Chris Hennes

Like these?

I tried the towel thing on my second batch and the only thing it accomplished was making a big damned mess! And I think I'm still picking peanut skins out of the washing machine! I wonder if maybe I didn't roast the nuts enough? The skins really didn't seem to want to come loose.

Hmm, I own distressingly few of those: Under Pressure, the Flavor Bible, and Alinea are it. Time to remedy that, so I just ordered Fat, Milk, and Raising Steaks. I've got some reading to do before I can begin handicapping this race...

Ah, AB's recipe contains this very useful tip: Brilliant. Separating the skins from the nuts was a huge pain the way I did it (manually).

Recently I've made a couple of batches of Mafé. Since it was peanut season at the time, I bought some fresh raw peanuts at the produce market and started there, but it turns out I don't really have the first idea how to do it. What I wanted to do was start by making what was in essence a home made peanut butter. That meant I needed to roast, shell, and grind the nuts. So, first off: do you roast them in the shell or out? What temp, for how long? How do you know when they are done? Second, when making peanut butter, do you remove the inner (red) skin from the "nuts" or leave it on. Is there a trick for removing it? Something that doesn't involve doing each little legume by hand? Finally, I was hoping I could just whiz them in the food processor until they formed a paste. The first time this worked fine, but on my second attempt they simply would not paste-ify. What's the trick?

Well, $6 for the Reynolds does seem steep, but the stuff is friggin' awesome. I don't know that I would pay that much, but I use it a lot, and it's great.

Not strictly-speaking true: in the Charcuterie Index we have a link to an earlier suggestion of jmolinari's:

I think that the Jack Rose is a great cocktail to highlight good grenadine: Jack Rose (From The Essential Bartender's Guide by Robert Hess) 2 1/2 oz applejack 3/4 oz lemon juice 1/2 oz grenadine

Those look great... feel free to mail one my way if you need some taste-testing assistance! If you are trying to get rid of the cream cheese twang, why stick with all recipes that have cream cheese in them? Have you tried something more along the lines of a peanut butter custard? Also, I find that adding just a touch of curry powder can make peanut butter taste more... peanut buttery. Could be my imagination, of course. But if you need a trick to amp up the flavor it might be worth investigating non-peanut additives.

Having just moved to Oklahoma, I'm pretty excited by how early I got to start this year. The peas and onions are looking good, as are the strawberries (their first year, so I won't get any fruit this season). The blackberries are still dormant, and my tomatoes and peppers have not shipped from the nursery yet. I'm doing herbs in containers this year, so we'll have to see how that goes: I have not had a lot of luck with containers in the past, but I would not give up any of my flower garden for the herbs just yet this year and thought I would give it another try. Ah yeah, green beans go in in a couple weeks, I think.

On this point I must respectfully disagree: a gin and tonic has two ingredients and a garnish, all of which are critical elements. If all I was interested in was the gin, I would drink gin (or perhaps a very dry martini). Using a high-quality tonic (Fever Tree is my favorite) makes a world of difference in this humble drink, taking it from standard crappy college bar fare to something that is actually worth drinking, and it is precisely because the tonic actually brings something to the party.

I love an over-easy egg on top of almost any corn tortilla product, so that sounds great to me. As far as cook-off length: that's the great thing about the internet. From the Cook-off Index:

OK, so now I am nursing a Gimlet using the recipe in Hess's book (2.25 gin, .75 Rose's), of course with the Rose's substituted with homemade. He actually has you stir it, rather than shake it, so I went with that. I think the lime cordial is sorta like a pre-emulsified lime juice, so it doesn't seem to need shaking (though I'll try it on my next one in the interest of science). In a word: excellent. Really marvelous flavors. I think it would go better with Tanqueray, rather than the Beefeater I used, but still, a really great Gimlet. I'll try it with your recipe next (including the fresh lime juice and the "Shake it like it's someone you hate," too .

