melkor

The stainless lined all-clad pans like the Master Chef series are aluminum on the outside and stainless on the inside. Yes if you bring an aluminum+aluminum+stainless sandwich up to 1220*F it'll melt, warp, and generally screw your pan. Tin melts around 500*F, the copper exterior of the pan doesn't prevent a tin lined pan from losing its coating if you leave it empty on a burner set on high. Stainless steal conducts heat poorly compared to aluminum, in a configuration like the all-clad pans use, it will actually act to insulate the aluminum rather than to dissipate the heat. If you were to invert the pan on a flame, the aluminum exterior would act as an effective heat sink transfering the heat from the warm stainless layer to the air.

But these pots are not solid aluminum but a pure aluminum core that is fused between a brushed aluminum-alloy that must be able to take a higher heat than 663. I'd be willing to put a bet on it. ← The logic that by sticking something else to aluminum you can raise its melting point is completely absurd. That said, Aluminum melts at 660*C not F.

In the grand scheme of things, ducks and geese having too much to eat doesn't rank very high on the list of problems with modern food production. We've got downer cows ending up in the food supply. Factory chicken farms with beak-less chickens crammed into tiny cages stacked on top of each other. Dead chickens being processed for food. Poorly run salmon farms polluting our coastal waterways. Stocks of wild fish dwindling from over fishing. Never mind all the problems with agribusiness vegetable production. There's no shortage of responsibly raised veal - something has to happen with all the male offspring that are born on dairy farms. I'm sure that the geese and ducks that are raised on foie gras farms would rather be flying around free, but the same is true for any other animal raised for food. I'd much rather be a goose at a foie gras farm than a chicken at a Tyson's factory farm - though neither would let me be as snarky as just being myself, so I'll pass on both of those alternatives.

Sure other forms of meat can be produced more humanely, but they aren't. Chicken factories are far worse than foie gras farms, but no one seems to care.

Are you taking the pictures with a flash? When I've had the meat folding all over itself inside the casing the obvious lines were only there in the gaps and they looked deeper than yours do now. Are the lines as prominent in person as they are in the pictures? It looks like the lines stand out much more on the outside curve of the sausage than they do on the inside curve where they aren't visible. Whatever the story is, it doesn't affect how they taste and I'm out of ideas. Every time I read this thread I get motivated to cure more stuff. I think pepperoni is the next sausage on the list. I've got some wagyu brisket showing up next week for my 3rd batch of pastrami. The cure is still not making it all the way through the meat, even after curing the brisket for an additional 3 days. Any reasonably ideas before I go out and buy a big ugly meat injector thing?

It's just that the force meat is too firm to fill the casing smoothly so its folding rather than ending up a continuous length of meat. It being either too cold or too dry would be my guess for the cause.

Nope

It'll take an hour w/o traffic. Figure two hours if you are trying to get there for a 7pm table. There are plenty of things to do down that direction, it'll be much easier to spend the day in Santa Cruz/Los Gatos/etc than it will be to fight with rush hour traffic.

You can see them in Ron's pic from earlier in the thread - they look like cracks in the meat.

You'll find threading the casings onto the horn much easier if you've got it attached to the filled cylinder. Without something blocking the air flow on the back of the horn the casings will snag on the leading edge over and over again and you'll end up with small holes all along the casing. With something behind the horn you get a small air bubble at the front and threading the casings is much much easier. One of the big problems I have with the book is the way temperature management is explained. Having the forcemeat get hot enough to start cooking will cause it to break but it makes no mention of having the forcemeat too cold to use. After mixing the filling if you let it get cold enough it'll get firm enough that you won't be able to stuff the sausages. You can see that in a lot of raw sausage photos where there are clear or white lines across the sausage from the filling folding against itself instead of merging. You can avoid breaching the casing by cranking more slowly and adjusting the casings on the horn as you go. Slide out a little more casing if the sausage is getting over filled, pull the casing back onto the horn if its under filled. If you overfill the casings they explode when you twist off the links anyway. Small holes in the casing will weep a little liquid, just find those spots when you are twisting off the links and adjust the length of the links so you can place the hole in the pinched part of the casing where there wont be any filling to leak out. The more I cook from this book the more limited I find it. The bactoferm quantity in the pepperoni recipe, the pork in the merguez, the weight inaccuracy for powdered milk, the excess sugar in the pastrami, the temperature explanations - most of these are things that better narration could solve, the others could be solved with a bit more research. In general I'm finding the book does a great job of motivating me to do more curing but no one seems to be very happy with using the recipes verbatim. I'm thrilled that the book is available since there really aren't very many alternatives out there. I just wish the book had more depth and better commentary.

The answer is to ignore recipes that call for seasoned salt, cans of things, powdered soup mixes, etc. Or you could just put in whatever you think will taste good instead...

