cbread

Reloader's scales are another source for very accurate scales - used to weigh out propellant for shooters who make their own cartridges.

Why can't book publishers offer mixed format: Chicken, cooked and diced .........X Cups...............OR........Y Grams Onion, minced.............................X Tbsp +Z Tsp....OR........Y Grams Chix stock...................................X Pints................OR........Y ccs

Forgive me for reviving an old thread - this topic seems important. My plea to cookbook authors.... Please write recipes so ingredients can be scaled - there are so many good gram scales around now, and for reasonable cost, and they make cooking so much easier and faster, and dividing a recip or increasing it is so much more easy and accurate. Gram scale are win win win.... Ingredient lists are easiest for all to use when they look like this: Chicken, cooked and diced .........X Cups...............OR........Y Grams Onion, minced.............................X Tbsp +Z Tsp....OR........Y Grams Chix stock...................................X Pints................OR........Y ccs Thanks!

I live in a small town in a small state and will answer your query with what I know for certain can get locally, since almost anything can be had via the net. At out local supermarket: sherry vinegar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yes pancetta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yes slab bacon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yes Spanish smoked paprika . . . . . . . . . . Some smoked - McCormick brand - doesn't say it's Spanish duck (fresh or frozen) . . . . . . . . . . . . Maybe 20 mile from town? Haven't seen any of the below locally. I do need to look harder in the twenty mile radius but have not yet stumbled across: Pomegranate molasses . . . . . . . . . . . No Sumac . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No Aleppo pepper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No creme fraiche . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No Mexican crema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No miso paste . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No duck fat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No trotters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No unsmoked hocks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .No cheeks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No skin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No Our local supermarket in town isn't very super. I've yowled about it here. It's twenty miles to get to a somewhat better market - still nothing near as good as a Whole Foods or the like. Real food selections are probably fifty to a hundred miles. Just not worth the drive. We just in the last year or so got a couple of decent custom butcher shops about twenty miles away. What a change! Good meat. Mmmmmmm. Wouldn't trust our local market in town here for custom work at the meat counter. I have never asked and probably never will. Heck, on the ordinary non custom meats in the bins, I look at everything there very closely before I buy. Too many substandard items. The worst though is just that the day to day meat and veggies are usually blah at best and of somewhat limited variety. The variety does keep improving. I don't want to think about what would not have been available twenty years ago. A request to any and all cookbook authors and publishers: please start putting gram based recipes in cookbooks - or both gram and the ordinary volumetric measurements. Even in my poorly provisioned outpost, gram scales are available a few miles away, and make such a difference that I can see a time when cookbooks will be considered near unusable without gram measurements.

I recall ice cream and balsamic, being a frequently used dessert combination.

There is, a rolled up cheepo cutting mat, the thin plastic kind, flexible so you can roll it and plunge your chicken pieces into a bag. Ditto, you can use it to "funnel" stuffing into a bird for roasting and do similar tasks. Alton Brown idea.

Maybe three years ago, I put a Thermador 48" rangetop in my new kitchen. It has four regular burners and a wok burner. Two of the the regular burners have the ability to run super low by cycling on and off. I have been very happy with all four regular burners. The wok burner just doesn't have the power to do what I had hoped. Were I to buy again, I'd fill the space with more regular burners or a grill or something. The unit has the front controls I like and the steel grating is plenty beefy without the faux industrial super grating poseur look. The price was better than some of the bigger name brands, and other than the wok burner, which was my fault for not researching more, I'm quite happy.

Ahhhhh!

So, does the cartouche lie directly atop the soup? Or is it "pinched" between the lid and the pot? Either might offer some benefit.

It keeps the surface moist, no risk of drying out. Although using both a cartouche and a lid might seem a tad obsessive. But this might well be the correct french way of doing things. ← That's exactly what I was wondering about - cartouche and lid? Yet, there must be a reason. Maybe lids, in past were not, or now, are not, tight enough to do the job? I have also recently run across recipes where a towel is supposed to go over the pan before the lid. presumably to do much the same. These different methods are fascinating.

