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Chad, Thanks for writing the book and for posting the excerpt here on eG. Your writing is fun to read! Net, over time I looked into knives several times and finally did a terrible thing: I just gave up on the subject. Why? I could never get any information that did much actually to help my selection of a better knife as a tool in my kitchen. From my father, I did start with some good versions of some old information, that he had, say, 70 years ago. So, in the 1930s he got his Bachelor's in Industrial Arts and Master's in Education from Ohio State. He took courses in chemistry, strength of materials, metallurgy, welding, machining, etc. When WWII came, the US Navy noticed his background in both metalworking and education and recruited him to help in training people to maintain airplanes. Since the Navy would not let him enlist, he took a second job in shipyards: He got his high pressure steam boiler welder's license, did welding, did welding inspection, and taught welding. He went on to be the technical training education expert at the Navy's schools in Millington, TN where they usually had about 40,000 students at one time in engines, sheet metal, welding, electronics, hydraulics, etc. I still have his wooden tool chest with his genuine Arkansas sandstone sharpening stones, etc. He explained the role of carbon in steel, forging, heat treating, the workings and roles of sharpening stones, steels, and strops, etc. For knives, he emphasized carbon steel and regarded stainless steel as not ready yet (he may have been correct at the time). Growing up, I spent hours sharpening blades -- knives for filleting fish, yard tools, pocket knives, etc. I put lots of oil on lots of stones. I learned that I could spend an hour trying to get a razor like edge on a sickle, for about 10 minutes have something that would make weeds fall over just from looking at it, and then have it dull again. Sharpen for a hour; use it for 10 minutes; BUMMER. I learned that for such a yard tool, it's better just to use a crude file and put something like a ragged edge on the blade. So, when I got interested in cooking, I got a Veritable Breswick Sabatier Paris - France Chef au Ritz carbon steel chef's knife with a blade about 10" long. So, yes, it has a lot that you mentioned: It is 'forged', has a full 'bolster', has a 'full tang' with rivets, etc. I used it for years and never let it be damaged from rust. I also got a sharpening steel, with a Victorian style, turned, furniture quality wooden handle, a triangular bolster, and a long rod with splines and about as hard as a file. Eventually I wanted a more functional chef's knife and started a search: Yup, I looked at Wustof, Henckels, custom knives, jigs for sharpening with an adjustable, known blade angle, diamond sharpening tools, etc. I was considering some heroic Teutonic thing with a blade 12" or 14" long for over $200 plus more for jigs, diamond tools. etc. Then I just gave up: Mostly the knife manufacturers would not provide any information on why their blades would (A) take a sharper edge or (B) hold a sharper edge. When they mentioned "balance" it sounded like something from a mystical, oriental religion instead of from my college physics course in classical mechanics. Mostly it was difficult even to find information on the blade hardness, e.g., on the Rockwell scale. Heck, I was looking at items sold as wedding presents, not as well designed cutting tools. At one point, I concluded that an exceptionally hard blade would require either a ceramic or diamond sharpening tool. So, off to look for those: In a woodworking supply shop, I found only some poor stock. So, a suitable diamond sharpening tool, e.g., that I could use in a jig to control the sharpening angle, would be not just a purchasing decision or shopping problem but an engineering development problem. Actually on Oct 12 2002 I posted some of my thinking in http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showto...ndpost&p=128582 with some output on blade angles from an arctan calculation from a little Fortran program I wrote. Enough already: I concluded, just buy a knife with some standard knife metallurgy and hardness, let the blade be stainless steel, sharpen the knife a little more frequently (than I might wish with my dream metallurgy), with sharpening tools I already have, and save the time for solving an engineering problem. After I gave up on the high end approaches, I still wanted something better than my old Sabatier that was letting my knuckles hit the cutting board. So, one day in Sam's Club I happened to see a piece of shrink-wrapped cardboard with two chef's knives for about $15. Gee, since I had been considering $200+, how much could I lose? So, I bought. The packaging reads 10" Stain-free high carbon steel NSF Tramontina Made in Brazil Yup, they look like they were cut from sheet stock, have no bolsters, no rivets, and have white plastic handles. I tried one. I cut the usual suspects, onions, carrots, celery. I sharpened it on my old Victorian style sharpening steel. Also at Sam's Club I got a 'stick' that claims to have some diamond in it; I've tried it a few times, and maybe it works. If eventually I conclude that the steel is not enough and the stick doesn't work, then I'll just get out a piece of Arkansas sandstone and some motor oil. I can find NOTHING seriously wrong with that knife: It sharpens and gets sharp. It cuts. The blade shape is quite traditional for a French chef's knife and, thus, makes appropriate contact with the cutting board for slicing, chopping, rocking, etc. It holds an edge about as well as I could expect. There is more room for my knuckles. The blade is thin which helps going through larger vegetables. It's light in weight which saves some effort. It presents no rust problems. It cleans easily. It's about as long as I can use on my usual small cutting board, and I don't like to move around enough items on my counter top to make room for my large cutting board to make room for, say, a knife with a 14" blade. I still have a small interest in getting a chef's knife that has a longer blade, takes a sharper edge, holds the edge longer, has still more room for my knuckles, etc., but so far this knife from Brazil (and its spare still in the packaging) has saved me over $200 and some time for engineering means for using diamond sharpening tools, etc. So, I saved time, money, and effort, and the only thing better would be to save calories, time, money, and effort! So, it was $15 for two chef's knives. Where am I going wrong? I did notice your: "It tells me that Food Network, with all its dumbing down, has it completely wrong." I fully agree that they are wrong: My explanation is that the powers at the Food Network believe in entertainment via traditional means of formula fiction, Hollywood, and TV and do not understand, like, or trust 'informative' or educational content. Often enough on eG I have described what they do as vicarious, escapist, fantasy, emotional experience entertainment where a viewer can 'feel' like they have cooked some terrific food, have hung out in a kitchen with a celebrity chef, and gotten praise from friends and, then, for some actual food get some carry-out pizza or Chinese food or unwrap something frozen and put it in the microwave. So, I don't like the Food Network. Indeed, as I type this, I am looking at eG with the TV OFF. In particular, I tried to help the Food Network in http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showto...dpost&p=1132604 and subsequently I did once see Ms. Moulton do a program with some high school students, although the girls were not nearly as pretty as I remember from my high school years! Ah, I should have paid more attention to those girls, and less attention to knife sharpening, back when I was young and rich! Yup, since my father was in Millington, TN, I grew up in Memphis where the girls were pretty beyond belief: Cybil Shepard, and I believe Stella Stevens, both went to my high school and were not the prettiest girls there! I also must have eaten over 500 pounds of chopped picnic pork shoulder BBQ which apparently even eG still thinks is good food! Actually, it is! With pork fat, smoke, sugar, vinegar, pepper, and herbs, how can something be better? Now, to get a good recipe for the coleslaw that was standard with that Memphis chopped BBQ: Then can use my chef's knife to cut the cabbage and chop the pork! It's been easier to get a suitable knife for $7.50 than a suitable coleslaw recipe! The knife is real; the BBQ is easy enough; the girls are just a memory!

Dave, Thanks! Yes, there are at least several quite different ways to cut an onion! Your way gives diced onion, which is likely by far the most commonly desired result and clearly a leading option for this dish. The way I suggested does not end up with dice! Instead, get some quite large pieces, each piece roughly a trapezoid with one of the two parallel sides quite short, that is, get nearly isosceles triangles. Or, each piece is nearly one eighth of the surface of a sphere. The larger pieces, when cooked in the fat with convex side down, can yield some quite large brown patches and, thus, a lot of browned flavor. The reason I keep the poles attached until near the end of the cutting is to help keep the layers together, but your approach will also work. There was an onion cutting thread at http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=102316 One approach I have used in my awful attempts at Chinese cooking and might be better here is to start by cutting off the pole pieces with the plane of the knife perpendicular to the line between the poles and passing through (1) the arctic circle and then (2) the antarctic circle, discarding these two pole pieces or saving them for diced onion. For this dish, could just go ahead and include the diced onion! Then with the rest of the globe, with the knife oriented so that the line between the poles is in the plane of the knife, use just the tip of the knife to cut through the outer, dry layer of the onion and peel that layer away and discard it. Now have a clean globe except missing the poles down to the arctic circle and the antarctic circle. Then again with the knife oriented so that the line between the poles is in the plane of the knife, use just the tip of the knife to cut along a line of longitude through 1-3 layers of the onion. Rotate about 60 degrees of longitude and repeat until all those layers are in roughly rectangular pieces. Then repeat with next 1-3 layers possibly replacing the 60 degrees with something a little larger. The result is a lot of relatively flat and nearly rectangular pieces. So, just managed to cut a lot of nearly flat, nearly rectangular pieces out of a nearly spherical onion!

