xxchef

An article in Popular Science out today outlined some newly discovered, near-sci-fi uses for some common cooking ingredients like turmeric and cinnamon. I've heard crazy stories about using Coca-Cola as a rust-buster, blood remover, engine cleaner etc (facts or urban myths?) since I was a kid. What other outrageous applications for common ingredients are there?

Good point, but at least it's better than a housing tract!

As a farmer, do you know what crops currently are eligible for subsidies? I hear of them for corn and cotton, but neither of those really count as food. No one eats field corn, except in derivative products. And these crops are produced in quantities larger than we need so they get exported at the subsidized prices, which destabilizes farmers in other countries. But for our own national food interests, are there food-related subsidies for things like broccoli, carrots, potatoes, oranges, etc? Beats the heck out of me. I'm sure one could find this info on FDA/USDA or other govt web sites but, like I said, I'm not personally involved in any of these programs. All I know is that historically they were originally intended to protect us from undo foreign influence/economic pressure related to key commodity items and/or to ensure their continued availability to us at prices deemed acceptable to the market. That original intent has been corrupted into a penalty/reward, vote-buying, social engineering system with little resemblance to it's roots. It's not just food and feed crops that are subsidized either. Mohair (hair of the angora goat)is a classic example. First subsidized in the 1954 Farm Bill in order to ensure sufficient supply to be able to manufacture US soldier uniforms for future wars (following World War II). This wool was discontinued as a "strategic material" in 1960 but it is STILL being subsidized today.

Let me preface this by saying that I am a farmer but also, by and large, I am against most farm subsidies (and wouldn't take one if presented on a silver platter). Certainly the current system is a criminal mess and quagmire of pork-barrel spending BUT the core idea behind some government farm subsidies is sound. It's (theoretically) all about National Security. It is in our nations best interest to keep farms running and making food so that we are not at the mercy of foreign interests. He who controls the food controls the populace.

Those inexpensive non-stick commercial pans are exactly what I use on a daily basis for anything sauteed/fried etc. I have two sets (14", 10", 6"). One is 7 years old and the other about 3. I do a lot of HOT pan searing, dry or with a little fat (lard/oil/butter/sometimes Pam) and they are holding up well with no blistering, delamination or worn spots and while I'm conscious of their supposed fragility I still use regular metal spoons, forks, whisks, and spatulas in them all the time. Maybe I'm just lucky but I think they actually cook better now than when new. They are black as night now and I suspect they have actually taken on something of a "seasoning" over time. For all I know there's no non-stick left (not going to dwell on that right now). I've never been particularly careful with clean-up either. Mostly all they need is a hot water/mild soap/sponge swish but I'm not afraid to take a green scrubby pad to them if necessary once in a while.

That's the other thing I forgot to mention. I always plan my cold smoking for the winter, which works out pretty well as we try do most of our butchering in late fall and January-February are my "easy months" at the dairy (not producing cheese commercially). If it's going to get above 50F outside it's marginal on being too hot for me to cold smoke with my rig. Some kind of ice chamber/heat exchange set-up would probably work but I'm inclined to not fight the elements if at all possible.

I guess if Chris has a "Ghetto Smoker" mine is probably more of a "Hick Smoker" Same principle, little bigger capacity, slightly more durable. It's made from a metal garbage can and has the addition of a small battery-operated CPU fan to pull smoke into the cold chamber. Shelf studs inside allow for several wire racks at different heights (or one at the top from which I can hang long sausages, bacon slabs etc. I too have found that anything less than 90F works great pretty much universally. Here are a couple of pics...

Good one Ruth! Just this weekend I was making a big pan of pecan sticky buns for one breakfast for the overnight participants of a 3-day cheese-making workshop we were putting on. Trying to mesh cooking all the meals with teaching the various course modules is always a juggling act but it usually isn't a problem. For whatever reason I had a major fail on the buns this time. When I turned the them out of their pan, the sticky-gooey topping grained-up completely. It tasted great but looked more like streusel then smear. I could here the group in the other room oooing and ahhhing over the smells and knew they would be finishing up in there and coming back to the kitchen for the next session in just a few minutes. They would most certainly be expecting to see a luscious pan of goodies and all I had was a mess. I suppose I could have faked it and said "These are pecan crumb buns" but had already told them what I was supposed to be making. I quickly scraped all of the still-hot crumbly topping and pecans off the rolls and into a sauce pot and put it on the stove to start re-melting. I dropped in a couple ounces of butter and a little real maple syrup and turned the heat up to high. Within a minute it had all melted down to a thick syrup. I added a few drops of lemon juice (acid is supposed to help prevent recrystallization) and poured the whole mess back over the buns. A quick swipe with an off-set spatula and it looked like brand new - just as the group came through the door. Phew! I hadn't had time to test the syrup to see how it was going to set-up but got lucky and it was gooey perfection. The rolls were a big hit.

