phan1

Just go out and be a line cook and see if it's for you. Then you can better decide if it's for you or not. And the stuff about cooks being druggies and alcoholics, I wouldn't believe any of that. Think about it: a line cook has to show up on time and do his job everyday. A good restaurant desperately needs dependable people to operate on a daily basis. You're going to meet some great people along the way I assure you. And you want to work in a good place as well. As in good, I mean meeting line cooks that have worked there for at least a year. That's a sign of a good restaurant. Then you can re-think your life better.

OK, I've done the technique; it works beautifully. But I'm having trouble perfecting it and getting the technique down right. It seems like a new adventure every time and I'm having a hard time getting some consistency. Here are my issues: 1) When you make the stock, can it go directly to the freezer or do you want to refrigerate and make sure the stock gels before putting it in the freezer? I thought maybe putting it directly into the freezer would help increase my yield, as waiting for it to jelly in the fridge would only trap more water in the gelatin. 2) OK, too much gelatin in the stock is going to decrease my yield, right? Any tips on getting a good yield? My yield is pretty inconsistent. 3) any advice on percentages when making consommes without gelatin from bones? How much gelatin to water would I need by weight? I was actually thinking of just not using bones at all and just using some ground beef and gelatin. Or making shellfish consomme that contain very little gelatine. 4) OK, general stock question. Let's say I had a pound of meat (no bones). How much broth could I get from that? I've never been shown how to make stock and my yield is only 3/4 pound of broth from a pound of meat... That sound right to you? Cause it's hard to justify buying a pound of meat and only getting 3/4 pound of soup from it. I guess that's why consommes can be rather expensive? Wikipedia said that as much as a pound of meat can yield an 8oz consomme. But isn't that true with all stocks?

OK, I need some help with a simple custard that calls for milk, egg yolks, and sugar. Most recipes call for beating the eggs and sugar until they've grown and volume and turned white. Then you mix your whipped egg whites and sugar with milk and heat up the custard. Now here's the problem. My whipped yolks and sugar is full of air, and when I add in the milk, it results in a custard mix that is "frothy" on top and liquid on the bottom. This "froth" tends to get in the way with whatever I'm going to do with it. So why should I whip and aerate my yolk and sugar mixture at all? Can I just add the milk yolks and cream all together so my custard isn't frothy? What does whipping the yolks and sugar do?

Hi, I see that a lot of recipes for chocolate ganache or syrup call for a bit of corn syrup. Can you tell me what it's for? It's usually such a miniscule amount, I'd like to know what it does.

I have a question about whether or not a foodsaver can ever achieve the SV technique the same way a cryovac can. Using my foodsaver, it's mostly about getting all the air out so my package can stay submerged underwater. My meat still coagulates and lets its juiced run out it, no matter how tightly it's sealed. At the end of the process, my package still looks like a piece of meat floating around its own juices. SV at home is really about poaching a piece of meat in it's own juices. How tightly the meat is sealed is really not a factor for me. I really don't need the foodsaver at all; I can just suck out the air from a ziplock bag. But from what I read, the amount of pressure used for meats using the cryovac machine is a big deal. So I guess the cryovac machine gives better results? It will keep the juices in the meat much more so than the average foodsaver?

I was wondering if anyone tried SV lobster for maybe 12 hours? I've been SVing lobster at 45C and unfortunately it still comes out too tough. I think that's just how lobster meat is. I don't think I've ever had lobster meat that was tender really. I was hoping leaving it to SV for 12-24 hours would do the trick. I want to know if anyone tried it, as I can't really afford to experiment with lobster too often.

I love the book as well, it's just that I can't make many of the recipes cause they all call for foi gras and truffles. But I did make the lobster broth and the "macaroni and cheese" lobster dish. Wow, I had no idea lobsters and cream would be such a luxurious combination! It was terrific, though I might cut down the amount of heavy cream in the future. REALLY heavy stuff. And on a side note, I really love Bouchon as well. I actually prefer it to the FL cookbook since it uses more available ingredients but still keeps to Keller's standards of technique and constant refinement.

Well Cinnamon Club and Simple Indian came in the other day! The Cinnamon Club was EXACTLY the type of Indian book I was looking for! You learn a good deal philosophically as well. We hear the author's love of the elegance, simplicity, and constant evolution of French cuisine and how he tries to apply it to Indian cuisine. A great book to learn from, which is the most important thing that I want from a cookbook. Simple Indian from Kochhar is good as well, but it's mostly a recipe book. The pictures are gorgeous though, and it's a nice buy.

