David A. Goldfarb

That's hilarious!

This series of four Itasan videos shows the whole process of butchering fugu, slicing sashimi, and cooking the parts that aren't used for sashimi-- The beginning of part 3 shows the thin flexible knife used for the sashimi, and he makes a point of showing the thinness of the spine and demonstrating the flexibility of the blade. Japanese knives are often hollow ground to prevent sticking (meaning the bevel is slightly concave. Some dimpled knives are currently marketed as "hollow ground," which isn't the traditional meaning of the term), and I suspect that's the case here. So much work for one fish! Is it that good?

The Zabar's guys who do nothing but cut lox and sturgeon all day, along with the occasional piece of sable or scoop of caviar, are using German salmon knives.

Very nice, Chris.

Strangely, the choux recipe in the app gives yield in number of "servings," which is totally vague, because an eclair is bigger than a cream puff and those have no standard size, but say he clarified that in the notes (there are notes and instructions for each ratio), you could translate servings into number of eclairs or cream puffs or gougères of a specified size. In any case, the calculator automatically computes yield for each recipe, so it wouldn't require any new formulas that aren't already in the spreadsheet. It would just have to give the option of yield as a variable. I suggested this in response to one of Ruhlman's Facebook posts. I'll report back, if he responds.

You can't enter the yield to solve for the components, though that seems like a logical thing that it should do, and I suspect that if you mentioned it to Ruhlman, it would be in the next upgrade. Meanwhile, though, it does display the yield, so you could enter and adjust the components until you got the yield you wanted. You can certainly just use a calculator, but this works like a spreadsheet where you can enter one value, and all the other values are calculated at the same time, and you've got them all there on your iPhone or iTouch. Of course a spreadsheet with three or four cells isn't that big a deal, but for $5, it's a convenience.

Thanks!

What is this one called?-- http://www.ehealthyrecipe.com/recipe-webapp/ecook/k0057.php I learned to do it with one knife, first cutting the slot, then along the diagonal, rolling and again on the diagonal.

Most butchers that I've seen in the U.S. aren't using Japanese waterstones or particularly fine stones as far as I can tell--usually the common two or three sided Norton oilstones and steels--and they manage to do their jobs well enough, so I wouldn't say that they produce a "horrible" edge. I used similar approach for many years before switching to Japanese waterstones, and I could get a sharp functional edge that way, and most people who picked up one of my knives would say it was sharp. Now I only take out the oilstone when I'm reshaping an older knife. Waterstones with good technique can produce a much sharper and more refined edge and will open up new culinary possibilities and make knife work more of a pleasure, but basic technique with an ordinary oilstone is probably good enough for most kitchen tasks.

If you have a controller, like the Sous Vide Magic, then you can use a large rice cooker (has to be the simple on-off kind) to sous vide. Since I've already got the rice cooker and a vacuum sealer, I've been contemplating this option-- http://freshmealssolutions.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage-ask.tpl&product_id=30&category_id=15&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=31&vmcchk=1&Itemid=31

It's my impression that most stones can function as oil or water stones, but once you decide it's an oil stone, there's no changing your mind about it.

Japan Premium Beef includes an extra cube of fat with its washugyu beef for just this purpose. I've noticed that they now sell dry-aged beef, so it may be time for another visit.

Looks like an older Sabatier carbon steel slicing knife. It's very confusing trying to navigate the various French knives branded "Sabatier," but the ones I have (**** Elephant logo and one "Professional Sabatier") take a fantastically sharp edge.

The salmon slicers are quite thin, and that helps. If you're not curing very large fish, a longish sharp boning knife works well. I usually use a 7" flexible boning knife. Here's the one I use (Henckels 4-star).

I find that after I fry any kind of fish in oil, I need to replace the oil. Heat it up and make some French fries, and I bet they'll taste like catfish. What I've been using for frying lately is a Griswold cast iron Deep Fat Fryer (#1003), and I've been really pleased with it. Fortunately these aren't particularly collectible, so you can find them on eBay for around $40 without the original basket or $60 with. The shape is just right, so there isn't excessive spatter with a half-full pot of oil, and the heat retention of cast iron helps maintain the temperature when the food is added to the oil, and it's not another appliance vying for counter space. I've been keeping it ready to go with beef fat in the fridge, and I filter the oil through a strainer lined with paper towel as needed.

