Edward J
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Posts posted by Edward J
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Those factors limit you considerably....
Still, I have one more bullet in my gun: Costco
Its not what you think, but Costco, HomeDespot, etc. do carry mini-bar sized wine coolers with glass doors. Temp and humidity look about right for choc with these units. Getting the bar fridges to look halfway decent will be a challenge, but it is an option.....
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It's no mystery to me, restaurant talent is leaving the industry because they have things like rent and food to pay for....
As a comparison, a few years before I went to Switzerland, (early'80's) the entire hospitality industry was going through a turmoil. The hospitality industry was wondering where all the cook, baker, and server apprentices were, and they knew if they couldn't figure out why, there would be no new talent in the pipelines for years to come. The answer came back, future apprentices were going into other fields where a 5 day week was the norm--the hospitality industry insisted on a 6 day week. Hotel owners frothed and fumed at the mouth, but eventually had to give in and offer a 5 day week--albeit 5 days of split shifts, but still a 5 day week. This was in 1982.... Ironically, when I left Singapore in '97, the hospitality industry there still insisted on a 6 day week, and were busy cursing the local work force and trying to recruit staff from neighboring Malyasia, Indonasia, and the Philippines.
The N. American hospitality industry, I feel, has dug their own grave, and below I will list my reasons why:
-There is no definition of what a cook actually should be capable of, or what body of knowledge s/he should posess. How then, do you design a culinary school curriculum? How do you then design a "living wage"?
-There is no definition of what a server shuld be capable of, or what body of knowledge they should posess. Oh, and let's not get into the whole tipping issue.......
-The culinary schools as I have said before, have no benchmark or qualification to base a curriculum on, but more importantly, have no criteria of what a prospective student should posess. The biggest problem employers have, are culinary school graduates who need to pay huge school debts, but have no practical working experience within the industry prior to culinary school. This problem is a clear responsiblity of the culinary schools, and they won't own the problem.
-There are no standards or qualifications for restaurant owners. Basically anyone with cash and who can pass the health inspection can open a place. The failure rate of restaurants within the first year is...well, let's just say that 99% of the financial instutions won't lend money for a venture unless the applicant has a prior succesful business under their belt. A poorly run and financed business will pay the absolute minimum for staff, and this does nothing to raise the standards for the hospitality industry, and yet there are too many poorly run restaurants.
-The hospitality industry relies on various gov'ts to set minimum wages, and then they base wages on this. If the industry wants future cooks and servers in the pipeline for the next 50 years they need to figure out their own minimum wages. This requires a series of benchmarks and/or qualifications, but there aren't any. Anyone brave enough to want a Gov't to do this? Or should the hospitality industry actually take ownership of this conundrum?
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How do you suggest cleaning a 1/8" wide slot that is 12" deep?
If it (knife block slots) had two open ends you could wrap a ruler with a cotton guaze and clean it like a rifle barrel, but alas, the slots have only one end. No mystery why the health inspectors don't want to see them....
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Naw, you couldn't get a firm, "snappy" chocolate by adding honey to cocoa mass. Don't know if dehydrated honey exists, (dehydrated corn syrup exists, and is used by the "big boys") but that might work
The option I did want to suggest was blending your own. And while I do not use malitol sweetened chocolate, I see no reason why you couldn't blend this with cocoa mass for your own 90% or whatever that isn't sweetened with sugar. Come to think of it there are chocolates in supermarkets that are sweetened with other natural sugar alternatives that could easily be blended with cocoa mass.
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I don't like knife blocks for a completely different reason....
I was "gifted" one about 12 years ago, an "upright" version, and so I used it at home. At that time we had a tiny kitchen with even tinier counter space, and I witnessed the knife block getting darker and darker. Meh, I thought, it's just the wood aging. Of course it was coffee spills, water spills, flour and sugar, grease mist from the stove, and gawd knows what else was spilled on that block. It registered in my mind but I didn't do anything about it.
The block was, delicately put, a cheap p.o.s. and after a year the laminations started to separate, and I needed to toss it out. Before I tossed it, I had the bright idea of smashing it on the sidewalk to see how many pieces it could split into. Three. But as I scooped up the pieces I notice all kinds of crud lodged into the slots. I've been using magnetic strips ever since.....
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I dunno about chocolate siezing when you add honey to it....
