Chris Hennes

Those may be "fish pants" but they are not THE fish pants. Lemme dig around... ETA: You can sort of make them out in the last photo here.

Next phase is the buns. These started with a sponge two days ago. Then an extensive (45-minute) autolyze of a flour/water dough today, an additional addition of yeast and combination with the sponge, and the addition of a number of flavorings and L-cysteine (an amino acid that relaxes gluten). After an hour of fermentation the dough is portioned and dropped in ring molds for the final proofing stage. It's a very slack dough, made with a soft flour (alas, I can't get White Lily here, so I used cake flour) and not kneaded much: that, plus the addition of the l-cysteine, means that even though it's not terribly high hydration, it's still something of a sticky mess to work with. Unfortunately, this is compounded by the fact that I only own three ring molds! Also, mine are only 3"-diameter molds, and the recipe calls for 4.25" -- so I should be making 24 buns! I made three as per the recipe, but halving the quantity of dough per bun to account for my smaller ring molds. the rest I simply shaped as for normal buns (but sticking with my 50g buns, instead of the 90g the recipe is for). Here is one such bun, pre-proofing stage: After proofing you brush them with whole milk and add toppings—the recipe calls for onion seeds, black sesame seeds, and poppy seeds, none of which I have on hand—I just used sesame seeds, unfortunately. Here's one in its ring mold: And one out of a mold: Here's a ringed one post-bake (6 minutes at 500°F): And a non-ringed one (center), baked: Finally, the interior: Texturally and flavor-wise, all of these buns are spot-on for a burger bun. Soft, fluffy, slightly sweet, and not overly assertive or firm. I think they will work very well indeed as burger buns. However, I had a number of problems with the ringed buns that suggest I need to work harder at finding the proper flour, get some larger ring molds, and get a more accurate scale for measuring out the minuscule quantity of the l-cysteine required. The ringed buns did not really fill out the mold properly, leading me to suspect that I still had too much gluten, especially since the non-ringed buns actually worked well. Nevertheless, these are vastly superior to my last attempt at making burger buns, so I'm definitely keeping this recipe around. Plus I now have enough l-cystein to make it something like 2000 times.

Turns out grinding meat so the strands all line up is harder than it sounds... Here's my grinding setup: it's a Northern Industrial grinder I picked up for making sausages. I keep the metal parts in the freezer and let them warm up for 15 minutes before using. The meat is entirely short rib. No seasonings added until post-patty-formation. Here is my grind: during the grinding I did my best to make the strands all line up in the same direction, but they did not hold together that well coming out of the grinder, and I kept having to take my eyes off the grind to make sure the meat was making its way into the feed tube. This technique turns out to be harder than it sounds, and definitely requires some practice (and it probably helps if you're a chef with some skillz, instead of, you know... me.) Once ground, you gently coax the meat into a tube-shape: the book suggests using a two-part cylindrical mold for this, but I ended up just using the Saran wrap and a flexible cutting mat, which I think worked OK. Then you slice out the burgers: As you can see, even with my half-assed attempt at aligning the strands the burger looks about right; even my feeble attempt appears to help. I think with practice (and maybe a sous chef...) you could get this to work better. I already foresee one problem, however: I made the burger patties the same diameter as the buns. But of course on cooking I expect the patties to shrink, so now they're going to be too small. Doh!

It is that: I don't think the implication of "throne" in the above post referred to a permanent holding area, but more to the way it's packaged such that it's pretty hard to imagine a kitchen-manual-only delivery. I'll love a photo of the box the kitchen manual came in complete with the shipping label listing it at 50 lbs! ETA: Didn't see Derek's post above. So Amazon's records should actually show they shipped a 3.3lb book even though the system knows it's supposed to weigh 50 lbs? And that didn't trip any red flags in their system? That's sort of astonishing, I'd have though that would be an important part of their supply chain management.

Perhaps someplace in the supply chain the shipment suddenly changed weight...

So far I've only eaten the ketchup on crackers, and on tater tots: both applications were very successful! Unfortunately I too had to make a number of substitutions, so it's probably not fair for me to comment on the recipe. That said, if you substitute all of the vinegars listed with sherry vinegar, and switch the barley malt syrup with agave syrup, the result is still very good, and I think still worth making. I think that ultimately this recipe is very adaptable, since so far all of us who have made it have reported good success even though we all had to make some changes.

