teonzo

When you deal with fiordilatte (or "white bases" in general) much depends on how you cook the milk and cream. If you can source raw milk and raw cream (or only raw milk and then separate the cream) and are willing to take a risk, then you can mix milk+cream+sugar at refrigerator temperatures (use an immersion blender to help the sugar to dissolve), then churn it. You'll get the best tasting fiordilatte you'll ever experienced, not because of texture, freezing point depression or else, but simply because you started with the best tasting ingredients. If you don't want to take a risk then you can start from pasteurized milk and cream, then proceed as above. Without heating milk and cream you avoid ruining their taste (industrial pasteurization is a light and quick process). If you cook your base to include stabilizers or whatever reason, then you are going to kill its taste. For many reasons professionals prefer to cook the base (sanitary reasons are the main concern), but at home you are free to do whatever you want without following HACCP protocols. Teo

I always pictured you with blue hair... Don't know if I'm disappointed or what else. Teo

You can make a risotto with cantaloupe and capers. I posted the recipe here time ago. This is a favourite of mine, so much that I already planned to make it tomorrow. If you like it then you can vac-pack (diced pulp + rind pieces) what you need for a serving for you and Ronnie, then freeze it. You can put the pulp in a blender, blitz it to get a puree, then freeze it. This puree can be used for sorbets (don't know if you have an ice-cream machine). Or as a base for a fruit salad: you pour the cantaloupe puree in a dish, then add diced fruit (what you want, apples, pears, peaches, cucumbers, watermelons, any berries...). If you have a bit of experience then you can candy the diced pulp, similar way as what you do to candy citrus peels. After candying you can can them with their syrup. Candied melon is the base for calissons. You can also make cantaloupe jam. If you like licorice, then it pairs really well with cantaloupe. Teo

Here are some titles that may be of interest: Andoni Luis Aduriz - Mugaritz. Puntos de fuga Juan Mari + Elena Arzak - Arzak + Arzak Jérôme Banctel - Jérôme Banctel : La Réserve Paris Jeremy Charles - Wildness: An Ode to Newfoundland and Labrador Bart De Pooter - Biotope: Pastorale Klaus Erfort - Drei Sterne Alexandre Gauthier - Alexandre Gauthier, Cuisinier Paolo Griffa - Petit Royal Willem Hiele - Sea Fire / Zeevuur Daniel Humm - Eleven Madison Park: The Next Chapter, Revised and Unlimited Edition Kei Kobayashi - Kei 2 Paco Morales - Noor Josh Niland - The Whole Fish Cookbook: New Ways to Cook, Eat and Think Nathan Outlaw - Restaurant Nathan Outlaw Karen Torosyan - Secrets et techniques d'un cuisinier orfèvre David Toutain - David Toutain Edwin Menue - Cuines, 33 Heiko Nieder - The Restaurant Ana Ros - Sun and Rain Blaine Wetzel - Lummi: Island Cooking I haven't seen any, so can't comment. Teo

Personally I don't see much sense in using pectin for peach jam. Neither for freezing it, canning is less of a hassle. If you do it right, peach jam is pretty thick, really no need for pectin unless you want to end with a brick. To do a jam you need to cook it, so canning it takes just the time to pour it in the jars, close the lids, turn upside down and keep them upside down for 30 minutes to be sure. Jams don't have the same dangers as other preserves, you do not pressure canning for safety precautions. You just need pasteurization. Start from hot jars, to do so you can put them in the oven at 120° C / 250 F, or heat them in the microwave, your goal is for them to reach around 100° C / 212 F. Jars need to be hot when you pour the jam in them, so you need the correct timing. After pouring the jam in the jars, close them with lids (well washed, no need to heat them) and turn the jars upside down. Keep them upside down for 30 minutes or a bit more. Keeping them upside down will pasteurize the lids. If the jars are closed properly you won't risk anything. Since you are going to pour the jam in the jars anyway (even if you freeze it) then there is not much sense to choose the freezer way, it's wasted money (electricity to run the freezer) and wasted quality (freezing it will cause a quality loss). To make peach jam I use this method: - peel the peaches, cut them in half to eliminate the stone, cut the pulp in small dices (5 mm / 1/4 in) - weigh the peach pieces, add 60% sugar, mix gently with a spatula - cook until they reach a boil, turn off the heat and leave undisturbed for about 12-24 hours - cook the jam to 105° C / 221 F and pour it in the jars. The cooking in 2 stages is for osmotic reasons, the sugar syrup will penetrate the peach pieces, the result will be peach pieces that are semi-candied, dispersed in the thickened syrup. Teo

