Chris Hennes

Tri2Cook, I'd say the two major "Modernist" contributions to the pie crust are the use of the intensified brown butter (via the inclusion of extra milk solids in the browning process) and the use of pre-cooked egg yolks to prevent contraction of the crust. Otherwise it's a pretty normal short dough.

Yes, but it's a completely different style of crust from this one. And this one tastes better .

Pie crust has never been my forte: this recipe was no exception. Precooking the egg yolks to prevent it from shrinking was handy, but could not resist my powers of pie crust destruction. I think it's mostly salvageable, but I'm glad I don't have to serve it at a dinner party just yet. On the plus side, the sous vide custard worked flawlessly and tastes great.

The solids are strained out. I'm pretty sure that I can make almost 100% of the recipes in the book with the equipment I already own (e.g. no rotovap, centrifuge, spray-drier, etc.)

The steak aging discussion is just a couple sentences as part of a larger discussion of beef: there isn't any further detailed information in MCaH.

Flaky pie crust (continued)... So the pie crust for this apple cream tart is made with half regular butter and half the super-intense browned butter I described above. I tasted the browned butter and it was fine (well, great, actually) so I guess it wasn't overcooked as I had worried. I went ahead and cooked the egg yolks sous vide to prevent shrinkage (an optional step in the recipe): Then the flour, almond meal, powdered sugar, salt, baking soda, and butters are combined with the yolks to make a dough: This is pressed out and refrigerated: It tastes fantastic, incidentally. The browned butter flavor is incredibly intense.

Moving on to the "Sous vide vanilla-cinnamon pastry cream" (KM p. 180): step one has you preheat a water bath, but steps 2-4 have you heat the ingredients on the stove and then refrigerate for two hours. Is this preheating step just to get ready for the egg yolks that are cooked in step 6?

That's my plan: in this case it doesn't ever get heated (I don't think). I bought a lot more apples than I think I should need, so I should be good to go. Another question: I made the browned butter as detailed in the KM p. 37, with 30g of milk solids and 100g of clarified butter... Those milk solids look a bit dark to me. Do you think I should have another go at it and pressure-cook for less time? My cooker is huge (it's a pressure canner) so it takes a long time to get up to temp and to cool down, so I was thinking maybe it overcooked the solids during that extra time. Then again, maybe it's just fine...

I started a "Cooking with..." topic here.

We've been eagerly anticipating the arrival of Modernist Cuisine at Home since it was announced... copies started arriving today, so it's time to start cooking. My mom's in town for the weekend and wants to try the Apple Cream Pie: it's pretty straightforward, but I do have a question about the Granny Smith apple juice. Lacking a juicer, I have to make the juice the hard way; should I be doing this cold, or can I use one of the juicing techniques that heats the apples?

My copy was waiting for me when I got home today... for the curious and/or obsessive:

Can you share the basics of the pasta recipe used here? Looks awesome. I don't think there was anything unusual about the pasta: just eggs and flour, maybe a little olive oil. Honestly, I probably didn't look at the recipe in the book.

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This is a continuation of the massive original Dinner! topic (when it got up near a thousand pages the database started having trouble with it...) Carry on! (Please note that the original topic is temporarily offline while I split it into chunks the server can manage... it will be back soon, I promise!)

There's no magic bullet here: high-quality ingredients cost money (even if you grow/raise them yourself: I'm sure my home-grown tomatoes are actually costing me more than the ones at the supermarket in a full-cost-accounting sense). If they aren't in your budget, they aren't in your budget. That said, I can guarantee you that a chicken stock made using standard supermarket-grade chicken tastes far better than "Better than Bouillon."