Dakki

dcarch, beautiful as usual. How did you make the cones in the top picture? MsDivinaLoca, flank steak is one of my favorites, and your interpretation looks particularly good. Keith_W, I have no idea what a peri-peri is but the chicken looks amazing. Fish fry @ Dakki's tonight. No pics because it was a failure. (Okay, relative failure). Having access to one kind of potato and that being the wrong kind of potato for chips has made me resigned, but I like to think I'm pretty good with breaded stuff. I tried an unfamiliar batter recipe and if it's not the one they use at Long John Silver's it does an excellent impression. It smelled vaguely like pancakes, turned into a dense, thick mass of breading that separated from the fish, and something in the sweetish mess accentuated the muddy flavors in the tilapia. Almost like eating catfish, my least-favorite fish. Had to drown the stuff in hot sauce and lime. I eat my mistakes.

I'll try boiling it until it clears. Thanks.

Okay, I have one... My simple syrup (using refined sugar and boiling hot, plain tap water) is a sort of golden color. It also smells like sugarcane for a bit while it's still quite hot, although the smell goes away. Am I overheating it or something?

Caught the tacos episode. Remembered the tortilla lasagne from some other episode. Suddenly not as sorry as I was this show is gone. (I still like Mr. Brown but I think TV cooks should stick to what they know.)

A chipotle-based pickle I made with my old man (family recipe) back when Nirvana was the coolest thing ever. There's gallons of the stuff and it seems to get better with age. Fairly sure I'm set for life on this one ingredient, bar a natural disaster or something.

From the pictures Ive seen here Id have to disagree with that, you plate as well as anyone Ive seen. This. dcarch, I think your plating is easily magazine or advertisement quality, and knowing that the stuff in the picture is actual food rather than food-based props just makes it all the more impressive.

I'm very interested in reading about your plating in general if you want to write something about it.

My recipe > that recipe. Just sayin'. >_> In all seriousness that recipe needs some spices. Achiote by itself isn't particularly tasty.

Thin slice of beef, breaded and panfried. Wienerschnitzel, basically, although it's beef instead of veal. Latin America got it through Italy instead of Austria so cotoletta a la Milanesa (I have no idea how to spell that) became milanesa.

No problem. I could go on about this stuff all day, and I'm sure some of the other posters in this thread could too, but we're getting further and further off topic. Looking over my previous reply, I should clarify the following (before someone jumps down my throat...): SAE grades are also sometimes called AISI or AISI/SAE. There are historical reasons for this but, who cares. It's just a naming convention. There are five-digit SAE grades. These are alloy steels that follow the same four-digit convention I explained above, but have 1% (nominal) carbon by weight or more, so xx100 means they have 1%, xx120 is 1.2% and so on. Structural steels (used in construction) follow their own naming convention, indicated by an A followed by two or three digits. Tool grade steels also follow their own naming convention, one letter followed by one or two digits, such as A1, D2, H13 and so on. All of the above applies in the USA and countries in their industrial sphere. Other countries apply different standards such as DIN (Germany), JIS (Japan), etc. which can get confusing. You'll be able to find an identical standard (or close enough) most of the time. Google tells me SAE 1060 is JIS SWRH62B and DIN C60.

You must be thinking of someone else, I love cilantro. I'll admit that I didn't always, but that was in a galaxy long ago and far, far away. Sorry, I could have sworn the OP was Darienne. I saw this and thought "Why is a mod telling me off this time?!" This being the case, cilantro is good in the green salsas. I use about 1/2 bunch (finely chopped or blended) per kilo of tomatillo and then garnish whatever I'm making with some more cilantro, but I really like the stuff.

SAE 1060 is a grade of steel. In this case you can read the chemical composition just by looking at the number. Three-digit numbers indicate stainless, four-digit are carbon and alloy. Anything that starts with "10" is plain carbon (with a small amount of impurities and some manganese allowed) and the last two digits indicate the amount of carbon. So 1060 means it's carbon steel with .55 to .65% carbon by weight. Joe Talmadge has a neat knife steel page (at least I think it's his) that has a lot of resources if you're interested.

