BadRabbit

I can't believe that this is not already a topic but the search didn't turn one up. I know I'm a little (ok, a lot) late to the party on this book but I just bought it and wanted to hear some of your experiences cooking with it. I was thinking about starting with the Lao Hot and Sour soup with Fish tonight.

Whoa, whoa, whoa... Who do you think funds most studies on things related to consumer goods? Not a lot of people are sitting out there conducting studies on foods & materials for the heck of it.... it is usually people with a profit motive and talk about "self selecting"... corporations have the most to gain from self selective research. I've was an executive at a consumer product company that sponsored lots of research... and have seen the self selection first hand. Seeing a bunch of "positive / no real risk" studies, funded by corporations with very little research done by organizations not tied said corporations doesn't give me the warm fuzzies... say for example you have dozens of Tobacco industry sponsored studies suggest there is no proof of the link between smoking & lung cancer.. but a single government sponsored study suggests otherwise... I am am going to er on not giving the corporations the benefit of the doubt... just sayin' Profit motive and commerce are the reasons you live in a house and have a computer instead of residing in a mud hut. I would suggest not pretending like they are forces of evil. Also, the government that you seem to trust and think is both good and competent has killed, extorted, stolen and lied more than all the corporations in the world combined but don't let that get in the way of the string of logical fallacies in your post.

I should probably just save following sentence and C&P to all similar topics: If everything that a study here or there reported as dangerous actually was dangerous, there would be nobody around to post on this forum. Media and academic journals suffer from the same issue. They both want something new and interesting and unfortunately, danger and impending death or sickness are always interesting. A hundred studies could be done suggesting that these plastics are completely safe but a journal would publish the one that showed statistically significant danger and the media would publish it as fact with a startling headline. Self filtering (i.e. people who do studies but don't submit them for publication because they show no significant effect from what they were studying) and natural biases by journals towards studies that had significant outcomes mean that outlier studies are much more likely to get published. I'm not saying that there is no chance that these things are dangerous. I'm just saying that as long as life expectancies are steadily increasing decade to decade, I'm not going to spend my entire life avoiding everything that MIGHT have the potential to cause me to live a year or two less when the process of peer review is so fundamentally flawed.

It was an analogy. It wasn't meant to be a perfect analog but your argument doesn't work either. The volume of oil in a kitchen is unrelated to the damage the same volume would do as a pollutant. I'm sure another pollutant would work better but I was trying to use the theme of egullet to make my point. Some pollutants could kill off a food species and cause mass dies offs up the food chain in an exponential way similar to the damage that a growing feral species can. Pick your poison (pardon the pun) but the actions by the government would still represent the same idiotic attitude of attacking the product instead of the illegal practice that caused the product to be dangerous. My guess is that you would have no problem with my hypothetical gestapo anyway since those that think government should be unfettered by the pesky rights of citizens typically recognize no bounds as long as they approve of the intended "public good."

The government wasn't going off half cocked. The DNR has been trying to get game ranches and use of wild boars stopped from the moment it started. Here is the webpage they set up on the topic: http://www.michigan.gov/feralswine One species of swine is banned - Sus scrofa. Domestic pigs are Sus domestica and not banned. There is a lot of politics and heat around this issue, but I think they made the correct decision. It is fine to disagree with me. If a bunch of restaurants started pouring (or leaking through faulty storage) their used cooking oil into rivers and poisoning them, would the answer be to ban cooking oil or to address the illegal dumping? How would you feel if the government then marched into all existing restaurants (regardless of whether they'd been a dumping offender or not) and confiscated all of their oil and fryers causing a considerable number of them to go out of business? And don't worry I wasn't sweating whether I was allowed to disagree with you.

Yes. Government going off half-cocked is always the best solution to any problem; private rights of citizens be damned.

You can use them as a starch with virtually any meal but they are especially good with seafood or pork "debris" IMO. To tell you the truth, I ate grits nearly every day of my life growing up but never had them outside of breakfast at home (except for the occasional "breakfast for dinner" meal). Shrimp and grits are a Carolina and Georgia thing that didn't become popular in Alabama until I was nearly an adult.

I've noticed it too but what I think is you're seeing a general move by grocery stores to reduce the number of vendors for one specific product. It seems that they are implementing this by reducing things down to just the top sellers in very specific categories. The reason you are seeing 10-20 balsalmics is that there are probably variations in the product that someone making these decisions has deemed significant enough to constitute a separate product. For example, they may consider a 10 year and a 5 year balsalmic to be different. There are also all the different flavors like Rasberry Balsalmic etc... I've noticed the same thing with flour, mayo, and even things like tortillas. My grocery used to carry 7 different brands of flour in 3-4 types per brand. Now they carry 3 brands(and one of the ones they got rid of was King Arthur!). I think the whole thing is stupid. I'd rather have my pick of 5 different red wine vinegars, a product that I use nearly every day, than 5 different flavors of balsalmic that I'll never even try. ETA: Walmart started this trend with their "Project Impact" that was partly concerned with reducing the number of vendors and products they stock. It wasn't really successful from a sales standpoint but apparently made a significant impact on cost. Others have followed suit.

I actually looked at that recipe and in my head said "That will never hold together."

Yeah. I've deep fried the skin before and they make a really interesting crisp but I'm looking for something that will enable me to serve the chicken in halves or quarters with crispy skin still attached.

I love smoked chicken but the skin always turns out rubbery and inedible. I realize this is because the temp never gets hot enough to render the fat and get it crispy. Does anybody have a good process for achieving both a tender smoked interior and a crispy skin? I was thinking of brining, smoking and then allowing to cool before grilling or flashing in a very hot oven. Any thoughts?

