Magictofu

I just cooked a fairly simple oxtail stew which at first tasted great but considerably lost flavour during the later stages of cooking. I cooked it in a 300 degree oven in two stages: about three hours the first day, including some prep and browning and another three hours the second day. The meat was perfectly tender and the liquid onctuous and nice looking but it was very very bland. I had to add lots of wine, lemon juice, herbs, salt and pepper to make it palatable but the meat flavor was lost. Is it possible that I overcooked my stew? How can we prevent such flavor loss?

I tried the method las night. My first batch was slightly undercooked and my second slightly overcooked.... I can already tell however that with a bit of practice, this can work great.

We recently bought a new house with a huge garden and plenty of basement space for a cold room. In fact, there is already a cellar in the house but it is on the main floor and requires an insane amount of energy to stay cool year round... so we are planning to transfer the whole thing to the basement in order to reclaim some living space on the main floor and save some energy. This way, we will also be able to build it to our own specification. Since we already have a compressor, it will have both a passive and an active cooling system (for extra safety). Now it is time to design our cold storage room... we plan to use it for storing vegetables from the garden, jams and preserves, a few wine bottles and deal with the occasional fridge overflow. We were also thinking about dry-aging meat when buying whole or half carcass for the freezer from local farmers and to experiment with curing sausages, bacon and ham. We want to make our cold cellar as efficient and polyvalent as possible and are looking for design suggestions. If you want to share pictures of your own cellar / cold storage room, please do so... we might get inspired!

How big/small do they have to be?

I've been thinking... do you think we can use head cheese instead of 'trotter gear'? I am guessing it could work and this is something I can easily find at a reasonable price around here.

I've never heard of this method and if you didn't say that the fries were not greasy I would not even have considered this recipe... now I am tempted.

So I am not quite sure from your post if you made this "gear" or purchased the ready-made product. Can you clarify this for me please. ← I am sorry for not answering your question earlier... I have been too busy celebrating to even get close to a computer over the last few days. I made one batch of "trotter gear" and now have six pounds of trotter gear in the freezer waiting for my next braise or bean dish. About a year ago I made the pig trotter recipe from the Bouchon cookbook. Not wanting to waste the cooking broth I made a bean dish the day after... and this was the best bean dish I ever ate! But since I don't eat pig trotters very often, I had little opportunity to recreate the dish. I guess I was too dumb to think about making trotters for the quality they can impart to other dishes instead of for the trotters themselves. Making a huge batch is great too because cleaning trotters is a messy thing that you don't want to do too often. I realize it might be an old trick but it is still a revelation to the novice cook that i am. As for the book itself, I think it is one of the greatest cookbook ever written... it is short and some might find the recipes a bit horific (e.g. the pig head) but the book remains very funny and I think better written than the first one. After all, why would we need cookbooks which includes the same recipes as all the cookbooks we already have.

I also believe this is one of Jamie's best show. I hate the series he made in Italy mostly because it was too centred on him, as with most of his shows... but this one is more about ingredients. It would have been nice to see his gardener a bit more... but I guess his very calm attitude and voice was too much a contrast with Jamie And I am extremely jealous of his garden and wood oven...

For our own security, I would not suggest anyone to mention any alternative cheese by name... there are some hardcore tatiflette fanatics out there! That being said, reblochon is a soft, washed rind cow milk cheese... there is a great variety of these.

Ce'nedra, I'd have to ask my friend about the origin of his recipe but I think he got it from China. As for yogurt, they generally cause much less discomfort to people with lactose intolerance... maybe another explanation for their popularity? Well maybe not, the yogurt in China, at least from what I remember, is so good that taste alone can probably explain this . I also recall I kind of cheese from Tibet and Yunan. Can't remember the name but its quite dry.

I just finished reading Fergus Henderson's sequel to Nose to Tail and my first bacth of trotter gear (which is also available directly at St. John, see: http://www.trottergear.com/) is resting in the fridge. "Trotter gear" is simply made of pig trotters cooked in broth and madeira wine with aromatic vegetables and can be used in a variety of recipes, particularly for braising. Having this "trotter gear" at hand , just like keping stock and meat glace, open so much potential... I am planning to keep a few bags of 'trotter gear' in the freezer for future use... particulaly for a few bean dishes and braises I have in mind. I'm also guessing that this idea can be adapted to different style of cooking... it is so simple but feel like such a revelation to me... I just had to share my enthusiasm!

Tell us how it went! I love tartiflette but my doctor strongly suggested me to be more carefull.

Gruyère can be good but it won't be a tartiflette! Reblochon is not a hard cheese at all but a very creamy one. As gariotin said, if you live in a large city I am sure you can find some reblochon.

A friend of mine uses milk in some ground meat preparation like dumplings as a tenderizer I believe. I am not sure about this but I though that one of the only group of people who had the genetic capability of assimililating milk proteins (or sugar?) as adults were Europeans. This means that until the enzyme which can help people digest milk is available, people almost all over the world would suffer unpleasant effects if ingesting too much milk. This enzyme is now widely available which allows more people to drink milk easily... maybe this explains part of this new trend. But then, Chinese did not drink wines made from grapes a few years back and many fruits and vegetables were also added recently to their diet... this might be explained in th same way we can explain why North American now eat lichee or sechuan pepper. I guess I'm adding more questions than answers...

