Chris Hennes

Might need to check with the school about whether she'd be allowed, there might be liability concerns or some such.

I need some advice regarding the sherry gel cubes that are one of the garnishes for the sous vide lentils in volume 5: in the recipe you are told to steep 15g of chamomile blossoms in 50g of water. It is not specified whether they mean fresh or dried, and in a later recipe they explicitly state that they want fresh blossoms. So I assumed that when not stated, they wanted normal, dried (as in, for tea) blossoms. But that makes the ratio of blossoms to water completely insane: 15g of dried chamomile basically soaks up all the water. So, um. Now what?

I love salmon roe, agreed. But I'm not sure it's fair to even compare it to sturgeon roe: they are incredibly different products. It's like saying ribeye is better than tuna.

You can count my plus one and me in for the "2013 eG Candy and Confectionery Workshop" (I like that change, good idea) in Niagara . Tentatively, of course, that's a long ways off!

I've had good luck with chocolate, and bad luck with syrup. Something about the color, I think: IR thermometers have to make some assumptions about the material they are measuring, and they seem to be pretty far off for sugar syrups, in my experience.

Consider a smoked paprika along with your S&P, too, I find that it works well with pork. Mustard is another obvious choice.

It's a completely different product: it's like comparing a smoked pork shoulder to a pan-fried pork chop. Both have their own merits. If you like the taste of pork ribs (as opposed to just the taste of BBQ seasoning, etc.) then yes, you can make great-tasting ribs in the oven. Hell, you can go ahead and season them up as for BBQ if you want, you're just missing the smoke flavor. Different, but still tasty.

I can tell you what was in it, but the ratios got sort of sketchy at the end as I adjusted the flavors. It was basically a 1:1 ratio of white chocolate to a blueberry puree made by boiling dehydrated blueberries in water until syrupy and then blitzing in the food processor. I also added a little orange zest oil, citric acid, salt, and rum, to taste. I would have like to have at it with an immersion blender at the end, but I couldn't find one that wasn't already covered in dark chocolate .

In particular what you need is a liquid, sodium citrate, and possibly a texturizing agent such as a carrageenan. Dissolve the sodium citrate in the liquid, bring to a simmer, and slowly add shredded cheese, probably until it is as thick as you want it when it's hot. Let it cool and see if it sets up enough for you. If not, you will need to play with the carrageenans to get to your desired texture. ETA: An immersion blender is very handy here if you've got one.

Oh, and I took a really crummy thumb-occluded cell phone video of Rob moving the showpiece, so we can pretend we're watching Food Network Challenge:

And finally, we come to the show table at the end. Every year it seems to get more elaborate: having a showpiece this year was awesome. Once it's all been laid out, we admire it for a few seconds, and then tear in: It looks like Bob's relieved it's over: A couple examples of the booty people went home with:

Sunday was a pure production day: there were a number of impromptu demos along the way, plus a whole ton of chocolate-making. Here are some highlights: Making tulips on balloons: Decorating a chocolate shoe: There's hand dipped, and then there is hand dipped: Teamwork: Assembling the showpiece: Piping strings for the lyre: Rob developed a technique for piping them into grooves laid down into a bed of sugar so they ended up straight, and with a neat sugar coating Donna flocking a bunny: More showpiece teamwork (lots of people had their hands in this piece): Dipping: Rob demonstrating molding technique to a few people from the school:

I was unfortunately unable to be in more than two places at once with the camera, so I know I missed a bunch of other demos, workshops, and just general cooking events going on (plus of course I did some cooking of my own): hopefully others will fill in the missing pieces while I skip to our St. Patrick's day-themed dinner... Scallion and leek mashed potatoes (Robuchon method): Smoked Wagyu corned beef with cabbage and carrots: Potato-leek crusted salmon: Chocolate crème bar with pistachio anglaise: The group:

And at yet another station, Rob continued with showpiece work, including making some chocolate flowers, and carving the lyre: And Joe showed us how to make modeling chocolate roses: Some specimens:

Meanwhile, in the other room (yes, they let us make gigantic messes in not just one, but two of their kitchens), Kerry Beal did a basic tempering demo/workshop covering the major methods that you will come across for tempering chocolate (perfect for newbies, I might add!) Of course, once they had a vat of tempered chocolate, they had to do something with it:

