ChrisZ

I get annoyed by simplistic claims than one thing is "better" than another. This is a problem with many food journalists, not just TV cooks. My pet peeves are claims that couverture is "better" chocolate, or that carnaroli rice is "better" for risotto. But there are lots of others.

Are you looking for a retail solution? 4 kg isn't that much, but you could grate it and package it as gourmet Belgian-style Hot Chocolate flakes, or make a ganache and package it with strawberries as gourmet chocolate dip.

Grrrr... I'm kicking myself for posting here earlier but then forgetting to mention the main thing I wanted to post about! In terms of artisanal chocolate, a fantastic experience is to purchase a Pralus 'tasting pyramid' and work your way through all of the different bars. Pralus make a range of single-origin chocolates, which have the same recipe (proportions of cocoa/cocoa butter/sugar) but each bar uses beans from a different plantation. Their website mentions 18 different single-plantation bars, and the tasting pyramid is a collection of 10 of them. It's amazing how different they are. Everything about the bars is the same except where the beans have come from. One bar will give you a burst of rich red berries, the next will be nutty, the next will be smoky and so on. It's a fantastic introduction to artisanal chocolate and it's no surprise that the Pralus tasting pyramid has formed the basis of chocolate tasting courses and blogs... Well worth the effort to find.

At the risk of lowering the bar, I generally eat Green & Blacks. It's now readily available in supermarkets (in Australia & the UK) so it's not really in keeping with the artisanal intention of the thread, but I don't think it's a case of 'the least bad'.

Forgot to mention Navarro's, Spanish tapas restaurant on Charlotte Street. Consistently good and always packed.

Roka is great. I prefer the basement, same food as the ground-floor restaurant but a unique cosy atmosphere. Dinner at Roka was the most expensive meal I've eaten while sitting on a log. Probably the best scallops I've ever had. If you want an interesting location then the Kensington Roof Gardens have a nice restaurant, and if you want a view then the OXO tower is worth checking out- it has a bistro and a restaurant, both of which are routinely accused of being overpriced but really they're not dreadful at all, and you can easily do worse elsewhere for the same prices and not get the breathtaking scenery. But it's the curry that I miss from London! The dodgy little Indian takeaway at the end of my Camden Town street made the best Chicken Tikka Masala, easily my favourite London meal and for less than a tenner.

There are more than a few laughs there... My favourite is the "literal" category - they give me deja vu: http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/search/label/Literal%20LOLs

Sesame prawn toasts... a slightly cliched weakness of mine. Big fat ones stuffed with loads of tender meat, not the wafer thin oily crisps you often end up with.

It probably depends on the type of cheese you use. But you have reminded me that as the internet has a global reach I should elaborate on my train of thought a bit. Apologies for digressing from the original topic of Dulce de Leche... In Australia the most common cheesecakes are the refrigerated variety - generally the filling is a mix of cream cheese, whipped cream, a flavouring and probably gelatine, poured onto a crushed biscuit base and chilled until set. Baked cheesecakes are certainly available from patisseries but they're simply not as common as the refrigerated variety. When I was a teenager I saw a recipe on the packet of Kraft Philadelphia Cream Cheese for a very simple cheesecake that was just 2 packets of cheese (500g) and a can of condensed milk. It may have had gelatine in it. I tried the recipe and found it OK but bland, although I noted that it tasted more like white-chocolate than some of the white-chocolate cheesecakes I've had! I tried it again using a can of boiled condensed milk and I liked the result much more - I made it fairly often when I was younger. I haven't made it for many years but as far as I can remember I just beat it all together until it's light and fluffy and that's it. It's probably safer to add gelatine but I don't recall doing it, and I don't like cheesecakes that have a jelly texture. Kraft Philadelphia Cream Cheese is a global, supermarket product that I actually prefer to more 'gourmet' equivalents! I've tried making cheesecakes with neufchatel and other - less processed - cream cheeses but I simply prefer the taste of Kraft! Oh well. If you beat it long enough it gets lighter and airier although you could add whipped cream to make it lighter still - then you'd probably need gelatine too. But if you're using a different type of cream cheese to Kraft, or prefer a very light texture, then you may need to adjust quantities and ingredients to suit. Returning to the original topic, scientists define Dulce de Leche as a different product from caramel but the taste is essentially the same, and 'caramel' is obviously easier to say, write and explain than 'Dulche de Leche'. Just wondering how strict people are with definitions of flavours like 'caramel', 'butterscotch', 'toffee' and so on?

BTW the creator of the Banoffee Pie, Ian Dowding, has directions for making Dulce de Leche from condensed milk on his website. He recommends submerging the cans and cooking them in the oven for 3 1/2 hours, by doing it in the oven there is no risk of a saucepan boiling dry and the cans exploding. Apart from the simple fact that it tastes delicious, you can make a caramel cheesecake in 5 minutes by adding a can to 500g cream cheese. Nothing else needed (except the biscuit base).

Thanks too Nextguy! Have ordered from Canada and saved handsomely... Considering that Amazon UK has the book listed for £395 that's a big difference.

Orange juice after brushing your teeth. There's something about toothpaste that disorientates your sense of taste for a while. Not that I eat toothpaste, but it's the only negative flavour combination I can think of.

