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Syzygies

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Everything posted by Syzygies

  1. How about this: Commercial Imperia Pasta Machine R220 It's surely not going to fail on you with a restaurant full of diners arriving. One could crank out pasta for lots of people with this machine. Otherwise, spend 4x for a Dolly extruder; don't buy electric junk.
  2. Venetian Bigolaro A shop such as the pasta counter at Mario Batali's Eataly will use a similar-looking machine to the OP's proposed purchase, probably far more expensive, to crank out lots of fresh pasta. The linked machine in the OP's post looks like junk to me (always divide price by parts to guess quality), and I'd be worried how many pounds of pasta to run through before manufacturing oils stopped contaminating the food. Of course, start with a hand-cranked pasta machine. One sees wider models in NYC's Bowery, intended for small restaurants. "Roller" machines cannot make odd shapes, and one needs to get the consistency, moisture content of the dough just right to cut properly without the noodles sticking. A pasta guitar (chitarra) is much more forgiving, but the modern available ones are cheap junk, that only last till one string sags. One can easily build one's own, using dulcimer hardware, with individually adjustable strings. For a restaurant I'd commission such a chitarra. My favorite pasta maker is the Venetian Bigolaro, shown above making pasta from home ground flour. http://pastabiz.com/machine-home/TORCHIO-pasta-press.html http://www.freshpastamachines.co.uk/bigolaro.html The two provided dies are the least useful of any alternative, but these take the same dies as the "Dolly", a popular powered extruder. My favorite dies are for round pasta, smallest diameters. This is particularly useful for Asian noodles such as rice noodles. Here I often extrude directly into the pasta pot fresh off the stove, then returning the pot to the boil, as I saw kanom jeen noodles traditionally made in Thailand. (There, extruding directly into a massive wok over a fire.) Cleaning pasta dies is nearly impossible. A garden hose works, eventually. A several thousand dollar ultrasound device is said to work, the $100 version doesn't. A half hour with a toothpick works. Many people simply soak the dies and use them frequently.
  3. Living two places has forced me to scan any recipe I cook from. I tape the printout to the cabinet door over the butcher block food prep counter, and I mark it up very liberally as I cook. After doing this for years, a cookbook holder feels like a horribly clumsy space hog. And I don't want to see again most of the markup during a cook; I'd never mark the actual book that way. When the printout comes down, I condense notes into a text file, stored next to the scan in a folder that names the recipe. With eBooks, one has the book everywhere, and a screen grab is quicker than scanning a physical book. Better, the Kindle format can be cracked. I consider this fair use, for my own use only, and it's the only reason Amazon is getting my money for eBooks. "Format conversion" has always been the legitimate fair use reason to crack encryption schemes.
  4. There is a continuum ranging from the sun dried tomatoes one sees prepared out in the sun in Sicily, to the "tomato conserves" featured in books by Colicchio, Keller, et. al. One should find one's way along this range, taking into account changes in available preservation technology, and the actual intended purpose as an ingredient. I've made many experiments along this range, and I believe that it is a mistake to slavishly produce a result others can identify, at the expense of the best flavor outcome. A dehydrator is a fantastic tool. I've tried both indoor and yard ovens (Komodo Kamado). Particularly over a fire, one can add complexity such as a roasted flavor using an oven. But one can easily process thirty pounds at a time with dehydrators. This is a necessity at peak garden harvest time, or after one brings an early September box home from an Italian market such as Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. Friends got me started using a dehydrator to make classic sun dried tomatoes. They taste best if one stops short of drying them to the degree one finds in Sicily, and then jars them in olive oil, as they are often sold at a premium. The classic full dry is for preservation convenience at the expense of flavor. A partial dry radically intensifies the flavor. One wants to find the sweet spot, without regard to convention. Same with salt. Now, I haven't opened a can of tomatoes in close to a decade, and I generally can't order tomato dishes in restaurants. My wife and I process our entire crop for the year, by skinning, salting, partially drying in dehydrators, and freezing in packets in a chest freezer. After drying, we press into a bowl in the fridge overnight, and there is just enough liquid to force the air out of chamber vacuum bags, sealing with a simple impulse sealer. Faster, less mess and more satisfying than any powered vacuum machine. At first we just used ziplock bags, which don't work as well. This is tomato as an ingredient, the flagship application of course being pasta sauce, but in fact anywhere one would have used a can. I have experimented with recovering a similar product by rehydrating the best available Sicilian sun dried tomatoes, and the results were unacceptable. Again, this is about finding the sweet spot for the intended purpose, taking advantage of modern aids such as chest freezers. While I love sun dried tomatoes as an appetizer, or discrete ingredient such as on pizza, they're a novelty act, not tuned for most applications of preserved tomatoes. If the same home methods apply either way, one should tune to one's needs.
  5. Yes, I'm pretty sure that's the book they stock at The Ice Cream Bar. A great book I have. Aspires to address all aspects of fermentation, and gives a different side of making sodas. Classic soda recipes can require a 0.01 gram scale for twenty odd ingredients. A Katz ginger beer recipe is a different world view. I know first-hand that artisan bread making is more difficult with freshly ground (green) flour; it took me fifty tries and a few additives to end up with a bread better than I could buy, and it helped that I could already make classic artisan loaves, and hippy bricks from freshly ground flour. Here, I'd master both approaches separately (O'Neill, Katz) before even dreaming of combining them.
