FoodMan

After quiet a few batches of homebrew, and only one failed batch, I never stop being a worry 'wort'. I brewed a batch this past weekend, was too impatient to wait till the temperature drop to 70, so I pitched the yeast around 80 F (Cooling the damn wort fast enough has to be the most annoying process, especially for the impatient!!). Anyways, It seemed to me that there was activity for a shorter period of time than there should've been. I brewed on Sunday, the airlock bubbled at about 8 second intervals when I checked on it on Monday, very little on Tuesday morning and completely stopped by that evening. I even opend the top of the airlock and took a whif..smells good, like beer. I'm sure (almost) it is fine, but wanted to post anyways. I'll probably be bottling this weekend after tasting a small sample and making sure it has no odd flavors and hopefully be drinking it in another week or two if all goes well. Does anyone worry as much as I do?

My cynic in me agrees with you...on the other hand he did burn the hell of those onions.

Cook or Artist. It really doesn't matter in this context. Do you honestly believe Santi's remarks are 'criticism'? Nothing is wrong with criticism, and no one should be above it, but like Doc mentioned it should be grounded in reality and should be specific and based on experience and knowledge. otherwise it is a plain and simple attack and looks nothing other than petty! How does he know they do not eat their own food? He DOES not! It is clear (from shows like Decoding Ferran Adria and diners posts here and elsewhere) that chefs like Adria and Achatz are very proud of their food, would love to share it with guests and at the same time they love traditional homey dishes. Their restaurant food is not for every day or every occasion, but neither is most of the 3 star establishments' food. At best his comments are simply a matter of opinion, but he does not phrase them like that. Nothing wrong with speaking ones own opinion as in 'I really dislike Ferran's cooking'. Unfortunatley he goes beyond that and accuses these chefs of serving harmful food to snobs! Hey, I guess he did get the publicity he apparently craves, but it is not via valid criticism.

Was that rotisseries from this weekend's episode one of the coolest things or what! I wonder of he really found it at an antique store or was he just romanticizing.

To each their own, but his 'accusations', besides being damaging, reveal that he does not know much about Adria's and others style of cooking or ingredients. No one wants to stop anyone from eating morcilla and eggs. Everything has it's place.

I'm not saying butterscotch and scallops cannot be made to work together, but I doubt it. However, we cannot compare it to the Vietnamese caramel used in cooking. The caramel (of which I always have a homemade jar to use in recipes) is burnt sugar and water, that's it. Butterscotch is not caramelized, it contains butter, scotch whiskey and brown sugar. Very, very different flavor profile. In the quantities he seemed to apply to the poor scallops I also went 'belch'. I actually was hoping I-cannot-cook-but-can-bitch Lisa to go home, but oh well. My hope is for a Richard Vs. Stephanie finale. ← Well, taking a look at the recipe here, it appears that he does caramelize the sugar, and there is no brown sugar called for. So nomenclature aside, I can't see a reason that this absolutely would not work: he may just not have executed it well. I've made (just the other night, in fact) a similar dish, though without the scotch and with fish sauce instead of miso (big difference, I know, but conceptually...). Edited to add: if he didn't caramelize the sugar to a dark enough stage it would have been too sweet: could his mistake have been that? ← Good point, I had not looked his recipe up, but even the concept seems cloying to use with sweet scallops and the ones on the show seemed drenched with it. Did you use butter in your recipe too, or was it just sugar+fish sauce? If so, then you made a very classic Vietnamese caramel sauce. They also would include some lime juice, coconut juice,...

I'm not saying butterscotch and scallops cannot be made to work together, but I doubt it. However, we cannot compare it to the Vietnamese caramel used in cooking. The caramel (of which I always have a homemade jar to use in recipes) is burnt sugar and water, that's it. Butterscotch is not caramelized, it contains butter, scotch whiskey and brown sugar. Very, very different flavor profile. In the quantities he seemed to apply to the poor scallops I also went 'belch'. I actually was hoping I-cannot-cook-but-can-bitch Lisa to go home, but oh well. My hope is for a Richard Vs. Stephanie finale.

