teonzo

Try charging the mold with static electricity, then the gold leaf should stick immediately. Teo

I wonder how much water is consumed for that cryopreservation stuff (building the machines, running them, so on). "This avocado needs X water, so I'm cryopreserving it for when there will be more water, this process consumes 2X water but it's a minor detail." Teo

You have 1 week to post your gyro experiments, otherwise you will be banned. Teo

That's fatherly love! You could choose the Italian way. Well, one of the many. Teo

People say so. I never tried it, not my cup of tea. Teo

I don't think you would see a significant difference in water activity. Teo

Seems like it's something in the vein of hot chocolate powder, but in bar form. You break a piece of the bar, add it to hot milk/water, let it melt and you get your hot drink. A guy in Italy is making good money with a similar product, people think that a bar is more natural than a powder. Teo

A well-done cake and a sunny day, what could they ask more? Teo

Yolks get firmer when they go near 0°C. There is difference in firmness between a yolk at 20°C and one at 4°C, but the difference between a yolk at 4°C and one at 1°C is much bigger. About the yolk-ey flavor, I'm not sure I'm interpreting it in the same way you are meaning. I never had an "industrial" egg that tasted yolk-ey. All yolk-ey eggs I tasted were free range, it depends mostly on what they eat: if it's winter and they eat mostly dried corn, then you have few hopes, much better if it's spring/summer and they eat much different things, including bugs and worms. If my memory serves right I found only 2 double yolks in industrial eggs during my whole life. With free-range eggs a double yolk is much more frequent, about every 12-15 eggs I would say. Teo

It's a secret rule that goes back to ancient Asia. Ask @shawarma_prince for more infos. Teo

Seems like a great gift basket. If someone gifted me a jar of chicken liver pate then he/she would become my hero! Teo

Try looking at cookie depositors with wire cutter. Teo

First of all compliments, this croissant is much better than what you find in most bakeries. You want your croissants to have a really crisp surface and an ethereal inside. If you aim for a more open crumb, then this does not mean the inside will be more ethereal, it's the opposite. If the honeycomb has small cells then it means there are many more "walls" than if you hade a more open crumb (less cells). Since the weight is the same, this means that if you have less walls then those walls will be thicker. It's much easier to bite a thin wall than a thicker one. You goal is to end up with a honeycomb with lots of small cells, so there are the maximum possible of walls: the smaller the cells, the thinner the walls, the more ethereal the bite. You are already there about the honeycomb structure and the final height/width ratio in the section. The only thing you need to work on is the proofing: this croissant seems a bit underproofed, it could have risen more. Next time I would suggest to try to let them rise a bit more before baking them. Proofing should be made in an enviroment with medium high humidity, so the surface stays soft, almost wet. About 15 minutes before baking it's better to transfer the croissants in a dry environment, so their surface dries a bit forming a bit of a crust: their surface should be dry to the touch, but not hard. When you adjust this you have the perfect croissant. Teo

All good matters say you can break bread with your hands. You just need to break a piece of bread, lay it on the rim of the dish, stab it with the fork, use the bread to mop the dish, put it in your mouth using the fork, be happy. I did this in a michelin 2* star restaurant, nobody complained, on the contrary, the chef was really happy that ALL my dishes came back perfectly clean and asked me to join him in the afternoon break. Teo

Cheap solution: go to a supermarket, buy a plastic box of your required size, put aside the lid, turn upside-down the box and it becomes your cover. More expensive solution: check some websites selling used stuff, you should be able to find a wine fridge or a cigar box with controlled umidity. Most wine fridges should have a humidity controller to avoid troubles with corks. Cigar boxes without controlled humidity have no sense. Given the current situation, there should be a wide selection of used stuff for sale, since lots of people are selling stuff to get some cash. Once you find what suits you then you can resell your actual wine fridge. Teo

You can try contacting this vendor in Canada: http://librairiegourmande.ca/ maybe you are lucky and they have a copy, or can source one. Or, as I wrote, Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York. Since it's still in print they should have no troubles to get it, maybe not immediately. But I don't know how much they ask for shipping to Canada. I'm 99% sure the CD-ROM has the English version of all the text. There is no Spanish or English edition, there is only one edition: book with only photos plus the CD-ROM. I agree with your considerations, that's why I kept postponing buying it. As far as restaurant pastry goes, this is one of the top 5 books to have, so it's a "must" for any serious professional. But it's not a book I'm going to pick up frequently, if ever. The elBulli books (the ones about the restaurant menus) are much much more informative about the creative process, including desserts. Teo

Beware the printed book is only photos, no recipes. If my memory is right the only text is the name of the dish above the photo. Recipes are in a CD-ROM attached to the back-cover, they should be both in Spanish and English. I speak by memory, I saw it when it came out and kept saying "I'll buy it with my next order". If you can't find it you can try contacting the guys at Kitchen Arts & Letters, also to confirm the CD-ROM has the recipes in English language. You can buy it from the official website: https://elbullistore.com/en/product/natura/ or from other European vendors, but I suppose that shipping price will cost as much as the book. Teo

If you don't have a guitar then I suppose you don't have an enrober, so you are hand dipping these truffles. If you start with a ganache with exact weight then you hand dip it, you can't expect the final truffles to be all at the same exact gram, you will have some heavier and some lighter. As Kerry wrote, your best course of action is buying pre-made truffle shells. It's quicker and more precise. Teo

Glad you liked it! For a 1 kg batch I use 30 g of mint. I would suggest you to try the sorbet version. Teo

