Tri2Cook

I have no idea what they do for the drink but I was smoking some tomatoes recently and still had some really good smoke going when I took them out so I cut some oranges in half and tossed them in for a bit just out of curiosity. After I took them out, I sealed them in ziplock and tossed them in the cooler for the night. The next day I collected the juice and zest from them. We were discussing it in the pastry forum a week or so ago. I wound up making a marmalade with the zest and a sliceable orange curd with the juice then did a plated dessert using both and a few other components. The smoke definitely makes it's presence known but it's not overwhelming. I never thought of doing a cocktail with it, now I wish I had.

You can do an uncooked soft marshmallow with xanthan and methylcellulose. It's torch-able and will hold it's shape on the plate but it's too soft to cut into cubes or anything like that. It pretty much has to be quenelled or shaped in a form or something. I have no idea what a trip through a whipper would do to it. I might have to try it sometime and see. I have the recipe on file but it's not mine, I found it on a blog, so I can't post it here. I'll try to find it again and give you a link.

Just my opinion, I'm sure someone will disagree with me, but calcium chloride in the spheres does not taste good at all. It's not a "yeah, that's not great" thing, it tastes really bad. Get gluconate-lactate for reverse spheres. I know that's not the answer you want since you already bought it but you'll spend a lot more pouring your sphere mixtures down the drain after you taste them with the calcium chloride then you'd spend ordering the gluconate-lactate.

There is an answer that works surprisingly well. I was a bit skeptical when I read about it but I figured if I couldn't give benefit of the doubt to Grant Achatz then I must be one arrogant bastard so I tried it. Spray dried coconut milk powder. It does not taste like fresh coconut milk on it's own but combined with coconut milk you can get a really intense flavor without getting that slightly caramelized taste reducing things with sugar in them get. It also thickens it a bit thus solving the problem of your added juice thinning it.

How about just removing whatever volume of liquid you want to add from the coconut milk? 150ml coconut milk + 50 ml liquid = 200ml... no cooking required.

Ok then, I still have about 500g or so of celery puree in the freezer from the last project so I guess I won't throw in the towel quite yet. Gonna be tough after celery curd though. andanand: That's beautiful. Welcome to the asylum.

Those are awesome Rob! Celery curd! I think I may be conceding the win to Rob on brainstorm: sweet celery. I'm not sure I can't think of anywhere to take it beyond that one. That's too cool.

I use... 1 part banana puree + 4% lemon juice + banana liqueur to taste (or not if you prefer) ...mix in... meringue: .5 part egg whites and .25 part sugar cooked to 120c with a little water + soaked, melted gelatin sheets at 4% ...then mix in... 1 part cream, soft whipped All amounts by weight based on the banana puree. You may need to adjust the sugar up or down a bit based on your puree and preference.

Then there would be as many or more people grumbling that they just bought a $$$ book full of recipes they'll never do. There are more people (which = more money) on the "make those fancy recipes so that I can do them after work on a tuesday" side of the fence.

Awesome. Better stock up on lots of chocolate now that the word is out, you're about to be Ashkelon's newest rock star.

I'm definitely having fun with it. Even with some of the concerned looks and "I'm not eating that" comments that accompany sharing some of my ideas it's still fun. Yep, the "Ritz" are the peanut butter shortbreads. I just brushed the tops with a little egg wash so they'd get the shiny browned Ritz look.

The folks at Ideas in Food created a recipe for Ritz Cracker Ice Cream. It's a thing of beauty. The warm base tastes like the best pudding ever and the ice cream is creamy, smooth and tasty. I had to do something with it for a dessert after tasting it so this is what I came up with. Snack Time: Ritz ice cream, peanut butter shortbreads, peanut butter sauce, celery coulis, sugared celery leaves. Thanks to Rob for inspiring me to play with celery, it was the perfect thing to break up the rich sweetness of the ice cream and peanut butter sauce a bit.

Hmmm. Hopefully, even if you're a really nice person, we'll never meet because I wouldn't want to offend you but if I know your first name and need to speak to you that is what I will call you. You must have informed me of it or I wouldn't know it so I'd feel weird not using it. I find it infinitely less rude than "hey you". If you require mr/ms/mrs so-and-so that's how you should introduce yourself to me, with no first name given. Even then I'm likely to just avoid talking to you, I don't do the formal mr/ms/mrs thing too well. I think it comes from a friend's dad when I was a kid requiring all the kids to call him "master so-and-so". Master my ass, I just stopped going to that friends house.

