Chris Hennes

The wafers are fantastic: the are 3 grams each, so it is easy to measure small quantities just by counting them out if need be, and they are all uniform, so they melt quickly and evenly. I don't know if I could go back to bars after getting the wafers. OK, lunchtime... per Oceangroveguy's request, I went to The Corner Room---here is the exterior: The Corner Room is the restaraunt on the street level of this building. The Allen Street Grill, on the second floor, has a nice atmosphere and good seats by all those windows, but is a bit more expensive and I don't think is worth it. And, as requested, I got the Cheeseburger Club, burger medium, on white bread, with a side of fries: Overall, I was favorably impressed with the sandwich, which I had never had before. The first priority of a club sandwich must be: is the bacon crisp? Check. Next, the meat, in this case the burger: tastes good? Check. Juicy? Check. Done medium? More like medium well, but close enough considering that it remained tasty and juicy. I found the lettuce a bit overwhelming, and the tomatoes are typical winter hothouse garbage (mealy, watery and tasteless), but the cheese was good, and there was plenty of it. So overall, I'd order it again, for the $7.50 it cost. The bonus was that the fries were better than I remembered as well, so good call on the Corner Room! If you're ever in State College and looking for breakfast or lunch at a reasonable price point, with friendly service and a typical PA diner menu, look no further. (I should add that their cheesesteak is pretty good for the region, and their early-bird breakfast special is a good value).

Siu yook is a great idea! origamicrane's post on the Siu Yook thread is one of the best I have seen on the forums! Incredibly thorough! I've actually never had siu yook, but maybe this week would be a fun time to try it. I haven't planned dinner for next Saturday yet...

Actually, charcuterie is what brought me to eGullet in the first place---I needed some help with the proper duck confit method for a cassoulet! I am always on the lookout for complicated cooking projects (I'm an engineer, I always look for the most complicated solution!! ), and charcuterie ranks right up there near the top in terms of complication. There is not much more challenging that making dry-cured sausage, IMO. Well, charcuterie is fun and all, but a little hard to bring into the office, and my wife doesn't much care for anything but the bacon. So I hunted around here and the folks over in the various confections threads seemed friendly and helpful, and confections seemed pretty dang complicated, so I dove in. Everyone at my office is going to get fat off all the truffles this week!!

The Corner Room is still alive and kicking: on the rare occasions that I eat breakfast, that is my restaurant of choice (mostly because it is across the street from my office!). I can't say I've ever had the cheeseburger club, but I'm game. That is definitely one of the spots I was going to hit for lunch, along with Herwigs Austrian Bistro and the Golden Wok. Any other Penn State alums out there? (We are!!)

When I get to my office and get my laptop hooked up, this is what greets me every morning: You might think based on this that I like bacon... you'd be right! The image on the left monitor is here, and on the right is from here. Obviously, then, one of the charcuterie items this week is a fresh batch of bacon: here is the mise en place (I did this on Saturday so I could smoke next Sunday and you would get to see the finished product) I'm actually only curing half the belly this week: the other half will be used in another, yet-to-be-determined, cooking project. Depending on when my l'Epicerie order comes in, I may also make some Hungarian Paprika Sausages, as well as some Hot-Smoked Andouille. These are all recipes from Ruhlman and Polcyn's Charcuterie (eG thread here).

The chocolates in those boxes (they are the 5kg boxes I picked up from Chocosphere) are, from left to right, "Creme Francais" 31% Cocoa Butter based White, "Soleil d'Or" 38% Milk Chocolate, and "Lever du Soleil" 61% Semisweet Dark Chocolate, all wafers. I really don't have anything exciting planned for the week, so I can take requests. Anything you want to see? I'll be hitting my favorite lunch spots in town throughout the week, but dinners will be at home for the most part. Yup---I'm leaving town this summer with my wife, and will hopefully finish up by December (at least, that's when I am funded until!). I will have to call her "Dr. Hennes" for an entire semester!! Glad you are all here: it's a gigantic mug! It must be around 14 oz, I can fit the entire batch of coffee in it at once. Get yours here!

Good morning from State College, PA (and congratulations to Kerry Beal for guessing my identity!) . I only wish that the first teaser photo was current---alas, it was taken last summer, things aren't quite that green yet at this latitude. Thanks, Susan, for inviting me to do a foodblog this week. First a little background: "Hennes" rhymes with "tennis," I'm 27, and I'm working on my Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering at Penn State. My wife is currently finishing her Ph.D. in Accounting here, and you're catching us an an exciting/scary/stressful time in our lives: tomorrow we have to decide where my wife is going to accept a job that she will begin at the end of the summer. More on that later... In the grand tradition of foodblogs past, here is how I begin my mornings (at least, when I have time!): The eGullet mug is an unusual embellishment: I usually drink my morning coffee out of a stainless-steel thermos mug so I can nurse it for a couple hours. But the mug seemed appropriate for this blog, so here it is! Coffee is typically my only breakfast: I don't get hungry until around 10:30 or 11:00 a.m. I know, this is horrible and unhealthy, but there it is... you won't be seeing much breakfast food this week! What you will be seeing is a lot of pork, and a lot of chocolate: Sorry to disappoint those of you who are hoping to see chocolate-covered bacon, but this is as close as the two will get to each other this week . I've had bacon in a chocolate bar: it was good, but I can think of better uses for both ingredients . Other items on the menu this week include such thrilling entries as tacos, stir-fried green beans, and BLTs. Ah, the culinary adventures of a graduate student! I hope you'll drop by and say hello from time to time despite the mundane dinners! And I hope no one is too disappointed that I don't hail from anyplace exotic!