That's a technique used for "ovis molis", one of the many traditional cookies here. The cooked yolks give a really tender texture, you do not even need to chew, they dissolve as soon as you put them in the mouth. Beware we are talking about biscotti tyoe stuff, here in Italy biscotti is the general term, what you call biscotti in the USA is just a single product. Our biscotti are in the family of shortbread, so the texture is different to what you call cookies. Teo

Teo

You should be fine with sponge cakes and chiffons. Don't change the leavener content or you will risk troubles. My experience with brownies is almost null, it's not a product that suits the market here. Cocoa fat will freeze hard as a rock, so it won't be one helping brownies to remain chewable. The reasoning is the same as for ice-cream: you want to avoid free water, you want your water to be bound with something that lowers the freezing point (sugars), you want air bubbles, you try to avoid stuff that freezes hard like cocoa butter. I would suggest you to give a look at some of the books by US (or Australian) artisan ice-cream makers. These are some names that come to mind: Big Gay Ice Cream Ample Hills Creamery: Secrets and Stories from Brooklyn’s Favorite Ice Cream Shop The Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream Salt & Straw Ice Cream Cookbook I never bought them so I can't say much about their contents. But usually most US artisans produce convoluted flavors like chocolate chip cookies and so on. So you should be able to find some recipes and informations in those books. Maybe you are lucky and your local library has some of them. Keep far from books from Italy, France and Spain, you will not find anything similar here. Teo

I confess my total ignorance. This will be corrected soon. I'll add some elderflower cordial, just to be sure. Teo

I dare to say that beer is the best fuel for a pissing contest. Teo

Sorry, but this typo made me laugh. Teo

I don't have direct experience, since here in Italy there's not much request for complicated ice-cream flavors. Most ice-cream for sale is the simple one flavor type (pistachio, hazelnut, lemon, so on). The most complicated one is tiramisu, where the savoiardi are put on top of the bowl, not as inclusions. Having said this, your goal is to avoid the icy texture on the palate. The main culprit is water of course, but you need to avoid butter in "big" pieces too. If you want something cookie like then you need stuff with low free water and no big pieces of butter. So it's better to double bake these inclusions: first time you do your normal bake, let them cool, then bake again at about 260-270 F to dry them. This way you eliminate almost all the free water. Avoid the method used for pie crusts in the USA (big chunks of butter in the dough, then it gets rolled). Your best bet is going with the sablé method: mix flour and butter until you get a sandy texture, then add the other ingredients. Stuff with lots of small air bubbles freezes well, meaning it's still "soft" at frozen temperature thanks to all the air bubbles and the small width of the dough "walls" around the air bubbles. I'm talking about stuff like biscuit joconde and similars, if you freeze them they remain pliable even at frozen temperatures (not as pliable as at room temperature, but still pliable). Angel food cake should be the same. I would keep far from stuff like pound cakes, the few times I tried eating a frozen piece it was not pleasant. Teo

This seems like a business suicide. Especially the owner's message copied in the first link ("we dont use commercial pectin..."). Every professional chef should know about mycotoxins, it's the basic stuff anyone who works in a professional kitchen is expected to know. Every commis is expected to know the basics of sanitations and risks. Let alone the head chef and owner. Saying she ate the remainings of some jam that got mold on the surface is just like shooting herself in the feet, it means admitting she opened a business without knowing the due procedures. Plus all the other stuff. "We don't use sweeteners" and "we use about half the sugar you'll find in a typical supermarket jam" can't be read on the same post. "A low sugar jam is more susceptible to the growth of mold"... not exactly, to reach gelification point you need to reach the same Brix concentration, which means almost the same sugar content in the final product, which means almost the same aW, which means almost the same risks. People should triple and quadruple check what they write before posting while dealing with this kind of mess. Teo

