Edward J

Fair question. What if I told you that there is a professional body whose mandate it is to represent hospitality workers? You'd never guess it, but it is the Unions Hold on a sec, I hate them as much as you or anyone who has worked for longer than a month, but listen for a second. Basically there are two ways to make an employer pay more: -Put a gun to his head and say "or else!" -Or establish a set of ascending qualifications for employees and base a pay rate on this. The second scenerio is why you and I pay $90/hr for a HVAC guy to repair our A/C or commercial refrigeration, plus a "truck fee", plus parts and taxes. It's why we pay $80/hr for plumbers, and no one will go lower, not even the one guy business in a '76 Econo-van will charge less. Granted, you could get Uncle Fred to install your hot water heater, or install your new oven, but if an accident ever happened and the insurance co. found out a non-licensed contractor installed or fixed something, you'd not only be s.o.l. but also open to lawsuits. But the hospitality unions? To their credit they have done nothing, no qualifications for cooks, waiters, or bakers. It's why the hospitality workers are some of the lowest paid people, why culinary schools get away with murder--they have no standards to base their curriculae on. Canada has one luxury, we do have a qualification for cooks, the "Red Seal". Almost every Province has taken this qualification and built on to it and improved it, it 's what the culinary schools base their curriculum on. Here in B.C. we took the Red Seal and split it up into three chunks: Cook I for newbies, with an educational portion of 3 mths, then a "working zone " of a minimum of 9 mths before the cook can apply for Cook II, another "working zone", and then Cook III after which the cook can write his exam and do his/her practical and finally, the qualification. Any culinary school that wants to tap into this has design their curriculum to meet the I,II, and II segments. It took a looong time to get this in order, but it is in place and it is working very well. Put some fire under the Union's butts, they are garnisheeing paychecks bi-weekly and have nothing to show for it. About Canuck tipping? It's nice that you stereo-type an entire nation, and I'd be happy to reciprocate--there is ample anecdotal material, but seriously, if you want to learn about Canadian tipping habits, I suggest you talk to a few Canadian servers in Canada--the majority of their customers are Canadian, so they know best. Oh, and I'd stay away from tourist towns. Rooms division mngrs and Bosses have a peculiar habit of cutting deals with tour operators where "tipping is all taken care of" but "forget" to tell service staff. Seriously, the tipping here is around 10-15% for white-tablecloth restaurants. Minimum wage ranges from $8.75 to $10.00 here in B.C. with national health coverage. Oh, and the exchange rate for US-CDN is 1:1--has been for quite a few years now.

Scratches inside the mold will show up as "scars" on the product once unmolded. After all, the mold is a complete negative of what you are casting. Don't even bother trying them out, send them back.

Wow, I've never heard of a cake being compared to an immersion circulator. How does one slice and serve an immersion circulator? With creme anglaise? Raspberry coulis? Plain whipped cream and coffee? Seriously though. $40 for a cake is pretty much standard for a custom made cake. Ingredients aren't free, neither is labour or overhead. Mass produced cakes re another story though.......

MMMMmmm Most trades and professions base salaries on qualifications achieved and experience, along with other factors. Waiters have no qualifications, no attempt has been made to create any. Comments?

Fair enough, but you can tell us what you don't like. I have a very hard time trusting customers who want their money back but can't tell me what exactly it is that they don't like

O.k. then, we can agree that apprenticeships are not part of N.America's history. Most cooks--at least the ones I've interviewed and worked with in the last 20 years have had some kind of culinary schooling. I scoff at at any culinary "degree". Cooking is a trade, and as far as I am concerned there are no degrees in culinary education--hospitality mngmt, yes, but cooking, no. I also wish to impress on you that without the hospitality industry there would be no Culinary schools--the two are very closely linked. I suggest you visit other food related sites and see for yourself how often the topic of school loans vs. salary for cooks comes up. It is a very common topic, and many employers are now asking for at least 1 year of some kind of culinary education. Perhaps you can ask a few local restauranteurs to verify this? Of course I don't "like how society values waiters and cooks differently", neither did Mr. McAdams- the speaker on the video that was featured in the first post of this thread. But hey, he's only a restauranteur in business for 25 years, and who speaks of collegues who share his opinion and are doing something about it in their restaurants. And of course there are a few people on this thread who, by reading their posts, share the same opinion. I guess that's the whole essence of the thread, eh? What do I know? I am a "lifer" in the hospitality biz, in my 31st year now, did a classical apprenticeship in Europe and have worked in 3 continents,and have owned my own businesses since 1997. So, like Mr. Mc Adams, I see a problem, and I try to deal with problems to avoid bigger ones in the future. Many others do too. Of course, we can always deny that the current state of tipping in N. America is wrong. Mind you, nation's economies are always changing, and a nation can, literally, wake up to a recession that happened overnight. That might change a few people's minds on this issue.

