jrshaul

The problem with the usps argument is that they're both better snd cheaper than the other options. They also must serve areas so remote no once could turn a profit. Around here, the his party selects for maulmen whi work like dogs. As for comission sales, the quality of service is often crap. I avoid them by default, as any post-sale service is unpaid labor and therefore non-existent.

I am hoping to turn the problem from a culinary problem to a distribution problem by the methods you suggest. Shipping the product shrinkwrapped and frozen so it may be defrosted immediately before purchase may also help. Back to the original problem: does adding alcohol reduce Aw or is it considered seperately? I do like brandy in my ganache.

The question is not one of convenience or profit, but simple safety. The cost of retail venues mean that most locally produced chocolate is sold through independent retailers; however, the required certification is difficult to obtain. I'm not a professional, so I prefer to err heavily on the side of not making anyone sick; I recently had a bad shock when some truffles went fungal, and prefer to plan for the worst case scenario. Outside of a freezer, I wouldn't dream of selling to anyone outside of seven days. They just don't taste right. But there's always going to be some doofus who expects fresh food to still be safe after eight weeks of 80F heat.

I just received Wybauw's #2, and am starting #3 tomorrow. I may have badly underestimated the shelf life of chocolates. I've read that a .85 will result three months, not three weeks. I can do 0.8 very neatly. Is there a service that will test the aW of samples economically? Meters are often over $3,000, but there's not likely to be much variation.

A friend of mine is starting a bakery, and I'm helping hi with ganaches and pralines. Neither of us is very keen on the use of sorbitol, glycerin, and other purely hygroscopic ingredients, but I can't see another way to keep the aW at a sub-7 level. Is there a chart somewhere documenting the self life reduction for higher aW? And how large is the advantage of blending under vacuum?

I am aware of this, but searing sounds like a more tasty option and doesn't require heating a big pot of water on my anaemic stove.

I feel that the best solution is to pay waiters more, increment the prices 12%, and put up a big sign saying "Waiters are paid enough you don't need to tip them (though you still can if you like.)" If the waiters mistreat anyone, they get the boot. There's only one bike shop in Madison that doesn't pay their workers on commission. It's also the only one I buy at.

I made canteloupe sorbet. The first draft was done with Alton Brown's recipe substituting all the sugar for invert sugar (I was interested in finding what would happen - it retarded freezing, but not completely.) For the second batch (not pictured.), I juiced the melon and added 0.5g of guar gum to about a quart of liquid. It was much smoother. I also omitted the lemon juice and used ascorbic acid instead. It's very good, though 12oz sugar to 27oz liquid is a bit sweet.

I'm in Wisconsin, so I'm likely out of luck.

I'm a little perplexed on the pre-searing thing, but will do so if it's found to be not disadvantageous. I buy cheap meat, and reducing the safety hazard of cooking at 137 is a definite positive.

I was not allowed to eat sweetened cereal as a child. I had raisin bran. The kind that tasted of cardboard. As such, I have zero nostalgia for "cereal milk", and find the retail distribution of maltose-flavored dairy absurd.

It's standard for a custom cake, but about double Whole Foods' price and quadruple the supermarket option. Set a diminishing return on investment curve proportional to that for food which allows me to buy a mcBurger for $2 and fillet for $25. If you're above the curve, great - but if you're not, you're in trouble. $40 is also, notably, very close to an entire day's pay after taxes at minimum wage. It's serious money. A lousy $10 cake is ignored. A $40 cake will receive greater scrutiny. Is it a harsh standard? Definitely. But surpassing it is why you can ask $40 for a cake, and I can't.

