KennethT

Thanks.... When your tomato plant flowers, how do you pollinate it? Most, if not all, tomato plants do not self pollinate - they rely on the wind, bees, etc to do it. So, indoors (greenhouse or apartment) you have to do it manually. The easiest way to do this is with a electric toothbrush. It vibrates at the right frequency to shake the pollen out - it's actually similar in frequency to bees wings! Just hold the toothbrush under the truss with flowers on it and press lightly. You should see pollen dust fall out of the flowers. Best to do I the morning, or late evening. I'm not sure if the same is true for peppers. Some hot peppers are notoriously difficult to set fruit indoors. Keep me posted as to your results!

Made the foie gras torchon last Saturday morning. Went by the recipe, but didn't have white port, so I subbed a 10 yr. tawny... 2/3 were aged only a few hours then frozen and shaved... excellent! The other 1/3 has been aging in the refrigerator. My question is: the book says to age "at least 3 days" but doesn't give a maxiumum time... If I started curing Friday night, and cooked Sat. morning, do you think it'll still be good by Sunday evening?

Agar will have syneresis also - hence agar clarification...

That video is in the DVD linked to above, plus others turning the whole chicken into parts for sautee... I love that video!

I don't think they're gearing this restaurant for the foodie set... I think it's for the hordes of tourists who love GF and will go anywhere he tells them - especially if it has his name on it! So, it's good that it's in Times Square, which is perfect for their target audience - and will have 0 impact on most NYers who actually care about food...

You wouldn't use agar to make spheres with a liquid filling... For that, it's better to do reverse spherification using sodium alginate in a calcium bath of some kind. Probably best to make a sphere of pepper jus. Then using an ice cube tray or something, add the olive sphere base about halfway up the mold. Freeze... then add pepper jus sphere and more olive sphere base to top of mold. Freeze again. Drop frozen "spheres" into warm calcium bath for a few minutes? As the warm bath defrosts the sphere, it will gel the outside. Then, when you have removed and rinsed, the sphere can full defrost leaving a sphere within a sphere.

Jacques Pepin has a DVD available (I think through the PBS website) where he shows many different techniques in quite good detail. With a little practice, he can show you how to take apart a whole chicken in less than a minute... granted, with practice, I'm still at about 5 minutes, but it's much better than it used to be before watching his technique! http://www.shoppbs.org/product/index.jsp?productId=11969480&cp=&sr=1&kw=jacques+pepin&origkw=jacques+pepin&parentPage=search

OK - my last guess is MikeHartnett - that picture could be somewhere off the Gulf or kinda swampy (aka New Orleans), and he started the Cooking with Momofuku thread...

Robert Jueneman? I know he has an ultrasonic bath for cavitating french fries...

One of the most effective (meaning giving the most yield) ways of rendering fat was discussed in Modernist Cuisine. It doesn't yield any crunchy bits (so Mrs. Liuzhou won't be happy, but you'll have a lot more fat for the effort). Basically, cut up the raw fat into small chunks and put in the blender and cover with water. Blend until you have a nice fat-shake, then put in a pan and simmer on the stovetop or in low oven. The solids will make a raft on top, and you'll have loads of beautiful rendered fat beneath. They've also taken the fat shake, put in a mason jar and put in the pressure cooker. IIRC, they also added some baking soda but I don't have the book in front of me so I can't check it. I think they found the pressure cooker method to yield the most neutral fat.

If it's of any consolation to you, I was maybe the pickiest child in the world. Somehow, in my late teens - early twenties things did a huge turnaround and now I am not picky at all (other than a stickler for quality) and in fact am very adventurous!

I usually do magret duck breast (from Moulard ducks) at 131F (55C) until pasteurized and they usually come out very good. I'll bump the temp up to 135F or so if I'm curing/smoking and then slicing and serving cold. Sorry - no experience with Gressingham ducks.

I'll sometimes add a little water to the onions to get them going... The water helps the onions cook through and soften before browning. I guess a lid would do the same thing, but sometimes I'm lazy and don't feel like clean something else...

Where does the pork cutlet come from? Is it the loin? If it's the loin,then I think your temp is too hot for too much time. I usually do pork loin at roughly 57C for as much time as it takes to pasteurize, depending on thickness. If it's everythin,it won't be that long - maybe a half hour? Best to either check the tables from the first SV thread (there's an index to it) or download the awesome Sous Vide Dash app if you have an iPhone or iPad. ETA: what is this "previously cooked" stuff? How/ why is it previously cooked?

