Chris Hennes

It really, does, Paul: I consider the gauntlet thrown, I'm going to make it again this week. Another question for you: when you made the sablés, did you use just the butterfat portion of the onion butter, or did you blend it back together and use it as "whole" butter?

I usually make croissants with a yeast-leavened dough, I've never tried just a straight Pâte Feuilletée. It works out OK? I guess you skip the rising and proofing stages and just bake it?

Do you have a sous vide setup? You could go low-and-slow to melt all the connective tissue, then pick out the bones and cartilage when it's done.

In what way?

Do you typically make the Pâte Feuilletée Fine or just the Pâte Demi-Feuilletée? I haven't really decided what I'm going to do with all of it (some of it is for the Onion Arlette in Modernist Cuisine, but that will leave me with a lot of leftovers).

Caught red handed... fried in the same pan as the rest of the hash. I don't even remember the last time I poached an egg.

I want to make puff pastry this weekend (not the "quick" variety, the real deal), but when I searched Eat Your Books it turns out I have something like 20 recipes for the stuff. Who is your go-to source? I was leaning towards the CIA's Professional Chef because they give me weight measures, but I've never actually tasted their version. There's one in Baking with Julia, and I usually like Greenspan's work, so that seems promising as well. Plus a Beranbaum, two from Malgieri, etc. etc. How do I choose?

My thought was that I cook pork with prepared mustard all the time, so I have some sense of how much to use. With dry mustard I have no idea. Suggestions?

OK, I made what I think was a hash for lunch today: I fried some potatoes, added onions when the potatoes were almost done, then added a large heap of leftover bolognese sauce from last week's lasagne. So, the meat was ground rather than chopped. Does that disqualify it?

Welcome to the eG Forums, Kathryn. The last time I made bacon I left the rib on: the folks from Modernist Cuisine say that you can eek a little more flavor out of them that way. I generally hot-smoke bacon: it's great cold-smoked too, but for the first go I'd just follow the Ruhlman/Polcyn recipe, which I believe calls for hot-smoking.

Agreed: the components work together very well in this dish, it's one that's clearly more than the sum of its parts. I felt the same way about the Braised Short Ribs: the individual components are fine on their own, but it's not until you combine them that you wind up with something special. Well, except the sables, which I ate all afternoon by themselves . I'm toying with the idea of making this again this week, since the ingredients are easy to come by and I have lots of leftover onion sugar.

You have great friends, Darienne, that's truly a work of art. I can't wait for a report on how well it works.

I've got a shoulder I'm going to do this week and am looking for some advice regarding seasonings: I don't want to smoke this one, I'm looking for something different. What sorts of things have you guys put in the bag with the pork? I was thinking of trying something with mustard, but am a little worried about the acidity over such a long cook. Any advice?

Looks great, Paul. Did you end up with enough of the onion gratin to make four servings worth?

Yeah, one side only. I never cut meat on the board in this spot, I have another for that purpose.

Just mineral oil. I thought about doing the mineral oil/wax treatment suggested above, but decided to go the easy route this time around and see how it goes.

OK, another V5 question: in the recipe on 5•95 for the Goan Curry Sauce, does it look to you like steps 4, 5, and 6 are in the wrong order? It looks to me like step 4 should come after steps 5 and 6. That is, you toast and grind the spices before adding them to the tomato-onion mixture.

Ah, I understand now. I was reading too much into the phrase "spread paste on plastic wrap," imagining it to mean "spread into a thin layer." But obviously it really just means "place it on the wrap and form a roll."

Why wouldn't you just remove the plastic wrap before slicing? I don't understand how you'd do that: is it not all rolled up in a cylinder with the paste?

Actually, reading through that Thai Crab Miang recipe leaves me with a couple more questions: in the recipe for the Puffed Crab Crackers, the recipe has you spread the paste onto plastic wrap, then roll into a cylinder. You then steam it, cool it, and slice it. But what has happened to the plastic wrap? I must be imagining this wrong, but if you roll it into a cylinder and then cooked it, haven't you cooked in the plastic wrap? Do you just pull out the shreds when you dehydrate the slices? Also, the recipe for the marinated crab salad calls for crabmeat and dungeness pomelo cells. You supposed they mean "dungeness crab meat" and "pomelo cells"? Also, are Makrud lime leaves just the normal lime leaves you get at the Asian megamarts?

I haven't made it, but it seems to me reading the recipe that it's got to be the oil for frying the crab crackers, right? The recipe makes 400g of oil, and in the sidebar they refer the the oil as "the frying oil" which is what they call for in the "Puffed Crab Crackers" recipe.

Finally, after having the lumber sitting in the garage for the better part of a year, I finished my new cutting board. End grain maple, finished dimensions are 16.25" x 21.75" x 2.25". The Nakiri sitting on it is 12" in total length, for size reference.

Damn you guys are awesome: I'm very happy that you've decided to add a beeper, and to make the timer more granular (this is especially useful for delta-T cooking, where timing is important). In the case of a power outage I am OK with the machine not turning itself back on, I am just looking for an alert if it happens so I can see how long it was and address the problem. On a 72-hour cook there is a pretty decent chance that somebody, somewhere, is going to have some power-glitch that shuts the thing down: the handling of power-failures is one of the touted features of other SV solutions, so if you guys could come up with a simple, cheap way to "do something" about it, that's just another selling point for the device.

eG-friendly link: Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal

Fantastic, Duncan. If you're looking for more advice, I'd suggest tracking whether the device was running or not, and checking that on power-up: if it was, there was a power-outage, and then a continuous beeping until it's interacted with would be nice. I presume you have some kind of EEPROM you are able to store a limited number of writes to?