I don't believe it is real truffle extract either. I once compared true black truffles with the chinese ones... very little in common but the shape and color. I'd rather use artificial flavoring ;-).

I do not bake very often but two of my favourite deserts are apple crusts and tarte tatin... both extremely easy and no recipe needed once you've done it a couple of time. Sometimes I also use apple peelings from the apples used in other recipes to make jelly or granita. Otherwise you can also cook them with pork or sausage if you have apple that can withstand high temperature without turning into mush. They also make great stuffings for the holliday bird... A bit off topic but still somewhat related, I recently saw on TV a trick to make apple sauce in a flash: - cut your apple in quarters (do not peel, do not core) - zap them in the microwave (only adding sugar when using older apples) - pass them in a food mill and discard the skin and hard bits This allows some color from the skin of the apples to come through in the sauce (green or red depending on varieties).

HA! HA! I found what seems to be a Norh American supplier! http://www.promofood.com/pricelist/NonPeri...s/Truffles.html Anyone ever bought anything from them? If shipping is not too expensive, I think I'll try my luck at ordering their extract.

For those intrested: Radio Canada is broadcasting a 7 episodes show featuring Martin Picard and some of Quebec's and the Atlantic provinces great culinary traditions including hunting and fishing. The show is in French and starts Thursday the 20th. Here's the blurb from the Radio Canada website:

A chirstmas gift for those who appeciate the work of Martin Picard, chef of au Pied de Cochon in Montreal: Radio Canada is broadcasting a 7 episodes show featuring the man and some of Quebec's and the Atlantic provinces great culinary traditions including hunting and fishing. The show is in French and starts Thursday the 20th. Here's the blurb from the Radio Canada website: Finally a food TV show worth watching? We'll see... but I have great hopes!

They got their extract from: http://www.patiwizz.com/catalogue/arome_de...mpignons_14.php Which I think was one of the three links I found. They obviously accepted to mail their product to North America (Canada) so I tried to place an order but the shipping alone is 65 Euros!! ... which is way too much for my wallet.

What! you don't want to buy a full container from China for the same price? So far my search for a North American dealer has ben unsuccesful (maybe the third link?)... I will try to contact the producer of the TV show to know about their source.

I just found this: http://www.honestjoy.cn/Product/1618-26-4.htm But sincerely, I would first try the "truffle aroma" in the three links I listed previously.

The list of 'ingredients' is for the aroma, the smell... not for the truffle itself. Most of the chemical make up of truffle do not smell anything but a few more volatile ones can be dispersed in the air creating its characteristic smell. The same is true of wine... which is essentially made of water and ethanol but its smell is composed of many different molecules, which all sound as bad as the list for the black truffle. I agree that nature is complex and that it can not easily be reduced to a bunch of chemical randomly mixed together. At the same time however, chemists are sometimes able to isolate certain molecules which are exactly the ones we crave for or need. I personally see more value in swallowing an aspirin when i have headaches than chewing on willow branches to get the same chemical compound. As I said, I understand the point you are trying to make but for someone like me who can't afford truffles but still appreciate their musky smell, truffle oil is good enough... especially as an accent (as opposed to a main component) ... it is not like nature is providing us with many cheaper substitute. I'd be happy to learn about other ingredients providing similar aromas. That beeing said, homemade and storebought truffle oils are almost all synthetic... which means that the issue here is not between real truffle oil and a fake one... it is about two fake ones.

The question should be: "which you would rather buy", not "which would you rather own"... even then, the distinction is dubious because the value of such painting has little to do with the quality of the art itself but is influenced, in this case, with the place of Vermeer in art history. On the issue of imitation I would say that we have good imitations these days and terrible ones too. But in this case, it is not even a question of imitation because most if not all truffle oils on the market are made in a similar way (often adding a few truffle shavings but still mainly aromatised with chemicals). And when you think of it, artificial vanilla is hard to distinguish from real vanilla in many preparations (ok, not in a vanilla custard but in a chocolate brownie...). I personnaly like truffle oil, although I find its omnipresence anoying. I am an enthusiast mushroom hunter and find that a bit of truffle oil, no matter how fake, always add a nice musky aroma to any mushroom dish. It serves as a nice accent to an already delicious dish. Since truffle oil almost never take center stage, I think it would be wasteful anyway to spend hundreds of dollars on real truffle oil when you can get something nice for few bucks. The chemical side of it is somewhat frightening but then the 'molecular gastronomy' guys are doing very nice things with similar products.

I doubt there would be a single chemical in the aroma of truffles... white and black truffles are definitely different animals so I guess they have different chemical characteristics. Again in French, I found this listof chemicals found in the aroma of black truffle (tuber melanosporum): dimethylsulfure 7,5% acetaldéhyde 4,5% 2-méthylpropanal 5% 2-méthylbutanal 4% ethanol 27% 2-méthyl1propanol 21% 2-méthyl1butanal 17% acétone 8% 2-butanone 2,5% 1 propanol 2 I'm no chemist so I won't try to translate.