Every once in a while, despite great care, long experience, and best efforts, something goes terribly wrong with a dish. This, of course, usually happens to the key component for a important meal with the guests arriving any moment. But all is not lost. Through intimate knowledge of the science behind cooking, creative epiphanies or just plain luck, we can sometime rescue these dishes (and dare I suggest, even improve them occasionally). With necessity being the mother of invention, what's your best Culinary Save Story?

Goat milk products do help her. She has none of the discomfort eating cheese and yogurt made from goat milk as she does with similar cow milk products. If she eats a cow milk product she must take medication to prevent her discomfort. That's interesting. Most of the lactose is consumed by the cheese making process as it is converted to lactic acid. This is especially true with hard/firm/aged cheeses, so regardless of milk type there should be a negligible amount left when eaten. Might be another clue that it's something other than lactose causing her discomfort.

We do a number of 3-day dairy/cheese-making workshops here at the Ranch every year (have one starting today, as a matter of fact) and I've taught a couple of 1-day basic candy-making ones here too. I'll second Genkinaonna in that determining the skill level of your participants is vital and further, knowing exactly what it is they want to take away when they leave. Our 3-day workshops are full-immersion with the participants having the opportunity to work along side us and do and experience every aspect of our small goat cheese dairy. They live and eat on-site and put in the same 14 hours days as we do. It's more of a mini-internship in that regard but, believe it or not, there are still many more things to do than we can cover in 3 days. My wife could easily fill all three days with just the herd management aspects of the operation. The way we decide what to cover, which cheeses to make and how intensely we teach the different areas is by pre-screening the participants. Each one of the 2 to 6 people gets a pre-workshop questionnaire to complete. It asks about their interest in and experience with in the various parts of the business and their goals with the information they get from us. This determines how and what we teach them. Our workshop for first-time goat owners looking to make cheese at home is very different than the one we teach to experienced herdsmen looking to add a value-added component to their operation. We've taught a group of executive chefs from a major hotel corporation who wanted to learn about artisan cheese-making so as to better understand in in their cooking. We've taught a group of lawyers from Tennessee who were really just foodies out for a 3-day party (they spent most of the time out on hikes with the goats and eating). We taught a couple of 3-generation fluid-milk cow dairymen how to adjust their business model to goats and commercial cheese-making (they now have a very successful operation and already undertaking a major expansion). Each of these workshops were unique and custom tailored to the participants and for that I think they got the most out of it and we got to focus on key areas and not try to cram too much unnecessary material into the time we had to teach.

If by "thicker" you mean higher in solids (butterfat and proteins) then it will depend on the goat. More specifically, the breed of goat. Although there are certainly significant differences in the qualities of the milk given by different individuals even within the same breed, there are certain general observations one can make about the differences between the milk of different breeds. For example, the Swiss breeds of goats (including Sanaans, Oberhauslis Toggenbergs and Alpines) are all high-producing dairy breeds but all produce milk generally in line with normalized, store-bought cows milk (3.5% butterfat and around 3% protein). Nubian goats (which originated in Africa) on the other hand do not produce as much milk as their Swiss cousins but make up for it in "richness". We milk a small herd of Nubians. Our herd average butterfat, depending on time of year is from 5-6%. We have individual Nubian goats who have, in late lactation, milked 10% butterfat and 5.1% protein. FYI, half-and-half cream from the store starts at about 10% butterfat. Nigerian Dwarf goats produce even less milk but it can be even richer - comparable to sheeps milk. So, yes, goats milk can be "thicker" but it isn't always. Large and national brand goats milk is often normalized to be comparable to store-bought cow milk.

Goats milk does have about the same lactose as cow milk so if she has diagnosed lactose intolerance then it won;t be much help. That said, there are a lot of people who believe they have lactose intolerance who don't (not that they don't have serious "issues" with milk). Commonly, it is actually a problem digesting the large protein molecules in cows milk that gives people trouble. Goats milk has much smaller molecules (fat molecules too which is why it is nearly naturally homogenized as well) and it is generally more digestible all around. Fresh goats milk can be substituted directly for cows milk in most recipes. If you are fortunate enough to have a local source you will be MUCH happier with the milk than with the most common ultra-pasteurized national brands found in grocery stores. Good luck.

How are different names or tenses for the same subject supposed to be dealt with? For example, the words homogenization, homogenize, homogenizes and homogenized in an article should all point to the same topic. How does one get the [[]] to do that properly?

Fascinating. Thanks for referring the other thread. Good stuff, indeed.

Dumb question alert... What, exactly, is the proper way to use a thermometer when cooking a steak? I assume it has to be a probe-type and I was taught to never EVER poke holes in the cooking meat or risk the juices running out (always use tongs, never a fork, etc). Is this just an old wives tale / culinary myth? Was this debunked by the wizards at MC?