Yes, oven baking will likely give much better 'baked' flavor than just heating in a microwave! An oven should give some browning that will taste much better than the somewhat ersatz browning in a microwave. I have not tried oven baking because I was in a hurry! But, now that I have a mix of flavors I like, good oven baking should raise the quality by at least one notch from the casserole dish and at least one more notch from oven baking! Sounds like I should try it and report! For the bacon, yes, I can believe that it will 'render' when baked on the surface: My concern was that the fat from the rendering would, then, stay in the dish with the beans, etc.; if using only a little bacon, then the amount of added fat should be acceptable and should add nicely to the flavor, and the bacon should help the appearance. For a 'manly man' like me who essentially never tries to achieve much in appearance in anything (mathematics with D. Knuth's TeX and software source code being exceptions!), a better appearance of this dish might make me breakout in sweat from too much stimulation of fantasies about getting this dish, back when I was young and rich, carried proudly, steaming hot, by a cook about 5' 6", 115 pounds, a 22 inch waist, waist length auburn hair, tied with a large bow, in a gingham dress with a long skirt with a white apron with ruffles and tied in back with a huge bow ..., but I digress! Back to reality, two questions: (1) To help with the browning of the top and the reduction, I assume that the baking is uncovered? (2) The temperature of the oven is, maybe, 325 F, that is, hot enough to be 'baking' with slow browning and still cool enough so that do get the dish heated through with some reduction in the liquids without too much browning on the surfaces? I've got a lot of beans, onions, Frankfurters, Bratwurst, and bacon and over the next two weeks or so should do some more trials and report. Thanks for the suggestions!

tracey: Thanks for mentioning the idea of baking in a casserole dish: Yes, some years ago in my efforts with this dish, I would put the results in a Pyrex glass casserole dish, either 1 1/2 quarts or 2 quarts, and heat uncovered at full power in microwave, rotating occasionally for even heating. One result can be reduction of the liquid with the beans, concentration of flavors, some browning on top, and a more dense result. This approach remains an option, but what I described just heating through in the pot is faster and okay. For putting bacon on top, okay, but before trying it I would guess that would want the bacon at least partly 'rendered' of its high fat content before adding it to the beans. Is that what you do? I just did get some bacon and intend to try it with frankfurters (the bratwurst already taste a lot like bacon): I am hoping to cook the bacon first and use the bacon fat instead of the olive oil when browning the onion and sausage. Didn't mention this because haven't tried it yet. For more brown sugar, maybe! The dish seems to me to have enough brown sugar now, but I could be wrong: I have little experience cooking with brown sugar so have little judgment. The flavor mix I am liking is the browning of the large onion pieces and sausage and the Worcestershire sauce, yellow mustard, and hot sauce on the 'base' flavor (piano left hand?) of the beans. The flavors can be something like 'BBQ' beans, and in this I am surprised at the role of the mustard.

For a standard vinaigrette, I regarded that as a thoroughly solved problem decades ago and have not changed my mind since. My models were common recipes for vinaigrette and the standard, quite yellow, vinaigrette at a French restaurant at the SW corner of Wisconsin and M Street in Washington, DC. Sometimes I ate dinner at Lincoln Center when they had some strange oil and vinegar; they were really different but good; I don't try for such things. I am staying with the position that vinaigrette is a solved problem with a fantastic solution and refuse to try for something better: Nearly anything else in cooking is much more deserving of additional attention than a fantastic, simple, standard vinaigrette. I use oil to vinegar ratio (by volume) of 3:1. NO, I do NOT just 'pour' and hope. Instead, I do MEASURE these volumes, ACCURATELY. For the oil, I use just virgin olive oil, not extra virgin. I'd rather use Canola oil than extra virgin. For the vinegar, I buy red wine vinegar, e.g., Progresso. My experience is that in the US the acid content of such vinegars is quite standard. I do remember a rumor that actually the best tasting red wine vinegar comes from native American grapes and not vinifera! No way am I going to use Balsamic vinegar in vinaigrette. For the emulsifier, I rely on Grey Poupon Dijon mustard and use much more of it than suggested so far, e.g, for 1/3 C of vinegar and 1 C of oil, will use at least 1 T of mustard and can use much more, e.g., 1/4 C. I've tried dry mustard powder and do not like it nearly as well as Grey Poupon. Yes, I thoroughly mix all the ingredients except the oil and then add the oil slowly while mixing. The notes in this thread on how the emulsification works are much more thoughtful than I have considered: For the mixing, I just use a stainless steel wire whip in a round bottomed stainless steel bowl. I've never seen the need to start adding the oil as slowly as drop by drop. E.g., I am willing to start with 1 T and whip; add another 1 T; etc. I have used a blender when making, say, 1 quart of vinaigrette, and then sometimes I added the oil very slowly as the blender was going full speed. In this way the resulting vinaigrette was beautiful and a 'ribbon' on the surface would last a few seconds; okay, but I never saw a big advantage. The other flavorings can be salt, pepper, garlic, shallot, thyme, parsley, anchovy. I've never tried sugar, honey, sour cream, etc. and refuse to! Of course, for a Caesar dressing, I include a nearly raw egg which, of course, helps with the emulsification. For the greens, I wash those, tear into chunks, spin to nearly dry in a salad spinner, and then chill, e.g., wrapped in clean cotton towels. When the greens are chilled and crisp, place in salad bowl, pour over a LITTLE dressing, toss a LOT, taste, and repeat until the greens are THOROUGHLY coated with MINIMAL dressing. Actually, for my standard green salad, that is ENOUGH. That is, can STOP there. Such a salad is appropriate between the red meat course and the cheese course. I would never drink wine with a salad with vinaigrette. French bread and some good sour cream butter? SURE! If want more in a salad, and sometimes I do too, say for a lunch, then add the small stuff, e.g., freshly grated hard cheese, bacon bits, sliced scallions, etc. Then add the larger stuff, e.g., artichoke hearts (likely marinated in vinaigrette), tomato wedges (likely dipped in vinaigrette), chunks of cooked meat (maybe already coated with vinaigrette), hard boiled egg, croutons, etc. If toss now, then will usually end up with all the added small and large stuff at the bottom of the salad bowl -- not good. Then serve and EAT. Just serving the salad will usually provide enough additional mixing. Vinaigrette is a sauce with many uses besides just salads based mostly or entirely on lettuce: Vinaigrette is a good first choice for pouring over sliced, cold meats, e.g., roasted chicken, over celery, carrots, anchovy hearts, hearts of palm, chick peas, etc. With some good bread, some extra vinaigrette is terrific. Question: In the back of the refrigerator I have a bottle of Caesar style vinaigrette I made last summer. I wonder: Is it standard food chemistry that the vinegar has necessarily stopped bacteria growth so that that batch is still safe to eat?

