Tri2Cook

Yep, it has the additional benefit of gifting the bride and groom with one complimentary bubble bath for the honeymoon. Regarding Sysco, you just have to be firm with your rep. We had problems out of them the first time around, we dropped them, they begged, bargained and pleaded us to try again and we squeezed some pretty sweet deals out of them (mainly in the realm of fixed prices on things we use a lot of, such as mozzerella, that tend to climb more often than you can adjust for easily) before going partially on board with them again. We use a seperate supplier for our meats, I haven't had good luck with Sysco meats being what I want it to be, and we get our breads from a local bakery. I enjoy baking bread but there's just not room for doing it in house at this time. The main advice I can give you on Sysco is always check your invoices carefully, not just that everything arrived in good condition (we very rarely have a problem with quality or condition from them) but the numbers as well. All of the numbers. Make your rep waive things like minimum order charge ($25 a drop here if you order under a set amount). If he/she says they can't do that tell them yes they can. Because they can and will if they have to. Sysco is a big company with a lot of money and they know all of the fine print tricks to milk more money out of you (kinda like cell phone companies) but most of it can be bargained out of the picture if you call them on it. Just make sure to watch the invoices even after that because the reps don't always "remember" to relay that information to the billing department and it may be up to you to catch it and say nope, not paying that.

I'm exaggerating a bit. I still find time to experiment with food, I like knowing how to do things even if it's not the sort of stuff I do at work. I find time for my cycling and mountain biking. I've put triathlon on the back burner for now, I really don't have time for proper training without giving up things that are more important to me so I'm fine with that. I have time for late parties and things of that sort, I just rarely choose to. I'm kinda boring. I sit at home and read or stay at work after closing and play with food most nights.

We usually offer a choice of salad, soup or fries with our lunch sandwich and wrap combos. I'd say we probably do a pretty much equal amount of each over the course of a year with a slight advantage to soup (long, cold winters here). We also include a piece of fresh fruit or yogurt and iced tea, hot tea or coffee. Since they pick what they want we rarely throw anything away. The combos are popular with local businesses. They call, order x number of combos and we have them ready for whenever they want. Another thing that can boost the economy is contracts with local businesses, etc. Of course you are already aware of that with your sushi contract. It can really make a difference, especially during the slower periods. We have a contract to provide breakfast (which we don't even do at the restaurant but it was part of the contract so I do it), lunch and dinner to the local police detachment for the prisoner meals. We also have a contract to do dinner for 25 every thursday night for the local chapter of the Rotary Club. We do pizzas for 2 elementary schools every friday during the school year. They send slips home with the kids on monday, the parents mark how many slices of pizza they want their kid to have on friday and send the money, the school calls us and we give them to them at a significant discount. They use it as a fundraiser for school trips, etc. It works out good for the school and us. The kids like it too. The owner of the restaurant is a member of the local chamber of commerce so we take advantage of that by having special sheets and the menu faxed to local businesses on a regular basis. It's out there, you just have to go get it... and then give up any form of social life and sleep to maintain it.

It's different as Rob said but I don't know that I'd call it irreplaceable (Rob didn't either). In my opinion, it depends what you're going to do with it. If you're using it as a finishing salt then you will probably enjoy the texture from the FDS more than the usual grocery store sea salts and may enjoy the taste more depending on the flavors it's competing with (meaning you may not even notice a taste difference against strongly flavored backgrounds). If it's to be used as an ingredient where texture is no longer a factor you may or may not find search out the FDS worthwhile. I've used FDS in caramel and I've used "fine sea salt" in caramel and I can't claim I noticed any remarkable difference but the same salts as finishing salts on chocolates (or anything else for that matter) are very obviously not the same.

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