Dave the Cook

With gratefulness and a tiny bit of regret, I announce that long-time manager Richard Kilgore is retiring as an eG Forums manager. Richard has been with us for many years through thick and thin, and his service, insight and advice has been invaluable to me, Steven and our other volunteers. Thanks, Richard -- we hope to see you in the forums!

Then you should be looking at Epicurean boards. Similar in performance to bamboo, but thinner and dishwasher-safe. Here's one of them.

And then there's Paul Prudhomme's high-temp technique, which can get you a medium roux in 6 to 7 minutes. I've never noticed a difference in any quality of a roux that related to how fast it's made. For me, it's just a matter of how much time I've got, what other prep needs to be done, and how willing I am to pay attention to it.

We did this just last night (and the night before) for a "steakhouse" cooking class. Just make sure the ridges are immaculate. The pans we had to use were Staub pans that had residual polymerized fat on them. It was almost impossible to get a clean release.

Did the sauce do what it was supposed to do -- "allow the wings to stay crispy even with the sauce on them"?

A friend of mine is hosting a conference in New Orleans in late October, and he's looking for a chef to run a cooking class or conduct a demo for the attendees. I don't know many details, but I assume that between budget and the short time frame, the usual, more famous suspects won't fit the bill, so he's looking for someone who's got local cred, but could use some broader exposure -- think along the lines of Emeril in 1991, right after he opened his first place. Is there someone in the city that fits that bill today?

Thanks, everyone, for helping out. In the end it came down to -- as it so often does -- what was actually on the shelf at the liquor store where we went to buy the booze. We found Sam's arguments to be compelling, and were in search of something of 100 proof or better. To our shock, there was no Old Grand Dad at all, at any ABV. We bought Wild Turkey 101. The Buffalo Trace probably would have been fine, but as Kurt points out, the point of the exercise was not about bourbon, it was about herbs -- in this case, mint. So we quit worrying about getting the perfect base liquor, and concentrated on the part that the herb plays in a julep. We showed how to build the drink, made everyone slap their mint, and explained how to place the garnish in proximity to the straws for maximum face time. Those two things were sufficiently revelatory to the group that we feel like we made our point. I don't think, though, that any of the students will be going off to buy bourbon. Instead, we gave them a lesson that will probably help them make . . . better mojitos. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so.

Buffalo Trace was on our list. We were also considering Knob Creek (a little above our price range, but not by far), Bulleit and some higher proof offerings, like Old Grandad or Wild Turkey 101. Are there significant differences among them that we can explicate?

We have a great wide-ranging topic on mint juleps, but I have a very specific requirement. What's the best bourbon for a mint julep? We're teaching a class on herbs, and part of the curriculum is showing how to make the drink, then passing out 2- to 2-1/2 ounce samples. We're not really bourbon people, and our house brand is Evan Williams (black), which suits our budgetary and mixing needs. But in a julep, the bourbon will be front and center, and we want to make sure that we've got a good one for our needs. Also, this will likely be the first julep most of our students will have ever had (hence the selection of the most common base spirit for our demo), and we want them to get a good sense of the drink. Ideally, it wouldn't cost more than $30/750, but if members here have more extravagant suggestions, we can pass them along.

We're not running the show this year, so we're providing sides: an excellent potato salad and deviled eggs in three variations: traditional, "mushroom omelet" and "Cajun eggs Benedict." We put the salad together and mixed up the egg fillings this afternoon. We'll finish things off before we head to the venue tomorrow afternoon.

450 pages. Looks like the same footprint as the original.

I find either size (depending on the pan I'm using and how big the steak is or how many I'm cooking) well-suited for this purpose.

The Modernist team has announced a "new" book: Modernist Cuisine at Home. The press release is here. Nathan says: The book is $115, so not cheap (at that price, I suspect the original's production values have been maintained), but more affordable than Modernist. Here's an Amazon link for pre-order.