Off and on for years have wanted some good ways to 'fix up' canned baked beans. Now have one way I like: Ingredients 33 ounces of canned baked beans, e.g., two cans of "Bush's Best Original Baked Beans, Seasoned with Bacon and Brown Sugar", 16.5 ounces per can 1/2 pound Bratwurst, e.g., three pieces of "Johnsonville Smoked Brats" sold six per pound 1 large yellow globe onion, raw weight about 1 1/4 pounds, peeled and coarsely cut (one cutting suggestion below) 2 T Worcestershire sauce, e.g., Lea & Perrins 1 1/2 T prepared yellow mustard, e.g., French's 1 T hot sauce, e.g., "Frank's Red Hot Original" olive oil black pepper Steps In a pot of about 3 quarts, add olive oil to coat the bottom for good heat conduction between the pot and the food. Over medium heat, cook onion until soft with some large brown patches. Remove onion and drain. Slice each bratwurst into, say, four pieces and brown. Get some spots quite brown. Remove and drain. Discard remaining olive oil. To pot. add beans, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, and hot sauce. Add ground pepper to taste. Mix. Add browned onion and bratwurst, mix, heat through slowly, and serve. Remarks Dish is good hot and also at room temperature. How I cut the onion: Regard the onion as a sphere with the root end the south pole. Regarding the knife as a plane, cut the onion in half by passing the plane through the line between the south pole and the north pole. Cut each half into quarters by again passing the plane through the line between the south pole and the north pole. For each of the four pieces, cut off the south pole and the north pole and, then, cut the quarter in half by passing the plane of the knife through the equator. Now have eight pieces. During the cooking, the onion layers separate. The larger pieces are relatively large, but this is okay for a 'manly man' dish! It's a lot of onion, but cooked until softened and then heated with the rest the onion is good. For a 'manly man' dish, a lot of browning of the onion and sausage is good. The dish is also good with 1/2 pound of frankfurters instead of bratwurst. The bratwurst mentioned above smell a lot like bacon when being browned, and with frankfurters intend to try including some bacon. The yellow mustard is curiously good at making the flavors bright. Tried including some molasses but didn't like it. Intend to try including some garlic. So far my guess is that garlic will not help. Suggestions for changes?

In recent months I've been cooking 'cod fillets', breaded, and deep fried. This is my first effort at breading and deep frying, but the results seem to be okay. Basically I just started with the common, broad, cliche of the 'three station, wet-hand, dry-hand' method and adjusted from there. As I tried, I measured and kept notes. Now I just follow the notes and the measurements. I season just the first coating, the flour, but I season it heavily. The fried results are good hot with lemon juice or cold with spicy, red, seafood 'cocktail' sauce. I buy it, but my old family recipe of Heinz Chili sauce fixed up with horseradish and lemon juice is similar. Ingredients One package of High Liner Frozen Cod Loins, 3 pounds, from Sam's Club. Pieces are rectangular, 4-5 ounces each. First Station In a 2 quart stainless steel bowl with a relatively flat bottom, 1 1/2 C flour 1/4 C Tone's garlic powder from Sam's Club 1/4 C Tone's onion powder from Sam's Club 2 T table salt 1 T freshly ground black pepper (about 150 twists on pepper mill) 2 T Emeril's Essence spice powder mixed with a cooking spoon. Second Station In a rectangular plastic container from Chinese carry-out, 4 USDA Grade A eggs, beaten Third Station In a 2 quart stainless steel bowl with a relatively flat bottom, 1 C white corn meal 1 C 4C Seasoned Bread Crumbs mixed with a cooking spoon. Equipment Taylor deep frying thermometer 3 quart classic Farberware pot about 1/2 full of Canola oil heated to 360 F over medium-high heat. Steps Defrost Fish Place a plastic dishpan in sink and fill about 3/4 full of water at about 80 F. Add still closed and sealed bag of frozen fish. Place second dishpan over the fish and fitting into the first dishpan. Fill second dish pan about 1/2 of water at about 80 F. After about an hour, should change the water to more 80 F water since the frozen fish will have lowered the temperature of the water. Wait for 2-3 hours for fish to defrost. From experience, if fish is still slightly frosty, then can proceed with cooking with apparently no ill effects. Cooking In the sink, open the top of the bag of fish. Use a dinner fork to pick up a piece of fish; let defrosting liquid drain; place in flour of first station; toss to thoroughly coat with flour. Use fork to lift fish; shake off loose flour (which would turn eggs to goo) and place in eggs of second station. Carefully and thoroughly coat piece with egg; care is needed since somehow it is easy for a bubble of air to get between fish and egg and leave an uncoated patch. Be sure to coat ends also. Use fork to move piece to crumb-corn meal mixture of third station. Thoroughly coat piece and then move to a dinner plate to rest. Bread a second piece of fish similarly. When oil temperature is about 360 F, place two pieces of fish in oil, set timer for 3 minutes, watch to be sure oil does not boil over and start a fire, and at the end of three minutes move cooked fish to towels to absorb excess oil. Continue until all the fish is cooked. Serve hot with lemon juice or cold with spicy, seafood, 'cocktail' sauce. Breading is spicy, crunchy, and dark and does stick to the fish. This recipe appears to be 'robust', that is, can accept many changes with few or no ill effects. E.g., sometimes I use 2 T of Tone's Cajun seasoning instead of Emeril's.

I sympathize, ask myself much the same question whenever I step into the kitchen hungry. There really ARE some good answers, and there really could, would, and should be some nicely developed principles and documentation, hopefully with good details and video clips, but I'm still looking for those. Broadly can go Classic French White Classic Italian Red Oriental Other modern stuff of questionable quality Can emphasize acid from citrus (lemon or orange) or vinegar, sugar, flavors in breading of the chicken, flavors in filling of the chicken, and more. Don't ignore Gray Kunz and Peter Kaminsky, 'The Elements of Taste', ISBN 0-316-60874-2, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 2001. For French white, the main ingredients are shallots, garlic, mushrooms, dry white Chardonnay wine, appropriate white stock, blond roux, milk, heavy cream, egg yolks, S&P, lemon juice, and finished with soft butter. In this case, stay totally away from all cooking lessons of the last 30 years and go back to the old themes -- make cups of this stuff, before cooking the chicken, keep it warm, just before serving finish it with softened butter, and then drown the chicken with it. It's the top, center, crown jewel of 'finger lick'n good'. Various cases are fantastic with scallops, chicken, and veal. In the sauce can include fluted mushroom caps or morels. If the chicken is split open, pounded flat, and rolled up with a filling, and lightly browned, then even better. But this sauce makes nearly anything taste at least good and usually terrific. This sauce isn't a 'pan sauce'; for the 'fond', wash it down the drain. New? No. Terrific? Yes. Your teachers may get a heart attack eating this stuff, but just no way on this planet can they say it's not good. I have some favorite proportions: 5 T minced shallots 1 clove of garlic, minced 6 ounces of sliced, small to medium white button mushrooms, washed, trimmed 2 C French dry white Burgundy wine from Pinot Chardonnay grapes a bouquet garni with bay leaf, thyme, and parsley 1 C appropriate stock 10 T all purpose flour 8 T butter (lightly salted or unsalted) 1 1/2 C hot milk 1 C whipping cream 4 egg yolks (USDA Grade A Large) S&P to taste juice of one lemon or to taste additional soft butter, several T, to taste Put first 6 ingredients in a 3 quart pot, reduce without scorching to 1 1/2 C. If want to poach the chicken instead of frying it, then use this stock as the poaching liquid, remove the chicken, and continue with the sauce. Remove and discard the bouquet garni. In another 3 quart pot, make blond roux of flour and butter and heat with slow bubbling for 60 seconds, stirring constantly with wooden spatula. Remove pot with roux from heat and add simmering stock to hot roux all at once. Whip thoroughly and return to heat, whipping constantly reaching all parts of pot. Mixture will be stiff. Slowly blend in hot milk with constant whipping. Whip and bubble slowly till smooth and remove from heat. Use whip to mix cream and yolks in a 1 qt bowl. With constant whipping, slowly add roughly 1/3 of hot sauce, by tablespoons at first, to cream and yolks. Add cream-yolk-sauce in 1 qt bowl back to main sauce in 3 qt pot and whip until uniform. Add S&P to taste. Add lemon juice to taste. Keep sauce warn. Just before serving add a few T of softened butter 1 T at at time and whip to combine. When the chicken is done, drown it with the sauce and serve.

