Mjx

Airbrush.

My SOP: Assemble and prep. all the stuff that's going into the pot (meat, vegetables, herbs, spices, booze, etc.) Preheat the oven to 125C/255F, and briefly heat a Dutch oven or other heavy, lidded pot/pan (I sometimes use a big heavy saute pan) over medium. Brown any root vegetables and onions, adding garlic (if you're using it) right at the end, so it gets about a minute; remove to a bowl. Turn the temperature up to medium high, and brown the meat. Kill heat, and add the vegetable back to the pot, then add herbs and spices. Mix this a bit, then add broth to about halfway up the meat; I add booze at this point, a splash of rum, vodka or akvavit, or a glass of sherry or port. Scrape the fond from the bottom, put the lid on, and put the the pot in the oven. I check every hour or so, to see that the liquid level hasn't dropped significantly. Depending on the thickness of the meat, it may be ready at any time between 1.5 and 5 hours. Something like pork shoulder I'd give at least 3 hours. I don't use a thermometer, since the temperature won't tell you how tender the meat is (and my sister still hasn't got around to sending over my Thermapen). Once the meat has reached the consistency you want, you can finish it in the oven, removing the lid and letting the heat and dry air reduce the cooking liquid and brown the meat (turn the heat up, and keep a close eye on progress). You can also take the meat out of the oven, and do your reduction on the stovetop. Once you get the hang of it, you can figure on half an hour of preliminary work, then the oven does the rest.

Just apropos point 1: I don't know whether I once saw somebody do this (and forgot), or it just makes sense, but I flick my knife over, and use the spine to move what I've cut. Dragging the blade that way would have to dull it.

I found one recipe without condensed milk on epicurious: http://www.epicuriou...rfect-Flan-1902. I've never tried it, so I've no idea of how reliable it is. I searched for [flan recipe] (also [flan receitas], to see what the Spanish-language offerings included), and although there are some recipes without condensed milk, most do use it. According to the Cook's Illustrated web site (originally published July 2006), it is possible to make a substitute for condensed milk (397 g); I've converted the measurements to metric weights: * In a saucepan, combine 355 ml (180 g) milk powder and 118 ml (123 g) whole or 2% milk; whisk until very smooth, about 1 minute. * Whisk in 133g sugar and 1 tsp vanilla extract (I think this might actually be more useful without the vanilla), and cook over low heat, whisking constantly until the sugar and milk powder dissolve, about 5 minutes. * Cool before using (whisk again just prior to using, to make sure it is perfectly smooth). * This may be kept covered in the refrigerator for up to 1 week.

I have to say I was very pleased with the results of adding rum to bean cooking water, to the extent that when I do a side-by-side, I'm planning on making the no-booze control batch as small as possible, since those have tended to not turn out as well. Jaymes, it sounds like I need to start experimenting with beer in cooking water; that sounds really good.

In a lot of countries (not just France) horse meat is sold openly, and isn't regarded as unusual (e.g. in Italian supermarkets, packets of horse bresaola sit beside the ones made from cows, it's just one more type of sandwich meat). I've eaten it, it's fine, tastes a bit like beef, a little sweeter. Have to say my feelings on horse meat itself are essentially neutral. Horse meat as such shouldn't be much of problem, since over the millennia, people all over the world have cheerfully eaten it (including in the UK, e.g. "They eat horses, don't they?" Susanna Forrest, The Telegraph, 13 January 2013). Mislabelling it – I wish this went without saying – is clearly unethical, as well as illegal. On the other hand, the presence of drugs harmful to humans is a significant problem, and if the animals in question were not raised for consumption, that's a legitimate and reasonable cause for concern (but this is a broad issue that is hardly exclusive to horse meat).

After reading the article, which mentions that Zilmax was originally developed as a drug to treat asthma in humans, I did a search to see what side-effects it has, and there seem to be no current references to this use. Now I'm wondering whether it has been pulled for human use for any reason (I checked for the compound name, zilpaterol hydrochloride, in hopes of getting a broader overview). Anyone else find something in google scholar?

I recommend Unmentionable Cuisine. This is arguably a bizarre cook book (it does have recipes), but despite its provocative title it's a good read, and I'm fairly certain it's nowhere near as controversial today as it was when it first came out (the gist of it is that one culture's 'weird/gross' is another's bog standard fare).

Shaoxing wine is relatively interchangeable with medium-dry sherry. No idea where you would get a meshuval version of that. Chinkiang black vinegar might be tough. Maybe try a combo of regular white wine vinegar and balsamic. You will get the acid but the taste will definitely be different. . . . . Since both chinkiang vinegar and shaoxing wine are made from rice, not grapes (unlike balsamic vinegar), wouldn't those be kosher (apart from at Passover), unless the rice is likely to have been full of insects when it's processed?

