Tri2Cook

I used Goslings until an awesome eGullet member hooked me up with a bottle of the Cruzan. I have no idea what else would work... but I'm sure somebody will. Edited because it appears I'm unable to correctly spell "awesome" in one attempt.

Since you already stated that you want to stay away from heavy cream, I'm going to go ahead and ask up front where you stand on the inclusion of egg yolk.

I don't know... the recipe you linked calls for brandy, not cognac. I'd think some form of brandy would have been more easily available during Prohibition than rum. But I could be wrong. If so, maybe you made a rich woman's Twelve Mile Limit.

You don't have to boil the cinnamon to extract the flavor. I usually just bust the sticks up a bit, toast them, toss them in whatever hot liquid I'm using and let them steep. Even if you were to boil the liquid with the cinnamon a bit, you can do it without the sugar. Just add that in after the liquid cools. Cold infusion is probably doable if you're patient but I've tried tossing cinnamon in cold cream and fridging it overnight and it didn't pick up as much flavor as I can get in a few minutes in a hot liquid. I've never tried it, but you could probably infuse a spirit with cinnamon, add a syrup and have a shelf stable cinnamon liqueur. We do it for falernum and pimento dram, I don't see a reason why it wouldn't work with cinnamon as well.

Started a new batch of falernum today. My prized bottle of Lemon Hart 151 took a whole lot of time and a bit of negotiating to get my hands on. I'm very stingy with it because I have no idea when or if I'll ever have a chance to get my hands on another bottle. So there wasn't even the slightest chance any of it was going into the making of falernum. Replacing my bottle of W&N overproof may be a little easier to do but still not without difficulty... but I was willing to sacrifice enough to do a split between it and an 80 proof rum to get a 100-ish proof base.

Yeah, I think I'd go with the thinner end of the 1" - 2" thickness recommendation if I decided to give it a shot. But I'll probably end up doing the full-week cure. I actually had corned beef already planned for next weekend, mixed up a batch of spices for it yesterday. I completely forgot St. Patrick's Day was coming up until I saw your post... maybe I'll hold off for another week.

Not according to Ruhlman.

From the Yahoo Finance article (quoting Taco Bell President Brian Niccol )... I'm guessing he'd like a chance to reword that one.

I'll have to dig through my notes but I developed a recipe a few years ago for a savory biscuit roulade. It had almost no sugar in it and the texture, crumb, etc. worked out great. I developed it at someone else's request, they were wanting a savory "jelly roll" type thing with a mushroom mousse. I realize you're not looking for savory and what I did wasn't a genoise, the reason I mentioned it is because the lack of sugar didn't seem to have any real negative effects when baked in a thin layer. I didn't try baking it in deeper pans. I'm curious now how it would have stood up to that.

That's sad. I feel bad for the people who make their living there and, on a more selfish note, I'll miss your posts.

Since you're not worrying over being strictly traditional, you could probably get away with making the cream more like a heavy mousse or something. With the syrup soak, you don't need it to provide moisture to the biscuit and that should stand up to collapsing or being absorbed better than a cream. You'll still get the creaminess from the DDL.

That's probably something I should adopt. "It looks and sounds awesome" was sufficient without further embellishment. I'd love to see it.

Yes it does. I definitely wasn't knocking anything about that pie. It looks awesome (his work always does) and I have no doubt it tastes awesome as well. The fault in what I said belongs entirely to me, I'm kinda picky when it comes to coconut. I like the flavor but I'm not a big fan of the texture in creamy settings. Entirely my weirdness, not a commentary on whether or not it should be used.

I was thinking "that looks great but I don't want coconut on my banana cream pie". But that doesn't change the fact that it does indeed look and sound tasty... or the fact that it's not my banana cream pie.

Regional speech and mispronunciation are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes the common speech of a region includes a great deal of mispronunciation that is accepted as correct within that region. I don't know if any of it has anything to do with regional pronunciations. That was just something I was offering as a possibility.

I understood that you were talking about food professionals. What I'm saying is, couldn't "I am from the southern US and I have lots of words that I pronounce in a southern way: oil, mayonnaise, etc. I'm not going to change and neither should anyone else." or similar apply to them as well? I mean, I went to school in the southeast US and I heard many a teacher (including the English teachers) say things common to that area but technically incorrect when speaking... they were still perfectly able to teach their subject correctly.

Now you're just being silly.

Maybe there's too much being read into it and it's just the way they learned to say the words and heard them said while growing up. They may know perfectly well that it's not technically correct. There are regional pronunciations for many things that, while technically incorrect, are accepted as correct in those regions. My grandmother knew perfectly well that you wash your hands but that didn't stop her from saying "warsh". It was the way she'd spent most of her life hearing it and saying it where she grew up. Just for the record, I'm not lecturing. Just offering another way of looking at it. "Marscapone" kinda drives me nuts too. But then again, so does "a whole nother".

Yep. At best, you'd get a colorful suikerbrood.

The Voltaggios have a recipe for a brioche style bread done in a siphon. Ideas in Food has a recipe for a sourdough done in a siphon. The Ideas in Food people also ran a Yorkshire pudding batter through a siphon with good results (their words, I haven't tried it) and did a siphon cornbread that I also haven't tried (the ingredients suggest it would lean more towards the dessert side but that would be easy to adjust. It uses corn flour because corn meal would be too coarse to spray through the siphon so a few simple tweaks could probably get you something similar to a broa). All of these examples were cooked in a cup in the microwave Adria style but it wouldn't be difficult to experiment with cooking them via other methods such as you mentioned in your post.

Modernist Pantry carries malt, white and balsamic vinegar powders.

I happen to agree with you 100% on this. I pretty much agree with this as well (and I actually didn't think you were picking on anybody). But he didn't actually say he was trying to improve anything. Sometimes it's okay to go sideways. And if it turns out something actually takes things backwards, then you know that definitively rather than theoretically. I do a lot of experimenting in the kitchen that isn't particularly aimed at making something better, it's just a matter of being curious and wanting to see what the result will be. So I'm not suggesting that anything you said is incorrect or contentious, just that it can expand beyond those boundaries without claiming to be something greater than the starting point.

I'm glad to hear that. While I tend to agree in general with what Bill Klapp has said, I'm also a strong proponent of experimenting with food. I think there's a point where it would become tedious and excessive to create a new name for everything that doesn't conform strictly to the original template.

Based strictly on my experience, I'd say you nailed it. I ate a lot of exactly what you describe growing up. A family of seven and not a lot of money. Huge pots of exactly the type of sauce you describe sitting next to a colander full of spag cooked exactly as you describe. Nothing gourmet or traditional Italian about it... and I'd still be completely happy to sit down to a big plate of it right now.

I enjoyed the Roasty Toasty too. I can't get a Pisco where I live so I went with the light rum substitution mentioned in the notes. I'm wondering how it would taste with calvados... I guess there's an easy way to find out. I made up a tiny batch of 2:1 demerara syrup today so I can give the Difference Engine a try.