Chris Hennes

Yeah, that's the part of the story I'm having trouble with. Of course the restaurant is within its rights to refuse to serve someone, and maybe they have a legitimate beef with this reviewer, but to me this part of the story reeks a bit.

Right - though we've discussed the merits of critic anonymity here before, and I find myself swayed by the argument that the anonymity is a farce anyway (after all, this restauranteur knew what she looked like enough to recognize her in line). ETA: Here is a topic where we had that discussion in the past. A few differing opinions in there, of course!

Takes "critiquing the critic" to a whole new level. I dunno about fair, but it's pretty damned funny.

Well, Jamie is "in it to win it"—when she saw that her dish was a failure, and realized that she could potentially escape the situation by continuously claiming she "just needed more time," she went for it. I think the set-up of the challenge was stupid for allowing that sort of behavior, but I find it hard to fault Jamie for not throwing herself in front of the bus (to use the conventional Top Chef metaphor). She sure didn't make any friends that day, though.

Do you have a meat thermometer? If so, you probably want to target just over 200°F for the ribs: by the time they reach that, they should have been at a high enough temperature for long enough to more or less completely melt the connective tissue, and will give you that literally falling-apart texture you are looking for. Wrapped in foil I'd expect them to come up to temp a little faster than they do in your smoker, since you won't get any of the evaporative cooling you get in the dry air of the smoker. You should have no trouble getting them cooked in the oven, I don't think.

True, of course. But the bacteria had 13 years to try... if the can's integrity was compromised, that is.

Well, there is a lot of water in there too: I don't know what the water activity of SCM is, but it's surely a lot higher than any confections, and they have a finite shelf-life due to the amount of free water. So canning is more than a safety precaution... if you want more than two or three weeks of shelf life at room temp, I would guess that sterile canning is a must.

I'd actually be really interested to know what potential contaminants we are worried about here (yeah, so I'm a nerd...). I would think that the extreme temperature SCM is processed at would eliminate any c. botulinin spores, and really pretty much anything else. What are the potential contaminants here?

I somehow always suspected you had a thing for beans...

My love of tea is well known, after all...

Of course, not all Szechuan cuisine has Szechuan peppercorns in it, and it's not always the dominant taste even when it is present. However, it sounds from tino27 and LuckyGirl that the dish was advertised as featuring Szechuan peppercorns, so it's fair to expect them to be dominant.

I've found that the width difference can make a dramatic impact on the flavor balance of pasta dishes, particularly when using fresh pasta. I think it's probably mostly to do with the ratios of sauce to pasta, but I suppose it could also be something more specific about the width. I make my papardelle so that when cooked it comes to about an inch wide: my tagliatelle is about half that. I personally prefer cream sauces with the tagliatelle and meat sauces with papardelle, in terms of the mouthfeel and flavor ratio. But obviously that is just my personal preference, I couldn't tell you what the "classic" proportions are supposed to be.

Most of the flavor from the Szechuan Peppercorn is in that outer hull: when I cook with them, I remove the inner seed portion and grind the outer hull in a mortar and pestle. I don't think the final dish has anything visually recognizable as a Szechuan Peppercorn, though of course the flavor is quite distinct. I also always toast them, which greatly increases their intensity and changes the flavor a bit as well, so it's possible that step was omitted where you had them. Finally, it's quite a lot of work to separate out that center hard nub, so if the restaurant took the lazy route and used the whole thing they were using a much smaller percentage of the flavorful part of the peppercorn. I don't recall the center nub having much flavor to speak of, I doubt it accounts for your "soapy" flavor. Regarding the white pepper: I find that nothing else out there quite has that flavor. Certainly not any of the other peppercorns of any color. I think if the dish tasted of white pepper, it's just because there was in fact a lot of white pepper in there.

I usually just use my air filtration mask... no need to go full SCUBA!

Toss it? Hell, see if you can sell it as an antique on eBay!

