TheSwede

Marco Pierre White's totally decadent Tagliatelle Of Oysters, basically lightly poached oysters with beurre blanc sauce, served in the shell on top of a small nest of pasta. Garnishes are cucumber julienne and real caviar. http://uktv.co.uk/food/recipe/aid/575730

Since you are UK-based, you really have to do something with a Marco Pierre White recipe. He is THE original UK celebrity (and bad boy) chef. Personally I don't have problems cooking stuff from White Heat or Wild Food but I am pretty experienced in the kitchen. Something that would probably make good TV is having a team of people cooking from the new Fat Duck Cookbook. Heston Blumenthal is of course also a big UK celebrity. Take two teams of smart, organized but cooking wise inexperienced people and have them try to recreate one of the signature dishes. Give them a day or so to practise and then end the day with a cook off competition. I would watch that! (Or participate )

Some sort of paté/terrine? Perhaps you could serve that in your café together with a salad, picles and some nice bread?

Has anyone outside the US (and possibly Canada) gotten a shipping confirmation email?

I had dinner at Mathias Dahlgren's Matbaren ("The Food Bar") last friday. Matbaren is also located at Grand Hotel, just across the foyer from much more prestigeous Matsalen ("The Dining Room"). Matbaren is a pretty casual dining experience. People can eat at the bar (really the serving counter), at bar tables or at a couple of regular tables. The menu is short and has no real distinction between appetizers or main courses. You order your courses one at the time and they are promptly delivered to your table. When you have finished a course, you order the next etc. I started with cured salmon, cucumber and horseradish cream, followed by a dry aged beef from Nebraska with oyster butter and jerusalem artichokes. For dessert I had a selection of locally sourced cheeses. My dining companion had the same, except switching the beef for lamb with ratatouille. There is a good selection of wines by the glass. Overall, it was a good dinner. High quality ingredients served pretty simply, although with some twists such as the oyster butter. Not much "wow factor", but probably not intended to be any either. Although the setting is casual, the price level is rather high. You are after all dining in Mathias Dahlgren's restaurant, located in the best hotel in Stockholm. An therein lies the main problem with Matbaren. You are paying fine dining prices for excellent produce, but served rather simply and in a casual setting. You will definitely get a good dinner there, but you will be paying a little bit too much for it. Personally, I much rather go once to Matsalen, then twice to Matbaren.

Chef/patron Christer Lingström is leaving Edsbacka Krog, Sweden's only two star, after 26 (!) years. Executive chef Fredrik Pettersson is taking over the restaurant. Since Petterson has been with Lingström for 20 years, I assume the restaurant is in capable hands.

My mother used to work in a lab and she sometimes "aged" her home made fruit liqeur in the lab's ultrasonic water bath. This was probably 30 years ago and I have no idea if it actually did anything to the taste.

You can get by without the caul fat. Cut open the tenderloin, stuff it with the forcemeat, wrap hard in double layer clingfilm and put in the freezer until firm but not frozen. Unwrap, sear in pan (while praying it all won't collapse), finish in oven. Or you could try the opposite: Sear tenderloin quickly, stuff, wrap, poach in simmering water with clingfilm still in place.

No liquid, but I did add a fair amount of sugar which I forgot to mention above. The texture of the rhubarb was very soft, not at all stringy. You could eat it with a spoon.

I actually tried reading the recipes in L'Express before ordering the book, and it wasn't that hard even without a dictionary. While my conversational french is really non existant, my written kitchen french is not too bad.

Just ordered the book. I think it will be good for my (almost non existant) french...

I've done rhubard sous vide. The main reasons for doing it s-v was that I wanted to infuse it with various spices and to keep the pieces nice and presentable while still very soft. See link below for picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/26839885@N08/2509015151/ The absolutely best part was the syrup collecting in the bag. I reduced it and served it with the dessert.

You have to remember that it is mandatory for brittish restaurant critics to be "witty". Their mission is not so much to inform as to entertain. Which is why I absolutely hate Giles Coren.

The freezing will only be at the sides, so you will have to constantly scrape the walls of the container. That is pretty much how an ice cream machine works. Why not just get an cheap ice cream machine? The variety where you put the bowl in the freezer can't be that expensive and does the same you want to do.

Those Bocuse prices are really really expensive for a restaurant in a department store. They are like main course dinner prices in a one star here in Stockholm.

That is a pretty cool piece of original cooking research.

My gellan fluid gel (0.5% gellan) got the consistency of room temperature butter. Quite nice actually, but in no way drinkable. Less gellan perhaps?

Oh, you are right. I misunderstood the question.

The cooking school way is to trim off both ends first, then removing the peel and pith by making curved cuts along the lenght of the fruit. Then you take the cleaned fruit in the palm of one hand hand and make slices on both sides of each membrane with the other hand. That way you get nice clean citrus "supremes". A really sharp filleting knife is a good tool.

Can you get a fluid gel liquid enough so it feels more like a liquid than a gel? I do have both gellan and a blender so I guess I could go and find out myself...

I think heat will mess things up. Unless you have something like fluid gels, heat will create convection that will stir the layers together. Edit: On the other hand there is that Heston Blumethal hot/cold drink (drinking from a glass and getting hot and cold liquid simulatenously) so there is definitely some way of solving it.

Note that you usually don't have to add extra gelatine to veal/chicken stock. Search for "gelatine filtration" in this forum to find a thread with much more information.

Sugar first, then pectin, so it is maximum 50% pectin. It is a powder, not a liquid.

I'm going to try to make a pates de fruit more or less according to Kerry Beal's recipe found here: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=118329&st=30# However, I don't have easy access to pure apple pectin. But I can buy a product in my local supermarket called Melatin which basically contains fructose and apple pectin in an unknown ratio. I'm trying to determine what percentage of pectin it contains. For marmelade, the recipe is 1600 g fruit and 40 g Melatin. For jelly, the recipe is 1 l unsweetened liquid, 40 g Melatin and 750 g sugar. Can any experienced marmelade-/jellymaker tell me the likely pectin content of Melatin? (This almost sounds like an old school math test question. )

Nice step by step tutorial. Right now I have a big piece of pork belly confiting on the stove. Should be ready in six hours or so.