I'm not saying it's impossible to compare two restaurants if they aren't after the same goal, I'm saying that the end result of such comparisons is of questionable value. I think in general people consider restaurants on a linear scale (stars/points/whatever) and that completely misses the point for everything but the top end of the restaurant spectrum. If you're looking for a burrito what value is it that the French Laundry has more *'s or Zagat points or whatever than the Mexican joint in the Ferry Plaza? The same holds true for regional Italian cuisine - if I'm in the mood for a NY style Italian red sauce joint Incanto is a crap choice. The menus at Lupa and Incanto have some similarly worded dishes, but in execution they differ significantly. The escarole salad at Incanto is a base of shaved buddha's hand with a bit of dressed escarole topped with cured anchovies, the focus of the dish is how the anchovies work with the buddha's hand. Having not had the escarole salad at Lupa I'm not certain, but I'd expect it to be more of a green salad. I'm not saying one is better than the other mind you, they are just different. I'm thrilled that Batali's chefs are shopping at the green market and supporting sustainable producers, but different markets yield hugely different products. Countless Italian restaurants shop at the NY green market, they all do different things with the product they buy. There are way too many variables for sourcing and culinary country of origin to be the entire basis for comparison. Besides, since when is ricotta gnocchi similar to handkerchief pasta?

The Incanto/Lupa comparison isn't a reasonable one to begin with - the two restaurants are vastly different. They share little more than the broad category of Italian restaurants and they both offer cured meats. Comparing Incanto to Hearth would be far more apt. To make a direct comparison between two restaurants rather than considering the the class as a whole is a mistake unless the two restaurants are attempting to do the same thing. Incanto is all about using every part of every ingredient - there's no shortage of livers, spleens, sweetbreads, or turnip and radish greens for that matter on the menu at Incanto. The style they are going for is far more rustic than what you'd find at any Roman trattoria which incidentally is what Lupa bills itself as.

Ino has excellent fish but he's a complete prick to any non-asian customers. Takara next door has as good or better sushi and a far more welcome attitude.

I'd skip both the Slanted Door and Mina. Boulevard like Gary Danko is on cruise control - they're both keeping the dining room full by providing excellent service and a reliable menu. The menu at Danko hasn't changed in years. It isn't that the food isn't good, it's more that it isn't compelling. Boulevard has a slightly more varied menu and Danko has better service - but I'd recommend passing on both of them. Quince is much better. If you are looking for something more rustic Incanto is excellent. In general, San Francisco's culinary strength isn't at the high end - The French Laundry, Manresa, La Toque, etc are all much better than anything available in SF itself. If you like sushi, Takara, Ino, and Kiss are worth considering - all of them are excellent, though you'll have a very different experience at each.

I was happy to pay the $200 for mine - it looks exactly like the one jason linked to for $80, that one seems like a no brainer to me.

I use a pair of clamps from my pasta roller to hold it down. I stick a large plastic cutting board between it and the counter so I've got some work space. It works really well. I just need to find a die extruding pasta using it - there's a shop in San Francisco that makes them, I just haven't gotten around to figuring out exactly what I need and getting it made. If you do end up buying one of these things, be sure to get the food grade grease for it - you'll need to use some on it every couple of times.

Exactly - this one is the one I use.

I'm a huge fan of the hand-crank piston style stuffer - you load all the filling into it, air pockets are less of a problem, and you've got complete control over the rate the forcemeat comes out at. The only disadvantages are price and the need to wash the thing by hand.

From the wine pairing on the menu is listed at $62 per person for 4 wines each. From the half bottle page they have things listed from $16/375ml - I can't imagine how you managed to rack up a $90 tab on two glasses there, especially at the lower end of the price scale. Maybe you had a couple of glasses of Romanée-Conti and got a fantastic deal on them.

Looking in cellertracker at what I've bought over the past few years - Domestic producers were #1 in 2003, #2 in 2004 behind France, and last year they ranked behind France, Germany, Portugul, and Italy in 5th place by revenue. I'd agree with the article that for the price foreign producers are offering vastly better wines.

Just to add my 2 cents. Very hot pan with the oil just starting to smoke. Dry the fish. Dry the fish again. Dry the fish another time. If you are sure the fish is completely dry on the surface put it in the pan flesh side down for a thick fish like salmon - skin side down will make it hard to evenly brown the flesh side. After a couple of minutes the fish will release and when you flip it onto the skin the fish will contract, flattening out the skin on its own. Either leave the pan on the stove to finish, or toss it in a hot oven/under a broiler. For a whole fish, I've had better luck finishing the fish in the oven. Thinner cuts of fish are less sensitive to which side you start on - skin side down makes it easier to flip without breaking the skin.

It is distressing, to say the least, that his presence should matter. ← Precisely. I always find it odd when 'the owner/chef/whoever must have been off that day' excuse comes up in response to someone having a bad experience at a restaurant. The thought that a single person being out of the building for one day would cause all hell to break loose suggests that the restaurant isn't in good shape to begin with.

We made another batch of merguez yesterday, this time using lamb fat in place of rendered beef fat (which was in place of the pork fat in the recipe). The lamb fat was cut into 1/4 cubes and partially frozen before grinding with the fine blade, the end result was far better than the previous attempt. In place of the water the recipe calls for we used more wine. This batch came out quite well. The duck sacussion sec from mid-december is at the proper weight, but it still feels quite moist so it'll continue to hang for another week or two. More brisket is curing for pastrami in the fridge at the moment, this time without the white sugar - though the brown sugar and honey are still in there. After 4 days last time the meat still had a small uncured section in the center - this time I'll give it 5 or 6 days in the cure.

I can't imagine ever getting to the point where all my shots are perfect, so since I expect to be learning from each shot I screw up over the next several years I figure I might as well use the bottomless PF all the time. The other nice thing about the bottomless PF is that you've got one fewer thing to clean - the espresso only ever touches the basket so the PF never gets coated in old coffee oil.