teonzo

That's pretty frequent in all French pastry when you use nuts in baked items. It's done for various reasons: - cost (as you wrote); - taste (heritage from the past); - texture. In French pastry, most of the times flavors are in the background, not in the foreground. Think about pralines (filled bonbons): if you go to a French chocolatier and taste a cinnamon praline or a lavender praline or whatever, first thing you will taste will be the chocolate, then cinnamon / lavender / whatever in the background. Things changed quite a bit in the last 20 years, mainly thanks to restaurants (where chefs want frontal flavors). But French pastry still has that philosophy: the characterizing flavor should be a nuance, not a kick. Almonds have a subtle flavor if compared to other nuts, so if you use 3/4 almonds and 1/4 pistachio / hazelnuts / walnuts you'll taste the second ones and not the almonds. If you use all almonds in that recipe then a good amount of people won't even notice they are there. There are professional recipes for pistachio biscuit joconde where the pistachio % is really minuscule. About texture, almond is the nut that gives the "best" flour, meaning it's the easiest one to grind to flour and gives the best texture in baked goods. Pistachio flour is coarser than almond flour. You can't get fine flour from nuts with higher fat content like hazelnuts and walnuts, they will start to release oil before getting a fine flour. If you use only pistachio flour (subbing all almond flour) then you'll get a product with a more grainy texture, even worse with hazelnut and walnut "flours". If you use nut pastes then you risk to deflate the batter (ruining everything), for sure you end up with a denser texture. The main advantage of almond flour in leavened baked goods (both chemical and physical leavening) is that it gives a fluffy and fine result, if compared to other nuts. You can sub almonds with pistachio in this recipe, you'll get a much more pronounced pistachio taste, but you will loose on texture and volume. Teo

This is the scientific proof that eating crystallized ginger makes you good at math. So we need to eat more without regrets. Teo

That's a wise decision for almost everything (I'm addicted and have a problem). Teo

It will work for sure, meaning that the top side of the meat will reach your desired temperature. Problem is about safety: it will take a lot of time to do so, while the meat is in the danger zone and directly exposed to air. Add that it's chicken and it makes for a really risky situation. Better not trying than ending up spending the night on the throne or in hospital. Sous vide cooking is made in the bags for safety reasons. Teo

I would answer something like this: "when someone goes to a strip club then he needs to pay more if he wants the naked cake". Teo

Out of curiosity, if you had to ship one of those items to a friend using 1 day delivery, how much would it cost? Teo

If I did it then lots of people would laugh: - the guys at Morgan Stanley, since my spoken English is simply ridiculous; - the guys at my phone provider, looking at the intercontinental bill; - my neighbours, who would hear me speaking an alien language with some dialect curses thrown in randomly. Those numbers can't be correct. It could make sense if the $8.32 was the typical profit for an order, not the typical order. My English is mediocre, so it can be a fault of mine, but if I read "typical order" then I understand "average amount of money spent by a customer for an order". $8.32 is far too low for an average order on Amazon, it would mean that for each item that costs over $100 there would be lots of orders below $5, a bit unrealistic. As is unrealistic the $10.59 to fulfill the shipment for an order of $8.32. An order for $8.32 is about the size of a blu-ray or DVD, I don't think the shipping costs in the USA are more than triple than in Italy. Having said that, you need to consider the whole picture, not the single frame. This single subject (free 1 day shipping for Prime members) is loosing money. But it can lead to more profits on other areas, like profiling (remember that Amazon makes LOTS of money on profiling customers). If this road leads Amazon to loose 5 on that single frame, but gain 8 on all the others, than the whole picture is +3, not -5. I would be confident that the guys at Amazon know pretty well their numbers and made lots of studies before making this choice. They can predict the costs for the 1 day orders, and they can predict the gains on all the rest, so if they took this road then it means their data pointed out it would be a profitable one overall. Teo

