Tri2Cook

Thanks! Nope, I don't venture into that market. One thing I've learned about marshmallows is that I enjoy making them but I do not enjoy cutting/packaging them in large quantity. I'll stick to things that go on plates.

I'm not familiar with Tortagel but if it's just powdered gelatin... - bloom it in a small metal bowl or pan, swirl it over low heat for a few seconds until it starts to melt then take it off the heat and the residual heat will finish the job... ...or... - bloom it in a glass bowl, pop it in the microwave for a few seconds just 'til it starts to melt and let the residual heat finish the job. Unless there's something different about this particular product, you're not trying to cook it. You just want to melt it and you want to do that somewhat gently.

I agree with Rob from looking at the recipe. A dry, crisp meringue is what I'd want for that. The meringue will soften a bit from the moisture in the bavarian. Meringue doesn't have to look browned to be done properly. In fact, it's usually considered more desirable to achieve dry, crispy meringues that don't color. For the bavarian, I personally would cook the custard without the chocolate despite what the recipe says. Cook it until thickened and strain it over the chocolate to melt it. Mix in the bloomed gelatin. Cool then fold in the cream. If it's too sweet for you, reduce or remove the sugar (depending how sweet you want it) from the custard. You can always reserve a bit of the cream to sweeten, whip and add in if it turns out not sweet enough. If you're whipping 3 c. of cream, set aside ~1/2 c. Keep track of how much sugar you end up using (if any) for making it again in the future and you can eliminate that step.

They look tasty Rob, you're rocking that book. I wish I'd work through an entire book sometime but I'm betting it won't happen.

Marinate cantaloupe in vanilla vinaigrette, drain, make a pile of the melon at one edge of a bowl, pour chilled horchata (maybe thicken it a bit with xanthan if needed) in bowl, add a toasted almond bread crouton (or, if you're feeling like a little more challenge and using Spanish horchata instead of Mexican, a tigernut and date bread crouton) on the melon.

Fair enough, my mistake. I use the large pots of water at work because they're going to be staying on the boil and ready to use for an extended period of time but I don't use nearly that amount of water just to cook one batch of pasta.

My ex-wife's sister. Every time I was forced to be in a restaurant with her I sat in anticipation of the little drama theater that was going to happen at some point that would get her a free meal. I think her record for fastest attempt was while placing her order: "What do you mean you are temporarily out of baked potatoes? That's what I wanted. Now I have to have something else. It should be free!". I hated it. I knew it was going to happen. I eventually blew up on one occasion and said "I'll pay for your damn meal, just stop bitching at the waiter. If you're too cheap to pay for a meal why do you go to restaurants in the first place?". We were never invited to a restaurant with them again so the evening with the cold shoulder from my then wife for doing that to her sister was well worth it.

I already got in trouble once for asking about the baker's couche, she said that was none of my business. Seriously though, I've used muslin well dusted with flour to line cheap baskets to do that job and it worked fine. That was just for home use but I think I spent something like $10 or so for enough muslin and baskets to do 5 or 6 loaves at a time.

30 minutes to boil 4 litres or so of water? Really? Anyway, I'm just curious at this point. I'm not worried about practical applications (yet) or energy conservation. I'd just like to find out if pasta could be pre-soaked, bagged and finished off in a short amount of time later that day without compromising quality. Basically, could it be rehydrated to the point of fresh-made pasta then cooked from there later. I'm not thinking par-cooking, I was thinking more along the lines of a cold soak. Spending a few extra minutes is nothing when feeding the family or serving one large group but a few minutes per order on a busy night adds up to a lot of time saved. You can't do much about how fast people eat their food but you can to some degree manage how fast they get it... just not at the expense of quality which is why this will be an interesting experiment to me.

Never tried it... but I'm going to now. Might make a few messes figuring it out but dry pasta is cheap.

Sorry Chris, wasn't trying to mess up your thread. I was just trying to be funny. The agar "corn chip" would suck for nachos, no crunch. No good reason to puree and reform strands of beef. A wine flavor in the cheese wouldn't be too nacho friendly, maybe beer instead though? The bean foam would work but can't really think of much point to it for nachos other than maybe to get a bean flavor without the heaviness which probably isn't a top-level concern to the person sitting down to a big plate of nachos. Of course bacon powder is tasty but so is bacon not as a powder and that would be much easier for nachos. But maybe I will make some tomato, jalapeno and onion caviars, coat them in a cilantro and garlic oil/lime juice emulsion, top 'em with a little sea salt and call it Molecular Salsa... or use habanero caviars instead and call it Atomic Salsa!

Very nice Lior. I wish I had the motivation to do various accents for all the marshmallows I made but I'm not going to. It was mainly just an experiment with various familiar flavors to get a good grasp of what the recipe will tolerate so I can start playing around with weird flavors. I'm just cutting mine (maybe with a shaped cutter, probably just squares to keep it simple and quick), seperating the flavors into 4 or 5 pieces per bag (little snack size ziplocks), labeling the bags, putting them in boxes and handing them out to a few people. I find the toasted marshmallow flavor dicussion interesting. I think I'll play around and see if I can contribute anything to that cause. It should be fun to try even if I just end up making a big mess.

Take some corn puree and set it into thin sheets with agar. Mix beef puree with transglutaminase and extrude it into an immersion circulator heated bath and arrange the strands on the corn sheets. Cook wine, cheese and sodium citrate until smooth and spread into thin sheets. Allow to set, cut, lay on top of beef strands and heat in 170 F. oven just 'til cheese softens. Top with alginate caviars of tomato, jalapeno and onion purees. Add a spoon of xanthan/methycellulose/pinto bean juice foam on the side along with some bacon fat/tapioca maltodextrin powder and a xanthan stabilized cilantro oil and lime emulsion. Sorry, just a feeble attempt at humor.

