Mofassah

My point is that the dices doesn't get smaller if you do it than if you don't.

I have many times wondered why the hell super duper top chefs do the horisontal cut when chopping an onion. Jamie Oliver does it here (skip to 2:12 to see the cut I am talking about): Gordon Ramsey does it here (at 0:50): I never do it. I have tried, and I didn't notice any difference in the end result. It's USELESS, End of rant.

Thanks for your replies. I usually just brutally cut my chicken in six pieces, first lengthwise and then make one piece with the leg, and cut the breast across in two equal part, one with the wing and the other without, and serve them bone in, so I haven't had any problems with the wishbone so far, and suspect I won't in the future either. :-)

Rapeseed (not grapseed) and extra virgin olive oil for dressings, depending of the taste I want Regular cheap olive oil for cooking sauces and other stuff that doesn't require high heat Sunflower oil for searing and fries Sesame oil in some asian dishes like ramen and spring rolls Sunflower oil for mayonaise Edit: I forgot to mention truffle oil, which is olive oil infused with truffle. Delicious stuff.

In most recipes for roast chicken I've stumbled upon, it says I should remove the wishbone. I have done it, and I have not. I must admit I am unable to notice any difference in the final result, other than the obvious, that the bone isn't there. So I'm wondering, why should it be removed?

I do it Heston's way, low and slow, and it never fails. But as important as technique, method and seasoning is the chicken itself. Cheap super market chicken simply can't compete with a real free range one.

Yay. I have acquired the "Modernist Cuisine - The Art and Science of Cooking". What a beauty in 6 volumes!

This is a great thread, and it's sure a lot of ways to cook a piece of beef into a good juicy tender steak. I haver tried more or less all of the methods mentioned here over the years, and my conclusion is that the meat itself is the most important factor to take into consideration. If the meat is properly tenderized, it's easy peasy to get a good result as long as you have a decent heat source, salt and pepper. It's a HUGE difference between searing a super tender dry aged rib eye and a random piece of super market beef. So I googled a bit on the subject, and will now try to find a small, cheap used refrigerator, and try dry aging as show here in this youtube tutorial:

BLASPHEMYYY!! Ok, I agree. Good rant.

I've gone up about 5 kilos in weight over the last year, and the simple reason is that my local food pusher have a permanent campaign selling Berliners, you know the deep fried buns that's filled with jam and rolled in sugar, 3 for the price of 2. I am not able walk pass them. They are so soft and puffy and fat and sweet and delicious I salivate the second I enter the store and smell them. Bloody hell.

Heya and thanks for all the great answers. I am sorry i didn't follow up, but life turned hectic, so I havn't been able to log on and reply. I ended up with serving them with a couple of rocket leaves, roasted pine nuts and a nice balsamico syrup, and the liquid from the sous vide bag swiftly brought to a boil with a dollop of butter. The reason I choose to cook them sous vide is simply because it is a bullet proof way of getting them just 100 % perfect every single time. When just searing them, there's a risk of either cook them too much or too litttle. I don't like them too raw, and I don't like them too firm. Besides, when I do it sous vide, they are not just perfect in the center but all the way through, and I can give thme just a really quick sear on a smoking hot skillet, ten seconds on each side, and get that perfect maillard reaction that makes them look perfectly light brown and taste devine.

A few warm newly popped pop corns, lightly dusted with chili powder.

Tequila and Cointreau, which I'm gonna mix with lemon juice, orange juice and frozen strawberries in my blender and serve some decadent strawberry margaritas in the warm summer breeze ... or in front of the fire place more likely.

Are you seriously suggesting brown shelled eggs peel more easily than other colours? Absolutely! All eggs, white or brown, peel like a charm if you just dunk them in cold water straight from the pot after cooking. This also stops the cooking process and avoids the eggs getting overcooked while the wife is in the shower. :-)

I am having some colleagues over for dinner next week, and I am going to serve scallops for starters and chicken for main. I have it all planned out for the chicken, but not sure how I will garnish the scallops. I will cook the scallops sous vide, half an hour on 54C first, then sear them quickly at really high heat, so that's a winner, but what do I serve them with? I've done some simple leaves with a balsamico vinaigrette, sun dried tomatoes and roasted nuts, and it's OK, but not perfect. Scallops are rather sweet, so I assume it needs a bit of acidity going there, which is why I think balsamico is a good idea, but ... yeah, it's a bit boring. I think I need somehting that's both a bit acidic but also with some richness. What do you think is the best garnish for scallops?

I'm surprised that nobody suggested wraps.

I recently made the lemon tart from that book, it came out so well (for a hack like me). I did the roasted chicken last weekend, but I did it in a combo with how he describes in the book and the way he did it in his TV show, which is much the same only with brine, and even lower and slower, I roasted mine for 8 hours, and it is by far the best chicken I've made ... or eaten even. It was worth the pirce of the book itself, and I can't wait to try the other recipes. Will try the lemon tart this weekend.

