Chris Hennes
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Posts posted by Chris Hennes
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2. Is McDonald's still steaming the buns or are they toasted or caramelized?
I just had one (for the first time in years---I wonder how many this thread has sold) and it was not toasted or caramelized in any way. The neon color of the cheese was a bit disturbing, since I think it is even more neon than normal processed cheese, but overall it is a good sandwich. I thought the amount of tartar sauce was perfect, and if it is fully canned now they must have figured out a way to do it right because I thought it was pretty good as far as store-bought tartar sauce is concerned.
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Now, this came as a bit of a surprise to us, as we had not seen this practice before. I'm wondering, is it better just to raise prices 5%, and not tell the dining public about it? Is it written this way for tax purposes? Does it bother anyone? Is it the beginning of a new trend? Should we be outraged?
I'm with Mitch and Rob on this, as well, though I'm a bit surprised that it is in tiny print at the bottom of the menu, like they are hoping no one will notice it. As long as the full 5% really is being used for employee health care, I have no issue with it, and think it is actually a nice alternative to just raising prices. This way the dining public can see why the prices went up.
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I'm kinda bummed about this year: because I'm moving mid-summer I can't do a garden. I will have to live vicariously through all of you. I love fresh peas! Right off the vine. Yum. Anyone have pictures of their gardens to post?
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Mmm, Reuben. Russian dressing or Thousand Island?
lol, crappy bottled Thousand Island, I'm afraid. I was going to make homemade Russian, but I didn't know it had horseradish in it, and I don't generally have that on hand. Doh! I'll remedy that soon and have another go...
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There is an older thread over here that is probably still at least somewhat relevant. The upshot is that diners generally love it, myself included. When traveling I generally only consider OT restaurants, since there are typically many good ones to choose from and it's easy to navigate and reserve. I cannot speak to how well it functions on the restaurant's side.
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I've noticed of late that I'm better able to pick out fruity notes in various coffees since I went from drinking one or two cups a day to nearly mainlining the stuff. I now understand why people prize Hawaiian Kona, Kenya AA and Jamaica Blue Mountain beans so much.
Yes, I have definitely found that with foods that I eat all the time (for me it is single-malt Scotch
) I am now far better able to discern the subtleties than I was before. My hope in starting this thread is that there is a "shortcut" to developing one's palate for all foods, so that immediately upon tasting, even something new, one could identify various flavor components, and be able to talk intelligently about how something tastes. Something like the kits for tasting wines. That with some practice using various "benchmark" foods, one can learn to discern the subtleties of a broad range of foods, without resorting to eating a single type non-stop for a week.I realized in my mid 30's that I could literally taste anything and have no real "kack" factor...even if I dont like whatever it is at all ..I can taste it appreciate it .....break down and discuss the flavors...I dont know if this was nature or nurture for me..maybe both ..there are foods I dont like that is for sure ..but I can still taste them and talk about them with objectivity ...that I feel is a gift...and I am so grateful to have it!This is a wonderful skill: I can eat almost anything, but I can rarely adequately describe the flavors. That is what I am really looking to learn how to do.
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My feeling is that "purism" is really about being right, and showing off the fact that the purist is more intelligent than the stupid rubes you don't know what substance X is really supposed to be.
Watch out, Chris -- you're in dangerous territory. Going beyond discussing behaviors to inferring the motivations behind them is popular, but often wrong. Because the inferrer brings different assumptions or mental models, and infers from within those -- not from within the world of the person doing the behavior, which can be very different. Such inferences consequently often reveal more about the person making them than the object of inference.
You're absolutely right, of course: my comment is informed primarily by my own (bad) habits. I find that whenever I get the urge to correct someone it generally turns out that the reason I want to do so is to "take them down a notch" and/or to show off my own knowledge. I try to resist "purism" for that reason, though of course many purists probably aren't operating on the same reasoning.
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People with what are considered unsophisticated palates will probably not enjoy, or even distinguish between things like blue cheese, tannic wines and well hung meat, in the same way a lot of desserts taste the same to me, whereas I have friends who can talk at length about cakes and chocolate bars.
This is sort of what I'm getting at---I have no trouble at all developing a taste for new foods, and I think that's a good thing, expanding one's culinary horizons, etc. But what I lack is the ability to discern subtle variations between foods. For example, in a recent thread on Domino's Pizza, Fat Guy mentioned an "off" or "chemical" taste to their tomato sauce. Well, I wasn't picking up on that until he brought it up. What else am I missing until someone else points it out to me?
