Tri2Cook

That's something I haven't had in a long time... might have to think about doing that myself.

Are you gonna make Seachicken wings? Seriously though, I don't have a dog in this years fight but it's football so I'll be watching. Haven't decided on the food yet. I tend to keep my football food to beer and stuff that can sit around on plates to be eaten as desired but I'm trying to convince myself to do a little more this time.

I'd like to see those recipes (Kerry and Diana) if either/both of you don't mind sharing. I'm completely unfamiliar with the Medovik so I won't be of any use trying to work it out but it looks and sounds interesting.

That looks exactly like pork belly goodness to me.

I'll back Andiesenji on the Sucanat being tasty. I use it frequently. I like doing chocolate chip cookies using all brown sugar and brown butter... they are a bit on the rich side though.

I did this one a while back using Gordon Ramsay's Pressed Belly of Pork recipe (with the flavors tweaked a bit for what I was going to do with it)... It's roasted in the oven, refrigerated under weight then warmed and crisped in the oven. I plated it with a salad of peaches, dandelion greens and chive blossoms and a pickled peach consommé but the base recipe for the belly is really nice if you want to go a non-Asian direction with some of it.

In the initial post you said "going to be making this cake" and mentioned you don't have or wish to purchase one of the specified ingredients. Then, after listing available substitutes, asked "Am I even close?". For making that cake, without knowing you didn't care if it tasted different (which is fine but something you didn't mention until later), the answer to "Am I even close?", without something to add an anise-like flavor, would be "no". There is no high horse, it was just people trying to help.

Winner!

The only tequilas on your list, and the only 100% agave silver and reposado, available where I live are the Milagros. So I can't compare them to anything else you can get but, compared to anything else I can get, they're great. I'm happy enough with them that I won't drive the 5 hours to where I can get a wider selection. So basically, listen to the others who know more about it than I do.

Let's be honest, even in a high end restaurant, if I cut a potato into perfect 3/8" square fries with my knife, push another through a french fry cutter with a good, sharp 3/8" plate and put some of each on the same plate going to a table, how many people are going to notice any difference? That's not an argument against having good knife skills, I happen to agree that it's an important skill. But if we're only doing it to impress the customers, for every one we impress, even in a high end place, probably 100 or more won't even notice that everything is cut to perfection (yes, I know several are going to start waving their hands and saying "I care" but eGullet is a very small and somewhat specialized representation of the overall number of people eating in restaurants). The reality is that we do it because we care, not because most of today's customers care. Maybe the celebrity chefs don't bother for the same basic reason. They have a set amount of time to get something done and most of the audience doesn't really care. Knock it out, get the shot, everybody (except for a few of us on eGullet) is happy.

How was that one? I added it to my "drinks to try" list after seeing it in the drinks thread but haven't got to it yet. One of these days I'm going to have to quit adding to that list or start drinking more. It's getting ridiculously long.

My biggest piece of advice when it comes to the modernist stuff would be to not wait until the day you need it to try a new technique. There can be variables that cause problems with many of the techniques and, frankly, some of them just aren't as good as they sound and look. Always do a test run with unfamiliar techniques and ingredients or new ideas far enough ahead to be able to make adjustments or come up with another plan. It's a lot of fun and most of it isn't as difficult as it sometimes sounds but there is a learning curve to some of it. Spend some time playing around with the ingredients and techniques just for fun.

The suspending technique works with chocolate too. I've been curious as to whether it would work with coffee beans but I haven't tried it.

Short answer is yes, just the CLG will cover all jobs including the standard spherification. The slightly longer answer is that it may require a little experimenting on your part when substituting in a recipe based on one of the other options. Also, unless it's just in the interest of following a recipe exactly, there's no benefit to even using the standard spherification. I don't do much of it anymore, for me it was more about wanting to learn how than actually having much actual use for it, but I pretty much adapted all of the recipes I was doing to the "reverse" method.

