Dave the Cook

A number of people have asked for advice on how to "read" Modernist Cuisine. For the most part, I think you can jump in anywhere, with the exception of volume five. It's like looking in the back of the textbook to find the answers: it might be a temporarily helpful shortcut, but you don't learn a lot.

The slightest evidence of coupons at checkout is sufficient reason for me to seek out another line. I'll even go back and search for something else to add to my order so as to avoid witnessing the transaction. Coupon obsession, in my experience, is correlated with last-minute haggling, flyer-lawyering, and check writing.

My grocery store carries dried shiitakes, and one package, though probably expensive compared to Chris' source, was exactly the amount needed. I didn't powder them, just put them in the pot. Everything gets blended anyway. I also considered dried porcini since I already had some, but decided to follow the recipe as written as closely as I could. Having done that now, I think porcini would work fine for the next batch.

I thought so too, but I trust Peterson (disclosure: I'm working with him on a new edition of his duck book), so I tried it. It makes a great product, assuming you want a roasted stock, of course. I'm not sure what your concern is with the meat; most of what you're losing is water, and since you're making stock, it's doneness isn't really important, is it? And yes, you've almost certainly got a Long Island (Pekin) duck.

The most efficient method I've found for rendering fat is Chris Amirault's emulsion method. You'll want to strip as much skin and fat off the carcass as you can, then chill it -- cutting duck skin at room temperature is a slippery and potentially dangerous exercise. As for the stock, James Peterson recommends (in his Duck Cookbook) roasting the wings and carcass with carrots, and onions at 500°F for an hour or so, stirring at the halfway point. Deglaze the roasting pan with chicken stock or water and add it to the stockpot along with the roasted bits. Proceed as usual for stock; Peterson says six hours at a minimum, and that overnight isn't too long. One carcass will yield about three cups of stock. But! When you've rendered and chilled your fat, you'll find about 1/4 of concentrated pink duck jelly at the bottom of the container. Make sure you retrieve that.

I can assure you that the method works just fine on an electric burner, as shown here.

Congratulations, Nathan! I'm amazed at the publication date for these editions. Accurate technical translations and the layout problems they present can be daunting -- the Romance languages, for example, usually take 20 to 30 percent more space to say the same thing as English.

If "regular sugar" = "refined white sugar," sulfur is irrelevant. It's not used in industrial sugar production, at least not in the US, Canada or the EU. The typical precipitant in refining sugar is calcium hydroxide, otherwise known as "lime," the same chemical used to transform ground corn into masa seca. At one time, calcium sulfate (CaSO4) was employed -- at one point, not four, in the process -- to refine sugar (perhaps it still in some areas), but it's a stretch to infer that 1) CaSO4 is the same thing as "sulfur," since it comprises one part calcium, one part sulfur, and four parts oxygen; 2) it's necessarily harmful -- CaSO4 is used to create tofu, among other things; 3) it's some sort of weird invention of food science. It occurs naturally, as do many other "additives" -- and as do snakes.

That's my thinking, too. You're right. Reducing the heat might be called the "Scantland variation" on the Ducasse/Shaw method. I can't recall when I came up with it, but most likely it's due to a combination of things: the experiments I did to write my Daily Gullet article "The Chronicles of Chuck," reading up on the Colicchcio method that partly inspired the article, and the fierceness of my cooktop. Sorry for the confusion.

Maillard reactions actually start much lower that that. From Modernist Cuisine (3-90): To give a quick recap of the Ducasse/Shaw method: Starting with the fatty edge, sear the steak on all sides, taking about ten minutes total. This usually means two minutes per surface, more or less. Reduce the heat of the pan and add a big chunk of butter. Return the steak to the pan and baste frequently. Cook ten minutes per side, turning just once. Rest the steak for 15 minutes. Combining all of that with McGee's observation that frequent flipping mitigates overcooking (something I've tested and found to be true), and I'm tempted to alter the Ducasse/Shaw method by monitoring the pan temperature more closely, trying to keep it around 300°F, and flipping every minute to allow the meat surface to cool a bit before dousing it in butter again.

It sounds like a not very good show on the wrong network. How many episodes did "Blais Off" last on the Science Channel?

That's because it's actually a bundle of four different muscles. Looks great, Anna.

I haven't read it all; I've dropped in here and there after a friend pointed out that eG Forums gets a couple of prominent mentions. Based on that partial reading, I think it's better written than one might expect from two non-writers. John Mariani made his feelings known the other day. In an Esquire blog post -- it's not really a review; in fact I'm not sure what to call it, as Life, On the Line is paired with Modernist Cuisine in what seems to be an excuse for Mariani to vent: This is after calling Achatz "insufferable," but prior to calling Alinea "Rocky Horror Picture Show: The Restaurant." This bile apparently stems from Kokonas' claim (p. 270) that Mariani used one of Alinea's four custom-made stainless steel wine lists as a notebook while dining there, and took it with him when he left. Mariani did not include Alinea in his subsequent "Best New" list that year; he says that he believes that Kokonas made the story up as revenge, concluding "Perhaps the book should have been called Life, on a Lie." Ouch.