Not an apples-to-apples comparison: with a broken finger, all the hospital is going to do is splint it, the same thing as the show's own medic. With stitches, their efficacy is dramatically reduced the longer you wait. When you need stitches, you need them NOW. Plus, with modern stitches and various adhesives, it's hard to say how serious a cut is based on the number of stitches. In my opinion, what we are seeing here is a clear case of the Elves giving the "villain" edit: I strongly doubt Jamie had any real choice about going out to get those stitches. If she did, the producers and their lawyers are sleeping on the job.

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I agree, I enjoyed this episode a lot. I'm sorry Dale went home, I liked having him around and would have preferred Fabio's elimination, but it seemed fair. And obviously Mr. Sommelier was not long for this competition (and seemed to know it upon defeat).

Well, the chapter on terrines is quite lovely: its real flaw is that it duplicates the content from the Garde Manger book, which I already owned. If you don't own Garde Manger and are primarily interested in terrines, this books will probably serve you just fine. While I love to eat (some) terrines, I don't make many of them, so that isn't much value to me. I bought the book for the sausage chapter: after all, it has dry-cured sausages on its cover! You know what they say about judging a book by its cover...

I think Lisa has a good strategy for determining a fair price for your soups, and I also agree completely about the bread pricing: I would think that you could fetch more like $5/loaf (or higher, depending on the bread) for fresh, high-quality bread delivered to your door.

I got my copy yesterday and have thumbed through it: I must admit to being quite disappointed so far, both with the choice of content, and with the way it is presented. There are many examples of areas where I think the content is unnecessary in a book written to the audience of potential charcuteriers. For example, most of chapter two is dedicated to describing the flavor of various herbs and spices. It even includes a "helpful" chart on which sausages they are used in: apparently paprika is only used in Italian Sausage... who knew? Much of the book feels like it was laid out first, and then information was added to fill in sections that the designer thought would look good on that page. The book contains a large amount of food safety information, some useful and some not. The extensive listing and description of the various possible bacterial infections is interesting in an academic sense, but contains little practical information other than "prevent cross-contamination," "cook everything to death," and "chill quickly." It treats trichnosis as a very serious threat, although it is now exceedingly rare in the US. And there, at the very end, is a single paragraph on "harmful molds in sausages." It contains no actual useful information, simply instructing you to use a mold inhibitor to prevent its growth. The remainder of the chapter is a copy-and-paste job from every other Food Production Safety 101 textbook on the planet. I would think that at a culinary school a course like that would be a prerequisite for entry into a charcuterie class: no need for it here. The chapter on forcemeats is large and well-illustrated, and covers exactly the same material as the Garde Manger book.The CIA seems to have a real fascination with terrines. The chapter on sausages contains some useful checklists for sausage production, and a nice discussion of the various types of casing. The recipes included are uninspiring, however, and there is virtually no coverage of dry- and semi-dry sausages: a few recipes and a few cursory comments, but no useful, practical advice. They follow up with a quite extensive chapter on condiments. Finally, they include a number of completely superfluous conversion tables. This book is nearly completely replaceable by Ruhlman and Polcyn's Charcuterie; add the CIA's Garde Manger if you want to make terrines, and definitely pick up the Marianski's The Art of Making Fermented Sausages if you are interested in dry- and semi-dry sausages.

I made a kohlrabi stew tonight from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian: the recipe was not very clear about what size pieces to cut the kohlrabi into, but after cooking in liquid for the time specified in the recipe (35 minutes) it was still quite crunchy and not at all soft. What is the general desired texture of cooked kohlrabi? Could this have been right?

Well, it's more like Greweling has written two books: the original Chocolates and Confections book, and the more recent Chocolates and Confections at Home book. The "at home" book isn't really related to the original, it's a different book entirely. Not that the title helps with that...

I agree—I've made several of the charcuterie recipes from Garde Manger and had very good luck with them. This e-mail was the first I'd heard of the new book, but based on the table of contents and index on Amazon.com I went ahead and ordered myself a Christmas present.

I just got an e-mail from the Culinary Institute of America announcing their new charcuterie textbook, The Art of Charcuterie: Anyone know anything more about this book? Planning on buying it?