Syzygies

Bourdain also pays homage to him in http://www.nytimes.c...intcookbks.html

My UK copy of Dunlop arrived, and I couldn't stop stop reading it. I want to eat everything in it. Not sure about the "beginners" label, I always skim technique sections as a recreational quiz to find something the author knows that I didn't, or vice versa, and the tone here didn't bother me. Sure the recipes aren't hard, but they look delicious. Her regional preferences match my own. Like everyone here, I have many books, and I don't expect any one book to be comprehensive. If there are other books people prefer to Dunlop, I'm eager to read those books too. (I've always loved The Good Food of Szechwan by Robert Delfs, lowbrow and loud, with my other all-time favorite dan dan noodle recipe besides Dunlop's "Xie Laoban's Dan Dan Noodles", yes now in two of her books.) As for technique, here's a quote from "everyday stock" p318: I'd first seen this idea in Tom Colicchio's Think Like a Chef. Later, Janet Fletcher of the SF Chron told me that this was classic Chinese technique, but I'd never noticed it in print before now. Even Thomas Keller waited a few books to come clean that this was protocol in his restaurants too. So why was he leaving this out before? I'm ok calling Every Grain of Rice a beginner book if we can agree that The French Laundry Cookbook is also a beginner book. There's simply worded advice that happens to be right. I know many good cooks who simply skim their stocks, with comparatively ghastly results that they're not even noticing. Like many of us here, I've very interested in sous vide. However, I don't particularly like skyscraper food, so I read those books for technique. There are many opportunities in Dunlop's book to experiment with substituting sous vide steps, such as the cold chicken dishes, or red-braising. A typical recipe in this UK edition asks for "300g celery" and gives temperatures in centigrade. I went to extra trouble to order this edition from Amazon UK to the US, out of fears as to how exactly the publisher would dumb it down for my market. I'd do this again.

We most recently bought Fatali (and other) plants from http://thechilewoman.com. We need the jump on starting from seed, to squeeze in a decent growing season. A couple plants outdoors will provide many dozens of peppers in a good year. I discovered fatali by chance, asking a plant guy about peppers at a local farmers market. He pulled out a couple of plants tucked away in back, his personal favorites, and gave me a warning/recommendation. It felt like the beginning of a Stephen King horror movie, "oh cute furry creatures, let's bring you home!" Never saw the guy again. That was our best pepper growing season ever, starting with a very hot June, and the plants went crazy. From some peppers we'd saved frozen. Next time I'd freeze part way through the recipe, ground in vinegar. And the recipe needs salt to taste.

Head south a few blocks and eat Korean?

A friend of mine is so obsessed with calamansi that he bought me a tree to plant in our yard. Alas, the frost killed it. He makes wicked improvisational sauces and so forth. To quote from a recent email from his wife, "I just made a small batch of preserved calamansi Moroccan style, and am halfway through a 4 day Nyonya (straights Chinese, as in Malaysia) recipe for pickled calamansi. I am going to go back online to look for another savory treatment. I still have the marmelades stored away."

It's no harder to dry meat taken out of a classic braise than taken out of a sous vide pouch. If the meat is overcooked and falling apart, then it's tricky either way, but otherwise it's routine. Maybe your pan isn't hot enough? In any case, we're both suggesting the same thing. I'm suggesting people don't pre-sear sous vide for no better reason than not having to then chill to avoid fouling their vacuum chamber. You're suggesting people don't post-sear classic braise for basically the same reason: it's a nuisance. I routinely sieve the solids out of a braise and reduce the liquid, if I don't like the balance. This is recovery from a mistake, and I'd prefer to get the balance right in the first place, but it isn't difficult.

