ChrisTaylor

It's cold so I'm planning on moving onto whiskey later but, pre-dinner, a Negroni seems sensible. Equal parts Tanq (the last of a bottle--don't you love it when that bit at the bottom gives you exaaaactly 30mL), Campari and Punt e Mes w/ a dash of Fee's orange bitters. I've been disloyal and played with many variations that replace the gin with this or that--genever, dark rum--and even less-sinful-but-still-somewhat-dangerous variants (2:1:1 in favour of gin, say) but this, yeah, as nice as some of those variations are the equal parts classic is a masterpiece. It's the Christina Hendricks of drinks: sexy and bold and red.

A couple of locals: Two Birds Sunset Ale. Label says something about biscuit notes. Yeah, reminds me a whole lot of Malt-o-Milk biscuits. A bit one dimensional. The sort of beer where you're glad you didn't, say, impulse buy a six-pack. Bellarine Brewing Company's Queenscliff Ale. A honey wheat beer. One of the first of its kind I've liked.

Where do you live? This matters. I mean, if you're in Australia then you might not be able to get some of the things that people here tend to recommend. Still: Brandy/Cognac: Martell VSOP or, if you can get it Rye: Wild Turkey rye if you're in Australia or somewhere else with a limited/expensive selection. Otherwise, Rittenhouse and Saz are both nice. Bourbon: I like Elijah Craig and Woodford Reserve, altho' Russell's Reserve is also very nice. Buffalo Trace, too. Champagne: I like Mumm, altho' I've never used in in cocktails Dry sherry Scotch: most scotch-based cocktails will use a blend. Monkey Shoulder is a pleasant-enough, albeit staid, blend. You'll get some cocktails calling for an Islay, tho'. Can't go past Lag or Laph. Tequila: I use Herradurra anejo in most applications, altho' if you want to spend less money Espolon goes down nicely too Gin: entry-level Tanq. Hendricks is nice. Junipero is good, too. Whiskey: By this you mean Irish, right? I like Bushmills. The 10 year old single malt. Not a fan of the Black. Orange liqueur: Cointreau. White rum: Banks 5 Island. Dark rum: Smith & Cross (or Inner Circle Green) and Appleton Spiced rum: no.

I bought some suckling pig belly w/ the loin still attached. It was a small piece with the bones still intact. I gave it 12 hours at 82C. After starting the cooking process (based on a Quay recipe I'd used before) I saw an interesting recipe that involved flaked suckling pig meat wrapped in crisp skin. That recipe cooked the pork for 70C/24 hours. Pork cooked at 82C flakes nicely, tho'. The skin didn't crisp up as evenly as I hoped: I guess this was because I cooked the meat at a higher temperature. Still, the meat itself is nice.

Poking and prodding Google I eventually got it to spit out a useful result: a blog post by some guy that butchered a couple of goats in his apartment. Yeah. He suggested 73C/12 hours and that sounded sensible enough to me. Anyone hardcore enough to portion two farm animals in a shoebox-sized kitchen sounds exactly like the kind of person I'd trust and take seriously. I wanted goat curry (hence not PCing a ragu, say) so I stirred the deboned, cooked shanks into the Muslim curry sauce from Modernist Cuisine at Home.

I found some goat shanks. These are from a baby goat and rather small. The first few search results on Google are useless: photos of dinners, a blogger going on about irrelevancies. Any suggestions on time and temp? Treating them as lamb shanks is a worst-case-no-other-choice-apocalypse fallout.

Flounder.

Dry the chips carefully before frying. Saves making an oily mess.

Barramundi with corn, oyster mushrooms and porcini/shiitake mousseline.

Let us know what you end up serving. Sounds like a great meal.

From memory Modernist Cuisine doesn't ask you to salt your meat before cooking it sous vide (excluding cured and semi-cured products like the duck confit). I'm assuming you were following the recipe and not just taking some information from the 'best bets' table and seasoning the meat your own way, tho'.

No fat.

So have you been air-drying chickens since it was discussed in this thread? I'm always afraid it will make them dry out. It just seems so counterintuitive. And how can brining fit in with this method? Step 1: Brine chicken. Step 2: Drain. Step 3: Pat dry with paper towel. Place uncovered in fridge for a day or two. It dries out the skin and not the meat. Works, too, with pork belly and steaks.

Tax. Stuff is just expensive here. Rittenhouse 100? Yeah, that's $80-90. Seen it a little cheaper elsewhere but, put it this way, if the price tag starts with a 7 you've found yourself a bargain. Go you. Wild Turkey's rye is more reasonably priced at $50something. Still yet to see the lower proof version of WT that eGulleteers have been moaning about, tho'. I guess it doesn't sell enough for us to have exhausted our supply of 101 yet. As for shipping alcohol to/from Australia, the cost of postage for a bottle of, er, wine is obscene. I think US postage is only slightly cheaper than Australian Post. SeaMail is 'cheap' at about $40-50AUD/USD per bottle (once packed/padded/etc) and it's not like you're going to be sending anything made of glass by SeaMail, is it? To send a bottle of wine to the US it cost me something like $60 or $70. Small chance of a small quantity of alcohol being noticed, tho'. I mean, you can post wine--actual wine, I mean--wherever you like and no one cares. Well, below certain quantities, anyway. Friends and I have ordered from Whisky Exchange a number of times and only got picked up (and hit with duty by Customs) once. Parcels send privately have not been uncovered. Roll the dice, if you like.

