Judy Wilson
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Posts posted by Judy Wilson
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Frank said:
I could certainly agree with JG at the trump. Make sure to try out the Prix Fixe lunch at nougatine (its inside JG). Best damn lunch for 27 Bucks you can get in the city me thinks.
I really like Nobu and The Atelier by Joel Robuchon @the four seasons.
Here is a link to simple review and Pixs i took at The atelier.
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.119738126490.113180.501571490&type=1
Thanks for the pics, Frank! Now I'm drooling all over my keyboard!
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Recently, a curious reader wrote in to ask:
How long in advance can I season and vacuum prep meat prior to water bath cooking? Specifically - beef filet purchased on Saturday, with intention of serving the following Thursday.
Option 1: on Saturday, I salt it, vacuum seal it, and leave it in the fridget until Thursday. Then I drop it in the sous vide surpreme for an hour, sear and serve. This is the most convenient approach for me as a harried office worker trying to get dinner on the table weeknights, but I worry that the extended time with the salt will damage the texture of the meat.
option 2: on Saturday, salt, vaccuum AND cook. Then put cooked meat in fridge until Thursday, when I warm it up a bit, sear then serve. This seems to be the commonly used option for advance prep, but the double-warming is extra effort.
Option 3: vacuum seal the meat. Don't do the salt or prep until Thursday when I'm about to cook. Involves two rounds of vaccuming, not as convenient, but will this give the best overall finished product and be safest health-wise?
Hope you can help, even though this is clearly a question from a household cook as opposed to a professional cook!
What has worked best for you guys?
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A while ago, someone wrote in to ask:
I own your very interesting set of books. Please advise who makes the vaccuum covers for the hotel gastronom type containers you show for storing berries under vacuum. They do not appear to be made by fooodsaver whose machine is shown on the opposite page.
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I tried making this the other day. I don't have a vacuum sealer, so I just used a ziplock bag. While I tried to get most of the air out of it, the bag shifted in the refrigerator, and all of the liquid that was sucked out of the fish fell into the opposite corner of where the fish was. As the corner with the liquid was actually hanging down, I was afraid that some of the cure had dripped down, and therefore, there was not enough cure on my salmon any more. As Maxime Bilet said on eGullet, you don't cook the salmon or anything after it's cured, and since it looks completely raw, I sort of freaked out and tossed it. This was my first time curing fish, so maybe it could have been fine, but better safe than sorry.
By the way, people will give you really weird looks if you accidentally tell them that you are planning on making "salmon-cured grapefruit." Even if they are chefs who worked on MC, though perhaps this was because when discussing what to do with leftover cheese water I had jokingly suggested ice cubes...yeah, I don't WHAT they must think of me.
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On the Cooking with 'Modernist Cuisine' on eGullet, there has been some confusion as to whether or not you are supposed to drain the mustard seeds before putting them in the food processor. You are, in fact, supposed to drain them, and we've added this to our errata page.
Some eGulleters, however, ended up liking the taste of the added vinegar, though they agreed it made the mustard too thin. Have any of you tried this yet? Did you leave the vinegar in or drain the seeds?
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In case you are curious about why there's more cheese than what is needed, Max also answered that in the same thread referred to above.
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Thanks to a discussion on eGullet, we noticed that some of the steps are incorrect in this recipe. We also noted this on the errata page, but for the record, the correction is as follows:
steps two and three should be replaced with "Combine in blender with cooked corn, and puree until smooth." In step eight, "Bake in 130 °C / 265 °F oven to core temperature of 88 °C / 190 °F" should read "Bake in 175 °C / 350 °F oven for 10 min, and then reduce oven temperature to 130 °C / 265 °F and bake to core temperature of 88 °C / 190 °F, about 20 min."
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Some people have had awesome results with this, and some people...not so much. On eGullet, Maxime Bilet gave some tips, such as making sure that the carrots are cored and the butter is melted first.
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Has anyone tried dehydrating in their oven? Over on eGullet, Maxime Bilet mentioned that you should calibrate it first, because you need a really, really low temperature:
"The most important thing is to calculate just how low your oven really goes (and not just how low it says it goes). You don‚’t want your oven to get above 80 °C / 176 °F to 90 °C / 194 °F."
Has anyone been able to get their oven to go this low?
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A couple months ago on eGullet, coauthor Maxime Bilet responded to a question about the best recipes for putting a thermomix to use. He suggested eggs or bases like ice cream or custard bases.
Anybody have one? If you don't, anybody have a recipe they really wished they had a thermomix for?
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Who has tried this? I've tried it twice and both times I've ended up mojito jelly, not spheres. I even have the benefit of being able to ask coauthor Maxime Bilet for tips...only to have him finally tell me it must have been some user error.
I should have taken pictures, but, well, I was kind of embarrassed!
I promise that next time I try them--and there will be a next time!--I'll take pics and post them here no matter the outcome.
If you did finally get spheres, I envy you. But, I am also curious to know how you served them. As Max noted on eGullet a couple months ago, they don't actually serve them in a cocktail glass at the cooking lab. The photo of the sphere in the glass in the book is purely to demonstrate the fizziness. So, how did you give them to your guests? -
A lot of people want to know how long this will keep. Coauthor Maxime Bilet answered this on eGullet a while back: "We can‚’t give you an exact time as we have not tested it ourselves. We do expect though that you will experience some syneresis, or ‚“weeping,” just as you do with any condiment kept in your fridge." He also suggests using a little xanthan gum to help this. Has anyone been keeping some stored in the back of their fridge? What's the result?
