ChrisZ

I've seen cocoa butter sold in 50g bars but it's really expensive. If this is for a small, one-off thing at home then you can try just using white chocolate instead - it all depends on the brand and type of chocolate you're using, but as a generalisation white chocolate will have a higher percentage of cocoa butter than dark chocolate - so adding white chocolate will increase the overall percentage of cocoa butter in your mix. In large scale operations, lecithin is used instead of cocoa butter because it's so much cheaper. A quick google search found this paper, which claimes that .35% lecithin is as effective as adding 8% cocoa butter.

Bakers have been adding milk powder to doughs for decades because of this, the milk powders make the bread softer and give it a more consistent golden brown colour - the colour and flavour of bread are the result of maillard reactions. A quick google search found this pdf with a few bits of information in there. A baker I worked with told me that there was a period (around the 50s) where so much milk powder was being added to bread doughs that they started referring to the product as "milk bread". However powdered milk is expensive, and eventually large bakeries found other products that did the same thing, but were much cheaper - including soy flour. So although there are loads of bread recipes out there that include powdered milk as an ingredient, large commercial bakeries will be using cheaper alternatives.

I coat in cornflour AFTER dipping in a standard batter of flour & water. It's messy, but crispy.

Chris, I'm really enjoying this, it's always interesting to see your home town presented through someone else's eyes. I also appreciate the distances you've travelled so far- for the benefit of overseas readers, Melbourne is a geographically HUGE city. While the suburbs that Chris has named may not mean much to anyone overseas, they're not at all close and you've really covered some distance in only a few day. Great job :-) I've often wondered how (if?) your epic restaurant trip to Sydney has changed your outlook on food and eating out? I enjoyed your write-up a lot, and I've re-read it several times, and I'd love to hear your thoughts now that some time has passed. Was it just a fun week? Was it something more? Did eating 14 amazing meals in 7 days leave a more lasting insight? I'd really love to know... -Chris

Returning to the original question, when making ganache.Judging from the comments made when that video was originally posted, some of their claims are a bit confusing, but it's an interesting video anyway...

Just to emphasise everything that Haresfur said - most spray on oven cleaners use caustic soda (aka sodium hydroxide / aka lye) as the main active ingredient. As I noted in the dishwasher thread, this is also the main active ingredient in dishwashing powder. Dishwashing powder and tablets have always been one of the top causes of household poisonings. When I worked at Coles we'd use cans of oven cleaner (just Mr Muscle, off the shelf) to clean the bakery oven glass every week. No-one liked the job, and we always wore rubber gloves, but it never to occurred to us that we might have the right to refuse doing it. Have you looked at the website for the company that manufactures the stuff you're using? They might have guidelines and warnings there.

Thanks for sharing. Just as a side note, sugar doesn't counteract bitterness, salt does. So if you reduce the amount of salt the end result may taste even more bitter. Books by McGee and Blumenthal both use the example that adding salt to tonic water makes it taste sweeter than adding sugar. Not that you shouldn't add more sugar if you want a sweeter result, just that it won't effect the bitterness...

While the garlic issue has been addressed, I thought I'd mention that I've made curries using SV and they've come out really well. I'm pretty lazy when it comes to Asian cuisines and although I don't mind using supermarket simmer sauces the meat usually overcooks by the time they're done on the stove. By giving the meat a quick saute first to brown it, then chucking it in a bag with a jar of sauce you can cook it SV for hours and not have to worry about the meat drying out. I've mentioned before that I like the way sous vide makes simple food really shine - chicken breasts and salmon are great examples. In the same way, using sous vide to cook a basic supermarket simmer sauce is incredibly easy and yet the results are really much better than you get by boiling chicken or beef chunks on the stove. So definitely try it. (BTW you can always try blanching garlic first before popping it in a bag)

Haven't tried them, but my first thought is that if they're in a vacuum bag then they might not be able to open, which will play havoc with the common school of thought to discard any mussels/clams that haven't opened during cooking...

