BadRabbit

I mentioned this in the duck fat thread but I'll reiterate here: I've found that you can get it in just about any grocery (I've tried Piggly Wiggly, Publix, Kroger, and Winn Dixie) if you just ask to talk to the meat manager. I had trouble getting it when I just asked for fatback from one of the meat counter guys but once I changed strategy I had no problems finding it everywhere. Basically, just tell the manager you want them to save the fat that they trim off of loins and give you a call when it's ready. I usually buy 5lbs at a time for $.25/lb (they usually just throw it away so they'll practically give it to you). The fat generally comes in rectangles about 4"x 2.5" with some additional smaller scraps mixed in. Edit: Looked in my freezer and realized I mistated size and shape of pieces.

In the south, we have "yard eggs" which are eggs that someone's "yard birds" have produced as opposed to eggs produced on commercial farms.

After looking at the temps in the recipe, I'm thinking that lowering the temp and extending the time is not going to work. The oil temp is already below what I usually fry chicken at. My options may be to dilute the buttermilk which should cause it to brown slower with less milk solids in the crust or I can hold in a 200 degree oven afterwards for 20 minutes which should allow them to finish cooking without affecting the crust too much. What say ye?

Thanks that's a good idea that I had not thought of. I will try that in the future but the Halal shops are on the other side of town from me and I'm cooking this tomorrow for lunch so I'm going to have to try it with what I have this time.

I've made his chicken three or four times and it is always amazing and I've made my fair share of fried chicken. His is the best I've done. I love how the lemon comes through in the end. I have a deep fat frier and it works really well. I find that you really need to go with the smaller chickens, which are sometimes harder to find. Most grocery stores have chickens in the 5 pound range. You really want something around 3 pounds. For me finding a sub 3 lb chicken has been like looking for a 500 lb turkey. Even the small gourmet shops look at me like I'm crazy. Whole Foods had nothing under 4 lbs. Anybody figured out the time and temps to get fully cooked but not overly brown chicken when using a 4-5 lb fryer?

Agree with Chris' comments about duckfat vs fatback. That said, you can probably get the pork fat you need from your local grocery you just need to ask for it differently. I asked around for unsalted "fatback" for a month or two before it finally occurred to me to just ask them to save the fat trimmings off of some pork loins. Most meat guys at grocery stores assume you want a packaged product when you ask for "unsalted fatback" and don't think about the fact that they throw away a ton of what you want every week. Mine sells it to me for $.25/lb. I ask them to save some and they call me a couple of days later to pick it up. Edit: Typos

It is incorrect usage, no matter how common it may be, as documented in Common Errors in English Usage. Exactly right. Linguists have this asinine assumption that if enough people say something incorrectly, it then becomes acceptable (is it Farve or Favre?). This reflects a bigger problem in modern thought, that there are no absolutes. Fortunately this isn't the place for that rant. While I agree with part of your sentiment, the fact is that language changes because mass usage does eventually alter what is proper. It's why Shakespeare doesn't sound much like what we speak today and how different languages develop in the first place. EDIT: too many Ss in the bard's name

May be too late to help at this point but here goes: When you say you put the bacon on the smoker cold do you mean that the meat was just cold or were you cold smoking? If you were cold smoking, you should have no problem whatsoever with putting it back in to cure longer. If you were hot smoking, it probably depends on what temp your meat came up to during the three hours. I still don't think it's likely to hurt anything but there might be some texture issues.

Though very few places know what I'm talking about, if I'm feeling like scrambled, I like mine "scrambled and pushed soft." Basically it is eggs cracked and lightly fork scrambled with still delineated white and yolk. They are put into a pan (never on a flat top) and cooked very slowly while occasionally being pushed with an inverted spatula into very large curds. The end result is a barely set scramble with easily identified white and yolk throughout. I think this is likely very local nomenclature because noone outside of 100 mile radius from where I grew up ever knows what I'm talking about when I order it this way. I'm in the "over easy" crowd if I'm getting fried.

RE: shrimp and squid I had always thought the same thing but then every dictionary I've looked in lists both shrimp and shrimps and both squid and squids as proper plural forms. I haven't checked the OED but I'm betting it's the same there. Edited: grammar

Unless you are having trouble sourcing pink salt where you are, I wouldn't use it. It's possible that the nitrate/nitrite are in something other than standard pink salt ratio and that could be very dangerous so I'd need specs from the company before I felt safe using it.