Small claims. If this person has any assets and you win against him, or he fails to show and you win by default, you might get a shot at reclaiming your losses. I don't know about where you live, but in NH, it pays to find out what it takes to actually be able to enforce a judgment. There are procedures you need to follow to put enforceable teeth in a judgment here. Good luck with this.

Best tip I found this last year was the use of an electronic gram scale for baking. It makes it easier, faster, and more accurate. I'll never go back.

Oops, duhhhh, I missed the salting of the croutons... I'm wondering what the cartouche does that a lid on a pan doesn't.

Dumb questions ... I should already know the answers to these, but I gotta ask. What's a russe? Why a cartouche? What is the benefit of coating the peas in the fat? There's no mention of seasoning for the croutons - do you ever season the bread to make up croutons? Wonderful info you are presenting! Thanks for taking all the time to record it. C

I think chasing down non tippers is amazingly crass, and would probably never go to any restaurant I saw allowing such an act. Random notes: A friend of mine - who was at one time owner of a restaurant - used to lay down a solid tip: 20% - 25% ish whenever she ate in the front of the house at her own place. I wonder how most people calculate their tip - what percentage for what product and service... While I do go out to good restaurants on occasion, most time that I am tipping, I am getting a breakfast bagel and similar small stuff via ordering at a counter. My full range is as follows. I tip 15% to 100%+/- , depending on circumstances. 15% if I am broke and/or the service is mediocre, 20% if the service is solid, 25% to 33% if everything is fabulous, and 50% to 100% + when buying very small stuff standing while ordering at the counter; a coffee, an english muffin... I rarely leave less than a buck regardless. When the financial gods smile upon me, I tip better. I'm lucky, have never had service so bad I declined to tip or tipped less than 15%. I hope I've never plain forgot. While I do try to tip appropriately, I still can't entirely reconcile myself to business models that pay poorly and put the servers at the mercy of the generosity of the customer, and that put a guilt factor on the customer. I'm thinking of all the other persons who depend upon tipping to get a decent living, waiters, hairdressers, cabbies, doormen...

This is all wonderful. Thanks! C

www.foodservicewarehouse.com/education/articles/auction.aspx has info - not very encouraging though. C

About 80 - some of those in storage.

SaladFingers, You've been cooking for a mere year and a half? If you've done a tenth of what you refer to, I suspect you're well on your way to being a very - very - good home cook. I have been sole cook for a household of two for about a decade, and been cooking for myself for the most part of 20 or more years before that. At first, I just wanted to be able to cook "instinctively" - to do the basics with little guidance. I had no ambition to be able to do more ornate cookery at that time. In time, I have accumulated a decent base of what you do with what, so that I can walk into a kitchen and come out with basic meals with no outside guidance, and now, as I have become more ambitious, more not so basic meals. It's taken that long for me to get the basic interrelationships between many techniques and ingredients. Give yourself time. You've just barely begun. Professional chefs can go to cooking school, and be instructed for two or three years by chef / instructors, eight hours a day, with tons of food to practice on, and in an atmosphere that is a hothouse for a cooking mindset. Just the volume of what they cook in a couple of years at school is more than a lifetime's cooking for the rest of us, and the instruction is irreplaceable. And then, they follow that by going to work at restaurant after restaurant, to go from being instructed, to being deeply proficient. If you tend to judge yourself by the professional accomplishments of others, it can be discouraging. I watch Iron Chef America, and see people make broiled monkfish icecream cake and seven other monkfish courses with no recipe, in a kitchen that's not their own, under cameras, with Alton Brown watching, in an hour, and I get it that they are doing things I'll never be ready for. It is largely irrelevant to my - or your - level of accomlishment as a home cook though. Other than illustrating the general idea that most foods can be the subject of massive creativity. Creativity takes time and practice. As amateurs we only get so much time and practice. Don't judge yourself by breads and cakes. Please. Baked goods, such as breads and, most especially, like cakes, are a separate category entirely. They tend to reward exacting, repeatable preparation, and they tend punish wontonly haphazard fiddling. I have worked up a couple of very solid bread recipes through careful, and moderate incremental tweaking, and through absolute rock solid record keeping. I am not quite yet able to just toss off a new and untried sourdough formula off the top of my head. I can do a simple pizza dough with no recipe, but it's easier and faster to start with a basic recipe even if now I do modify it. Practice. As you cook more, you will note that the vast majority of recipes depent upon a certain basic constellation of fundamental items and techniques - onion/carrot/celery - fast cook for sear / slow cook for tender and moist - slow cooking items early - delicate quick cooking items at last moment.... As time goes on, those things become second nature. I do have one suggestion. Think about trying to NOT use recipes all the time. Develop your inner cook by doing some of the most basic meals from your head and your accumulated knowledge. It will gradually become more and more as time goes by. Soup is a great place to start. Soup is forgiving. Ditto, basic meat and potatos and basic veggies. Learn how they respond to what you do to them. You will find some things don't work. And that some things work like a charm. Failures stop being failures when you use them to tune your "inner chef". I've learned a good portion of what I know about food from just trying things out in the kitchen. Lots of odd meals and tough meat and so on, but they have been wonderfully instructive. You can't let a bad meal make you feel like a loser though. Learning some of the basics by trial and error has finally got me to the point where I usually understand what's going on inside a recipe. Now, I am using more and more recipes, understanding them, and learning to expand upon the basics. Now, I know by the feel of dough, when it's ready to rise, when it's ready to go into the oven etc... Best, C