For about the last two years I have been making honey bon-bons, with a 50/50 mix of honey and couverture. What I get is a "plastic" type of, well, ganache, you could call it, that doesn't sieze up, but will eventually dry out if if isn't enrobed in chocolate.
I also make my own 90% bars that is a blend of, you guessed it, 100% cocoa mass and 70% couveture. No reasn you couldn't do a 82 3/8% or a 91 5/16 % blend. Been doing it for about 3 years now, tempering is no problem, molding and storage are no problem. You might have to add some cocoa butter to thin it out a bit if you want to mold, but a lot depends on the fluidity of your "mixing couverture", although the cocoa mass is pretty darn thick, even at 45 C.....
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I don't understand the logic of an aluminum mixing bowl, or even an aluminum alloy.
Mixing bowls are best used for, well, mixing. I have only attempted to whip chilled cream in an aluminim bowl once, my result was a grey substance flocked with tiny metallic flakes.....
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Try vegacases.com. They are a local co. in Vancouver, but are highly recommended and specialize with pastry and chocolate cases, and export worldwide.
They are expensive, make no doubt about that. After that there are the european models, but I have no experience with these.
My experiences with chinese made cases are unprintable, but I came quickly to the conclusion that they work best with the plug pulled out....
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I've got a "thing" with W.F., but it has nothing to do with packaging or weights.
I produce chocolate bars, we've got them in about 30 stores now, including two national chains. We've approached W.F. several times now, but get a variety of excuses.
When talking with other suppliers, we found out the "real" reason: We don't go through a distributer. And we won't do that since we don't want our product marked up three times instead of two.......
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"---However mechanized abrasives will remove a lot of steel very quickly ------"
The biggest problem with motorized sanding is that you can in fraction of a second, permanently ruin a good knife by de-tempering the thin metal edge.
Don't do it.
dcarch
Of course you can de-temper or "cook" your edge, I have done this on occasion. But if you use light pressure and keep the piece moving fairly quickly (ie multiple passes) you can avoid the de-tempering.
However, I only endorse mechanized abrasives for bulk metal removal, and for this reason, I never use anything finer than 60 grit, be it grinding wheels, or sanding belts. Again, with this coarse grit and light passes and moving fairly quickly, de-tempering can be avoided pretty easily.
However, to remove the coarse grit scratch pattern and polish the bevel I'll use my stones and hands.
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There's nothing "bad" or "Wrong" with an edge-pro or any other type of mechanized abrasive. Fact is, the knife doesn't know or care who, what, or how it is abraded, just that two surfaces meet at a clean sharp junction.
However mechanized abrasives will remove a lot of steel very quickly (or quickly compared to doing it by hand on a 8 x 2 stone...). Again, this is not necessarily bad, especially if you need to grind out a nick, or re-profile the bevel. But if you use mechanized abrasives for daily touch-ups and honing, it will eat up your knives rather quickly--it does what it does, abrade steel.
Just my observation, but the further I climbed up culinary ladder, the less my knives had an impact on me. As I got into more and more supervisory positions I only cared that I had enough knives and that they were clean and sharp. I spent more time finding bodies to wield those knives, and I really didn't care who supplied the knives, I only cared that the work got done, properly, and on time.
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I've used Dexters, and while they are not my first choice, they do fit in with what you want to use them for: A general purpose workhorse that is not geared to an individual, but rather a group of people. It'll do fine.
My choice is VIctorinox, but then I'm biased since I am Swiss, and was trained with Victorinox and/or Wenger.
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Hi Minas,
You only need to seal nuts prior to panning if you are going to use dark chocolate. You will get "fat migration" (looks pretty much like fat bloom) on any nut product that is enrobed or panned in dark chocolate. I get this frequently with dark hedge hogs and dark Italian Nougat--regardless of my temper and storage conditions.
If you pan with milk chocolate you won't get fat migration with nuts. I just start off the panning with nuts, toss in some milk choc, toss in a scoop of cocoa pwdr to make it "stick", then pan with only milk chocolate.. I do about 10 kgs of choc panned hazelnuts a month and have neve had problems with fat migration--even when I get product returned to me several months past the expiry date.
Hope this helps
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Part of the whole non-stick schtick is the actual polish of the material. Both s/s and aluminum are capable of a very high, mirror like polish. The higher the polish, the smoother or slicker the surface is, and the odds of something sticking are greatly reduced.