Okay then, I did oops. I could have sworn that truffle torte demo here was on the one from the cake bible. Sorry 'bout that.

I don't have anything that would add to what's been suggested. I just thought this thread deserved mention as a "you know you're an egulleter when..." thread. There are probably 10 billion people out there that would read it and say "Oh boo hoo, they can't get their rice to be clumpy".

I assumed it was the cake bible since that was what was done in the demo but I could be wrong. If so... oops!

Apologies. Didn't intend for that to sound like a lecture. My point was that you don't know if you need to tweak a recipe until you try it. You may have a good educated feeling that "this would be better with walnuts in it" or "that isn't a long enough bake time" but you won't know if you haven't tried the original to compare it to and someone else telling you it's better another way doesn't mean you'll agree. I always try someone else's recipe their way first. I guess it was drilled into me for too long to change. My mom always told me to give the creator of the recipe the benefit of the doubt the first time through unless it was obvious they didn't have a clue and, while I don't agree with everything in RLB's books, I would definitely not accuse her of being clueless about baking. Maybe that's not the best approach though... I do have my fair share of bird food and trash can filler when experimenting.

I like that cake idea Kerry! I think I'll try it with an olive oil cake. Thanks!

So today I made a ganache with 200g of 70%, 120ml of lemon thyme infused cream, 120ml of reduced smoked tomato puree (I made a lot of the puree for a different project but decided to reduce some of it and try it with chocolate), 30ml of glucose and 60ml of butter. It's dark, smokey and probably not for those who like their chocolate sweet but it's not bad. Now, since I'm the court jester of molding and dipping chocolates I have no idea what I'm going to do with it. Any ideas from the experts?

Champagne truffles?

At the risk of making a whole lot of people not like me, I tend to find the same problem with many traditional holiday breads, cookies and cakes. I always get the feeling that the place where they originated has some secret they don't tell. Maybe they sprinkle them with booze or wine or top them with custard or soak them in a syrup or something that they don't let everybody else in on. They sometimes seem lacking in flavor and almost always seem dry. Then again, I guess it could be related to local preference, what they had to work with when the recipes were created or the need to have them last a while back before fridges and freezers. Regardless of all that rambling I just did, it all looks great... and the money shot for egullet is what's really important.

I haven't had that luxury yet. Hopefully someday I'll find myself in a kitchen full of all the nice equipment I want so I can have the priviledge of turning my nose up at them if they're not as great as I expected. I'm kinda glad I couldn't afford a pacojet when they were first available because I no longer drool over it as much as I used to. I think I'd rather have a really good ice cream machine at this point. But that's coming from someone who's never used a pacojet.

Yeah, I think some things require a particular mindset. Not a better or worse, right or wrong, more or less sophisticated issue, just a different approach in thinking about, looking at and tasting certain things. It takes a bit of effort at first to push aside everything you think, know and have learned about food. Sam Mason, Dominique and Cindy Duby and the brilliant Ideas in Food team (Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot ) have inspired me to do an embarrassingly large number of things that invoked the "I'm not eating that shit!" response based on description and, occasionally, appearance... but things usually work out ok if I can get it in their mouths. Keep putting the "weird" stuff in front of her, it gets easier unless the person you're trying to convert is intentionally resistant.

I've done a few recipes from that book. It's been a while but I don't remember needing to tweak any of them, the recipes I tried all worked. There were probably a few I wanted to tweak or tweaked just for the fun of it because that's what I do (and sometimes wish I hadn't) but I don't remember any "yuck" or catastrophic failures resulting from following the recipes as written. Try a recipe. If the thought "maybe it'd be nice with/without this" enters your head when you taste it, ty that. If that makes you happy write a little note in the margins. Have fun with it, they're just recipes not laws (although I sometimes get the feeling from her writing that RLB may disagree with me on that ).

So HUGE thanks to tan319 for digging that up for me. I'm going to work with it but you weren't kidding about the sorbitol. Wow. Is there something related to his recipe that makes the sorbitol necessary when it's not used at all in the other version? I'm not particularly opposed to using sorbitol but it's not something I keep on hand or use normally.