OK, getting on that time of year. I've still got quite a bit of pork left in the freezer, but I want to get a head start this year on trying to find an area farmer who is raising a few hogs. Since I'm getting in earlier this year, I'm hoping I have more options available. However, it seems like finding a slaughter operation that doesn't skin the hogs is tough: most of these small farmers hire the butcher to bring his trailer right to the farm, where they don't have the equipment to blanch and scrape. Before I start posting classified ads, I need to figure out what I want. Talking to people it seems like I do not want a hog that was raised as a show pig: they are apparently judged basically on "what would Hilshire Farms want to see in a pig?" Not quite what I'm after here. The question is, what, exactly, am I after? I want a tasty hog. Preferably with a lot of fat. How the heck do I advertise for that?

Has anyone tried omitting the yeast in a second batch? The way I typically make this bread these days is to mix up a new batch when I am down to one loaf's worth of dough left. I was thinking that there is really probably no reason to add any yeast with the subsequent batches because the yeast leftover in the original batch should just start multiplying one it gets fed with the fresh flour, right? Like doing a sourdough, but with a commercial yeast? Does this seem reasonable?

Rick Bayless brings this up in his "Mexico: One Plate at a Time" cookbook (companion to the TV series of the same name). In it he presents two different enchiladas: he characterizes them as "home kitchen enchiladas" and the other "street-food enchiladas" (I'm paraphrasing here). The first type, according to Bayless more typical of a home kitchen or restaurant, is more along the lines of what those of us north of the border think of enchiladas: a quick-fried and then chile-dipped tortilla wrapped or folded around some sort of filling. In the second type, the tortilla is first dipped in chile sauce, then fried, and served folded, with some lighter topping on top, but nothing in the middle. Personally I love both, though the "street-style" are a bit messier to cook since the oil splatters all over the place due to the water in the sauce. Still, they are delicious.

Possible? Sure. Likely? Who knows. The proof is in the tasting... you going to take one for the team?

From Wondrich's comments in the Esquire article you linked to:

Oh, sure, now I come back to read this, having decidedly NOT pressed down on the solids... too habituated to making stock, I think. Nevertheless, it smells great, and I'm looking forward to giving it a try tomorrow.

OK, I found some tartaric acid and made this tonight: I need some clarification, though. The recipe says to "heat on high for ten minutes"—does this really translate to "reduce to XX amount" or something along those lines? I couldn't heat on high for 10 minutes, I boiled over after 2 so I just let it simmer vigorously for ten minutes. How much reduction am I looking for, for future reference?

That's a good point, in that I doubt that many of us commenting here are the target audience for this book (which will not stop us from buying it and commenting on it, of course!). But I think that if you could communicate the idea that cooking is not magic, but rather a set of quite simple ratios that can then be endlessly modified, it seems to me that would be quite liberating to someone who is intimidated by the idea of cooking without a book. It will all be in the execution, but I think the idea has potential.

(Good catch, I did the math wrong: my bread, which is around 75% hydration, is really 910:680:23:16. Damned ratios!) I'd be very surprised if Ruhlman, who is a big advocate of weighing ingredients, wasn't figuring his ratios by weight.

I think you're right: upon reading the whole page at Amazon, I think I was lead astray by the subtitle: "The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking." In my mind, "Codes" has distinct connotation of "magic" or something along those lines. But the rest of the blurb goes on to mention that it is actually a book with only 33 ratios in it: the idea seems to be that you make small variations to those ratios and can make basically anything. Since that's almost the whole idea behind all of cooking, I think now I buy it...

My go-to recipe for bread, reduced to integers, is: 910:450:23:16 (Flour:Water:Salt:Yeast) So, while it does indeed "reduce to integers," I don't think that it is particularly "simple." So my concern is that what it will turn into in a book like this is "2:1 dry:wet" which does not actually provide enough information to make bread, and is not a very useful formula to know. Maybe I'm just reading too much into the blurb, and it will be a set of very simple formulas intended as starting points (few of my vinaigrettes wind up at exactly 3:1, but I may start them close to that and adjust as necessary). It just seems like a stretch to write a book on that premise: I don't really understand what the point will be, but I suppose none of us really knows until it comes out.

Katie, what is the reason behind having both citric and tartaric acid in your recipe? I ask because, naturally, I only have citric, and am feeling lazy... what would I be losing if I only used the citric?