Has anyone come across some indication of the portion sizes involved? I cannot figure out how people managed this sort of thing; if they ate like that on a regular basis, they would have been far heavier as a group than photographs suggest they were, unless these banquets played out like tasting menus. I can't even eat most 3-course meals without feeling at least a little awful afterwards, and there is simply no way one could eat most of any meal in a corset (I've eaten while corseted down to just 20 inches, not the 18 inches upper-class women strived for during that era, and you can manage about a handful of food at a go, that's it).

Well played sir... some how that one slipped my mind. Didn't we already do those in the 90s? I seem to recall seeing this sort of thing on menus around the same time that roughly every other person I knew in NYC had some sort of swing-dance injury.

For whatever it's worth, I made another poorly (read 'un')controlled experiment with cooking beans in rum. This time, I used cannellini, and a dodgy-looking batch they were, with about half looking about a decade older then the rest, and none looking less than 'kind of old'. However, just to see what happened, I only discarded one bean (which looked like something had been living in it, then left because it got too depressing). The rest, regardless of how withered they looked, stayed. I dumped the half kilo of beans into a pot, added the rum (same as before, above), then added a bay leaf and boiling water, just enough to cover (I wanted to dilute the rum as little as possible, to optimize any effect it might be having). I loitered about, topping up the water so the beans stayed covered. About an hour later, things looked pretty bad; about half the beans had picked up water, and were smooth and cream-coloured, while there rest had expanded, but looked withered and chalky. Biting into one of each, the difference was clear: the smooth, newer beans were softening, but still a bit crunchy, while the wrinkled white beans were very hard, and had softened just enough for me to notice that they were a bit rubbery. I gave them another hour, still topping up water, to keep them just covered. At the two-hour mark, the difference among the beans was far less pronounced, in both appearance and texture, and they had reached an 'edible, but barely' stage. I added about a tablespoon of salt, and gave them another half hour. At this point, they were distinctly edible, although some were still slightly crunchy, so I took a chance, and drained them and transferred them to the chicken and sausage mayhem I was braising for dinner, and the beans cooked a couple more hours in broth with a bit of tomato paste, sherry vinegar, and sherry mixed in (no idea of the pH, but it was pleasantly tart, so I'm wildly guessing 'under 5'). At the four-hour mark, the beans had an extremely pleasant texture (I noticed no distinctly crunchy ones), which is not something I can normally say of a batch like the one I started with (also keeping in mind that I usually pick them over and may discard nearly half as being unlikely to ever be pleasant to eat). I have no idea of what (if anything) alcohol does to dry beans when they absorb it, but after two unusually good batches, I'm now feeling inclined to do a controlled test.

I thought that McGee et al established that searing doesn't seal liquid in meat. He's talking about something completely different (cue Monty Python theme): Over high heat, the exterior browns very rapidly, and the inside remains relatively cool during that short time. Over a lower heat, the exterior of the meat takes longer to brown, giving the interior time to also become warmer; as the meat warms, the fibres contract, causing the juices to be squeezed out (the effect you get when you sqeeze a sponge, if you can imagine the sponge self-squeezing). 'Sealing' doesn't enter into it.

That was my thought, too. Regarding the toughness, pre-soaking the strips of meat in a solution of sodium bicarbonate and water (5g in 130g) makes a huge difference, and I wouldn't do a stir-fry without that (I first came across this recommendation in Cook's Illustrated). Also, have you tried velveting?

An eG forum search for 'pressure' brings up a good handful of discussions, including the Pressure Cookers - what's cooking? topic.

Is this true? Does all the chloride get rinsed off? I thought spheres made this way would continue to thicken over time. Especially with ganache, since the cream must have some calcium in it. If this isn't an issue I'll try standard spherification. If not I'm interested in other sources of calcium, like the lactate Tri 2 Cook mentioned. MC on direct spherification (4-186): 'Rinsing [with clear water] slows the gelling process and washes away any lingering flavors from the setting solution. Rinse the spheres at least twice. Remove with a perforated spoon. Optionally, heat to 85 °C / 185 °F for 10 min to stop further solidification. Store the spheres in water or oil until needed.' I don't speak from experience, since I've only attempted reverse spherification, but my next effort in this direction is definitely going to involve direct spherification, since I'm hoping the results will be a bit sturdier.