dockhl: This morning, after the sauce was made and off the heat, I added 1/4 t of vanilla extract and stirred it in. You are correct: The vanilla did noticeably 'round out' the flavor. It's a good addition. Might even get by with 1/8 t. Thanks! Shalmanese: Thanks! Yes, since my first post, I went to Google and looked for orange-butter sauces. Curiously, my post was on the first page of results! So much for Google using only their 'page ranking' algorithm: Clearly now they have additional means of 'ranking' Web pages and, curiously, (A) are 'parsing' out the individual posts to eG threads and (B) using the 'perma-links' with those posts. Sounds like Google thinks a lot of eG. Yes, back when Crepe Suzette was popular, I made the dish several times. And I have a bottle of Grand Marnier. So, it did occur to me that there might be a connection between what I am trying to do, mostly just by guessing, to get some orange flavor in some breakfast omelets and old Crepe Suzette techniques. And the flavor did remind me of Crepe Suzette and also orange souffles. Here the vanilla idea is improving on those classic French ideas! From the Google search, etc., you are correct: My orange-butter sauce is a close cousin of a lot of orange-butter sauces, even some with soy sauce! The effort this morning didn't work as well as I wanted: -- Same bag of oranges, but the grated orange peel I got, packed, measured about 80% of 1 T and, thus, was much more than the 1 t of the second trial I reported above. -- The orange juice I got from that orange measured about 1 T short of 1/2 C and, thus, was much more than the 1/4 cup t of the second trial I reported above. -- The final sauce, reduced enough to be a syrup, measured about 2 T less than 1/2 C and, thus, was more than the 1/4 C of the second trial I reported above. When the sauce cooled to room temperature, it was more like a sticky goo -- reminded me of orange marmalade -- and less like a crumbling soft candy. -- The flavor was too harsh, basically less good than the second trial I reported above. Apparently with so much peel and juice, need more sugar. So, next trial will try to standardize on 2 t of peel, 1/3 C of juice, 3 T of sugar, and about 1/8 t of vanilla extract. When this direction is okay, may add 1 T of Grand Marnier -- then it might make a good midnight omelet! For a better looking dish, and another, fresher, 'layer' of orange flavor, after peeling the orange and before juicing it, might slice off one or two thin, large diameter rounds, peel them, and put them on top of the final omelet. So far I notice that when the omelet is good and the sauce is good, the two are a bit too distinct and need to be better 'integrated'. So, maybe add some orange peel and orange juice to the eggs before whipping and cooking the eggs. Or, even consider using a second orange to have more to add to the eggs. So far, I've included the butter with the juice during the reduction, but I'm not sure that boiling the butter helps its flavor. So, may try adding the butter after reducing the juice-sugar syrup and, then, just heat enough to melt the butter and get it combined. So far when reducing the juice, etc., have been careful and not scorched the mixture. Still, some people might like a 'caramel orange butter' sauce or a 'butterscotch orange butter sauce'! If made cups of this stuff, with extra sugar, then maybe could get children to like omelets! Or, might add to, say, raspberries or pour over grapefruit or banana slices? If made a large quantity and heated to the 'softball' stage or some such, might have an 'orange glaze' could pour over pound cake, sponge cake, or even a dense, soft chocolate cake. I shouldn't have to do these experiments and, instead, there should be a good PDF file with a lot of BIG color pictures -- mostly of the WORK, not just 'beauty shots' at the Greenbriar, etc. -- and some YouTube video clips from a project sponsored by the Orange Group, the Sugar Council, the Butter Board, and the Egg Consortium! paulraphael: Thanks! Yup, might save the fresh orange for slices for the top! And did notice that one of the trials seemed to be like orange marmalade! I haven't been getting white pith, but I have had trouble with the result being too sour and bitter. Again, a bottled product from a commercial producer will no doubt do better on getting a better balanced flavor consistently than I can do one orange at at time, for breakfast, still sleepy!

Second Trial: Continued with same bag of oranges. So, took one orange and o washed and dried, o used coarse hand grater and removed outer layer of peel, o cut orange in half, and o juiced the halves. In Teflon skillet. combined o grated peel, packed, it measured just over 1 t o 2 T sugar o 2 T unsalted butter o the juice, about 1 t short of 1/4 C and over high heat, with constant swirling, melted butter, dissolved sugar, reduced to a light syrup, final volume 1/4 C but to get this volume did use rubber spatula to wipe the sauce from the Teflon surface. The sauce was much better than before, more viscous than before, with better flavor, well on the way to being good. The orange used this time was from the same bag but, still, seemed sweeter than the one used before. The sauce was good on an omelet made from 6 eggs and 1 T of butter. Good breakfast. Once cooled to room temperature, the sauce was a soft candy, no longer a viscous liquid, and tasted good by itself. dockhl: Vanilla? WOW! Would NEVER have thought of that. Will try it tomorrow! Thanks!

emilyr: My late wife's name was Emily. Thanks for the help. Yes, I intend to try 2 T of sugar for the next trial. And I also intend actually to measure the volume of the peel and the juice so that others now and myself some months from now will have a better idea just what I'm doing. I was wondering if I was somehow missing something, e.g., beyond just an extra 1 T of sugar? E.g., while the oranges have a LOT of flavor, maybe cooks with experience with such sauces would say that such sour oranges are hopeless and I should get some sweeter oranges. Or, maybe I should just be trying to make an orange flavored sugar syrup in which case a lot more sugar might be appropriate. Or, there are some classic French orange-butter sauces and maybe I should be trying to borrow from those. Also, I am unsure of what oranges would or would not be good for such a sauce.

I'm willing to make it. I'm wanting to make it. I'm waiting to make it. I'd like to know how to make it. But I know I don't know how to make it. I have a stack of books on Chinese cooking, and I gave up on those, or any books, telling me how to make it. And all that is just one small special case of a general situation: I don't know how to make anything served in American Chinese restaurants. I don't even know how to cook the rice. I do know how to cook rice, and it's fine, but it's not like in the restaurants. I don't know how to cook the dumplings, egg rolls, hot-sour soup, fried rice, Szechwan Chicken, Shredded Pork with Garlic Sauce, Beef with Orange Flavor, General Tso's Chicken, Sweet Sour Pork, or anything else like the restaurants do. E.g., essentially every recipe I see for a dish like Szechwan Chicken comes out way too dry. The dishes in the restaurants have a lot of sauce that helps flavor and succulence and is good for flavoring a side dish of rice, but the recipes are just obsessed with making the dishes as dry as possible. Big mistake. Huge. Tools, the right tools? Wok? I have a wok, 14" in diameter, from China, sheet steel. Heat source? Outside I have a rugged propane burner that puts out 140,000 BTUs per hour. The closest I've ever come to making anything either good or like in the restaurants was Moo Shi Pork as in Joyce Chen, 'Joyce Chen Cook Book', J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1962. Her recipe is good, but the restaurants use a greater variety of vegetables, and I don't have a weak little hollow hint of a tiny clue about what they are doing. In some ways, Chen's recipe may be better than in the restaurants, but the restaurants get a wider range of flavors. You tried duck sauce; for Hoisin Sauce or Oyster Sauce -- I wouldn't try before getting the basics right. I don't even know how to make the mustard sauce used for dipping egg rolls. Here are some of the apparent obstacles: Old media is locked into assuming that, of course, no one would ever want to learn anything from a TV show. Instructional is taboo, a dirty word. Instead, the media wants to follow the principles of formula fiction where they create for the viewers a vicarious, escapist, fantasy, emotional experience of imagining that they are cooking great food, easily, and are the center of attention and admiration. So, watch and watch and watch, maybe learn how to smash garlic and shout "Done!", and, then, call out for carry-out. America's Test Kitchen is a shining exception, but their content on Chinese cooking is meager and not their best quality. There is a norm: Everything should be easy. If it is not really easy, then pretend that it is. So, in particular, omit careful measurements. A claim is: Instead of measuring, should pursue individual art, but (A) when I try that, the results are best flushed, and (B) the results in the restaurants are surprisingly similar and, thus, likely not the result of individual art. This claim is just an excuse, and, then, I waste time, don't learn anything, and get torqued. An argument is: The restaurant cooks don't measure. Well, they don't use Western measuring cups and spoons, but they cook the same dishes so often that they can measure well enough by eye, but that can't be communicated in a few words in a recipe, and measurements with cups and spoons can. This argument is just an excuse, and, then, I don't learn anything and get torqued. An argument is: Precise measurements are not sufficient. Right: But they help reduce the variability and permit getting closer to the target. Nearly 200 years of knowledge in chemistry shows that measurements help a lot, and clearly cooking is close enough to chemistry that measurements should help in cooking, also. In addition, I have a cookbook about 80 years old intended for American kitchens, and that book is very careful with measurements. This argument is just an excuse, and, then, I don't learn anything and get torqued. A standard comment is that the restaurants serve "cloyingly sweet" sauces and use too much oil and, thus, do work that is not worth learning or reproducing at home. But, they are commonly still in business for years in the same location, right? So, likely they are doing things that a lot of people like. This comment is just an excuse, and, then, I don't learn anything and get torqued. An claim is that Oriental cooking requires special Oriental spirituality that can only be acquired by long, dedicated, ascetic apprenticeship under an Oriental master and is usually beyond Western culture. That claim reminds me of the Oriental game of Nim as in the book Courant and Robbins, What is Mathematics? that has a good algorithm for winning! The books on Chinese cooking overwhelmingly want to claim to be authentic, i.e., direct from China. Apparently the book publishers see no hope for selling a book showing people how to cook what is in the American Chinese restaurants. So, someone trying to learn buys yet another book on Chinese cooking, finds nothing like what they like in the restaurants and don't like what is in the book, wastes time, money, effort, and calories, gets torqued, and pursues something else. On my list of projects to-do is a series on DVD and/or the Internet on how to cook the popular dishes in the restaurants. So, the series will have to have a lot of video clips, some very specific details on ingredients, some careful measurements of weights, volumes, times, and temperatures, and good descriptions of colors and appearance. For this, I will have to hire some chefs in the restaurants and have them teach me the dishes. Then I will document how to do the work so that others can do it. That's a lot of effort just to learn to cook some Chinese food as in the carry-out restaurants.