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Continuing in the "food my wife doesn't eat" thread, tonight's dinner was a Reuben, inspired by the "Food Purity" thread:
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Over the years several discussions have cropped up here about the palate: see What's a palate?, A 'sophisticated' palate, and Acquired tastes, for example. In these threads it is frequently mentioned that it is, or at least may be, possible to "educate" one's palate. I'm not talking about acquiring tastes, here, but rather developing the ability to distinguish between tastes and to enunciate the difference, and, if such a consensus exists for a given food, evaluate it as "good," "bad," "indifferent," etc. For example, there are kits for developing an appreciation for the differences between wines (there is even an eGCI course on the topic). But with food in general, how does one go about systematically developing one's palate? Is it just a matter of eating different examples of the same substance over and over, for each individual food one wants to study, or is there a "tasting kit" for other things besides wine?
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I guess I am a purist mainly when I have an opportunity to bring someone down a notch.It's a step beyond regular food snobbism into something like hypersnobbism, in which pleasure takes a backseat to purism. But that's what makes it interesting.
My feeling is that "purism" is really about being right, and showing off the fact that the purist is more intelligent than the stupid rubes you don't know what substance X is really supposed to be. It doesn't really have anything to do with food, or taste, or whatever: that's just the manifestation we run into here at eGullet because that's what we're knowledgeable about. This is normal, and I am as susceptible to the impulse as anyone else. I just think the refusal to eat a food based solely on its name is fascinating, and I just can't subscribe to it. Nothing is gained from it, and plenty is lost. Raisin-cinnamon bagels and vodka martinis taste good! Not together, of course. Or do they? I don't usually have a martini with breakfast...
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Some recipes get written as "bakers' percentages".
Now *IF* other recipes were given in such proportional terms, then a scale that would do the calculations to vary the total quantity might be useful. But personally, I doubt it would be a big seller. AND since it seems too difficult to get recipes published in simple weight terms, I think that hoping for weight proportions is a pastime for an optimist.
Regarding bakers' percentages.
Since they relate to the total flour, they can get kinda tricksy when there are mixtures of flours used, and especially when some of the flour goes into a pre-ferment, long before many of the other ingredients would be measured out. Use a mixture of flours with a pre-ferment and a spreadsheet would likely be simpler than wrestling with the logic inbuilt into a scale.
I agree that the feature would not be useful in all circumstances, too all people. But since it is a very minor variation of the pre-existing "count" feature of these scales, and for some of us it would be very useful, I don't see the harm in including it. I am using large-quantity recipes most of the time, but scaling them down to more manageable quantities for the home baker/confectioner.
On that note, I see that my confectionary recipes do not have a 100% ingredient, like a baker's percentage. The percent system they are using is as a percentage of the total weight: the baker's percentage feature described above would not be useful for these quantities, since there is no way to set a base ingredient as an arbitrary percentage (say, by telling the scale the chocolate is 71% of the total weight, etc.). I don't see a reasonable, cost-effective way of supporting this, since you would need a full keypad.
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I just read this thread for the first time, and find myself a little bewildered. At this time of year, out here in Centre County, PA, we can get fresh leaves at the regular supermarket. Do you mean to tell me that is not true in Philly?!? I haven't even bothered to look for them frozen, or at the local Asian markets, because I can get them at the Wegmans. What gives? Usually I have to go to Philly to get weird stuff!
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I use "On The Border" chips. Not sure if they are available in PA, but On the Border is also a chain of Tex-Mex restaurants (many locations down here in Dallas, plus other areas in the region).
We have the restaurant (they make a killer margarita!) in Philly, anyway, but I have never seen the chips. I will keep my eyes open for them. Do you use 100% cheddar on your nachos? I usually blend it with some smoother, easier-melting cheese, like Jack or Colby. I love cheddar plain, but I find that it gets overpowering, and even a little greasy, once heated.
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To me a perfect scale would be high accuracy and high capacity. These exist but are very expensive so to counter it I have to keep three scales around. I have one at work that goes 0.05 grams, one at home that does 0.1 g and another one that does 0.05 (?) at home too. They all have differing capacities too.
To answer your specific question, I need to ask one of my own. Can you give an example of a recipe where percentages are used? The reason I ask is because 20% of the flour weight does not mean 20% of the recipe.
Take 100 grams of flour. You set that as 100%. Then you add 20 grams of sugar.
The total weight is now 120 grams and the sugar represents 16.66% of the mix, not 20%
Baker's percentages are generally defined as a percentage of the amount of flour. So the flour is, by definition, 100%. Obviously, this is not 100% of the total weight, it's just a system that makes scaling up and down really easy. So if you have sugar in your recipe and it is 50%, that just means that it is 50% of the weight of the flour. Many culinary school textbooks and standardized industrial recipes use this system. A scale that could do this would be handy because you would never have to actually do the math: you would just measure out the desired amount of flour, set that as 100%, and then the rest of your ingredients would be automatically scaled appropriately.