Knifemakers in Oaxaca still use old leaf springs, rotuts. I think the one I visited told me it was similar to working with 1060.

I like it for barbacoa. Unlike Zeke I do mine wrapped in foil in a low oven, other people just steam it. For this application all that lovely connective tissue is a big plus.

Take some of your favorite dried chiles, seed and toast them. I do 20 seconds each side on a very hot griddle. I favor morita (which the rest of the world calls chipotle - what we call chipotle they call meco, for some reason), cascabel, arbol, and guajillo. Mixing them is a good idea - morita can be overpowering. How much chile is up to you, 50 grams per kilo of tomatillo might be a good starting point. Fry some onion (say 1/2 medium per kilo). Toast a couple of cloves of garlic in their skins until they're very soft while you're at it. Remove the papery skin from the tomatillos and blanch the tomatillos in boiling water. Throw everything in the blender with a little water (say, 1/2 cup per kilo) and a shot of vinegar or lime juice. Blend until it's a smooth consistency (you might have to do this in steps - this is one application where something like the Vitamix would work really well). Correct the taste with salt and spices - I like cumin and black pepper. Substitute fresh, roasted hot green chiles for the dried to make a common salsa verde. I won't tell you to put in cilantro because I know you dislike the stuff. (This is how I make salsa for chicharron en salsa verde, btw.) These freeze really well! (Sorry for not posting this as a formal recipe - I don't measure ingredients when making salsas because chiles can vary so much in strength.) By the way, tomatillo salsas don't have to be green. They can be all kinds of funky colors depending on the chiles you use. This is arbol. A little less chile and it would have been bright orange; about half as much, yellow. EDIT: image link.

A work of art.

No hard feelings on this side.

With all due respect to your experience and etc., I don't buy it. A few HRC points off aren't going to make an immediately visible difference in appearance, but they will certainly have an impact on edge stability and durability. I've been flame hardening industrial parts (as well as machining, grinding and HVOF and plasma coating) for 12 years and dual-frequency induction hardening for one. This is my cylindrical flame hardening rig. Roller is 52100 @ 62 HRC, 3/8" deep, 14.5" diameter. Bearing surfaces are coated in tungsten carbide.

Hard to tell without actually measuring.

Basically, this. The presence or absence of backing is largely irrelevant because you are generating heat (potentially quite a bit of heat) where the steel touches the abrasive belt and most of it is concentrating in a tiny, tiny area. (Come to think of it, the lack of backing might actually be a disadvantage here, since more material would act like a heat sink). The temperature at which martensite (the stuff that makes knives hard) is destroyed varies in different alloys, but it is never very high except in hot hard tool steels. In a machine shop context we use cooling fluids directly on the contact surface when grinding. EDIT: Good choice, wigeon. Make sure to ask if you have any more questions. Knife nuts love to talk about this stuff, as I'm sure you noticed by now.

Watts are a unit of power, so if that's what you mean by "stronger"...

I see your potato chip, fake cheese and hot sauce and raise canned broth, instant ramen and frozen veg with enough lime juice and hot sauce to kill whatever flavor the foods had originally. I've been sick, okay?! *shame*

I for one would love to hear about it... although we might be getting a bit overly technical on this thread already. (To the OP and other beginners: Sharpening really, really is not complicated at all. We're just being nerds here.) From the opposite side of the sharpening technology field: Although I've changed my priority from "having a perfect edge on the day I sharpen" to "having a good edge all of the time" for my everyday knives, I've been experimenting with the "One Stone Honing" method developed or rediscovered by the straight razor community on my babies. Overkill on kitchen knives but very interesting stuff if you're into sharpening for the sake of sharpening.

And back to this question: the answer is "get a cheap benchstone and learn to sharpen freehand." It's not rocket science and it's pretty hard to screw your knife up permanently as long as you stay away from power tools.

Assuming the knife was sharp to start with.