Chris Hennes

I attempted to correct my earlier mistakes with the carbonara, and served it for lunch today. Yesterday's cheese stick was 1/2" thick and 1 1/2" wide. The recipe calls for a stick 3/8" thick and 2" wide, but I'm guessing from the photo that it's actually only about an inch wide, so that's what I made today. I am out of eggs at the moment, so I changed up the toppings a bit, but otherwise this is basically the same thing as yesterday: Reducing the amount of cheese helped a lot, but I think it could be reduced even further. It's also quite possible that when served with pork belly (as suggested in the recipe) the ingredients balance better on the plate overall. Or maybe the MC team just likes parmesan more than me.

Short ribs are our favorite cut for this Unfortunately, pastrami is already the backup plan: I originally intended to do the "Braised Short Ribs" from p. 5•42 but the short ribs at the butcher this morning were really lame. Thwarted at every turn!

Oh: I'm also going to make the pastrami this week (though I'm using brisket, you can't get beef cheeks around here): what is the difference between "red pepper flakes" and "chili flakes"?

I intended it as one course of perhaps two or three (dinner was just going to go on all night, I think ), but actually given how rich it was, after finishing I decided not to make anything else. Also bear in mind that my serving size was much larger than what was called for in the recipe. I've got the sous vide rig heating up right now, I'm going to try to make this properly this afternoon so I can give a fairer appraisal.

Yeah, re- re- rereading the recipe, I really screwed up the ratio of cheese to pasta quite badly. I might give this another shot today and see if I can make it work better.

I confess that this is the sort of thing I sometimes catch myself doing, and that makes me scared that all my OCD stuff is spiralling out of my control. The fact that I find the idea of doing something like this very attractive, is not helping How long did this take, and did you have to fiddle with it a bit, to get it just right? I think it took something like a half hour to lay out all the strands from 100g of pasta (enough for at least four if not six or eight servings, especially if you actually follow the recipe and make then the correct size). It was fiddly work, but ultimately actually quite rewarding: it's fascinating how the texture of pasta changes when you serve it like this, it has a quite different mouthfeel, I thought. I'd do it again.

Is that Canadian $?

The "mold" is what a confectioner would call "caramel bars" or what a cheapskate would call "a couple sticks of aluminum taped together and set on a Silpat." It's what I use for layered dipped chocolates: each bar is 12" long and 1/4" square cross section, hollow. I make the shape I want and then tape them together so they don't slide around. Real "caramel bars" are heavier and will stay in place on their own.

Yeah, five hours. Five hours of the house smelling like heaven. And the bacon comes out crispy, flat, and flavorful. No, that's not out of Modernist Cuisine, I think I got the idea from an article on Cooking for Engineers way WAY back.

It was worth the trouble in the sense that it tasted good, and was a lot of fun to make. As usual, if you don't enjoy futzy cooking, this probably isn't going on the dinner rotation. Yes, the yellow squiggle is the yolk. And I cooked the bacon in the oven at 225°F for five hours, which for me counts as "straight cooking".

