Syzygies

Here's an alternative to bannetons, if one is also comfortable sewing and woodworking. I haven't seen anything like it before, though my wife showed me a bread proofing "hammock" from the seventies that gave me the idea. I was never happy with how bannetons handled, and I could never find the shape I wanted. Working with wet doughs, I need the support that rigid sides offer, over just using a linen cloth as more serious bakers might do. The linen cloth is sewn from rack material at a fabric store, Easier than ordering online, one knows what one gets, and one can get the size right. I have access to a sewing machine. It is worth learning how to make rudimentary hems like this. The wooden frames are made from 1" x 4" wood, which is 3/4" x 3 1/2" actual. These were the prototypes; I may make more using finger joints, but only to get joinery practice. The construction shown is fine for breadmaking. Note the rotation of the end pieces; one doesn't want to drill into end grain. Think of wood fibers like a bundle of spaghetti, and one understands the relative strengths in different directions. The screw heads are inset using a separate conical bit, to keep the screws from scratching other surfaces. The frames were given a quick sanding after assembly, and left unfinished. One actually wants the wood to breath. Linen is nonstick without flouring. With this approach, one can hang the cloth afterwards to dry, and wash it easily if desired. What I like best about this approach is being able to lift off the frame, then roll the loaf off the linen cloth with a minimum of jostling. For very wet doughs, the less handling the better. Just an idea...

Just checking, have you confirmed what will be hard and what will be easy, before picking your sink? You don't want to unduly constrain yourself. Firs of all, there will be some plumbing work, to put in a new sink. And under-sink plumbing is modular. It goes from "a bit harder than changing a light bulb" to "needs a professional" as one reaches the wall, but this transition is generally out of the way of a deeper sink. (It was for us.)

Yes, we're just finishing a kitchen remodel, undermount and granite as you describe. It is very nice to have no obstructions, sweeping into the sink. Our stainless steel sink is deeper than before. Took us a bit by surprise but we like it.

There are two grades of Oxo Swivel Peeler (straight): Swivel PeelerPro Swivel PeelerThe Pro model has replaceable blades: Pro Peeler Blade Replacement CartridgeI've tried many peelers over the years (ceramic or not, straight or not, various brands). Even a famous "cult" peeler, bought shortly before the vendor's death: His Stage, the Street; His Rapier, a PeelerThe Oxo Pro peeler is my favorite peeler of all, by a wide margin. I don't mind the heft. Replaceable blades cinches the deal. My hands do the voting. This isn't what I want to believe, this is what I reach for.

Didn't realize the "bark" would be a matter of debate! Here's a closeup. Yes, a Komodo Kamado. I started with a different ceramic cooker, and we realized this really mattered to us. We use it various ways several times a week, most nights in the summer. The pit temperature was controlled using a BBQ Guru, and set to 210 F for six hours. Colors can change, but pretty hard to burn anything at that temperature. My biggest concern with ribs is to get these falling apart without drying out. These came out pretty good. Even on the forum where everyone had paid three grand for such a cooker, many people express moral outrage if one doesn't buy cheap meat. As if BBQ is supposed to be about cheap meat. Cheap ribs go hand in hand with heavy, sweet, complicated sauces. With a decent rib source, I do no more than rub in 0.8% sea salt by weight, half that much black pepper, and an assortment of ground chiles from the local Mexican supermarket. Those start out red to black, get blacker in cooking, but don't acquire the bitter taste I associate with burnt. At the same time, this wasn't exactly a crunchy bark either, just an outer layer of flavor. It's so hard to tell what anything really tastes like from pictures. I don't make ribs that often. These were a Fourth of July request from a dear friend's schizophrenic daughter. She loves my ribs. If any of us can find some joy in food, I think that's great.

Ribs for Fourth of July.