Am making an orange-butter sauce for breakfast omelets and would like suggestions for improvements: Got a bag of seedless, organic, navel oranges: They o have a LOT of orange flavor, especially in the rind, o are sour. So, took one orange and o washed and dried, o used coarse hand grater and removed outer layer of peel, o cut orange in half, and o juiced the halves. In Teflon skillet. combined o grated peel, about 1 T, o 1 T sugar o 2 T butter o the juice and over high heat, with constant swirling, melted butter, dissolved sugar, reduced to a light syrup. It's okay. Still a little sour. How to improve it?

Fresh spinach in a salad? Okay. Cooked spinach? Instant upchuck. Asparagus? Even smelling it, run from the room with upchuck. Eat it? Never was able to get down any at all.

Recovery time: Come on, guys: Suppose we have some hot oil, add some cold food, and want to know the time -- 'recovery' time -- it takes to get the oil back to its original temperature. So, how long? Well, when lowered the temperature of the oil, took some energy from it. The recovery time is what is needed to add that much energy back to the oil. So, a larger quantity of oil will have its temperature fall less, but the energy taken from the oil and, thus, the recovery time will be about the same. So, a larger quantity of oil should not change recovery time significantly. To reduce the recovery time, add less food or use a more powerful heat source.

FG: Have to agree with the theme of your experiments and report! My version of a report of such experiments was in http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showto...dpost&p=1087260 While I need to try corn meal as you report and may agree with you that it's the way to go, I believe that you are a bit too negative on use of flour in handling the dough! I use flour and have no problems! My maple breadboard just fits an outline depression on the top of my stainless steel sink! So I form pizzas on my breadboard. The scattered flour goes mostly just into the sink. Once I'm done with the breadboard, I just use a kitchen utility towel to dust the excess flour into the sink and maybe wipe the board with a damp towel. If a little loose flour scatters on the counter top, then one pass with a damp cloth suffices.

Horrors! The way you wrote it, sounds like weigh first and peel later. Then do not know the weight of the potatoes actually to be used, i.e., the peeled potatoes. Instead, should write "peeled and grated red potatoes" meaning to peel and grate first and weigh afterward or at least "peeled red potatoes, grated" meaning to peel first, weigh, and then grate so that, either way, know the weight of the potatoes actually to be used. Also, using measuring cups to get a reasonably accurate estimate of the volume of potatoes, peeled or not, is nearly hopeless; even grated it's tough. By far the best thing is just to specify by weight. Otherwise just resort to Archimedes: Fill a pot with water. Remove 2 C. Add peeled potatoes until the pot is full again. Absolutely brain-dead outrageous, a compulsion to be helplessly incompetent. These book editors are showing their solid attachment to fantasy, romantic English literature well before the 20th century. Such positions have nothing at all to do with the people buying the books and have only to do with the editors who personally just hate any thought of measuring anything. Indeed, one of the most important reasons they went into book editing is that they wanted a life of 'letters', i.e., fantasy, fiction, drama, poetry, and just hated mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, and technology. Since the weight of "one potato" commonly varies by a factor of more than 10, absolutely, positively just CANNOT get any reasonably accurate weight of potatoes just by counting potatoes. Similarly for carrots. For celery, usually the stalks on the outside of a bunch of celery are at least 10 times the weight of the stalks at the center of the bunch. Even just in making a skillet full of hash browned potatoes, have to be reasonably accurate on the weights of the potatoes and onions and the volume of the oil. Escoffier measured carefully about 100 years ago; the importance was clear enough then and much more clear now. GREAT! We have book editors denying the importance of careful measurements while typing into computers based on processors with line widths of 90 nanometers, about 900 atoms, and sending their e-mail over optical fibers carrying 80 wavelengths of light with each wavelength carrying 10 billion bits per second. No "scales"? Nonsense. If nothing else, people have postal scales, commonly used both for determining postage and for weighing foods in dieting. A set of postal scales can be enough for measuring a few ounces to a few pounds of onions, carrots, celery, potatoes, cheese, chicken, etc. Food processors are assumed to be common enough; scales are much cheaper and much more useful and should also be assumed to be common. Right, we have recipes 'tres chez chic' calling for really strange, obscure, rare ingredients from half way around the world, and assume that people can get those, but, 'Horrors', can't be expected to have some simple postal scales. Clearly it's not about customers not having scales; instead it's about book editors personally just hating any concept of measurements. There's another big point: "I watched a famous cook, and he didn't measure anything. So, why should I? And why should a recipe have precise measurements?" Well, the famous cook actually did measure, nearly everything. But cook for 16 hours a day for 20 years and cook some dish 20 times a day for two years, and then for that dish will be able to measure quite accurately just by eye. Won't need measuring cups or spoons, scales, timers, or thermometers. But, in trying to communicate via a book to a reader 1000 miles away a year later, a reader to cook the dish for the first time, then accurate measurements of weights, volumes, times, and temperatures become just crucial. The 20th century showed via astounding progress in mathematics, physical science, medical science, engineering, and technology the overwhelming importance of measurements, commonly quite accurate measurements, and the hopeless, often dangerous, incompetence of fantasy and guessing. It was one of the largest steps up in the ascent of man. Careful measurements are one of the top, center crown jewels of civilization. This far into the 21st century, there is no excuse for ignoring measurements. "But I see famous chefs on TV never measuring anything?". But those TV programs are under the control of writers, directors, and producers who have their careers tightly tied to creating vicarious escapist fantasy emotional experience entertainment (VEFEEE), in the case of TV cooking shows, from having the audience 'identify' with the famous chef and, thus, have a fantasy that they are the chef cooking great food effortlessly. The fantasy is believable enough until try to eat the resulting food at which time the deception and delusion and the waste in time, effort, ingredients, and money become obvious. Sure, getting the English literature, fantasy fiction, romantic poetry, theater drama, 'to measure or not to measure; that is the question', publishing media community to move forward a few hundred years into the 20th century and understand weights, volumes, times, and temperatures is TOUGH, but this is just a special case of nearly all progress where we have to pursue large changes but do it with great care and at the beginning will have few others with us. Yes, Star light, star bright, The first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, Have the wish I wish tonight. is really cute, and really sweet in the movie 'Samantha: An American Girl Adventure', but it doesn't even start to put a satellite into orbit, a satellite that can report weather data, warn of hurricanes and snow storms, provide global positioning signals, transmit data, etc. For such satellites, need some very high quality engineering where measurements are central and crucial. This stuff about rejecting measurements is deliberately incapacitating incompetence, a rush to dysfunctional dependency, fantasy in pursuit of vulnerability, and this far into the 21st century, just dangerous. E.g., 'global warming': Yes, light a candle, and warm the Earth. Okay, but how much? Can we measure it? Is it significant? E.g., a recent long Thomas L. Friedman TV program on global warming never even once provided any data at all to show that anything humans are doing for global warming is more significant for the temperature of the Earth than lighting one candle. Further, the program never once indicated how many degrees F or C the Earth has warmed since 1950, since 1600, since year 1000, etc. Instead, using the importance of measurements, as we can see in 'Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years', National Research Council, ISBN 0-309-66264-8, 196 pages, National Academies Press, 2006, since 1950 the Earth has warmed less than 1 F and now is about the same temperature as it was 1000 years ago. Yes, since 1000 years ago we had 'the little ice age', and the Earth has been getting warmer since then. How much has been caused by humans? Tough to say. Maybe a lot, a little, or nearly none. We should know, not in terms of 'media emotional guilt' but in terms of careful measurements. Clearly in 'global warming' the crucial issue is temperature, just temperature. So, in discussing global warming, just must discuss temperature, careful, well documented measurements of temperature. So, Friedman's presentation that avoided temperature was just creating fantasy nonsense as media entertainment to grab people by the gut. Being wrong on global warming is from silly to dangerous. The phobia of the literary-media community against measurements is dangerous. Can't communicate clearly how to cook even hash brown potatoes without some reasonably accurate measurements. "One potato, two potato" will result in several trials of bad food until the cooks work out some reasonable measurements for themselves. Bummer. E.g., in a dish I am working on now, with everything else given and fixed, I am finding that a weight of 16 ounces of chunks of green pepper pieces is good, but 24 ounces is too many; 12 ounces of mushrooms is good, but 18 ounces is too many. To know, I had to weigh and taste. Can't do this by counting whole green peppers or mushrooms and, instead, have to use weights. E.g., I am working on how to make an omelet based on 2 T unsalted US butter, 6 US large eggs, and some salt. I've wanted to know how much salt to use. TV cooking shows have the cooks reaching (with their food covered fingers) into an open container of salt and throwing salt at the food. Ah, TV! Instead, I did the most recent omelet with a level 1 t of standard US table salt; from taste I conclude that the salt level is okay. In the previous trial, I used a level 1/2 t of such salt and from taste concluded that the omelet could use more salt. Next trial I will use 1 1/2 t of such salt. When I decide how much salt I really like, then I will put the result into my notes and just use that measurement from then on. Then I will measure salt and not shake, dribble, or throw it. Media executives: Whenever I see salt shaken, dribbled, or thrown, potatoes, carrots, stalks of celery, or onions measured by volume or counted, etc., it's an instant channel click, a book thrown onto the logs for the winter fireplace, etc. You can sit there in your media conglomerate corner office in fantasy that you are providing attractive, enjoyable entertainment, but in fact you are instantly convincing me you are a totally brain-dead fool and pi**ing me off. We can't expect that the publishing community, determined to roll back civilization to before Newton, will join us in the 21st century. Instead, in time they will just die off, and the people left will have and use measuring cups and spoons, scales, timers, and thermometers. Then we will move on to measuring BTUs per hour, thermal conductivity, pH, water content, sugar content, viscosity, spectral density, aromatic esters, Malliard reaction components, liquid chromatography fractions, etc.

