Chris Hennes

Right, it goes without saying that one cannot use this technique to make an official "Pizza Napoletana," by definition. It is then simply a matter of making the best reproduction we can (or, perhaps simply making the best-tasting pizza we can!). The DOP standard lays out what we are looking for in excruciating detail, including the final temperatures of the various ingredients. And it says not one word about "char." Read it here.

There are some very nice photos (on pages 2-26 and 2-27, when the books arrive) of pizzas that certainly look cooked to me, but they aren't showing the underside of the pizza, so perhaps the char level does not meet scott123's requirements for Pizza Napoletana. Who's going to take one for the team and try it?

Quite right, I didn't understand you. So: that's not what the book says (or to my reading what Nathan says above). I suspect that the bottom element is indeed more or less inconsequential to the result: if you have a broiler element cranked all the way up and a 550°F 3/4" thick steel plate in direct contact with your pie, you will probably achieve good results. As you decrease plate thickness the result gets worse, but pretty much ANY thick-ish plate is better than a sheet pan.

My experiment was obviously quite crude/spur of the moment, but it does give a glimpse of the time it takes for energy to conduct it's way through that 1/4" of metal. Even if the change in temp is 15 deg. during that time, it's still not consequential enough to have that much impact on the undercrust of the pizza. What you were testing was the ability of air to transfer heat to the metal plate: I will grant you it's quite poor indeed! However, place a pizza in contact with a sheet of steel that is 550°F and I think you'll find that the steel-to-pizza heat transfer rate is a touch higher.

In my experience McMaster is always more expensive than a local source: I'd check the Yellow Pages first and rely on McM for the weird stuff you can't find anyplace else.

Try preheating the plate for an hour, like you do with a stone. I suspect you'll find that it holds and transfers heat quite well when it is up to temp.

Nice summary, cbread. And of course, this is all covered in detail in the book, too. Your oven stores heat in its walls (and in any big hunk of metal you put in there...): the air is almost completely incidental. So opening the oven door has far less affect on the oven temp than is commonly assumed, since air is such a horrible conductor.

I think I feel another Mexican cooking spell coming on here... I got this book for Christmas, and haven't made anything from it yet. Do you guys have any favorites?

Gotta disagree with this: I rather like the QPC and the Big Mac. I also like those breakfast biscuits. For me, Hardees is the king of the "horrific fast food" camp. I also think that Carl's Jr. burgers much, much worse than McD's. Now McDonalds' coffee? No chance. Wow what dreck.

Yeah, I'm rather fond of my little label printer, it sees a lot of use in the kitchen. The one I have is similar to this one: it appears the actual model I have doesn't exist anymore.

I'd be pretty surprised if that was the standard the community of contributors settled on, but I've been surprised before. Frankly, I see more value in a resource that is 99% accurate and has 100k articles than one that is 99.99% accurate and has 1000. That said: I think it's obvious that if you (or anyone else out there!) want to focus your efforts on improving the reliability of the resource by hunting down citations I think that everyone would appreciate the work done. I'd love to see a small team of people in there doing that sort of thing. Maybe those who aren't interested in writing?

There was not much to say about the zucchini: if you like zucchini and you like garlic, you'll like the dish. there's really not much to it. The problem with the green beans was my owned damned fault: the recipe for the stir-fried pickled green beans says to use the normal pickling brine, but to only "pickle" them for three days, and do it in the refrigerator. Of course, for that short time and at those low temps, the beans don't "pickle" at all, in that there is no fermentation. So you just end up with brined green beans. I didn't really think about that when I changed my mind and decided to just serve them as a pickled vegetable: they weren't pickled! Doh.

Tai Bai Chicken (tai bai jin) (pp. 245–247) Zucchini Slivers with Garlic (chao nan gua si) (pp. 303–304) Pickled Vegetables (si chuan pao cai) (pp. 71–72) Look, three dishes! I even served them separately instead of plating them all together. Of course, this was made possible by the addition of the pickled green beans. Unfortunately, I had intended to use those green beans for a pickled green bean and pork stir-fry, so they pickling procedure was a little different: it did not work at all as just a pickled vegetable, because they never fermented. Basically they were just very very salty green beans, not my cup of tea. The zucchini is a very simple stir fry of zucchini and garlic, pretty tough to screw up, it tasted pretty good. But the star of the show was clearly the Tai Bai Chicken, which was fantastic. I have nothing bad to say about it: it was spicy as hell, but not unexpectedly so, and not unbearably so, and it was balanced well by the sweetness of the dish (and a lot of rice!). I will definitely be making this again.

