nickrey

But it's so easy to sharpen, why not if you have the tools and skill This comment was in response to Keith's comment above that you can't sharpen the blade on a Benriner. Actually taking mine out, it would be easy enough to remove the blade and sharpen it on stones, so I agree with you.

David Thompson has recommended the Megachef brand (he's the brand ambassador). Andrea Nguyen's review of the sauce can be found here. I've used it and it is very good and available in Sydney.

There is no need to sharpen the blade on a Benriner as it can be replaced with a new flat blade.

Yes, it is a reflection of a modern kitchen. Going through the recipes, there are a number of calls for sous vide, vacuum compression, liquid nitrogen, a pacojet, and a centrifuge. But for virtually all of these, substitutes can be made to give an adequate product without the high-tech labour-saving equipment. For example, the centrifuge is used for creating flavoured oils (eg. parsley oil) that are tasty and clear. You can make parsley oil by dehydrating parsley in your microwave, grinding it up into a powder, adding oil, and then filtering through fine filter paper. It won't be as clear as if it were centrifuged but it will do the job. The pacojet is used for sorbets and granitas, which can easily be done in the conventional manner. Use an ice-cream maker instead of a paco jet or the liquid nitrogen and you'll be able to do a good version of most of the recipe ingredients, albeit with a larger ice grain size. Perhaps with the exception of olive oil granita, which won't freeze well without the intense cold of liquid nitrogen. Sat does use various thickeners such as agar agar and gelatine. The most exotic ingredients apart from these are maltodextrin and ultratex. As for localised ingredients that are not easily available, I think we all have had to substitute in one way or another when we used recipes from the other side of the world. His use of ingredients is nothing like the locavores such as Redzepi or Nilsson. If you are used to cooking modern restaurant style dishes, have flexibility in your use of substitutions, and can use appropriate alternatives for obvious restaurant-based gizmos, this is a very approachable book by a talented chef.

We'll have to have an Aussie cook off with the book. I'm making up one of his desserts in a few weeks time (Lemon Fennel Mousse, which is a frozen lemon mousse combined with Italian meringue served wedged between dried lemon meringue slices topped with a layer of pickled fennel and scattered with finely snipped fennel fronds). Will let you know how it goes.

As a sausage substitute you could always make up meatballs using the same fat proportion (basically skinless sausages).

Sounds like good old pork and beans to me. Wouldn't calling it Cassoulet be a bit on the pretentious side?

And rest the roast chicken breast down before serving. (Tip courtesy of Maggie Beer appearing on "Ask the butcher")

When it is studied in controlled conditions the effect sees to disappear or appears independent of the presence or otherwise of MSG. All the anecdotes above suggest the possible involvement of MSG but do not prove it. Perhaps if we publicise MJX's experience we might get people queuing up for Chinese food. Maybe there is a link, maybe not. Research evidence tends to support the latter, anecdote and rumour supports the former. I know which source I prefer to look at to shape my views. As a scientist, my view is always open for refutation given evidence from controlled, double-blind studies (sorry MJX, that rules out your experience as "proof" - the placebo effect is too strong to deny a possible psychogenic origin for your symptoms). At this stage I haven't seen it and this in an area where a scientist's reputation would be enhanced by unequivocally demonstrating a link between the symptoms and the alleged cause. I'm not denying any of your experiences, which are very real to you and of concern, but am sceptical that it was MSG that caused them.

Check out this thread. The whole Chinese restaurant syndrome myth started with an observational letter published in the 1968 New England Journal of Medicine. The story is so familiar it's cringeworthy. Published in reputable journal, must be right. Mass reporting in popular press. Combine this with suggestibility in the general populous and a subsequent expectancy that they will have negative effects. The rest is not difficult to predict. The guilty chemical was burnt at the stake of myth, rumour, and self deception. It's still smouldering despite heaps of reputable evidence to discredit the original opinion.