Mostly the 300 ml Pyrex bowls; have maybe two dozen. Then, in stainless steel, have 5, 3, and 2 quart sizes and some at various sizes under two quarts. Yes, I regard these as 'prep' bowls, e.g., for 2 pounds or so of prepped onions, green peppers, or mushrooms. For more, I've kept some plastic containers food came in. And curiously useful, kept from 20 or so years ago some 'plates' that frozen TV dinners came on. Got those before eG! They are maybe a kind of paper covered with plastic; they've lasted all these years. Use them for prep and also in the microwave.

I keep shredded Mozzarella in the freezer. As far as I can tell, it's fine on pizza.

FANTASTIC! I LONG wondered about JUST that! Now you actually SAID it! Fantastic! So, make a stock for flavor, partly following Escoffier, and for the gelatine just get a little package. From what I heard about how gelatine is made, probably don't want to know! But, still, it's just gelatine.

Kit, You asked about teaching: I've taught mathematics and computing in college and graduate school, but I've never taught in K-12. Now I'm in business. To be clear, for high school material on mathematics and physical science, a few years ago I saw maybe a dozen videos. All of them were awful, should never be used in high school mathematics or science, and full of VEFEEE except the one by Gleason and Apostol which was excellent. Admittedly, competing with A. Gleason is asking a lot, but just getting rid of the VEFEEE should be easy enough and would help a lot. For what is in the K-12 books now, I cannot say. You mentioned publishers of text books as possibly better publishers of books on cooking. Maybe: In advanced mathematics, usually well beyond K-12, Addison-Wesley, John Wiley, McGraw-Hill, Prentice-Hall, SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics), Springer Verlag, and Elsevier have well deserved reputations for astoundingly high quality and precision. The best books that they publish deserve to be counted high among the crown jewels of civilization. In the books of P. Halmos, W. Rudin, H. Royden, L. Breiman, J. Doob, and many others, errors are very rare, and a careful reader can go for hundreds of pages without finding even the smallest error of any kind. There is not a single vapor of a single drop of VEFEEE present anywhere. And some of the content from some of these authors is just crucial for what we are doing now in business. One reason for my anger at the role of the VEFEEE culture in books on cooking is the collection of rock solid material on mathematics, physical science, and computing on my book shelves and, now, on my computer. E.g., the last book I bought was Edward Whalen, Marcilina Garcia, Burzin Patel, Stacia Misner, and Victor Isakov, 'Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Administrator's Companion', Microsoft Press, Redmond, WA, 2007. This book is over 1000 pages and tries to explain a piece of $25 K software just crucial for our business and for much of the modern economy. The quality is not up to Rudin, etc., but the clear goal is JUST to provide the information, and the authors have worked very hard to achieve this goal. There is not a drop of VEFEEE anywhere. Shockingly, I have to conclude that the VEFEEE culture just does not know what high quality writing to communicate solid information really is. All they know is VEFEEE. One loss is good information on how to make, say, caramel frosting. If it is possible to give a clear proof of the Radon-Nikodym theorem or the martingale convergence theorem, and it is, then explaining how to make caramel frosting should be easy. The problem is that the goal of the VEFEEE people is just VEFEEE, not frosting. Again, it's just 'vicarious' frosting, and a reader is not supposed actually to MAKE the frosting and certainly not supposed to eat it! The contrast is bizarre: (A) In books on cooking, can go on and on about quaint, romantic restaurants in the south of France, pictures of pigs hunting for truffles, pastoral landscapes, etc. but never really show people how to cook anything. Apparently there are few definite negative consequences. (B) For that book on SQL above, any lapse in the important goal of providing clear, accurate information about SQL Server would be well beyond outrageous. The consequences for the book would be devastating. There is a more general contrast: In all of our economy, media VEFEEE is nearly unique in its lack of connection with reality. In nearly any other part of human or economic activity, such mere 'fantasy' would be instantly unacceptable. Or, while the stuff on TV is junk, the ads ask people to spend their money they earned by work that is much more solid than the TV junk. I conclude that the media industry is about to have a unique revolution. eG is part of this revolution. It is possible to write clear material without pictures. E.g., much of the mathematics in the books of W. Rudin really is about geometry, but there are no pictures at all. Yes, there is the famous remark that a child said he liked radio better than TV because the pictures on radio were better. Still, and even in mathematics, pictures can help. In cooking and many other skills, good pictures can help a LOT. Good video clips with sound can help still more. ATK is a good example of using video to help instruction. But, with video, commonly, e.g., on the Food Network, the VEFEEE people win out and replace the instruction with entertainment. Then I don't watch. For ATK, I like what they are doing, but I have no connection with them at all.

