Chris Hennes

Can you confirm that they have added a beeper for the timer? I think that's what I understand from the post uptopic.

Naaah... A little clever marketing ('hand-crafted!' 'exclusive, very limited edition!' 'heirloom style'), and jacking up the price to about 250% of the cost of the ones that came out right, would have these bad boys flying out the door. There's one born every minute... OK, OK, so you could sell them. That doesn't assuage the misery when, after spending hours making the damned things and thinking they were perfect, you go to pop them out of the mold and they leave behind the top layer of cocoa butter: believe me, I've done it, several times. It sucks. It's not over-perfectionism, it's failure. I throw them away.

The gap is 1 1/4".

I use 1% for vegetables, in general.

Cracked shells and missing outer layers is too critical? Both items would be completely unsellable.

Anything new on the Cynar front in the last couple years? I've got about 3/4 of a bottle on the shelf that I'd like to use up to make room for ... something else.

RobertM - Can you give us an update/reminder on the price for various things for the attendees (and guests)?

Nope. I very rarely sous vide a whole egg. If I want a poached egg, I poach the egg.

Yeah, I'm happy with it. It holds a very sharp edge for a long time (I use it exclusively on vegetables), and it's quite thin. It took some getting used to the round nose, but I've come to appreciate that, too.

I've never tried to make them on the stove with distilled water, so I guess my reference point is off, but I've never found that I could get a soft, creamy interior and still have structure from the shell when I've cooked them on the stovetop. Either they were intact and the interior too firm, or they were split and the interior was right. But maybe it was just the switch to distilled water that corrected the issue, and not the sous vide itself.

The Inazuma Nakiri from JCK. It's just cheesecloth: you make a big pouch of veg, stick it in with the lentils and little water, cook it, and then toss the pouch when you are done. It's basically equivalent to using a rich vegetable stock to cook the lentils in.

I actually haven't found lentils (French green lentils, anyway) to be that easy to cook normally: I find them to nearly always wind up overcooked and mushy, whereas these still had some bite. Cooking sous vide is also a great way of getting tons of flavor out of those veggies and into the lentils, since there is not that much water involved.

Thanks to everyone who joined in, hope to see you in Lebanon starting tomorrow. My final post of the week: yet another Sauvignon Blanc, this one from New Zealand. Farewell, and take care!

I had reported on the sous vide lentils in this post and reported that they wound up too firm, and suspected it was my use of filtered water rather than distilled: I tried again today and sure enough, using distilled water, they came out perfect. They smell great coming out of the bag, too.

If you don't believe this about cooking, then MC V5 is not for you. You have to enjoy cooking, not just eating. The tart tasted great, best onion tart I've ever had. But you can make a damned good onion tart in about 30 minutes. It's not as fun, though.

Dinner tonight was a hot lentil salad and asparagus. The lentils were cooked sous vide yesterday with a massive pouch of vegetables (the veg were discarded) I used distilled water this time and it made a huge difference, the lentils came up perfectly tender, and very few had split. Today I made some massive asparagus I picked up at Whole Foods last weekend: These are bagged with a little water, olive oil, and salt, and cooked at 85°C/185°F for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, I prepared the rest of the ingredients for the lentil salad: Those are dried cherries, pecans, and a sour cherry vinaigrette. Toast the pecans, of course: I wanted some greens in the salad, so I went out the the lawn near my herb garden: Those weeds? Not your normal weeds: Shot of my cilantro, for kicks: So, I plucked some parsley from the lawn and chopped my ingredients: I wanted a sauce for the asparagus, so I decided to try to do an egg yolk and lemon juice sauce thickened just slightly sous vide: My favorite egg yolk sous vide bag: Once the asparagus were done I dropped the temp to 65°C, the temp for a gel-like egg yolk, and added the mixture: Unfortunately, it turns out that was too warm, I wanted a runny, flowing sauce, and was hoping that cooking the yolk to gel and being thinned out with the lemon juice would give me that, but instead the whole thing came out as a thick gel. Oh well, now I know... it tasted good, anyway.

Last weekend I picked up a few Meyer lemons at the Whole Foods, on a whim. Today I put up one of them following the Alinea recipe for preserved Meyer lemons: And dropped the other two into a jar of vodka:

If you ask a mountain climber at the top of El Capitan whether the view was worth the trouble, you are apt to get a funny look. Ask the climber why, then, did he climb El Cap? "Because it was there."

Two places: I used them to make today's omelette, and I had previously used some of them to make a pasta sauce for lunch.

I'd guess that you can confit the dark meat more or less like duck.

This morning I made (or I should say, attempted to make) an omelette using some of yesterday's leftovers: In the large container in the back is some leftover onion butter. The tin mold contains the gruyere custard, and the glass bowl is the remainder of the onions from making the onion butter. I might have overfilled the omelette just a little bit, as you can see: it tore to shreds when I rolled it. Oh well, the taste was fantastic. In particular, the texture of the just-barely-melting gruyere custard as an omelette filling was really excellent. And those onions... oh man.

To clarify: I'm not suggesting that you chop instead of slicing, I'm suggesting that after slicing, you might want to slide a knife over the pile a few times. I think you need them to remain strands to keep the structure, but shortening the strands would make it easier to eat.

Oh, another detail I forgot: the quantity of onion butter that you wind up making was a lot more than is needed for the sables, so everyplace else where clarified butter was called for I used onion butter instead. I decided not to re-emulsify the butter when it was cold, I only used the butterfat portion in the sables, which seemed to work fine.

I made exactly the quantities listed in the recipes (or rather, I used the exact quantities listed in the recipes and took whatever yield I got). For the main components: Custard—the recipe as stated made 22 1" cubes, enough to make 7 servings with one extra. I tried to plate mine with the same ratio of custard:gratin that are listed in the recipe, and am glad I did. Gratin—the recipe made, for me, only enough gratin to form one 2" x 4" x 1/2" rectangle, with a bit to spare, so instead I served it as a 2"x3" rectangle and got two of them. I have no idea why this quantity was off so badly. Perhaps I overreduced the onions. You will definitely want to do a dry-run of this to see if you have the same experience. Also, I suggest giving the onions a rough chop once they are sliced, they were a little unwieldy to eat, sort of like a tangled mass of pasta. Sable—if I had rolled this thin enough I think I could have gotten 50 sables out of a single batch of the dough. At one per plate, that was a lot extra. I just ate them as cookies all afternoon, they taste great. For the pearl onion garnish, I suggest going by the number of onions you need, not by the weight (and make sure you use red pearl onions for good visuals). Allow about 25% extra for onions that fall apart on cooking, and then scale the rest of the recipe to match. I didn't weigh out anything for the arlettes, except the sugar. I probably have enough leftover sugar to make 1000 more arlettes, so don't scale that recipe at all. Just make sure you use good-tasting puff-pastry, mine were basically a loss. And roll them really thin, they would have looked much better. ETA: I was surprised by just how large this came out, even at 2/3 portion size. It's a pretty big "tapa".

In the interest of "keeping it real": I just drove through Taco Bell for a snack, had a Volcano Burrito. On purpose. Because I like them. If you saw the state of my kitchen you'd understand!