Wow! He's an unsung hero of mine. I'm sorry to learn that he died. Creole Gumbo and All That Jazz is a great book. I got bumped three times the same day in the 1980's, on a $39 People Express flight EWR to ROC flying home one Christmas eve, all because I got up the nerve to chat with this English traveler who managed six bumps that day. She taught me the ropes. A week before next Christmas, I have a free ticket about to expire, so I go to the airport and look at the departure boards. New Orleans? Never been there, let's go! I went on a gumbo crawl, perhaps having twenty gumbos that weekend. One famous place was too full to ever seat me, but I bluffed my way to having them bring me three bowls to wolf down on a couch in the waiting area. And so forth. By far the most amazing gumbo I've ever had in my life was at Chez Helene (now closed) on North Robertson Street, north of the French Quarter and a bit dicier neighborhood. Gumbo became my go-to dish for crowds. I've cooked gumbo for 20 to 80 people many times; the only other way to handle that scale is multiple pork butts, which is much easier with the right cooker (like http://www.komodokamado.com). Everyone should master gumbo, it's a quintessential American dish. It's the original fusion dish; I've tracked down precursors in African restaurants and they're also the best thing on the menu. Once I was spending a month in Nice, France, thinking how could I cook there for guests when my primitive notion of a fancy meal was to cook French. I reasoned that the crucial ideal for Chez Panisse was creatively mapping Provence onto California, so I should creatively map New Orleans back onto Provence, and make a Niçoise gumbo. This idea had enough appeal that I got invited to various houses to cook for parties. At the last house, Alice Water's friend and Chez Panisse co-founder Martine Labro showed up as a surprise guest. I then spent the last evening of my trip watching her make pizzas in her home kitchen for a party in the garden drawn by her in Chez Panisse Pasta, Pizza, Calzone. This was a cooking dream come true. And how did I really learn to cook gumbo? From Howard Mitcham's book Creole Gumbo and All That Jazz. He paints a vivid picture of how a party can come splendidly unhinged, having friends help make gumbo. He gives many recipes, but one puts away the book and understands how to make gumbo without a recipe. His book conveys a sense of how real people make gumbo, that no celebrity cookbook can convey. One does want to put away all books, and make gumbo by methods one already understands. I took many French lessons from a great private teacher (http://www.lacuisinesanspeur.com) and his insightful blueprint for the precursor dish bouillabaisse applies here: Make a great stock, emulsify it with the supporting ingredients, and add each meat or fish to cook perfectly counting down to serving time. If you got that and you've tasted bouillabaisse, one could argue recipes till dawn but there is no recipe, just do that with the ingredients you have. For gumbo, a great stock would be a triple stock as made in the French courts before people simply boiled down demiglaces: Make chicken stock, make crab stock with that, make lobster stock with that. Crabs are cheap, it doesn't matter how much meat one recovers as long as the flavor ends up in the gumbo. Lobsters are best treated as Thomas Keller teaches, removed from their shell as soon as feasible and poached very gently separately in butter, to serve over the gumbo. Howard Mitcham helps anyone to find their version of this thinking, in far fewer words. They say that barbecue isn't a cuisine, it's a religion. Howard Mitcham is a preacher for the religion of gumbo. Please honor the man. I wish I could have met Howard Mitcham; he is a hero of mine.

I've also spotted them at Monterey Market http://www.montereymarket.com - call.

Can you try on a practice cooler first? I've used the two part stuff one mixes just before use. The mixture becomes thicker as it expands; with proper hole placement and juggling around of the lid you will get pretty complete coverage. And perfection doesn't matter. If you do a 90% job the insulation gain will be 90% of what it could have been. Just like patching 9 out of 10 leaks in the bottom of a (porous) bucket; the bucket still leaks, but more slowly.

I agree that the chemical exposure risk is probably minimal. By analogy I don't expect to get mad cow eating any beef in the United States. At the same time I think twice sourcing a beef cheek. I don't expect to get poisoned eating any citrus here either, but I think twice when making limoncello from the rinds of 40 lemons. Fruit selection for making homemade preserved lemon is mainly about quality. I found exactly the same thing making limoncello: I might see lemons somewhere that called for a change of plans that day, time to make limoncello, but I couldn't decide to go buy lemons on a given day for limoncello, and end up with anything I really wanted to drink. We grow several kinds of lemons and limes in our backyard; I have a frost shelter, Christmas lights spray-painted black, and an outdoor thermostat protecting my kaffir lime from frost. On a good year I get 300 kaffir limes, and I mail out a few dozen care packages to Thai food friends I met through http://www.thaifoodandtravel.com. But by far my favorite is our Bearss lime tree, with ripe yellow fruit unlike anything I can buy. Now I'm wondering if I should put up the last of our crop (if not already freeze damaged) as preserved lime? Were this Indian pickle, one would be broadly opportunistic about what to use...