Now, now, now! I FULLY agree that recipe writing is a dysfunctional, contemptible scandal. But, for the metric system, it is not crucial: First, that you usually prefer weights to volumes is right on target, but the metric system includes both weights and volumes so that just converting to the metric system doesn't mean we get weights instead of volumes. Second, the metric system is not crucial. Anyone, especially with a computer, should be able to convert between the standard systems of units. For butter, in the US, that is usually sold in one pound packages where one pound has four sticks and one stick has 1/2 C and weighs 1/4 pound or 4 ounces. So, with such US butter, measuring with tablespoons and cups of volume or with ounces of weight is easy. But the key point about recipe writing is illustrated by your experience making caramel frosting: Absolutely, positively, hardly a single printed recipe in a book or magazine is written with the intention of providing useful instruction about cooking to the reader! Hardly a single one! Instead, here is how it goes: Books and magazines have editors. The editors are in the world of 'writing', and this world is dominated by people who regard 'writing' as 'creative' writing as in 'belle lettre', English literature, drama, and fiction, especially 'formula fiction'. This 'writing' is part of 'art' as in 'communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion' via passion, pathos, poignancy, and poetry and, more simply, just following the rules of 'formula fiction'. In the most practical sense, this writing is intended to be just attractive, 'entertaining', and smelly bait for the ad hook. It's exploitative, a manipulation, for any practical purpose for the reader, at best meaningless, useless, worthless, and pointless and sometimes worse. Further, absolutely, positively, yelling, screaming, scratching, biting, with little feet planted firmly in concrete, NO WAY will that 'writing' culture ever consider anything like practical, useful information. In the ancient dichotomy of passion version reason, it's all just passion with no role even to hear of reason. These people really LOVE Shakespeare and mostly didn't major in chemistry in college. In particular, any concept of a system of units, e.g., MKS, and weights versus volumes are regarded as just poison in the 'writing'. In simple terms, you are not supposed actually to cook, and certainly not to EAT, anything from any of those published materials on 'cooking'. I mean, you didn't expect to get anything edible, did you? And I certainly hope you didn't try to eat it. What you saw in making the caramel is right in the center of the best examples of the situation, and your explanation was good: The people who read the recipe as a case of 'vicarious escapist fantasy emotional experience entertainment' (VEFEEE) just enjoying 'imagining' that they have make a terrific caramel cake, and are receiving praise, admiration, and love from others, will be fully pleased, and only the rare people like you who actually try to COOK from the recipe will notice that the information quality is JUNK, mostly just an invitation to waste time and money, and at best a suggestion of a culinary 'R&D' problem to be solved. Indeed, should there have been actual useful, practical instructions on how to make the caramel frosting, complete with explanations of what is really required, common problems and how to solve them, etc., then the VEFEEE value would be lower, the publication cost would be higher, and only the tiny fraction of people who actually want to COOK would be pleased. Here's what is expected: Read the recipes, look at the pictures, have some good VEFEEE, buy the products in the ads, call out for a pizza, extra large, with extra toppings, gain weight, watch TV, and have some VEFEEE about being thin and beautiful! The world of writing, publishing, and advertising are a scared, monolithic herd 100% locked into VEFEEE and absolutely terrified of anything like useful information. It isn't just cooking; it's essentially ALL of 'old media'. No matter what the ostensible subject, the approach is nearly always the same -- VEFEEE. So, for Hollywood, have 'celebrity news' VEFEEE letting the public 'identify' with the celebrities and enjoy feeling like they are going to "A-list" parties. For auto racing, will never hear about compression ratios, cam shaft timing, gear ratios, frontal areas, drag coefficients, center of gravity, spring rates, shock dynamometer curves, tire compounds, aerodynamic center, aerodynamic stability. Instead, it's all VEFEEE, with drama -- "It's a close race, folks, neck and neck. Will he win? WILL HE? It's close, SO close. There he goes. He's trying. Will he make it? Will he? Will he? Will he? He's the best driver ever to start an engine, folks; he came with his right shoe tied on; can't count him out yet. He'll make it if he POSSIBLY can." Net, if it appears on a printed page or has passed through a motion picture camera, then the work was nearly always under the control of writers, directors, producers, editors, and executives who believe ONLY in VEFEEE. E.g., even videos made ostensibly to teach high school mathematics are forced to be 99 44/100% VEFEEE, the rest water, and 0.00% good instruction on mathematics. I only saw one exception -- A. Gleason and T. Apostol on plane geometry, just elegant. As this video was being made, the VEFEEE people must have had to have been bound, gagged, held down with chains, and locked out to keep their screaming about "Out, out vile spot", etc. from ruining the content. Since the VEFEEE crowd has been able to ruin nearly all of high school teaching of mathematics and physical science, and they have, there is little hope for useful information on cooking or caramel frosting. As discussed extensively elsewhere on eG, the TV Food network concentrates on 'food as entertainment'. So, while I am very interested in learning to be a better cook, I long ago gave up on getting much from the TV Food Network and, thus, rarely watch it. Broadly the solution currently visible is 'new media', the Internet, and, for cooking, eG. To learn how to cook caramel frosting, do a Google search and collect some broad information. Take only the most credible information although it likely still will not be good enough to cook from and will mostly be only a start for more 'R&D'. Then, on eG, start a thread. explain what you have learned, and invite others to contribute. Do some trials and report what you learned. Expect to do about two dozen trials. Hopefully you will have a way to get some good digital photos to document what you are doing. Then, in a few months, you should be able to add caramel frosting as a solid dish in your repertoire. If you document well what you have learned, then others will be able to cook good caramel frosting by the second or third trial and maybe on the first. And, even two years from now, so will you! For cooking, other crafts and skills, and for a wide range of practical subjects, the VEFEEE people stand, and richly deserve, to go the way outlined in Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction" as technology aids replacing their work with better work. America's Test Kitchen (ATK) does work to be an exception. It does appear that some VEFEEE people have slithered their way on their own excreted, ancient slime into some occasional influence, but the core intention and content of useful information remains. No doubt the VEFEEE people are contemptuous until they need to learn to cook something. Since nearly all the rest of PBS is nearly a high altar of worship of VEFEEE, and seems to me to be aimed mostly at old maid high school English teachers, ATK must be in an awkward position largely saved by the reported fact that they are the most watched cooking show on PBS. The VEFEEE people may yet get their revenge of "Out, out brief candle".

Update: Experiments and experience suggest that the best means of improving flavor discovered so far are: (1) Olive Oil. Before starting the saute of the chicken, green pepper pieces, and mushroom slices, measure out 1/2 C virgin olive oil. In the saute, use ALL of it and keep it in the dish. This extra olive oil helps the flavor a LOT. (2) Salt. When making the sauce, include quite a lot of salt, say, 1/4 C of table salt. (3) Pepper. When making the sauce, be generous with the freshly ground black pepper. (4) In the sauce, can use more onion and garlic. Can increase the coarsely diced yellow globe onion to 1 1/2 pounds and the minced garlic to 1/3 C. (5) In the dish, can be generous with the mushrooms, e.g., can include 18 ounces instead of just 12 ounces. This way get noticeably more mushroom flavor. The chunks of thick slices of large white mushrooms are nice in the final dish. For the idea that should buy old, partially discolored and open mushrooms to get better flavor, I thought that the flavor was worse and prefer fresh mushrooms. (6) Simmer the sauce about an hour to help extract the flavors from the spices. Even if the S&P seem a bit much in the sauce by itself, combined with the chicken, green peppers, and mushrooms, the S&P are not too much. For order of battle, suppose the sauce is made and in the refrigerator and want to cook a batch of the chicken: So, get a pot, say a 5 quart Farberware classic pot, add 1 quart of the sauce, and start this to simmering. Measure out the 1/2 C of olive oil. In a skillet of about 12" diameter, add four pieces of the frozen frozen chicken, enough oil to help heat conduction, set on medium-high heat, brown, flip the pieces, and brown the other side. Here the frozen pieces will defrost and release chicken broth which will boil away. It takes a while but it works. Meanwhile, wash and cut the green peppers and mushrooms. When the chicken is browned, add it to the now simmering sauce. Now are not adding the chicken to cold sauce and, thus, are reducing the time until the dish is ready to eat. Saute the green peppers, likely adding more of the olive oil. For flavor, do get a few browned spots. But, also for flavor, let the rest of the pieces be nearly raw and let them get cooked and further release their flavors in the sauce. When these pieces have been sauteed enough, dump them, with their olive oil, into the pot with the sauce and chicken. Do much the same for the mushrooms. Simmer about an hour to get the chicken up to about 185 F and easily 'shredded'. One piece of the chicken and 1/4 of the rest makes a good, filling main dish. Even with the olive oil, can lose weight on this dish. A dry, tart Chianti with some bouquet also helps! More experiments and experience needed, e.g., for capers, olives, Portabello mushrooms, more fond from the saute, etc.