I may have posed my point poorly. Here's the short-and-dull version. 1. Restaranteurs benefit from the tipping system - it allows them to reduce overhead on slow days, incentivise employees, and shift the burden of compensation to those who will pay the most. It's a very good system. 2. In return for the increased risk, employees can profit very heavily. Those at the top are compensated very well. 3. For the customer who actually tips, there's a significantly higher final price combined with service dependent on how nice you dress. 4. Waiters can get screwed severely by a kitchen screw-up, or will profit off a restaurant's success. This hurts waiters at poor restaurants, but can be very rewarding for those at the top (As above.) 5: It's more profitable for the restauranteur to pad the price of big-ticket items than to add a flat fee across the menu for service. As such, you'd be paying a percentage of your tab anyway. Sales jobs are often much the same way. Paying your employees entirely on comissions is easy, but it can mean that smaller customers can get awfully screwed, and the risk requires higher average compensation. Yes...and no. A friend currently lives in the middle of nowhere. She's dyslexic, so she figured she'd try being a waitress for a while. Live the american dream and all that. Problem is, she's making ~$600/month during the slow season. You can live in the middle of northern Wisconsin on $600 a month, but god forbid you leave. $600/month in Madison, WI buys you a walk-in closet. Incidentally, god forbid you have to go to the hospital for food poisoning and rack up an enormous bill. (The restaurant in question - not her employer - won't pay; I suspect we can't prove it was food poisoning, even though two other people ended up in the hospital that evening from the same place.) She's been trying to leave for months. I doubt she ever will. Adam Smith's "perfect market" is about as realistic as carnivores embracing Tofurkey. Your "of course" confuses me. Why of course? How is the dollar value of a particular skill set determined? By market forces. In this case, market forces have zero correlation with anything other than the restaurant industry's convenience. I once recall the head dessert chef at WD-50 having bargained his way up to a little over $60,000 a year. I know artists from Wisconsin who do better than that selling jewelry at art fairs. It's rather curious that you say that. I had some university classes at a tech school that trains both chefs and electricians. The latter had a more formal process of apprenticeship, but both made it pretty clear that you'd be starting on the bottom and learning on the job. There's no formal standard for chefs because the quality of their work is apparent to the untrained. I don't actually know that much about structural grounding, but I don't care if a chef's a three-eyed Venusian if he never botches an order during the Friday night rush. Is this in France? If so, the price is much lower. If you index cost of living by things that are a little bit higher (rent, though this may no longer be the case) and things that are a lot higher (automobiles, where this is DEFINITELY the case), France's cost of living is definitely higher. It certainly isn't less. I can't make a direct comparison, but $16 in Wisconsin will buy you a bowl of soup ($3.50), a BBQ sandwich ($9), and pie ($4.50.) No cheese plate. Soda $2. I don't know what the difference is, but $16 is definitely a deal. Congratulations! You've just isolated why quite a lot of formal economics is bollocks when applied to anything other than commodities. The actual valuation of a culinary arts program is much lower than the perceived valuation, and the vast oversupply is pushing wages down. It's like the housing bubble, if people were still buying houses. They also ate Detroit, and increased the magnitude of the Great Depression (the old one.) In theory, a unions gives a supply-side monopoly to labor suppliers ("people") to balance out a demand-side monopoly of labor consumers ("employers.") In reality, they can warp the market just as badly as any other monopoly, and senority within the union often results in preferential treatment. Your union seems to have created a situation that is stable and profitable for all parties involved, and I applaud them for it. But you've also got the UAW scalping new hires so that older employees don't lose benefits from the bankrupt companies they work for. The word "Union" has a lot of baggage.

Urethane spray foam is a powerful insulator.

Where can I get these? I'd love to put some in liqueurs.

What's the best bet for getting choice grade chuck roast? An experience with buck-a-pound chicken cooked too low gave me quite the upset stomach, so I'd rather not take additional risks cooking at just 132.

Can you provide additional information? My immediate thought is the use of traditional ingredients - say, egg whites - has alienated customers used to the standard of flour and mayonnaise. Also, at $40 a cake, customers may have very high expectations. $40 and change bought me an immersion circulator.

Here's the fundamental issues with tipping, as I see them. Please note that the prices are all in 2013 "real" dollars. And by "Real", I mean "Not reflecting that the low end of food and housing is much more expensive than it was ten years ago." 1. For many years, 15-20% was fairly standard. Combined with a more reasonable cost of living, a waiter could live very comfortably on $2.73 an hour in today's dollars. My father was a waiter for many years; he described is actual paycheck as being largely inconsequential compared to gratuities. The shrinking economy has created two opposing pressures: The cost of living is higher for both customer and waiter. Tipping is reduced, and waiters cannot live as well on what would previously have been an abundant salary. 2. Waitstaffing is often reduced in quantity. According to my father, a restaurant in Ohio with $40+ entrees might have a sommelier and many entrees flambeed tableside. 20% on a $200 table was justified by the increased staff and risk of waiter's potential immolation. Today, you just get a waiter. If you want something cooked in a chafing dish, they beat you over the head with the bill. (Of which the waiter actually doesn't see any.) 3. The disproportionate spending of "whale" tables often leads waiters to favor them very heavily. If the guys next door order two rounds of beer between my seating and receipt of tap water, you're getting a short tip. Of course, I'm only augmenting the problem, but I don't actually care. 4. Waiters used to be tipped in cash. Now they get a percentage of debit. This is 100% taxed income. A friend of mine works ~40 hours a week at a nice sit-down restaurant in rural Wisconsin. After taxes, she sometimes only takes home $800 a month in the slow season. She can either get her ulcer checked out, or she can pay rent. The tipping system works very well as intended: A 15-20% baseline gratuity provides adequate compensation to ensure quality labor, and is proportional to the effort - either in quantity, or quality - provided. It also reduces the overhead for the owner in the event of a slow night. However, when the majority of tables offer meaningless compensation, the quality of labor reduces (you can make more tip-free at Subway) and it becomes advantageous to favor the profitable minority.