Michel Roux related a story of something that happened in his restaurant in a letter republished in Sat Bains' new book "Too many chiefs and only one Indian." I'll summarise. Two couples come into the restaurant five minutes apart, both order aperitifs and the five-course tasting menu. After the meal, which spread over a few hours, they both asked for their bills. The first husband said "I hope it comes quicker than the meal did." Michel went to see him and was told that the service was slow and apparently inefficient. The second couple then asked for their bill. The husband said that the meal was good but serving five courses in two hours was just too rushed to let them enjoy it. Michel said to the second gentlemen "let me introduce you to someone who doesn't seem to share your point of view." He the asked them to see if they could mutually come up with a solution to what he should do to make people happy. Needless to say they disagreed and continue to do so. This story may help us all to put perspective on comments that there is such a thing as "proper" pacing and that restaurants are "doing it wrong."

How about patty cake, which is a term used in Australia.

I quite often fill a sink with water at around 55-58C. Put the package in there and the large thermal mass of the water both defrosts and reheats the packages. Finish with a quick sear on a very hot pan or with a blow torch and you add a Maillard effect. If you are worrying about bacteria, no need as long as you cooked the food originally long enough to pasteurise it. With the water defrosting/reheating the package is not long enough in the danger zone to be of concern. If your water in the sink gets too cold, top it up with some hot.

Plus food processors inject large amounts of water into their processed pork products. Steaming from the inside as well as the outside would not help matters.

Chris Young, who was one of the authors of "Modernist Cuisine" and Heston Blumenthal's manager of food research, has set up a website called Chefsteps. His recipe for ultimate roast chicken and a video demonstrating the process is at this link.

You missed the option of inserting some fat between the breast and the skin. This is often recommended as one way of keeping this part of the bird moist while you get the dark meat up to temperature.

When I first made tabbouleh I used Claudia Roden's recipe soaking the bulghur in cold water did not soften it sufficiently. Since reading about soaking it in boiling water, I tried it and it achieved a much better consistency. This may be a function of the raw product used but it worked for me.

Free range, typically as applied to chickens. Yes they are not kept in slums as industrial chickens are but an advertisement here on television portrays them as gambolling merrily through the fields, playing with each other. We had chickens when I was growing up and their behaviour is nothing like this misty-eyed advertising conceptualisation of free range. It is more than enough to bring out the cynic in me and wonder how they are really kept (mobile chicken coop driven around a paddock is much more likely).

I know this could be heresy in this topic but unless I'm doing a melange of seafood I'll always cook prawns in the traditional manner. In surf and turf most likely over charcoal and simply cooked until they are just translucent. You can't post sear sous vide cooked prawns as that would overcook them horribly and without the sear they are simply too gummy in my opinion.

Have you tried adding all of the ingredients that give depth of flavour on the first day (garlic, chili) and compared the results? It seems to be a fairly conventional tomato-based sauce that you should be able to make in an hour at most. If you want depth of flavour, retain a portion of some of the ingredients to add later in the cooking process enable some to be cooked longer and some shorter.

The oil from garlic confit has the same effect. Or how about garlic powder? Or wrapping the garlic in muslin cloth and removing it before serving?

Anything in excess pushes people past their comfort levels eventually. But the examples that you chose... Pickled raisins represent a sweet/sour flavour, what's wrong with that? Smoke is added to salt and to other elements of a dish to improve the flavour; I'd be more worried about overuse of the product than the product itself (eg. piling tabasco on everything, or adding salt and pepper before tasting a dish). And a toaster that let's you see when the toast is at a perfect level of doneness; that's really over the top -- crazy kids.

I recently went to cook some bok choy in oyster sauce only to find out that I had run out of the sauce. With time being a limiting factor, I rifled through my supplies of ready made sauces, choosing some ready-made ponzu sauce as a potential substitute. I separated the leaves and stir fried the bok choy with some garlic and ginger. This was finished with the ponzu. The acid/sour+salty components in the ponzu complemented the bitterness in the bok choy perfectly. I liked it more than the equivalent dish made with oyster sauce. Next step will be to make it with home-made ponzu made with yuzu. Has anyone else substituted an ingredient/ingredients and found that the resulting product was better than the original?

I like the concept of using it to make egg shells more easy to peel off. This may solve my frustrations with sous vide quail eggs.

I'm not sure this would give the butter flavour though.