Tri2Cook

Awesome stuff everybody. I've been too busy to make any contributions recently but I've been having fun keeping up with what everybody else is doing. I did a bunch of fresh fruit tartlettes for a smallish catering job (breakfast, lunch and two coffee breaks for 35) today. No pics but they were just your standard pastry cream topped with various fresh fruits and fruit combos type.

Definitely hearts, I can see them.

Thanks for the additional information. I haven't forgotten this, I just haven't had a lot of time to play with it lately.

How to Pick(le) a Peach: Ok, not really. Pickled peaches are easy and google can give you 100 variations faster than I can type "pickled peach" so I won't bore anybody with that. However, I will self-indulgently bore you with the next step I took them to. Pickled peach consomme. I took pickled peaches I made along with their pickling liquid, added roasted fresh peaches, some peach nectar and some water. I blitzed it smooth, heated it, sieved it, adjusted it to my taste with honey and salt (keeping it on the savory side) set it with .5% gelatin and put it through the syneresis filtering process. I'm doing the test run of two dishes I want to bookend a meal with featuring this consomme. A starter and a dessert. I'll report back on how those work out.

Chill it before whisking. You can then whisk it set in a bowl of ice if you want to play it safe but so far I haven't found that necessary. It thickens really fast once it gets going.

I used to Swiss meringue-itize the yolks (heat 'em over hot water with part of the sugar) and also make a Swiss meringue with the whites and remaining sugar but I haven't been able to dig up any evidence that it was actually any safer. I don't think the heat level involved is enough to kill the nasty critters. I don't know if that's the case with Italian meringue either, never actually stuck a thermometer in there after adding the syrup. Maybe I should. The only way I ever felt completely sure the yolks were taken to a safe temp (other than using pasteurized eggs) was by custardizing them with part of the sugar and a little milk (which does effect the texture of the end result a bit but not by much). There's a ratio of egg-water-acid that allows eggs to be carefully heated above 150 f. without thickening them and a ph threshold that makes life for the little nasties pretty much impossible but I don't think that would help much in a tiramisu (unless you were doing a citrus version maybe).

Very cool Lior. Sounds like fun. I'm going to steal... errrr... borrow your notes from this thread for future reference in case I ever find time to take a trip south and sign up for one of Kerry's classes. I'm not really too interested in going into chocolates and confections production but a lot of the techniques translate to dessert uses as well so I'd like to actually learn to do it properly at some point.

I decided to preorder the Frozen Desserts book from the C.I.A. that should be out by late summer. Hopefully it will be a good one, looks interesting anyway. I'll report on it when it arrives.

Yeah, I didn't word that well. I was actually agreeing with what you said. I'm a picky, do-it-right-or-get-out-of-my-way person who loves order, numbers and precision. I enjoy cooking as a science and reasons for doing it this way and not that way. I don't think that sort of stuff interferes with creativity in the least. Plus, there's just something about the sweet side that's slightly more fun to me... which is weird because I very rarely eat sweets.

Eight hour days? I've heard rumors of those. Of course I'm not a pastry chef. I'm cook/pastry cook/baker/catering cook all rolled into one bleary-eyed mess. Sort of the "master of none" thing I guess. I currently do five 14 hour days, one 16 hour day and one day that varies depending on if there's any catering going on. I don't think working those hours has anything to do with gender though. Male or female, it's not can or can't... just will or won't. I'm not female or in New York but if I was going to decide on a single direction to go as the thing I do it would almost definitely be towards pastry.

I'm not sure I agree on this one. While I will agree that Fox can go low enough to win even the toughest Limbo competition at times, celebrities showing up at big-name restaurants is nothing unusual. The Hawaiian Tropic girls are celebrities of a sort. I won't argue the subject of whether or not they should be, that's entirely subjective, but they are. I realize that it's a tv show and they didn't just "show up" but it's probably supposed to appear that way to the average viewer. I will admit that they could have just as easily scripted in a crew of male models but, ummm, I don't make the rules. I just enjoy them.

I think calcium chloride tastes really bad. However, there are a lot of Chefs that know more than I do and quite likely have better palates than I do who use it and I'm sure they wouldn't if it made their food taste bad. The only explanation I can come up with is that maybe I have an unusual sensitivity to it or something. I'd say give it a shot if you already have it and have time to play. If you have to buy it anyway, I'd go with the lactate-gluconate if it were me. The dinner sounds like fun. I've played around with most of the techniques within the scope of what I have to work with (I don't have the Chef Blumenthal kitchen/science lab at my disposal unfortunately) but I've never put it all together into a meal before. Probably never will, I'm more of a "ok, now I know how they did it so on to the next thing" person, but it does sound fun. I'm looking forward to hearing how it goes and seeing the pictures. EDIT: I typed "However, there are a lot of Chefs that know more than I do" which sorta implies that I'm a Chef. I'm not a Chef (well, by the strict, literal definition I guess I am since I'm in charge of the kitchen and kitchen staff), I'm just a self-taught cook who wishes he'd followed his interests instead of his wallet 20 years ago (because then I might have earned the title of Chef by now) so I felt the need to clarify that.

