Tri2Cook

I base my tips on 20% for table service regardless of where I'm eating or how much I'm spending. If the service is exceptional, that number goes up. If the service is subpar, that number goes down. My scale generally ranges from 15% at the bad end to 25% at the exceptional end. I never penalize a server for mistakes of the kitchen, bar, etc. I will hold them responsible for how they react if there was a mistake from the kitchen that I consider important enought to mention. For example, about a year ago I ordered a burger with bacon in a local place. The bacon was raw. Not undercooked, raw. The fat hadn't even turned translucent. I was on a time schedule that day and did not have time for them to redo it, it had already taken over half the time I had available to get it in the first place. When I pointed out the problem to the server and said I didn't have time to wait while it was fixed so she could just charge me for that burger minus bacon, she became a bit unpleasant and told me that burger without bacon wasn't on the menu. I said sure it is, the menu says "add bacon to any burger for $x.xx" so just deduct that amount from the price. She said she couldn't do that. I said she would do that or just take the whole thing away. She snatched the check from the table, scribbled out my order with enough force to tear the paper, threw it back on the table, grabbed my plate and walked away. Didn't see her again despite others at the table requiring service. The owner/manager questioned the scribbled out portion of the check when I was paying for the others who were with me. I explained the situation and his only response was "ok, so you just have to pay for your iced tea". She got no tip. Not one penny. And I haven't been back in that particular restaurant since. It takes that level of abuse for me to leave nothing at all. 15% is about as low as I go as a "penalty" tip. If the service/server attitude is bad enough not to leave that amount, it's bad enough that I leave nothing. I do always make a point of letting someone other than the server (if their attitude is bad enough to warrant no tip then it will be bad enough that nothing good will come of trying to point it out to them) know what the problem was so they can pass word along when the server is later telling them that I was a cheapass.

Michael Laiskonis' Workbook is my ultimate go-to blog for pastry related information. It's like having a continuously expanding instructional book on the art and processes of pastry that is current and relevant to what's going on at the leading edge of fine dining pastry. Another of my favorite pastry blogs is Canelle et Vanille. It's a little more traditional and less instructional than Chef Laiskonis' blog but it's always showcasing beautiful work and tasty recipes.

A puree of boiled okra, boiled flax seeds and xanthan gum.

And that's what really matters in the end. Besides, it looks fine to me.

I don't find it appealing, I just don't understand the intense anger over it. A lot of people believe a lot of things that are absurd or just plain wrong but I don't assume they are bad people deserving of my hate because of it. It's just what they believe. It doesn't automatically mean he has a chip on his shoulder regarding women as cooks/chefs. Maybe he does, I don't know, but to assume he does based on his repeating something he was taught during his early cooking years is a bit heavy-handed. If he says something like that in a teaching context, someone should have the 'nads to speak up and say "ummm, ya know, that's just ridiculous and completely untrue".

Very cool Rob. I sat this round out. Not due to the flavor pairing, which I'm fine with, but because I just didn't get around to it.

It's a coke commercial. No more, no less. People need to relax. Stress is the leading cause of heart disease... unless burger king's molecular onion rings have moved them to the top.

Apparently he made a comment in an interview that he'd been taught in his early training that women can't make mayo while they are menstruating because it will always break or something like that and, as usual, people have insisted on being highly offended over it to the point of disliking a person they don't even know. I think way too many people these days are on a constant vigil to find things to be offended over. Of course it's a ridiculous thing to teach someone but if that's what he was taught and nobody has had the backbone to tell him different then why wouldn't he say it? If I'd been told at an early age that yellow is purple and nobody ever bothered to tell me otherwise then I would probably at some point mention publicly that yellow is in fact purple. Nothing to get the knickers in a twist over.

I think you already know the answer to that one.

@#%^... $@&%.... @!*#... How the heck do people without guitars cut those PB&J's without the peanut butter gianduja breaking all to pieces? I followed his ratio exactly, mixed the tempered milk chocolate with the peanut butter, tabled it, poured it over the PDF and let it set. It now is like trying to chop a block of tempered chocolate rather than slicing like a ganache. It just snaps and breaks all over the place. I'm thinking next time I'll skip the tempering and tabling and just mix melted chocolate and peanut butter and maybe increase the PB a bit. The PB flavor is a bit muted behind the PDF and the dark chocolate I dipped the few decent surviving pieces in.

I hope not, I've had mine for over a year and still have quite a bit left. It still works fine though, used it yesterday.

Using the G-Pectin, the recipes work just fine by time if you cook for the updated 3 minutes instead of the 2 minutes in the book. I did a large sheet of plain raspberry yesterday and topped it with a layer of the peanut butter gianduja from the Grewling book. Now I'm just left with the hard part (for me)... getting them cut and dipped.

I temper by the "it looks good to me" method. I'm probably wrong more often than I think. I rarely make chocolates though and things seem to work out pretty good the majority of the time for what I do with it. One of these days I'll find the time to have someone who knows what they're doing shake their head sadly and tell me to step away from the chocolate.

Nope, still not acceptable. I guess I'm just an ass. ← I'm curious as to why you feel so strongly about your opinion? How do you assure your servers they will attain adequate wages? ← Whether or not staff attains adequate wages and whether or not they are rude and confrontational with customers are two entirely different issues. Do you really think publicly announcing to someone that they are a cheap asshole will change anything? "Ohhhh. I'm cheap. You just put a spotlight on me and pointed that out for everyone. That changes everything... here's more money." We all know that isn't happening. Imagine you're the person in the spotlight. You're going to tell the server to go f@#% their hat and you'll never spend another penny at that establishment. That helps noboby.

