nickrey

I don't know if you can get it in Europe but here in Australia we can buy jars of pre-chopped lemongrass. It is a Thai product containing Lemongrass (50%), water, acidity regular (330). Lemongrass is easy to get here with every supermarket selling it but this is something to have in the refrigerator if you find yourself short.

I have the CookTek - it has a low-high range but ALSO A SET YOUR TEMP function. And it works! Pricey? Yes. Worth it? Yes. http://www.cooktek.com/product/cooking-front-house/cooktops/apogee%E2%84%A2-single-counter-top-cooktop I just looked that unit up. It's over $2,000 here in Australia.

When using US-sourced recipe books, I always cut the added sugar down by a third to a half. Not doing so makes the dishes far too sweet for my palate.

I use home branded artisan pasta imported by my local Italian providore. Someone above mentioned bronze die extrusion. This leaves little ridges down the pasta to which the sauce will stick. This type of extruded pasta is a level above Barilla (which is good for a mass produced product) and typically a bit more expensive but the difference is noticeable and worth pursuing.

The 1725 date is as cited by the Oxford English Dictionary specifically for "Welsh Rabbit" It reads "1725 J. Byrom Rem. (1854) I. i. 108, I did not eat of the cold beef, but of Welsh rabbit and stewed cheese." "Rarebit" came a bit later. "1785 Grose Dict. Vulgar T., Rabbit, a Welch rabbit, bread and cheese toasted, i.e. a Welch rare bit." The Scotch rarebit is approximately the same time: 1747 H. Glasse Cookery ix. 97 To make a *Scotch-Rabbit. Toast a Piece of Bread‥, butter it, cut a Slice of Cheese,‥ toast it on both Sides, and lay it on the Bread. The OED defines it as somewhat uncertainly as "scotch rabbit, ? a ‘Welsh rabbit’" I can just imagine the Surgeon of Crowthorne working on that one.

Basting?

As Heidi says, no meat sample is going to be prototypical of the class. As a result, I'd be very surprised if the authors of the said articles didn't analyse a series of samples and then average to come up with their final results on content. As such your rounding is going to be well within the range of levels that they tested.

Sorry for hijacking thread. Traditional rarebit uses welsh cheese, beer, and mustard. Typical variations use Cheddar, ale or even stout, and add Worcestershire sauce. Others add milk or cream (not for me I'm afraid) and something to give some heat such as cayenne or hot sauce. It can be considered either a fancy toasted cheese sandwich or a fondue applied to toast. On the original topic. The recipes all look pretty good. Important things are to choose a good cut (sirloin is good, as the old saying goes, "arise Sir Loin of beef"), brown before roasting (some miss this step; don't use those recipes), roast beef so it is rare (you can include use of a thermometer here to make sure, I'd take it to 55C in centre; it will rise slightly as it rests) and rest before carving (this is when the puddings are made). For the puddings, it is important to rest the batter, preheat muffin or pudding tin with dripping so it is close to smoking and then pour the batter into the hot tins before returning to oven to cook. As it is a rising baked good, don't open the oven to peek during the first twenty minutes. As the previous poster said, it may have been the national dish before the BSE outbreak but many now view beef with suspicion.

That poor rabbit again, always getting put forward when people are looking for rarebit.

Well, exactly. I'm looking forward to seeing what the OP has chosen for Scotland, my place of origin. Probably haggis, (a thing of great beauty), which is mainly eaten by brave tourists eating it for a bet. (By the way, should you find yourself in Edinburgh and see a man in a kilt there is a 99% chance he will be Canadian.) Or is it the deep fried Mars Bar? I've never encountered one in Scotland but I don't go there often Actually the nearest Scotland has to a national dish is a breakfast speciality, enjoyed by generations for millennia. An Embassy Regal and a cup of Nescafé with three sugars. Wouldn't you want neeps and tatties with your haggis?

That's true for cooking, but for baking, it's a recipe for failure.I forget who said it, Rhulman maybe, but for baking at least, it holds: "Use the scale or you will fail." Even then there are differences between flours, etc that need to be taken into account. Using scales will put you very close and typically create a passable product. Fine tuning by feel is needed for perfection.

