Dakki

Assuming you're talking about the disco itself and not the burner, it's a Mexican wok. (semi-serious) There are gas-burner versions like the one in the OP and wood like the one below. The original is alleged to be the worn-out blade from a steel plow ("disco de arado") but this could be made up; I think plow blades would be too shallow and heavy to be practical. "Disco" itself just means "disk." They are usually stamped out of of heavy gauge carbon steel. A typical meal prepared in a disco is called a discada. Discadas are usually meat (pork and beef are most common but sometimes poultry) cooked in a generous amount of lard, moistened with a flavorful liquid (I favor beer but some people use orange juice, tomato juice etc.) together with garlic, onion and the chile of your choice (or what I like to call "Mexican trinity"). You can also use it as a regular pan for preparing carnitas, making asado or even poaching a fish if you have a lid to fit the disco.

Sweet! I thought I was the only one who knew what these things are on eGullet. Around here we use wood rather than gas but your setup looks pretty nice. I don't have any recipe to share (this being an eyeball thing) but a very basic discada involves a generous amount of lard or bacon, cubed pork, chile poblano, garlic and onion. When the pork is cooked you take it out with a slotted spoon and make refritos with the drippings.

That does look nice. I wish I'd checked this thread out before I fried a dozen thighs this morning. (No pics, they're ugly)

I'm fine but the house smells really interesting.

Roast mass quantities of habaneros with the windows closed.

Knife people use the term "performance" in a specialized way. What it comes down to is the ease with which it will go through a given material. This means a paper-thin gyuto has better performance than a chunky German knife. It does not mean, and is not intended to mean, that the gyuto is a superior tool for every possible job. EDIT: Yeah, forging doesn't guarantee a better knife, and there's plenty of stamped high-end jobs. But it is also true that the really cheap crappy supermarket knives are all stamped. I think this is where the forging=quality myth got its start.

How's this?

What angle are you using Percival? Forschners/Victorinox use good steel (and arguably more importantly, heat treat) for Western knives, but you can't treat them like high-end Japanese knives. They just aren't that hard. The other possibilities are that you're getting a tiny bit of a wire edge that's collapsing with use or that the grinder burned the edge. If it's the first, use lighter pressure when sharpening, particularly in the final passes; if the second, the problem will go away in time. How long have you had these? Agreeing with this. I've bought two knife sets in my life, the first when I didn't know any better and the second when woot.com was selling a 9-piece Shun set for under $250. I already had my trusty 240 mm gyuto at the time but the Shuns are hella nice to have around.

Sorry Holly I totally missed the part where you were already using photoshop and high-end gear. Anyway since this is post-processing night here's my hamfisted attempt, done with the FSIV sharpen and color adjustment tools on a 7 year old Dell in under 2 minutes.

Hi Holly, FastStone Image Viewer is a free to use, lightweight, ridiculously friendly program that does simple snapshot editing. http://www.faststone.org/

Oh man, you have no idea. I've only been taking food photos for a little bit, and I don't do it very often. If you look a couple of pages back, you'll see how horrible my initial attempts were; I think I've improved, but certainly not enough to go around offering advice as if I was an expert. This is what I've learned (so far) in no particular order: 1-Low angles. Overhead shots suck. 2-Closeups are good. Backgrounds can be distracting. 3-Pay attention to the composition and plating. 4-Think about the light. Flash (at least from a pocket camera) makes images flat, artificial lighting can be weird colors, and mixing different light sources can mean you have areas that look differently weird and become hard to fix. The simplest way around this is sunlight and the use of reflecting surfaces, but you can "cheat" and fix the photo's colors afterward. 5-Touch up the photos, particularly color, contrast and sharp. Digital cameras don't correct for weird light the same way our eyes do, so the stuff that looked fine to us under the kitchen lights turns an unappetizing shade of purple in photos. I think David Goldfarb recommended Photoshop Elements but I have a phobia of Photoshop products. What I use is called FastStone Image Viewer, a free-to-use little program that does very basic snapshot editing (sharpness, color, cropping and so on) with none of that layering nonsense that makes Photoshop such a PITA. 6-Take lots of slightly different pics. The way our brains are built (well, my brain, anyway) we tend to focus on getting that one shrimp in the cocktail in beautiful light and perfect focus and totally ignore the filthy kitchen rag in the background, which becomes obvious once you look at the photos on your computer. Finally, this isn't actual photo advice but I think an account with a free photo hosting service like flickr or Photobucket is better than attaching your pics directly to the forum. That way you can post larger images and share the same image over several boards without uploading it every time. Well, that's the kindergarten-level advice I can offer.