Right: what I'm wondering is if they ran it through a rotor/stator or high-pressure homogenizer. I think that would emulsify the fat better, and can lead to a much lighter color, bordering on white if it's homogenized enough. Or, they slipped with the "saturation" setting in Photoshop .

You can see it in the photo set uptopic.

I did 40 minutes, but as I mentioned above, I think that the texture of the shredded meat was far superior to the texture of that left as whole cubes. Did you shred?

In addition to quinces, water, and sugar, the recipe calls for citric and malic acids, calcium gluconate, sodium hexametaphosphate, and high- and low-acyl gellans. I actually have all of those, but lack quinces... perhaps you could send me some?

Salsa Verde is excellent on grilled pork, especially if you get a nice char on there. ETA: Yeah, not paying enough attention to the topic under discussion... when I do the salsa verde as a "sauce" I typically go with just S&P on the pork.

Since my L Cystein didn't show up in time today I had to postpone the burgers until tomorrow. So I made the pressure-cooker carnitas instead. In this method you pressure cook the pork in a very small amount of water. Then you (optionally) shred it, and deep-fry it in two stages, where some of the pork gets fried briefly, and some gets fried until completely desiccated. I thought the technique was more successful with the shredded pork than the bits I left whole: the shredded pork wound up wonderfully crisp, and not greasy as I was expecting. The larger pork chunks were a bit too firm for my liking. In the future I'll have to make sure I am more thorough with the shredding.

OK, I just finished making the glaze for the burger: it's beef stock, tomato confit, rendered suet (I used rendered chuck fat) and salt... The tomato confit: Reducing the mixture: The finished glaze: One thing I notice here is that it looks nothing at all like the glaze in the photo of the burger. The one in the photo is white: Nathan, did you guys go at it with the homogenizer, or what?

I'm not cooking the mushrooms in stock, I'm making mushroom stock. I threw the mushrooms out when I was done. I'd guess that there are some desirable chemical reactions that take place at these high temperatures, this didn't taste like the mushroom stock you get when you just simmer mushrooms in water for an hour or two.

Awesome, thanks. I pulled it at 70 minutes. I can't compare to what the broth tastes like when done according to the recipe's specifications, but it tastes good done like this at any rate. It's now in with the rest of the ketchup ingredients:

Dunno, Sam, I thought that was entering autoclave territory.

Speaking of pressure cooking... I let Chris Amirault talk me into the mushroom ketchup, so first up this morning is making the mushroom broth. It calls for 45 minutes at 21 psi, but my cooker is the sort that only goes up to 15 psi: any advice on how long to cook at 15psi to achieve a similar result?

Yeah, Post-Its have been my solution here. I just can't convince myself to write on the pages just yet. Though at their current usage rate I'm going to need another copy in a few years anyway...

Yeah, dozens or maybe even hundreds of things... but most tend to be brand-specific items that don't really have exact generic equivalents. Not all of them are particularly "Modernist," either. The pantry at Nathan's house must be incredible...

Considering the massive complexity of the mushroom ketchup, I guess I just won't stress overmuch about those two ingredients, though I'll have to hunt them down for round two. I just ran to the store (at 10pm) to get the mushrooms, so I guess I'm in for the ketchup. But I'm still replacing the veg. with bacon.

Thoughts on substitutions for the cane vinegar and the barley malt syrup?

So, when are you starting to take orders? Where does the line form?

So, I've mentioned a couple times that this stuff is prep work for "The Burger"—that's not quite true. I can't actually make The Burger owing to a spousal objection to mushrooms, and a lack of a chamber vac (or for that matter, tomatoes worth compressing in the first place). So rather, I am making the bun, burger, glaze, and cheese slice. Instead of a mushroom swiss burger, I'm making it a bacon swiss burger: no vegetation involved (lettuce or tomato). So I guess this is the Lite version of The Burger. I still tell myself I'm considering it a warmup round for when I can convince my wife that a) mushrooms are good, and b) a chamber vac is clearly a kitchen necessity.

It does. This is the tomato confit, which is used as a component of the burger's glaze. I should note that I'm not making the exact burger in the book, though I'm getting pretty close. In particular, I am supplying an alternate source of the smokey flavor called for in the recipe.

OK, just popped these beauties into the oven: Wow, you should smell my house! Slow roasting tomatoes, garlic, and herbs... just about the most soulful food imaginable.