I'm looking foward to "Maze" and "Pierre". Cookbooks from reputable restaurants. I get a lot of my books from amazon.co.uk. Shipping sucks, but there are so many great cookbooks that you can only get in Europe.

I have a question. Does "time" matter, or does only "internal temperature" matter? I never timed my sous vide; I just throw it in there and then can come back for it when I have the other elements of my cooking done (usually 1-2 hours). But for things like brisket, it takes a very long time because that's how long it takes to reach that temperature throughout the meat, or is the meat going to tenderize if you keep it at the ideal temperature for a couple hours? I've heard of Heston Blumenthal cooking his duck legs SV for 48 hours! So the extra time has got to play a factor, not just internal temperature, right? So if I cooked lobster at 45C for 10 hours, will it be more tender than the one I cooked at 45C for two? Or is a 45C lobster still a 45C lobster?

I find salting one of the more difficult parts of cooking. If salting at the end, I have to continually taste after each pinch to get it right, because if I don't, it goes from underseasoned to salty very quickly. One thing that helps is just to keep salting early and recognize what foods might need to be more salted than others. Veggies for example need to be salted pretty heavily compared to other things.

What are your thoughts on using a pressure cooker for stock? I'm a big fan of Heston Blumenthal, and he loves using a PC for stock. He uses it a lot in his "In Search of Perfection" series, where the recipes are definitely not made with shortcuts in mind. So why doubt the man? I have NEVER read anything from reputable cooks/chefs about using a PC for stock. If using a PC was so great, wouldn't everyone do it? Who would want to wait 10 hours to make stock? Restaurants would especially benefit from having huge PCs in their kitchen, since stock is such a painful ongoing process. Heston does some other questionable/unclassical things too... For example, in his "perfect fish pie" he makes a seafood stock for the fish. He 1st makes a fish stock with veggies, fish flesh, and bones and puts them in a PC for 30 minutes. He then adds in the roasted langustine tails, more veggies, and cooks them in a PC again for another 30 mins. That's like making seafood stock for 5 hours using a normal stock pot! There's no way you make a seafood stock for 5 hours in a normal stock pot; the flavors will start to deteriorate! He then proceeds to add cream, egg yolks, and agar agar to thicken the stock into a sauce. No reduction. Classically, a cook would reduce the stock, add cream, then reduce again. You get a thick sauce, no need for egg yolks or agar agar. Any thoughts on this part? In the end, using a PC does make sense to me. You get less flavor loss from boiling off your stock, and the higher heat would probably aid in flavor extraction. The short cooking time might also mean that you can't overcook the flavor of your stock. But it might also lead to muddy stock. But in the end, if it was better, wouldn't everyone else be doing it?

I'm sure it was tasty, but did you eat the brains straight up? I've only limited experience with brains, but they always taste pretty yucky to me.

ARGH! Awsome post. TY very much!

I'm wondering what you mean by Indian food and the lack of finesse. Is this assessment by appearance (watching shows, reading books, etc.)? Is it by taste of food that you've made or seen made? To me, the methods of bringing together of so many different spices and components into cohesive, nuanced dishes is what continually amazes me about Indian cooking. I don't mean to say that my opinion is definitive- I think I simply may be missing something in your perspective. Better understanding might help with providing a good book recommendation. What also might be helpful is if you describe Indian dishes that you enjoy and would like to make..... ← Well for example, I watched an Indian Cooking show with Gary Rhodes. There was a top Indian Chef there and he just kept adding huge amounts of garlic and chile to everything. Even Rhodes was like, "Are you serious?" And this chef was holding back from how he normally cooks too! From my experience, the spices and aromatics are what play the main role, not the meat. Heck, it's like meat is used as a thickener more than anything else. The Indian cuisine I've been exposed to is just too rustic and out-dated for me. We don't need heavy spices to preserved meat anymore. But I absolutely fell in love with the Indian food at a fine, contemporary restaurant I went to once. Conversely, the Indian food I've had at cheaper, rustic places would make you grow hair on your feet and cause you to smell for days... But this is only what I've been exposed to. I do know that Indian cooking can be very elegant without being terribly over-powering. The problem is, I just haven't been exposed to enough of it, especially here in the USA. I decided to purchase one of Atul Kochhar's books and "The Cinnamon Club". The type of Indian food I'm looking for is in Britain, hehe. Thanks for the advice guys!

Now that we're onto the 4th season, I think the show has shown that the home enthusiast can't match up to a trained cook. They've been putting more people with real chef credentials on the show each season, and I believe all the contestants in the last season at least made a living in the food industry. I don't see how an enthusiast can cook better than someone who eats, smells, lives, and breathes food and cooking from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep. As an enthusiast myself, I'm restricted to the grocery store where I can't really afford to go experiment with hundreds of different ingredients. There's just no way you can be exposed to the same wealth of knowledge of preparation and ingredients that a person working in the kitchen can.

