Chris Hennes

Thanks, Maggie. Not sure Rick really needs my help... after all, on the back of the book he's got an endorsement from Rachel Ray! Strange, there aren't too many 30 minute meals in here... Tonight is an exception, however: this was indeed a 30-minute meal, and probably even less if you don't count the time to get the grill going. Tlayudas "Casi Oaxaqueñas" con Chorizo, Guacamole y Queso Fresco ("Almost Oaxacan" Grilled Tostadas with Chorizo, Tangy Guacamole and Fresh Cheese) (pp. 202–203) This is a pretty simple dish: grill some tortillas until crispy, top with chorizo and a thin tomatillo-avacado sauce, and sprinkle on fresh cheese. Best enjoyed by a group of friends standing around the grill with a beer in hand. Or perhaps margaritas... at any rate, simple and excellent. In particular, the guacamole is fantastic, sort of a hybrid between guacamole and a tomatillo salsa. The first step is to take somewhat dried out tortillas and grill them. As you can see from the one that is puffed up, mine were still too fresh: I don't think they are supposed to do that. Once they are crispy on both sides (which takes some judgement and some prodding with the tongs) you brush them with lard: Hopefully after that step you haven't lit anything on fire, and can pile on some cooked chorizo: Finally, once the chorizo is warm you pour over a bit of the "guacamole" and sprinkle on some queso fresco: I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn't like these. And as long as you are OK just sort of hanging out around the grill, I bet you could arrange an entire fiesta around this dish and some beer. Sign me up.

Pheh, they're probably editing out the real discussion so that the casual viewers aren't confused by complicated "food" stuff.

Everyone I have talked to has a preference between the two, and it seems heavily skewed towards carrots. I want to see if the consensus at eG backs that up. Which it shouldn't, since celery is clearly superior. Peanut butter on carrots? No thanks.

I usually have one pint of blueberries to 1 1/2 cups flour, which I think is plenty. More than that and I have trouble getting the pancakes to cook through, the blueberries slow things down I think.

Pancakes get a lot of love around here. Of course, there is The pancake topic to end all pancake topics, plus also Pancakes, how do I love thee? , Pancakes, Waffles, French Toast: Pick One., and more. But I think that blueberry pancakes are both unique enough in construction, and just awesome enough in general, to warrant a separate discussion. One of the tricks with blueberry pancakes is that their minimum thickness is governed by the size of the berries: if you have big berries, you are going to wind up with thick pancakes. I find this necessitates some changes to the batter structure so that you achieve the best texture. I also like to skip any vanilla extract, but add a little (or sometimes A LOT) of lemon zest. What are your thoughts on blueberry pancakes? How do they differ from your normal pancake recipe, if they differ?

If you had to pick one, which would it be, celery or carrots? Me, I'm definitely in the celery camp. It's good raw, cooked, and everything in between. Good with any number of toppings, as a main ingredient or as a bit part. Carrots? Too sweet, and too carroty.

Huaraches (Sandal-Shaped Corn Masa Cakes with Black Beans, Salsa, and Aged Cheese) (pp. 206–207) There were pretty tasty, and also pretty easy to make. I'm trying something new tonight, since the final photo doesn't really describe what's going on here, and I think the photo in the book is completely worthless, so here goes... You start out with a pound of fresh masa and 3/4 cups of black beans, both seasoned to taste with salt and adjusted with water so they are the same consistency: Portion the masa into eight equal balls (2 oz each), and the beans into 2 teaspoon balls (for me that was 11 grams... sorry for the mixed units!): Bayless says to take the ball of masa and form it into an "egg" shape, so here's my egg, with a quarter in the background for size reference: Then, you press your thumb into the egg to create a pocket for the beans: Add the beans: Then seal it up and roll it into the shape of a "cigar" (again, according to Bayless). I wasn't sure what kind of cigars Rick smokes, though, so this first one I made basically completely cylindrical. Later I made them tapered at the ends, which I liked better visually. He then says to flatten it into a "six-inch oval." When I think of flattening masa, I think of a tortilla press, but that didn't work very well. I think he just means to press them out with your hands. I used a frying pan to squish them, which worked fine (I've made tortillas that way too): Next up you cook them like tortillas, but on lower heat since they are so much thicker Here's how thick mine came out (again compared to a US quarter): After their first cooking, you fry them on each side: While frying on the first side mine puffed up: Bayless didn't mention that they would do that, but it seemed reasonable. Then you flip them over and top them with salsa (I used Roasted Tomatillo) and cheese (I used Cotija): Let them cook a bit, then serve them with chopped onions, radishes, and cilantro:

I think this has been my favorite snack food "trend" of the last few years. In particular, they've got some mixtures where they use pistachios as the "filler" now instead of peanuts. Well hell, that's my kind of nut mix, I love pistachios! I still wish they'd leave the Brazil nuts out it, though, I just don't care for them.