Most of those items are listed in the index. Maybe all of them are in the book, but not explicitly indexed. Corn bread (5-76): Fresh kernels are blended with lard, eggs a dairy. The mixture is sieved to remove the kernel husks, then combined with dry ingredients (flour, isomalt, cornmeal, sugar, leaveners and thyme). Baked at 130°C/265°F for about 20 minutes. Bacon jam (4-229): described as "a sweetened and stabilized Hollandaise made with bacon fat." The sweeteners are sugar and maple syrup; isomalt stabilizes. Mushroom omelet (5-215): If I read it correctly, the omelet is the striped top; the egg underneath is a separate component called scrambled egg foam. They use a pastry comb to create the stripes. It's cooked in a combi oven. Pastrami (beef cheek) is on 3-213. Steven's photo looks like short rib to me. There's a recipe for ultrasonic fries on 3-325. The fries are cut and bagged, then cooked at 100°C/212°F for 45 minutes. Then they go into an ultrasonic bath (still bagged, I think) for an hour and a half. Cool, dry, double fry. The posset might originate in the parametric recipe for protein curds on 4-105. There's a recipe for sous vide lemon curd on 4-227: yolks bagged and cooked at 65°C/149°F for 35 minutes, then combined with sugar syrup, butter and essential oil. Cold coffee extraction is discussed on 4-370: ". . . ideal when coffee is to be used as an ingredients (sic), such as when making coffee ice cream."

I thought Rocket was just another name for Arugula? Yep. Around here -- and it's in every grocery store -- it's labeled bilingually: "Arugula (Roquette)."

We keep a spreadsheet very much like the one you've laid out, Chris. We repeat some of our classes on a quarterly (a 3-day beginner's class), semi-annually ("science of" classes, rotating through protein, starch, eggs, etc.) or annually (Valentine's Day, Cinco de Mayo, etc.), and we use Google Docs, so either of us can access the schedule for planning, review or revision. It sounds like you probably won't be repeating this particular class, but if you do others, you'll find that some tasks come up over and over. It's helpful, for example, to know that it takes a group 20 minutes to make lemon curd, or five to trim asparagus. Not having to rethink this sort of thing makes mapping out new classes much easier. Typically, our spreadsheet has a column that yours doesn't. It's easy, in the rush of a class, to forget even the most basic concepts. So for each class, we make a list of essential principles that we want the students to take away. Then we assign each principle to an appropriate task, as a reminder. So for example, Group 3 at 5:15 might get an explanation of what a shrimp "vein" is, and why you might or might not remove it. Or at 6:30, when you're tasting liquids, you might want to be sure to explain glutamates. We print out the schedule (which, with these notes is more like an agenda) and leave copies -- actually, we tape them down like a band's set list -- at various places in the kitchen so we never need to take more than a step or two to check our timing and information plan. We also we run through the schedule with our assistants prior to class, and give them a heads-up on any potential issues: "we'll need you to wash the work bowl of the food processor right away and get it back to me for the next group," or "once we've done X, you can clear the cutting boards and knives, so we'll have room for Y." On an unrelated note, unless you know everyone in the group, and everyone in the group knows everyone else, get name tags (I'm sure you've got a Sharpie!) It's surprising how this elevates not just the comfort level of the group, but makes your job easier. In a large class, it's much faster -- which is often important, like before Bob cuts off a fingertip -- to get an individual's attention if you can call out their name. (If you're using bib aprons, have them apply the tags after they've put them on; a tag that can't be seen through the bib is useless.) Darienne, the place where we teach recently adopted the shelf-liner solution. Unfortunately, they cut the matting in squares of about four inches. I'm not sure what they were thinking: sure, the boards don't slide on the counter, but with that pad in the middle, they rock back and forth. So now you need a pad at each corner. If the point was to save setup time, I'm not sure they did themselves a favor.