If you put it in water for that long, I'm guessing the water content is going to increase and you're not going to have something with the texture of coppa. Agreed on both points. I wonder what the impact on texture would be if I let it bathe, then re-hung it for a few days? I imagine the texture would eventually get back to what you're looking for but putting the whole thing in water for any significant amount of time is going to leech out more than just salt. You'll probably lose a considerable bit of flavor and it might even make it unsafe to rehang. On the safety issue, that's just a guess; somebody else may be able to give you a definitive answer on that.

If you put it in water for that long, I'm guessing the water content is going to increase and you're not going to have something with the texture of coppa.

The tongs I use do not have teeth.

Commercially made mayonnaise will not come even remotely close to killing you after a few hours in the sun regardless of locale.

I read that when it was first published and my first impression was that nearly everybody involved in selling the mislabeled products must be being dishonest. I refuse to believe that people who deal in fish everyday could be tricked into thinking tilapia was snapper (I ran an oyster bar for a long time and have dealt with fish buying at nearly every level from boat to plate). I'm sure there are a few restaurant owners that are clueless but I doubt seriously there are distributors that are truly being tricked. They see the fact that the product was originally sold to them under false pretences as plausible deniability and decide just to go with the flow and make extra money doing so. Edited: grammar

I was at my local Publix last night and noticed they had "Dry Pack" scallops for $16/lb. I then looked behind the sign to see U-10 scallops that were obviously sitting in an inch of sodium tripolyphosphate bath. I informed the guy behind the counter and he argued that these were indeed dry scallops. I was in a hurry and didn't have time to speak to the seafood manager and I'm wondering whether I should even bother calling back about it. It's obviously misleading labeling but I also imagine that anybody that knows enough to ask for "dry pack" probably knows what the milky liquid is. At a different store, I recently saw something labeled as black grouper that was obviously not. It actually looked more like catfish than it did grouper. What do you do when you see things that are obviously labeled incorrectly? Do you just inform the manager? What if you see them doing it again at a later date? Do you call the authorities?

Ad Hoc at Home purports to be a book for home cooking. You'd think Keller would be aware enough to realize that certain things that don't make sense in fine dining make lots of sense at home. Or hell, you'd think Ruhlman would have stepped in and said "Tom, maybe this doesn't need to be a blanket proclamation."

I could understand the need for precision if the page in the book was talking about plating with micro-basil. I don't think that's the point he's making though. The passage is clearly talking about turning meat and other items while cooking. Surely he's not turning fried chicken with hemostats.

He suggests always using something that "lifts and turns." Here is the google books sample. The part in question is on page 8. http://books.google.com/books?id=yMZn936MHLcC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false As an aside, if the tongs pictured are the ones he's been using, I'd say his problem is the quality of tongs and not tongs in general. I hate the kind pictured.

I think that tongs transfer more information than instruments that lift and turn. I can tell pretty well how done meat is by the resistance I can feel through the tongs. I would get very little of that feedback from a spatula. I'm still going to poke the meat with my finger to tell exactly when it's done but the tongs tell me when it's time to start checking.

I use tongs every day. I prefer them for chicken, pork chops, and beef in a pan or on the grill. Today, I noticed that in Ad Hoc at Home Keller makes a big deal (there's a big picture with tongs being crossed out) out of not using tongs. He claims tongs crush and tear food. I have not had this experience and the only time to me I can even imagine this happening is with fish or something else very delicate (where I wouldn't even think of using tongs). Anybody else think there's a good reason to never use tongs for cooking?

I regularly used to make noobs drain the water out of the coffee machine after service using the hot water spigot and a tea pitcher. My personal best was a guy that spent 15 minutes doing it before he realized that there was no way that machine held 30 pitchers full of water.

I virtually never cook shrimp in with a sauce despite being regularly instructed to do so by recipes. Shrimp don't cook long enough to soak up much flavor so I'd rather just saute them separately and add at the last minute. That way, I get perfectly cooked shrimp in my shrimp curry or shrimp and grits. If I think the sauce needs a little extra shrimpiness, I add some shrimp stock or just throw some shells in a cheesecloth and cook that with the sauce.

Ascorbic acid inhibits the formation of nitrosamines. Do a google search for "ascorbic acid nitrosamines" and you'll see many university papers on it. Having said that, i don't know how it links to the use of celery juice in cured products, which i find to be ridiculous, and really pisses me off. That's why I asked here. I figured I might be missing it because I wasn't searching for the correct terms. I keep seeing scare sites claim that the vitamin C contained in celery juice is enough to prevent the harmful effects of nitrites and therefore "uncured" items (read: ones we approve of because it's "natural") are safe to eat where cured (read: the ones with the dirty, dirty chemicals)are not. That explanation seemed even more ridiculous to me since there are a fair amount of regular cured sausages that contain vitamin C so why wouldn't they be safe too even though they contain pink salt.