SethG

Thank you for that wonderful course. Very eye-opening and educational.

Not only is it a moral obligation, it is also a pretty common thing to see these days! I would say it's at the very least the norm now for any book containing flour measurements to at least state how many ounces equal a cup. The CIA would hardly be going out on a limb to provide weights as well as volumes. Their policy is simply inexcusable. Very disappointing. Also, and this is not a complaint, it's funny to see an event to publicize a book for home cooks in which the demonstrations all appear to be done in restaurant quantities! Thanks for the excellent report.

Whew, what a relief! You do live in California, so it didn't seem out of the realm of possibility. "Suckering" sounds like a treatment many tourists get at the airports here in NYC. "Hey lady, need a hand with that bag?" Also, I keep meaning to mention that your photo of Vinyard Drive makes me very jealous.

Mine looks pretty much just like that (but with cherries instead of cranberries, thanks for the suggestions, folks!). It's sitting in my fridge awaiting baking tomorrow. I halved the recipe, which seems to be working out fine so far. It may have made the mixing easier. I didn't really need to do much scraping down, and my mixer wasn't strained at all. I'm really looking forward to tasting this. "Leap of faith" is the perfect description.

That's a totally legit way of going about sourdough breadmaking. I was just commenting on what it appeared Bertolli was trying to get you to do. I don't know if Bertolli mentions this, but you can freeze pate fermentee for at least a month. Just something else you might want to try.

I missed 'rye's original question, but it looks to me like he should have definitely discarded the extra starter. I don't have Bertolli's book, but it appears he uses a typically French method where the starter, once established, is used to make dough, and then a piece of that dough becomes "old dough," or pate fermentee, for new breads. Seems like 'rye figured it out.

Congratulations! How about a picture?

Tell me, oh wait, maybe it is, maybe it isn't... Is that pizza whole wheat?

You guys are ahead of me. My fruit is macerating tonight. Focaccia will be served Wednesday.

Great pictorial essay! I LOVE your fridge (and the rest of it too). And those waders! Or whatever you call them.

I am aware of the inverse relationship between onion sweetness when raw and sweetness when cooked. However, I gotta tell you that the Vidalias I roasted last night were tremendous! When I roast a chicken, I usually wedge up some onion and some fennel and toss the wedges into the skillet in which I cook the chicken. If I turn the wedges over halfway through, the edges get caramelized with chicken fat, and the rest of the onions, while cooked through, are dried out a little but not usually browned. (I roast them for about an hour and ten or fifteen at 400 degrees.) So I'm familiar with how standard yellow onions react to this treatment-- they react very well! But I think the Vidalias were, if anything, even better. The aroma was really great and I thought the flavor remained quite sweet. My wife and I just gobbled them up. I can't explain it. Maybe because the onions really don't end up cooked that much? I certainly wouldn't try to completely caramelize them. But I don't think I can agree that cooking Vidalias at all is a mistake.

I just bought a big bag of Vidalias. We put some in tuna salad for lunch, and I've got some Vidalia wedges roasting in a pan with a chicken right now. I want to get the most out of these sweet things. Tell me what you like to do with them. (There are numerous Vidalia mentions on eGullet but I have found no thread devoted to the subject.) Also: I saw a cooking contest show recently that was taped in the south. And on the show a few different folks pronounced it "Vie-day-lee-aah." I had always assumed it was "Vih-dah-lee-aah." Given that the onion is grown in Georgia I'm inclined to believe the southerners on the cookoff show were right. How do you pronounce it?

Okay, I haven't read through every page of this thread, but I bet this is a new one. I will never again.... well, it's complicated. Yesterday I grabbed a can of powdered infant formula off the shelf in order to mix up a bottle for my son, but as I reached into the can for the scoop, my hand was suddenly submerged in something gooey. So I looked down and saw that instead of the can of infant formula, I had mistakenly grabbed (and had now stuck my hand into) a nearly full can of solid crisco vegetable shortening. I won't be doing that again.

I'm in. I would never try it on my own, so it's a perfect choice. The recipe says the dried fruits can be varied, and my wife is no fan of cranberries. Any ideas for a substitute dried fruit?