Probably it was a problem of recipe balancement. Home freezers should have no troubles in keeping a 0 F (-18° C) temperature. A correct professional recipe is hard at that temperature, so it's fine to run it in the Pacojet. Seems like they were using home-based recipes, I mean recipes for ice-creams that remains scoopable at freezer temperature (around 0 F). If they used a recipe that was balanced for remaining scoopable at freezer temperature, then it's normal that it never got hard enough to be run in the Pacojet. They needed to start from recipes with a service temperature around 7-10 F, so they harden completely at 0 F. Teo

This sentence seems to be pretty inaccurate. Let's say Amazon has a 50% profit margin on those $8.32 (50% is really optimistic). With this margin, they would be losing $6.43 every $8.32 order. With a 30% profit margin they would be loosing $8.09 every $8.32 order. These numbers make no sense. Teo

It's impossible to give a precise answer without having the real stuff in front of me. To work properly you need a refractometer and a pH-meter. The refractometer is normally used to check the final concentration of the pate de fruit. But it's also useful to check the solids concentration in the fruit puree you are going to use, which is one of the problems here. Frozen fruit purees are standardized, meaning the producers mix them in a way that the final product has always the same values (pH, sugar content, pectin content, so on). You can't rely on this if you start from fresh fruit, since fresh fruit can vary a lot (variety from variety, season from season, area from area, so on). If you measure the puree you are going to use with a refractometer then you get a good idea on the sugar and pectin content of that puree, compared to other purees of the same fruit (underscore "same fruit"). The pH-meter gives you the pH value of the puree you are using (how much acid it is). If you don't want to invest on a pH-meter then you can buy litmus paper, it's really cheap. After measuring the pH of the puree you have a good idea of how much citric acid you need to add to your pate de fruit. HM pectin (the one used for pate de fruits) need a pH between 2.5 and 3.5 for proper gelling. So the first thing you need to do is measuring the pH of the pate de fruit you made and is giving troubles. If the pH is outside that window, then you know that the problem to be fixed is the amount of citric acid to add. If the pH is inside that window, then you need to add more pectin. Beware that pears do not have high pectin content, on the contrary. You just need a quick google search. Wikipedia says they have high pectin content, but NEVER trust what you find on wikipedia. If you open more serious pages you'll find that pears are among the fruits with low pectin content. It just takes a bit of experience on jam making: pear jam (without added pectin) is one of the less firm, just like figs. Pear puree is used to round the taste (because it's a fruit with mild and neutral taste, it gets owerpowered by most other fruits) in pate de fruits, not for adding good amounts of pectin. Teo

This is a real mistery for me. A good ice-cream machine plus a dedicated freezer cost much less than a Pacojet. For the vast majority of ice-creams it would be the best choice, an ice-cream made with a proper machine has a better texture (due to overrun) than one made with a Pacojet. 15 years ago there were limited choices for the immersion circulator and the costs were insane. Now there is much more choice and costs are pretty low. Pacojet still have almost no competition and the price is still insanely high. Ok, there are some things that you can do only with a Pacojet, but they are limited to the modernist restaurants and they are a really small part within that style. Yet people continue to buy these machines. A mistery. Teo

Before reading the text I thought you prepared æbleskivers for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society. Teo

For the end of October, yes definetely, the usual high should be around 55 F here. This is by far the hottest October I've experienced. Teo

Beware there are various subspecies in the rubus family, each one producing different blackberries. Wild ones give small blackberries, much richer in taste and pectin, acidity can vary a lot. Cultivated ones give bigger blackberries that are juicier, less taste and less pectin, usually they are pretty acid. So you need to adjust the amount of pectin and even the amount of citric acid. Sometimes I added around 10 g pectin for 1 kg of blackberry puree when using the wild ones, otherwise I ended with a brick. Pay attention to acidity too, otherwise you risk to go out of the correct window for gelling, especially with acidic blackberries like the cultivated ones. Teo