Sorry, no special insights from me. If I felt like yum cha (dim sum, to any confused readers not in Australia...) I'd go to Minh Tan 2 on Victoria Street - as mentioned above. It used to hit the spot but I always thought Sydney had better yum cha restaurants. As a point of comparison, I think the best yum cha I've had in Sydney was at Zilver. But I'm not too fussy. I was blown away by Yauatcha and that will remain my personal benchmark. Sushi is even more difficult, and as I haven't lived in Melbourne for many years I wouldn't know where to begin. A long time ago I was lucky enough to have lunch at Kenzan and it was easily the best sushi I'd had in Melbourne, but nothing like the 'real' stuff in Japan. My mate still talks about being served prawn nigiri in Japan that was so fresh the prawn meat was still wriggling on top of the rice... I don't think we'll ever see that sort of freshness in Australia. I do find that local salmon can be wonderful, so I generally avoid the flavourless tuna and rubbery prawn nigiri that's so common and just get salmon. ( and BTW I should point out that Brunetti's isn't directly on Lygon street, but rather just off it on Faraday. A few doors down is a great boutique bakery that specialises in sour dough. )

I worked at Coles as a teenager, so I can offer some insight into how they managed the use-by dates in their meat department (beef,lamb and pork. Not chicken). They might have changed their policies since I left 15 years ago, but I don't think they will have. Firstly, all meat is butchered on the premises from carcasses, and once a cut of meat is packaged up it is labelled with a use-by date four days ahead. This is probably the main thing to know - that Coles has decided that freshly butchered meat should be used in 4 days. Secondly, Coles allocate one day for the meat to sit in the customers refrigerator, so they want it sold in three days. Thirdly, if the meat hasn't sold after the second day, it is grouped according to quality and minced. All mince is sold the day it is made, and if it fails to sell at the end of the day it is thrown out. So to clarify: Day 1: Meat is butchered and packaged and offered for sale at full price. Day 2: Meat is reduced in price towards the end of the day to help it sell. Day 3: Any unsold meat from Day 2 is graded and minced. Unsold mince is thrown out. I can suggest from personal experience that beef can easily last for more than four days after it is freshly butchered. This also means that the most expensive grade of mince at Coles is made from the best cuts of beef, including eye fillet, rib eye, sirloin and rump. Anyway thought you might find it interesting...

Melbourne is so big and so diverse that's it's not difficult to find anything, so it's hard to give specific recommendations- it's more a matter of personal preference and geography. But off the top of my head, here are some thoughts- -I agree with RRO that Prahran market is pretty good. I used to live over the road from it, and I thought the produce was better than the Vic Market, even though it's a fraction of the size. -Also at Prahran market is the Essential Ingredient, a great shop for foodies. They sell all your gourmet specialities, as well as kitchenware, and they run cooking classes upstairs. Unlike Simon Johnson (below) the prices are very reasonable. I spent loads of time and loads of money there... -There's a place in Brunswick simply called 'Mediterranean supermarket', 482-492 Sydney Rd. If you like Italian food it will make you cry with happiness. I used to make special trips there just to stock up on pasta, tomatoes and everything that's great about Mediterranean food. It even smells like Europe. -The South Melbourne market is not really special, but they do have an incredible dim sum stall in the middle where you can watch them make fresh dumplings and then buy them hot or to cook yourself later. They make sesame prawn toasts that are stuffed so full they're the size of tennis balls. There's also a guy who sells about a million different types of potatoes. -Brunetti's is an Italian cake shop in Lygon street, the heart of the Italian community in Melbourne. It's a Melbourne institution and the best patisserie I've seen anywhere. Melbournians tend to rave about the cake shops on Acland Street but I've never thought they were very good. But Brunetti's is awesome. -Pellegrini's is my all-time favourite Melbourne cafe, and I make sure I visit every time I'm in the area. It hasn't changed since it opened in the 1950s, and it claims to have had the first espresso machine in Australia - imported at a time when it was only allowed to be operated by a qualified boiler-maker! I love the way you can sit at a bench in the kitchen and watch the Italian women cook, and I appreciate that they've never taken anything down from the walls, only put newer stuff on top ;-) -If you have more money than sense, you can shop at Simon Jonson. This is where you'll find gourmet foods with prices to match their quality. Amongst other things, they're the Australian distributor for Valrhona. -Victoria Street, Richmond, is the home to Melbourne's Vietnamese community. There's loads of Asian supermarkets dotted between the restaurants and they sell fruit/veg/meat/seafood at great prices. I lived off Victoria St. for 6 years and loved finding random things in the Asian groceries, and I would buy bunches of fresh herbs there for 70c when they were $2.50 at Coles. They're the places I can think of that are special to me, but you shouldn't have trouble finding good food at all. Melbourne is a great city for foodies. Have fun!