Re-visiting these threads is a favorite exercise, all the more fun if I have something to add, albeit nothing too earth-shattering. I was starting a new batch of home-cured Pancetta this weekend and I had a strong craving to have some of this amazing pork product ASAP (I still had the butt end of the last piece in the freezer). I had no tomatoes for a PLT, and did not want to have a Pancetta and egg sandwich either. It was lunchtime and I needed something fast, filling and delicious. A lightbulb goes off and I remember I still have a few canned San Marzano tomatoes in a tupperware in the fridge leftover form another meal. Spaghetti All'Amatriciana of course!! with extra pancetta no less. Here is a picture by picture report of the process. Hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did....then again you have to be able to smell it and eat it to do that. So go make some.

Alton Brown uses the baking method too. It does work great and produces excellent rice with minimal effort.

The fuzzy pods are what make young green almonds so special. IIRC, green almonds don't freeze well (or at least, they don't thaw well). However, they will keep for a while in your carry-on bag. Just make sure you get them as fresh as possible, as soon as possible before your departure. Wrap them in paper towels and place them in a plastic bag. Good luck! ← I agree, but good luck getting them past the customs agents. Green fresh stuff is usually a big non, non

Thanks Hathor. The recipe I use for the Panelle is from "Jamie's Italy" by Jamie Oliver (I do add a bit more chickpea flour than he asks for though). I'll look it up when I get home and post it.

A recent Sicilian-inspired meal We snacked on Panelle (sp?) while cooking the rest of the food. These delicious street foods from Sicily that Kevin made upthread. I like to form these chickpea fritters into long rectangle to resemble French fries. It gives them more of the crispy crust I love and are much more approachable to my 4 year old who calls them Italian French Fries and ate them with ketchup!! In all honestly, they do tast good with ketchup Cavatappi with cauliflower, saffron and anchovies. I love this shape of pasta and the flavors work great together especially with a good dose of chilli flakes, Pecorino, and a squeeze of lemon juice Leg of lamb, marinated with garlic, fennel seeds, rosemary and a touch of red wine vinegar. I roasted this in the oven on a bed of rosemary sprigs and garlic cloves and served it with a delicious contorno. A sort of a sweet and sour chickpea and tomato stew (it included honey, little vinegar, cumin, fresh oregano, raisins and pine nuts) and was so tasty that I'd eat it all by itself anytime. I also made a quick sauce with the cooking juices and some stock and garlic that had been roasted with the lamb. Picture is kinda ugly, but the food was great.

I finally stopped at Thelma's for lunch per this thread last week. I am glad it is close to work because eating there is not an option. Talk about a 'hole in the wall' with no A/C!! that place was warm. I picked up a catfish sandwich to go and ate it at my desk. I certainly do agree, this is one big and very tasty non-muddy sandwich. I'd like to stop by again and get some brisket. I tried the pecan pie on a whim as well...nothing special.

Hi Valancy- You technically can use any cut you want provided that you still mainatin at least a 30% fat ratio in there. You can do that by adding some fat back to leaner cuts like ham. Hope this helps.

Yes. I could not have said it better. Jen bugged me a lot but I defintily expected the other team's Antonia to be booted off for her total disregard of the main item POLISH (Kielbasa) sausage. Even her sorry chorizo was buried under a slab of fish. Then she has the nerve to say that PS is a dish not worthy of a 'Chef' too cook. A Chef should have respect for any properly made dish, especially a revered charcuterie item like sausage! Make a beer sauce for it and serve it with purple cabbage and you'll have a winner, especially if you make the sausage.

Ditto.....and again I say ditto. Although I'm sure it could make one heck of a drinking game, all I can think about every damn time she starts in is that scene from the Outsiders when Matt Dillon/Dallas Winston is going on about the big rumble..."Let's do it for Johnny, man! We'll do it for Johnny!". Damn those Top Chef editors.......actually, I wonder how many "gotta do it for Zoi's" they left out? I did enjoy the elimination challenge quite a bit. A little goofy, but they had the chance to do some actual cooking. ← Triple Ditto...in the beginning of this episode I was like 'well how would zoi like it if they kick your butt to the curb next!!!'...and they did.

