ChrisTaylor

Perhaps it's not too far removed from recipes for things like tagines or pasta sauces circa the seventies, when people couldn't easily get some now widely-available ingredients in the Australian suburbs, so recipes were altered accordingly by their authors. Or recipes in restaurant books now that adapt a sous vide preparation to work in a regular oven. A recipe for the masses rather than those truly dedicated to the task/with deep pockets. EDIT Incidentally, I'm fairly certain Larousse Gastronomique has one or two curry recipes that are basically the above recipe plus a handful of spices. I think one of them even includes a ham-based mirepoix.

Well, so much for the fortnight. I tasted the pepper vin tonight and I'm really happy with it. Used it in collards, even. Well, with black cabbage ... seeing as collards don't exist here. But even if this doesn't develop any more over the next week or so I'll be mighty pleased. If fish and chip shops down here offered this instead of plain white vin with your chips every motherfucker would get vinegar-soaked chips.

Calbee's curry-flavoured potato crisps. Thin, Lay's-style crisp. That's automatically a problem for me. Slightly greasy--not as bad as Lay's, though--with a boring and generic curry powder flavour. Mild heat. Perhaps the redeeming feature is that, as well as that greasy aftertaste, there's a bit of potato on the end. Not Calbee's finest hour.

Note to self/others: 72 hours/60C as per the barbecue dinner in Modernist Cuisine isn't very much. I get that they were going for 'barbecue' as opposed to 'steak' but ... yeah ... no. The East Texas-style barbecue sauce was nice, though.

Once I read the above responses my mind did wander in the direction of the 'modernist' processed cheese, such as the one you linked to (or the one in Modernist Cuisine). Although I think this fudge lost all of its hillbilliness the moment I contemplated making processed cheese. It's now less about 'oh, that recipe for fudge sounds interesting' and more a case of 'I should because I shouldn't'.

So, this just landed on my doorstep. First impressions: As is the norm for Phaidon, the book has an exceptional level of presentation. The cover is solid. The photographs are very nice. My only 'issue' is that the recipes are all crammed, in fine print, at the very back, separated from the associated story and photographs. The page(s) with the story don't include a page reference for the recipe. Basically, an even more unfriendly layout than NOMA if you actually want to cook something from the book.Some of the recipes are, for the home cook, near-impossible purely in terms of the equipment Bottura calls for. That's nothing new for this kind of book. That being said, I'd argue the recipes are, on the whole, more approachable than those in The Fat Duck Cookbook if only on the basis they're comprised of fewer elements.Some of the recipes are, for the serious home cook, approachable. The ragu recipe is less insane than what some of the reviews make out. Assuming you live near the kind of butcher that stocks/will order in small quantities of things like veal tail and tongue. I mean, if you scale up the recipe and freeze it in batches, the ragu is doable for anyone that owns an immersion circulator and has the time to do all of the shopping. The home cook might skip his recipe for tagliatelle, though. Incidentally, the story attached to the recipe states that the meats are all bagged separately. The actual recipe sees them mixed together in one bag. I don't know if the 'simplified' version of the dish is a more recent/superior take on the dish. I doubt it's an effort to make the dish easier as, really, putting everything in one bag rather than splitting things between several smaller bags seems like an odd concession to make. Part of the egg content is made up with the 'liquid' from balut. He states that this gives the pasta added bite. I haven't heard of anyone using balut ... liquid in pasta before. It's an interesting idea.Ingredients aren't a 'problem' as much as I expected them to be. Sure, some recipes call for one or two expensive ingredients or things that might be hard to find outside a particular region of Italy, but there are plenty of recipes that involve things I can get locally half way round the world without even having to go on an epic shopping trip or turn to online purveyors.Obviously, this is not a book for everyone. It's not trying to occupy the same shelf space as the likes of Hazan's work or even cheffy takes on the same such as Giorgio Locatelli's Made in Italy (my go-to Italian book). It's very much in the territory of the books turned up by Alinea and Noma, albeit with one foot rooted firmly in tradition (some of the dishes, like the ragu, are Bottura's straightforward attempt at a 'perfect' version of a classic). Anyone got this book yet? Anyone cooked from it yet?