Are the pretzels a discernable texture or just a flavor component? If the texture is smooth ice cream but the flavor is pretzel you can probably just puree them in. Alex and Aki posted a recipe on Ideas in Food for a Ritz Cracker Ice Cream that is amazing. I'm sure it would work with pretzels just as well because I've used it with other items (ice cream cones for example) and it tastes like whatever flavor item you decide to use. If there is an actual texture provided by the pretzels you would want to mix them in at the end of churning before hardening.

Me too. In fact, I'm sure it doesn't work that way. If it did, you'd be able to taste the calcium chloride when using that as the calcium source for a calcium bath and that would render it useless because it's some nasty tasting stuff. If you were to use lactate and/or gluconate and not rinse them you may get some residual flavor but you could just as easily hold the spheres in a flavored liquid until serving if you went that route.

There's a recipe in the Sweet Serendipity book called Humble Pie that is a peanut butter pie. The ingredients for the filling are cream cheese, peanut butter, sugar, vanilla, heavy cream and chopped peanuts. The crust is graham crackers, butter and peanut butter. It's not frozen, just chilled in the fridge and it is tasty (there are a surprising number of tasty recipes in that book). I can PM or email the recipe if you want to take a look at it and see if it sounds about right. I'd just post it but... you know... then you'd just have to go to the effort of deleting my post after you read it.

So Rob, I tried the no-sugar frankenmallow idea I mentioned in the other thread and, nope, not even close. It looks more like a spongecake. It's stable, not sticky, easy to slice, flavorful and not at all a marshmallow. The texture is a tender gel full of bubbles that collapse and disappear in the mouth. I did this test by mixing 200 ml water with 100 ml frank's hot sauce and thickening it with 1.2g (.4%) xanthan. I then sheared in 3.75g (1.25%) SGA16 methylcellulose. I hydrated 14g gelatin powder in 80ml water and started whipping the base mixture in the kitchenaid on high. When it began to thicken enough to mound slightly I melted the gelatin with a couple quick zaps in the microwave and streamed it into the base. I then let it crank on high until it increased about 4x in volume, spread it in a pan and tossed it in the cooler. It lost almost half of its volume before setting and what you see below is the result. Nothing even remotely similar to what you wanted... but I had fun with it and I can think of uses (with different flavors) for what I did end up with. So thanks for inspiring me to play.

You can make gelato in your machine, it just takes paying a little extra attention during the churning process. You'll probably get different definitions from different people who will defend their opinion to the end but according to Chef Migoya the only consistent difference between ice cream and gelato is the amount of overrun (the amount of air mixed into the base while churning). Gelato should have less overrun and thus be more dense. The only way to control overrun with the frozen-bowl type machines is to check it now and then as it churns and estimate the overrun by the increase in volume. Once you know how long it has to go to reach the desired overrun, you can just go by time from then on with that base. You're shooting for around 20% overrun (increase in volume) for gelato.

Yep, that's the one. I probably should have made it a link since I referenced it.

Ok... but I'm still going to try my idea. Even if you don't need it. Your fault, I'm curious now. I have to know what will happen even if it's nothing good. Sometimes knowing what doesn't work is worth the time and ingredients used to find out.

It's entirely possible to do good ice creams and sorbets in the "frozen bowl" type of machines. Is there a difference between ice cream done in one of those and ice cream done in a top-of-the-line pro machine? Yes. Is that difference enough to justify $5,000+ vs. $50 for home use? In my opinion, no. If your base formulas are correct, your container is well frozen and your base is well chilled, your results will be good. Everything I've posted in the "Frozen Desserts" thread was done in my "frozen bowl" machine because I was doing really small test batches and it seemed silly to bother with anything larger. I have a home-sized machine with a built in compressor that works really well but it's more a convenience thing (continuous batches without waiting for bowls to freeze) than a quality difference. I think you're going to have to get up into the expensive commercial range fast-freeze machines to see any real difference in quality that's a result of the machine.

It does work. I dipped some pieces of candied smoked salmon in 85% chocolate last summer and it was actually quite tasty. Part of the fun of TGRWT is the surprise at seeing some of the really creative things people do. I agree that simple is sometimes best but the spirit of TGRWT encourages pushing boundaries.

That's funny, I was actually comtemplating a smoked salmon marshmallow dipped in unsweetened chocolate or smoked dark chocolate for this month's challenge. I was just going to do an isomalt marshmallow with smoked salmon powder added. I also contemplated a smoked salmon ganache as the center. Contemplating is as far as either got. I'm thinking an isomalt marshmallow may not be overly sweet for what you're doing but if it's not what you want then it's not the right thing. I'll do a test run of the methycellulose/gelatin idea and let you know what happens but my hopes for it aren't real high.

I haven't managed a no-detectable-sweetness marshmallow. I worked at it for a bit with the soy marshmallow but hit the deadline for the challenge without succeeding and haven't really been back to it. Using isomalt instead of sugar reduced the perceived sweetness but I wouldn't classify the result as truly savory. Texture is the major problem I've run into with trying to eliminate the sweet base. There are recipes for methylcellulose based marshmallows (that contain sugar but only because they were going for a traditional marshmallow flavor, not as a structural element) but they're not the same critter. Calling it marshmallow seems to be more of an artistic license thing. I'm wondering what would happen if you were to add a bit of xanthan and some SGA methycellulose to a savory flavor base (the basic thick, stable "shaving cream" type foam) and also add some melted gelatin or agar while whipping so that the foam will set as it cools. In my head the texture still wouldn't be right but it would be easy enough to try.