Chris Hennes

Well, it only took me three years, but I've finally managed to coax a decent yield out of my tomato plants here in Oklahoma: Those are Porter's Pride, it's a variety out of Porter, Texas, designed to set fruit even when it's very hot out. That, coupled with exceptionally fantastic weather since January, resulted in my first useable tomato harvest here. About time!

You might also try using the filter and carafe from the Technivorm but doing a simple pour-over brew, so you can control the water temperature. French press coffee is quite different from drip.

Setting aside the copyright question (both books were published in the US, I believe), the trouble is that something like Italian Country Table is incredibly general: there are probably dozens of cookbooks with similar names. And across the universe of publishing duplication of titles is really quite common. I wonder how many different books out there are called Sauces, for example.

Are you following the brewing instructions at Sweet Maria's?

Well, my concern is that it may be that you don't like most coffee, and that it doesn't have anything to do with freshness, etc. If I was you'd I'd try replicating the blend of your brother's that you liked to make sure you get your brewing technique down first, since you know for a fact that you liked that one. If you start right off into roasting your own there are going to be too many variables.

How many different varieties of coffee have you tried? Do you know whether you prefer a darker or lighter roast (in general)? If you liked the eight o'clock/Kona blend at your brother's, have you tried making the exact same thing at home?

The latter: for example, Modernist Cuisine lists all ingredients by weight, even liquids. Of course with water it's easy to interchange if you want to, but with anything else the recipe has to be written with weights, or you have to look up the appropriate conversion.

I'm not even convinced that the "flaw" that the article purports to identify is really much of a flaw. To be sure, if you want to achieve statistical validity you need to cook hundreds of steaks and carefully control the experimental parameters to ensure that you are comparing like-marbling to like-marbling. But that the article doesn't reference the actual experiment or quote any numbers at all from it: it just postulates a hypothesis that may explain some of the weight loss. However, as PedroG points out, we actually understand the mechanism for the moisture loss quite well, and proper experiments have been conducted to demonstrate it. Considering the condescending tone of the article: "The best they've come up with is some version of the following 'experiment'" and its failure to cite any evidence that this experiment is anything like the "best" "they've" come up with, I'd say that basically eliminates any credibility it might have.

I have lots of cheap stemware that I'm perfectly happy to wash in the dishwasher, but I wind up basically having to plan the entire load around it because it's so awkward to balance in there. What with Fat Guy's announcement and all today I wandered over to Quirky to check them out and ran across these things: seems like a slick idea. There was also some mention of a "caddy" in this ancient topic, but the link is dead. What else is out there to make this a bit easier?

That article appears to completely ignore the theory and evidence presented in Modernist Cuisine: in fact, its entire rebuttal rests on a casual analysis of a single unreferenced experiment. "This one experiment I read about this one guy on the internet doing didn't properly control for all the variables." Not terribly compelling.

Has anyone else noticed their bottles being underfilled? I noticed that I fell short of the amount needed for a drink on my first bottle, so I checked the other three, and they all were only filled with three ounces of liquid, not four.

I've got a recipe from Nick Malgieri's Perfect Pastry for a raspberry: 1/3 cup raspberry puree 1/2 cup currant jelly 2 Tbsp Framboise 2 1/2 tsp (1 packet) gelatin I'd guess that you could use those ratios for other purees, but I haven't tried it myself.

Recently I've been using the technique Kevin Liu suggested above, preheating the beans in a 350°F oven for fifteen minutes before going at them with a heat gun: I've had very good success with this method, especially when I wanted full city or full city+ roasts. I still like to use the heat gun (and use it outside!) for the final roasting stage, so that it blows all the chaff away.

Interesting, I've never heard of doing PaC with layers of chocolate rather than batons (yes, I'm talking about the ones based on croissant dough, not brioche).

How are we looking for a location for the Saturday feast?

I've only ever used batons, I don't know the melted chocolate technique: can you explain? Do you think I should roll the dough thinner than usual?

I had the impulse to make pain au chocolat this weekend, but I really have no use for a whole batch of them to eat myself. However, I could bring them to an event on Friday evening if I could come up with a way of making them tiny: maybe not necessarily single-bite-sized, but roughly the equivalent of a small cookie or so. A couple bites at most. Do you think this would be possible? Any suggestions for how to do it?

The original MC does not, so I'd doubt if MCAH does.

Labs are also staffed by trained professionals who (nominally) take their time to get things right. I find precision easier to achieve with a scale, and I have more confidence in my ability to read numbers off a screen than to evaluate the position of the meniscus relative to a bunch of little red lines that may or may not actually themselves be accurate.

Melons and squash seem to have an amazing affinity for compost heaps, even young ones where you wouldn't think the nutrients were actually available to use yet. I've actually got a tomato growing in mine this year too, in addition to the usual squash volunteers.

What makes you think they are thinking about accuracy at all? This is all about convenience (or at least, the appearance of convenience, since of course it's really all about selling more Pyrex!). The reviewers on amazon.com seem happy with the thing, and to be honest, when I need precision in measuring liquids I go by weight anyway. I only use my Pyrex for casual liquid quantities where a half ounce here or there doesn't affect anything.

The shape change seems to be a result of the "read-from-above" feature, sloping the sides out so there is more separation between the gradations when looking down into the glass.

Sure:

One of the more appealing aspects of canning is the row upon row of neatly-ordered jars you wind up with in the end. I'm sure the pickles are good, too!

The one that pops immediately to mind is Oaxaca al Gusto by Diana Kennedy. It is a no-holds-barred look at Oaxacan cuisine, and it is not easy to acquire the ingredients.