The barbecued beef brisket from Modernist Cuisine: smoked then cooked sous vide at 63C for 72 hours before being brushed with the MC team's take on Kansas City-style barbecue sauce. I was inspired to cook it after picking up some grass-fed brisket and short ribs (currently in the water bath) from a stall at the local farmer's market. Neither my cold smoker nor hot smoker can hold the prescribed temperature, so I just gave the brisket a short stint (just over an hour) in my hot smoker. The end result was a very nice piece of meat. The Kansas City-style sauce wasn't great, though. Not bad but not something I'd repeat. I'll check out their other sauces--I'm making the East Texas one to serve with the ribs--but I reckon a slightly modified version of my go-to brisket sauce might be better. I reckon I could reduce/thicken it into something I could brush onto the meat.

The recipe has been reproduced elsewhere, albeit with modifications (the type of cheese and the disappearance of cream of tartar). I've never consumed Velveeta but I'm struggling to see how using it in fudge is any different to using a heavily processed cream cheese (like Philly) in a dessert. EDIT For context, I guess it's worth mentioning my sister uses cream cheese in fudge. It's the only fudge I can really recall having any time recently and, seeing as everyone seems to like it, I kind of figured Philly was a normal thing to put in fudge. The end product doesn't taste cheesy. It's not hard, through my totally pastry blind eyes at least, to see another processed cheese product serving as a workable base for fudge.

Sean Brock regularly calls for benne seeds in his book. At one point he mentions that it's different to sesame, although Wikipedia says benne seeds = sesame seeds (the website of an Australian spice seller, Herbie's, agrees on this point). The exact same thing or not, 'normal' sesame is probably the closest I'll get, locally, to benne. Are the black seeds or the white seeds the better option? Both are readily available.

Does homemade Velveeta, a la America's Test Kitchen, behaviour in the same way as 'real' Velveeta for all purposes? For instance, if I had a recipe for fudge that called for Velveeta, would the homemade stuff do the job? EDIT For context, Velveeta isn't available locally as no one imports it due to quarantine restrictions. I'm not asking this question just to be difficult.

I'm not really sure. I've never made any kind of vinegar. I followed this recipe to make the pepper vinegar, although I used white vinegar instead of white wine vin. It seemed truer to what I've heard pepper vin described as: a product based on white vin, cider vin or malt vin. I figured 'flavour neutral'--acidity plus peppers, naught else--was the way to go. I'll taste it in a fortnight or so. I followed this recipe to make beer vinegar, albeit at a lower volume. It's warm here, obviously, so I'll taste it in a month or two and see how it's trucking along. I'm also not sure if working with smaller volumes speeds up the process at all. I'd assume not.

So, I set out to make pepper vin. So it was only natural to throw together a beer vin, too.

Home brew shops sell 'white sorghum syrup' intended for use in gluten-free beers. I would assume this is a wildly different product, in terms of flavour, to the sorghum Brock often calls for? I mean, I didn't realise until I saw Mind of a Chef that it came in syrup form (nothing about the recipe suggested adding a dry ingredient would be weird). When Edward Lee called for it in Smoke & Pickles I figured he meant the grain, which is easy enough to find locally. EDIT This is the product I can get: https://www.craftbrewer.com.au/shop/details.asp?PID=4962 I can also get this stuff. The product description, to someone that has never knowingly consumed sorghum syrup, does not make it obvious whether it's 'white' or the darker product that Brock used on television.

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaad photo. The quiche lorraine from Heston Blumenthal at Home. Slightly quicker to make, but arguably more involved, than Keller's take on the same dish. The Heston touch helps with this dish. I basically agree with his assessment of quiche: it's usually not very nice. In this case the filling (300g cream, 80g gruyere, 3 eggs, sauteed onions and bacon) is taken up to 63*C in a saucepan, poured into a pre-baked pastry case and then slowly taken up to 70*C. It's a bit of dicking around on the day of preparation but not too bad. Fuck separating out 25g worth of egg from a whole egg, though. I just made my standard shortcrust. And, yeah, the salad was a lazy effort. A bag of mixed leaves dressed with sherry vin, walnut oil, a bit of Dijon mustard, salted capers and shallot. It took more time to make the Old Fashioned I'm drinking than it did to serve dinner. That's something I can live with. EDIT That fried chicken looks great.

