ChrisZ

I started making the Modernist Cuisine pasta until I worked out that I needed far more eggs than I had. With normal OO pasta flour, the MC recipe calls for 57.6% egg yolks. I weighed the egg yolks I had and they averaged 20g each, but for 1kg flour that's 576g egg yolks, or 29 eggs! Is it possible to use lecithin powder instead? How would you calculate the amount of lecithin powder needed to emulate an egg yolk? It's possible that it will work out cheaper to simply use the 29 eggs, but I have no idea what I would do with 29 egg whites and adding lecithin powder to pasta seems far less decadent than so many eggs. (BTW I had 180g of egg yolks, so I made the pasta with 310g flour. The pasta was very good, so I'll be doing it again).

If you're really interested, there's a detailed history of the KFC machine in 'Modernist Cuisine', along with photos (maybe even a cutaway, I can't quite remember). What I found interesting is the footnote that chickens have been selectively bred for tenderness so effectively since they invented their technique that we don't appreciate how comparatively tender KFC would have been back then. But the idea of attempting something at home with a deep fryer and oil made me think of the film 'The English Patient', and not in a good way...

Minestrone, something that we make on a weekly basis. The smokiness of the smoked paprika really transforms the minestrone and it's surprisingly different to regular paprika. I also make pumpkin soup often but I usually throw in some red capsicum rather than use paprika, not sure why! It's just one of those things I've always done. But I love having a bit of extra warmth to soups and paprika is a great way to achieve it. Thanks so much for your blog, I have enjoyed it so much and can't wait to visit the places you've introduced us all to.

Herbies is awesome. I have found that the quality of their products is a significant notch above the stuff you get in a supermarket and you need to adjust accordingly... the smoked paprika that you bought is something I've used in soups but I find it easy to add too much. I think most home spice racks contain a few bottles which have been long neglected and that have faded away, but even so it's still a shock to get herbs and spices which are so powerful!

Thanks so much, this is brilliant! I've just come back from 3 weeks in Italy and I ate my own bodyweight in gelato, but these photos and flavours look better than anything I tried over there. Can't wait to get to Darlinghurst and sample them... As someone reasonably new to Sydney your blog (and Nickrey's) has been invaluable in helping me appreciate the city's food. Much appreciated. (and something I found interesting - there's a Harris Farm near us in a suburb strangely named "Dee Why", the meat section is inside one gigantic cold room and so they hand out freezer jackets to people as they enter...)

Thanks Kate for a truly inspirational blog. I'm looking forward to visiting the places you've mentioned, and I can't wait to see where the best gelato in Sydney has been hiding. Just wondering, how often does someone say to you - "You should go on Masterchef" ? ;-)

I find it interesting the way that food 'fashions' can sweep across countries and the globe. I would be interested to know what desserts are considered to have been 'fashionable' in the past? (I'll avoid the word 'hot' because of the potential for confusion). Here in Australia, I was in high school when I first started reading the food pages of the daily newspaper and paying attention to critics and restaurant news. Around the late 80s I noticed from newspaper articles that 'sticky date pudding' was becoming a very fashionable dessert, and even cafe reviews mentioned whether or not they had it on their menu. By the 90s it was tiramisu. And in the past few years it has been chocolate fondants, or chocolate lava cakes, whatever you prefer. And of course these days anything with caramel in it is described as 'salted caramel'. I have no doubt that in other countries different desserts have had their rise and fall. We can look back at peaches melba, bombe alaska and crepes suzette as desserts that had their time in the limelight. I don't think any of the really popular desserts have been highly technical, or difficult to make. Certainly sticky date pudding is farmhouse comfort food. Tiramisu is pretty straightforward and even chocolate fondants are simple to mix, the skill is in judging oven temperature and cooking time. In the UK Banoffee pie is popular partly because it's so mindlessly simple to make (and also because its delicious). I don't think a dessert that's highly technical will spread too far, because it's the appearance of the dessert in everyday cafes and eventually supermarkets that will make it really popular. Predicting the next big trend is always difficult. Maybe another simple old farmhouse recipe will be rediscovered - golden syrup dumplings were a favourite of mine. Jamie Oliver showed he was a marketing genius by popping some white chocolate into a rice pudding and labelling it 'risotto'. Perhaps if restaurants realise they can charge $15 for a bowl of rice pudding just by changing the name we'll see a big surge in popularity ;-) One trend that I have seen in high-end patisseries is the reinvention of popular chocolate bars. Snickers, mars bars, jaffa cakes and anything else you might have eaten as a kid are being dissected and recreated with good chocolate and gorgeous presentation but with the same basic flavours as the originals. But I think this approach is too technical to become a widespread trend. Whatever it is, I'll eat it.