Commercial preserved, homemade preserved, and fresh lemon are three very distinct tastes. I do like Roland for a deep note one gets in commercial preserved lemons that's missing from homemade. When I ate at Aziza (http://www.aziza-sf.com) their house made preserved lemon was definitely in the homemade camp, and with a spectacular liveliness. The closest I can come to buying that style is the preserved lemon from The Cultured Pickle Shop in Berkeley, CA (http://www.culturedpickleshop.com). They also sell a best-ever Indian pickle. The elephant in the room is fruit selection, if one is making home made preserved lemon. Unless home grown or organic, pesticides in the peel are a question. And lemons vary widely. I grew and provided the Meyer lemons in season for a friend's homemade batch, but I wouldn't be happy starting from anything I saw at the grocer (even Whole Paycheck) on a random day. Beware of Chinese pine nuts, they have an inclusive notion of species and some cause a mild poisoning where everything tastes like metal for two weeks. Better to pay at least $50 a pound for Italian pine nuts, and treat them like truffles.

Mourad New Moroccan pp 95-97 sides with earthenware unglazed tagines, for their ability to carry flavors from cook to cook. One keeps different tagines for different meats/fishes, and is wary of lending out the chicken tagine if it might be fouled by use for "supermarket chicken". The presoak and preseason is mandatory, and must be repeated after several months of disuse. One has to ask, for the international cook who might be too involved with other cuisines months at a time to get back to Moroccan cooking, if this carrying of flavors is a good thing? The geometry is likewise described as well-adapted to the problem, but it evolved for use over a charcoal fire. Hmmm. I don't keep different mortar and pestles combinations for different countries; like Jamie Oliver my three Thai mortars will have to do for all cuisines. Similarly, the Spanish make the most practical and flexible range of earthenware pots, for all purposes. I use a covered cazuela when I cook a tagine outside in a charcoal oven (http://www.komodokamado.com/) and whatever pots I'd use for any stew when cooking a tagine inside. I own several tagines and just don't use them. Sticking to a small set of pots one actually uses saves space, and guarantees regular use. Paula Wolfert's latest book makes plain her obsession with cooking in clay, and describes many options. With sufficient glazing, the virtues of earthen cookware are reduced to questions of heat transfer rates. I'm reminded of RevereWare cookware from the 1960's with their idiotic decorative copper bottom films, that couldn't possibly be functional. If you're going to go earthenware, go all in or don't bother. I used to be much more obsessed with authenticity in my youth (at least I got margarine right). It used to be nearly impossible to find tagines meant for cooking rather than decoration. The degree of glazing is an indicator.

If a little voice in your head wonders whether the sous vide movement and raw food movements are converging, listen. This may be blasphemy, and read to those who know as an uneducated palate, but I'm finding that higher temperatures taste better sous vide than they ever would by conventional means. One should treat the sous vide tables as safety guidelines only, and rediscover what tastes best by extensive experiment. Painting the territory above 132 F as cowardice serving yahoo guests is really stacking the deck against an objective appraisal. Of course, I love the more challenging cuts, like hanger steak.

I've read about tropical volcanic cone islands that are fortunate to be able to draw deep, cold sea water from their shorelines. It sees many uses; one is simply to run the pipes underground through crops. Fresh water condenses on the cold pipes, irrigating the crops, and the crops do much better because their roots are cooled. Perhaps some aspect of this approach can be applied here?

