Tri2Cook

I put beef in brine earlier this week. 5% brine with pickling salt, brown sugar, pickling spice, fresh garlic and prague powder #1. It's difficult to get uncured brisket where I live and ridiculously expensive on the rare occasions the local store brings it in. I'm using eye of round because it's lean and, based on past experience, nice after brining. I used top sirloin last year and was very happy with the result but the difference in price between the on-sale round and not-on-sale sirloin at the time I needed to get it in the brine was enough to make it an easy decision. So 5 lbs. of beef is brining until early next Friday morning when it'll go in the sous vide tank before work and get 36 hours or so at 55 C in time for St. Patrick's day dinner.

Then piping I shall do. I'm thinking even if I want to fill some, I could pipe them full, dump so there's just a little around the edges left to scrape, then pipe the bottoms on so they don't have to be scraped. Thicker than ideal bottoms won't matter for these.

True, and sometimes that law of supply and demand works to the good. We have more restaurants than a town this size should be able to sustain and they all stay busy because cooking is not a favorite pastime of most of the locals. Reliable cooks are in short supply so the pay is better than average. Still not going to be making a down payment on a yacht any time soon but I can keep a roof over our heads and food on the table.

I'm going to attempt to use some Easter molds that were my moms. I kept them after she passed away but I've never used them. They're the somewhat flexy type molds (fairly thick and don't flex under their own weight but they're not the hard polycarbonate molds) and it looks like they're going to be a pain to scrape because they have a little lip around the edge so we'll see how it goes. The chocolates won't be to sell anyway. I considered cutting around the edges to remove the lip but I'm thinking that may be what's keeping them from being overly flexy. Maybe piping each cavity full to avoid having to scrape would be a better way to go?

"Good money" is relative though. Some positions in fine dining establishments may pay good money compared to their counterpart at a lower level place but that doesn't necessarily mean it's good money in the overall wage market. If you make $10/hr at Plop 'n' Slop, making $13/hr at Big Plates/Little Food would be good money relatively speaking but it still leaves you pretty close to the poverty line at the end of the year. Edit: In case it sounds like it, I'm not whining. I made my career choice. Just participating in the discussion.

If I was going to buy one, I'd go with the non-tilting... so I'm no help whatsoever if you want someone to help change your mind. Regardless of whether or not it's actually the case, the non-tilting model just looks more solid to me. With an 8 lb. capacity, lifting it off of the base wouldn't be an issue for me. I understand that it may be for some so having the tilting model available is a nice option.

Those are nice for the snowy areas on gingerbread displays. I find the flakes to be a bit large for the effect I want so I give them a quick spin in a spice grinder to break them up some. Not to a powder but to a smaller particle size that still gives a nice fresh-snow sparkle when light hits it.

I'm a bit surprised by those expressing shock at the wage. Did anybody really think cooks make big bucks? I've been doing it professionally for 18 years and I still don't make a whole lot more than I did my fist day on the job in my previous line of work. Less money but a happier me. I worked in construction for the first part of my working life. I wouldn't say there's any more sense of purpose in cooking than construction, I just enjoy cooking more. You're right about the weather though.

You may be right. I have absolutely no idea which post I was responding to at the time and couldn't even figure it out by reading back through the thread so I won't make any attempt as claiming I was right.

I didn't think of that, I may have to make an instagram account one of these days. And thanks for the mold number! Edit: and there it is, came up at the top of the google search results on the site I get most of my molds from. I was sure I searched it thoroughly. Apparently I was wrong.

They look great! Right after he posted that, I spent a good bit of time trying to figure out which mold he used to make the discs that are joined together to make the little flying saucer shaped pieces that are the base for those. Never did figure out which one it was though.

I'm going to have to agree with paulraphael on that one. I've not found many cases, if any, where introducing large amounts of water to an ice cream recipe is beneficial. It just leads to having to do all kinds of other things to compensate that generally overshadow whatever you gained by doing a water extraction.

An interesting approach for sure, may have to give it a shot. Though I'm not entirely sure I'm willing to mail order the suggested vinegar, so we'll see. One question, just out of curiosity. Do you think the egg yolk is causing any of the problems you were trying to solve? I'm guessing not since you have this much time invested in creating the recipe, I'm sure you would have investigated that by now. I just find that in some ice creams, egg is not my friend. And not just because it tends to mute some flavors, sometimes the egg flavor, even in smallish amounts, is just plain combative with the flavor I'm trying to achieve.

Perfect! I don't see me being in France any time soon so that makes it even easier to stay off of that slipper slope.

That's a mighty drumstick! Are those cats and dogs commercial molds or molds you made? Not that I need to start down the slippery slope of buying figure molds, just curious because I like them.

With the number of elite chocolatiers to be found in the U.S. and Canada these days, I can't even imagine wanting to go to the trouble, expense and risk of having high-end chocolates shipped in from France. But to each their own. Best of luck with your search.

Those are awesome... from that angle, looks kinda like Spy vs. Spy all dressed up for a formal occasion!

A local convenience store decided to stop carrying Haagen-Dazs and is selling all of their stock for about half the normal price. While I generally avoid buying it, that made it tempting. Unfortunately, by the time I finally decided I was tempted, other than some flavors from their "spirits" series which don't really interest me, they'd been pretty picked over already. "Snooze, you lose" was certainly appropriate this time.

I was thinking that about several of the techniques showing up in this thread. While they look amazing and I'm glad people are doing them so I can admire them and maybe even learn how they did it, I can't really see myself spending that much time on each cavity of every mold while producing chocolates. Not as long as I still have a 6 days/week primary job interfering with chocolate time anyway.

A very nice review... even if he did call that sunny-side-up egg in the photo "over-easy".

I was almost mildly grumpy at myself for not asking you about those before I bought mine when I saw that price, I paid $15 and change each on amazon.ca. But then it occurred to me that once you convert that to Canadian money and add on shipping from the U.S. (I got free shipping), it probably wouldn't have made much difference.

A quick question, just to be on the safe side before corned beef time gets here. I had to order more Prague #1 recently and got it from a different source than I usually do because they had some sausage making supplies I wanted. All the information on the label is identical to the one I usually order and I don't doubt the supplier but the powder is white instead of pink. I know the pink is added just for easy identification but is it particularly unusual for a manufacturer to leave it out?

I believe you and pastrygirl, you're both much more experienced at this than I am. I was just picturing me trying to scrape color off and about the fifth or sixth time the scraping caused big flakes of the color to break away, me saying a few discouraging words as the mold went sailing towards the trashcan.

This is not sarcastic, I'm asking this in all sincerity... why wouldn't it be easier to paint the yellow line in with a brush, spatter with black, then back with the blue? It would still be a lot of work painting all those lines in but it seems to me like it would be easier than trying to cleanly scrape colors away. Edit: the more I look at the picture, the more I'm convinced on the paint them in idea. It looks to me like a perfect example is being held in the foreground. Some in the background look like they have areas of heavier yellow in the line that could have been a start and stop point with the brush.

Yep, that's my general approach to solutions that I need in tiny amounts. Just make a more manageable amount and use what I need from it. I have high precision scales so that's not an issue. I don't even know if I'll ever make this, it was more an exercise in scaling it down to see how far I could get it before some of the numbers started getting silly. At 1 lb the tartaric acid solution gets ridiculous small (.284 grams) and the cream of tartar would be significantly less which has me wondering if there's a minimum batch size below which things don't act like they should.