Chris Hennes

I've been able to get most of the acids the book calls for at a local homebrew supply store, though I haven't bought lactic yet. Regarding the BBQ: yes, that's my interpretation: the whole thing is like one big parametric recipe. You pick a rub, you pick a meat, you pick a sauce. Mix and match.

I made the wheat pasta from the "Best Bets for Pasta" table for dinner last night: my wife and I agreed that the texture was considerably better than my standard egg pasta. I had to add a bit more water than the recipe called for to get the dough workable, but overall the recipe worked well. Served it with a quick sauce made to highlight the few fresh peas my garden yielded yesterday:

Alas, legal requirements have precious little to do with whether or not you get your ass sued off.

Shoulda figured you had fancier equipment ... I've just got the freeze-the-bowl stand-mixer attachment.

I've had pretty good luck just cranking up the speed on the KitchenAid.

This must be attempted. Please. The world needs this.

The amount of air that gets beaten into the ice cream during churning. Fluffier ice cream has more air in it.

I like it: in particular I like the texture and amount of overrun. In my opinion most of the superpremiums are too dense, as though minimizing overrun is their primary goal.

For tonight I did cream, garlic, pepper, and Locatelli Romano: But keep the ideas coming, I'm probably going to have this problem every other day for the next two weeks .

I actually like peas in carbonara! But they play a distant third role to the pork and the pepper there. I just made some fettucini, now trying to come up with a sauce that doesn't mask the peas (fortunately they are massively flavorful so that's not too tough).

Like many gardeners, my preferred method for eating peas is standing in front of the plants eating them right off the bush. Alas, this habit also means that the number peas that make it into the kitchen is woefully small. Here's today's batch: Any ideas for how best to highlight them? That's not even enough for one side-dish serving, so they've got to go IN something. But what?

I noticed that one too. There are only few restaurants or places that I think serves really good carbonara here in my place. I wonder how carbonara tastes like in Italy. The worst restaurant carbonara I ever ate was at a sidewalk cafe in Florence: there are bad restaurants all over the world, Italy doesn't get a pass on that . Heidi, I think you are definitely right about Caesar salad, that's another one where you have to order it realizing you have no idea what's actually going to show up. I don't know about Alfredo: most places seem to at least have the courtesy of adding a modifier to the name if they are going to add something to the dish, e.g. "chicken fettucini alfredo" etc. My observation with Carbonara is that is not the case: the riffs all seem to go by the name "Pasta alla Carbonara."

I just started into The WikiGullet Project article on Carbonara which set me to thinking about the subject. It seems to me that at least in the English-speaking world, carbonara is among the most riffed-upon of all Italian pasta dishes. For example, Modernist Cuisine has TWO recipes for it. I don't remember EVER seeing it in a US restaurant made with guanciale, and usually not even with pancetta: the US preference seems to be for bacon. It's often made with Parmesan, sometimes even to the exclusion of Romano altogether. Peas? Broccoli? The list goes on and on. Anyone else notice this particular creative attention to carbonara, or is it my imagination?

Yes, it rendered a good amount of the fat, leaving the softened tissue behind. Actually, my skin came out quite "authentically" adhered to the breast, I don't think any more so than the non-Franken-duck version where you just leave the skin attached naturally. I did not use a whole lot of Activa though. Yes, that first photo is post-SV.

Today for lunch I made a duck breast following the instructions on p. 3•82: this isn't the cryosearing method, it's the one where the skin is cooked off the duck and Activa'ed back on. You start by taking the skin off the breasts and sealing it up. This gets cooked at 53°C/131°F for 24 hours: I had a bit of difficulty at this point: the skin shrunk while cooking, so it didn't cover the breast anymore (note that I had butchered the duck to leave the skin in as large a piece as I could, but they were long, rather than wide): So I sort of Frankensteined a few pieces of skin together: Not winning any beauty contests, but I applied the Activa using the slurry method and popped it in an SV bag: This is cooked at 56°C/133°F for 30 minutes to cook the breast and set the Activa: It's then seared off quickly and served (I served it with home fries fried in duck fat and with a duck-stock and orange gastrique): Visually, it really didn't work that well at all, the Franken-duck is a bit silly: I need to come up with a way to butcher the duck so that my skin pieces are bigger. I left the fat layer on the duck skin, rather than scraping it off, which was fine, though I might try removing it just for kicks next time. I should have brined the duck breast or something, they were a bit bland. Finally, I don't think the fat from the skin softened the way it was supposed to, so I will need to double check my temperature calibrations. Has anyone else tried this technique? Did your skin shrink like that?

I'm a big fan of the Lexington-style.

Frankly I'd just sub in corn syrup, they are almost completely interchangeable.

Yeah, chriscook, I think so. Step 8 is the one that calls for simmering for 45 minutes, which makes much more sense with an extra 250mL of water.

Larry, thanks again for sharing all these photos, it looks like a great meal (and thanks for finding all those errors that led to the meal in the first place!). What was the topping on the left-hand Pot de Crème?

OK, I clicked through the site to check out the dermaroller, and I don't quite understand how it's going to work on a piece of duck. They seem to have very, very short needles, at least as far as I can tell. However, I suppose the only way to know for sure is to try it... you first, GMO!

Are the holes from a dog brush really that noticeable? I thought the whole point was that after cooking they all but disappeared?

Stacking is always a photography-favorite, like this image from Wikimedia Commons (used with permission):

Duck leg confit with Pommes Sarladaises (p. 3•178) I think I'm the third or fourth person in this discussion to make the confit, I'm falling behind the curve, here! I did change it up a little by not adding any fat at all to the bag, I didn't see the point. As we've discussed in the various confit topics here, it really doesn't matter. Plus, duck legs render a LOT of fat when you cook them anyway. So although my original plan was to rub the legs with duck fat when they came out of the SV, that turned out to be completely pointless, the were already coated with a gorgeous layer of duck fat. As with any confit, this one starts with a dry curing mix: I made it last week and stuck it in the fridge... when I opened it yesterday it smelled incredible. I bought a duck at my local butcher (Pekin, alas) and butchered the legs so they had enough skin to wrap all the way around them: Those get bagged up with the cure mix: And cured for ten hours: Here they are out of the bag: They are rinsed well, then individually bagged: Those then get popped in the sous vide rig at 82°C/180°F for eight hours. In the meantime, I started on the potatoes. These are red potatoes that are cut into coins and sealed up with some duck fat, water, garlic, thyme, and salt: That gets cooked sous vide for about 20 minutes at 80°C/190°F. The duck legs come out of the sous vide rig looking like this: And unbagged: I shredded one of the legs for my wife: it had plenty of fat coating at this point, so this is when it became obvious that no extra was needed: And of course, the liquid gold exuded from the legs while they cooked, destined for lunch tomorrow: Next up, the duck leg is sauteed quickly to crisp up the skin. Yes, I completely stole the plating from the MC team, including the little purple flowers (mine are sage blossoms, since that's what's in bloom in the garden today): I will stop boring you with superlatives, or faux surprise at how well the dish turned out. This, for me, is the definitive proof that the traditional confit technique is completely superfluous. Cooking the legs sous vide with no added fat yields precisely the same result: flavor, texture, everything. Oh yeah, it's delicious. I love duck leg confit. This technique is easier, cleaner, and required no vast supply of duck fat waiting in reserve. I love it.

Sous vide?

I'm working on the duck confit now: is the chill/reheat step is necessary, or just a convenience?