teonzo

I love how they look and I love the flavor pairings, so I'm saving this and will try it in the future, thanks. Almond flour has no binding power (no available starches), so if you need to avoid wheat flour then it should be better to sub it with half almond flour and half rice flour (or cornstarch). Teo

I'm waiting for a video where you perform some teppanyaki wizardry. Teo

I will never again open eGullet after watching a Twilight Zone episode. Teo

You can spray them with cocoa butter. Teo

I don't see any surprise in that move by Michelin. It's a very different case from the usual chef leaving a 3* restaurant. The chef in a usual 3* restaurant is just directing the brigade, he/she is not executing any food and he/she has a sous chef who is able tu run the kitchen when the chef is away, maintaining the same levels. So when a chef leaves a 3* restaurant there's no risk for it going downhill. At The Araki it was the chef who executed all the crucial preparations, so after he left people can't know what to expect from the new chef: he can continue making 3* sushi as well as he can be making 2* or 1* or 0* level. When Michelin heard about the chef departure they had no time to make new visits, so based on their principles the more sensed choice was leaving out the restaurant from the guide. A sous chef taking the lead at a usual 3* restaurant is making a small jump, a sushi master assistant going chef is a much bigger jump. Teo

Nowadays it takes few time from when a technique is invented to when someone puts a video on youtube on how to do it. Just think about the spiderweb effect by Sattler. So you just need to wait a few weeks and you'll get an idea on how to do that technique on youtube. Then you calculate costs and realize it's doable only if your shop is in Paris and you are selling pastries for 100 eur / kg. All these social media star professionals (Penkina, Yuen, Tarasova...) are not selling pastries, they are there to sell their image. Making a great looking pastry is a thing, making a profitable and sellable one is definetely another one. Try calculating the final price for a viennoiserie by Peter Yuen, then ask yourself if you have enough customers willing to shell that price. Teo

Pears or apples are added when you need to "round" the taste of the main fruit when it's too sharp or similar reasons (passion fruit, lemon...). What sets the pate de fruits is the pectin (both in the fruit and the one you are adding), not the body of the fruit puree. Figs have a lot of body but you need lots of added pectin. You can make water pate de fruit if you want (water + sugars + pectin + acid). If you are starting from fresh fruit and not frozen purees (which is a great thing in my opinion, I don't like frozen purees), then you need to adapt each time. Only way is cooking a microbatch then adapt. If they are weeping then you need to add pectin. Which seems natural, since you wrote your fruit is juicer this year, this means the % of pectin in the fruit is much lower. Beware each fruit has different content of natural pectin, so you need to add different amounts of pectin for each different fruit, you can't base your recipes adding 25 g pectin each time for each fruit, for example blackberries on average have much more pectin than strawberries. No need to go over 106° C (223 F) in my experience (sea level). Teo

You are absolutely right! I was half joking because I really wanted to tear off that page with king Roux, I can't stand people taking themselves so seriously. I recalled how much I paid for the book and put it on the shelf. Haven't touched it from then because of my backlog combined to lack of time, for example my books of elBulli 2005-11 are still in the shrink wrap and I got it more than 5 years ago. I started reading an old confectionery book about 2 months ago and am about 1/3 of it... Teo

I thought she had a personal helicopter, I'm disappointed by this lack of toys. This seems like putting a neon sign on their forefront with written "PLEASE TROLL ME". I would go there with the sole intent of driving insane the pizzaman. Teo

I agree it's too expensive. Besides that, from what I saw she is a master in glazing techniques, not much on the rest. All those effects gives many side troubles during production: it takes much more time; you need to solve the problem of the excess glazes flowing down the cake, all the colors mix up and you can't be sure you will be able to re-use them for the cakes you are producing. Teo

Another synonym is "bean fueled". Teo

There's not much sense in using top quality dark chocolate for baked cookies. During baking the chocolate reaches relatively high temperatures, so most of the secondary and tertiary flavours (the ones that make the difference between good chocolate and great chocolate) go lost. It's better to avoid high percentage chocolates too, they risk to "burn". Usually pastry chefs choose good dark chocolate around 55%, keeping far from top quality 70%+. Teo

The voice of reason! I need to get past my obsession of keeping my books in pristine conditions. Time to pick this Sat Bains book off the shelves and finally read it. I remember liking the idea of the charts about the 5 tastes for each dish, unfortunately nobody followed this idea (at least I haven't seen any other book). Maybe I'll find the courage to tear away the page with "king" Roux, I found that photo really really sad, the book can only get better without it. Teo

That's probably the best looking restaurant book ever! I have similar feelings, I bought it when it came out years ago and still haven't read it, just for the fear of ruining it. I must remember to buy a pair of white silk gloves. Teo