I stopped using invert for my ganaches about a year ago. I use a "natural, pure" form of invert--Honey. The stuff will start to get weepy/watery and separate after about 6-9 mths, depending on how old it was when you got it. For sorbets, I used to sub 10% of the sugar for invert, and one of the caveats about using invert was not to heat it above 80 Celcius--if memory serves me, I think I got that from one of Wybauw's books

I use tempered for all of my ganaches, but I use a robot-coupe to process them. They do set up faster, which means you can cap them faster, which means you have less opportunity for contaminents to settle on the ganache before capping.

Whoa, hold on there! America never had an apprenticeship system, but more importantly there is no standard or benchmark for cooks in the U.S. "The industry" evolved around immigrants who couln't get hired into well paying jobs and instead opened up a restaurant, laundry, or other small business--and still does to this very day. But I digress, How can you have an apprenticeship and not have a standardized qualification????? True, each culinary school has thier own form of a standard, but each one is different from the other, as well as curriculae. In spite of all this, the facts remain the same: Cooks are saddled with student loans, and are trying to pay them back with crap wages. Cooks get paid crap wages at the end of the month, and servers walk home with $100 or $200 in their pockets at the end of the night If you think the restaurant industry and the culinary school industry are not related--don't communicate with each other--- then you have some serious re-thinking to do.

I fear you might have earned a reputation for giving money back while everyone has a free slice of cake. If the customer can't be specific about WHAT they don't like, then smile and nod and brush them off. Valid complaints are too dry, off flavours, not to dietary instructions, or special instructions. None of your customers mentioned any of these complaints. If you want to keep the cake, keep one handy for samples or make mini-cakes/cupcakes for sampling or sale, and make sure they try it first. If you want to give money back, ALWAYS get their receipt back, and ALWAYS ask for the uneaten portion of the cake back--you are paying them for it. You can throw it in the garbage in front of them, but always get the uneaten portion back.

Now here I must disagree, tipping is illogical. If we take the example the speaker in the video, Mr Mc Adam gave, of table "A" having a bill of $200 and "B" of having a bill of $300 each with the same amount and quality of service (same server) "A" will tip 20-$30, and "B" will tip 30-$45. Yet both tables had the same service. I find this illogical, but there's more. Usually you can get just as much information about what people are NOT saying, as what they ARE saying. In each post I made on this thread I made the statement that the server is tipped a percentage of the entire bill but is not responsible for the entire dining experience. I am doing so again. Yet no one one acknowledges this, and no one will argue against it. Anyone?...., jrshaul?..... I also beg to differ with Annabelle's comment in her first post about people not being forced to accept such employment if they find the compensation distasteful. Pardon my language, but this is Boule-cheet. How? Most cooks take some form of culinary schooling, and most employers are looking for this. Fair enough. This can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $60,000, all depending on the school and the curriculum. When the graduates leave school and look for work, the average pay rate is +/- $10-$14 per hour--and no guarantees that you will get 40 hrs/week either, plus you have to factor in the cost of gear, uniforms, etc. How does a graduate expect to pay back a student loan with this kind of income? If the graduate wants to stay in the industry s/he trained for, s/he/ is pretty much forced to take the low paying jobs--there are no huge pay differences between Restaurant "A" and Restaurant "B". Of course the culinary graduate can seek employment in other sectors and pay off his loans and start to earn a living with a higher salary, but this defeats the whole purpose of getting a culinary education. Comments?

Uhh... you can't fight condensation, just like you can't fight gravity. Here's an easy experiment to illustrate what I mean: Take something from your fridge--anything that's been in there longer than 4 hrs and leave it out at room temp. What happens after 10 minutes or so? Condensation happens. Condensation is when warm meets cold--warm air having more humidity than cold air. It's why your car's windshield fogs up, or why you get dew on the grass in the mornings--warm meets cold. Not much you can do about this--other than having double glazed windows. This has absolutely nothing to do with the type or quality of chocolate. However, chocolate with more sugar content (or less cocoa content) will suffer much more "sugar bloom" damage from condensation. Here's what happens: Moisture is formed on the outside of the item (condensation). This moisture dissolves the sugar in the chocolate. Chocolate contains no water, the sugar is not dissolved, it is only very finely pulverised. When the sugar is dissolved it becomes sticky or tacky, and when the moisture evaporates, it leaves behind a sugar crust, or "sugar bloom" that looks like white mold. It is perfectly fine to eat it just looks nasty. Hope this helps....

Ehh...No. Pastry girl spoke of income disparity

Strawberries covered in chocolate don't keep well. I think we've all made the mistake of putting fresh strawberries in a an airtight plastic bag, and we are rewarded with mush in a few hours--refrigerated or not. Alas, chocolate is pretty air-tight I don't know the ingredients of "a-peels" but real chocolate shrinks as it dries. If you dip the entire berry when the chocolate hardens it will squeeze the berry and will crack. For this reason dipped strawbs are only dipped about 3/4, with some of the skin showing, allowing it to "breathe" Even so, after about 12 hours, the strawb. will shrink away from it's chocolate shell, the stem will wilt, and if refrigerated and then brought out to room temp, the chocolate will sweat (sorry, "condensation) which will dry eventually, become tacky an then display "sugar bloom" or sugar crystlization on the surface, IMHO to avoid stress and doing it all over again--plus related costs, dip the strawbs a max of 12 hours in advance.