When you fold egg whites / meringue in a batter then your goal is that the whites have the same consistency of the base batter. If it's so, then it will be much easier and faster to mix them. If the whites are harder then it's more difficult to mix them, because they are hard and give resistance to incorporating the base. So you end up mixing more, thus deflating them. This is a common mistake made by non professionals, because the natural thing to think is "the harder the whites, the most difficult for them to deflate", while the reality is the exact opposite (it's counter-intuitive). So always be careful about the source you are using, in this case youtube: it's full of people that look reliable, but give out bad infos. Always better to look at professional sources, not much for the recipes, but for techniques and explanations. That's a possibility, it's impossible to say from this far. Youtube videos are edited. So who knows if what people are showing is the real stuff. Teo

Adding some sugar to the egg whites when you beat them is a good idea, you are already doing this. The problem should be in how much you beat your egg whites. You talk about stiff peaks and firm peaks, that's too much. You need to reach soft peaks and not more. If your whites are soft then it's much easier to fold them into the base. If they are hard then you need to fold much more, deflating them and ending up with a runny batter. So try beating your whites much less, just until they reach soft peaks. Be careful when you fold them, you need the correct movement and folding the less possible. It's impossible to explain this by words, try looking at some videos by professionals. Teo

I'll bring dessert, thanks. Teo

I'm totally ignorant about this. Can you summarize what happened please? Teo

That's another good one. There are many quality books out there, the last 10 years were pretty good for this. Another couple of names besides the ones made by the other eGulleters: Chad Robertson (Tartine Bread, Tartine Book 3), Peter Reinhart (depends on what you want to learn). It's hard to choose one over the others, all are high quality. The choice depends mainly on what they deal with. Usually people suggest Hamelman because he covers almost everything, so if you start with that you get the best foundations. After that it depends on what you want to explore. Personal question: did you end up marrying Penelope Pitstop? Teo

Cutting wires tend to break with frozen dough. Especially if there are inclusions like chocolate chips or nut pieces. Plus it's hard to go straight if you don't have a guitar type machine. If you want to do it safely and with good precision, then I suggest this. Go to your hardware store and ask for a sort of plastic half pipe, with a U shaped section. They should have a wide selection of section shapes (half circle, rectangle with 3 sides, oval, so on) and measures. The dough should be agle to rest in the pipe without moving, the pipe sides should go over the dough. When you find the correct half pipe for your needs, you ask to make an indentation on one side with a saw: the indentation should be as large as your knife blade. It should reach the bottom side of the pipe, without cutting it through of course, so your knife can cut the dough till the end. The indentation should be made near the end of one side of the pipe, at the exact width of the cookies you want to cut. So you just need to lay the dough on the pipe, so it's in line with the end of the pipe with the indentation, cut the cookie with the knife, go on. This way you get exact cuts and don't risk your fingers. Teo

Gave a look, been disappointed, left it there. Teo

Much depends on what your goals are. Commercial yeast or sourdough / levain / natural starter / howyoucallthat? Are you going to look for your "perfect" loaf then repeat it? Or do you prefer to be creative and go for the weird stuff? The best book to start is "Bread" by Jeffrey Hamelman. It gives you a great overview on the basics and most of the techniques. With bread is better to reason in baker's percentages, the transformation in metric is immediate, but reasoning in baker's percentages is much more useful. If you want to go sourdough and be creative, then I suggest "The Sourdough School" by Vanessa Kimbell, it's overlooked but really well done, both about explanations and recipes. Teo

The best way to remain in business is making the best product possible and giving the best customer service possible. If they are not willing to listen to this kind of constructive suggestions to improve their product, well, then they can't complain if their sales are tanking. Teo

You should contact their customer service, asking to implement these ideas in one of their next firmware updates. They should be open to these suggestions, since you help them making a better product. Teo

I did not know you were a prince, so I bow down. Teo

You can see it as a seasoning. Most of the times the only "seasoning" you see in pastry is a pinch of salt. But seasonings can serve in pastry as they serve in savory. Small amounts of peppers, acids, MSG and so on can make a good difference for the final product. If you add a bit of white pepper (not to detect clearly its presence) to strawberry sorbet then you enhance it. If you add a pinch of MSG to nut cookies then you enhance them. Acids help to cut fats and brighten the flavor, so on. Teo