nickrey

The hanging does more than drying: it is where the flavour develops. I'd leave it for the recommended time and experience the full taste of the product.

hmmm.. Regular consumers... Auctions Vintage Chateau Lafite-Rothschild ... Not two things I'd normally hear linked in a sentence. My suspicion is that they've always been out of that market whether by personal choice or means. So some of the very wealthy are now not able to afford some of the more obscure wines. Of course my heart goes out to them. But everyone else is getting benefit from increased competition, better production techniques, etc. No issue here.. Move on...

I'm like Chris and use a can of crushed tomatoes, chopped olives, and anchovies. As you need to cook the sauce for a bit longer with chopped tomatoes, the anchovies dissolve in as a taste rather than being a feature (Kevin72 makes this point). Reading through your recipe, have you tried adding the basil chiffonade just before serving? The residual heat will cook it without losing its delicacy of taste and the interplay between it and the tomatoes.

That title is open to far too many interpretations. I thought they were going to start sending them up the chimneys as well.

This is an interesting question. I was in my late teens/early 20s when the metric system was introduced into Australia so it was more like moving from one system to another rather than being a metric user from birth. I find that for those things that I have highest exposure to such as weight and volume (through cooking) I tend to think only in metric, although I can covert relatively easily using the ratios we first used when the system was introduced. Because I drive, again I can easily and naturally grasp larger distances and speed in metric. I use smaller length measurements much less often so I must admit to still thinking in feet and inches and converting to metric in my head. My recommendation coming to this as an adult is, like bague25, just use it and you will come to adjust. If your use is infrequent, you won't switch or will translate measurement which adds, to my mind, an unnecessary level of difficulty. As a general rule when cooking: weigh. There are just too many variables that mitigate against consistency of measurement when using volume measures. I take your point about liquids Chris but when you get have 1 litre of water = 1 kilogram, it's just too easy to pass up. Moreover, base 10 is much more logical to work with than base 16 or base 12.

Thanks for the blog Prawncrackers. Visually stunning and outstanding cooking as usual. Something to aspire to.

Supertasters are particularly sensitive to bitter tastes, non-tasters aren't. Perhaps it is possible that your SO is a non-taster (as opposed to a medium or supertaster) and lacks not only the vocabulary and experience but also the capacity to differentiate the tastes. In this case you could be tasting something objectively different and any attempt to understand or educate will be hampered not by a lack of common language but by a lack of a common sensory framework.

Check out this blog for a southern Italian recipe. Also try looking up involtini rather than braciole. It's one of those dishes that has different names across different parts of Italy.

Scallops cook so quickly and the searing gives such a nice caramelization I don't think I'd even want to sous vide them.

Addendum to what Pedro posted: I used to boil the juices to coagulate the proteins and then used the strained liquid (osmazome) for sauce making. Looking more carefully at the proteins that were coagulated, they seemed to be the residue that the meat would put out whilst frying that then cooked onto the bottom of the pan and would later be deglazed to make a sauce. Using this reasoning, I now heat the liquid and strain off the osmazome, which I add later in the sauce making process. I then cook the remaining residue at a sufficient temperature for it to be undergo a Maillard reaction and give the approximation of the bits that stick to the bottom of the pan when you fry meat. I then deglaze with an appropriate liquid (typically red wine, which I then reduce) and proceed to make the sauce, adding an amount of the osmazome as one of the components (as well as chicken stock, veal demi glace and an acid just before serving). Once the sauce is cooked down to a suitable thickness or thickened with a starch such a potato starch (this call depends on the flavour of the sauce and the degree to which it will cope with being further concentrated), I strain it and serve it over the meat. The flavour of this sauce more closely represents a traditional sauce due to incorporation of the meaty, maillardized flavours.

I take it from your description that the collagen softened. Seems this temperature/time and collagen conversion thing gets me more and more confused the more I read and experiment. Roll on Nathan's book I say.

White Chocolate? Isn't that what's left when the chocolate is removed from Cocoa?

I'm really subject to a lot of roll tying envy. Are they individual ties or those fancy butcher-type rolling looped ties, which I always have problems with.