People who want an ebook version of Modernist Cuisine because they think it might be cheaper should probably think again. I'm in the last (I hope) third of a project to re-purpose a relatively small (~200 pages) cookbook as an ebook, and I can offer the following observations from my experience: If photos or illustrations matter, forget the Kindle format. Kindle is basically one long column of type interspersed with low-resolution pictures. It's great for novels and such, but it's useless when color or layout matters. Therefore, all the careful work dedicated to layout and typography for the paper version must be reconsidered, and that's just the start. Most likely, to present the material effectively in the new format, you'll have to generate an entirely new design. This is not a trivial exercise. Even assuming that the book was originally laid out in an intelligent publishing application, every link will still need to be re-examined, recoded and tested (Michael Ruhlman doesn't know "mind-crushingly boring" until he's done this sort of task). Beyond that, how do you handle cross-reference linking? As someone noted above, you could easily end up with many open windows/tabs, and not remember where you started. If you want an ebook to be truly useful, you have to figure out how to backtrack a game of dictionary tag. That's just the general stuff. When it comes to Modernist Cuisine, you have specific challenges: The photography is not just exquisite, it's essential to the narrative of (at the least) the section in which it appears. This makes an iPad version challenging. It's a great platform, but the screen is still pretty small. Maybe that's a compromise you make, but you would still want to be sure that images appear to their best advantage regardless of platform. That could mean simple stuff like resizing, or it could mean painstaking image mapping and pop-ups that scale to whatever screen and window size is being employed. The numerous sidebars, most of which are not to be missed, will require creative thinking and reformatting. If you render them as actual sidebars, you'll end up with mice type on smaller screens. How do you handle those so that they're accessible but not obtrusive? The sheer length of the book will make it a difficult download, especially if you include high-resolution photography. It seems a better candidate for a DVD -- I'm sure we're talking about gigabytes of data. None of the above considers video, which would increase file size and add to the production costs. Those are the things that are obvious; any design project, even the small ones, presents surprises. It would be a miracle if a 2400-page tome didn't break a record for them, and I'd be astounded if such an undertaking didn't require some very tricky scripting (if not new techniques). Just mapping the book would take a couple of hundred hours. All in all, it's hard to imagine that an ebook that preserves the beauty and utility of Modernist Cuisine would in any way be inexpensive. Which doesn't mean it wouldn't be worth it. I say all of this as someone who would love to have an ebook version so that, like Amirault, I didn't have to tote around three books to remind myself of all that might be at stake in a particular preparation -- and as someone who's already damaged volume 3 by taking it into the kitchen (I hang my head).

If it ever seems to you like Society members are just a bunch of food- and drink-obsessed nuts who gather in a metaphorical hallway of meeting rooms and pretty much talk to ourselves, maybe you should widen your focus. A couple of months ago, we declared 2011 "Gully's Year of Modernist Cuisine." Maybe that seemed odd, but with Myhrvold, Young and Bilet's epic tome on the way, along with (auto)biographies of notable modernists Ferran Adria and Grant Achatz, it made sense to us. (Of course, it hasn't slowed the panoply of non-modernist issues we discuss -- thank goodness!) What we didn't anticipate was the influence our discussions would have in the world outside our forums. Modernist Cuisine -- a work that even with substantial discounts is probably the most expensive cookbook any of us, or anyone we know, will purchase -- is not just Amazon's number one food reference book, but is at the 74th position among all books that Amazon sells. Surely, much credit is owed to the deft publicity deployed by the Modernist Cuisine team, but we're going to claim our share, too. That's because for every member that logs in to read and post, there are a couple of dozen visitors who've never registered -- we share our meeting rooms with a multitude of eavesdroppers. Those are the people who not only propelled Modernist Cuisine to its lofty perch; they've also made it impossible to procure a home version of a vacuum chamber in less than four weeks, or iota carrageenan in fewer than ten days. We aren't hanging out in meeting rooms. We're holding discussions in a stadium. But it's not just in the sales of a monumental book or formerly obscure chemicals that we're influential. Look at related topics, like sous-vide, the latest on El Bulli (one of several Adria-related topics), or even the six-year-old Alinea Project, and you'll see a disparate number of posts versus views. That doesn't just reflect the multiple times you clicked to see if someone responded to your post (admit it -- you do it). It's all those peeps who want to read what you have to say, and it's never been more clear -- whether it's about Meyer lemons, wok burners, or meat glue -- that your voice matters.

Chris beat me to the awesomeness part. But rather than what we'd call top round, I think that's a rump roast. Either way, a great use of a cheap(ish) cut. ETA: there's another great use of a "lesser" cut by FoodMan over here.

What's the difference between pork belly pastrami and bacon? Or pastrami made from beef navel and pastrami made from pork belly? The obvious porkiness aside, of course.

I should add that the kitchen manual is spiral bound, with what seems to be a vinyl-coated wire. The outer covers are some sort of flexible clear plastic, and the pages are Tyvek or some other synthetic material. It's as indestructible as a cookbook can be without sacrificing utility.

No dust jackets. Presumably the case, which holds the hardbound volumes, serves the same purpose. I think it's a smart move, as jackets are easily torn, scorched or otherwise abused.

That seems entirely possible. I should have said (above) "I think the filter is marketed to serve two purposes . . . " That said, some designs are probably more -- or less -- vulnerable to mineral deposits, hence Dairenne's adjusted cleaning schedule.

I think the filter serves two purposes: one is removing stuff that creates "off" flavors, which doesn't seem to be an issue for you. The other is the coffeemaker itself, which (if I'm right) will need more frequent cleaning if you don't use the filter. You might be used to this already, so if the taste is okay with you, it's probably a choice of whether you want to clean the machine fairly often, or pay for filters to slow down mineral deposition.

Thanks for including Alinea and Under Pressure for scale. I had no idea of the size of the volumes. Where are you going to shelve it?