Ladies appreciate my mojitos. Or maybe it's my dashing good looks and witty conversation. On balance, I think it's probably the mojitos.

"Yes, I think I'll have that." If you're willing to take criticism from a photo n00b the tomato on the right (this is what I immediately look at in this photo) looks slightly blurred to me. This might just be the way the cheese naturally looks. The tomato on the left looks like it's angled away from the camera. Also you could have cheated and brought up the red a bit. The food looks delicious though.

Used to eat these maybe twice a week - as part of the nightclub crowd. Your description sounds almost exactly right for the ones sold here, except some carts also offer them with the sausage opened down the middle and stuffed with cheese. The jalapeno can be grilled or pickled, depending on the cart. Another difference is that the cart sometimes offers fresh pico to put on them, which I avoided for obvious sanitary reasons. I haven't had them in years and now I'm craving one.

Welllll ... I won't belabor this, but a food friend, distinguished humanities dean, has students who do research needing wide-ranging library access to many kinds of materials. He says most really good sources online are private, i.e. within specialized libraries or databases that charge to support themselves, therefore little of it shows on public searches. Today, Barzun's "reference book" [read: Google] users never see that content. Same for scientific sources I use, even for side interests like food (I must keep actual books handy, the good ones don't give their content out free online), and many of my remarkable primary-source food books (pre-ISBN) -- here I don't just mean cookbooks -- not to mention articles, are never even mentioned online, let alone accessible. The current and the recent obsess the online world almost exclusively. Oh, the humanities. [/pun] Yeah your friend is talking about how a lot of stuff is inaccessible. My point is that a lot more stuff used to be inaccessible. I won't bore you with the kind of stuff I like to read but here's The Historic American Cookbook Project, found by Googling "old cookbooks online" and reading a forum post in the first result. Took me maybe 20 seconds. Imagine what it would have taken to get access to this information 20 years ago.

Agreeing with this. HFCS sounds industrial/synthetic/nasty, corn sugar sounds comparatively much nicer. Renaming unpopular stuff to make it sound harmless and give it a fresh start in the public's mind is a favorite pastime of the PR types who run our civilization. See: Layoffs, downsizing, rightsizing. Polyester, microfiber. Neutron bomb, enhanced radiation weapon, reduced blast device.

Problem: They're all going to be believed by some portion of the eGullet membership. I won't point out threads because of the risk of offending people (my fatuous popular misconception is someone else's cutting edge science/common sense) but it won't be too hard to find them. Off-topic, that Barzun quote is interesting but I think the argument is outdated. One of the nicer things about the interwebs is how easy it has made to get your hands on vast amounts of literature (for free!) that was previously only accessible through an interlibrary loan, if at all.

Molcajete, disco, molinillo. EDIT: Metate.

What size were the pieces of meat? Maybe 90 minutes just wasn't long enough for all the collagen to break down. (I'm not a big stew guy, just assuming the principle is the same as in pulled pork, brisket, barbacoa etc.)

You don't think habaneros smell like a wet dog? It might be just me.

I recommend La Anita habanero sauce. Plenty of heat, no vinegar, not too salty, none of that wet dog smell which is the curse of habaneros. For the vinegar-based sort I also like Valentina. For the botanera type of salsas (such as Bufalo) I prefer the chamoy-based kind; regular ones don't taste good to me at all, no matter what chiles they claim to use. The worst is chipotle, probably because I make my own (which doubles as a bbq sauce) so I already have an idea of what a chipotle salsa can taste like, and the commercial stuff just doesn't measure up at all.

I think we have identical ones nakji. Also, I love your little pot.

+1 for stovetop. Not sure if this is included in the topic but I do fresh chiles directly over the burner. I'm embarrassed to admit I burned a heck of a lot of dried chilies before I learned when spices leave off being "toasted" and start being "burned." It's not immediately obvious to a novice learning on his own! This is an area where those OCD cookery geeks - I mean those nice molecular gastronomy people could advance the state of the art if they put their minds to it.

I've wondered about that too. My gadget is shaped for the folding filters and all the gold filters I've seen seem to be of the other, basket-shaped sort.

I have one of these (maybe not the same - it's basically a ribbed plastic funnel on a base) and a rather high-end programmable drip coffeemaker and the funnel gadget sees a lot more use. I think it makes better coffee, too.