Or even chop it with a chef's knife. I prefer the texture of hand chopped beef, and it's not that hard to do, really, for one or two pounds of meat.

He was doing mostly technique with single bevel knives as far as I saw, but there was sharpening happening simultaneously, so I didn't catch all of the sushi demo.

Kikuichi did that at Brooklyn Kitchen not long ago. They brought in one of their quality control experts from Japan to demonstrate sharpening, straightening, and engraving (offering free engraving on any carbon steel knife purchased at the demo), and a sushi chef from Blue Ribbon Sushi to demonstrate some techniques. I wrote this up on our "Family of Food" blog a while ago with illustrations, focusing on the sharpening aspects-- http://familyoffood.blogspot.com/2009/08/ohe-san-japanese-knife-sharpening.html The guy from Blue Ribbon demonstrated katsuramuki (rotary peeling), and how is used in practice, and I picked up a neat propellerish sushi cut that I also use for things like cherry tomatoes.

"Blessed with the Essence of White Truffle" sounds like "there's so little white truffle in this dish that it might as well be a kind of metaphysical consecration."

From the days of fern bars and "The Magic Pan." Who can remember the last time they made chicken crepes with mornay sauce?

Why? Because plain properly-seasoned carbon steel works better than either and costs less. Agreed. Amortized over 38 years, the plain steel Chinese wok that my father bought around 1972 and that I use today was practically free, and it improves with age.

Jewish style is to braise it flat like a pot roast with about a 1/4" of fat cap on top. The preference is just for the flat end, but if you have the whole brisket, you just do it in a larger rectangular roasting pan. A brisket puts out lots of its own liquid, so you don't need to add any braising liquid--just a spice rub. Here's how my grandmother did it-- http://familyoffood.blogspot.com/2008/01/jewish-soul-food.html Of course you can change the spices to whatever suits. Fortunately Grandma never got into that thing where you slather it with Lipton Onion Soup Mix and tomato paste and wrap it in foil, but that was a popular method in late-mid-twentieth-century Jewish-American households.

Since I've generally been keeping my knives sharper in the past year than I used to, I picked up a proper 7.5" F. Dick meat cleaver for tasks like bone splitting. Out of the box it had a rounded polished edge and convex bevel. You could press your thumb right into the edge without cutting yourself. I decided it needed to be a little sharper than that to cut through meat as well as bone, but I maintained the convex bevel, which is quite strong and resistant to chipping.

Boning knives for boning, one 5" stiff and a 7" flexible. I bought the long flexible boning knife specifically for removing the breast from a roasted turkey before slicing it across the grain, but it's also good for slicing gravlax and other smoked fish. Slicing knives can generally slice meat thinner than a chef's knife, so I've got one more curved one and one longer straight one. I recently picked up a Wusthof offset sandwich knife with a reverse scalloped blade, and I'm kind of ambivalent about it. It's very sharp, and it has more or less replaced my regular scalloped bread knife, but the edge is always collapsing. Unlike regular scalloped blades, it can be honed with a steel to keep the edge straight, but it seems to require a lot of maintenance for a serrated knife. My parents have an older Henckels bread knife with a blade like a hacksaw blade. No one seems to make that anymore.

The "Hall of Shame" thread has me thinking about things I used to like but can't really tolerate any longer. I think I could easily make my way through a whole box of Hostess HoHos when I was around nine years old, but I tried one a few years ago and the fascination has clearly passed, which is fortunate, since I no longer have the metabolism of a nine-year-old. Maybe the ingredients are of lesser quality, or maybe the mylar wrapper that was once aluminum foil has changed the texture by retaining more moisture, or maybe by eating better cakes, I've acquired a distaste for them. When I was growing up, we also generally used margarine at home, and I was a bit apprehensive about butter, but now we always use butter, and I find margarine revolting. Have you learned to dislike things you once liked?