Why does it seem that when "local, sustainable and organic" is discussed it has to be all-or-nothing? Why isn't the commitment to sourcing quality ingredients that follow these tenets when possible good enough? I think it's ridiculous to limit ones resources based on some arbitrary distance-traveled, carbon footprint or the type of feed given to an ingredient during its life. That said, I think it's admirable for anyone to at least look at these attributes and give them some weight when given a choice between items of comparable quality. I personally go well out of my way to eat local, sustainable or organic products when possible and appropriate and understand why they can cost a bit more. On the other hand, we live in a day and age when we have the incredible means to eat the highest quality Japanese fish in Toronto that is fresher than what we might catch ourselves and bring home from a weekend camping trip. To dismiss such amazing culinary opportunities out-of-hand based on ill-defined or unsubstantiated objections seems like a conceit.

I do not have the book yet but in reading a lot about it and seeing sneak -preview pages this seems way off-base. The book appears to be well set up to give one a solid grounding in the science behind how things in cooking work (or don't work). The numerous tables and scaled recipes are laid out in a way that the observant reader will see the relationships between ingredients, methods, times and temperatures so that he or she can develop their own combinations more successfully. I submit this book is a pinnacle tool for helping even home cooks maximize their creativity.

Yeah, you're right about the paint on the blades but I've never worried about it. A quick look at a couple of the blades doesn't show much worn off after a couple animals worth of use. I usually use heavy-duty coarse metal-cutting blades in the 10-16 TPI range. More tpi will give a soother cut but go slower and tend to clog up. Coarser and there's more bone fragments on the meat to deal with and the muscle tissue can look a bit ragged. I try to cut almost all the way through/around with my knife first for, say shanks or chops, then just cut through the bones with the saw. This gives me the best results. I've also cut whole pork loins into chops end-to-end with the saw alone but it was par-frozen/"hard chilled" first. I used a coarser blade (6TPI maybe?) and it worked pretty good.

I do a lot of seasonal butchering (steers, hogs, goat, poultry) here and have an 18-volt Milwaukee cordless reciprocating saw ("Sawzall") I use for this purpose. Blades are readily available up to 12" and in many teeth-per-inch (TPI) and thickness configurations at any hardware store and they are not prohibitively expensive. This set-up is also very fast easy to clean and keep sanitary.

I agree completely. Of course they can do what they want, but is it good business practice to be unaccommodating as a standard operating procedure? The success of many of the chefs and restaurants mentioned in the article seem to suggest it is. Of course, the ones for whom it didn't work for aren't there to write about any more.

This is another good point that bears exploring. It seems like that the most likely practitioners of this "customer not always right" philosophy are also some of the more high-end chefs and restaurants. Aren't theses top-dollar places exactly the ones you would expect to bend over backwards to make the customer happy and satisfied? I would think that spending a lot of money on a meal should come with some expectation of being treated well. The refusal to honor simple special requests would erode this expectation rather quickly.

My first reaction after reading the article was: "This is CRAZY! It's a service business and not supposed to be a platform where culinary demi-god-chefs dictate to the pions far below what they should eat and how. Of course chefs and restaurants should met all reasonable special requests and they should do it with a flourish and a smile!" Then I remembered the singular best restaurant meal I've ever eaten. I had the rare occasion to be able to personally deliver some of our cheese to a regular customer at her restaurant. It was early evening, I was 5 hours from home, and I inquired if they had room to squeeze me in for a diner reservation before the rush. The owner/chef immediately seated me in the already-crowded dining room and proceeded to bring out course, after course, after course of many of the house specialties and a few things she whipped up just for fun. Wines (wonderful wines) flowed and as she had the chance, the chef would come to the table, sit for a few minutes, sip a glass of wine and talk about her food. It was amazing. She brought me things I probably never would have ordered if left to my own devices and in combinations I would not have dreamed could be so successful. I was completely at her mercy and she helped me dine SO much better than I would have on my own. That night she knew better than I exactly what I should be eating. It was perfect and I would, without reservation, put myself in her hands again anytime. I would not dream of asking her for a substitution. Perhaps this is the kind of experience that David Chang and others may be trying to give their customers. Perhaps if they acted more like tour guides revealing the wonders of their art rather than dictators forcing their subjects into submission they would be better received.

And at the end of the meal, when the eight sat smugly, thinking they had taught the chef a thing or two, you were embarrassed to the point that you over-tipped significantly and sent a bottle of wine to the kitchen. Been there.

I don't understand. What kind of restaurant doesn't have a variety of sides of vegetables and salads you could order right off the menu? Even fast food places these days have enough choices to make a meatless meal out of. We're talking about about someone who, despite having these choices wants something different/special/not on the menu. It would be like going to a place offering "spinach lasagna" and "5-meat lasagna" and asking for the 5-meat lasagna without meat, because you don't care for spinach. I suppose that with a tasting-type menu there would be courses, or parts of courses, that you would chose not to eat (with a fish allergy I empathize) but aside from feeling like I perhaps didn't get my full money's worth, I'm pretty sure I'd still be happy and get enough to eat. Certainly some of the burden for ensuring your dining success and pleasure falls to you, your friends and family in how a restaurant is chosen. My sister eats out regularly with a vegetarian friend and has the courtesy to always chose places that can accommodate (if not specifically cater to) her preferences. To do otherwise would be rude, to say the least.