  6. In San Francisco, there's an old school soda fountain bar, far more advanced and retro than I've seen anywhere else: The Ice Cream Bar. The sodas are fantastic. They're country cousins to a serious revival in alcoholic mixed drinks, with some crossover in their gurus. They sold a unique book in the shop, that I recall was hard (but not impossible) to find online. For the life of me, I can't figure out from any of my logs or emails what that book is. Call them? They'll be friendly, and you're a kindred spirit. Get a very precise scale.
  7. You don't state whether you need "channel" bags (for an external clamp machine), or plain bags (for an impulse sealer or a chamber machine). The answers are coming in "channel" bags, as used by FoodSaver machines. I stock both kinds of bags in bulk, but only one grade: Thick, for optimal freezing, and heatsafe, for sous vide or quick thawing/reheating in simmering water. One can get away with thick bags for sous vide. I never know when I'll then apply heat to a frozen bag, so I only want heatsafe bags in use for any application. I don't own a chamber vacuum machine, to save space as much as to save money. With sufficient liquid in the pouch, and sufficient practice, an impulse sealer is quicker than any alternative, and does a fine job. I prop it at a slight angle, and slide the open end of the bag over the sealing strip. Grabbing at the low end of the opening with one hand, while squeezing the liquid with the other hand, one burps the air pocket past the high end of the sealing strip. Now one can slide the bag back for more slack if desired, and seal. This is much harder to describe than do (many cooking tasks require far more dexterity), and fast. For example, I freeze all stock this way. It is very convenient to then thaw the stock in a water bath, nick a corner, and pour as needed during a cook such as risotto. One needs this option to complement an external clamp machine, as none are entirely graceful with liquids, which can destroy the pump. An impulse sealer can also handle hot liquids, unlike a chamber machine. My external clamp machine in each kitchen is a MiniPack Cyclone 30. It draws a stronger vacuum than any FoodSaver I've owned, which contributes to the quality of freezer preservation as much as bag thickness. One needs to use bone guards with it or risk punctures, not my experience with more feeble machines. It also has an adjustable seal, allowing the use of a variety of bags. Any high end machine should have these characteristics; with a FoodSaver or other mainstream machine some bags might prove unsuitable. Typical channel bags carve the grooves into the bag material. If you're worrying about thickness you should consider the minimum thickness taking into account these grooves, not the nominal thickness. Channel bags feels and act flimsy because of the channels; one falls in love with the plain bags after experience with an impulse sealer. VacMaster takes a novel approach to working around this problem: They add channel material inside a standard plain bag, not compromising the bag itself. I love these bags, which are heatsafe. I buy them bulk, and use them with my external clamp machine. VacStrip Bags by VacMaster Vacuum Chamber Pouches by VacMaster Bone Guard The chamber pouches are also available on Amazon. MiniPack includes samples of their channel bags, more conventional in design, but nice and also heatsafe.
  8. I have a Komodo Kamado, and make brisket regularly. Tough choice, but I'd go with door number three. Smoke absorption is only significant up to some cutoff temperature you'll already have reached. At that point an oven is less romantic, but will still work.
  9. In this particular case, kidney failure is on the horizon, so any chemical alternative to salt is out. Yes, fresh vegetables, any food that tastes alive, my tomato pasta was a hit as much as anything because I started from scratch with some good, ripe tomatoes. But what tweaks in place of salt would win Iron Chef? (All chemicals are banned.) I've got the rough idea what to cook, but I want the food to taste better. Very alive, fresh foods, and master umami, but what else?
  10. I periodically find myself cooking for elderly family members who must severely restrict their salt intake. (Having been the driver to the ER several times after sequences of restaurant meals, and seeing a radical improvement after following a low salt protocol, yes I'm willing to stipulate for purposes of this discussion that in some cases this is necessary.) When one has thoroughly enjoyed good restaurant and home cooking in better days, it is hard to find joy in drab food meant for the elderly. Looking forward to eating is looking forward to life itself. If our skills as cooks mean anything to us, they should come to the fore at times like this. What would an Iron Chef do, cooking with no salt? I phrase my question this way, because previous threads have hung up on the need to reduce salt, or the politics of restricting salt for the rest of us, or on finding complete recipes for average cooks to support such a diet. An Iron Chef may be able to recite 10,000 recipes, but generally cooks without a recipe and knows what to do. Moreover, when cooking in a very limited kitchen, after shopping in a strange town, even to execute a recipe as written involves a lot problem-solving. To leave out salt, and yet end up with something that tastes surprisingly good to the person that matters, is a fascinating problem to solve. I want to know techniques (divorced from the question of complete recipes) that the winner would apply to enhance flavor, if an episode of Iron Chef left out the salt. Standard advice is to add lemon, and increase the herbs. I interpret this as to be very thoughtful about acid balance, and to use fresh herbs which taste more alive and are less likely to be overbearing. But this advice alone would quickly wear thin. A bit of something in the madeira, sherry, even armagnac category, with the alcohol boiled off, introduces a new note of depth and roundness. This can be applied in dishes where such a note might be unexpected if one were using salt. Umami - Coming from an Irish-American background, I'm of the conclusion that umami was simply off the radar in my childhood cuisine, and in many similar American traditions. Even the Brits have their funky dark sauce concoctions, perhaps hard to find without salt, that introduce an umami component. If one is going to leave out salt, one has to master umami, to compensate. Dried porcini mushrooms (less challenging than many wild mushrooms, and widely available), kelp (yes from the sea, but not salty?). It would be good to have a list of options to consider, as one tastes and tweaks any recipe, without prejudice as to what flavors belong in the dish.
  11. Yes, I've cooked chicken sous vide multiple times and by pressure cooker exactly once. A pressure cooker is great for many things (beets, anyone?) but pressure-cooked chicken tastes institutional.
  12. Syzygies