I only know through books, but one eats tagines in general traditionally with bread. I wouldn't go with rice. Nevertheless, tagines are great on couscous, and no one you serve will be any the wiser. Paula Wolfert's account of making couscous is the best. Her details can be overwhelming if one is unfamiliar with making couscous: What one remembers without the book is to mix in some water, steam for a while with the lid off (cheesecloth over the holes of a pasta steamer insert works well if you don't have dedicated equipment), remove to cool a bit and mix in butter or olive oil with your fingers, steam some more, serve. Or just make not-as-good couscous in a rice cooker. As a counterpoint to Wolfert's detailed instructions, couscous is basically indestructible and you'll get steamed food no matter what you do. Some fat makes it more savory, and the dance I describe makes it lighter. With these goals in mind one can improvise. Before buying any book, locate some preserved lemon and make any online version of Chicken with Olives and Preserved Lemon. This is one of the top dozen dishes from any cuisine, and it doesn't challenge the "fruit in my dinner" envelope as other Moroccan dishes do. Mourad: New Moroccan is the best read, for an orientation into Moroccan food, tradition and spices. The food itself leans Keller, and their kitchen more so, directly in the French Laundry diaspora. A great meal, but I cook more traditionally. Anything by Kitty Morse is the most straightforward; execution is up to you. I love the Momo cookbook, but I should have finished my cocktail and just left when the restaurant hinted I should order something I hadn't made. If Moroccan cooking is unfamiliar, you will be pulled into too obedient a stance, cooking the recipes. You have to take charge, figuring out the spices, and all that matters is what tastes best to you; your tastes will evolve. It might be better to work up to full spices, rather than making overspiced pumpkin pie and giving up on the category. It's particularly hard not to use too much saffron. Momo gives the excellent advice to measure from a saffron solution, but this is impractical if you use saffron irregularly.

Years ago I had a rather crazy hydroponic setup in my New York apartment, growing all manner of culinary herbs. (Be prepared to take a lot of kidding from your friends for not focusing instead on the obvious cash crop.) As I recall, even on the 15th floor in the dead of winter, it turned into bug heaven. Nature is bigger than all of us, and if you're not on Mars you can't count on isolation to protect you. A bigger issue is the question of what gives herbs character. Like tomatoes or wine grapes, low yields and duress are presumed to lead to better flavor. I eventually concluded that most herbs need dirt. Nevertheless, you have room to do controlled experiments; just don't don't imagine it will be easy to produce herbs of your dreams. Play with barely enough water, nutrient balances and so forth. You certainly should try Genovese basil for pesto. What passes for basil in this country tastes like lawn clippings when used in pesto; the Italians grow or buy rather young bunches for pesto. I now dedicate half wine barrels to basil in season in California, and I can taste differences in soil, but simply avoiding the lawn clipping taste will be substantial progress.

In these cases, there's nothing like internet time travel! http://archive.org Could this be the blog you're remembering? It's the only entry on searing I could find. http://web.archive.o...kingissues.com/ To Salt or Not To Salt –That’s the Searing Question They apply scientific methods to determining how to pre sear (calling into question anyone's blind comparison that might not have optimally pre seared) but they take pre searing for granted.

My hot plate is ancient, oversized, built like a Soviet missile or United in-flight entertainment. I just haven't replaced it. It has a sealed burner, not the basic SRO model that looks like a mosquito coil. Like anything a PID controls, look for an absence of smarts that would get in the way. I browsed recently induction burners with a manual mode, but they were very expensive. Whatever stock pot you already have. Taller is better for convection.

Agreed. Though reducing a litre of stock won't have the same effect; you're sending the aromatics into the room. If one wants to go really old school, one makes double or triple stocks, rather than demi-glaces. This is not entirely forgotten; The Flavor Bible quotes Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns as making a triple pork stock. I've made triple stocks for gumbo; I imagine one would be spectacular for Bolognese. What I don't know is whether using a pressure cooker to make stocks negates any advantage to making a triple stock. It would certainly save time.