... just ensure you're not using mint flavoured floss! (some things you learn from experience)

The British cult film "Withnail & I" has a great scene where they're trying to roast a chicken. It starts with Withnail contemplating the live chicken - "how do we make it die?" - and ends with them placing the deceased and plucked chicken in the oven, perched upright on top of the kettle. From the same film I've also heard more than one person quote the infamous line "We want the finest wines available to humanity. And we want them here, and we want them now!" - which isn't exactly cooking, but it's the sort of thing you hear in a kitchen...

I haven't lived in Melbourne for about 7 years, but one of my favourite restaurants was a Japanese place called Misuzu's, in Albert Park. In additional to standard a la carte offerings they had a large range of 'salads' and nibbles - Japanese tapas I guess - many of which were vegetarian, and at the time I lived and ate there you could order a vegetarian platter for 2 or 3 people for under $20. I have eaten at a number of vegetarian restaurants around Fitzroy and St Kilda and none of them were particularly good. The platters at Misuzu were not only delicious, simple and cheap, but not particularly Japanesey - important if you have friends or guests that have a prejudice against Japanese food. I'm sure the prices have changed since then but I hope the food hasn't! I would much rather eat there and order vegetarian than go to a dedicated vegetarian restaurant.

Without having tried the recipe I can only share a few thoughts. Firstly, if the caramel sauce you have made according to your recipe is too firm, can you soften it by heating it gently without getting it too hot for the whipped cream? Or is it firm even when it's warm? Maybe it's just too cold. Secondly, proportions for eggs / gelatine will vary depending on the texture you want. Any calculations would be done according to the volume of the caramel sauce, not just the sugar. It would depend on what your preference is. If you want a very light, easily pipeable mousse then you may only need whipped cream. If you want the mousse to have a traditional velvet texture then whipped cream & egg yolks may be enough, maybe 1 yolk for every 50-70mls of sauce? Gelatine would give a firmer texture again, depending on how much you use. I don't have any ratios or guidelines for eggs and gelatine in mousse, sorry. If you decided to use egg yolks and wanted some shelf-life, I'd want to heat the yolks- whisk them with sugar until thick and then pour in the caramel sauce, like a custard. Thirdly, if you're prepared to try different recipes or create your own, then my basic ratio for a caramel sauce is 2:2:1 sugar:cream:milk. This would equate to 200g sugar, which I would caramelise, then I would add 200mls cream mixed with 100mls milk. As I outlined above, once the sauce has cooled I would then add whipped cream, gelatine and egg yolks depending on what I wanted. I find caramel to be a fairly delicate flavour, so I wouldn't be adding much whipped cream at all. Whipped egg whites would make it lighter and airier. Finally, there's an alternative recipe for caramel mousse as part of this dessert (you can ignore the other elements). I've made it a few times and find the caramel flavour to be very delicate, I'd probably use less whipped cream than the recipe asks for. Hope this helps.

I would expect that a pro is purchasing whole fish. Having visited the Osaka fish markets I've seen the care and attention that goes into selecting which fish to purchase. The skill to butcher a whole fish into slabs of sushi/sashimi ready meat is something I would expect of a professional. Perhaps it's just me, but when I think of 'amateur' I think of purchasing ready-cut slabs of fish from a fishmonger. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Hi Nick, Just wondering how you arrived at the 82C - 12 hour combination? Is it directly from Thomas Keller? I've found a number of time/temperature combinations in the archives but mostly around 60C and for 36+ hours. I'm guessing you've cooked many pork bellies and I'd be interested to learn from your experience. I've got one brining in the fridge at the moment...

What recipe or technique or are using? And what do you mean by it turning into toffee- are you saying that your mousse sets hard? Caramel mousse is not too difficult to make and using a sugar thermometer will help you get consistent results. A typical approach would be to boil sugar until it turns into a caramel, add cream/ cream+milk to the browned sugar to make a caramel sauce base, then let it cool and add whipped cream, gelatine, egg yolks (& possibly whipped egg whites) depending on the texture you want. The temperature you take the sugar to will determine the colour and flavour of the mousse. Although it's a matter of small debate, the choice of a wet or dry sugar caramel won't affect the flavour, just the speed at which the sugar browns. The only reveal caveat is that adding cream to hot sugar will result in a dramatic eruption that can easily give you a steam burn. If you start with a different type of caramel base, either a commercial caramel syrup or a dulce de leche (ie. a boiled can of condensed milk) then the process would still be the same. To make the caramel into a mousse just add whipped cream, gelatine, egg yolks. Using only gelatine and not eggs will give you a different, firmer texture that arguably isn't a mousse, but it depends on what you're trying to do. But I'm curious to know what your problem is, because toffee sounds like a starting point. You just need to add cream to make it into a liquid caramel base and then go from there.