'Optimal control' and bang-bang controllers? Good, grief, my Ph.D. dissertation was on stochastic optimal control, but I never thought it would be used in cooking! For a controller to be 'optimal', need to specify essentially the context, assumptions, etc. That is, in control theory, 'optimality' is a mathematical property, and, to get any such conclusions, mathematics needs some assumptions. Yes, in principle, keeping something 'constant' in, say, temperature, voltage, position, speed, is a problem in control theory. When I was discussing optimal control with some experts -- MIT, Cornell, Brown -- the 'practical engineering' view was that optimal controllers are often bang-bang controllers. This fact can play havoc with the results in the elementary theory of differential equations! As a practical matter, if I were making a constant temperature water bath and was getting too much 'overshoot', then I would reduce the power level of my heat source so that the source was on, say, about 50% of the time, in the context. To adjust the power, might use a variable transformer, a common piece of electrical laboratory equipment. Of course, another way to 'adjust' the power is just to use a bang-bang controller that turns on and off at relatively high frequency. One way to do this is to take the approach of a 'switching power supply'. For a practical design point, might mount the heating element at the 'intake' of the water circulator and mount the temperature sensor a the 'output' of the water circulator. Generally want relatively rapid water circulation and a relatively small distance between the heating element and the temperature sensor. When I was at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, our group had a spectrograph we wanted to keep at a constant temperature within 0.01 C. For this, we used a bang-bang controller and a room deep in the basement and kept the door closed. When I was in a biophysics laboratory, we had a lot of constant temperature water baths. These were all just 'home-brew'. Each bath was in a big, heavy glass jar. We used bang-bang controllers. The heating element was an incandescent light bulb with the glass end in the water and the electrical connections out of the water. For water circulation, there was a little electric motor with a shaft with a propeller on the end. Can get similar shafts intended for mixing paint. Gee, you guys are considering MEASURING things, and even getting NUMERICAL answers! WOW! I was concluding that any mention of measurements or numbers was strongly against the norms of the 'foodie' community! Guys, be careful or might be criticized, chastised, and ostracized!

Developing a dish based on chicken, 'Italian' tomato sauce, mushrooms, and green bell peppers. Have made some progress and here report results to date and ask for suggestions of how might improve in the future. The goal is a dish good on flavor, nutrition, preparation time, and cost for everyday eating for lunches and/or suppers. Some of the ingredients have been selected to save on both cost and preparation time: So, instead of fresh everything, there are canned tomatoes, frozen chicken, and dried herbs. The chicken is just frozen, skinless, boneless chicken breast pieces. Yes, chicken thighs should give better flavor and texture but, unless frozen, skinless, and boneless, promise to increase preparation time. I'm surprised at how good this dish makes the chicken breast meat. Turns out, I'm also using this dish as food on a weight loss diet. After two weeks, the diet seems to be working well. So, I'm not adding in lots of cheese or any pasta. I'm surprised at how good the dish tastes now, but it could be better. The dish is convenient: I make four 'servings' at once, eat one serving, and reheat each of the other three. After a day in the refrigerator, it does taste better. For someone working in an office that has a microwave oven, could take a serving, cold, in a covered microwave-proof container and warm it for lunch. The aromas might create some jealousy! The tomato sauce is thick and 'chunky', and the green bell pepper pieces and mushroom pieces add more nice chunks and quite a lot of both flavor and volume. There is a lot of flavor. There is enough cooking to get the chicken relatively 'succulent' and not just 'chicken dust' and, then, enough sauce to make sure nothing tastes dry. INGREDIENTS four pieces of skinless, boneless, frozen, chicken breast meat, e.g., Tyson's from Sam's Club, five ounces of weight per piece (if from Tyson and still frozen) 4 ice cubes of well reduced, traditional, French chicken stock relatively thick slices of about 12 ounces of rinsed, large, white button mushrooms, about 10 mushrooms about 16 ounces of pieces of green bell pepper, about 3 medium sized green bell peppers 4-5 C of chunky, well flavored tomato sauce, as below. STEPS The saute pan I use making this dish is aluminum with a Teflon coating and has inside diameter at the top of the pan of 12 1/4 inches. This pan is large enough to do well enough cooking all the chicken at once, then all the mushrooms at once, then all the green pepper pieces at once. In a saute pan with enough virgin olive oil to provide good heat conduction -- 1/2 C is too much, 1/4 C is more than enough -- saute the chicken until lightly brown. Apparently the chicken, fully defrosted, will generate about 1 C of chicken stock. If cook the chicken starting with it frozen, then will have to let this stock boil off until it coagulates before browning can begin. Once browned, place chicken in a 5 quart pot, with a cover, e.g., Farberware 'classic' 5 quart pot. Add four frozen ice cube pieces of well reduced, traditional French chicken stock. Bring to simmer and cover and cook over low heat. Meanwhile, in more virgin olive oil, maybe 1/4 C more, saute the mushrooms at least until the water they will readily give up has evaporated. Drain and add to the chicken. To the chicken, add the tomato sauce, bring to simmer, and simmer, covered, slowly. Once meat reaches 180 F internal temperature, continue simmering slowly for 1-2 hours if convenient. This extra simmering helps change the chicken from 'chicken dust' to something more 'succulent'. If simmer the green pepper pieces too long, then they become too soft. So, can add the green pepper pieces near the end of simmering the chicken. In about 1/4 C virgin olive oil, saute the green pepper pieces until there is no loose water in the pan and some of the pepper pieces start to brown. Drain, add to the chicken, mix, heat through, maybe simmer another 30 minutes, if convenient, and serve. One piece of chicken with 1/4 of the peppers, mushrooms, and sauce makes a good serving. The dish reheats well. === TOMATO SAUCE === Here we make about 4 1/2 quarts of tomato sauce. The sauce has a lot of flavor, is somewhat chunky, thick, and 'meaty', not thin. INGREDIENTS 1/3 C virgin olive oil 1 pound of medium sized dice of yellow globe onion 1/4 C of minced garlic 6 ounce can of tomato paste, e.g., Contradina from Sam's Club 1 C of dry red wine 1/2 C dry parsley 2 T dry oregano 2 T dry basil 2 T dry rosemary leaves 4 bay leaves 1/2 t of red pepper flakes (optional) salt and pepper to taste 6 pound 6 ounce can of peeled, whole tomatoes, e.g., Contradina from Sam's Club 2 cans, 28 ounces per can, of crushed tomatoes, e.g., Tuttorosso from Sam's Club STEPS Set a colander in a bowl of about 5 quarts and add the peeled tomatoes. Using a table fork and a table knife, cut each tomato into 2-4 pieces. Add the tomato juice under the colander to a 3 quart pot, e.g., Farberware 'classic', and reduce slowly. Coarsely chop the peeled tomatoes and return to colander. Continue to add the tomato juice under the colander to the 3 quart pot. Will have about 2 quarts of tomato juice. Reduce this, slowly, without scorching, to 1 quart. In a five quart pot uncovered but with a cover available, e.g., Farberware 'classic, add olive oil and onions and saute until softened. Add crushed red pepper flakes (optional) and garlic, mix, and saute gently. Add wine and reduce until the wine is nearly gone. Add the tomato paste, mix, and cook to slightly 'caramelize' some of the tomato paste. Add the herbs and mix. Add one of the cans of crushed tomatoes and mix. Add the second can of crushed tomatoes, the diced peeled tomatoes, and the reduced tomato juice, mix, simmer slowly, say, to at least 180 F, add salt and pepper to taste, refrigerate uncovered and then cover.