The only thing remotely unfair about that is that they were eliminating a team, rather than a single person: it could easily have happened that a real loser dragged a contender out with them. But a) that didn't happen, and b) if the person were REALLY a contender for "Top Chef" shouldn't they have been able to deal with having a loser on their team? The fact that at the end there were only three teams competing is not relevant if you view the contest as a whole unit.

Blueberries are in season, we've been doing blueberry pancakes for dinner once a week all month. Sometimes we even eat them with forks!

I see that at JCK they are now listing an additional line they call "Inazuma": the styling is more traditional, and they use a different steel. Does anyone know anything about 19C27 steel, and how it compares to the VG10 in their Gekko line?

In the eGullet Culinary Institute course on stocks Fat Guy and Carolyn Tillie show us how to make classic chicken and beef stocks, but no mention is made of the existence of vegetable stock. There is a topic on how to make it, but not much discussion on how to use it. Some people seem to just use it to handle vegetarian requests, but use chicken or veal stock if they possibly can. But I happen to like a well-made vegetable stock. I know it's not a straight-up replacement for a meat stock, though: are there places where a vegetable stock really shines?

I had actually assumed that given the structure of the challenge, there would not even be a winner declared, so I was a bit surprised by that. But I think had they omitted the winning part, the challenge was perfectly reasonable.

Can you reduce a vegetable stock way down the way you do a meat stock? I know you won't get an actual glacé texture without the gelatin, but does the flavor suffer on the reduction? I'm thinking in terms of storage space.

I've never actually tried the jarred stuff, but I think I've seen it on the shelves at the store I get all my Mexican ingredients at. I could be thinking of something else, though.

Awesome, I'm glad the publisher has put some of these recipes online, thanks for finding that. You addition of the mojo de ajo sounds great, too. Did you use homemade?

Agreed, that quickfire was a little "precious" for my taste.

Phew, Kenny dodged a bullet there. I didn't figure the instructor was long for the competition, and if that kid couldn't tell the pasta was undercooked, what is he even doing here?

No, this is a bit of a "meat and potatoes" state. In addition, PA is a major source of mushrooms for the US, and we had Wegman's there (a nice grocery store chain).

Mushrooms.Here in Oklahoma I can get white button, the occasional shiitake, portobello, the super-common ones. But living in Pennsylvania for five years I had access to a dozen different varieties that changed on a regular basis. It was great, I miss it.

I don't really know how you could tell: I've never seen field corn for sale here (not for human consumption, anyway). But the standard corn that we eat here in the US anyway is a sweet corn, not a field corn, or so I read.

Are we just talking about sweet corn here? In Mexican cooking the corn used to make tortillas and tamales is a field corn: not sweet, and hard to find (at least around me).

Mochomos con Cebolla Dorada y Salsa Roja (Crispy Flank Steak Shreds with Golden Onions and Red Chile Salsa) (pp. 140–141) From the instructions for this dish: You know what the main difference between a professional chef and a home cook is? A professional chef has a sous chef to do this crap!! It takes a LONG TIME to shred a pound of flank steak. Next instruction: So let me get this straight: I have one pound of flank steak, shredded into bits NO LARGER than a strand of angel hair pasta. That's hundreds, probably thousands of individual threads. For reference, here's 1/4 pound: You see all those tiny little strands? That's a lot of strands to drop in one by one. Also, you see that bit of moisture on them? That's water. There's water in them, too, and when they heat up the fibers squeeze together, forcing the water out into the 375 degree oil... where the water vaporizes and rises to the surface to the oil in the form of a big splatter. A LOT of big splatters. So, finally, you fry some up. If you get too aggressive adding too many at once, you wind up with this: Lovely, OK, we can still work with that, clumped though it may be. And then I tasted it. Tasted like... deep fried crispy stuff. Wait, how much time did I just spend shredding that perfectly good flank steak? To wind up with "deep fried crispy stuff"? I should have just bought some damned Chow Mein noodles. The texture was quite nice. The taste was fine on its own, and totally lost with the other components of the dish, with the fried stuff serving in a purely textural role. My advice? If you want this dish just go to Bayless's restaurant, where he has dozens of minions shredding beef for him, always-ready fryolators manned by line cooks with no fear of oil splatters, and a ventilation system to get rid of the smell. This has no business existing in a cookbook at this level, if you ask me. This is not "The French Laundry", it's "Fiesta at Rick's."

Steven, we get into DTW on the 5th at 4:15, we could pick up our car and then swing back around to pick you up. Obviously this is predicated on our not missing any connections (we'll be coming in from SFO). ETA: We have a car, obviously, and are staying at the Fairfield Ann Arbor.

I made tamales for dinner tonight and tried something new: I have an electric smoothtop range, so I turned a burner on medium-low with nothing on it. After I put the fillings in the tamale, but before I folded it, I took the whole thing over to the range and quickly heated it up right on the surface of the range, literally a few seconds before folding it over. It worked like a charm once I got the hang of how long to heat them for.