Did the recipes give any actual indication of the consistency the dough was supposed to have? A lot of recipes are specifically for slack doughs, in which case, the recipes were behaving the way they were supposed to (I work almost exclusively with doughs that definitely fall into the 'wet glop' category; I don't even consider kneading these, but just go at them with a hand-held mixer with dough hooks). Flour will absorb water differently, depending on protein content; it's possible that the recipes you used were intended for flour with a completely different percentage of protein (405 flour runs about 9% protein, US all-purpose about 11% protein, high-protein flours run about 14 to 15% protein).

Couldn't you make/keep the base more liquid, and just drop it into the solution with, say, a turkey baster, or even a small ladle/portion scoop? Also, since you mention submerged the spheres to warm them, it sounds like rinsing them wouldn't be an issue, and direct spherification might be worth looking into, since any residual calcium chloride would be rinsed away.

Short answer: No. Longer answer: Every waiter, diner, and group of diners is different, and, apart from being professional and polite (and toeing whatever line management sets), the only effectve strategy I found was to pay close attention to the people I was serving, and adjust my behaviour accordingly (some people practically want their food cut up for them and put into their mouths' others want you to just bring food and drink, and get lost; some know every fne point of etiquette and frown on any break with serving form, others pride themseles on dispensing with 'all that nonsense', or have beliefs/opinions thatlead them to reject form). Don't be hard on yourself for not being psychic. I'm not exactly an extrovert, so my thing was being unobtrusively on-the-spot-as-needed, keeping an eye on things, but not hovering or intruding; someone with a more outgoing personality would clearly do things differently, I'm not saying this is the only way to go. If you work closely with people for a while (I didn't wait tables long, but I've done other work that demanded the same level of attentiveness), you soon recognize patterns, internalize things to look out for, and respond more or less intuitively to the situation in front of you. Also, your peripheral awareness of the room steadily increases (or should), until you practically have eyes in the back of your head (it takes a while: when I began, I was so focused on not dropping things, and remembering who got what, a table could have had a circle of nude aliens around it, and I wouldn't have noticed; it wasn't long, though, before I could almost feel someone being unhappy about their food [given where I worked, this happened pretty often]).

Seems like adding flavour to the whisky once it's in the glass would be a better way to go. I'm not even a whisky drinker, but pre-flavoured whisky just sounds unpleasant (and I'm speaking as someone for whom it is almost impossible to make a drink that is too sweet/ridiculously flavoured to drink, as long as it's well mixed and balanced).

I've only noticed graininess with whole rice flour (it didn't really bother me much, though).

What intrigued me was that this time around, none of the beans were tough or stony (usually, since beans aren't a big thing here, they're pretty old, and no matter how long they're cooked, a good number of them stay hard, and the calcium-laden local water doesn't help); these were more or less perfect, and I wondered whether the alcohol didn't have something to do with it. Since ethanol and ethanol + water solutions are really close to pH 7 (here, probably a bit more basic), I was actually wondering whether there mightn't be some other chemical behaviour at work, completely unrelated to pH (it might have been a fluke, unrelated to cooking method).

Thanks! These recipes sound really good (@judiu: the exact same though crossed my mind ), and it sounds like the alcohol used in them actually brings flavour to the finished dishes (mine doesn't seem to have done, although it may just be extremely subtle). What's interesting to me is that all these recipes instruct you to add the alcohol once the beans are softened, or at least reconstituted; anyone know whether reconstituting/cooking the dry beans in an alcohol-containing liquid is known to have any effect on their finished texture? My impression from this batch alone is that it does, but I'm wondering whether this has been systematically investigated by anyone.

I cook dried beans fairly often, and this morning, as I was adding salt to the water covering some pinto beans, and staring at the bay leaf bobbing about in it, my sleep-deprived brain went: 'bay. . . rum'. I know Bay Rum is an early iteration of aftershave (and modern versions probably contain neither bay nor rum ), but while my brain was considering the history of male cosmetic preparations, it was also directing me to slosh in some rum. Which I did. About a quarter cup/60 ml of Bacardi Superior, to be precise. The beans have come out really nicely, with no stony ones (unusual with the only brand of dried beans I can usualy get hold of, here), and a very pleasant texture and taste (they probably smell good too, but I'm congested to the back of my skull, so I've no idea). Now I'm wondering, is cooking dried beans with booze a thing? Are there recipes for this? I can't recall coming across this growing up, but it doesn't feel like a hugely Tuscan thing, so that doesn't surprise me. So, do you do this? Any special recipes you'd care to share?

Any other places worth visiting in Bremen? My boyfriend's parents are headed there for a couple of days at the beginning of next week, and they're interested in simple, cosy, local places, 'nothing fancy'. Good takeaway is definitely of interest, too. Thanks!