My plus one votes Italian. I abstain.

There is an oxygen absorbing packet in the lining of the bag, and the bag itself is made of thick mylar in the outer layer (which is very airtight).

You might want to have a look at the Cooking Issues post on centrifuges in the kitchen.

Modernist Cuisine's section on centrifuges is pretty short, but the recipes it lists are: How to separate fresh butterfat from cream Carotene butter Tomato water Pea juice (including pea butter) Roasted hazelnut oil In addition, in volume five the centrifuge makes a few (optional) appearances, where it seems to be used mostly for clarification. I'd bet you could develop an entire cookbook based on neat things you can do with a centrifuge... if only anyone but Nathan and the guys at Cooking Issues had one!

It's a good review: the criticism is pretty much spot on: While of course many are cooking things from the book, I suspect many more will value it more for the first four volumes (and the kitchen manual) than for the fifth volume, which is dedicated to plated dishes the likes of which you expect to see at Alinea or The French Laundry. I suspect not many of those are going to be making an appearance at dinner parties!

I'd say that a centrifuge is of no use whatsoever to the "average home cook." There are many products you can make in it that cannot be achieved in any other way, but they are hardly the sort of thing you expect from a home kitchen. Then again, a smoker doesn't find a place in many average home kitchens either, but I think we can agree that you can make some mighty fine food with it.

Yeah, I've found that's a great approach for getting articles started: I take the Wikipedia article (don't forget to put "Copied from Wikipedia article XXX" in your edit summary!), and then remove all the non-culinary stuff. I've also been striving for a sort of "inverted pyramid" article style that starts by asking "What is the most likely reason a person came to this Wiki to read this article? What question are they trying to answer?" and then arranging the article to answer the most likely question first, and so on. Of course, there are many different questions that might be asked, so the whole exercise is wildly subjective, even when just stating facts!

To some extent this is the sort of thing we're just going to have to work out as a community of people building a wiki: obviously, a statement made with a citation to a reputable source is simply more valuable that one made based on one's own experience, no matter what the statement is. At the same time, I'd hate to see the project paralyzed by people unwilling to add what they know because they don't have the time or energy or whatever to find a source. After all, someone can easily come along later and put in references, and I certainly hope they do so. The point here is that we can work together to incrementally improve the wiki: an article does not have to spring forth full-formed, and if you don't have a reference yet, I personally hope you'll still add what you know.

All we are doing with a centrifuge is accelerating the action of gravity (OK, sometimes we are accelerating it A LOT). So pretty much any centrifuge is going to be better than no centrifuge ... but it's not like this is a critical piece of equipment. One thing is for sure: you should NOT be trying to build your own that can equal or even come close to the power of a lab centrifuge. Playing around with your washing machine is safe, and it may even be modestly effective. But please don't go mounting things to your router!

I haven't: all the measures I have seen max out at hundredths of a gram, and the majority in tenths. Of course, my scale resolving only to tenths is obviously iffy when the recipe calls for tenths, you'd like one additional digit. Also, this only applies if you are making the stated quantity: if you want to cut a recipe down, now you might be talking about wanting more accuracy. Surprisingly (to me anyway) is that the recipes given seem to be geared toward making four portions, so it's not like these are recipes you are going to want to make 10% of or something.

So, I'm making (or should I say, "attempting to make") the "Aromatic Alsatian Mustard". Nothing Modernist-y here, it's just mustard. But I realized after blending it that I may have misunderstood the intent of the instructions, so if I could get your take on this: 1) Blanch mustard seeds 2) Combine seeds with vinegar 3) Soak for 12h 4) Combine soaked mustard seeds with other ingredients and process In step four, do you interpret that to mean "drain mustard seeds and combine seeds only"? Or "combine seeds/vinegar mix"? I simply assumed that, given the very precise quantity of vinegar called for (none of the "to cover" stuff), and given that there is a step for combining the vinegar and mustard seed, that if they had wanted them drained they would have said so. But I'm having second thoughts: the mustard came out of the food processor pretty thin. Any advice?

It seems to me that their strategy when cooking sous vide is to simply make an entirely different class of sauces for those dishes that are protein+sauce focused. Though truth be told, the "protein plus sauce on a plate" style of dish is definitely not the focus here! They have a couple (like the BBQ, or the aged rare roast beef jus), but the vast majority of the plated dishes are not like that at all.