I do something sort of like this, both as a quiche (not closed, just a bottom crust), and a sort of frittata thing (but only baked, nothing on top of the stove). But in both cases, I add a custard overall.I'm interested in how it comes out without the custard. Does the melting cheese hold it all together? Isn't it very dense without the custard? The cheese hold it all together in there, no need for custard, and the onion and the juices from the ham keep it from getting too dense, in fact, the texture of it is quite amazing. The ham I use is simple cooked ham, but I'm sure smoked ham would do the trick too. The cheese is regular gouda, but I am sure all sorts of good cheese will do.

There's a great hot dog stand in Bergen, across from the Fisketorget. Photos accompany this post. On more than one occasion during my all-to-infrequent visits to Norway a couple of hot dogs at 7-Eleven or Narvesen has allowed me to eat in the cheap, a considerable achieve t in the land of $30 pizzas. Here's a link to a blog post about Polse Porn: http://norwaysaga2010.blogspot.com/2010/07/plse-prn.html ImageUploadedByTapatalk1371498527.942412.jpg Wow. Imagine that. Finding the very "Trekroneren" mentioned here at EG, that's pretty cool for me. I grew up in Bergen, and I must have bought hundreds of hot dogs from Trekroneren over the years. It was mandatory to stop there and much down a couple of dogs after a moist evening out when I was in the clubbing age. Trekroneren is most likely the best hot dog vendor in Norway. The name means "three crowns", which was the price for a hot dog when this little kiosk opened many many years ago. Three Norwegian "kroner" (crowns) is about 50 cent. Thanks!

Call me ignorant!(You're joking, right? You don't actually put shrimp salad on hot dogs... Right?) Nope, I'm dead serious. It's really nice, especially on one of them long chunky ones.

Fill a simple closed pie with equal amounts of chopped onions, ham and cheese. Yum.

Brilliant rant, allthough somewhat not very applicable to the hot dog situation here where I live, in Norway. Here the standard hot odg is either a boiled wiener or a fried sausage. The fried sausage comes in many varieties, the cheap ones are skinless and tasteless ones, and would cost the same as the wiener. Over the last years however, we have had a great development in the sausage industry, and the major vendors of hot dogs now are all teh gas stations. They are so popular that they make more money on the hot dogs than they do on the gas, and the quality is actually damned good. The top seller is a long, thick sausage with cheese inside, and rolled in a long streak of bacon, and is almost a full meal. If I have two of them for lunch, I dont have to eat anymore that day. Steamed buns doesn't exist here, but a toasted bun is mandatory. Toppings are simple, no slaw here, just mustard, ketchup, french dressing and either crispy fried onions, you know the processed sprinkly kind of shit that taste like the scrapings of your kitchen vent (yuck) or raw fine chopped onions. Mayonese based shrimp salad is quite popular too among us hot dog connoiseurs, but the regular ignorant doesnt understand the beauty of it and call it disgusting. Pffft.

I received "Heston Blumenthal at home" last week, and I love it. Not much in there that's new to me though, since I have seen all his TV-programs and read all there is to read about his cooking on the internet and like a gazillion of references to his work, but I still love it. He is not just a brilliant chef, he is also a pretty decent writer. And after a decade or two with extreme focus on photage, it's really nice to have a cookbook that is actually a good READ too, not just mouthwatering pictures of food that never looks like it does when I cook it at home anyway.

I make my own crisps: #3 - 6 can be skipped. They are for complete nerds who won't get satisifed unless the chips are as crispy as human possible. For those nerds, two rules apply: # 3 to 5 can be skipped¨and replaced with # 6 You don't do #6 if you do # 3 - 5 #6 is easy and all should do that if you don't have ultrasound Slice good, high-starch, potatoes to 1,5 mm slices on a good mandolin. Peeled or not is up to you, but I don't peel them, theres a lot of nice flavour in the peel. Rinse thoroughly in running cold water untill the water becomes totally clear Put them in a bag with 500 ml water with 15g salt and vacuum seal them in a chamber sealer Let it soak over night in the bag Put the bag in an ultrasound bath at full power for 40 minutes Dunk them in boiling water with baking soda (one teaspoon per liter water) for 40 seconds Dry them off on a paper towel Deep-fry them in peanut oil at 150 C for 7 minutes Add salt. Munch,Ultrasound makes a gazillion of tiny micro cavities in the surface of the potatoes, so the surface becomes much much larger, which in turn makes it a lot crispier when fried. Cooking them with baking soda does much the same.

Sorry, I have to disagree. I've tried to bake with unripe pears (inadvertently), and the bad news is, they don't soften enough during cooking. Not enough to be toothsome, anyway. Also, since they are not sweet, they don't taste that good. I've baked with Bosc and Anjou pears. Bartlett pears, when ripe, tend to be very soft. My test is to eat a ripe pear. If it's sweet, chewable, but still firm and sliceable (not mushy), it's good to go. For a pear cobbler, any ripe pear should be fine. Believe what the recipe says, and buy the best pears at the market. Ah, sure, I agree completely. I did not mean hardest as in not ripe. With "hardest" I should have said "firm". You don't want pears that's not ripe for sure. A very ripe cornice would for instance disintegrate almost to jelly when cooked. I have used bartlett (or Williams as we call them in Europe) and concord pears with decent results.