Tri2Cook

Good point. I guess I missed something in the reading, I didn't pick up on the perfume actually being an ingredient. I thought he was going for aroma. I can't imagine perfume tasting particularly good either. I'm not debating whether or not it's a good idea, that can only be answered by trying it. I'm just kinda thinking out loud (so to speak) about whether or not I can picture it being a good thing. I'm having a tough time putting it together in my head so I want to be as encouraging as I can so I get to read about the results of his effort.

But what if it weren't overpowering? What if he found a way to use it that was background and subtle? Kinda like the woman who dabs a bit behind her ear compared to the woman who showers herself and her clothes in it? I'm not saying it's a good or bad idea but it is an interesting idea. Maybe he'll come up with the dish that reminds people of the one mom/grandmother/whoever used to make right down to the perfume she always wore. I don't know, someone probably thought sticking their brontosaurus mignon in the fire was a silly idea at some point.

True enough. I didn't mean that to sound anti-pickle and cracker like it ended up appearing. It was a long winded way of saying "give the people what they want and they will come". Ya gotsta have the pickle.

True story as witnessed by me. There was a sandwich shop in an area where I used to live. They sold good but smallish sandwiches of the sort you mentioned (you might need two unless you were dieting or a very light eater). They sold these sandwiches for, let's say $4.99 (because I don't remember the exact number). A butcher shop in the same area decided to add a deli counter to the business that would also make sandwiches to order. He knew all about the "place with the small sandwiches". He decided to use 8oz. of meat in his sandwiches (they were HUGE, eating one was a challenge) instead of the 2oz.-ish the other place used. No filler, no fluff. Just massive sandwiches that were good. He sold his sandwiches for about $1 more than the sandwich shop. Word got out. People thought he was crazy selling them that cheap. The people in the other sandwich shop were thrilled. "He'll never make it doing that". He began to sell a lot of sandwiches. The word spread even more. He began selling so many sandwiches he had to hire additional help so that he could tend to his butchery. The other shop wouldn't budge on what it was doing. It became a downward spiral where eventually they couldn't afford to compete with him if they wanted to and they closed the shop. More sales at a slightly smaller margin will take you further than a couple crackers and a pickle. If the customer base says the portions are too small, make them bigger.

I think it's an interesting idea and look forward to seeing what you come up with. I don't know if it's something I would explore, I usually work hard to downplay the perfuminess when I use flowers for flavoring things. I made rose petal ice cream and lilac ice cream and both were accused of "bleh, it tastes like perfume" so I now make serious effort to accent the floral while bringing out as little of the perfume vibe as possible. Still, it will be very cool to see where you go with it. I was competely blown away by Rob's (gfron1) experiment a while back where he fed people cheesecake in a room aromatized with chocolate and most thought they were eating chocolate cheesecake. Go for it and keep us updated on what you come up with. Maybe you'll show me good reason to embrace the perfuminess... that would be awesome. I love learning new tricks.

I almost always roast chicken in a modified Heston Blumenthal manner. I like the results of his roast chicken in his In Search of Perfection book except that I prefer my chicken a little more browned on the outside and slightly more done on the inside than he does. so I sacrifice a bit of the ultimate juiciness for a higher temp in the oven to get a nicely browned and crisp skin. I've done it both ways and once the chicken-infused butter is injected I don't notice much difference in the end result as far as juiciness goes.

Sounds interesting. I did my peach salad ode to my time in the southeast U.S. with pickled peach but the raspberry does sound really nice. Did you do raspberry-vanilla for the vin or are you getting the vanilla from the ice cream in there in another way? Maybe a pool of vanilla cream (not sweet) under the salad or something? A creamy vanilla-rasp dressing might be good too (sorry, didn't meant to start spewing ideas... this just sounds fun). I think pound cake croutons would work if you tweaked them a bit to the savory side. I'm personally not a big fan of croutons in salad I'm eating (I know, I'm weird) but the pecans would have been a nice addition. Kinda wish I'd thought of that.