    About roux

    Same in SE Asia, soybean oil now common, but in the past, what was available. Rendered fat, or coconut fat. In any case, one should be able to recite exactly the manufacturing process of any oil one uses. This is a huge blind spot among people who otherwise abhor processed foods. I've never understood the fascination that Thomas Keller (otherwise a viable choice for zombie master) has with canola oil. Or rather, I understand it, but, really? Gumbo is one of my all-time favorite dishes, which I've made for 50 to 100 people more times than I can count. Tricky, because while I put peasant dishes on a higher altar than skyscraper food, peasant techniques are often mediocre. Yet, it is precisely the flaws in a method that gives dishes character. Bad cooks burn, timid cooks come nowhere close, and great cooks confidently stride near the precipice. If one overanalyzes the "intended purpose" of a technique, one gets caught between what people think they're doing and what they're actually doing. Roux isn't even remotely about thickening, though this can be a side effect, diminished as the roux gets darker. It's a crucial ingredient, and a high art to get right. Gumbo descends from both a family of African dishes, and from bouillabaisse. The latter, being French, is taught with more refined technique than practiced by the country yokels whose cuisine I admire. This technique can be borrowed for any roux-based dish: Go learn how the French think about roux, then make it darker. Clarified butter does solve some technical problems, and is easy to make. No one will know, or they won't know why they like it so much, and the cook's goal in any case is to "sell" the dish to the diner. The diner generally wasn't watching in the kitchen. A good gumbo sells itself. Centuries ago in France, one made double and triple stocks in the belief that simply boiling down a stock threw away much of its character. A triple gumbo stock, made from chicken then crabs then lobster, can really lift the dish. The key point to bouillabaisse is to time backwards from serving, when adding the fish. Here, follow the Thomas Keller technique of removing the lobster meat while nearly raw, freeing the shells for stock, and serve over the gumbo lightly poached or sous vide in butter with a bit of water. Not traditional but no one will object. In short, return to the roots of any dish for further guidance. My French cooking teacher, resolutely authentic, nevertheless described authenticity to me as the "last bad performance."
  13. If you search for one on Amazon, you can see what they look like. Hole in the middle, pretty much what you'd expect if you've seen angel food cake.
  14. Syzygies