Do you have a link? All I could find was this episode: http://www.heritager...-3-Harold-McGee They discuss preheating to inhibit lactic acid bacteria, but no blind taste tests comparing searing methods. Another "expectation of outcome" effect: A young scientist needs to believe at least a little bit that they're smarter than 500 years of predecessors, to make progress. At least they're aware part of the time that progress doesn't work that way. When a modern chef dismisses "tradition", I wonder if they're giving someone like Fernand Point credit for being more than a country yokel. Democratic blind taste tests are a slippery slope; they presume that we're all equally perceptive. I've met wine tasters who can match up a dozen wines blind after a four hour break; I can't come close. In chess one learns not to play one's opponent for a fool. Is it right to tune cooking step by step by what an average person can taste? This denies the possibility of an ensemble effect. In audio circles there's the notion of a "golden ear"; on DIY forums one knows the best ears within driving distance willing to critique your new design. People debate whether one can hear the differences in new digital standards; the consensus is that most people can't hear the difference between sampling rates of 96kHz and 192kHz. Nevertheless, the most gifted sound board engineer can tell the difference between 96kHz and a live feed, but can't tell the difference between 192kHz and a live feed. There is some evidence that music sounds better with intact high frequency overtones that listeners can't detect in isolation. Barb Stuckey's Taste What You're Missing describes large variations in taste sensitivity, with "hypertasters" at one extreme. In my world view, a chef like Thomas Keller works harder than most people with his gifts, has unusual manual dexterity, and is a hypertaster to boot. I might flunk individual steps that he can distinguish, and still appreciate an ensemble effect when he's done.

By training I'm sensitive to ways people trick themselves into creating and believing dogma; that's my second order bias system, and I'm aware that it could be misleading me here. The reason people don't braise first, sous vide in restaurants, is because the heat will foul the chamber vacuum machine. My one brush with "professional" cooking classes was the most convention-riddled experience of my life. People can turn the accident of this equipment limitation into a commandment carried down from some hill. I'm all for modernist thinking, but anything that flies in the face of hundreds of years of perceptive tradition has to be examined really closely. (*) There's a common arrogance that holds that individual chefs can have deeper insights that entire nations. I don't buy it; I've been around geniuses and they're as smart as twenty people, but not millions of people. So why does classic braise technique sear first? If adapting to the limitations of chamber vacuum machines happens to be the right answer and everyone for centuries before got it wrong, that's rather lucky. That said, I try it both ways and I haven't made up my mind yet. It is rather convenient to cook sous vide straight from the freezer, stopping home for five minutes on a Tuesday afternoon. (*) The founding of the Guggenheim Museum makes a great object lesson. A new generation of rich were jealous of a previous generation snapping up impressionist art for a song, and wanted their thing. They latched onto a severely restrictive definition of abstract art, and bought all these early blotches on a wall. Meanwhile, Matisse was far more successfully painting nearly representational works that veered into the wilds of abstraction, teasing the interface between the two. As modernists, we don't want to throw out the past.

In the kitchen where I have the SousVideMagic, I've used a hot plate and stock pot as my primary method for years. I could say you want this option in any case, whatever else you do. The SousVideMagic is modular so you're not boxed in to a single approach. Before I knew about the SousVideMagic, I bought a commercial soup warmer with the idea of rigging it to an eBay PID. Forcing my hand, its internal thermostat failed, leading me to short it out of the circuit, and I learned about the SousVideMagic before I got around to the PID. In the end, I generally used the hot plate instead. I believe firmly in regular psychotic breaks where one sheds half of one's possessions (other people go in for cleanses but that's not my favorite chair) so the soup warmer got tossed. Now, with improved methods for sealing chamber vacuum bags using an impulse sealer, I'm into longer sous vide cooks where the insulation of a rice cooker makes sense, so I'm still shopping this category. Meanwhile, what's the elephant in the room? In other threads people agonize over how to improve their game, cooking, and advice comes down to really tasting what you're doing. Meanwhile, sealing a package and launching it into outer space is flying blind, it makes sense for a restaurant where they practice the same steps every day, but asks a lot of us. And I don't believe that cooking 134 F is a test of my manhood, the best steak I've ever served sous vide was a hanger steak 140 F for three hours, with a sauce from some stock and the bag juices. (Hanger steak is tough; it needs that long to slice up like prime rib of the gods.) I like the SousVideMagic for really controlled braises. I have a handmade ceramic bean crock that fits beautifully on a rack in my stock pot on my hot plate, in a water bath controlled by the SousVideMagic. I can sear first without fouling my chamber vacuum machine. I can taste and season as I go. What does this amount to? A really awkward version of the slow cooker one could simply buy if the CEOs in that industry weren't all dinosaurs. Nevertheless, this setup has produced many great meals. My advice is to set up the hot plate and stock pot first, and see for yourself what size water bath you'd need for an insulated alternative. Then spec and buy that alternative.

