ChrisTaylor

This thread has inspired me to pull the book off the shelf again. Starting off with the chicken and vegetable curry and the stir-fried wild pork curry (altho' I admit I'm using pork, as wild boar is very expensive). My only problems: I'll have to sub a bit of zest for the lime leaves (couldn't find any today) and could only find regular basil, not even the standard Thai stuff. The latter is of more importance to me, but hey, #firstworldproblems and all.

Just oil or did you add some herbs, etc?

Did you marinate the olives yourself, SobaAddict?

Thompson knows his stuff and, consequently, has very strong opinions. I have seen him on TV making the same points. The curry pastes are good but obviously inferior to a commercial product if you don't have access to the right ingredients. With regards to your thoughts on the recipes, keep in mind this man strives for authenticity. There's a part where he mentions only using beef, chicken, pork and other 'high end' meats is itself a concession to a western readership that doesn't have the need to trap random rodents or birds.

Yesterday I tagged along when annachan and her husband when they went to Costco (a fairly recent addition to the Australian retail scene). We found ribs. Now, this is unexceptional to many of you, but down here ribs are often cut very differently to what I've seen in pictures. You can get BBQ racks which are very expensive and contain very little meat. Or you can get spare ribs--and these, basically, are slices of bone-in pork belly. Sometimes very thin slices. These ribs at Costco, tho', were the real deal. When I got home I hit them with a dry rub from Modernist Cuisine: the Memphis-style one, which is heavy on the paprika but contains no sugar (I chose this one simply because I didn't want particularly sweet ribs). I smoked them for four hours uncovered (during which I sprayed them every so often with Adam Perry Lang's apple juice and cider vinegar 'mop') and then wrapped them in a double layer of foil (which got a few generous squirts of the apple spray) and cooked them for a further hour. They were then glazed with a store-bought BBQ sauce (Australians might know of the Outback Spirit company, which also sells native herbs and spices), which was jacked with a little bit of mustard and chilli sauce and watered down some, and given another 20 minutes. My first truly successful batch of ribs.

I've eaten Argentine-style barbecued meats before and was very happy with them. What I liked most of all were the ribs--cut differently to the beef ribs I've had elsewhere. Wikipedia tells me these are 'flanken-cut' short ribs'. Here is a picture of the cooked product This cut is sometimes sold in my area under the name 'asado ribs'. Now, coming to this with an understanding of the cut of beef I need (and I know that there's more to asado than just ribs) and knowing that the ribs are cooked 'low and slow' over a wood fire, I want to know how to cook them with what I have. I have three options, I guess. The grill on my gas-powered BBQ. Problem: the grill, which you can't raise or lower, is very close to the heat source. Even on the lowest heat setting, this ribs will turn into charcoal. Gas-powered smoker. Removing the hickory/mesquite/etc chips, of course, and maybe putting some other kind of timber in their place. A small spit (i.e. suitable for a chicken, duck or maybe a 2-3 kilo suckling pig) that also doubles as a coal barbecue. I could fill only the bottom (it's deep) with coals and place the ribs on the grill, well above the heat source. The only problem is that adjusting the heat (i.e. by adding more coals or timber or removing them/pushing them around) involves physically removing the grill, which is kind of a pain in the arse when you're cooking. Thoughts and theories? My holidays are coming up so I'm inclined to experiment.

Anyone ever attempted a riff on the 'format' with, say, grapefruit, lime or orange (even blood orange)? Kumquats?

Roast duck w/ herbs de provence.

In Australia it's 'pepperoni', too. And salami is used as a fairly generic term: it applies to a wide range of cured sausage products made, supposedly, in the style of sausage-makiers from Italy and Hungary and God-knows-where else. I've even seen cured chorizo spoken of as a Spanish version of salami. And I really don't see the big deal. Most of the consumers who buy the product speak English, not Italian. The terms pepperoni and salami and, I guess, parmesan, too, have become corrupted. Like, I guess, the word bolognese. But any more, they're not used as Italian words. They've been adopted into our language and, like any word that hops from one dictionary into another, the meaning changes--sometimes in subtle ways that only people really familiar with the topic would appreciate, sometimes in ways that are quite dramatic. I think, for most applications--the pepperoni pizza, the sandwich-grade salami that's mass produced in a factory in North Melbourne, the affordable, locally-made cheese that calls itself parmesan but doesn't attach itself, like Italian versions of the same thing, to a specific region of Italy--these Anglified usages work just fine. And, shit, if I was running a pizza shop and wanted to upgrade my mass-produced pepperoni to some fancy artisan/organic/etc stuff, I'd still call it pepperoni--as for most of my consumers, that sausage maybe mistakenly named pepperoni really is still pepperoni. And they pay my phone bill.

Pork belly anything is anything but humble.

Working from the Marque cookbook. Foie gras, duck prosciutto, roast beetroot, raspberries and Parmigiano Reggiano. Poeled rabbit with wakame and zucchini.