The knives thing is all about heat. Heating up a sharp knife is the easiest way to make it blunt. When I was 15 my first job was cleaning out the local butchers, which included washing up all their knives. They could tell if I washed them in water that was too hot as all the knives would lose their edge, and they often told me not to wash them in scalding water. It's worth knowing that dishwashers don't clean by 'scrubbing' dishes in the way you do it yourself in the sink. Dishwashing powder is mostly caustic soda, and dishwashers basically clean by squirting hot caustic soda over everything until the food corrodes off. Anything that reacts with caustic soda, or a basic environment, will not do well in a dishwasher. If you have glasses or crockery that have a gold rim then it will dissolve in a dishwasher. Aluminium reacts with caustic soda, which would be the source of any warnings not to put aluminium in a dishwasher. Some types of plastic will go cloudy. So basically - dishwashers clean with heat and caustic soda. Anything that doesn't like heat or caustic soda will fare badly in a dishwasher. Knives don't like heat, and a number of metals don't like caustic soda.

In Melbourne, the Flower Drum has been listed in the world's Top 50 list a few times, and has been suggested as the best Chinese restaurant in the world by the New York Times. It's had the same executive chef (Anthony Lui) since 1985 but AFAIK he's not popped up on any TV shows, released any books, or lent his name to a kitchenware line... His name might be known to those in Melbourne foodie circles but he definitely doesn't have the name recognition of the chefs with famous restaurants on Sydney's waterfront, or advertising deals with local supermarkets.

I agree too, and as the request is for books that will be a gift there's no way of knowing how interested the recipient will be in learning about cooking... In my experience, Jamie Oliver's books stand out because people actually cook from them! This might sound bizarre if you're into food and have libraries of cooking books, but I've got a number of friends who have only a passing interest in cooking and the only recipes they make are from Jamie Oliver books. Other books just gather dust...

We were given a lot of Scanpan stuff for our wedding, and I've grown to really like it. I would happily swap any of it for La Crueset, but if wasn't looking for enamel I'd happily buy more Scanpan. The odd thing with Scanpan (in Australia, anyway) is that you can always find it heavily, heavily discounted. I don't know if their margins are artificially high or whether their RRP are drawn from a hat, but it's easy to find their products at about 1/3 of the 'suggested rrp' and they're always featured in brochures and tv ads. I would never pay full price.

What ingredients are in the kit? It would be surprising if they're all bad, and many of those types of ingredients have an indefinite shelf life. But they can vary in strength and some techniques, such as spherification, can be sensitive to a number of variables, for example the amount of calcium present in your water.. Have you downloaded the free recipe collection from khymos? Lots of information in there. I've tried reverse spherification a few times and haven't had perfect results yet, but I've bounced between too soft and too rubbery so I know that my ingredients are fine. I'd check your ratios against as many online guides as you can find. Try a few small batches with different ratios- even in a 50ml bath - to see if you can get any results at all. If you can't get any spheres of any shape at all then something's wrong somewhere. Regarding agar and other hydrocolloids, they all have their own characteristics and demands to work properly. Generally you want to add the gelling agent to a cold liquid because it can help avoid lumps, then you heat to a certain temperature and allow time for the gelling agent to hydrate. Agar should be boiled (unlike gelatine, which should not be boiled, and gellan, which only needs to go to about 80C). Again, the khymos collection is a good resource to check you're using each ingredient correctly.

Just sharing a few random thoughts after reading your post. - It's going to be a very sweet cake! - If you're going to include a chocolate ganache and a chocolate mousse, I'd make them clearly different. But if they're both just plain chocolate my guess is one will dominate the other, so you're better off choosing one and using it 3 times and saving yourself the time and dishes. This is really just an opinion based on my failures, so ignore me if you know what you're doing ;-) But looking at your concept you have chocolate cake, chocolate mousse, chocolate ganache and potentially discs of pure chocolate too. I don't think I could make that cake and have all the chocolate layers clearly distinctive (but I'm sure a better chef could). - I have tried a few cakes with layers of caramel mousse in them and I find that a caramel flavour is easily diluted as a mousse. I have not had any luck in producing an intense caramel mousse that can be clearly identified against a rich chocolate cake. So rather than use a true caramel (starting with sugar) I use a dulce de leche instead - this means either boiling cans of condensed milk for 3 hours or simply buying a can of caramel from the supermarket (Nestle sell pre-boiled cans of condensed milk, and in our supermarket they're sold next to each other). If your chocolate cake is a light, mild sponge then you might have more luck than I've had. - You can get great texture and additional caramel flavour by making honeycomb - AKA sponge toffee or hokey pokey. Regardless of what you call it, it's essentially a sugar caramel with a bit of bicarb in it. Break it up into crumbs and sprinkle it on the top, or make a layer out of it. It will give you a sticky, crunchy texture as well as a nice rich caramel flavour. But honeycomb is something that can weep if you put it in the fridge, so bear that in mind. HTH and would love to see a photo of the finished cake! -Chris