So, as I mentioned above, tonight I made the "Spaghetti Carbonara" for dinner, from p. 3•384. It was pretty involved, and doesn't bear a whole lot of resemblance to the classic (except in terms of flavor). The process begins with bacon: Garlic (sliced thin and blanched): And Romano (the recipe calls for parmesan, but I didn't have enough. Plus, I like Romano...): This is sealed with cream and cooked sous vide for two hours to infuse: Then you cook some spaghetti: And strain the sauce over it: Here's where it starts to get weird (yes, OK, the Italian food lovers started tearing their hair out at "cream"... here's where the rest of you start.) You take the sauced pasta and, one strand at a time, lay it out to form a mat: That gets popped in the fridge while you make the cheese. This is a brick of parmesan (I just barely had enough for the recipe, hence the use of Romano above) that is emulsified and gelled with whole milk: so it still tastes like a brick of parmesan, nothing else. You also make a gelled egg yolk by cooking a yolk sous vide for 35 minutes. I simply cooked it in a piping bag, rather than a sous vide pouch and transferring to squeeze bottle. Of course, this means I omitted the straining step. Now, you create the portions. This is done by wrapping the pasta around a log of parmesan: Now, to reheat. I had a sneaking suspicion that these were going to be fragile, so I actually improvised a steamer setup that let me steam them on serving utensils (spatulas, in this case): Here's where things went a little wonky: I oversteamed the packets, so the cheese gel started to melt (which it's not supposed to do): I had a bit of trouble transferring the packets to the plates still (I should have greased the spatulas), but they plated up OK I thought. I served it with a piece of bacon: Overall the dish was rather successful, but I will make some changes for next time. In my attempts to match the photos in the book more closely I just sort of eyeballed the size of the parmesan bricks, but the parmesan was too assertive, I had too much and threw the balance off. Next time I think I'd probably make the logs 1/2" x 1/2" square cross-sections, and maybe even give them two wraps of pasta instead of one. Something else I am going to do is just serve the pasta alone as a meal: the infused cream was a really nice sauce on its own.

Interesting: the JJ variant is blended with Sodium citrate for use in jellies. I found a ton of info about the Kelcogel products in this PDF.

I wonder when the most recent occurrence of it was in a major publication (magazine, newspaper, book, etc.) Anecdotally it sounds from these few responses like it's a phrase that's falling out of favor but has not yet fallen out of the dictionary. Does anyone have enough Google-fu to track down its use? I get too many false-positives from the noun.

The only constant in language is that it changes: a word means whatever it's used to mean. If people use "french fry" to mean "deep fry" I'm OK with that, I've just never heard of it. Perhaps it's an old usage that has fallen to the wayside?

That reply is from Chef Rubber.

We're having quite a time over at The WikiGullet project working on the "French fries" article. One of the questions that has come up is whether "to French fry" is used as a general-purpose synonym for deep-frying. I've never seen this, but MaxH has, and sure enough, Merriam-Webster thinks it's used that way. So: who's seen this? Recently? Do you use it?

This is what my supplier said when I asked: I have never heard of, nor seen anyone else selling, "medium-acyl" gellan. Is such a thing possible, or must it be by definition a blend of high- and low-acyl versions?

Yes.

I started in on the "Spaghetti Carbonara" from page 3•384 this morning (the one based on Jean-Françoise Piège's recipe, not Wylie Dufresne's). So far I've infused the cream, cooked the pasta, and laid out the spaghetti strands. Let me tell you, it takes tremendous willpower at this point to not grab a fork and just flat eat this stuff. It turns out that cream infused with garlic and bacon makes a might fine spaghetti sauce. Who knew?

After a morning spent making many, many different gels, I am convinced that what I've got here is either pure high-acyl gellan, or a mixture with a very small amount of low-acyl. I'm basing this on the qualitative descriptions of what I should be getting for various ratios in Modernist Cuisine. I would think that if it had significant low-acyl gellan content, then when I used the ratios to make a firm, brittle gel, I would have wound up with something that came across as much too firm (I focused on that one because it's closest to what I need this afternoon). So, here goes nothing... starting in on the "Spaghetti Carbonara"...

Hey now! We prefer "Texas Junior". Oklahoma City, decidedly amateur.

I really loved the raspberry saffron one. I think I may try the "Wine Cream" next.

Now that hardly counts as shameful at all, if you ask me. What is wrong with it?

It's basic human nature (in the most literal evolutionary sense... the research is fascinating) that we are more or less completely unable to handle the notion of relative risk when it comes so small risks: a scientist who studies the adverse affects of X is going to naturally and completely logically be prone to dramatically overestimate the actual danger of X, because he or she knows so much about it, and spends their life immersed in the subject. No malice, unethical behavior, or money trail is required. Cue "driving on the highway" example....

I've realized this week how out of practice I am... I need to do some serious confectionery work this month! hard to believe it's so close now. Kerry, can you post an updated schedule with what's what where as it stands right now?