..and here is what I did with the other half of the brioche dough from last week. Raisin Brioche Snails! I baked them for breakfast today and they are indeed addictivly fabulous. I used golden raisins instead of brown ones because -and this is a rarity- I had the golden raisins on hand but was out of the others. Normally I never have golden raisins...enough blabbing about stupid raisins. These 'buns' with the soft custardy filling and the sweet run-raisins are a fantastic treat and if you have some brioche dough on hand or in the freezer, you have to give them a try. I chose not to use the optional glaze because these were sweet, moist and rich enough on their own. My 4 year old still opted to slather strawberry jam all over his though .

Nothing too fancy, but I loved this dish that I made recently to use up a few very ripe plantains. I love coconut milk, I love sweet plantains..so this one was a no-brainer for me. Plantains in coconut milk:

Chris- I just bought one of these a couple of weeks ago and just posted some results on the charcuterie thread. The noise does not bother me much and so far I am pretty happy with it.

I made two fresh sausages since I bought this machine. It is such a pleasure to use and clean up and so far, no complaints. The first sausage was not very good, due to err..user error. I so badly wanted to use the machine and the only meat I had on hand was some beef round. I ground that up with some pork fat in order to make 'Beef Shawarma Sausage'. Unfortunatly I screwed up my proportions some how and used way too much liquid (red wine) and not enough pork fat. 'nough said. It's edible, but not worth photgraphing or posting about. However, the idea of making Shawarma flavored sausage kept on haunting me until I made the chicken version. Now this was awsome. I falvored it with all the traditional flavors of the Lebanese Shawarma and used Ruhlman's chicken with tomato basil recipe as a template. Here is the recipe if anyone is interested: 3.5 lb boneless skinless chicken thighs, diced 1.5 lbs pork fat back, diced Spices, to be mixed in before grinding the meat: 2 tsp ground ginger 1 tsp cardamom 1 tsp cloves 1 tsp cinnamon 2 tsp ground pepper 2 tsp finely crumbled bay leaf 30 gr. kosher salt 50 gr. mashed garlic Liquids, to be mixed in after grinding (but you all know that...): 4 Tbsp Lemon juice 2 Tbsp Yellow Mustard 6 Tbsp white wine Here are some pistures. I cooked them on the grill (one busted real bad, the rest were great) and served them just like a Shawarma sandwich i pita bread with lettuce, tomatoes, pickles and fries. This is a sausage I'll certainly be making again. Elie, I received that unit as a gift a few months ago and it's been a real pleasure to use. It's fast and easy to clean. It also stores relatively compactly, too, which is nice. The only thing I can't yet assess is the durability (because I haven't owned it long enough) but the warranty seems pretty good. =R= ← Thanks Ron and fellow 'Duderino' (I couldn't help but make a commnet about your sig line). I'm hoping to break it in by this weekend, but like you said and barring any factory/QA bugs, only time will tell. ←