Second the professional books. In particularly, your specific problem is that of a caterer. I used to cook for twenty frequently at a beach house. Start early. To this day I think of more coarsely chopped garlic, onions, etc. as "beach cut". It helped that everyone was starving. Half wanted a diverse international menu, and half were sensitive only to timing and fuel value. So maintain schedule at all costs, and figure out what you're capable of doing within this constraint. Equipment: It is mandatory that you shop at a restaurant supply house for cookware that is appropriately scaled to your quantities. The "cafeteria effect" is when a dish that tasted sauteed for eight, tastes steamed for twenty four. Here, it isn't the recipe that needs adjusting, it's the pan. With three times the surface area, a strong enough stove, and attention appropriate to the raised stakes, one is back on familiar ground. Yet most amateurs don't make this adjustment. Same with knives, cutting area: you want your food prep to take more space, not more time. With a huge cutting surface you can stage prepared ingredients with no wasted motion. Above all, if you don't do this frequently, is menu selection. The two meals I'll make for a hundred are barbecued pork butt, and gumbo. For the gumbo I have a very large pot.

Winged beans have been sighted this week at MithapheapMarket in Oakland, CA. I learned this through a mailing list for students of Kasma Loha-unchit. Her classes were amazing, and the food in the various advanced series was the best Thai food I've had outside Thailand. Highly recommended.

I'm reporting on our naturally leavened bread from freshly ground flour, after dozens after dozens of experiments. It is a serviceable house loaf that is around all the time; we just had bruschetta tonight with first tomatoes of the season, for which it was perfect. It is my attempt to balance the looks of classic artisan bread with the flavor of sourdough from whole grains. I can't buy bread that tastes like this bread, and we're within a drive of Acme Bread, which I revere. Some of the links and observations may be helpful to others. Bread is a continuum, so I find it crucial to maintain a spreadsheet, rather than follow other people's recipes. I tape a summary page to a cabinet door, to mark up as I work. It helps to adopt baker's percentages, in order to compare notes with other sources. Our default grain is organic red winter wheat; the spreadsheet (in grams) tracks other additions, and yields two loaves. A day before baking, I feed our 80% hydration starter every 12 hours, using 75% red wheat and 25% rye. The night before baking, I grind and measure out all dry ingredients. The day of baking, I autolyse the flour for an hour or two, then add starter and salt, kneading by hand twenty minutes on a butcher block counter. This starts out a mess as with any wet dough; a bench knife is essential for collecting the dough every now and then. I bulk rise 3 to 4 hours, then proof 3 hours (until ready, usual finger test) in linen cloth in wooden frames. I transfer to the oven on parchment paper on a cookie sheet, and remove the parchment paper part way into the bake. I started out far more of a "flour, water, salt, leaven" purist. The bit of yeast is insurance and a bit more loft; it can be left out. Similarly, a bit of diastatic malt promotes rise and a nicely colored crust; this too is optional. Freshly ground flour is "green" and will flatten into the classic, feared "flying saucer" loaf shape unless one adds a bit of ascorbic acid. How does one add so little? One cuts in stages to a 1:400 concentration, thinned with white flour, as directed e.g. by Suas. I similarly cut the diastatic malt to 1:7, and keep jars of each mixture handy. We grind flour using a Wolfgang Mock Grain Mill. One can spend more; we weren't happy with the flour or noise from several lesser choices. It would have saved us time and money to have started with this mill. This is also known as the Komo, a frequent choice over at The Fresh Loaf forum. We sieve bran from our flour using 12" Round Stainless Steel Sieve, Fine Mesh (55 mesh) set in a Vollrath 8 Quart Heavy Duty Stainless Steel Mixing Bowl. Setting the Wolfgang two clicks back from a gnashing noise, this yields 80% extraction flour. For comparison, Pain Poilâne uses 85% to 95% extraction flour. A smaller sieve is too tedious; a larger sieve would be nice if one has the room. A matched pair of these bowls and a coarser sieve is handy for sifting mixtures together, such as preparing fixed concentrations of ascorbic acid or diastatic malt, or mixing these into one's flours before autolyse. We bake over a charcoal fire in a Komodo Kamado ceramic yard oven. I usually set the fire a few hours before baking, bringing it down below 500 F before adding 400g of ice for steam, then baking 20 minutes or so at 450 or so. One can't judge such an oven by air temperature, as radiant heat is a significant factor; one wants to bake naturally leavened breads to 200 F internal temperature, with outer appearance a potential bonus, not the deciding factor. For steam I keep 400g slabs of ice in our chest freezer, formed in a chamber vacuum sealer bag, sealed using an inexpensive impulse sealer. This is the way to go, for example, to freeze stock. This slab easily slides onto a 15" Lodge Logic Pre-Seasoned Skillet filled with two spools of Straight Link Chain in Stainless Steel. I've seen this idea in a number of places, the earliest being The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens. Most recently, Bouchon Bakery advocates such an approach, getting lots of credit and ridicule for popularizing this much steam. Steam injection oven – Keller style – safe? is an eGullet thread on this topic. In a nutshell, commercial bread ovens introduce lots of steam, plant spritzers don't, 400g ice over this much thermal mass turns into enough steam to displace the air in an oven a few times over, and not everyone is convinced that they need steam. It does lead to a thinner crust and better oven spring.