At this point we split up and the more hands-on stuff began. I'll begin with Steve's work on the Mint Patties. These are basically fondant, mint, and invertase, enrobed in dark chocolate. Absolutely fantastic mint flavor. Steve heated the concoction up to 160°F (I think that was the temp, right Steve?): Then into a double-pastry-bag for piping into circle forms: However, since Steve has "pastry hands" and that bag was hot, the job got handed off to Rob (who has "grill hands") to finish while the rest of us critiqued his form: These set up for a few hours: And then get dipped the same day, before the invertase has a chance to liquify them too much to handle:

After lunch Saturday was Rob Connoley (gfron1)'s showpiece demo. We started out with a brainstorming session about what comes to mind for the holiday (in this case St. Patrick's day): Once he/we came up with a design, he used poster board to lay it out on the work surface, teaching some of the finer details of how to tape it down correctly, etc.: Then mette piped in the chocolate: That last one is one of the silicon molds provided by Chicago School of Mold Making: The cool thing about the silicon molds is that since they are flexible, you don't have to let them solidify flat: Then Steve Lebowitz demoed a technique for making a granite-like base structure out of various colors of chocolate and cocoa butter:

Lunch on Saturday was an incredible set of sandwiches: of course, we had to have some table decorations... We had a shrimp po' boy: And a roast beef with pesto and figs: There was also a chicken salad served on croissants, but since it was assemble-it-yourself I won't disgrace it with a photo of the sloppy mess I put together: it was delicious however, as were all the others. Yes, of course I had one of each! Finally, sensing that the massive array of sandwiches they put out was simply too little food, they included a dessert: Alas after sampling all the sandwiches I couldn't bring myself to try it, but reports indicate that it, too, was delicious. While of course as the event organizer it is RobertM's job to pat everyone on the back, I can tell it like it really was... and it was wonderful. Everyone at Stratford was kind and helpful (despite the incredible mess we made and the fact that almost half the participants had almost no confectionery experience at all!); the students we met were polite, helpful, and inquisitive; the facilities were perfect for our purposes; and they fed us amazingly well. I cannot thank Stratford enough for not just allowing us to use their space, but for truly hosting us in the best fashion.

Of course, we started the morning out with coffee... or tried to. Kerry Beal brought a vacuum pot for tikidoc, and we attempted to figure out how to use it. Despite all three of us having advanced degrees, we were unable to do so! (Tikidoc got it figured out in the end, but we ruined two pots of coffee trying) We had some gift bags provided by one of our sponsors: And of course, an amazing array of ingredients to play with for concocting strange new ganaches (lots of people brought their favorites or picked up a few bottles of something interesting to try): The first scheduled event was a demo by Joe Sofia of Cargill (owners of Peters and Wilbur chocolates, among other things). He did a molded bananas foster bon bon and a slabbed carrot cake candy Shiny... we like shiny.

I'll start out with some photos of the Friday night event: this is the "just showing off" part of the festivities, where we all brought in chocolates to share. We had a lot of chocolate this year (and no small amount of wine, either!):

It's a silver cocoa butter and then an amethyst, both the "jewel" line from Chef Rubber.

The advantage of fatback is that it isn't just fat: it's lard embedded in a network of connective tissue that makes it solid at room temp (and quite a bit higher, in fact). There are certain sausages such as Mexican Chorizo that have a pure fat added (lard in that case) but they are a rarity. You definitely cannot simply plug in duck fat, or even lard, in place of fatback.

Per the discussion above, I think the word you are looking for is "basted" not "braised."

Make a styrofoam lid and pre-heat the water and the SideKIC should work fine with your cooler. Note that I have not experimented with cold smoking prior to sous vide, only hot-smoking (though obviously with ribs the "hot" isn't all that hot, to avoid overcooking). Cold smoking is a completely different flavor profile from hot, and is often done for much longer periods of time.

Yes: but to say it's "useless" seems to me to contend that there is no point in doing it, which I disagree with. The flavor is different, but it's also very different from an unsmoked cut. I certainly have no trouble tasting the difference. I find this is true in brisket, pork shoulder, and pork ribs (the three things I've tried). I typically smoke for 3-6 hours and then somewhere from 36-72 hours of sous vide, depending on the product. Ribs on the shorter end, brisket on the higher.