Thanks for the IIF twice cooked scallops hint. Looks great, I'll get a test batch brining today and am looking forward to trying the results. Wrapping them up in a tube before SVing is just the sort of extra tip I'm looking for - I'd seen this done in MC with Activa to make a single long piece of scallop meat but it didn't occur to me that I could omit the Activa and just SV them this way to maintain a firm shape and texture. Cheers!

I have been idly looking around the archives (and through my books) to see if there's any benefit to cooking sea scallops sous vide. I can't find any reference to anyone who's even tried it, and although Modernist Cuisine has them in their shellfish table at a recommended temperature of 50 degrees, the text briefly suggests that scallops are best cooked quickly pan-seared. I really love pan-seared sea scallops, and they're not exactly difficult to cook, but if there's any way to improve their flavour (by brining, for example) or texture (cooking sous vide) then I'd love to try it. Any suggestions?

I don't mind being labelled a pedant, but I use 'parmigiana' when I have a genuine Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano, and I use 'parmesan' when I have a generic supermarket parmesan-style cheese. I don't know if it's a global thing, but locally the term 'parmesan' is used pretty broadly. But even good local delicatessens happily sell imported Grano Padano as 'parmesan', which I find slightly irritating. I agree, however, that this isn't a pronunciation issue!

Botrytis stops me in my tracks. (bot-rye-tiss?) mille feuille draws a blank. (mill fuel?) mange tout has always mystified me (mangy touts are people hawking tickets outside football games) poffertjes is more difficult to pronounce than 'Dutch pancakes' celeriac always comes out as 'celery-ack' and I'll never get used to the UK pronunciation of yoghurt, where the 'yog' rhymes with 'jog'. In Australia the 'yo' is pronounced as in 'yo-yo'.

A good friend of mine is a female sushi chef, she is Japanese and trained in Osaka. I have asked her advice on a number of topics that have popped up on this forum, including the one about eating raw scallop roe.

Thanks for linking the video, and for posting the recipe (which looks very similar to the one I lost). I'm looking forward to trying it soon, it will be a very satisfying meal to make from scratch :-)

It is very interesting to read a thread that dates back to 2003. These days my first stop for questions is wikipedia, and so to address the original question of 'what exactly is butter chicken' here is the link to wikipedia's article on the same dish. It is interesting to note the reference to a documentary on butter chicken by the Discovery Channel, I guess those who are seriously interested will be able to track that down on the internet too. Wikipedia emphasises the difference between the Indian dish and the English 'chicken tikka masala', which itself is a dish of obscure origins. There are a number of speculative stories about the origins of chicken tikka masala and several restaurants claim they invented it, including one in London called 'Gaylords' which was around the corner from where I worked and had a sign out the front staking their claim. It is often quoted that a 1998 survey of 48 British restaurants found that the only common ingredient they had in chicken tikka masala was chicken. In Australia I have seen many restaurants and take-aways which list butter chicken and chicken tikka masala as being the same thing, but in England I noticed that butter chicken, or murgh makhani, was often not on the menu at all, and if it was then it was definitely listed as a different dish to the ever-present chicken tikka masala. Regarding Butter Chicken, or Murgh Makhani, I have a pre-packaged spice mix that contains (in proportional order) paprika, cumin, coriander, tumeric, pepper, fennel, ginger, cinnamon, fenugreek, cardamon, chilli, cloves, caraway and mint. The local supermarket had a much simpler 'butter chicken' packet mix containing garam masala, cardamon pods and fenugreek leaves. I had a favourite recipe for butter chicken that I unfortunately lost, I recall that it contained pureed cashews and a dollop of honey.