Chris Hennes

I've been playing around with the Book entry form today: it will now create the article title automatically for you based on the book title and subtitle you enter. It also appends the word "(book)" to the end of the title so that it's clear. This is especially important when you have ambiguous-sounding books like "Thai Cuisine." Give it a try and see what you think: http://wiki.egullet.org/index.php?title=Special:FormEdit/Book_article

Yes, more or less. You can add them to the article before they exist, if you want (by simply typing in "[[File:My great image.jpg]]" or whatever): that will show up in the article as a redlink that will take you to the image upload page. I'm not sure that's any easier. There are apparently some usability projects going on at Wikipedia that aim to address the annoying way this works, but nothing has come of it yet.

No, though I'm not sure it would crumble, either: it wound up the consistency of clay, even after an overnight rest in the fridge.

On the contrary, they are using (for the most part) the best ideas from the past seasons. Not "retread": "greatest hits".

I personally liked the long shot of the Swanson Chicken Stock during the cookie challenge. Maybe just a little out of place? that said... as long as the challenge involves cooking, I don't care about the product placement, store placement, location, whatever. The chefs are competing against one another head to head, they all have the same limitations, and this time the guy who went home left because he oversalted his soup, not because he got screwed by a broken hotplate or something. Not the most exciting or interesting challenge, but hardly as egregious as all that.

That's a good suggestion (and welcome, PetersCreek!): I'm not sure that rice milk powder will add what you need, so there may be no benefit to using it. I think it's the protein in the milk powder (and of course the soy protein powder) that is doing the job there. Does rice milk powder have much protein in it? I admit I know next to nothing about it.

Oh, and that cheese sauce went great on a potato and chorizo hash this morning, so it's not just for mac and cheese...

Well, it would allow you to make fondue with cheeses that don't normally work I guess, like this really aged cheddars and goudas. I also think that you can get better flavor release from some of the modernist thickening agents than you can from the starches typically used in fondue, but I don't have the book handy to check that table. Chris A, does the book mention fondue?

I think probably each major category of tea will wind up in a subarticle. But of course we can always split stuff down the road, too. Write what you know...

Actually, the reason you couldn't figure it out is because it's magic... MediaWiki (the software running the wiki) automatically adds the content box where there are four or more sections on the page. However! You can both force the box to appear before then, and suppress it from appearing at all: just put either __NOTOC__ or __FORCETOC__ someplace in the article. (Those are called "magic words". Yes, really. You can read more about them here.) ETA: A "section" in this sense is anything set off by a heading or subheading, so: == A great section == === A great subsection === ==== Not a very good sub-sub-section at all ==== == Another section == And that's enough to get the contents box to appear.

I love that Deal Extreme scale, I've got the same one. I can't believe how great it is for $10.

We're rolling along now... article 300 ("Bread") was just started by Society member Iradubinsky. Of course, some of those article look like "Tea", which may be somewhat... inadequate. Anyone know anything about tea?

I agree with vice: I think you could probably simply omit the powder.

Chris, this recipe calls for the iota carrageenan, and as I discovered writing the WIkiGullet article on the stuff, they are definitely not interchangeable. Yeah, you're not missing anything lacking Velveeta ... at refrigerated temperatures Velveeta has a very odd texture, squishy and rubbery, but the key is when you heat it its mouthfeel is perfectly smooth, and it doesn't break even at very high temperatures. The combined emulsification of the carrageenan and sodium citrate is pretty powerful. I took two quite grainy cheeses, and once melted and emulsified they were completely smooth, with no detectable grain, even heated to a near boil.

For those looking to make links to WikiGullet pages here in the forums, I added a new BBCode tag today: [wiki=Article name]Text to link[/wiki] So for example: [wiki=Carrageenan]A great thickener derived from seaweed[/wiki] would give: A great thickener derived from seaweed. Please let me know if it gives you any trouble.

It took about ten or fifteen minutes to make the cheese block. I chilled it for maybe half hour at room temp, and another half hour in the fridge. It was still not quite solidifed when I went to shred it, so I wound up with "cheese spaetzle" rather than "cheese shreds" but it didn't really matter. So call it 20 minutes of cooking total? Plus the chilling time? Faster than the bechamel method...

Mac and Cheese (p. 3-387) No, this isn't some kind of play on words, or a joke-recipe, or some kind of fascinating modernist creation. It's just macaroni and cheese. This recipe is a clear demonstration that while you can use modernist ingredients to create some really crazy stuff, you can also apply them to simply take a classic dish and make it better. And believe me when I say it: this version of mac and cheese is so vastly, clearly superior to anything I've ever had it is mind boggling. There are two keys to the dish, both related to problems with the original: the first is that when you make a cheese sauce with a bechamel base, you have to use a LOT of bechamel, and there is a limit to how much cheese you can add before it breaks. This winds up diluting the cheese flavor, and is part of the reason I would never consider making a traditional mac and cheese with a really great cheese: its subtlety would simply be lost, and you'd gain nothing over using a simpler cheese. The second key is that not only does bechamel dilute the cheese flavor purely by volume, it also has poor "flavor release" compared to, say, carageenan: the book spends a great deal of time talking about this sort of thing, and it's very helpful for understanding why these techniques work as well as they do. So, the modernist version of the dish does away with the bechamel base: instead, you make a small amount of a solution of beer, water, sodium citrate (to emulsify the cheese) and carrageenan (the thicken the sauce). You then melt a huge quantity of excellent cheese into it (I used Cabot clothbound cheddar and Roomano Pradera Gouda), in effect making your own processed cheese block. You chill it down until you literally have a block of processed cheese more or less the consistency of Velveeta, and then you shred it. The pasta is cooked in just enough water for it to absorb, and then the shredded cheese product is stirred in. You wind up with a mac and cheese the same texture as if you had used Velveeta: perfectly, flawlessly smooth. Except it tastes incredibly intensely like the best cheeses in the world! Perhaps you have gathered here that I rather liked the stuff. If this is "Modernist" then consider me modernified. Sort of. I did serve it with dry-fried chicken and steamed broccoli...

I saw one, in the first volume. An "and" instead of an "an" I think.

My order from Specialty Bottle arrived, and they are perfectly sized for everything except the Tapioca Maltodextrin (which is really light, so takes up a lot of space).

According to McGee:

I believe they suggested a normal fine mesh strainer, but my reviewer access has expired so I can't check it out. Chris Amirault, you reading this? Can you look it up?

The Modernist Cuisine suggestion is to filter the wine first.

Pedro's Daily Gullet article is here: Santi Santamaria: passion(ate) matters

The only online version I am aware of is the reviewer version (basically just photos of the pages... pretty miserable to deal with): I don't think there is an actual eBook or real online version.

rancho_gordo, you are a hell of a tease. Let's just say, hypothetically, that if you were to land a deal with these chile growers, I think you'd have a few customers here.