I don't think you are being insane. If you don't use them, maybe having one in "premium" space in the kitchen would not be a first choice for you. I can't speak from personal experience to the benefits of over the range, since I don't like anything over the range space other than necessary ventillation. If I can bump my head on it, it usually gashes my head, so I design defensively. I like more room over the range so I don't peel back my scalp. I'm balding, and everything that impinges on that volume of space tends to leave me with a big scar and a foul mood. Range hoods get installed higher than standard for me. Ditto wall cabs. There are options. Can you find wall space to build it in? Can it go under counter? Could it go on one of those lift bracket thingies that usually are employed for stand mixers? Can it go in a closet in or adjacent to the kitchen? Can it go on a cart you roll out when needed? Best, C

I appreciate everyone's information, thought and experience. I'm getting closer to having things sorted out. No one near me sells Sitram, so I hope for your help to get a feel for what they are like. I have looked on the web at various bits of info on Sitram's Profisserie, and "Catering" lines, and cannot tell if the clad portion is just the base, or whether the clad portion extends all the way up the rim. I'm looking for clad all the way up. This page: http://frieling.com/products/cookware/profiserie makes it look like it's just sandwitched on the bottom on Profisserie. This: http://frieling.com/products/cookware/catering makes it look similar, copper sandwitching on the "Catering" line. The Mauviel M'cook makes me suspect it is closely related to the Viking line - both extol the benefits of a seven layer construction.

And we haven't even yet mentioned bacon candy. Vile by the way. Yes I tried a tiny bite.

I must be missing something or be the odd man out, since I have only two wooden spoons and rarely use them. Somehow, it bothers me that the working end is so blunt. I have wondered on occasion, whether I should reshape the ends to "sharpen" them up. I may try that, to see if they become more desriable as a tool to me.Currently, I use some plastic spoons that have a simple wooden spoon profile, but more slender. They have just enough of a point at the working endm that I can get under things, and frequently use them as spatulas.

I hadn't given any thought to Le Creuset Tri-Ply. Positive commentary here and looking at Sitram's website made me wonder if I should include them in my "universe" of potential cookware. There seem to be quite a few people who think Sitram Profisserie is seriously good cookware. Does anyone have experience with Sitram Profisserie, Le Creuset Tri-Ply And Viking who could shed light on them? I am especially interested in the beefiness factor and how it translates into even and dependable cooking. It appears the handles on the Profisserie would make me happy. I'll have to take a serious look at Le Creuset Tri-Ply. I had pretty much ignored it. I'm really grateful for all the time and experience people are sharing here. Thanks!!!!

The sound of liquids hitting the hot sides of my wok. The sound is percussive - almost explosive; I'm not sure it's doing all that much, but I love the sound regardless.