Perhaps it's what you grow up with. You mentioned it was not as smooth -- I would tend to extend this description by commenting that many non-European chocolates are much too grainy for my tastes.

I've made it twice, both very successfully using the essential ingredients of the Ruhlman and Polcyn recipe (meaning I typically won't follow a recipe exactly but used the recommended proportion of pink salt to meat). Both times I wrapped the brined meat in cheesecloth for maturation. The first time I made it, I matured it in my bar fridge. The second time it was in my wine storage fridge. Being in a humid location, both these options seemed successful in maintaining a (relatively) stable environment. The pancetta in the wine storage fridge developed a covering mould but as recommended on threads here I simply wiped that off with a mild vinegar solution. While the taste of both was superb, I preferred the one matured at a warmer temperature in the wine fridge.

If you like Marmite/Vegemite, try Natto. It is another really rich source of umami.

Definitely Amedei Chuao. The story of how the French told the Italian producers they were not evolved enough to use Valrhona and the Italians went ahead and took their premium plantation supplier from underneath them is a salutary lesson for all snobs everywhere. Read the story here.

The panda did give it away, but probably only to those of us who linger on your posts in the Dinner thread. Really looking forward to the blog.

Hi Grace, I wasn't familiar with the terminology Cornish hen until I read your food blog. Like Ambra and Heidi H, I spatchcock the Cornish hens (what we call poussin) by removing the backbone and pressing down on the breast to flatten the bird. Put two skewers through the bird at diagonals to keep it flat. Then marinate and grill. Because it is flat when cooked and turned, it cooks through without overcooking any individual parts of the bird. I had a picture of one over on the grilled chicken thread at this post. It is only a half a bird but you get the idea.

Thanks for doing the tests, looking forward to the results. I take it the meat is all from the same source?

Can't see any attribution on this page for this Food Network Recipe. Unless it is in the small print somewhere, seems to be a textbook example of plagiarism.

There seems to be three different issues emerging here. The first is blatant plagiarism which is (relatively) easy to prove and seems to be emerging as a fact in this case. There are sufficient balanced pieces and publicized examples to suggest that this has happened. This is an issue for many on this site and understandably disturbing. The second is the editors (reported) reaction to being challenged on the issue. This is less hard to prove although because it was reportedly contained in an email, it too should be easy to verify. If true, this compounds the first issue because it highlights the wide gap between moral rights and what can be done to legally enforce them, particularly given a purported lack of professional journalistic integrity. The third is the depth of the reaction. The term "Internet lynch mob" has been bandied around. Blog comments tend to be immediate, they tend to miss the self-imposed censorship that first draft emails often receive. Couple this with a generalized whipping up of emotions and it is easy to see why this has escalated so fast. As someone said up thread this is likely to turn into a case study for journalism students. Let's hope they learn something from it.

Having personally seen copy from news feed sources topped and tailed and printed complete with a journalist's byline claiming to have written the story, this story seems too close to real-life for comfort. Edited to add. Having looked at one of the linked facebook pages above and the original recipe, the only original part in the Cooks Source recipe was that the subeditor changed the title slightly (probably to fit into the column width). The rest was just cut and pasted exactly as it appear on the other web page. Too lazy even to edit the content - at least we now know the source of the cook's source.

Looking forward to recipes with crustacean as well as Panda from our mystery contributor (oh, and spectacular photography).

Epidemiological science, particular in diet, is correlational in nature and extremely inexact. Correlation doesn't prove causality, which is what these researchers often seem to fail to realise. Once the information then enters the public domain, it becomes open to journalistic licence, which leads in turn to headlines and stories that many scientists cringe at. Running real controlled experiments to prove the science under consideration would be unethical in the extreme. However until this is done, we have speculative findings at best. Building legislation on what could turn out in fifty years to be bogus science echoes the pre-enlightenment fusion of religion and state. Let's try to keep a healthy separation between science and the state. My suggestion would be to use science to inform legislation within reason but never to use it to dictate. Mandating food salt content would be dictatorial -- leading to the slippery slope you mentioned.