    Brining pork chops

    Even if one has no other need in life for spreadsheets (count yourself lucky if this is the case!), spreadsheets are unbeatable for adjusting bread recipes, and adjusting brines. Paul Bertolli's Cooking by Hand spells out how to compute brines. The simplest approach is to ignore the meat, ignore the math, and use lots of liquid. Then one adjusts salt by brine time. For example, a half cup of salt and less sugar per gallon of water is a "light brine" in the barbecue world (where the "three Rs" refer to cuts of meat). Four hours is nice for salmon or chicken, but longer can be too salty. Next up, one adds the weight of the meat to the weight of the water, and computes the amount of salt to add as a percentage. (Work in grams!) Here the idea is that the salt concentration will be the same in equilibrium in the meat and water, so one can leave the brine overnight or for days and it will come out just right. Treating the meat as no water, or all water, are both approximations that are clearly wrong. The truth is somewhere in between. One can guess at the bone weight (or learn, weighing both parts each time one bones) and multiply the meat by some fraction to estimate its water content. Say, 60% or 80%, depends on the cut. Any such approach if followed consistently will self correct small errors. Your idea of the ideal salt concentration may be off from reality, but will still work for you if you adjust it to taste. The more liquid you use, the smaller any errors will be. Exactly the same thing happens in bread baking, where some people won't take into account their levain hydration in figuring their bread hydration. They can still get wonderful results as they adjust their target hydration over time, this just interferes with communicating with others. I like 2.5% salt, counting the water in bone-in pork loins as 70%. This is a very light ham, which I find preferable to either "brined" or "not brined". I then cook it in the yard oven with smoke from apple wood, cooked just to the point guests will find acceptable. I separate the bone, leaving lots of meat on, and cook it longer, like ribs.
  15. This appears to be the recipe in the original Fanny Farmer Cookbook: Boston Brown Bread. One doesn't have to use an old can as a mold, but that would be traditional. The book as a whole calls for prodigious quantities of molasses. I remember this bread well from childhood.
  16. Striped bass. Tom Colicchio's Think Like a Chef has a dead simple recipe that rocks. Salmon would be too easy a choice; I have some lightly brined salmon on a bed of basil in a cazuela in my yard oven, slow over apple smoke, for dinner with neighbors tonight. It's also good.
  17. Syzygies