The cooking process is just as important as the meat. Wagyu is typically sliced thinly so the monounsaturated fat can render properly. If you cook a thicker piece, aim for medium. If you try to cook thick steak rare the fat will not melt and will be rather chewy and unpleasant.

I made some pasta at lunchtime and decided to try this out. First I got the water up to a rolling boil. Then I added the pasta and let it come back to the boil. There was active rolling and foaming. At this stage I added the oil (around 1 tbsp). I was quite convinced that it would settle down, partially because of what was said above but also because the oil was at room temperature. To my surprise, the rapidity of the boil and the foaming did not change. Whether or the the sea settles down, it seems that boiling water doesn't. I do have to recant one of my earlier statements, however, the pasta did manage to circulate through the oil and was coated with oil. This was unpleasant and the sauce didn't stick as well as it should have. I'd encourage others to experiment to see if their water settles down. If it does, we can look at how my process differed. If it doesn't, I think we can lay this one to rest.

This raises alarms with me in the same way as "sealing a steak keeps the juices in." Is there any evidence for this "conventional wisdom" or is it an urban cooking myth? A quick search of the Internet suggests that doing so lowers the surface tension but this could simply be the same fictional justification repeating itself.

Yes. It is traditional to do this with pastes prior to adding other ingredients. I'd brown onions then add paste and fry it off then add other ingredients. I realise that you are doing it for convenience but marinating the cooked meat in the sauce overnight and having the aromatics penetrate the meat prior to heating would give you an even more complex flavour profile.

It will spoil at least 10% of the bottles. Or maybe that's just cork and it does nothing to octopus.

Mine is still going very well.

I'm not sure if you can get this in the US but one of my favourite hot sauces is Sambal Asli. The sauce comes from Indonesia and contains the usual suspects (chill, vinegar, sugar, salt). It is a bit more textured than Sriracha and to my taste a bit hotter. It can be found on the tables in most Warung (cafes).

My thought would be that the lemon juice in chimmichurri is a vital part of the flavour profile as well as preventing oxidation. By putting the lemon juice in at the end for chimmichurri you add sufficient to balance the taste, which can only be done when all the other ingredients are added. For artichokes or apples it is simply a way of stopping the brown and therefore can be added earlier.

I didn't take a picture but it is easy to describe. Basically it was a quenelle of soft serve malt ice cream set on some finely diced cooked rhubarb is its juice with some beetroot sauce poured in a pool around the quenelle.

I notice that there is a revised and updated version of the book coming out soon. Does anyone have any ideas of how much it is revised and updated?

Last night we had a very enjoyable degustation menu cooked by a newly arrived chef from France (via a stint in the UK at Hibiscus as head chef), Guillaume Zika. The dessert he served was exceptional. It was a malt ice cream served with rhubarb and beetroot. The taste combination was exceptional and not one I've thought of or seen before.

As a lot of people use ready-made frozen puff pastry to good effect, I'm not sure that I see the logic in this.

Yes, it really makes sense that you'd serve peas with a meat other than lamb and in addition call it shepherd's pie. Wonder why I didn't think of that myself.

Katie, As someone who grew up in Australia with vegemite, which is basically a umami and salt compound I was recommended by a Japanese waiter to try Natto, which I love. I've given the opinion on other posts that because we grew up with a savoury flavour base, we are less likely to enjoy excessively sweetened dishes as, for example, someone who grew up on peanut butter and jelly may. When travelling in North America I find many dishes overbearingly sweet. This is common amongst many of my Australian peers. Not wrong but not in line with our flavour preferences. I agree that people who are open to new experiences will try them but whether they like it or not is likely to be dependent on prior exposure and consequent taste preferences. We do not come to food with a tabula rasa. This is one reason why foods that remind us of our childhood, pleasant experiences, etc generate such positive emotions. The "can't taste" in the previous comment was about religiously proscribed foods; the Leviticus-driven Kosher requirements for Jews; not eating beef for Hindus, etc. As for the caviar/white chocolate question, this is the prime case cited as to why using shared flavour matches came about. The pairing was so out of left field, Heston Blumenthal went seeking a reason, which he found in partnership with food scientists in the flavour resources that I quoted earlier.