My suggestions for cooking for one:1. Boxed stock plus good-quality frozen vegetables makes for a decent soup. Make a batch, eat over the next three days. Beef stock plus kale plus some dried mushrooms is a nice combination.2. Sous-vide chicken breasts cooked with a little garlic can be pan-seared for greater enjoyment or chopped up and added to stir-fries. I might try glazing them with BBQ sauce and broiling briefly. I cook mine in a 160 bath for two hours - the texture is very nice, and it ensures the safety of my bottom-grade poultry.

After much fretting over absurd online prices, I gave in and made my own invert sugar. The "Chef Eddy" recipe below works very nicely, and remains liquid for at least a few weeks. http://www.chefeddy.com/2009/11/invert-sugar/ I do, however, have a few questions: 1. Is it true that alcohol functions similar to invertase in its' capability to invert sugars? I've seen alcohol used in cordial cherry confections to invert the sugar, but was wondering if this was an unrelated effect. If so, a splash of everclear may be useful to prevent crystallization and sustain the usability of the product. 2. How much invert can or should I use in baking? And where might I use it? I made it for ganache centers and ice cream, but as long as I'm keeping it in the fridge, I'd like to try improving my pastry. 3. How much invert is recommended for ice creams and sorbet? A complete replacement keeps the result from sometimes freezing at all. PS: Go make some invert sugar. It's handy!

I've been making a lot of ice cream in my freezer-bowl machine, and have made the following observations: 1. Guar gum is superior to xanthan for stabilizing and preventing crystallization. It also causes a lot more air to whip in. Overrun increased from 10% to over 50%. My ice cream maker is of low quality and the ice cream is often still liquid when I remove it from the bowl; the reduction in ice crystals in the finished product is dramatic. I've found 0.5g per liter of liquid works pretty well. It's available from Whole Foods under the "Bob's Red Mill" brand. 2. Invert sugar is an inexpensive and easy way to prevent crystallization. As a 50-50 mixture of glucose and fructose, this is to be expected. Because it's made from table sugar, it also has none of the starchy flavor of glucose products synthesized from cornflour. The only problem is it's too effective: I made the Alton Brown melon sorbet recipe using invert sugar in lieu of granulated, and in tandem with the included vodka, the stuff is still a slurry despite freezing overnight. I make mine by adding ascorbic acid to a sugar syrup and cooking to 236. It should be a highly viscous liquid at room temperature. Given that pure glucose is difficult to obtain and supermarket corn syrup contains superfluous water and vanilla, I find this a very useful addition. You can find further instructions here: http://www.chefeddy....1/invert-sugar/ 3: This isn't a big secret, but ascorbic acid does wonders to preserve color and flavor. It's usually used in conjunction with citric acid in the form of lemon juice, but plain ascorbic acid - sold as "fruit preserver" in grocery stores - is less intrusive. And now, to my problems: - I have huge amounts of trouble with egg custards being too...egg-y. I suspect I have been overcooking them - my old candy thermometer appears to be providing inaccurate readings at some times (but how?). It may also be a result of uneven heating due to my rubbish electric stove heating parts of the pan well above 160. I may SV-bath some custard to the recommended temperature and see what happens. - I'd be interested in recipes (such as the Ben & Jerry's cookbook recipe, which has been heavily recommended) using raw eggs. Pasteurizing eggs is a cakewalk with SV gear, and I'm told this produces a very nice result. - I can't puree canteloupe as fine as I'd like in my cheap food processor. Any solutions for this short of a Vita-Mix?

I managed to buy a secondhand immersion circulator for $50 on eBay. Works like a charm. You can find older units for $100 or less if you look, and given the difficulty folks have had with cobbled-together solutions, I still feel this is the superior option.

What I've got so far: -Tomatoes -Hoppy beer (I make toffee with dark porter, so anything but would be cheating.) -Sesame -Avocado -Greek yogurt -Garlic -Basil -Corn -Squash -Tofu -Rosemary. Any more suggestions? I was thinking also of the following: -Adzuki beans -Black tea (green tea is a gimme) -Rice

I've been trying to buff my repertoire of patisserie, and am organizing an impromptu "Iron Dessert" competition amongst my friends. The details are presently being finalized, but I'm hoping the grand bazaar will provide me with an array of possible Secret Ingredients that I might dramatically draw one randomly from a hat. Requirements include: 1. Available. Participants will be obtaining their own ingredients, so something inexpensive and easily obtained is optimal. The avocado is a good option; the moon-dust of Phobos, less so. 2. Unusual. In contrast to the original Iron Chef's focus on optimal use of, say, milk, I'm going for novelty factor. A good example would be beef suet: While used in desserts for millennia, most people - myself included - have never used it before. 3. Appropriate. Some ingredients - say, marsala wine - have such limited application that the results will likely taste very similar. 4. No balsamic vinegar. On pain of ninja death squad.

I've recently been mucking about with adding flour to custard pies. It's interesting - add too much and it starts to turn into something like a dense steamed pudding.