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A while back, someone wrote in to ask us:
"The section of vacuum filtering for essences/consommes I'm very intrigued by, but being charged by the L of water I use, the faucet aspirator although inexpensive may overall end up costing more due to the amount of water I use. So I've been looking and there are kit's being sold with the Buchner funnel, flask and all of the vacuum hoses and other accoutrements but they attach to a hand-held pump.
Unfortunately it doesn't give an idea of the PSI it's able to achieve or anything really and I was just wondering if you had any experience using these."
Anyone have any recommendations?
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One reader wrote to us to ask:
"I tried the kerala curry sauce (6-224). I tried to be as accurate as possible. Nonetheless I feel it didn't end the way it was supposed to be.
1. The recipe calls for curry leaves. I had dry ones. As I was pouring them I felt there were too many (5 grams!), then I thought, maybe they meant fresh curry leaves! Is that correct?
2. Second, my "sauce" ended like a curry paste. THere was no way I could "simmer" this for 45 minutes. In an attempt to recover what was clearly a failure, I added 200 g more of coconut milk and that seem to have averted a total failure. I checked egullet and somebody seem to have had the same problem:
http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?/topic/136959-cooking-with-modernist-cuisine/page__st__840
scroll to find the posting by anna:
So it just seemed possible this morning to attempt an MC recipe and I chose the Goan Curry Sauce (page 224 of KM). [...] The last step in making the sauce is "Simmer for 45 minutes". At this stage of the recipe, and I followed it very closely, one ends up with a very small amount of "sludge"...
So it seems that there might be a "bug" in these recipes, or the variability in the ingredients is not making them work for some of us.
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Thanks again, for all the hard work,
daniel german"
From coauthor Maxime Bilet, and Anjana Shankar of the kitchen team, I received the following advice:
1. Yes, the curry leaves are supposed to be fresh. You can buy them at Indian or Asian grocery stores (personally, when I made the Masala curry, I bought mine at Uwajimaya in Seattle. Though I just tossed in the called for amount, I might have been better off chopping them up).
2. Thickness of sauce can depend on a variety of things, such as the actual heat of your range (even on low) and the width of your pan. How finely you chop the shallots called for in the recipe can also be a factor. While the goan sauce does indeed have an error in it (as noted on the errata page) in the amount of water, the amount of coconut milk called for in this recipe is correct. That doesn't mean that you can't use more, of course, especially if you are trying to balance out working with a particularly fickle stove, for instance.
Has anyone else found this recipe to be too thick?
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Has anyone had any experience with Sigma Aldrich? One reader wrote in to ask:
"I want to purchase the xanthan gum and other ingredients and the easiest supplier I can find (based in India) is Sigma Aldrich. Their products are for tissue culture use.
What is the difference between lab grade and food industry grade gums (including other gelling agents like alginate or carrageenan).
Is it safe to use sigma aldrich products in food?"
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Thanks for your patience, everyone! I'll come back and announce it here and in the "cooking with Modernist Cuisine" thread when the page is up.
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This reminds me of something that bothered me last summer. Walking through my neighborhood, I noticed a house (particular notice to me, because it bore the flag of my husband's alma mater's archrival, and it's basically in my marriage contract to hate this team), which had a little box garden on their easement. As summer progressed, I debated with myself the right or wrongness of stealing from this little garden. I decided that no, stealing is always wrong, but it just about killed me because not a single vegetable was picked by anyone. I watched them rot. Yellow squash, zucchini, tomatoes. All rotted.
So, is it better to watch a neglectful gardener let his or her veggies rot, or maybe pilfer some for yourself? Theoretically, of course.
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Hi. I feel like I know all of you, but you don't know me. My name is Judy, and I've been lurking on this site, watching your frustrations and victories, trying to soak up some of your cooking skills ever since I joined the Modernist Cuisine team about two months ago.
Finally I made my own account, because, well, I'm sick of lurking, and also, I wanted to point out that answered the questions regarding the salt in the pink brine last month:
5. nolnacs was puzzled over scaling. Why does the pink brine have a salt scaling of 10% but the other brines are 1%?
Pink brines need to be much stronger than other brines to achieve the full effect. Functionally, a pink brine is actually more of a liquid cure; it is called brine simply by convention. Our brining section (starting on page 3•152) provides all the details on brining to equilibrium and working with high-salt brines.
So, please don't readjust your scaling, Msk!
I worked very hard on that errata page, and if there was something wrong with the salt in the pink brine, I would probably remember.
Anyhow...feel free to send me any messages and let me know if you have any questions. My cooking skills aren't great--sure, I enjoy cooking, but that doesn't mean I can make mojito spheres. Yet.
[Modernist Cuisine] Caramelized Carrot Soup (3•301 and 6•150)
in Cooking
Posted
According to Anjana, who usually makes this at the lab dinners, coring the carrots is very necessary as the core is drier than the outer part of the carrots. We found that some readers who had trouble with the recipe might not have cored the carrots. She also advises that you make sure to melt the butter in the beginning.