Thing is, a mirror polish requires a bit of energy, in other words it'll cost. This is one of the reasons that medical/operating room equipment and instruments are so expensive, they have a mirror polish so they are easier to sanitize and keep clean.
Then again cheese is a high preotein product and it will stick like a (deleted) I make a 2 kg batch of caramel about 3 times a week, and I do it in a S/S sandwich bottom bottom pot I bought from (gasp!) Ikea. Meh, after 15 min soak I attack it with a s/s scrubbie and it's as good as new again.i
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Ah, aluminumumumn....how I hate thee.......
The anodizing is not because of non-stick issues, it's because aluminum oxidizes very quickly, reacts to acidic ingredients, and is very soft and scratches/gouges easily. The hard anodizing compensates for all of this, as well as driving up the cost to well past what a decent s/s sandwich bottom pot would cost.
But even hard anodizing won't stop the pot from warping, on a gas stove it'll warp faster han the USS Enterprise.....
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I spend a good deal of my time deliveing to various grocery store chains, and see what goes in and out.
All the stores have a policy of giving away scratch & dent canned goods to various charities, most have a policy of giving away overripe fruit and veg to soup kitchens, dairies will take back product with expired dates, and I don't know about meat.
The one thing that left me scratching my head was at one store I delivered to and saw a big tub full of bagged items--ju-jubes, candies, nuts, etc. These were bagged by customers at the self-serve bins and were found lying about in various parts of the store. I was chatting up the reciever, and he told me that by law they had to dump these directly in the garbage--they could not guarantee that the items were not contaminated, and that this was an ongoing issue between them and the health inspector.
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Mmmm.. Did you ever consider that people want what the media tells them to want?
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Not the fault of the programmers.
Not the fault of Guy,
It's all about supply and demand. The population demands, the producers and the performers supply.
The problem is the culture we are in. They demand that kind of programming.
dcarch
This should make sense, but everything and everyone I know tells me it doesn't make sense.
Virtually all of my friends are in the hospitality industry, and virtually all of them have "gave up" on food network TV, they don't watch it. And the hospitality industry is a large one....
Even my relatives, for instance my b.i.l. who's a bus driver, knows there's "something off" about FN tv in general and "doesn't watch a much as I used to"
So, who is demanding this stuff? Advertisers who need a vehicle to flog their stuff on TV?
Never understood the media, or even tried to. I'm still fighting with them (the media, in particular the magazines) for refusing to acknowledge that weighing out ingredients as opposed to volume measurements is a for more intelligent method, more accurate, faster, far better repeatable results, and of course, the fact the we've been doing it for well over 3,000 years. They refuse to acknowledge...................
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Yes. commercial equip[ment.
I think what the O.P. (who coincidentally hasn't responded) is looking for is advice.
In particular, advice as a result of working in commercial kitchens, and familiarity with commercial equipment.
What the o.p describes is a $700 option of adding a squirrel cage fan to a regular commercial oven-under-the-range. The o.p. also wants to bake his own bread, which is to be congratulated--not told to buy from a bakery.
The crown (or ceiling height) of a regular oven-under-the-range is between 18"-20" and typically this oven will only accept two full size (18 x 26inch) baking pans, thus he can only utilize one shelf if he wants to bake Pullman style loaves.
Shall we get back to topic?
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The capacity issue is a good point but I'm not confident that any oven loaded to absolutely full capacity will function how you want.
You really think so?
Go to any production bakery or supermarket bakery during peak times and watch them load the ovens
I dunno, but I've been loading every type of oven known to man to full capacity with good results for more than 30 years now.
It's kind of like buying a pick up truck that's rated to carry 1000 lbs safely, but the mnfctr states you can only carry 750 lbs....
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it's not the duty cycle of a consumer grade oven, it's the capacity...
A typical N. American convection full size oven listing at $5500 will accept 5 full size 18 x 26 sheet pans.
A typical Rational combi oven listing at $12,000 will accept 6 18 x 12 half sheet pans*
A typical household range will accept 2 18 x 12 half sheet pans
The typical commercial grade 12-er muffin pan will not fit into a half size oven
The original poster needs an oven for regular restaurant usage PLUS baking, so don't forget when baking bread that takes 45-60mins your oven is tied up, same thing when roasting a large roast, except for a longer time.