Risotto, risotto and more risotto. Just had dinner with squash risotto, even if it's still hot like hell here (today we peaked at 23° C - 74 F). Radicchio in all the ways, it's the best vegetable this land has to offer. Polenta with everything. Goose, November is the goose month here. I'm sure the two gooses I saw today understood pretty clearly which where my thoughts, judging on how loud they screamed at me after noticing the way I was looking at them. Cotechino with mashed potatoes, I love "cotechino con la lingua" (the one with the tongue pieces inside) more than the plain classic cotechino. Brassicas are starting to show, if cooked well they have nothing to envy to summer vegetables, if cooked badly they are the worst stuff on earth. Roasted chestnuts, this is the flavor that screams autumn for me. Marrons glacés, they are a guilty pleasure limited to autumn, otherwise my name would be Ted Zeppelin. Focaccia veneziana, the typical enriched bread of this land, which I love more than panettone. Teo

You mean the goal of all those wild ducks is not ending up as my dinner? That's depressing. Teo

You can flavor it with: - cinnamon + grated orange zest; - nutmeg + grated lemon zest; - coriander seeds and Sichuan pepper; - sesame and tamarind (sub 0.5 cup of oatmeal with sesame seeds, add tamarind paste to taste to the chocolate mixture). Teo

Depends on the troll, some are worth the money: https://www.birrificiotroll.it/ (no English version, people in this country will never learn) Teo

Price is great, too bad I live in another continent or I would be up for this. Teo

I don't have a good trusted recipe for torta della nonna, sorry. I've never been a fan of baked pastry cream, so I never tried making it at home. I never made it in a professional setting neither, since the bosses where I cooked considered it "too simple". From my experience, you get the best results for baked pastry creams when you use a "fluid gel" recipe. Usually pastry cream is a standard gel: you cook it on the stove till gelification and you are done. When after this you bake it, you end up ruining its silky texture (this is why I never liked it). The "fluid gel" version is made using about double weight of starches, so after the stove passage you get something thick like a brick; you let it cool to fridge temperature, then run it in a food processor, similar to what you do with the fluid gels in modernist cuisine (where they gel something with agar, get a brittle gel, then run it in a food processor until they get a silky fluid gel). With this method you get a silky pastry cream that can stand baking without getting ruined in a noticeable way. Don't overmix, or you end up liquifying the pastry cream. If you try this method then use 50% corn starch and 50% rice starch, avoid wheat flour as hell. I don't have my database on this laptop, so I can't copy a recipe. By memory it should be something like this (can't swear): 80 g egg yolks 80 g sugar 25 g corn starch 25 g rice starch 0.5 u vanilla bean 500 g milk So medium / high amount of yolks. Teo

My answer would be this. I would be interested in local food, but also would like to advantage of all the diversity (something we lack here). But this answer just depends on each different person. I know people that would be interested only in local food, others that would steer really far from British food just for a dumb prejudice. So your best course of action would be asking in advance to the people you are going to guide, then plan accordingly to their tastes / needs. If you are going to offer your tours on a website, then you should offer the various possibilities, so you show that it's not "take this or shut up" and people have room for their tastes. Teo

You can make a big batch of frolla (6x, 8x or more), divide it in single portions (flat discs, about 1 cm width), wrap them in cling wrap, freeze them (raw dough). If you have a vacuum machine, you can prepare a big batch of pastry cream base: you mix yolks, sugar, starches, milk, vanilla (or whatever ingredients are called by the recipe you use), divide them in single portion in sous vide bags, seal the bags, freeze them. When you want to prepare the crostata you just need to pick a portion of raw frolla and one of pastry cream base from the freezer, let them defrost, then roll the frolla and cook it, cook the pastry cream, assemble the crostata. Teo