I have a couple of old Tomkin 'thermtex standard' piping bags that have begun unravelling from the nozzle end, one of them has split almost to the top and is unusable and the other isn't too far behind. The fabric isn't damaged, it's just a glued seam coming undone. Just wondering if it's possible to repair them - what type of glue can you use that will stick the bag safely without contaminating the contents, or providing a medium for bacteria to grow on? Even the local supermarket has started stocking disposable piping bags so maybe their time is up, but I'd like to salvage them if I can. -Chris

If you're after something new then try tea-smoking chocolate before making the ganache. I haven't done it and it might not work, but it's on my list of things to try. I'm thinking you'd grate the chocolate first so it has more surface area to absorb the smoke, and you'd want to have it stacked on a bowl because it will probably start to melt. But otherwise tea-smoke it in the same way you'd tea-smoke chicken (and away from the smoke alarm...)

I love pumpkin ravioli, just two quick additions: - when I roast the pumpkin I always roast it with loads and loads of garlic, then mash it all together. I always roast with olive oil, never steam or boil. - My partner's (Italian) mum swears by Japanese Pumpkin instead of butternut pumpkin.

Goat is also a traditional part of some Italian religious festivals, it's often braised/ served as a ragu- you could even use an osso bucco recipe and substitute goat for the osso bucco. If you're not wanting to go down the more spicy avenues then just google for Italian goat recipes and you'll find loads of options. Although it's probably something unique to our butcher and not to goat in general, when we buy a goat we have to wash it carefully to remove bone chips/ bandsaw reside. Yes, I'm jealous!

Wow, so many great suggestions... My quick meal tip is to spend time on a weekend preparing filo-pastry parcels and freezing them. During my uni days the problem I found with quick meals is that they're mostly pasta, stir-fries, or stews. Sometimes I really felt like a traditional meat & 3 veg meal but without doing the prep work and the subsequent cleaning. Filo pastry to the rescue... You can parcel all sorts of stuff up with filo pastry and I'll leave that part up to you, but my my personal favourite was chicken breast, apricots and cheese. I'd dice up chicken breasts and season them, dice up apricots (usually canned) and add pre-grated cheddar. Then portion the mix, wrap them up in filo and freeze them. The proportions can easily be sized according to the relative appetites of your family members. And of course the combinations are endless... everything from a vegetable ragu through to beef wellington, or spinach & ricotta with or without chicken- and so on. You can take the filo parcels out of the freezer and pop them into the oven with some potatoes, if you time it right they'll be ready together. Steam some frozen vegies in the microwave and you can have a tasty meal ready with virtually no preparation and no mess to clean up. It will take closer to 1 hour than 30 minutes to cook, but with negligible preparation. (PS and on a different note, omelettes are great too)

I just noticed that the Amazon page now says six volumes, where it used to say five... not sure if this means there is more content, or if the volumes have simply been re-formatted to simplify publishing?

Melt it back down and use it to dip fruit, esp. strawberries.

The first thingI did when I joined eGullet was to read my way through the braising lab. It took a few evenings but it's a wonderful resource, highly recommended to those who haven't read it. Probably the most surprising result for me was that the browning process didn't seem to add anything to the final result in terms of flavour, but I don't feel like it's my place to summarise the results here. Work your way through the archives!

a fondue set! Is a rotisserie regional enough? In addition to the tagine there's also the tanjia.

Very interesting thread, from which I have gathered that grinding fresh whole spices undoubtedly gives a better result than the jar of spice powder that's been in the spice rack for a year, and toasting/roasting the spice before grinding can lead to a different and hopefully improved flavour. But in situations where the spice powder is also fried as part of the recipe, do you still see a benefit in roasting/toasting the whole spice before grinding, or is the frying doing the same job? For example if a recipe calls for garam masala to be added to sautéing onions (and you were grinding up fresh garam masala from whole spices) would you get a different result by toasting/roasting the garam masala components first? Or is the frying of the ground powder going to give the same results?

I wonder if a blanch-and-freeze would work. I was wondering that too. If you're just blanching then adding bicarb soda to the water would help preserve the green colour without affecting the flavour too much.

For something slightly different, I like to make potato pancakes as a dessert (ie. not a roesti or hash brown). They're so fragile it's difficult to turn them properly but they melt in your mouth and have a distinctive flavour that compliments sweet sauces. I've traditionally served them warm with bananas and a caramel sauce. The recipe is approximate but simple: 1 cup mashed potato 1 cup milk 1/3 cup plain flour 2-3 eggs Mix together until smooth, season with salt. The mix will be quite runny so it's best to make small pancakes so you can turn them without them disintegrating. Best eaten warm, fresh out of the pan!

I agree that there are different ways a cookbook can be bad, which is why I disagree that the Fat Duck Cookbook is bad. I have it and I haven't cooked anything out of it, and I probably won't. But as a source of inspiration it is unparalleled. It's the only "cookbook" I have that can be read more or less like a novel and that imparts all sorts of useful knowledge, and that changes the way you think about food. You could argue that it pushes the boundaries of what a "cookbook" is by going beyond a collection of recipes and into psychology and science and cooking methodology. From this perspective it's the single most valuable cookbook I have, even if I never cook anything in it. As a point of comparison I have lots of cookbooks on chocolate that are all interchangeably bland. They all have a few pages at the front on the history of chocolate, how it's made, where it comes from, etc etc. Then they have a bunch of recipes that are all pretty much the same, perhaps with some drinks shoehorned in at the end, and probably some recipes that don't need chocolate but it's been added anyway. The photos are pretty but the actual content is just plain average. The recipes are much more accessible that those in the Fat Duck cookbook but I'm no more likely to make anything because none of it is really interesting, and the entire book is forgettable so it just sits on the shelf gathering dust with all the others. The difference is that after reading the Fat Duck cookbook I feel inspired about food, I have learnt a bunch of techniques and methods I have not heard of before, and I want to explore new techniques and become a better cook. After reading a generic chocolate cookbook I just want to eat chocolate.