A vegetable risotto, I guess. Or, if it's that good, a consomme. Or use it in place of water in chana masala.

I'm going to go right out and say that, so far as I'm concerned, salmon and ocean trout roe are superior products to caviar. Not just in a bang-for-buck sense. But in the sense if I could buy both for exactly the same price, I'd go the salmon/trout route every time. Wonderful stuff. But there's a product I've yet to experience that I see avaliable damn near everywhere: the unfortunately-named lumpfish roe. Is this something I want to try? Or is it just cheap shit (which, really, on a per-jar level, is only a couple of dollars cheaper than some very nice salmon/trout roe?)?

Zinfandel is very, very, very hard to get in Australia. A handful of vineyards grow it here and what I've had, so far, is very good, although I'm told it's all really different to the US stuff. Anyway. Say I was to have access to a decent-sized/stocked bottleshop in the US. And I was to go in with $100(USD) with the intent of coming out with two bottles of--ideally contrasting--Zin. With no intention of getting much, if any, change from that purchase. What should I look into?

It's salty good. Saving the second piece for an upcoming dinner, I think. In the freezer so I kind of forget about it.

My first batch has now matured. I normally don't like liqueurs, much--at least not straight, as they're too sweet--but the heavy allspice and cinnamon kick of this is very nice. Now to choose a cocktail to showcase it.

[Moderator note: The original Cooking with Ruhlman & Polcyn's "Charcuterie" topic became too large for our servers to handle efficiently, so we've divided it up; the preceding part of this discussion is here: Cooking with Ruhlman & Polcyn's "Charcuterie" (Part 6)] Duck prosciutto.

The foie gras hamburger from the Au Pied de Cochon book.

Indeed. 'Panini' is a loan word. Loan words tend to follow the grammatical pattern of the language they've been adopted into.

I think this is something the world wants. No, needs. 90% of the way through a bottle of Australian Zin, duck chorizo--no, forget that, duck liverwurst feels as revelatory an idea as the coming of a messiah. EDIT There are technical reasons, mentioned earlier, why duck fat won't sub for pork fat. Sure. But if you make me sausages loaded up with duck fat and then saute them in duck fat--or even confit them--I assure you I'll still eat them. Happily.

To foreigners, 'flake' probably means nothing at all. Which is sad. As shark is nice, nice, nice.

A nice ragu, roast ('fast' or low and slow), chilli, those big French classics like coq au vin and cassoulet, a lamb tagine, braised shanks or osso bucco, a smoked lump of chuck or brisket or short rib, ma po tofu, really good sushi, paella, butter chicken, the wonderful family of pies and dumplings, tacos et al, chicken soup, duck in any and all forms, pork belly, the world of charcuterie.

Just tried this. This is a yes. Very much so.

bumpbumpbump Has anyone actually cooked from Escoffier before (any edition) in a serious way? I'm not concerned about the lack of detail in his recipes--I figure if you already have the basic skills to some degree and something to help find out about the stuff you don't already know (Google, Larousse, etc) you'll be fine--but any tips? Recipes you'd suggest? I was aiming to make a menu of Escoffier dishes that was pretty much by-the-book.

I've finally got around to uploading photos from the southern dinner. Apologies for the terrible, washed-out photos. I got out the SLR (you'll see it in a couple of the shots, just resting on the table) with the express purpose of taking nice photos of everything, but after ~10 hours on my feet after a whole week of teaching, I sort of just sat down on the tiles when I was finished and let my partner take care of the photography (when she has the flash turned on and takes a picture with her camera, it's a little bit like that Danny Boyle Sunshine movie, where at the end the heroes all die hurtling slow-motion into a star and talking into handycams, but manage to save the world by reigniting the sun). You can notice this most of all, I think, on the beef chuck. It had a little bit of olive oil w/ parsley drizzled over the top but came out in the photo looking like it'd been sitting in a pool of congealing fat underneath a heat lamp for a couple days. Popcorn crocodile and some boxes of cakestuff my sister brought. Rice, barbecue chicken (the competition thighs from Lang's Serious Barbecue), black-eyed peas, popcorn crocodile, red beans, coffee and garlic-crusted smoked chuck (see what I mean about the congealed-look?), chicken and sausage gumbo (using the andouille I made a while ago). A friend brought along Heston Blumenthal's perfect chilli con carne. It was very good. Keith_W's popcorn, corn and jalapeno salad. Very nice. Two versions of forum lurker Nich's chocolate/rum/chicory tarts. Some fudge my sister made. Pineapple upside down cake from one of Nich's friends. Cupcakes from my sister. annachan came with gifts. For context, this sort of thing is hard-to-find here (even in well-stocked stores, like the Casa Iberica deli and Oasis Bakery I showed you in my blog, you'll only find ancho, chipotle and maybe one or two other varieties of chilli--and you'll pay ~$10 for a bag of two or three).