Mjx

There are two possibilities here: The first is that alcohol-based extracts are not sold in what you would consider 'the usual sorts of shops', and may instead be found in one of the last shops you might be likely to look for them (e.g. pharmacies); health food shops sometimes have ingredients that aren't found elsewhere. The other possibility is that in Germany, vanilla is not [widely] available in liquid extract form. I've never looked for vanilla extract in Germany, but in Denmark (where I spend a lot of time), vanilla is most commonly available as the ground bean (powder), as a paste, and as vanilla sugar (and the whole beans, too); recently, I've seen a single brand of vanilla extract in a some branches of one supermarket chain, but it still isn't commonly found. For whatever it's worth, the Dr. Oetker site (one of the major German baking-ingredient producers, also very widely distributed in other EU countries) lists several forms of vanilla: http://www.oetker.de...ackzutaten.html. My German is nearly non-existent, so I couldn't determine for a certainty that any of the products listed were alcohol extracts (but I think not).

Swim bladder!

Miroir! There may be other options, but none are springing to mind.

I'm up for shops that cater to professionals, too...

Have you checked out some of the tea discussions right here on eG? http://forums.egullet.org/index.php/forum/127-coffee-tea/

How are the bees looking in your area?

I'm not in North America, that's the reason driving down to Berlin is an option I kind of like to handle something/see it in action, before buying. Also, in Germany the warranty period covers up to 2 years, so it's a better deal for anything that has the ability to conk out. But mostly, I'm interested in seeing what I can get my hands in Germany that I'm not likely to find in Denmark, where the selection tends to be a good deal narrower.

The goose fat is a brilliant idea!

You do need to cut up larger bones, since it doesn't seem that boiling/simmering extract collagen from any great depth. I've never made stock from just bones, because unbrowned animal proteins tend to have very little flavour (but I have made stock with no bones; it needs a good bit of reduction to acquire some body). I can't think imagine buying bones to make stock, although I do keep a pretty good supply of them in the freezer. However, I generally don't make stock without bones (or chicken feet, or what-have-you), because stock made without bones lacks body and a certain unctuousness that comes from the dissolved collagen.

I'd second that, food mills do a great job of this sort of thing. but couldn't you just peel the apples? It's a bore, but might be your simplest solution, if you don't have a food mill.

Right. It's understood that 'gayette' is almost certaily 'galette', the waiter's pronunciation was apparently a bit... misleading Thanks to fellow member the greek, I am able to pass along the information that a gayette is a 'small sausage patty made with pork liver and bacon, wrapped in caul fat' (the link to which he directed me:www.patriciawells.com/glossary/french_english_food_glossary.pdf), and I'm sure we're all looking forward to Soundman's elaboration on this in his upcoming write-up.

We're driving down to Berlin next week, and I was wondering whether there were any kitchenware shops particularly worth looking into. There are a few things I'm interested in (e.g. a jeweller's scale, instant-read thermometer, certain modernist ingredients), but browsing is great, too. So what I'm interested in is pretty much any unusual/substantial, kitchen-related shop, and I'd love to hear your recommendations. Thanks!

Did you come across any other places serving quick, casual food (apart from [curry]wurst; I can easily get that downtown where I am, if I wanted to), or good, reliable bakeries?

For sorbets, I'd check out Harold McGee's The Curious Cook, which devotes an entire chapter (with tables of the proportions of fruit juice/puree, sugar, and water for over two dozen fruits) to his experiments with sorbet and its relatives.

Well, no: bone contains a good bit of collagen, since proteins comprise the bone matrix in which the minerals are suspended. But collagen doesn't bring much to the party in terms of flavour (unless you brown it, which doesn't happen when the collagen is extracted by boiling/simmering) so you're going to get a really weak broth if you use just bones. Bone is connective tissue.

Check out the primer mkayahara linked to; I just took a quick look at it, and realized this was a must-save.

I count on bones to add gelatin, not flavour. When I save bones, I never scrape them clean, I usually roast them first, and I use plenty of meat, too. I hate wasting the leftover meat form making, so I usually freeze it to eventually add to soup or tortellini/ravioli filling.

Most of the Danes I've met seem to favour margarine (when my boyfriend's mother needs butter for a recipe, she usually borrows it from me, since she rarely buys it). Lurpak is a popular brand , but mostly because it's almost the only brand of butter you find in many supermarkets. The thing about smørrebrød is that it simply means 'buttered bread' (smør is 'butter', and brød is 'bread'), so it effectively covers a really broad range, from plain bread and butter to the most elaborate sandwiches (these are always open-faced). On festive occasions there is often at least a gesture towards the formal, traditional combinations, usually as part of a larger kolde bord (the Danish equivalent of the Swedish smorgåsbord), but the general trend in sandwich-making here is pretty much the universal 'let's see what we've got in the refrigerator... oh, better use that up!'