+3 for Guanaja. Probably my favourite 'mass market' chocolate.

Arrack to soften something. Love it.

http://www.bras.fr/site_blanc/pdf/gargouillou-en.pdf Totally forgot that. I've had it at a couple of local restaurants and have noticed versions of it in the cookbooks of numerous high end restaurants. It's an oft-copied dish. And yet, if you choose your vegetables right and prepare them carefully, it's brilliant.

Yeah, there's that, and I've sometimes been ... not amazed, but interested to see a little suburban cheap and cheerful joint getting the same score--or even a superior score--to somewhere like Attica (highly regarded by local guides. on the San Pellegrino list, etc). And then I step back. Now, don't get me wrong: I like Attica a lot. I like that kind of restaurant. But there's a certain ... snobbishness, if that's the right word, to saying, oh, it's in a different game altogether to the local sports bar or cheap dumpling house or whatever. Yeah, I know, part of the higher price tag involves higher quality ingredients, (probably) more labour and so on ... I get that. I get that they're offering something that's a bit more than a meal. But it's like a newspaper or magazine or, say, a website like GoodReads having two different scales or a scale that, through some magic, adjusts for how valid or artistic something else: one for your JM Coetzee/Vlad Nabokov/Ian McEwan-type guys and another, totally different, less valid scale for King and Clancy and Rowling and all the rest. And maybe it's because I'm from the suburbs, the outer suburbs at that, but I really don't like that idea at all. To some extent, I guess the person reading the Urbanspoon/TripAdvisor/et al scores does that themselves. I don't think a 5 star sportsbar and 5 star dumpling house are offering the same thing. I am not necessarily going to enjoy a 5 star sportsbar more than a 4 star Italian restaurant. The way I read those scores is, I guess, that if I want to go to a sportsbar than this one here, which has a 5 star rating, is very good at what it does. I don't need the paper/book/website to make a different scale (i.e. 5 drunk college kids out of a possible 5 drunk college kids instead of 5 stars) for me. But based on, yeah, the opinion of people that like places like this, it's good. It's irrelevant whether the score is higher or lower than that of a different kind of restaurant, as chances are a lot of the people that eat dumplings might never set foot in a sportsbar or, if they do, might judge it by the standards of dumpling houses. I like the idea that both a fine dining restaurant and sportsbar can get five star ratings. If the sportsbar is turning out excellent steaks and such and ticking every single box for what makes an excellent sportsbar, why should its rating be limited by the fact that it's a sportsbar? It's not up to a publisher to make that distinction by actually having a different scale. It's up to the reader to look at it as such.

Love the photography that comes with your posts, FrogPrincesse. If you're ever down here in Melbourne--altho' there's one in Sydney, too--you need to go (ideally not passing 'go' or collecting $200) to The Local Taphouse. It's a pub that has, at any one time, 25-30 beers on tap. And for some fairly small fee you can try a 'paddle' (less the kind you'd use to move a boat through water and more the kind you'd use to discipline someone in a dodgy movie) of five sample sized glasses (something like 90mL, iirc). Though you'll get the odd lambic or whatever, the focus is very much on very small Australian breweries. Super cool.

This morning's trip to the supermarket I bought some sweet potato specifically to make your drink.

That sounds ... fucking awesome. EDIT I'd be tempted to use a blend of Angostura bitters and Jerry Thomas' Own Decanter bitters.

Duck eggs are a little richer. If my local poultry store couldn't order them in then I'd just use some extra large chicken eggs and not think the dish inferior because of it. Anyway. The version in the book is, as I said, different to the one I tasted. Poached duck egg with salt and vinegar cabbage - Cook 10 eggs in water bath at 64.5C/50 minutes. Immerse in ice water. Peel eggs. Discard the outer layer of white. Set peeled eggs aside on moist kitchen towel. - Discard outer leaves of 1 head of Savoy cabbage. Pick the rest of them, discard stems and slice into chiffonnade. Blanch in lightly salted water then dunk in ice water. Strain. - Reduce 500mL chicken stick by two thirds. Use immersion blender to stir in 200g butter (yeah, really). Season w/ salt, pepper and lemon juice. Store at room temperature. - Make cavolo nero powder by removing stems of 200g cavolo nero, blanching leaves and parking in a dehydrator (no setting/temperature specified) for 4-6 hours until dry and crisp. Grind to fine powder in spice grinder. - Remove stems from 300g kale, blanch leaves (same method as the first two sets of leaves), cut into 'smaller shapes', brush w/ extra virgin olive oil and season w/ salt. Dehydrate in same fashion as the cavolo nero but do not turn it into a powder. - Use paring knife to remove individual leaves from 300g Brussels sprouts. Ensure leaves are dry then deep fry half of them in 150C canola oil until they start to colour. Drain, season and keep warm in food dehydrator. - Blend 15g freeze-dried sherry vinegar until you have a fine powder. Blend with 15g Malto. - Reheat eggs in combi oven at 55C for 15 minutes then season w./ salt and pepper. Use tea strainer to dust w/ cavolo nero powder. Reheat Savoy cabbage in the butter/stock mixture and season. Steam the Brussels sprouts leaves (not the deep-fried ones, the half you left untouched) w/ chicken stock then toss in butter and season. - Plating: Savoy cabbage in the middle of the plate w/ an egg on top. Starting w/ steamed Brussels sprouts, build a pile of steamed and deep-fried leaves in a neat pile resting against base of egg. Finish with kale on top of that pile. Dust dish with a little of the vinegar powder. Good luck finding freeze-dried sherry vin.