Tilapia with a grapefruit-lime vinaigrette:

My wife cringes whenever I break out the pomegranates: they stain everything!

lol, I was mostly referring to his use of various oils and extracts that are hard to come by. Half the recipes in the book require something that I would consider "exotic," so my point is that cocoa butter, by comparison, is not that odd! Lime oil? Mojito liqueur? Apple essence?!?

lol, it is very possible there were recipes in the box, but I must be honest and admit that if there were, I didn't even notice them . So posole is slaked corn, and I so I skip the cal step, if I can just figure out how to grind it. Has anyone used this grinder: Universal Grain/Corn/Cereal Mill?

I think the difference there would depend on whether you were making an asparagus soup or creating an asparagus soup. ← I'm trying to imagine what circumstances under which you would have to create a new dish with an ingredient you didn't like. Does this happen frequently? I would have figured that as a chef, when you decide to create a new dish, you have the flexibility to avoid ingredients that don't taste good to you, at least the vast majority of the time. As a cook, preparing someone else's dish, it's another story, of course. Then, all that matters is the proper seasoning, which I think you could do independent of liking the ingredients (as mentioned above).

Well, I guess it should be no surprise that you would come up with such a perfect method... I have always just made it (and by always, I mean, the one time I made it!) by heating the juice and sugar to boiling to kill any bad things, then cooling and storing. Better than Rose's, but I'll have to give your recipe a go next time. Have you ever tried using freshly-squeezed pomegranate juice?

Count me in the "retro" club---that food looks marvelous, esp. the duck leg on rosti.

That's an interesting point: if he wanted me to have a specific cocoa butter content, though, I wish he would just use cocoa butter. It's not like the rest of the book doesn't call for outlandish ingredients... cocoa butter is normal by comparison.

They do, and I wanted citric acid and lime oil anyway, so I went ahead and ordered it from them. Thanks for the tip.

Chris, the apple compote is basically just unsweetened applesauce boiled down to act as a source of pectin. You could substitute one of Shott's recipes with the G pectin if you don't have any apple pectin. ← Thanks, Kerry. The recipe calls for both the compote and pectin, so now I'm really confused... I think I will just pick up some pectin, but how much do I reduce the applesauce to result in "compote"?

I just got a big Rancho Gordo order in and it included a bag of "white corn" (thanks, Señor Sando!)---is this the stuff y'all are using to make the masa? Any more progress on this front?

Has anyone made the pbj's on page 284? They look great and I definitely want to try them this week now that my wife is back in town and I have someone to feed . Stupid question, though: what is apple compote in this context? How does the fruit layer in this compare to the ones in Shotts' book? I only have g pectin right now, so I was debating using one of Shotts' recipes instead of Greweling's.

Has anyone tried the gingerbread truffles on page 95? The ganache calls for three different types of chocolate, which strikes me as completely absurd, since it doesn't specify the brand so could not possibly be that specific to a taste profile. Any thoughts on this? I'm leaning towards using E. Guittard 38% milk to keep the flavor relatively light (they are coated with white chocolate).

Yeah, I am using the technique from the Cook's Illustrated article: I put a sheet of parchment in a saute pan, raise the loaf in that while the Dutch oven is preheating in the oven, then transfer the loaf, parchment and all, into the Dutch oven. I'm glad the technique worked out for you, sadie432. I've had a new batch of dough in the fridge for a few days now: I'm going to try for pizza later this week.

It looks like culantro to me.

That one on the right is my new favorite "dessert" ... I had never had uni before and that was the last course when we were there a couple weeks ago. Incredible, just incredible.

How warm did you have your chocolate? Was it effectively "melting" the caramel, making it more liquid that it would normally be at room temp? I wonder if using 90 degree F tempered chocolate (that would then set up very quickly) would eliminate this problem.

I had the Chef's Sashimi and Sushi Plate at Morimoto last night. Which was stupid, since I was at Fuji last week and the sushi at Fuji is head-and-shoulders above the stuff at Morimoto. In my defense, I had the Omakase last time I was at Morimoto and until I ate at Fuji that was the best meal I had ever had, so I had fond recollections of Morimoto. If you go to Morimoto, get the Omakase, and I would recommend going light on the sushi and sashimi, which is not where they excel. Some of the cooked dishes from the omakase were very, very good when I had it. YYMV, of course, but in my opinion the sushi experience at Morimoto isn't worth the money.