Edited to add an example: my recipe for Pate a choux looks like this---
1) Bread flour: 100%
2) Water: 167%
3) Butter: 67%
4) Sugar: 3%
5) Salt: 3%
6) Eggs: 100%
So this could be, for example, to give a total weight of 660 grams:
1) Bread flour: 150g
2) Water: 250g
3) Butter: 100g
4) Sugar: 5g
5) Salt: 5g
6) Eggs: 150g
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Those look like really hearty chips---what kind are they? I've actually never tried to put refried beans on my Nachos, but those look tasty.
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Chris, I have eyed this recipe. How was it? Would you make any changes?
It was less flavorful than I expected, but I don't think that was a bad thing: it allowed the shrimp flavor to shine through. I added quite a bit more lime than the recipe called for because I love lime, but otherwise I left the recipe alone and it worked well. It is also very fast to make, probably around 20 minutes including prep.
ETA: I made a 1/6 batch and it was still quite a bit of food when served over rice, so I think the recipe could easily serve 7 or 8.
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well i am looking for a chefs equivalent of that fake thing
how lets say i turn cheddar into that gooey chemical goodness without the chemicals
The part of that "cheese" that allows the real cheese to remain emulsified is the chemicals. You can create an excellent cheese dip, but I don't think you could replicate quite the same gooeyness. I am, however, quite fond of a simple cheese dip made with heavy cream, a bit of creme fraiche, and monterrey jack, that is sort of the "real cheese" equivalent of Cheese Wiz.
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While my wife is out of town I eat all the foods she doesn't like: tonight, that means shrimp. This is the shrimp stew recipe from this month's issue of Fine Cooking:
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ANYWAY, to get back to the original topic, I like Busboy's formulation of purism: you eschew certain foods, even though they taste good. Everything else is just plain ol' food snobbery, the subject of a thousand threads on eGullet. In the category of purism, I'd put nontraditional, and especially sweet, bagels. A blueberry bagel might well taste delicious; ditto a bacon bagel. But I won't eat them, because they lack essential bagelness.
So, let me get this straight: categorically refusing to eat certain foods based solely on the fact that they are mis-named is less snobbish than eating them but complaining about the name? I assert that it is in fact, not only more snobbish, but downright absurd. I love food, and I love talking about food. And a time-honored tradition among people who like food is discussing/arguing/kibitzing about what the definitive recipe is. But why refuse to eat something that tastes good? It seems kind of antithetical to liking food...
Your link didn't work for me, Chris.Sorry about that---fixed now.
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In the course of my beer brewing adventures, I've discovered that running something like malted barley through my flat-burr coffee grinder (Saeco MC2002) does a fantastic job of getting it sparkingly clean. Since I don't want the malt turned into flour, I crank the burrs wide open to the point that the clicky indicators of position stop clicking... running a half pound of grain through gets all of the coffee build-up gone.
Do your run a "sacrificial" batch of coffee through when you are done? I'd be concerned my coffee would wind up tasting like barley... I stick to the disassemble-and-brush strategy.
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According to that article:
A traditional and effective way to [remove the caffeine], says Veytia, is to pour a little bit of hot water into the leaves and then swirl the mixture around for about 30 seconds. Next you simply pour the water off [...] caffeine is the first photochemical to infuse into the water, so by pouring off the first batch of water, you are pouring off between 80 and 90 percent of the caffeine that was in the tealeaves.So the stated facts in the article are a little different from Rob's, but it's the right idea, anyway. I would be concerned by flavor loss, though, with a 30-second steep that gets discarded.
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The molds were filled first with chocolate using a disposable piping bag.
This seems like a good idea, but do you have to go really fast with the bag to make sure the shells have even thickness? I have been just dumping a whole lotta chocolate onto the mold and scraping it down with a spatula: it's fast, but really messy, and means I need to temper a lot more chocolate than I actually need.
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Love to see recipes! I've only got enough black beans for one batch, so I need to choose carefully!
My black bean supply has dwindled so fast because they were particularly tasty when cooked in a pressure-cooker.
Is there a specific type of black bean I should be looking for, or will any bean do? I have to special-order the pork anyway, so may as well get the right kind of beans!
Small Apartment Kitchen Dwellers Unite!
in Food Traditions & Culture
Posted
I probably don't even belong in this thread, but I will post anyway, because pretty soon I have to give all this up