For those of you outside the US that want to try building your own terra cotta smoker similar to what ScoopKW mentioned above, here's a good pictorial of a build. http://makeprojects.com/Project/Clay-Pot-Smoker/877/1 I've built several of these for under $70. The materials should be available nearly anywhere in the world. Buy the round grill grid(s)/rack(s) first and carry it with you to buy the pot so you can make sure it fits. The only difference in mine is that I use a small cast iron skillet to hold the wood. I find it prevents the wood from igniting and also adds an additional heat sink which helps maintain temp. I also have a second smaller rack between the element and the cooking rack that I either use to hold a bowl of water or sometimes I just wrap the rack in foil. This provides protection from direct heat because direct heat is an enemy of good BBQ. I regularly use mine even though I've got multiple commercial smokers because the terra cotta smoker is very efficient with wood and for a small amount of meat like a single pork butt (or 2), a beef brisket or a whole chicken it works great. Additional notes: Use wood chunks instead of chips if possible.

Update: Amazon is now preselling. It's not coming out until September though. http://www.amazon.com/Vietnamese-Home-Cooking-Charles-Phan/dp/1607740532

Trash fish? gulp I'm on the Florida west coast and for me there is no best fish. Fresh fish is quite available. My job is to not screw it up. Here are some amberjack fillets I cut a few weeks ago. I like it a tad pink in the middle for best texture. Currently amberjack is a favorite since it is plentiful, fresh and down right tasty. My brother went fishing in the Gulf a few years back and caught an amberjack. He was thrilled and the guide was incredulous that he wanted to keep it. Lots of guides from the Gulf region hate amberjack because they are often incredibly wormy and even a seasoned fisherman can be put off by it (which is what I was alluding to in my earlier post). After you've fileted a few jacks that look like they are hosting a tapeworm convention, you find it incredible that people still want to eat them. Note: The worms are harmless to humans; they are just disgusting. Edit: Typo

His buns in "Artisan Breads" are very good as well.

I've done it plenty of times. It doesn't turn out to have discernable little chunks of undercooked bacon in it. It mostly just adds some juiciness and that bacony smokiness. I'd suggest this falls into the "don't knock it til you've tried it" category. I am sure it will make the burger taste good. My point is eating raw bacon safety. dcarch You can eat commercially produced bacon raw with impunity (and probably 99% of homemade bacon as well). You're much more likely to infect the beef (or bacon) with something from your kitchen during the grinding process than you are to get sick from something in the bacon as it comes from the package. Edited for clarity

I've done it plenty of times. It doesn't turn out to have discernable little chunks of undercooked bacon in it. It mostly just adds some juiciness and that bacony smokiness. I'd suggest this falls into the "don't knock it til you've tried it" category.

99. My general advice to home cooks is that if you think you have added enough salt, double it. Grant Achatz Alinea and Aviary, Chicago If anyone in my family were to follow this advice, the food would be inedible. Signed, Most Southerners

I've tried two of his sourdough pizza recipes (this book and American Pie) and didn't have good luck with either.

I made the ciabatta this weekend and it was a great success. We had a party with 15 people and I went through 3 large loafs before dinner (I just has it toasted and served it with both herbed olive oil and hummus). My other experiment was a disaster. I tried the bagels and they really were not good. They were overly dense and the crust split all over the place. Anybody else had luck with the bagels? I feel like maybe I didn't roll them enough during shaping.

I agree on taste and texture but you do not want to clean too many Jacks yourself if you would like to continue wanting to eat them.

Scamp (Abadejo) is my favorite but it's very hard to get because the fishermen often keep it for themselves around here. I would eat it every day if I could. I also love King Salmon and Patagonian Toothfish.

Last night I roasted some cubed turnips, rutabagas, and golden beets with bacon and maple sugar. We regularly eat turnips but we don't eat beets or rutabagas near as often. Here's the mystery, one of the three roots did not work as well as the others but they were all very similar in color once cooked so my wife and I were having trouble determining which was the culprit. I am nearly certain it was not the turnips. Overall the dish was a great success but I would like to leave out the offending root next time. The facts: After cooking, one of the roots was decidedly more orangy-yellow than the others. My wife insists this was the rutabaga. We liked this root. Also after cooking, one of the lighter yellowish-white color ones was the root that we didn't really care for and I suspect that was the beet (it was slightly perfumy tasting). My confusion is that the beet started out bright orange and the rutabaga close to white but they now seem to have swapped colors. Do golden beets get paler as they cook? I know that rutabagas typically get more color.

Nearly all IR thermometers are calibrated using "black bodies" which means they are not very accurate with clear substances. This is why it works fine on chocolate and not well on clear substances (I'd imagine you'd also have trouble with cocoa butter or something else nearly white).

I diluted the buttermilk 1:1 with water but the chicken still browned much too quickly to fully cook. I then held the chicken in a 200F oven until it reached 158F. The crust was still perfectly crispy and the chicken moist and delicious. I also fried in lard because I hardly ever fry food at home and decided that if I was going to make something unhealthy I was going to make it as delicious as possible. Notes: (This was very good but there are definitely improvements to be made). There is a slight bitter taste in the meat itself that I assume is from the lemon pith. Next time I'll use the brine Keller used in the Food & Wine recipe which has just juice and zest instead of whole lemons. The bay is overpowering. I will cut that in half next time. The crust is very good but I agree it's got too much in it. I think I prefer my normal breading which is virtually identical sans the garlic and onion powder.