nickrey

Dinner last night. I cooked some pork belly sous vide and built the dish around it. Pork in three guises served as surf and turf. 72-hour sous-vide cooked pork belly with cider glaze, Serrano ham, and blood sausage. Served with scallops and Avruga, pork jus, cauliflower puree, and wilted baby spinach.

AS you are boiling the master stock intensively each time you use it, it would seem that the question would be more one of spoilage of taste rather than bacterial. Given the components that are used it may not be much of a problem, particularly as the master stock is typically reconstituted with ingredients as you go along.

The South Australian version of a Berliner (donut with cream as well as the more conventional jam) had its name changed during World War I to the more English "Kitchener" bun, after Lord Kitchener. It remains the Kitchener bun to this day.

Why not start with this one? Then you can give us an opinion that is based on the actual book rather than its reviews.

What's a "glucose wash"? Are you trying to make a joke or something? The Maillard reaction involves a reducing sugar and an amino acid. The caramelization reaction involving sugar is somewhat different and typically happens at a higher heat but it can enhance the effect. Douglas Baldwin suggested a wash of glucose syrup prior to searing to enhance the flavour achieved during searing. See what happens when you let scientists loose in the kitchen.

Congratulations Douglas. Can't wait to see the final product. As Pedro said those of us in more far flung places will have to wait until it appears on Amazon to get a copy.

Forget the lobster. Oysters and lemon juice. No need for a heat source and the oysters come with their own built in salt broth.

Heston Blumenthal does something similar with his dishes. For example, he sometimes adds onion at two different stages with varying cooking times and methods to allow for two different flavour profiles to emerge from one ingredient. It's all about the flavour profile, which is what separates an award winning dish from the others.

I do similar: grapeseed for high heat in frypans; extra virgin olive oil in salads; and peanut oil for deep frying. But it depends on what you are cooking. Grapeseed is flavour neutral and will not interfere with the dish; many of the other oils are not. If I am working for a particular flavour profile I'll variously use: clarified butter; ghee; sesame oil; anchovy oil; butter (for burnt butter creations where you want the burnt taste); or even a mixture of oils, which not only gives a meld of different flavours but changes the smoke point.

Are those lotus root chips? How did you cook them to get them beetroot colored?

Only if you consider that a fine razor cut is physically the same as a hack with a blunt knife.

One key issue for me with eggs is the freshness and the degree to which they retain their viscosity. This is particularly important because I poach eggs and don't want the white floating away as a mesh of flimsy filaments. As the egg ages, the albumen (white) becomes denatured and watery and the yolk membrane becomes weaker. At the same time, the egg loses water through its permeable shell. Fill a saucepan with water. Place the egg in the water unopened. If it floats, the eggs is more air than substance: throw it away. If it sinks, it is fresh and what you are probably looking for. If you are poaching eggs and they are a bit older than you would like, McGee suggests sliding the egg onto a perforated spoon prior to cooking. The runny egg white just flows away: mind you, if the egg is too old, you wind up with a yolk and not much else.

I've frozen similar processed meats to salami in vacuum bags and they seem to survive the process remarkably well.

The list price of the book will be $625, because the total project has grown to about 2300 pages in 5 volumes. The list price is not the same as the street price, because there usually is some discounting. My guess is that street price will be about $500, but that is just a guess - the discounted price depends on the retailers (Amazon and others) and it is not up to me. Pre-orders on Amazon will get the benefit of the discounted price charged at the time of release. We are working for a release date in late 2010. The book will be expensive, no doubt about it. People have an expectation that books should be cheap, and most cookbooks are very cheap. As a result, most cookbooks make lots of compromises to hit a price point. We made fewer compromises - for this many pages, with tons of color photos, and huge page size, and nice weight paper .... well, it is hard to make it really cheap. So it a bit like dinner at a top restaurant - Per Se, or L'Arpege or similar restaurants have a top quality product, with a price to match. The book will cost less than dinner for two at Per Se (before wine, tax, tip). Eventually we will look at doing a cost reduced version, but the focus right now is getting the full edition finished. With five heavy volumes, the postage to Australia will add significantly to the price of the books. Are you thinking of an e-book version?

If you can sous vide, leave it as a whole piece of steak and cook it low and slow. No need to play with it to get the tender result you want.

Have you ever considered a Thermomix? Think food processor, blender, thermal cooking device in one. No I don't have one, but it's definitely on the wish list. Mind you it's a whole different ball game on price. But to clear the cupboards of a few gadgets at once...

Tonight's dinner was Greek marinated lamb fillet on baby spinach cooked with fetta and pine nuts with a mushroom and eggplant stack (fried eggplant, mushroom, eggplant and shallot mousse, mushroom on top).

Basically any metal that a magnet will stick to will work.

I was searching for recipes for BBQ sauce and came across this forum. Intriguingly, it doesn't seem to have the story of how Lea and Perrin's Worcestershire sauce came about. This is a quote from the company web site: "The story of Lea & Perrins® famous Worcestershire Sauce begins in the early 1800s, in the county of Worcester. Returning home from his travels in Bengal, Lord Sandys, a nobleman of the area, was eager to duplicate a recipe he'd acquired. On Lord Sandys's request, two chemists—John Lea and William Perrins made up the first batch of the sauce. Lea and Perrins were not impressed with their initial results. The pair found the taste unpalatable, and simply left the jars in their cellar to gather dust. A few years later, they stumbled across them and decided to taste the contents again. To their delight, the aging process had turned it into a delicious, savory sauce." From there, the sauce took off.

Sounds like it's the compression that spoiled your Foie Gras Jan.

I've been playing with variants on beer batter and think I've found one that works very reliably. It is a hybrid between tempura batter and conventional beer batter. 1 cup cold beer (something with body like an ale is probably best) ¾ Cup Plain Flour ¼ Cup Potato Flour 1 egg yolk ½ tsp salt, ½ tsp pepper Mix together flours, salt and pepper. Stir egg yolk into cup of beer. Add beer/egg mixture to flour all at once. Combine using a chopstick. Leave lumps, they add character. Dredge your fish through the batter and place immediately in frying oil. Drip and drops enhance the product.

If you use frozen, the higher temperature first thaws then cooks the foie gras. It has to be timed impeccably and use the correct sized (and weight) piece. Heston Blumenthal's recipes are complicated but will work if you follow the directions to the letter, and this would include the nature of the ingredients. I note he uses cryogenically frozen foie gras. Cryogenic freezing works much quicker than normal freezing, thus creating large numbers of small ice particles rather than larger ones. The result is better texture and flavour retention. Either way, using fresh was probably not such a good idea at the temperatures and times given. My suspicion is that, like fish, foie gras is probably better frozen first then vacuum sealed in order not to add mechnical degradation to the ingredient through exposing it to pressure. Or, if you have a super vacuum machine, adjust the sealing pressure down so as not to damage the product.

Most of us "sous viders" sear the meat afterwards using very high heat to give a Maillard reaction. This is often aided by salting or by a glucose wash (credit to Douglas Baldwin for the latter).

From fresh, I'd probably opt for a core temperature target of 54C. See this post by PedroG on several temperatures that have been used, some unsuccessfully.

Blumenthal's recipe calls for frozen liver. This would impact on timings, vacuum packing, etc. Fresh would disintegrate.