I like Ian Hemphill's book, Spice & Herb Notes, altho' as with all such books I've noticed a few gaps (mostly relating to fairly obscure spices).

Do you have Mark Best's cookbook, Marque? In it, there's a slightly different version of a dish I had at the restaurant. Essentially it's a poached duck egg (poached sous vide) with some interesting seasoning and a salad made from a variety of small leaves (microherbs, baby this-and-that). It mightn't sound like much but it remains the finest egg dish I've ever had. Out of a week's worth of fine dining degustations, this was one of the standout dishes. The presentation was also impressive. Here's the version I tasted. 'The duck egg sitting in a nest of artichoke, mint and radiccho (with additional radiccho present in the form of powder) would make for a perfect breakfast. A perfectly cooked egg (a yolk the texture of custard) with a refreshing salad. The bitterness of the radiccho was present but thankfully restrained.' - http://forums.egullet.org/topic/139525-a-week-in-sydney-two-restaurants-per-day-plus-cake/?p=1825494 If you don't have access to the book but like the sound of the dish I can give you a brief summary of the review. EDIT Yeah, apologies for the dodgy lighting in the photo.

There's a similar issue with Urbanspoon, probably the most popular system for Australians (well, at least in the big cities). Altho' the 'rate this review as helpful/unhelpful' system doesn't seem to solve the problem. A review can be ranked as unhelpful simply because it expresses an unpopular opinion (i.e. this place isn't the bee's knees, it's merely good), even if that opinion is justified and fair. A review is not unhelpful because you disagree with it. That review is unhelpful. Another example of unhelpful is, say, 'I didn't check the prices for the degustation menu before I went but, gee, $150 for a few bite-sized morsels is really expensive! I could get a burger and fries for $7 at McDonald's!' Like not being compared with like: i.e. comparing the perceived value for money against, say, other popular but expensive restaurants would be fairer and more helpful. I think that the 'everyone's a critic' nature of these sites is the cause of the flaws. You can introduce any mechanic you like but there you have it. Even Urbanspoon, which tries to get around the problems tied to sliding scales (just look at the breakdown of IMDb scores for any popular film: plenty of people will give it a 10 if they enjoyed it but a 0 if they disliked it even a little or, shit, will give a book they enjoyed 0/5 stars on Amazon because the courier left the parcel in the rain) by having a love/like/dislike scale is flawed. Oh, this restaurant didn't give me stuff I don't deserve (like your guy wanting the early bird menu too late in the evening), that's 0 stars. Down voting that makes sense but I've also seen rational comments get down voted because, I assume, some people dislike hearing that a place that's getting a lot of love from hipster bloggers isn't actually that great. Don't get me wrong. I think that Urbanspoon is a nice place to get a rough guide of whether a place is going to be any good. If I'm passing through an unfamiliar area and want an affordable lunch I'll rely, pretty much, on Urbanspoon rankings (after a quick glance at the actual reviews to see whether the complaints/praise is fair and balanced). That said, I'm not convinced they're much worse than professional reviews. In Melbourne and Sydney, The Good Food Guide (and a couple of sister publications) comes out every year. It's tied in with The Age and Sydney Morning Herald metro dailies. And mostly it's an okay guide to what's nice ... but at the same time it's very obvious that the reviewers have their little darlings. Some restaurants get a very high ranking when public opinion--whether you judge from people that have been there or all those amateur review sites--has turned on that place many years ago (or was never in favour of it to begin with). Some new restaurants opened by certain owners seem to go from nothing to a high ranking almost straight away. I can understand a newspaper giving a glowing review to a restaurant on day one but for an annual guide to pick up a place in its first year? I like to think of a 'three hat' (think 'three Michelin stars') as having staying power. Give it a year of consistent quality, at least. There's also, unlike Urbanspoon, a very strong bias towards certain cuisines or parts of the city. In short, I tend to temper Urbanspoon (or similar) scores with professional reviews and the other way round. And just as I think about this owner/restaurant's history with the publication in the case of anything put out by Fairfax, in the case of Urbanspoon I skim through a dozen or so reviews. I've found that looking at the score, no matter what systems are in place to make the score fairer, is never enough. This goes for reviews by everyday punters as much as it does professionals.