To Kent and Chappie- I appreciate both of your responses (except for Kent's first statement), but my argument boils down to one sentence: We do not NEED this crap. Period. To elaborate a bit, it is the wrong answer to the problem of commercial/mass-produced 'protein' that we have today. Stuff like Tyson chicken or Smithfield pork are an abomination IMHO and are as unnatural as the stuff that is being raised in a petri dish. I am not romanticizing these mega-businesses that treat living creatures like nothing more than bags of 'protein'. They are not in it to 'feed the planet', they are in it to make billions. I hope this clarifies my postition concerning '98%' of the available meat in the market. These are the businesses that need to be heavily regulated and forced to raise their standards. The same goes for the consumer who expects to pay 1.99/lb for chicken and thinks it's ok to pay the same thing for potatoes. That is the root of the problem. By saying that we need to 'grow meat in a petri' dish we are being very simple-minded and narrow-focused and in my skeptical opinion another way to make a ton of money for someone. Animal protein is NOT the only protein out there, as mentioned, before entire civilizations have thrived without it and entire cuisines are more than delicious without using a single meat item. We really DO NOT need it. We WANT it. So, saying we have to do this in order to have food for everyone without killing animals and using resources for these animals is rediculous. I also want to take this one step further and ask, why should we not kill an animal for meat? Provided it is raised and killed humanely? We can have the best of both worlds, we can eat meat and enjoy it and get it from an animal that lived a decent life. We just cannot do this for every single meal of every single day! As we all know these cows/pigs/chickens are mortal. Right? They will eventually die. If humans who have domesticated them for thousands of years just stop doing that, what will happen to them? They cannot survive in the wild. They will still die, via desease or other wild animals or old age. None of these choices are much better than than providing them with an environment where they can be comfortable and slaughtering them for food. Yes, we are on top of the food chain, animals do taste good and it's only natural for us to eat them.

It is just wrong...on so many levels IMHO...I sure hope I'll be long dead before this crap comes to be the norm. There is nothing worng with killing an animal for food, just treat it well like a living breathing crerature not a 'commodity') before slaughter.

I'm not sure it does make sense, how can something taste more like itself than the real thing? Surely when we start talking about something having the "true essence of olive" it can only be "true" up to the point it tastes like the olive, after that it must become an artificial flavour that no longer tastes like an olive? ← Think of the flavor of the finest olives that you have ever eaten unencumbered by textural distractions with a burst of pure flavor in the mouth and you get the spherical olives that taste more like olives than olives do. Perhaps Adria's greatest genius is his ability to capture the real essence of the epitome of an ingredient's flavor. ← Another explanation...not very sceintific but here goes. An olive has in it whatever makes it taste like an olive (oil and other chemicals I'd imagine) plus water, cellulose, fiber,...Now remove all those distractions from 50 olives and only leave the olive flavor. Imagine if all that flavor is concentrated in one 'spherical olive'. That's how it can taste more like olive than an olive. Odd, but it made sense to me when I tasted it.

Regarding 'overmixing', please see this thread about making charcuterie from Ruhlman's book 'Charcuterie'. What too many pages to leaf through? Want the quiock answer? Well ok, since it is OT I'll make it short. When making charcuterie like sausage or pate,both with high fat content, you want to first season the meat, then grind the meat (keep it cold), and then you want to mix the hell out of it to develop the Myosin in the meat. In the book Ruhlman actually encourages you to use a mixer's paddle to 'knead' the meat for a few minutes before stuffing it in casings or putting it in a terrine. I have no stand mixer, so I knead it vigorously until I see the myosin filaments (kinda hairy) starting to develop, it takes a minute or 2. Myosin is similar to Gluten and yes, the meat is kneaded in the same way to have a cohesive emulsified mass with strong -not crumbly- texture. With a pate you cook it in a lowish oven in a water bath, gentle heat. For sausage you also need to be gentle when cooking it. Heat it too fast and you get a puddle of fat and dry separate mass of protein. For a terrine, you weigh it with a heavy brick AFTER it is cooked and this compacts it even further. That is why he was beating the meat, he was actually kneading it to make a pate. With burgers, that are much leaner you do not want to overwork the Myosin or you will get rubber pucks. You want a semi loose and crumbly patty to cook fast and rare. With meatballs and meatloaf, bread crumbs mediate the problem and make a tender , not rubbery, end product. edit: some typos.

Thanks for the Asparagus explanation, it sounds even better than it looks. When we were there a few seasons ago, I enjoyed the fact that a few dishes required the waiter's intervention, from adding a touch or two to actually 'cooking' a dessert. It seems from your descriptions and from some pictures that more dishes have the waiter doing some work. Is that the case? I think this is a wonderful idea, and sort of mixes the classical (haute cuisine of years ago where tableside service was typical) with the utlra-contemporary food of Adria.