There's an eGullet thread on seasoning cast iron: Reseasoning cast iron, flaxseed v. grapeseed oil, based on a blog post getting lots of traction: Chemistry of Cast Iron Seasoning: A Science-Based How-To. The overwrought, authoritative title aside, the blog post is onto something for the first phase of seasoning a pan: Drying oils, applied in thin layers at 500 F, with flaxseed oil the best food-grade home choice. I found that this method nails one aspect of seasoning a pan: blackening it with a protective, rust-resistant coating. For the actual nonstick effect, I found that browning potato bits with salt and oil is crucial as a followup treatment. In other words, oil alone doesn't work without starch, like what happens naturally cooking hundreds of covers in a restaurant. In fact, my most heavily used pans start to look more silver again on the actual cooking surface, while maintaining a nice seasoned effect. The drying oil worked best for me to protect the rest of the pan. My favorite pans in this category are by Spring USA, such as this one: Spring USA 2 Quart Fry Pan. In case, I don't have the directions in front of me (they're in my other kitchen) but the Baking Steel reseasoning directions were exactly in this school of thought: Apply thin films of flaxseed oil, and heat.

At the individual level, we're creatures of habit, and there's the anchovy effect: How should one reason after tasting one's first anchovy, invariably a seriously nasty business topping a bad pizza? It could be explained away as an inexplicable food obsession for some, like Vegemite, or that fermented shark that Icelanders have to get really drunk to eat. Or one could reason that for something so horribly debased to have survived, the best of category must be truly spectacular. Sanfilippo anchovies from Cantabria answer that question. At the country level, we don't respond to shocks well. The United States is the poster child for this effect: decades after prohibition, most beer consumed in the US could pass for Coors Light. Many nations ate what they could during World War II, such as brown rice in Japan, and went out of their way to avoid the same foods with later prosperity. The form of the brown rice question that interests me is this: What did the world brown rice map look like a few centuries ago, before any current form of social postering distorted the map? I suspect that all rice was processed with entirely practical concerns in mind, balancing preservation and nutrition. I helped thrash rice with some traditional people in rural Thailand, and that's the rice I saw; I wish I could buy that rice. Partially processed by hand, it didn't need to pass as brown or white. It was simply their rice. We grind our own flour for virtually all purposes, using various sieves to remove some or all bran. Our 80% extraction (for comparison, Pain Poilâne is closer to 90%) resembles a chestnut colored white flour, denser but passing through a sieve that won't pass bought white flour. Parallel to this thread, I used to detest whole wheat products, hippie concrete that tasted like a roll of unbleached paper towels fell in. Then I learned that one could do better. I passed a sample of freshly ground flour to a Calabrian family of serious cooks, and heard back that the grandmother was horrified we'd thrown out the bran. One is supposed to make a mash to feed the chickens; we had actually composted it. Here, neither white nor brown was the traditional flour through much of Europe, when mills were a local affair, and one didn't hang on to milled flour for long. Whole grains are the perfect form for storage. The nutrients that are replaced in highly refined flour (and some rices) match the nutrients lost through overprocessing. The healthiest way to eat is to avoid all processed foods as much as possible. As in, most of the pie chart of what one eats each week is self-processed, not extrusions from some factory. It is hard enough to eat organic, which simply requires affluence (and ignores the issue that one needs to manufacture fertilizer to grow enough food to feed the planet). To process one's own food requires time. From this perspective, brown rice is a very easy place to start.