I don't have pictures yet and they're still uncut but I finally finished my little marshmallow marathon. I have the following flavors made, dusted, wrapped, sealed in containers and ready to cut, package and give away: - Chocolate (callebaut cocoa) - Strawberry (strawberry puree and lemon juice) - Raspberry (raspberry puree and citric acid) - Passion Fruit (passion fruit puree) - Blueberry (pureed local wild blueberries that were in my freezer, lemon juice, replaced corn syrup with homemade wild blueberry syrup) - Cherry (morello cherry puree, citric acid) - Honey Lemon (fresh lemon juice, citric acid, replaced corn syrup with honey) - Apple (pureed granny smith apples, malic acid) - Caramel (caramelized part of the sugar and added a healthy dose of sea salt) - Coconut (coconut milk boosted with spray dried coconut milk powder) - Banana (pureed bananas) - Pumpkin (pumpkin puree, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, vanilla) - Vanilla (that one explains itself) - Chai (strong chai tea) - London Fog (strong earl grey and vanilla) - Coffee (espresso) - Rosewater (another self explanatory flavor) - Mayan Chocolate (cocoa, cinnamon, new mexico chile powder, vanilla, replaced 1/2 of corn syrup with honey) Things I learned: - Nightscotsman's recipe rocks but through testing I discovered I prefer to use all fruit puree instead of the 1/2 puree, 1/2 water as listed. It doesn't seem to hurt anything and gives a more powerful flavor. - I made numerous substitutions to the cooked syrup depending on the flavor I was doing and it caused no problems at all. - The recipe is very open to changes, the only thing that seemed to mess with it was the addition of fat (coconut milk and cocoa for example) which resulted in less volume and a more dense texture but otherwise was fine.

Mayan dessert soup courtesy of my imagination so you can blame me if you try it and don't like it. Completely, thoroughly, totally not authentic but all of the ingredients are authentic to the Mayan diet. Heat water, honey, cinnamon stick, vanilla bean and dried chile, steep, reheat and strain over chocolate, give it a little salt and adjust sweetness if needed. Marinate diced papaya in heated water and honey with vanilla bean, steep, drain. Put a little corn pudding in a bowl, top with some of the papaya and pour the chocolate soup around.

Will marshmallows do their thing with fairly significant levels of alcohol in the mix? Like if you were to use some form of booze as the flavor base? I know wine/champagne work, I've done those before, and I'm happy to experiment with the stronger stuff but I thought I'd check in first in case somebody already knows I'd be wasting time and ingredients.

Nice! Not sure about the streaking, I'm a hack when it comes to the chocolate/confectionary stuff. I don't dust them if I'm going to dip them, I just put a thin "foot" on them before I turn them out of the pan. I don't know if that's a good thing or not but it works for me.

Well, I don't know if it actually goes "bad" but I've found a nasty vinegar-like mess that I wouldn't want to drink in a bottle or two in the past. Actually though, the "bad" I had in mind was just wondering out loud if it's going to be crappy wine.

Nightscotsman beat the molecular gastronomy folks to the punch! I think the methocel warm ice cream showed up sometime in '05 if I'm not mistaken (which I very possibly am). I used callebaut cocoa in his chocolate marshmallow recipe (from early '04) and it tastes exactly like chocolate soft-serve and has the smooth, creamy mouth feel of soft-serve until it sets. Warm chocolate soft-serve!

I found two bottles of white wine in a cabinet at a friends house. I was helping her with some repair work and there they were. All she knows about them is that they were given to the guests at one of her friends wedding in 1995 so they're not all that old. She'd forgotten she had them and they've been relabled with a simple "thank you from ... and ..." type thing. The corks look to be in good shape and they were stored in a dark, cool (basement) cabinet but otherwise I know nothing at all about them. She told me to help myself so maybe I'll be adventurous and open one.

Not true... a tasty dessert is never out of place.

I've found that the easiest way for me is just to dump it in the pan, give a hand a spritz with canola spray and pat the stuff around the pan with my hand. It's quick, easy and if the fingertips start sticking to the marshmallow you just curl them into your palm to regrease 'em and keep going.

Hey Kerry, check THIS out. I'm going to have to get around to getting some form of SV equipment. I've looked at the PID/rice cooker stuff and the price is right but I keep telling myself to hold out for the immersion circulator.

The Alinea book!

Got a few more flavors done but I'm going to have to do some playing around with the coconut. I replaced the 1/4 c. fruit puree and 1/4 c. water (I'm doing 1/2 recipes of each flavor) with 1/2 c. coconut milk boosted with a couple spoons of spray dried coconut milk. The flavor and aroma are beautiful, exactly what I hoped they'd be, but the amount of fat from the coconut was too much for the syrup to deal with. They set nicely but are dense and less than half the thickness of the other batches. I'm thinking of trying again and just using the powder mixed with water instead of coconut milk to see if that helps. If not, I'll have some thin, dense marshmallows that taste and smell really good. Edit: Ok, after work tonight I gave the coconut marshmallows the ol' sniff and taste tests again and I can't alter them. They taste too good the way they are. I'm not willing to give up any of the flavor so that they'll be more "pretty". So I'm going to make the full size batch of the coconut instead of the half I've been doing and put it in the same size pan I'm using for the half batches. That will solve the problem of them being half as thick as the other flavors. They'll still be more dense but I can live with that. I made the decision before starting this that I wasn't going to add any coloring other than what the flavoring agents provide on their own so they weren't going to be all that "artsy" regardless.