*this makes it roughly 4 times more expensive than a plain-Jane convection if your main purpose is to bake with
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Lets see now....
You can successfully mold shells up to 48 hrs in advance. You will have to warm the tops slightly with a heat gun after filling with ganache so your "cap" will adhere properly to the shell.
For all molded bon-bons, I make the ganache a'la minute--in the robot-coupe. I never, ever, ever make a cream based ganache for "mise en place" and then warm it to pipe in the shells, always a'la minute and pipe it in fresh.
I only have about 24 varieties of bon-bons on display at the store, and maybe only 48 pcs of each variety.
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For serious baking in a restaurant setting, you will want a combi oven. I'd rather buy my bread from a quality local bakery than try to bake good bread in restaurant quantities without a combi. You will find other uses for it.
I have to disagree with both points.
Firstly, a combi is like a Lamborghini: expensive topurchase,, expensive to maintain, and only really good at high speeds. A combi is really good for plate rethermalization--it can easily pay for itself in a few months in a banquet setting, it's also very good with roasting meats (far less weight loss) and poaching and steaming.
Yet none of the scenerios I listed is what the O.P. wants, he is looking for something to bake bread in. A combo for the O.P is like driving his mother-in-law to the airport in a Lamborghini, sand if you pay attention to the o.p.'s post he is on a tight budget....
A N. American convection oven will bake bread quite well--especially Pullman style loaves and buns, less so for "hearth baked"| style breads, and downright mediocre to lousy for many types of pastries. The typical N. American convection oven (baker'spride, Blodgett, garland, southbend Vulcan, etc) is a "stupid" oven It has only one temperature zone and the fan blows in only one direction. When the fans blows in a clock-wise direction, any product in the back right hand side of the oven will bake faster, if the fan runs counter--clockwise, it's the back half of the left side. The bottom rack will always have an pale bake compared to the upper 1/3 of the racks. This means you have to rotate the pans, and every time you open those huuuuge double doors, you are letting out a lot heat into the kitchen and the oven needs more time to get back up to temperature.
I was using first generation Rational combo ovens in the early '80's in Switzerland that addressed this problem quite well. On European combis, the fan blows clockwise for 5 mins, stops, then reverses for 5 mins and so on, and when you open th door, the fans stops instantly, avoiding the loss of a lot of hot air.
The ideal oven for "serious " baking is a deck oven. Here you have heating elements under the deck as well on the "ceiing" of the oven, you can control the intensity of these elements, as well as the overall heat. For example I want to bake quiches. and I want dark gold bottom crusts and pale gold tops. I set the bottom heat to "3", and the top heat to "2", with the overall heat to 190 (375f). For a lemon meringue pie, I'd turn the top heat to "3", the bottom hat to "0" and the overall hat to 220 (425f) For thumbprint cookies I'd have the bottom heat to 2 and the top heat at 1. With deck ovens you also have a damper and can control the humidity generated in the oven.
Using bakeries for bread is a nice idea, but most--if not all bakeries want a minimum amount for deliveries--usually $50 per drop. For a small restaurant this is a lot bread. There are two options, with the first buying a week's worth of bread and freezing what you don't need. The second is to bulk up the order with breakfast pastries or desserts.
What most places do is buy in "par-baked" bread, which you take what you need and pop it in the (convection) oven for a few minutes to give it colour and out it goes. Another option is to buy in frozen dough balls, shape th bread as needed, proof and bake. This is the only option giving you "bragging rights" of "Freshly baked bread"
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Get the plain jane oven for under your range...
Odds are very high that after 2 mths you'll be wanting a second oven for baking.
Why?
The oven under your typical N.American commercial range (ie garland, u.s. range, wolf, south bend, etc) will only accept two sheet pans. If you're baking bread in loaf pans, you'll only get one sheetpan in that oven.
On the other hand, if you've got a prime rib or a pot roast in the oven, you can't bake anything else for the next two - three hours.
For general restaurant purposes, you'll be using your oven-under-the-range for:
-trayed up bacon
-baked potaotes
-lasagna
-and of course, for a'la carte servce
you're going to need a second oven if you want to do any serious baking.....
Storing compost in condo to take to beach house
in Food Traditions & Culture
Posted
Stinkproof storage?
Your freezer.