Can you use Skype as a replacement of sorts? Teo

Thanks for posting this! Making people happy is the goal of every act of cooking, from the parents who have no money to buy new shoes to the celebrity chefs who ask hundreds of dollars for a single meal. Teo

I suppose there's another thing to consider: buying habits are pretty different in China if compared to the USA or Europe. From what I understand people in China buy their food fresh everyday, they buy what they need for that day and stop. So their storage requirements are pretty different than American or European people. Chinese people are going to cook what they buy immediately or after few hours at worst. American and European people are going to store it for days. Seems hard that a Chinese person is going to buy clams and asking himself/herself how those clams are going to stay alive till the next day. Teo

Seems like the optimal solution in all aspects. You are raising the amount of almonds, not the amount of hazelnuts, which is perfect because hazelnuts are stronger than almonds. No troubles about shelf life, many pastry shops here sell "spumiglie", they are big meringues (4-5 inches) that are half baked, meaning crisp outside and soft inside. They last ages, I made an "experiment" (read "I forgot them in a tin box"), after 5 years they were still fine. Teo

All supermarkets here sell pasteurized egg whites. Few of them sell yolks and whole eggs, but whites are sold everywhere. They are in the fridge section near milk and cream. They are packaged in tetrapack, each one contains 500 g egg whites, cost is 1.50€ on average. I suppose you should be able to find them there too, since there is a much bigger choice of packaged stuff in the USA. Definetely a problem, especially because Sosa stuff is not cheap. About hte marjolaine, the original was made with dacquoise. I can see why people talk about meringue on the various webpages, that's because few people know what a dacquoise really is and they assume it's meringue-like. A dacquoise is meringue based for sure, since you start with egg whites and sugar to get a soft meringue. Then you add the ground nuts and optionally some flour. Usual ratios are 1 part egg whites, 1.5 part sugar, 1 part nuts. Sugar is less than a usual meringue (should be 2 parts in a usual meringue). Dacquoise is cooked until it retains its shape and remains soft, here lies the main error made by people who don't know what a dacquoise is. They see it's meringue based and baked and suppose it musts be crisp like meringues (the cookies). If you keep baking it then it becomes crisp, that's for sure, but it's not what a dacquoise is supposed to be. The real difficulty in making a dacquoise is being able to judge when it's at the correct stage of baking, it takes some experience. Meringue baking works similarly. If you take it out of the oven after few time, then it retains its shape and is soft. If you keep baking, then the outer sides become crisp while the interior remains soft. If you keep baking more, then it becomes completely crisp (which is what people aim for meringue cookies). If you want to have both a crisp part and a soft part, then you can bake the meringue disks until they are crisp outside and soft inside, which is pretty easy to check: take one out of the oven, bite it and see by yourself. Then you can spray with cocoa butter or dark chocolate (would go with this) or what else, so you are sure the texture will remain the one you wished for. If you put the meringue disk over the ganache without spraying it, then it will absorb part of the moisture from the ganache (the usual water migration). This will change with time and is a bit out of control. Curiosity: one of the traditional Italian bonbons are the "cuneesi al rum": https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneese_al_rum http://www.pasticceriacuneo.it/prodotti/cuneesi-al-rhum/ They are made with a chocolate pastry cream flavoured with rum (lots of rum, which acts as preservative) sandwiched between two discs of meringue (baked at higher temperature than usual, to get maillard reactions and nut like flavor), then coated in dark chocolate. They are really successful with people who love booze. Teo

Dimensions seem correct on paper. On your last photos there aren't much rounds on the final croissant. With "rounds" I mean how many complete rounds you give to the triangle base to form the final croissant. You count the rounds on the final pastry, they are the "shoulders" on the surface (the signs of the cut dough, where you can see the laminated layers). In your last pictures the rounds are 2, while the minimum should be 3. Better doing 4 or 5, both for consistency and looks. Before rolling the triangles you should pull the point tip, resulting in a triangle that is about 2 inches higher than when you cut. The thickness should be the same from the base of the triangle up tp about half its height. From half its height the thickness should decrease steadily, so when you reach the point tip it's almost null. This way you are able to make more rounds. Another thing to do is making a small cut at the base of the triangle, at half the base and perpendicular to it, this cut should be about 1/4 inch. Making this cut helps to get the best shape, both during rolling and during proofing/baking. It's impossible to explain it with words, try looking on youtube, there are boatloads of videos about croissants, many of them feature the cut on the base and the pulling of the point tip. Your tip rises up because it's too thick, not for other reasons. If you don't feel confident with this then roll the dough thinner and make bigger triangles. Same base width, bigger lenght. Say something like 3.5 inch width, 15 inch length, 1/6 inch thickness. Remember one thing: this dough is elastic, so it tends to retract after rolling. If you roll it, measure it immediately after rolling, cut the triangles immediately, then the dough will retract, resulting in smaller and thicker triangles than when you cut them (seems like this is the issue in your case). So it's better to roll it to your aimed width, let it rest few minutes (in the fridge would be better, you can fold it without pressing), then roll it again to adjust for how much it retracted. The first section photo (second photo overall) shows an almost perfect honeycomb with a small hole inside. The other photos have bigger holes. If the source of the troubles was one of these you listed, then you would have not ended up with that honeycomb. Those holes are result of a bad shaping. Which is caused by few rounds. Meaning the triangle was too thick compared with width and height (see above). Malt does not effect dough in that way. No troubles in adding or subtracting 2 g of malt. Teo