure to check out the seafood counter. It seems to be a shop-within-a-shop, run by Japanese guys who also make some sushi. Very limited selection. But every piece of fish I've had from here has been amazing.

I usually use safflower oil for high heat searing. I choose this over over light refined oils just because it's the cheapest at the stores where I shop. I'm close to 100% sure that the off-flavors from Canola come from low quality oil and aren't innate to canola. I don't notice any change in flavor (or much flavor at all) when I've used it. I also saw it used exclusively for sautéeing fish at Le Bernardin when I staged there. Eric Rippert has a more refined palate than I do. In general, smoke point has a lot less to do with the variety oil than with the degree of refinement. The more refined, the higher the smoke point, and the less flavor. Dark, cloudy, unrefined grapeseed oil is for salad; light, clear refined grapeseed is for sauté.

Cream sauces from the Nouvelle era were generally reduced, and sometimes even had butter swirled in at the end. It's hard to get more rich than that. Hilarious that this tradition is still thought of as "light." You can get the same mouthfeel today with a lot less fat (and the associated flavor-masking) by using hydrocolloids, like carrageenan, locust bean gum, and xanthan.

Haven't tried Co yet. The best I've had (ever) is Roberta's in Bushwick. Motorino (Williamsburg and East Village) is practically as good. I'm fond of Wheated in Ditmas Park, because it's close to home, but don't think I'd make a long trip. After a return to Tottono's this year, I was so horrified that I eviscerated them on Yep. Complete joke. p.s. ... go to Roberta's on a week night. The waits are awful on weekends.

I don't know, guys, the new menu looks awesome.

Wow, I haven't been here since the southern food days. Maybe it's time to return in spite of the memories ... I was in a band at the time and we played a gig there that literally no one came to.