Coincidentally, my greengrocer had them today (pictured). They somehow remind me of artichokes, but that could be intriguing earthy flavor reached through tedious work, rather than an exact match. One is likely to find recipes only in cookbooks printed in India. Some of these books have been or can be imported. I found four, among my books on this coast, recipes sketched: 1000 Great Indian Recipes p285 Curried drumsticks: drumsticks cut 2.5", grated coconut, green chiles, cumin, tumeric, garlic, ginger, oil, onion, salt, vinegar. Peel drumsticks, grind next ingredients through ginger to paste, saute onion then paste, add drumsticks and water, add vinegar and adjust. Dakshin: Vegetarian Cuisine from South India p26 Drumstick rasam: a typical many ingredient rasam featuring drumsticks The Essential Andra Cookbook with Hyderabadi and Telengana specialties p191 Drumstick curry: drumsticks cut 2.5", water, milk from grated coconut, oil, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, ginger-garlic paste, turmeric, chilly powder, coriander powder, cumin powder, chillies, coriander leaves, lime juice. Boil drumsticks, fry curry paste as usual, add green chillies coriander and coconut milk, simmer and add lime juice. (This is my favorite cookbook brought back from India, on somewhat better paper than most.) Saraswat Cookery p37 Tender stems of drumsticks (kisara): drumsticks in finger-size pieces, red gram, pumpkin, jackfruit seeds, grated fresh coconut, red chillies, turmeric powder, triphals, kokum, salt, jaggery, coconut oil. Boil water with red gram, drumsticks and jackfruit seeds. Grind coconut, red chillies, turmeric. When stew soft, add ground masala, pumpkin, salt, jaggery, gamboge and triphals. Simmer till thick and soft.

Both great Catalan books. Coleman Andrews started it all for many of us. On a recent trip there, I looked everywhere for cookbooks. The definitive Catalan cookbook is tiny, packed with recipes and thinking: El petit llibre de la cuina catalana by Per Sans. Hard to find online, but https://www.abebooks.co.uk/ also has stock. I was drawn to it by the many salt cod, and fideuá recipes. It's in Catalan. This is less of a hindrance than one might expect, if one speaks a few romance languages badly. They all run together, with Catalan closer to the Latin origins, and one can browse by simply not trying too hard, then translate recipes as needed using http://translate.google.com/ .

We also make fried rice from brown rice all the time. No adjustments one wouldn't make in any case: watch the total oil budget. Ours features homemade hot chili oil, adapted from a Barbara Tropp recipe (an old label above) which really complements the brown rice. Yes, chill the rice, the whole "twice cooked starch" bit is at play here. Our favorite brown rice is Massa Organics; we're on our third 20 lb bag.

Is one promoting tenderness or structural integrity? That guides the choice. In Asian cooking, matchsticks or Julienne strips are often sliced along the grain, so they don't fall apart during cooking. I work both with and against the grain when portioning spaghetti, as my wife likes her noodles short.

That would be okra that is too mature. To a point, one can cope by thinly slicing against the grain, as with any grain, but beyond a certain point they'll be hopeless. If one wants the flavor, mash then strain a puree? I'm most familiar with cooking okra in Indian dishes, where one is often already slicing against the grain. Requiring more commitment, expat Indians sorely miss "drumsticks" (Moringa Oleifera). These seed pods make stringy okra seem like child's play; one endures nevertheless for the flavor. Or has this plant evolved to exploit the obsessive behavior of humans? I don't know; I enjoyed drumsticks when served but I've never managed to actually cook those I've found frozen.