Probably because you are looking at the wrong recipes... If you are looking at recipes found on the internet then you should be much more careful about choosing which sites to read. There are tons (the vast majority) of food sites that write low quality stuff. KA is proofed after shaping and before baking, as are all leavened items, it's the very definition for a leavened item. The very definition for traditional KA is using salted butter in the inclusion, that's what they did when the recipe was created, that's what they still do in Brittany. A recipe that does not state this basic stuff is totally unreliable. You said you read KA recipes where they call for not salt or added salt in the inclusion, this means no one of those recipes specified that fact about salted butter. You had better to delete from your memory all those recipes, their are faulty. This is a clear example of all the crap that can happen online. KA was totally unknown outside Brittany up to about 10 years ago. Then some pastry shops in Paris started making it. Then it reached the USA and became famous through Dominique Ansel. Then lots of people jumped on the bandwagon without checking what they were doing, writing lots of crap. You can notice this just checking if they talk about salted butter. If they don't, then it's just a recipe copied from another recipe copied from another one copied from another one, all of them wrong. Just because "everyone makes KA now, so I need to add it to my site to be cool". I strongly suggest you to check better your sources and not trust everything you find on internet, since the vast majority of the stuff you find on internet is unreliable crap. Best thing you can do is building some solid foundations reading some quality books, like the one by Hamelman. When you shape a bread you press out almost all the gas that formed during the previous fermentation stage (if there was one), so you need another fermentation stage to let the dough form gas inside it and leaven again. I prefer to not know where you read a recipe that called for baking a bread just after shaping it and without the proper fermentation stage. I repeat, I strongly suggest you to check your sources. Which means avoiding most of the stuff on internet and reading reliable sources (mostly books by reliable professionals). Teo

I would say it's more to save time and work. Lower costs for the professionals, easier to reproduce for the home cooks. It affects texture too, but in a minor way. During each fermentation (if done correctly) the microbes consume carbs and not proteins (they consume proteins if the setting is wrong, mainly low pH, but since it's wrong it's not what you want to happen). This means you end up with less sugar and starches, while keeping the same amount of gluten. You just need to check the weight of the dough before proofing it and after proofing it, it looses a sensible % of weight (solids that are transformed in gases). If you proof a dough, punch it down, proof it again, punch it down, proof it again, you end up with a different starch / gluten ration than if proofing it only once, so you end up with different texture too. But this is a side effect, not the reason why people create recipes with one single fermentation. The difference is in the lamination (what you include in the dough and how you do it), not in the dough itself. The base dough for croissant, kouign amann, pain au chocolat and pain au raisins is the same. What's different is the rest of the process. You need to look as laminated doughs as 2 different phases: the dough (which is the phase that's going to proof) and the inclusion (which will act as a barrier between the layers). They are laminated, not mixed, so they remain separated. Osmotolerant yeast is used when you need yeast cells thatcan survive with high osmotic pressure. The higher the % of sugar and salt (compared to the free water) in a recipe, the higher the osmotic pressure. When osmotic pressure exceeds a certain value the yeast cells are going to die (osmotic pressure destroys their cell walls), this value depends on the yeast strain. Osmotolerant yeasts are the ones that can survive to higher osmotic pressure than the other yeasts, but they have their limits too. Seems like you are confusing something. What's fundamental is the final proof, the one you make after shaping the bread / pastry and before baking. That's done for every kind of leavened product. The difference is if there is a pre-ferment, a levain or else, meaning the fermentation stages are more than 1. But you can't think as the final fermentation as a number and the pre-ferment/else as another number. The final proof is the real and fundamental one, it's not the first or the second or whatever. You can add more fermentation processes before that, but you can't call one of them first and the other second. Simply because the fundamental one is the last, not the first. Proofing times are guidelines, not a rule. Each batch has different times, you need to get the due experience and learn how to check if the dough id perfectly proofed, you can't base this decision on a timer. The extra salt is added in the inclusion. The inclusion has almost no effect on proofing times. Fermentation happens in the dough, not in the inclusion, they are two different and separated phases. Teo

If you don't have an ice-cream machine then you can make a fake ice-cream: freeze the ice-cream / sorbet base (ice cube trays are the better choice for this), then run the frozen base in the Vitamix. Not exactly ice-cream (overrun is almost null) but a good substitute. If you like Nutella then you can make your own version starting from quality ingredients you like. There's not a real single recipe, everything depends on personal tastes, so you need some tries to find the ingredient balance you prefer. Teo