A simple good sablé / shortbread would be my choice: 200 g flour 100 g butter 80 g brown sugar salt spices 20 g water Put flour and butter (really cold and diced) in a food processor. Blitz for few seconds until you have a fine powder, don't overdo. Add brown sugar, salt (a pinch) and spices (your choice, hard to go wrong). Blitz again for few seconds. Add water and blitz until you have a dough. Let it rest in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. Roll and cut in the desired shapes. Cook in a pre-heated oven at 340 F. You get a good crunch with this recipe. If you want it crumblier then use 120 g of butter instead of 100 g. Dried cranberries pair well with brown sugar and most spices. Teo

"If you gaze into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." Teo

Some more ideas. You can serve raw prawn heads, after all they are the more flavorful part of the animal. You can serve fish heads in various ways. Pig's head terrine is great too. Many years ago at a restaurant we had a dish in the menu called "il brodo che ti guarda" ("the broth that looks at you"), it was served in a bowl covered with a cloche, when the customer raised the cloche he faced a normal broth with inside a real beef eyeball (quite easy to get from the butchers since no one wants them). Tuna's eyeball are one of the best parts of the animal, unfortunately it's pretty difficult to get them. If you want to be really artsy, then follow the Giuseppe Arcimboldo way, maybe using beef tongue, black-eyed peas, ears of corn or orecchiette (translates as "little ears"), angel's hair pasta, pope's nose. Langues de chat for dessert. Or "middlefingers": you prepare a ladyfinger batter, then shape it like a closed hand with the middle finger. Mozart balls. Teo

Sorry to ruin the party, but that page is far from the real stuff. The peculiarity of brutti ma buoni is that the batter is cooked in a pot on the stove before the cookies are formed and cooked in the oven. It's that passage that gives the peculiar taste, texture and appearance of brutti ma buoni. That page totally missed the point. Teo

Beware if you invite someone from northern Italy, since "brut" means "ugly" in the dialects here (there's a famous scene from the cult movie "L'allenatore nel pallone"). You can prepare maltagliati (roughly translates as "badly cut"), you just need to roll some pasta at uneven width, cut it in random shapes, then serve it with whatever condiment you like. On the sweet side there are brutti ma buoni. Best possible thing would be asking @liuzhou to send you a pig face. Teo

You can study what happens when spraying cocoa butter for decorating molds: - which are the conditions when the adiabatic expansion and the agitation (happening when the cocoa butter exits the spray gun) allow the cocoa butter to get tempered and so on; - which are the best conditions (cocoa butter temperature, ai pressure in the gun, room temperature, mold temperature...) to get the best shine on bonbons, shine is dependant on surface rugosity, so it must depend on the particle size of cocoa butter that forms during spraying (the smaller the particles, the better shine). Every chocolatier has his/her own favourite settings for spraying cocoa butter, but as far as I know there's no research available on this. Teo

If you were using the correct chocolate temperature and you had no troubles with the following batch, then it can mean that some transfer sheets went out of temper while in storage. Maybe you stored them for a short period in a hot place and the ones that went out of temper were the ones on the top of the box. Or the courier did such a thing, after all we are just at the end of summer. So you should think about when you received those transfer sheets and where you stored them. Putting them in diagonal will end up with finished pralines without tails. All the ones in the photo have the big tails because of how they were placed. Putting them in diagonal will save you quite some time. Teo

You should see this person as a potential powerful ally, not as an enemy, even if you are right and he/she is wrong. His/her comment should be read like "I'm following every single detail of what you are doing because I REALLY CARE, you made this minor slip and I wanted to take the time to make you notice it". If this is his/her only complaint then it means that everything else is perfect even after being scrutinized with a magnifying glass, so you should be proud of it. And you should try to become friend with him/her: if he/she took the time to write you for such a minor detail, then if you befriend him/her he/she is going to be a living advertiser of your restaurant (for free), which is always the best form of advertising for every business. Teo

The oven method would work the same, after all it's just a time-temperature matter. The problem is that you would spend much more money for gas/electicity than with the usual stovetop method. Teo

@Paul Bacino, you should consider yourself really lucky since this story could have ended really badly. And you should take it as a lesson for the future. Foraging wild stuff is not a joke, you must be really careful and know what you are doing. Confusing phytolacca americana with sambucus nigra is a HUGE error, their fruits are really different. When foraging elderberries you must be really SURE of what you are doing. For example the fruits of sambucus ebulus are really similar to the ones of sambucus nigra (elderberries), big problem is that sambucus ebulus is poisonous. Elderberries are toxic when eaten raw, you must cook them, even after cooking it's better to eat them in small doses due to the diuretic effects. Please be much more cautious in the future. Teo

Strawberries and cream! Teo