Wow, definitive is quite the mantle for any book to wear. One possible interpretation makes Simple French Food by Richard Olney definitive: For a good cook who generally doesn't need cookbooks, his ideas take on a life of their own. He teaches the spirit of French cooking, that one might miss by studying recipes. His blueprint helped lead to Chez Panisse and a California food scene paralleling Provence. A different interpretation would a reference that isn't embarrassed to take up the classics, that is likely to shed light on any notable traditional dish that becomes an obsession when encountered while traveling. Perhaps not the same dish, but a representative dish in the same vein, with a likely ancestral relationship. For example, Provencal fish soup is a continuum, with Nice and Marseille marking two poles. I'd accept a book as definitive that leaves the question at that (one makes soup with the fish that's available, after all), and also includes a stockfish recipe. Nevertheless, some books take on the "nine words for snow" problem and go much further. In this light, the Italian books mentioned so far are fine books, but none definitive. I know strong Italian libraries where they are each deliberately omitted. Italy Dish by Dish: A Comprehensive Guide to Eating in Italy is small enough to carry on a trip, and rather complete. No recipes, but a paragraph per dish could lead to successful improvisations based on taste memory, if one is familiar with Italian cooking. One can find startling omissions, but not easily. Italian Regional Cooking by Ada Boni has been on remainder stacks as long as everyone in my cohort has been cooking, and was our definitive first resource. Very strong regional coverage, mildly interpreted, an abridged translation of the Italian original Il talismano della felicità. I learned about Le Ricette regionali italiane by Anna Gosetti della Salda in a different eGullet thread, and it is the most definitive Italian cookbook that I own. It is in Italian. To take up a sample question, what greens belong in pansoti? The wikipedia entry for preboggion is exhaustive, but one might not know this word. The Italy Dish by Dish entry for pansoti refers to the entry for preboggion: Italian Regional Cooking simply proposes "spinach, spinach beet or spring greens". Le Ricette regionali Italiane specifies preboggion, and refers to the recipe for riso col preboggion for a description: One can find a surprising profusion of related herbs at the Ferry Building farmers market in San Francisco, making this last entry most useful. Some of the previously recommended Italian books describe a version of preboggion, if not by name. My next question would be how to make bigoli noodles using a Venetian bigolaro, and what sauces to put on top? Another "nine words for snow" problem.

Huh. Of all the things in that category, I'd try Pedro Ximénez sherry. It is sometimes blended with other sherries, and it is very handy at home to tame an experimental sherry purchase that otherwise requires too much commitment. It would be in a familiar role here.

Huh. Sorry for the confusion. Perhaps they serve anchovies both ways? I have also known waiters to get things wrong. On my friend's tasting menu the anchovies were described as "salted anchovy with toasted bread" (he sent me a scan of the menu), and he was served this dish for which they're famous: Anchoas a la Barbacoa Estilo Etxebarri In any case, you can take Sanfilippo anchovies home with you, and this isn't marriage, one doesn't have to be faithful to a single anchovy!

After other raves, friends of mine ate there, the one high-end meal of that trip. (After crawling pintxos bars for days in San Sebastian, it would be tough for any tasting menu to compete, but...) $200 a head with wine for the tasting menu, very good but very overpriced with standoffish Trama-esque service. The "salted anchovy with toasted bread" is a fresh smoked, not fermented product. My friend said the anchovies were excellent when I asked him now, but at the time he directed me to Sanfilippo without even mentioning Asador Etxebarri anchovies. He believes Sanfilippo is best of category.