A belated thank-you as well. Thoroughly enjoyed reading through everything, I especially appreciate your honesty- not a hint of the pretension that can creep into formal reviews or food blogs. I have a gift voucher for Ormeggio and am looking forward to using it, hopefully it will be quieter! I sometimes work opposite Bentley and next time I'm working in the area I will book dinner there. I will put in a quiet word of support for Zumbo. There's an outlet by the Manly ferry wharf and it's easy to drop in on the way home from work with no expectation or fanfare. There are never any queues and I'm often the only person in the shop. Despite being initially suspicious due to Zumbo's profile (is he the only Australian pastry chef to get his own TV show?) I have always been impressed by everything I've eaten. But $9 a slice means I've tried a lot, but not as much or as often as I'd like to. But I've never been disappointed. Otherwise, thanks again for sharing your trip with us.

If you want to take it in a slightly different direction, you can caramelise white chocolate in an oven, then melt it into your base. In one of those funny coincidences that happen, last week in a local bakery they were giving out free caramelised white chocolate macarons that had broken, then when I got home there was a caramelised white chocolate mousse being made on Masterchef... The macaron was delicious, definitely white chocolate but also definitely caramel too.

Honestly it was something I did so quickly I don't remember exactly. There's nothing I can say that isn't in the sous vide index (scroll down to the fish bit). I just bought a piece of salmon, salted it slightly, bagged it up and popped it in the bath. It was bought, cooked and eaten in less than an hour. I was aware that cooking fish for too long can make it go mushy, so I used the tables in MC to calculate cooking time based on the thickness of the meat, which wasn't very long. I don't remember but I think it was about 20 mins or less. It was a smallish piece. I did heat the plate first (something I always try to do when cooking) and when I found the fish to be 'cold' I checked its internal temperature with a digital thermometer - by which time it was 38C (100F). I crisped up the skin with a blowtorch but apart from that it was very simple.

Just an observation... I tried cooking salmon sous vide at around 41C (107F). The taste and texture were wonderful, but even though I ate it immediately I couldn't get over the sense that I was eating something that had gone cold. I wanted the fish to feel hotter than it was, although heating up the fish would've defeated the purpose of cooking it at such a precisely low temperature! Perhaps I've been conditioned by a lifetime of eating hot food - or at least food which is either very hot or not hot at all - but basically I found something in-between to be fairly disconcerting. Overall though it was such a relief to eat salmon that wasn't overcooked (and so easy) that I'll do it more often, so I'll probably get used to it. But just wondering what other people think when eating food which is barely luke warm?

Your heading caught my attention, but I haven't heard of pomme souffle before. Sounds interesting so I looked it up. There's an entire page dedicated to pomme souffle in 'Modernist Cuisine' but there's nothing modernist about the ingredients or the technique. It may be the most conventional recipe in the entire set of books. It does say that the trick is to get the moisture content of the potato slices correct but there's no mention of any special modernist technique to do - no special equipment used, no molecular ingredients. This could mean that experimenting with methylcellulose and other modernist ingredients and techniques is either unnecessary for pommes souffle, or that you may be the first to discover something really cool!

Yep - all are used in sour candies - citric acid, malic acid and tartaric acid. I've got small amounts of them (and ascorbic acid too) and I'll happily admit that at 100% purity I can't taste a difference but they're all incredibly sour. I haven't tried making boiled sweets, but I have made sherbet powder by combining citric acid, bicarb soda and icing sugar. It's a common recipe in kids cookbooks! You need equal amounts of the acid powder and bicarb, and double that in sugar. If you want to add colour and flavours, use some of the crystals in packet jelly mixes. As long as you keep it dry, you can use sherbet powder as 'surprise' fillings in marshmallows, cupcakes, chocolates and so on.