I wouldn't say you're alone, just a different audience than most of the shows being mentioned are targeting. The majority audience for most of the cooks/chefs being referred to here don't really care so there's no reason for the cooks/chefs doing the shows to spend time teaching or worrying over it. As far as the cooks go, setting can matter as well. A cook doing the entire menu alone trying to turn 60 seats at lunch so that a second crowd can get in may be willing to live with knife work that looks a little different than it would if that same person was doing it for a catering job or in a fine dining setting with a brigade and 3 hour seatings. Sometimes people just want to have a good meal and get back to whatever they're doing and aren't measuring things or lining them up to compare cuts. Of course I'm talking about minor discrepancies here, not carrot slices that range from 1/8" - 3/4" that would lead to problems cooking them evenly.

Most of those food network shows aren't even pretending to try to teach people to do a perfect brunoise or to tourne a potato or anything like that. Most of their audience couldn't care less about that. In fact, if I had to guess, I'd say there's probably 1% or so of all existing restaurants where the customers care about that. I guarantee the average person making dinner at home after work doesn't care if every piece of vegetable is perfectly square and exactly 3mm or if every potato is exactly the same size and shape. Good knife skills are worth having but I'm not sure I'd base my opinion of what a cooks is capable of doing based on what they do on a food network show.

Homemade bread is never mundane. Both loaves look awesome.

I think we've pretty much hashed it out. There's not much to discuss beyond the vinaigrette thing. I don't think any of us who answered your original question were looking to try to establish a new list or addition. Even if we did, it would only have relevance within this discussion. It wouldn't change what's already established and accepted by the culinary world in general.

My general goal is to push myself to spend more time in the kitchen outside of work and try to reconnect with the happiness I used to get out of cooking just for the fun of it. A more specific goal is closely related to what Matt and David mentioned. I was given a meat grinder and a sausage stuffer for Christmas. I already have a Bradley smoker that I recently ordered a dual probe PID controller for so I can automate temp ramping, final temp and smoke control. My primary interest right now is in sausages but I'm going to order a temp/humidity controller in the near future and use it to convert a small fridge I'm not using into a curing chamber so I can eventually venture further into the world of charcuterie.

It looked kinda like you were infusing with chanterelles to me... glad I didn't guess.

Thanks to new ownership taking over the only grocery store in the small, remote town I live in, there is way more variety available than ever before (some are complaining about a small increase in pricing in general but it's a trade I'm happy to make). The result being that this morning I had grits for breakfast for the first time in over 10 years.

As far as I'm concerned, bechamel, veloute, espagnole, tomat and hollandaise are the (French) mother sauces. I won't argue with anyone who includes vinaigrette, they have Escoffier on their side, but I don't include it if asked. I do like pastrygirl's list...

Crab quiche sounds tasty. The only quiche I've seen on menus around here is the usual Lorraine. I rarely eat quiche and I never make it but I might be willing to bend that for a crab version. Of course, chicken pot pie is always a good thing. It warmed up to around -16 this afternoon, we were sitting at -41 (temp, not wind chill) when I went to work yesterday so it feels like spring today. Of course, warming up here during the winter just means snow. We're under a snowfall warning for today and it's been coming down pretty steady since early this morning.

I haven't played with bitters for baking. I have made an orange bitters ice cream that I was happy with so maybe I need to give the baking with bitters thing a try.

Best at feeding the family by making something from very little? Best at making consistently good meals on a daily basis? Best at laying out a gourmet spread? Best because they get in there and do it when someone else in the house, who may be a better cook, doesn't? I mean, I could cook circles around anyone in my family in a restaurant kitchen and in the home kitchen too from a technical standpoint but I don't feel like that means I'm "better". If you'd asked me this same question 15 years ago, I probably would have answered it with a simple "me". But I've learned a lot about cooking since then and I better appreciate things about the cooking others did all along that I kinda took for granted and never really thought about in terms of whether or not they were good cooks. Apologies for the non-answer.