I HEAR you!!! Same for me. Tourist season in my neck 'o the woods, so I'm just slammed. I want to try this too........I can imagine it's sweet and eggy, but I wonder how "rubbery" it might be, since it's so flexible and all. I'm also wondering if the inside of the sponge roll (the multicolored part) that raaga posted is the same recipe or if it's different? If you look closely, you can tell the the rolled up sponge is one element, and the tiger skin part is wrapped around it. ← It's tourist season (fishing) here too. Then comes tourist season pt. 2 (moose hunting). There's a break between each though. Yeah, it definitely looks like the "tiger" sponge wrapped around another rolled sponge all glued with some thin layers of something white. I don't know what all of the components are but I'm not really interested in doing the entire critter anyway. I just want to check out that outside layer and see if it's something I want to play with.

I'm guessing kinda sweet and eggy. I'm still going to try it, I'm curious about it too, just not going to worry about it tonight. It's been a long, busy day.

Awesome. I was actually going to try this tonight just to see if I could make it work. Already have everything weighed out and ready to go for later. Looks like it worked just fine so I may not bother now. I'll keep the recipe around though.

I'd go to the Fat Duck and order Sound of the Sea... I miss my island. But if I have to make my own food after all I've been through it would probably be something like a soup and a sandwich of some sort. I generally eat pretty simple when I'm cooking for myself unless I'm testing ideas.

Cool stuff Rob. Five years ago when I gave up my career of twelve years to cook it was a scary leap. I now work many more hours for less money and sleep has moved from the necessity category to being a luxury but I'm relatively stress free and I'm happy (of course I didn't have the added burden of it being my own restaurant). Best of luck with this. You get used to it. I'm in a small town as well and one thing I've learned is that, with a small customer base (compared to big cities), you have to accept that they like what they like. You don't have to give in to it always, you just have to be prepared to say "todays special is (insert any dish that you put a lot of time, care and love into here)" and have them reply "yeah that sounds good but I'll have a cheeseburger".

It's been around for a while but you didn't mention it so... do you already own Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking? If not then that's definitely one I'd recommend. Edited to remove irrelevant rambling.

It was good but probably not the way I would do it for a go-to type rub. In the context I used it the cocoa level was appropriate but I'd lower the level a bit for general use. The pork was part of a 10 course dinner for 24 I catered (cooked on site) that was themed around chocolate. Chocolate in some form was incorporated in every course. They wanted it, they got it, they enjoyed it and I had fun but between the idea testing and the actual event I didn't want to do anything with chocolate for a while after. I was tempted to alter the formula a bit based on what I think would give a better balance but it didn't seem right to offer up something I hadn't actually tried so I left it the way I did it. I would definitely recommend adjusting to taste.

That's awesome Rob. Looks great. I'm loving that the celery sheet has the ribs on it. I'm glad it worked out because it sounded like a tough challenge when you described what you wanted to do. Was the ganache enough to bring the celery and olive to the sweet side or did it keep a savory edge? Either way, cool stuff. You are the celery sensei.

We have those in Canada too, eh. Seriously though, looks good.

I tried the canned stuff for velveting dessert components and it worked (you have to work with a frozen or very cold item to be sprayed as Kerry said) but it's just too expensive. Much more cost effective to buy pails of cocoa butter and a sprayer (I just use the ol' Wagner power sprayer) for that job unless it's a one time thing. For the chocolate/cocoa butter ratio, I started at the 1:1 that I'd read about and worked my way down from there until it started getting a bit difficult to work with. My goal was to use the minimum amount of additional cocoa butter that I could get away with and still get the result I want. The ratio can go surprisingly low without trouble if you keep the sprayer in a pan of warm water when not spraying. I've gone as low as 3 parts chocolate to 1 part cocoa butter but 2:1 is what I usually work with because the resulting shell seems to be of better texture on the plate. The 3:1 seemed to make a shell that wanted to flex and bend rather than cut or break. That's strictly based on observation though, no extensive testing or anything was done by me.