As it happens, we make two hot sauces, both because we can't buy them: A "Tabasco" style fermented red hot sauce, and a Caribbean style hot sauce from Fatali peppers. I'd be making something up if I provided a "reason" for fermenting the red hot sauce. I tried making hot sauce without fermenting, and it was bad. Pathetic. I even found similar recipes online by famous authors, and I was embarrassed to read them. As in, the hot sauce was "gee whiz lets make a nuclear accelerator in our backyard using Q-tips" bad. So I read up on the original McIlhenny recipe (no matter that I find the modern commercial version lacking) involving packing in oak barrels for years, carving off the black bits that looked like they'd kill you (I paraphrase) and mixing with vinegar. The acidic fermentation process used to make sauerkraut and kimchi struck me as quicker and more controllable (like modern wine making in stainless steel tanks) so I went for it. The http://morebeer.com warehouse was in my town so I used beer carboys; I've since switched to German fermentation crocks. The results were much, much better, with fermentation. No reason. Rather, an empirical observation. While I wouldn't call this approach widespread, I would call it obvious (I'm a mathematician and we have a pretty harsh notion of originality; this was an exercise) and I've since seen similar approaches described on fermentation forums. If you want to sound like a troll, go express concern about botulism on one of those forums. They're pretty confident that proper fermentation technique can't possibly lead to botulism. I bought a pH meter, and acidify at the start to a level that can't support botulism. The fermentation bugs don't mind, and they take it from there. On the other hand, fatali peppers make an astonishing cooked sauce, with little trouble. This sauce is the all-time favorite of various friends, and we grow fatali peppers regularly just for this sauce. A quarter teaspoon can be just the tweak to bring a tomato pasta sauce to life. Or slather it on a sandwich, if your tolerances are higher: 24 Fatali peppers, chopped 1 cup chopped onion 4 cloves garlic 2 TB oil 1 cup chopped carrots 1 cup vinegar (rice, champagne or white) 1/2 cup lime juice Saute garlic and onions in oil, add carrots and a bit of water, simmer till soft. Grind to puree with chopped peppers, combine with vinegar and lime juice, simmer 5 minutes.

Here's the eGullet post about PolyScience pressuring Underground to drop Sous Vide from their name: http://forums.egulle...15#entry1903215 (I couldn't find this story elsewhere online.) Here is the Underground Circulators web site ($499): http://undergroundci...s.com/Home.html There are other cooking categories where I went commercial rather than consumer, such as my chest freezer (not all positives; you can dance on a home chest freezer but they fail) or my Vita-Prep blender. Or for that matter my stick blender. Home blenders are just dumb, and too small. Let's face it; we do want the $800 PolyScience. Our hesitation really is about the money. The $500 Creative is surely more cheaply made, but the 2 to 3 days bit has to be sales blather trying to split their markets.

I found this to be a great read: http://auberins.com/Sous%20Vide%20application%20note.pdf Fresh Meals blog makes a similar recommendation to your find: http://freshmealssolutions.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=74:best-sous-vide-cooker&Itemid=100088 Yours looks like a nice find. The one question I'd have, is it too well insulated? If so with stock settings the PID will overshoot for short cooks. Like so many things in life it will be trivial to learn enough math to redo the PID control values, if necessary. There's lots of online help with this. I'm not positive that my model or yours can have the PID values adjusted, but I got the impression this is the case. I understand the principles involved but haven't done it. (There's a whole parallel universe to sous vide where people control their charcoal fires with PID controllers; that's how I cook 20 hour pork butts and briskets on my http://www.komodokamado.com ceramic cooker.)