    Making rice noodles

    Kanom Jeen is one of my favorite Thai dishes, made with rice noodles from fermented sticky rice paste. On a food tour with Kasma Loha-unchit, a few of us clients broke away with Kasma and the drivers for a breakfast at what was being reported as the best Kanom Jeen place in the region. In the drivers' opinions the fish innard curry stole the show; I want to agree, though it was rather salty, funky, and intense, and the Kanom Jeen noodles should steal the show. The noodle dough was fermented in a long process, then steamed over one wok, and extruded into another. Each wok was over a yard across. I own a Torchio (Venetian Bigolaro) from http://pastabiz.com/. It is a great toy, even though the two pasta dies that come with it are the least useful of any available; it also accepts any die that works with the "Dolly", a widely used powered pasta press. I recommend being boring, and getting the smallest sizes of plain round noodle dies, which are the most versatile. Truth be told, I don't find that extruded pasta develops as interesting a flavor as rolled pasta from freshly ground flour. However, this device is the bomb for extruding Asian noodles. I too find it easiest to extruded directly into a pot of recently boiling water, which I immediately return to the boil. I've tried many variations on rice noodles. I don't know an easier way than using a bigolaro.
  18. I'm continuing to have better luck with steam in my yard oven than I ever did indoors. After adding ice and putting in the loaf to bake, I totally shut down the air intake vent and the top vent for a few minutes. The fire resumes just fine when I open the airflow back up. I believe that my relative success is because the Komodo Kamado is much tighter than my indoor oven, and bakes to a greater extent using radiant heat. I've moved to the main rack in an effort to actually reduce the radiant heat effect, and I'm baking at an air temperature of 400 F, getting results similar to an indoor oven at 460 F. So I agree with the above guess at the physics. It takes a great amount of energy to turn water to steam, and the steam releases a great deal of energy as it turns back to water. The other calculation I've wondered about: Water expands by about 1600x as it turns to steam. I estimate that my indoor ovens are each around 140 liters. This is also a reasonable guess for the volume of my Komodo Kamado. Bouchon Bakery's recommendation to use 350 grams of water will yield 560 liters of steam, or enough to fill either oven four times. So of course we feel steam exiting these ovens. There is steam left to do the job. On the oother hand, less than 90 grams of water won't fill the oven once with steam, at which point one would expect to see less of a benefit from the steam.
  19. Thanks. I like Hamelman so far, for that level of technical detail missing in books aimed at the home cook. I'll save my money for Calvel. Returning to California, I bought some chain to go in the skillet in my yard oven: Everbilt #2/0 x 30 ft. Straight Link Chain in Stainless Steel Lodge Logic L14SK3 Pre-Seasoned Cast-Iron Skillet, 15-inch Komodo Kamado Refractory Grill/Smoker/Oven The skillet is 11.2 lbs and each roll of chain is 8.6 lbs; several would fit. With one roll, I estimate one can produce 320g of steam from hot water, and 260g of steam from ice. I went with more ice than that, easier to set up the steam before adding the bread, and it all disappeared in the first few minutes. To revisit the Safe? angle opening this thread, I am afraid of the toxins that could be produced from the coatings (zinc or galvanized) on any kind of chain other than stainless steel. If anyone knows for sure (isn't speculating) it would be good to know a less expensive substitute. I fear that Bouchon Bakery simply overlooked this issue, not imagining that it could be a problem. Worrying about different metals is a standard topic in the barbecue community. In any case I'm struggling to work with "green" flour, that we grind fresh for the flavor and nutrition. ("Green" flour, not properly aged, is notorious for having uncooperative glutens, leading to flying saucers.) The bread shown is 40% red winter wheat, 10% rye (both freshly ground, 82% or so extraction), 50% white flour. It is 70% hydration, 15% leaven, 2% salt, 1/4 tsp yeast, 40ppm ascorbic acid. Three hours bulk, three hours proof. This loaf was lighter with better oven spring and a thinner crust than I've been getting in an indoor oven. While I love the drama of more rugged loaves, so far good oven spring looks like a water balloon for me. Both adults and kids devour the loaves, at the end of the day it's food. So some books state that steam is to moisten the crust. People who understand the need for techniques frequently get the reason wrong. Here, one could imagine other ways to moisten the crust, if this was all that's going on. I closed down my yard oven during the steam phase, and it came rushing out the bottom vent, with the potential for much more severe burns than hot air alone would produce. Potential, I reacted fast, but this reminded me how the steam felt on my face last week. The Komodo had clearly filled with steam. This didn't put the fire out. Steam transfers heat much more effectively than hot air. This is why steaming is a fundamentally different technique than baking. It would appear that the primary purpose of steam in a commercial bread oven is to transfer enough heat for good oven spring before the crust sets. Wetting the crust is secondary; if that were all, one would simply wet the crust some other way.
  20. I now have a 30 lb baking steel under my cast iron skillet, on my oven floor (a reasonable place to store it, when not making pizza): The Big! Baking Steel Modernist Cuisine Baking Steel (eGullet) This more than triples the thermal mass available for producing steam. The difference is striking, with a significant potential for steam burns if one isn't careful. The sound of violently boiling water, that used to last part of a minute, simply stops after a few seconds. That's a scary silence, respect it. As noted on that thread, one could buy steel plate and clean it up oneself.
  21. Syzygies

    Fish Sauce

    Here is an ingredient page by my Thai cooking teacher, Kasma loha-Unchit: Kasma's Favorite Brands Her favorite brands of fish sauce are Tra Chang and Golden Boy. We routinely debate this on her mailing list, and she's quick to point out unwanted additives in various other brands. In other words, read the label. I'm quite fond of Italian colatura ("garum", dating to Roman times). Purist may object, along with the frugal. I like how it tastes.
  22. Syzygies

    Mandolines

    A teacher of mine swears by the Benriner Japanese Mandoline Slicer. He's classic French, wouldn't prefer a Japanese gadget unless it actually worked. It sure looked like it worked in his hands, and I'm tempted, though I always prefer knife work. I have an old school mandoline, I only use it to lend to friends to convince them they don't want one either. It always comes back.
  23. Here's an earlier version of the Bouchon Bakery "rocks and chains" protocol: Michael Suas, in 2008: The breadmakers' guru (San Francisco Chronicle) Suas is the author of a highly regarded professional baking book, Advanced Bread and Pastry which assumes use of a professional deck oven with a steam system. I've found bits and pieces of the book invaluable, for instance for sorting out why "green" (freshly ground, not aged) flour misbehaves and what to do to compensate.
  24. The KK is big, much bigger than, say, a BGE, and any stone on the upper grill is far from flames. I didn't order the protective metal pan, and I've had no problems from flame, the Fibrament has held up fine through many high heat cooks. I like your washer idea, though, to augment protecting it with a heat deflector to change the "bottom heat" bias. What about baking steels (DIY or not) as radiant heat sources? In many applications I'd like stronger radiant heat from above. My favorite way to cook with the KK is as the fire dies out, but this could be enhanced, and radiant heat could certainly be improved in a home oven.
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