After having Genovese friends patiently explain to me what basil for pesto must look and smell like, while clutching six inch shoots bought at market in Genova, I don't know whether to laugh or cry seeing basil for pesto in the United States. Which is exactly why they viewed the lesson as a matter of some urgency. (Also get the pine nuts right; Chinese pine nuts can be toxic. Google "pine mouth".) Supermarket basil, or the weedlike basil plants in most gardens, are suitable as leaves for flavoring a pasta sauce, and make a spectacular bed on which one can smoke brined salmon over apple wood. But any pesto made from these large plants will taste like lawn clippings, after one has tasted the original in Genova. (A great place outside Genova, if passing through, is Ristorante U Giancu, Via San Massimo - Rapallo - Genoa - Italia http://www.ugiancu.it/.) We grow Genovese basil from seed in half wine barrels, using misting equipment on irrigation timers, and thin the bed of basil for pesto till it starts to taste wrong. This is now the only pesto we'll have outside Italy. Yes, a little old lady sold us apricots, from her front lawn outside Marseille, and I simply can't eat a fresh apricot again in my life. Cooking them into compote, perhaps, but raw will never be the same. Will check them out as departure lodging, next trip through Bilbao airport. I'd guess that they're on par with Sanfilippo, unless this is a scaling issue (beer has a sweet spot and it isn't smallest batch size; I don't know about anchovies) or a source issue, or one kitchen is more attentive. Sanfilippo does absolutely everything in their power to get it right, without regard to expense. So if one is actually better, the other could and would learn and enact the improvements. I can't judge which would be best on first principles, without a direct comparison. And will Asador Etxebarri sell you six kilos to take home? A life-changing tasting experience wouldn't lead me to a vow of anchovy celibacy, I love them too much.

Here is a list of vermouths that includes all but your Casa Mariol: http://vermouth101.com/vermouths.html On it I find Perucchi (Vermouth producer from Cataluña, Spain) which I buy sometimes from at the Spanish Table in Berkeley (http://spanishtable.com/). Both the rojo and blanco are true to type, and very interesting to sip over ice. I've never tried mixing them with gin or to make a drink. With this nascent fascination, I ordered a vermouth on arrival at the seriously old school Hotel Etxeberri, Zumárraga, Spain (http://www.etxeberri.com/). Best vermouth I've ever had, though context didn't hurt. They surely made their own, as limoncello would be made along the Amalfi coast by any establishment. So where's the thread on making vermouth? The picture in this NYTimes article says it all: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/13/dining/american-made-vermouths-anything-goes.html

The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens This is an amazing book on natural starters and building your own oven. They discuss the differences between all-purpose flours within the United States (in the South it's for biscuits), and worldwide. I'm guessing the flour.

Sanfilippo Anchoas en salazon de Cantabria Bajada del Gromo, Argoños, España, Avrupa https://maps.google.com/maps?q=43.455139,-3.484163 (+34) 942626005 I brought back six kilos of salt-packed anchovies from these guys, on a fall excursion to San Sebastian and environs for Pintxos. The factory can be dropped in only by prior arrangement, and you'll only see the front alcove. Speak Spanish. They had three kilo tins ready, but as I wasn't a restaurant and they didn't know my OCD tendencies first-hand, they insisted on repacking into eight anchovy tins. This also raised the price, though I didn't mind. Print the map or get those GPS coordinates into your navigator, or you'll never find the place. There are people who've never heard of eGullet, who will be finding this thread on Google for these coordinates. Most of them will wish I'd written this in Spanish. Unequivocally the best anchovies in the world. Oil-packed are for the understandably lazy, though they make most of their money this way, for tapas bars. They relayer the anchovies every two weeks during fermentation; pretty much everyone else just lets the stack go. To lay down my cards, I am pro everything Italian, but I recognize that in many ways foodie Spaniards have it all over Italians. It is worth the flight over for the anchovies alone, but if one is going to be this close to Santander (a distant second to San Sebastian on the Pintxos front) one must fill out one's luggage with turron from Monerrris. A different league from any other in Spain. And I'm not even that much into dessert.

The Bigolaro is a fantastic toy for extruding pasta. The extra wide Imperia is a tool for cranking out lots of fresh pasta. And naive restaurant diners are more likely to identify rolled fresh pasta as house-made. Go for volume, start with the Imperia? With practice, I truly don't see the need for a motor. However, restaurants that extrude generally go powered, Dolly and up for $2K USD and up, not the Bigolaro.