I understand what you're asking for - I have a decent selection of modernist ingredients and while I can measure stuff with a precision scale, I don't always understand why. I spent a lot of spare time trying to compile my own notes on ingredients and realised that there's plenty of recipes available (khymos is remarkable for what it is), but not a lot of underlying information, and the information that is readily available online seems to be slightly different versions of the blurbs on the manufacturer's website. I know that not everyone wants to be told that the answer is in 'Modernist Cuisine', but it's easily the most comprehensive guide. However when I'm looking for information on something I generally cross-reference 'modernist cuisine', the fat duck cookbook, 'cooking for geeks', khymos, wikipedia, and then the various websites of companies that sell the stuff, such as willpowder, kalys and www.creamsupplies.co.uk For a particular ingredient, any one of those resources may be better than another. Without pulling out the books and comparing them side-by-side, for example, I have a hunch that 'gellan' is discussed more thoroughly in the Fat Duck cookbook than it is in 'modernist cuisine'. The reason why sodium citrate is used in cheese sauces is discussed in the most detail by Herve This in 'molecular gastronomy', although I still haven't found a good explanation of why sodium citrate is preferred over citric, ascorbic, malic or tartaric acids. There are many resources that say that xanthan gum and guar gum can be combined to emulate gluten, but beyond khymos suggesting a 2:1 ratio for xanthan to guar gum, I haven't seen any more detail than that on how or why it works. But in general, 'modernist cuisine' is peerless as a source of information. I know that recommending a $600 book that's been out of stock for months isn't a great answer, so I'll add that I've been really impressed with the book 'cooking for geeks'. It's less than $20 on Amazon, so it's hardly a big loss if you don't find it useful. It doesn't have the pages of text and tables that you'll find in 'modernist cuisine', but you can't argue with the price and the whole thing fits in your pocket. Maybe it will help you...

I've recently been reading through the archives for advice on cooking pork belly sous vide. You can look at the sous vide index here to follow previous discussions - scroll down to the pork section, I'm not sure how to link directly to it. You will see that there's a range of different time/temperature combinations suggested. As a newby I defer to those with more experience, but my understanding of cooking meat sous vide is that cooking too long leads to mushy meat, not dry meat. I thought that dryness is associated with temperature, not time? I had never thought about it before but Modernist Cuisine clarifies the difference between terms like 'juicy' and 'succulent', as well as clarifying that if meat is dry from overcooking then smothering it with a liquid will not make the meat any less dry, or any more tender.

I think that's it. I re-read the entire brining section and I'm still interpreting the tables in the same way- that is, if you include the meat & water together as 100% then the salt is 1% and sugar .4% (scaling 1). But if you include water only as 100% then the salt is 7% and the sugar is 3% (scaling 2). The same tables are also repeated in the kitchen manual with the same descriptions. I think you're right that the text on page 171, where it says "follow steps 2-5 above" should actually read "follow steps 3-5 above", otherwise there is no difference between the two methods! Hopefully this will be confirmed in the 'Modernist Cuisine' thread. I checked the errata on the Modernist Cuisine website and it wasn't listed as an error, but I'm certain that it is. At least salt, sugar and turkey wings are cheap! BTW - upon re-reading the brining section I noticed that it specifically said to exclude the weight of bones in your calculations. I have no idea how much the bones weigh in a turkey wing but this would also have an impact on your totals.

I'm still a novice at brining / sous vide but just a couple of notes- - The brining ratios you mention are actually those suggested when you use water (only) as 100%. This is not equilibrium brining, so although the setup and calculations are easier doing it this way you need to include an additional rest period after brining and before cooking, for the salt to distribute evenly in the meat. I assume you're using the brining tables in volume 3, pg 168? The suggested ratios when you have meat+water as 100% are 1% salt and .4% sugar. In your example, where meat+water = 3.5kg you would need 35g salt and 14g sugar. This method is equilibrium brining- the advantage is that you can't 'over salt' the meat. - When I brine, I follow Heston Blumenthal's example in his 'perfect roast chicken' episode and sterilise the surface of the meat first. This simply involves dunking it in a saucepan of boiling water for a few seconds and then dunking it in a pot of ice-water. You can watch him . In his case, with a whole chicken, he leaves it in the boiling water for about 30seconds. When I'm using much smaller pieces of meat that don't have internal cavities, I usually just count to three. This is really easy and simple to do, and offers an extra degree of safety- any bacteria on your meat is most likely to be on the surface. I think it's worth the effort. It's possible that sterilising the surface of your wings first with a quick bath in boiling water would've prevented you problem.- I've had a pork belly in brine for a few days and just opened the bag, and I couldn't smell anything at all. Can't wait to cook and eat it...

San choy bow... it's a semi-regular at our place. You can make it with any meat.