jmacnaughtan

Looks good! Your sponge looks a lot different from the dacquoises I'm used to making - would you mind sharing the recipe?

Seems logical

What would you flavour a Day of the Dead cake with? Please don't say Mezcal.

Is that brown sugar crumb just pure brown sugar? I know I enjoy eating the lumps in brown sugar myself, but I'm not sure I'd have the courage to put them straight on a cake...

That's a French-style flan, like you see in every bakery here. They're built to be sturdy enough to take a slice out of and eat out of hand. Normally, it's just pastry cream baked in puff pastry, but you frequently see it with apricot or coconut. It's the first time I've seen it with blueberries. Looks good, though

Pure white silicon kitty litter with some distilled water works as a good humidifier. I've never used it with brown sugar, but it's a great way of keeping humidity up - I use it in my electric wine cellar, and it works like a charm. I got the tip from a cigar forum - if you need to know anything about humidity, technical cigar threads are a good place to start. And stop, quickly, before they drown you in tedious, tedious detail.

The only proper way to cut a doughnut is with your teeth.

That sounds like a tattoo if ever I heard one. Or an epitaph.

Ah, I understand. I used to be the same, looking for extremely big flavours. I think it's partly food TV that's put me off - TV chefs and critics always wanting to be punched in the face with flavours. I think I just don't enjoy being punched in the face any more...

Interesting. I used to do that a lot, until I realised that what I really wanted wasn't actually a dessert that tasted (for example) like a really intense pear, lemon or piece of chocolate (because I can get that by eating a properly ripened pear or a piece of good chocolate, and lemon on its own is not great), but rather one that tasted like a really good pear, lemon or chocolate dessert. I get more pleasure out of harmonising these flavour elements with sugar, fat, starch, etc. now than going to great lengths to amplify them.

Just curious- how many portions are on this plate? If it's just one, I'm impressed.

@rarerollingobject, that squid looks good. I celebrated my 30th on Saturday, so I decided to have a bit of a party and get 20 or so people around the table. Most of the cooking was outsourced - the star of the show was a 7kg suckling pig, with a leg of lamb and two racks of ribs, all spit-roasted by my obliging butcher To pre-empt any questions: - There were some leftovers, but not as much as I expected from more than 10kg of meat. - Suckling pigs are harder to carve as they seem, even when relatively sober. - I regret to say there are no photos of the cheese platters or dessert. The hands taking the photos had become somewhat unstable and greasy. - And yes, those are all magnums of wine. Mostly Burgundy and Champagne, and a jeroboam each of Bordeaux and Rosé for the apero (not in the photos). I refuse to have anything smaller than that on my table

I've recently been hooked on the vintage French cooking videos from the INA archives on Youtube, so I thought it would be a good time to bump this thread. Has anyone seen this technique before? Here, Paul Bocuse removes all the tendons in a turkey's legs using a broom handle (start watching at the 10' mark). Excellent video. Obviously, it is in French, but hey. It's Bocuse!

Yeah, I know it's rhetorical. I'll still answer Cook the asparagus and the broth separately. Blanched or charred tips/stems in a clear broth would look pretty...

Ah, OK. So do you do anything to counter the sweetness of the caramel and the pears? In my experience, they don't have much in the way of acidity. But with pork they should be excellent

It looks interesting. And this may be a silly question, but are these pears destined for sweet or savoury purposes?

Wow. That's something I've never seen before. How do you stop it sticking?

If you have digital scales, then it's just as easy to weigh the ingredients as to wing it. You do need to use instinct when dealing with fruit and other fresh products - they vary enormously, even within the same variety. But for structural ingredients like flour, eggs, etc. it's not worth the hassle. Find a decent recipe and stick to it. Use your intuition to work out when to take it out of the oven

I like those. I'm not sure how you'd going about preserving the shape, unless you wanted to slice a "steak" out of it and prepare it whole. Recently, I've been tempted to do that myself - brown it off in butter, then braise it in stock. With any luck, you could preserve some of the texture. What I frequently enjoy doing is slicing it (whole) quite thinly, frying off the slices and layering them with equally finely sliced tomatoes. Bake slowly for a couple of hours, then top with breadcrumbs fried with... whatever you want, really. Bacon is good.

They may be. But you've got some big flavours jousting on that dessert... I'd be interested to see how you put them together. In any case, my problem with cardamom is that it tends to be way too powerful. In the original recipe for this topic, the poster uses "a couple" of cardamom pods for a chocolate mousse, which seems an enormous quantity. If I was doing it, I would take it down to just one or two of the seeds within the pods. You'd still get the aroma, but without that mouth-wash astringency.

Cheese.

A little smaller than the white chocolate leviathan above, but there were only four of us... Apricot Fraisier Genoise soaked in muscat syrup Whipped muscat curd Dried apricots reconstituted in reduced muscat Gariguette strawberries Marzipan Hedgehog (optional)

If you're having trouble getting it out in one piece, you could try chilling it before unmoulding. Cakes are always much more fragile when warm, so if it's down to fridge temperature it will be more robust.

I disagree. A lot of the skirt you get here is closing in on an inch thick in places, and it's excellent rare. It's one of the few cuts I enjoy blue, mostly because there's so little fat

Agreed. Just make sure it has plenty of fat in it to keep it moist. I used to have my côte de boeuf (rib steak? Beef rib joint? The part that the ribeye comes from...) rare, and have come around to having it medium, even slightly well done. It's a big piece of meat - normally around 1.2kg - with a lot of different muscles, so you'll get very well done on some, then progressively rarer as you get towards the bone. This might be an option - when you carve, serve your wife the more done parts (which are still delicious), and keep the pinker meat for yourself. And then, preferably when she's left the table, attack the bone