This is what I've always thought, too. Maybe Paula will drop in and set us straight as to what her opinion is.

Paula Wolfert makes reference to Davis in her latest book, The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen (eGullet credit link). Wolfert is an admirer of Davis' work, but she cautions against using some of Davis' methods today, because some of these slow cooking techniques can result in massive bacterial growth. Some of the recipes in Wolfert's book attempt to get Davis' results without some of the dangers. Edit: I'm loving the blog, by the way.

I feel used.

Cherries have just hit New York's markets in the past week, although they're still expensive. Any favorite cherry creations? (By the way, I noticed in one of nightscotsman's photos that his strawberries-- from Driscoll's-- are the same ones I get in NYC! I think they taste like styrofoam. Do they taste better after they're macerated in sugar? Does the quality matter less when they're glazed? I mean no insult to the Bellagio; I'm asking in all seriousness.)

Jan! Good work! What kind of wine did you use?

ludja, this thread is a great idea! I made a rhubarb upside-down cake a couple weeks ago (from Baking With Julia). Anyone with his or her thinking cap on can find a picture of it somewhere on eGullet, but there's no way I'm posting a pic of that ugly cake here after nightscotsman's photos! I'd love to hear of other people's favorite pies/tarts to follow the seasons. I'm going to take a look at that Patricia Wells raspberry thing. What else should we be making right now? In the northeast U.S., the rhubarb seems to be disappearing, and the strawberries still suck. This has dimmed my enthusiasm for a rhubarb/strawberry pie.

I apologize, everyone. As the originator of this thread, I feel a moral responsibility to bake every proposed dish, but I've now flaked out two weeks in a row. It's not that I haven't been baking, I have. I've actually been sort of insanely baking, several different loaves of bread a day, part of a sort of personal project I've undertaken to bake every bread under the sun before I return to work on June 1. But an unintended consequence has been my neglect of the thread which gave birth to my baking, the metaphorical apes who raised me in the baking jungle. You have my pledge. I will catch up this weekend. Danish, genoise, even pebble bread (I stumbled across some barley flour the other day). Meanwhile, no need for anyone else to wait for me. Anyone want to do anything in particular this weekend?

Was that the new U.S. version, or the old U.K.? If the former, how quickly some people give up. If the latter, that's really a find! (But I warn you, there are a few errors in it. ) It's the US edition. A review copy found at the Strand (main store).

Somebody stop me. I purchased: Bread Alone, Daniel Leader The Village Baker, Joe Ortiz Classic Sourdoughs, Ed Wood The Baker's Dozen Cookbook The Splendid Table, Lynne Rossetto Kasper and The Whole Beast, Fergus Henderson. All of 'em used except for Classic Sourdoughs.

I've been falling down on the job this week. Somebody proposed genoise a few days ago. I would suggest the French Strawberry Cake (p.273), except that strawberries aren't really in season here in New York, and the ones that are currently on sale taste like ass. What about Glazed Mini-Rounds (p.271)?

The wife and I had a very nice dinner at Veritas last night, accentuated by the fact that it was our first night out to dinner since, I think, last December. We had no trouble with the wine service. We found ourselves in a sort of purgatory between the restaurant's excellent "Market" list, which contains great value choices, and the "Reserve" list, which contained page upon page of wines we couldn't afford. I wanted Burgundy, mostly because I figured that if a restaurant exists where we were could get a relatively reasonably priced bottle and not fall prey to the all-too-common Burgundy letdown, this would be the place. We were directed to several choices around and below our cutoff of a hundred bucks (did I mention that this was our first night out since December?) and we settled on a 1999 Volnay from La Pousse d'Or, which I believe translates into English as "the golden puss." We were really happy with it. Others who actually know can tell me if we were directed well. As for the food, the foie gras appetizer and the short rib entree really stood out as the big winners of the evening. I opted for the cheese course, and I thought it was very nice, but the real highlight of the dessert for me was the Sauternes we ordered by the glass. I'd never tasted Sauternes before, and I'm not really a dessert wine kind of guy, but I left very impressed. I had forgotten how ugly the room is at Veritas. But it is intimate and pretty quiet. We had a very good time.