I was wondering if anyone has heard of this, because I end up getting an awkward, sour smell when I do. I believe it's from the onions, but I'm not sure. The first time was when I was sous vide-ing meat with some whole green onions in. I open the bag, and I get a sour, unpleasant smell that's not meaty, so I guess it had to be from the green onions. The second time was when I was making fish stock with my pressure cooker, in which I included a big chunk of raw leek in there. When it hit full pressure, I smelled the same sour smell coming out of the steam. The vegetables were not spoiled or anything. Maybe the sulfur doesn't have a chance to cook away, and that's where the smell/taste comes from? So I was just wondering if anyone has ever heard of this happening. Not often are we cooking things in tightly enclosed spaces anyway, so many people probably haven't gotten in a situation where this has happened. I'll be sure to cook out my onions before putting them in a pressure cooker...

Food mill takes up too much space and it's expensive... Preferably, I'd like a really fine-sieved ricer if anyone can recommend one. Would any ricer be able to match a food mill or tamis?

I want soft, luxurious puree, not mashed potatoes! Unfortunately, the potato purees that I read about call for a Tamis, which is too expensive for me, especially considering I'm looking for a tool that will just do one thing. Can someone maybe recommend me a very fine ricer or some kind of press? I'm looking for something that's not going to take up much cooking space but will also give me a very find puree. I've no experience with ricers, but would they work as well as tamis? I've had heavenly results running them through my strainer, where a tamis would give me the same result. But even one serving would take forever for me to do, so I'm looking for some equipment help.

Well, I love the ideas of Indian food. I almost see them as the opposite of new French cuisine, with lots of ingredients, spices, and complex flavors. But from my limited experience, the food also lacks finesse. All the Indian cooking I've been experienced to (books, TV shows ect.) have always been about big overpowering flavors. LOTS of garlic, LOTS of chiles ect. I was wondering if there was a French-Laundry-ish type of book out there that involves Indian cuisine. I remember a Micheline-starred Indian restaurant say that philosophically, "We add spices to food the same way you would add salt and pepper to steak." That's the type of Indian food I'd like to cook!

Thanks for the replies. But what I'm really looking to fix is the "dirty" taste that I get. If prepared properly, I'm assuming I shouldn't even get that taste. I got some good advice in removing the membrane from the sweetbread, but for the liver, I don't know how I'm supposed to fix that. I could have gotten bad liver... I'll try again.

Well, it would be nice to be able to turn this usually unappealing cut of meat that no one wants into something incredible. Unfortunately, I've twiced failed. The things I tried cooking are veal liver and beef sweetbread. They both turned out dirty tasting and inedible. I pretty much did the same thing to them: 1) soak in water for over 24 hours and 2) saute them in a hot pan. Since it was my first time working with offal, I just wanted to cook them simply so I have a certain idea of how to branch off from there. Can someone help me make these things edible?

TY VERY MUCH!

Well, I've been doing a lot of reading but not much cooking. One question I have is that there are a lot of professional recipes that call for straining out the fat that accumulates from the fluid when braising. This leads to a better, cleaner looking sauce. But then they finish it with butter! Wouldn't the butter muddy the sauce and have a tendency to rise to the top of the sauce just as animal fat would? Or is butter pretty different from animal fat? There seems to be a consistent story of getting rid of animal fat but adding butter. I like butter, but I also like the flavor of animal fat too! I feel it's a shame to not use it, especially since it's already right there in the pan...

I'm not familiar with this dish, but I've played a little with gellan, and have inadvertantly made some non-melting sorbets using to much gelatin. This was a with a Pacojet, though. Pacojets deal very well with gelled bases. If I had to guess without further knowledge, I'd guess that he makes this by mixing in the gellan at a high temperature to hydrate it, letting it gel solid, then freezing and Pacotizing. My intuitive guess would be that you aren't going to have good luck duplicating this with a standard churn type ice cream maker. Maybe, though. Try it and see! Le Sanctuaire is probably your best source for gellan if you are in the US. La Tienda sells the Texturas (El Bulli) brand, which I presume is great but also very pricey. I don't think that a soft alcohol flame is going to generate very much heat, though, so you might be able to use agar, gelatin, or pectin instead and get a similar result. The effect might even be reasonable with just a scoop of any heavily stabilized sorbet. Tell us how it goes. ← How much gellan did you use? So I have a reference point.