nickrey

I did a comparable course with similar dishes. One thing that adds to the asparagus and poached eggs dish is the whipping siphon delivered hollandaise, again from Chef Steps.

I always wondered where those try-hard restaurants get their creative ideas that never quite seem to come together.

Not on for a few days and look what I missed! Shelby!!! Looking forward to this, now to read it from the start...

Edge up. I take knives out by handle. Can't see how you'd ever cut yourself: given how clumsy I am and the fact that I've never cut myself, I consider that proof positive.

How about Ottolenghi for modern Middle Eastern? I note an absence of Japanese cookbooks as well. It's not new by any means but Tsuji's "Japanese Cooking A Simple Art" is hard to go past. Also, no Italian? Giorgio Locatelli's Made in Italy is very good. Try Francis Mallman's "Seven Fires" for Argentine Grilling. What styles/regions are you thinking of? It will help us to narrow down recommendations.

Haven't posted for a while. Needed to use up some lemons so thought I'd make hummus. This led a Middle Eastern inspired dish -- hummus with spiced marinated lamb and pine nuts.

My daughter's partner is a coffee roaster whose senior partner in business just won the World Barista Championship in Seattle. We went away recently and he used the french-press method outlined above. The scale he used is linked to an iPhone to give perfect timing as well as weight. Removing the foam apparently removes some bitterness.

They've also put the course resources out as an e-book in this iteration.

I also have a parrot corkscrew, mine was from Alessi. Having been heard to opine that many things from Alessi are far more decorative than practical, this corkscrew has had me changing my tune: It works very well.

Is it just me or does that striped bass look like a mobile phone?

How do you keep the brew oxygen free?

I've not experienced this to the same extent. What specific brands are you talking about? It may be related to the wines you are buying rather than the whole category; as dyjee100 says above some of the big tannic wines actually open up and become more pleasant over time; albeit not over three days. I'd also support using a vac-u-vin or getting a spray-in heavier than oxygen wine preserver and storing the treated wine in the refrigerator to extend its life.

Reading rotuts' reply a number of times, I'm still not sure what is meant by the comment . Patience (sic) is possible because you also have wines to drink that makes you less likely to drink the wines you want to age? If so, well yes. Wine ageing in red wines is a function of balance, length of finish, intensity, and complexity. In white wines, it is a function of fruit structure and acid (and, in the case of dessert wines, sugar content). Cleanliness is one element but it is incrementally unimportant as winemaking generally becomes clean and more technical. Passion and complexity are consequentially becoming much more important.

Welcome fellow Aussie.

Here in Australia the widespread use of screwcaps means that many wines are lasting much longer than they previously would have. The majority are not reductive and retain their fruit characteristics much longer than similar wines under cork. My problem with many aged wines is that they taste of aged characteristics (cigar box, leather, tobacco, meat) rather than their primary fruit structure. This means an old Syrah is very difficult to differentiate from an old Cabernet as most of the nose and palate is simply "old" wine. Contrary to what some people may think, most wines are drunk within around an hour after they leave the bottle shop. The big jammy (and typically high alcohol) wines are easy drinking when they are young and this may go some way to explaining why they are popular. Like Syzygies, I'd tend to err on the side of drinking too young but there is a lot of pleasure in a well aged bottle of wine that is drinking at its peak. Too often I've had old wines that are a shadow of their former selves and nothing but a missed opportunity best enjoyed years earlier.

As above, I'd suggest that poor cooking techniques, cooling techniques, refrigeration, production, and holding techniques are responsible for more food poisoning than any "cleanliness" issues in the kitchen. If good HACCP processes made money, we'd likely see the advertising agencies pushing them. Unfortunately the things that make money are peripheral to safety but high profit.

Sounds like we need to come around and stage an intervention. Unfortunately, I'm in Sydney, Australia; any volunteers?

Is it just me or does anyone else wonder if lindag has cooked anything sous vide since she started this thread? <crickets>

I still think our approach to hygiene is influenced too much by the advertisements on our television. A quick spray and all is right? Not likely. A reply above to my post pointed out the problems with males cooking. Perhaps they just spray and think this will fix everything. If we want to help people to be safe, let's focus on the things that matter in terms of HACCP, not trivialities. It may seem like I'm against food safety. Quite the opposite. I obsess about it, but in areas that count. Sterilising bench tops falls way down my priority list when I need to worry about cooking and food storage techniques that can multiply the few bacteria on my benchtop into a full blow gastric emergency. Let's get the discussion focussed on things that make a real difference.

Let's cut the obsession with cleaning surfaces with antibacterials and instead think about hazard control. Most cases of food poisoning occur not because there are benches with germs on them (news to those who haven't done microbiology, this is most if not all of them) but rather because the food is not cooked properly or is kept too long in the danger zone or heated, improperly cooled, reheated, etc. Clean benches aren't going to help you if you have bacteria ridden egg yolks and make a raw egg yolk mayonnaise which you then keep at 50C for six hours. What do I clean my wooden chopping board with? Not much of note except a wash cloth and water because most of my chopping is done with colour coded boards and my raw meat plastic chopping boards go through the dishwasher (although I do treat wash cloth with an iodine-based sterilising wash regularly to make sure that the worst of the bacteria are removed). I cook for large numbers of people regularly and have yet to have a case of food poisoning. This is because of appropriate hazard control, not because of sterilising preparation surfaces. I'd suggest that if you are not aware of how to stop bacteria from multiplying (through pasteurisation or the like) or how to cook and chill without holding food too long in a danger zone of multiplying bacteria, you are much more likely that me to have issues, even if you spray clean your benches regularly with anti bacterials.

So now we're being dismissive of food safety? The words sublime and ridiculous come to mind. If you don't bathe your kitchen in UV light or use one of the many anti-bacterial products to wipe down surfaces, you are going to poison people? Really? We just seem to take all this a smidgen too far. Brings to mind what Jacques Pepin said to Julia Child about washing chickens: “if bacteria could survive that oven, it deserves to kill me.” What's next? Autoclaving cooking implements?

So what happened to getting accustomed to bacteria to develop a resistance to them? Seems the quest to rid the house of "germs" leads to more sickness than it avoids. Personally I blame the advertising agencies selling "germ destroying" products.

So have you found something to cook? If not, I'm sure many of us could PM you with suggestions.

Check out this post which compared smoke first sous vide later with the opposite order.

I thought you were meant to drink it, not sniff the bubbles.