I don't care if he calls it Under Pressure because he had beans for dinner the night before he titled it. It's Chef Keller sharing information. I will have it.

Yeah, I followed that link too. It's hilarious (other than knowing that I've made a cake or three that would belong there if I were a professional and sold cakes). "And what kind of ocassion calls for a "naked babies riding carrots" decor, anyway?"

I have. I did an amuse a while back with a cocoa rub on cubes of pork tenderloin that I grilled then plated with passion fruit coulis, ancho oil and caramelized cocoa nibs. 2.5 parts cocoa powder 1 part ancho powder 1 part brown sugar .5 part pasilla powder .5 part garlic powder .5 part salt .5 part black pepper .25 part cinnamon

Comparing 53% and 70% (assuming the same origin) isn't really a matter of which tastes better. That would be entirely subjective and relevant to what you intend to do with it. Your basic non-specialty Callebaut is good chocolate, I use it often in desserts, but I don't think I'd rank it as "TOP" chocolate. I consider it a good workhorse chocolate. It's a nice balance of flavor, availability and price and I've never had anyone be unhappy with things I make with it... but I don't do chocolates very often. I'm more into doing desserts.

Thanks for the nice comments. I don't mind sharing at all. For the ice cream I took 40 regular large marshmallows (from the grocery store, I may try it again with homemade marshmallow and see if it makes much difference but then again I may not... I was pretty happy with the result as is) and toasted half of them over a fire. Yes, I built a small fire with some of the hickory chips I was using for smoking the chocolate in a pan and used it to toast the marshmallows, a gas flame just didn't seem appropriate for this one. The other half I put in a pan and smoked while I was smoking the chocolate (I put the marshmallows in a pie pan and the melted chocolate in another pie pan and put them at one end of a large hotel pan, I then put another pie pan of smoking wood chips covered with foil with a few holes poked in it at the other end of the hotel pan, covered the whole thing tightly with foil and left it alone for about 30 minutes or so). I melted the marshmallows in 600ml of whole milk, sieved it, added a little vanilla and 500ml of 35% cream, chilled it and gave it a spin in the ice cream machine. It's not super sweet (compared to an actual marshmallow) so you may want to adjust the amount of marshmallow to your taste or add a bit of sugar. The recipe for the graham cream can be found on the Ideas in Food blog. Search for ritz ice cream. I subbed the grahams in for the ritz crackers, reduced the sugar a bit and used it chilled as a cream instead of frozen. It's a simple 4 ingredient recipe but I don't want to put it here without their permission. Their original ritz version is a thing of beauty and it translated very well to the grahams. The aerated chocolate is 200g of smoked 70% chocolate mixed with 100g of milk chocolate to mellow it a bit then charged in a cream whipper, sprayed and chilled. The crumb is 2 parts oreo crumbs, 1 part graham crumbs, 1 part melted butter, 70% chocolate, sugar and salt to taste and a bit of egg white to bind it a little. It was spread on parchment and baked for a bit then cooled and crumbled.

Ribs and biscuits. Yeah, I'll take a supersize order of that please... but will it offend the Chef if I request just plain butter on my sweet potato?

It tastes like s'mores made over a campfire. When I smoked the chocolate for the aerated chocolates I smoked half of the marshmallows for the ice cream at the same time. The other half of the marshmallows I toasted over a fire. The combination gave the ice cream that nice, toasty flavor that makes outdoors s'mores so much better than the oven versions. The graham cracker cream is a blatant rip-off of the Ideas in Food ritz ice cream recipe. I replaced the ritz with grahams and adjusted the sugar accordingly then used it as is instead of freezing it. The crumb is chocolate cookie crumbs, graham cracker crumbs, butter, 70% chocolate, sugar, salt and a little bit of egg white mixed, baked and crumbled. I'm happy with the result.