Thanks Dejah! I actually have the necessary ingredients to attempt this, and I think it's interesting to see this modernist technique entering the mainstream, ready-to-eat market

Are those essentially alginate spheres? I've had standard tapioca pearls in bubble tea, but I've never come across these... they look delicious, though.

Thanks to everyone who followed along this week (and to Kristoffer, Inge, Helene, Lasse, and Mads, who have invariably answered my apparently endless questions about Danish food with apparently endless patience)! I hope you enjoyed seeing this tiny bit of a Danish summer through the eyes of a foreigner as much as I have, and I leave you with my latest find, pineapple strawberries (yep, they smell of pineapple):

We made a quick trip to a small ‘farm shop’ nearby, which manages to be a sort of greengrocer/general store: the owners sell an intriguing array of things, in addition to their own produce (and others’): Various juices and some ceramic ware: A terrific selection of liquorice: Some cook books, and the omnipresent scrubbed (thanks, Mette!) potatoes in water. They also sell chalk paint, slippers, watering cans and garden gnomes (that’s just the tip of the iceberg). There’s a good-sized green house right next to the shop, where you can get various flowers and herbs in pots, and there’s a very substantial grape vine occupying about a third of the roof (the green mass at the far end): Dinner was venison with the fennel and carrots I picked up at the farm shop. There were a few changes to the original plan, and the hokkaido-chestnut soup was broken down into hokkaido puree and caramelized chestnuts. Tonight, we had dinner with my boyfriend’s parents: And now I’m sitting here, finishing off the last of tonight’s wine

That's Swedish (the ö instead of the ø gives that away)! In Danish it's called det kolde bord ('the cold table'), and basically, it's just the stuff that gets made for lunch, although more substantial and varied selections show up at events like julefrokoster (where you can find a fair number of different kinds of herring, but since by the end of the night it may well be being used for body sild, I'm not sure this really gets noticed). Thanks! I actually enjoy the Danish summer and feel a bit guilty about it, because when everyone is looking out the window and wishing it would stop raining, I'm hoping it will just keep on I made a note to give allspice a go in frikadeller, they really do need something to bring out the flavour. And scrubbed, hm? I should have noticed that...

For lunch, we had an adaptation of smørrebrød. Right before we started, my boyfriend remembered that lettuce was kind of required for dyrelægens natmad, se we went out and picked some greens in the garden: This is the selection of ingredients we went with: The sort of wet-looking pink meat in the centre is salt beef, then clockwise from the dark brown stuff, which is beef aspic, you have liver paste, the last two frikadeller, onion and dill for topping, baby greens, mustard, mayonnaise (I know, I know), smoked salt, and salmon. The results: Apart from the dyrelægens natmad (the one with the onion rings and slab of aspic), these are all improvisations, not anything formally recognized (@brucesw, if you're at all familiar with this, you probably noticed that this isn't close to a full-on, authentic smørrebrød), although it's still a good bit more elaborate than what we usually do. Tradition stipulates that shrimp and salmon are eaten on white bread, and most other things are eaten on rye bread, but that went out the window when my boyfriend stood firm on his preference for fresh bread. Also traditionally, you eat smørrebrød with a knife and fork, but there was no way any standard table knife could make a dent in the crust of this bread, so we just picked them up and ate them. DKK 90, actually, so close to USD15 (but that includes tax, and since wait staff are paid a living wage you don't tip, so the price includes everything).

Breakfast today included Guinness Stout ginger cake, which you may notice is a little. . . dark: Okay. The top is burnt black: Even reducing the temperature to compensate for the oven’s tendency heat spikes didn’t help (although it seems to have interfered with the rise a bit ). Fortunately, the thing wasn’t incinerated, and with the thin carbonized layer trimmed away, and if it didn’t look beautiful, it still delivered in terms of flavour (it’s so good with coffee), and the recipe is one I highly recommend. The cake is also a bit paler than usual, because at about 22.45 last night I discovered that I was out of molasses (difficult to find here), so I frantically racked my brains for a substitute, and hit upon a combination of cane syrup, pureed prunes, and cider vinegar. As a substitution, this was passable, but hardly ideal (but hey, I did promise at least one culinary fiasco).