You asked for experts and I'm not even close to being one of those but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night (actually I didn't do that either) so I'll add my completely irrelevant and unsolicited opinion by saying that the main problem with using calcium chloride in reverse spheres (in my already admittedly non-expert opinion) is that it tastes nasty. Not bad. Not less than stellar. Plain ol' tastebud-offending bad. Of course I have previously admitted to the possibility that I just have some weird hypersensitivity to the stuff but I've gone down to levels that wouldn't even do the intended job and the stuff still made me wish I'd put something tastier (like a cod liver oil sorbet with extra turpentine) in my mouth.

Soooo... I guess I'll just go back to popping a cake mix in the oven and opening a can of icing.

Oh yes you are.

When I was younger and broker we (my beer-swilling friends and I) used to add hot sauce and cut up hot dogs to the leftover pickle juice and let them fridge for a few days. I won't say they're good but they were good at the time. They actually tasted better than those pickled sausages you stagger out of 2am convenience stores with because they were out of frozen burritos.

I like one. I'm not sure what the actual dish is but it's fun to watch.

I'm thinking it's probably because the gelatin ratio is so low for this process that a traditional, well jellied stock is actually too high in gelatin. I've had my best results with liquids that are not far beyond a fluid gel when set. Of course that's just from personal observation, I'm certainly no expert on the subject.

But has Richard really been the molecular poster child? Did he foam? He applied smoke to a couple of items, then his smoker broke. He sous vided, and that was a disaster. What he has done mostly has been clever with ingredients and pairings and conceptions. He may be in to it but that isn't what got him to the final. ← True. I'd just like to see somebody hang their ass in the wind though. The whole "play it safe" thing is probably the smart move but it's not as fun. I want to see somebody look at the judges and say "this is what I do and I sure had a lot of fun with it whether I win or not". Of course I realize the whole goal is to win so I don't actually expect anybody to play that way.

I can't bring myself to watch this one. Food Network hit an all-time low for me today. I was browsing through the Good Eats episodes and there was a link at the bottom for a recipe (from a different show) for coconut popsicles. I thought "that doesn't really require a recipe but maybe it's something cool so I'll take a peek". The recipe in entirety was "dip store-bought coconut flavored popsicles in rum or pineapple juice, sprinkle with demarara sugar and serve". Seriously? I think anybody with the culinary interest to join egullet would be overqualified for the position of "next food network star". Edit: Forgot to mention that the recipe actually instructed us to remove the wrappers from the popsicles before dipping and sprinkling. I guess that was the professional edge that made the difference.

I kinda agree in concept but they also mentioned that it resulted in the muddling of flavors. I can see that because people don't always eat one item at a time on their plate even when you want them to. They take a bite of this, a bite of that, which is fine if she designed the items to work together that way. Chef Colicchio said it was a bad plan so I'm assuming it didn't all harmonize well on a single plate. That's where my "it's all about the food" theory takes a hit. I try to keep that in mind but the constant pouting and anger-girl thing makes it difficult (even if it is just due to editing). I hate to see grown folks whine. Me too. I don't agree entirely on the Marcel thing though, my thing with him was he seemed to second guess himself too much instead of just doing what he felt good about doing. He should have brought his science guy A-game and jumped in with both feet if that was how he wanted to be portrayed on the show. Oh well, that's irrelevant now.

A quick question on the science of ice cream. When a recipe calls for equal parts heavy cream (35% m.f. here) and whole milk (3% m.f. here), if my math is correct, you end up with 19% m.f. once combined. Is there any reason not to just use 18% cream for the total volume instead? I know there's a 1% difference involved but does that really make a noticable difference at smaller batch sizes? If so, that's easy to adjust for anyway. Using 35% and whole milk isn't a problem, I'm just curious as to whether there's a real world reason to use one over the other. I can't think of one but I'm no food scientist either.

me too ← Gail and Padma are both attractive. Gail has the girl-next-door thing, Padma has the exotic thing. Kinda a Mary Ann and Ginger thing going on. None of that is why I watch the show. I don't really care if Frankenstein's Monster and The Creature from the Black Lagoon are doing the tasting wearing neon green and purple swirl potato sacks with bright pink Crocs. It's all about the food.

Chocolate/coffee/raspberry maybe? I have no idea what it would be like for what you're doing but I made a coffee/chocolate ice cream base today that I'm going to freeze and swirl raspberry sauce into tomorrow. A friend of mine really likes chocolate-raspberry coffee from the local coffee shop so I decided to make this ice cream and see if it passes her taste test. How about chocolate-blue cheese ganache with a port-pear jelly? Does that sound like a little too much going on? I'm trying to think of a ganache to use a chile (habs, jalapenos, etc) jelly with beyond the usual suspects but the brain isn't in high gear right now. Of course we have to include a show of respect to Rob in this list. He's been on the cutting edge of all things celery in the pastry forum so maybe a peanut butter ganache with celery jelly? This is fun.

I don't like to clean. Nothing specific. No single item above the others. I just don't particularly like it. Especially since the bulk of it comes at the end of busy 14 - 15 hour days. Another hour spent cleaning is the last thing I want. It has to be done and it is done but I don't have to like it.