When you're in one of several situations: working/worked late; too tired to cook; kitchen renovation; plumbing emergency; stuck in a hotel in Casper, WY without a car: it's not about getting good pizza. That's almost certainly not going to happen. It's about choosing which of the available options will fill your stomach without revulsion. In my experience, the big three -- Pizza Hut, Domino's and Papa John's -- almost always fit this bill. They're all different in minor ways, but equally acceptable.

It is equally possible that you need to taste good pizza sometime. No, it's not. I've had good -- even great -- pizza, though not from Papa John's. All I'm saying is that your single experience with their product doesn't match my multiple encounters with it.

Without saying that Papa John's makes great pizza (they don't; it's just decent), your experience seems anomalous to me. I'm not proud of how many of their pizzas I've eaten, but it's been quite a few, and I've never received product like you've described. Should future circumstances require it and you can order from another outlet, you might give them a second chance. If you don't like that specimen, then probably you just don't like the way Papa John's makes pizza. As it stands now, all that's certain is that you don't like the way one store in Wyoming interprets (or screws up) the recipe. It will be a long while before you can order a Bertucci's pizza in Wyoming.

The fat shake method is the best way I've found to render fat, and depending on the source of your fat (i.e., if it has meat attached), you often get a bonus of a small amount of very gelatinous stock at the bottom of the cooled product.

Thanks for asking! It came out pretty well, but a bit on the sweet side. I made it again with some modifications, which are posted here. And these days, it's easy to find Steen's in Atlanta.

It's less surprising if you dig into their "Locations" map a bit. On the surface, it looks like they've got much of the south and west covered. But clicking through reveals that they don't have any actual stores east of the Mississippi, just ones that are "Coming Soon!" None yet in New Mexico, Wyoming or (as Scoop points out) Nevada. There's but one store in California (Victorville).

If it helps Anna, last I heard, the blade roast was Jacques Pepin's favorite cut for pot roast.

This is misleading. Beef back ribs -- the ones attached to the rib roast (or a bone-in rib steak) come from the rib primal. Short ribs almost always come from the chuck primal, though occasionally a short rib cut will impinge on the rib area (you'll know this is happening when you see the price jump; butchers won't give up expensive rib meat for chuck prices). Although both primals are mainly cut from the rib cage, they deal with different and differently used muscles. For more information, refer to one of the charts here: Virtual Weber Bullet. The "Angus Beef Chart (2007)" is accurate for the US. Check out the Australian version and you'll see that what the Aussies call short ribs are not what Americans are referring to, though sometimes you'll see ribs like this in "real" US butcher shops -- but in neither case are they part of the rib roast cut.

Here in Atlanta, we can usually find beef back ribs in slabs or cut into individual pieces. I find the latter inexplicable, but they must be popular, as they're often easier to find than the slabs. Structurally, they're almost identical to (pork) baby backs, just bigger. I heat the oven to 350°F, salt and pepper the ribs (or sometimes use a dry rub, depending on my mood, timing and the rest of the menu). The ribs go in, and I turn the oven down to 225°F. I flip them every 30 to 45 minutes, though I'm not sure it makes a difference. Somewhere around 2-1/2 hours, the meat starts to draw back from the end of the bones and the rack becomes very flexible. If I'm going to glaze them, this is when I do it. The low temperature dehydrates the glaze without danger of burning, and you get a lovely, sticky mess. When the meat has pulled back nearly an inch -- this will take another 15 minutes or so -- they're done. I think flanken are not back ribs but short ribs, which come from the chuck.

At the Heartland Gathering this year, we made an aged Gouda "crouton" with sherry instead of beer. As Tom Noe's excellent photo of it here shows, it worked fine. Tasted good, too.

I wonder if the 350 figure in the dish recipe just got transferred from the lentil-component recipe. 350g grams of dry lentils will weigh a lot more after cooking. Of course, it would also make for a lot of salad.

It's worth looking at the bolster/handle design of Shun's Ken Onion line. They're not for everyone -- you have to have the right-sized hand for it to be truly comfortable -- but here's what I've observed many times in our beginners' cooking classes: there are always one or two people who just can't figure out the pinch grip, no matter how we describe it, demo it, or explain the advantages of it. Once we wrap their fingers around a Ken Onion, though, light bulbs go off.