Of course they are different trades, but the issue is tipping, not income inequality. Look at it this way: -The diner tips the server a percentage of the final bill. : -By doing the above, the diner acknowledges that the server is responsible for the entire experience -The server works very hard, but is NOT responsible for the entire dining experience. Most diners don't know or care if the tip is shared or not. I know that in California, it is illegal for servers to share tips--what is given to them is theirs. There is a problem with the current tipping culture, and we can't just say if cooks and servers don't like the pay to go and find something else.

Oh yes it does, big time.... Best thing for this kind of couverture is to use it in ganaches or praline pastes

Ahh, well there you go Mkayahara, that's the attitude you've got change. Good luck!

There is no standard for what a server should know or be capable of, and this is one of the key elements to the whole debate. In most parts of Europe, a server completes a 2 yr apprenticeship. Cooks too, don't stay longer than a few months at most places. Pay is one of the key motivators for this. In the U.S. there is no standard for what a cook should know or be capable of either. There are hospitality Unions, always have been, but they have done nothing to implement standards, done nothing to address "tipping wages" in certain States, and have done nothing to further education within the industry. They do, however help themselves to a chunk of paycheques. An acknowledgement has to be made that while the server works very hard, they are not responsible for the entire dining experience, and a tip-currently-- is expressed as a percentage of the entire dining experience. No one wants to make this acknowledgement... On another tangent, the media is doing nothing to improve the situation either. Servers get healthy tips, cooks get a verbal compliments, the public follows suit.

Anodizing is the only foodsafe permanent treatment for aluminum that I know of. Many metals rust, tarnish or oxidize in some form--other than gold, tin, and I'm not sure about platinum. Enjoy your cookware. The next time you're in a "cooking paraphenelia" store, check out the cookware, the quality and the prices, just so you can compare.

Nothing is the matter with anodizing, it is great for aluminum!!! It is however costly, and a decent pot with a sandwich bottom and anodized shell can be as much or even more than a s/s one with a sandwich bottom.

Yup..... And I have used and abused "IKEA 365" brand s/s cookware day in and day out for about 5 years now at work, and it still looks and works perfect, and it's probably from the same factory that produces 90% of the restaurant quality stuff too. It's true, I am biased against aluminum, I hate the stuff for reasons listed above, but one of my biggest pet peeves is the oxidization, that greasy grey/black film gets on everything: Clothes, countertops, shelves, and hands--especially hands. Face it, the ubiquitous 18 x 26 aluminum sheet pan is standard in any N.A. kitchen. Handle just one sheet pan and you have black hands, no matter if it is squeaky clean or not. Drives me crazy. I have "found" steel baking pans at auctions, but not in the quantities I need, and they are in pretty bad shape too. The only thing that helps is to have the aluminum pans coated with a "baker's glaze" at about a buck a pop, which stops the oxidization. The glaze eventually wears off--it is food safe, but high sugar content foods will accelerate it's breaking down. The glaze won't last on pots and pans though, which is why I won't have any in my kitchen--either at home or at work.

Yup. Which brings us right back to the fact that untreated aluminum will oxidize no matter what, and that treated (anodized) aluminum is just as expensive as decent restaurant quality s/s pots. And if it doesn't have a "sandwich bottom" the sucker will warp and pit very fast. Cast aluminum won't warp but I haven't seen much of this in cookware

I use a variety of techniques for slabbing The first method I use is a 12 x 10 wood frame that is 1/2" high. This I made from maple with half-lap joints that are pegged. I lay the frame on a cutting board, lay a sheet of cling film on top, pour in my ganache, and smooth flat. When set I remove the frame which comes away clean, brush couverture on the surface, pick up the whole slab and flip over, remove the cling film, and brush couverture on the newly exposed side. I also bought a set of frames from D+R in Montreal. These are S/S and quite nice, but expensive. However they come with a "movable wall", a bar of s/s that you can move within the frame to make any size you want. I lay a sheet of parchment on a large cutting board, then the frame, then fill. When cold, I run a torch along the frame to remove it. I also have a set of s/s bars in 1/4" and 3/8" widths that I got made a metal shop for quite cheap. Very flexible and usefull. I toyed with the idea of cutting grooves in a cheap nylon cutting board so the bars can sit in and not move about, but that means I have to custom-cut a piece of parchment to fit in the bottom. I prefer the other methods

Plain aluminum will oxidize, nothing will really stop it from oxidizing. Anodized aluminum is treated and won't oxidize. Personally, I run away from any and all aluminum cookware, the only things it has to offer is cheapness and decent heat conductivity. The cons. are that it warps--real bad, it pits, it oxidizes of course, most mnfctrs are loathe to weld aluminum and so the handles are riveted on--with aluminum rivets. Aluminum is soft and so are the rivets, so these will eventually deform leaving you with a loosey-goosey handle dribbling liquid all over the place. Meh, aluminum belongs on aircraft and old Chevy Vega engine blocks...........

Russell food eqpt, corner of Clark & Venables Dunlevy Food eqpt, Manitoba and 6th,I think. Pacific Food eqpt on Hastings, inbetween Clark and Main.