I don't know if this qualifies, but I thought I once made "cane syrup" by adding water to Demerara sugar, then heating to thick syrup stage. Served with puffed pork rinds.... Tasted pretty good

Community gardens are great - there's a really good one not too far from my apt., but I don't know how much time commitment they'd need, and how much I have! BTW, Rod, a good thing to check is UrbanHydro.org - the Urban Hydroponics Growers Union... a bunch of people who are experimenting with trying to push the boundaries of urban gardening... Some of what they do is in yards, but some is completely indoors - in closets, 4'x4' tents, etc... it hasn't been updated in a while, but there was some interesting stuff there the last time I checked them out. I understand your lack of space and other issues - I'm just saying that if you want to do something bad enough, where there's a will, there's a way!

Rod, just because you live in an apartment, doesn't mean you can't have a nice garden. It's just different - maybe a little more work, maybe not. See my pics above? That's in a 800sqft. apartment in NYC. I have it a little easier because I have big, southern facing windows, but if I didn't, I would be using more lighting. Right now, I'm using lights to supplement the window lighting - especially for the lime tree and tomato plant. So far, the herbs/leafy greens don't need the extra light.. .I doubt they will anyway - I was growing Chinese Broccoli in the leafy herb area back in Feb/March and it grew great with no additional lights.

Wow!!!!

That's similar to what I did in the cooking issues forum post. I made a ravioli where mango was the dough, and a gazpacho was the center. The LMA pectin puree in high concentration (8% IIRC) worked great as a glue. If your fruit doesn't have much calcium, you'll need to add some in the form of cal. gluconate, or one of the other calcium sources.

There was a topic like this in the Cooking Issues forums... I wound up making a fruit glue out ofLMA pectin and mango purée. But you can use any fruit and add calcium as needed.

Last year I grew a Goose Creek tomato plant in the spot where the Robeson is now. Those were probably the best tomatoes I've ever had, but sadly they were unavailable this year, and unfortunately I didn't save any of the seeds. The GK was a good learning experience - once the plant got to be about 5 feet tall (up to the ceiling) I had the great idea to top it so it would stop growing..... Hmmffff it had other ideas and turned into a giant bush with tomatoes lurking everywhere. It took over the entire corner of the apartment and threatened to take over the whole thing until it roots grew into the nutrient fluid fill hole completely clogging it. One day I came home from work to a flood of about 15 gallons of nutrient liquid on the floor! It looked like a small pond in the middle of my living room. Suffice it to say Ihad no choice but to kill the plant to find and eventually fix the problem. Now, a few modifications to the system later and hopefully I won't have that experience again. So yes, it can definitely be a challenge, but it's lots of fun!

So I finally got around to taking pics of my urban garden.. very small, but considering there's only 2 of us, it works out well - plus part of it is still in progress.. the nice thing about doing things indoors is that you can continue to start and plant things all year long... This is a Paul Robeson heirloom tomato - it's about 2-3 weeks old. Got the start from Laurel's. This weekend, I'm going to attach a string to the ceiling and train it up the string as support. It should produce about 5-6 tomatoes a week for the next 8-10 months. Dwarf lime tree - probably about 7 years old - bears standard sized limes. It was having root rot problems for a while until I discovered the miracle of Hygrozyme, and now it's much better and it's the first time I'm letting it fruit in about a year. L-R: Rouge Grenobloise Batavian lettuce - I actually harvested half of the head last Monday, and it's basically grown back to full size since then; Basil; Thai basil. On the way (not pictured) is rosemary, french thyme, fl parsely, more lettuce, tarragon, cilantro, etc... In the past, in this setup, I grew Gailan, bok choi, arugula and some oddities like chocolate mint, variegated lemon geranium, coconut geranium, and lime thyme. Mint is a bad idea in this setup because the roots wind up taking over the whole trough.

I'm sure it was posted at some point before, but I can't find it now.... anyone have good temp for turkey breast that will be sliced cold and used for sandwiches?

I've had green mango in Thailand - it's awesome, especially when dusted with salt, chili powder and a little sugar, or dipped into fermented shrimp paste... wish I could find it here...

frozen crawfish tails are very common, and I'm sure they're not frozen with LN. All of the frozen ones I've seen are completely precooked in the shell, then shelled and frozen. BTW, when I make a Louisiana style crawfish boil, I could eat 5 pounds of crawfish by myself!