I found out about Sean Brock through his stint on Mind of a Chef. Really enjoyed his half-season and the sort of food he was turning out. His book, Heritage, recently hit shelves. My copy landed today. Yet to cook anything from it but I've already bookmarked a few recipes. Early impressions: A mixture of simple/accessible recipes and things that are slightly more complicated. So long as you can get the ingredients--and in a few cases I'm going to have to make substitutes--you'll be able to make most of these at home. After work? Maybe not. But we're in similar territory, effort-wise, to some of the preparations in Pickles, Pigs and Whiskey. I'm going to have to see if I can find someone, locally, that stocks Anson Mills products or can acquire them for me, as well as that bourbon barrel-aged soy sauce. Or someone that can send me some (altho' I expect postage will be crazy expensive).A lot of what I, as a foreigner, associate with the south: Hoppin' John, fried chicken, fresh vegetables prepared simply and so on.Sort of what you'd expect from a restaurant book: sexed up versions of things like hushpuppies (stuffed with ramps and crab)Fried chicken fried in a mixture of lard, smoked ham fat, bacon fat and canola oil. One of many sensible ideas.Some nice breakdowns of techniques: how to cook grits properly, how to smoke with some degree of precision.The now-obligatory section devoted to pickling. A lot of detail here for a book that isn't specifically dedicated to preserving. The section also covers sauces and some basic charcuterie,A section dedicated to beer food (boiled peanuts, pork AND chicken crackling) and cocktails. At first brush I really like this book.

Anyone still cooking with this book? I return to it regularly. Tonight I made the pork sausage w/ rice cakes. A bunch of people ... somewhere--people suggested pan-frying them, as per the other dok recipe in the book--was the way to go. And random people on the internet must surely know better than David Chang. So that's what I did. Only I pan-fried them in wagyu fat instead of neutral oil.

Use baby wipes. They refresh your hands, too.

My first batch of mustard: a riff on the whole grain Guinness mustard from Currence's Pickles, Pigs and Whiskey. I traded the Guinness for some homebrewed wheat beer and swapped the small pinch of cayenne for a larger quantity of chipotle powder.

You use the cider vin in the hot sauce? That's good enough for me. Champagne vinegar is expensive. Especially when you're watching a whole bottle's worth glug-glug-glug into a container of fermented chilli mash.

Me? No. Only the Buffalo ones. Here's another CALBEE, Inc.'s Barbecue-Flavoured Grill-a-Corn. I didn't bother with a shot of the rear face of the packaging as it's essentially the same: just mess with the colours a little and sub the words 'hot and spicy' for 'barbecue'. This one just has a fairly ... generic flavour. Almost like Twisties without the overpowering hit of real fake cheese flavour. The Hot and Spicy Grill-a-Corn meant expectations were high. This, like most any snack food product that claims to replicate the flavour of barbecue--whatever that means--tastes vaguely of non-specific meat flavouring jacked with a little paprika and something ... kind of sweet. I guess that's the non-specific quantities of glucose and fructose.

Well, I can't say no to a request

A double batch of John Currence's Tabasco-style sauce. Ten different kinds of chilli instead of the prescribed/recommended jalapeno, although jalapenos make up approximately half of the batch by weight. About thirty seconds into pureeing the chilli peppers I grabbed an extension lead and moved the operation outside. The mash.

Well, a local-ish Brit butcher has started turning out (small) haggis pies. Sliced haggis, incidentally, can form a reasonable foundation for a hamburger. I just hope you're not putting any American/Australian/English/French (well, maybe that's just passable)/etc cheese in there. EDIT Also, that Scotch egg jacked with blood sausage? Genius.

I've made his spin on Tabasco. It was the first chilli sauce I've made and, after my early success, I've been reluctant to try anything else. It's very simple. It just works. Although I have realised that the quality of the end product hinges, more than anything else, on the vinegar. Vinegar that might be fine in small amounts in a salad dressing or sitting in the background of a fridge pickle (i.e. jacked with sugar, salt, spices, the flavour of whatever vegetable you've parked in there) turns out to ... not be so fine in Currencebasco. Considering good white wine vin is really expensive I'm tempted, for my next batch--I'm waiting for my chilli plants to fruit a bit more--to sub the white wine vin for something else. Rice vin? Sherry vin? Blending is nice. The first time around I used 500g of assorted chillies: half a dozen kinds. I thought it worked nicely. Some jalapenos for the flavour with smaller quantities of some hotter chillies. Incidentally, your jars don't look like Mason jars? Do I process them the same way?

Terrible photo. More Collards & Carbonara: gnocchi with caramelised fennel and corn.