cdh

You've made creme bulgare. Yummy on most everything.

Are you a full-time-enough resident to be a constituent of a member of parliament? Getting your local rep to sit down with you for a half hour to explain the reasoning behind the law that selling fresh seafood off the docks is forbidden would be fascinating... and if it is 75-year-old protectionism that serves no purpose any more, maybe you could get the law rescinded. Give the fisherfolk a new market, draw people in who think you you did, etc. Somebody might even appreciate that you did it.

Absolutely, but not in the quantities you're using. I've found that a Manhattan base is good to play with a teaspoon or so of different eaux de vie... A fdew drops into an espresso is also a delicious augmentation.

Nothing anybody can tell you here will substitute for your own taste buds. Find stores that will demo the machines and pods you think you want and see if you like them. I personally like espresso and not plain coffee, so if I were looking for something poddy, I'd look at Nespresso machines. Your link seems pretty clueless, since it says it is about espresso machines, and then highlights things that are not espresso machines. Do some reading at coffeegeek.com

Do we have a lot of sugar sculptors on here nowadays?

Given the sad state of tea produced by commercial establishments, I don't know if I can blame your horrible women. Making tea right really is an art, and no place is going to be able train staff in the subtleties of doing it right. The old saws about freshly boiled water and such are a pale shadow of what you need to know and do to get a good result from any particular variety of leaves. Were your horrible women completely and totally freeloaders? Never bought a thing that you can remember?

nope, nope nope yourself. You're nuts if you think the right thing to do is experience half a meal at subpar standard, but pay for the whole thing then walk out. Particularly as a food critic.

That is a very interesting dilemma at a place like that... where there is just a set price for a tasting menu, how do you get up and walk out halfway through and still settle your bill? Drop some cash on the table and dare them to come back at you with a call to the cops for theft of services if they think the cash is not enough? I'd be interested to see how that plays out... but probably not as the NYT food critic.

All I can say is... Damn! http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/dining/pete-wells-per-se-review.html?ref=dining

Of all the things I've fermented, I've never tried to do kombucha... So the taste is supposed to be like a tart apple cider? The one kombucha I remember trying was more like cider vinegar... very acetic. Was that an outlier in the style, or are they all pretty vinegar-y? I've enjoyed making water kefir in the past... a very clean lactic tartness... I wonder if my kefir crystals in the fridge are still alive after 6 or 8 months...

Thinking in a 19th century fashion here: What about giving the raw stuff a heavy salting? A start down the path to curing would extend the window before things go stinky and slimey, no? And you'd want the stuff seasoned when you cook it anyway. I just noticed a pack of pork belly in my fridge that had definitely stayed there too long and I had the thought that I should have given it the salt treatment as soon as I bought it, and it would not have been a problem...

Rotuts- It looks like the issue is that OP frequents culinary wastelands with some regularity. If you're a 50 mile drive from anything but Golden Corral and bologna sandwiches for weeks on end, you're entirely reasonable looking to engage in self help. God knows what people who live there do... maybe all the good stuff is home cooked, or served at church picnics... but if you're not local, you won't know where to go... so self help is the thing. Totally agree on bringing a circulator and a Searzall, then hitting up the Piggly Wiggly for some protein.

Makes sense... nuts are so oily that in a microwave they'd render and fry themselves.

Haven't played with a Rocky myself so can't really say... but I will throw in my observation about grinders. The grinding beans part of their job is the least challenging part of what they do. Getting precision grind is easy. Doing it without huge noise or mess and without the possibility of locking up and jamming and burning out the motor is where the engineering efforts are going. Back in the day 15 years ago I went from using a little Salton burr grinder with lots of plastic components to a Saeco grinder. The Saeco's burrs were mounted in a giant solid brass screw mechanism for adjusting... once you dialed in a grind, it wasn't going to change... and you could grind as fine as needed and moreso... but the thing spun so fast that it threw grinds all over the place and was a total mess... and noisy. So I retired that and got a Baratza Preciso. Fantastic when it was working, but lots of plastic bits in it kept breaking when I tried to throw lightly roasted beans at it. It spun much slower, made less mess, was quieter. But fragile. So I'm now using an Ascaso, which is pretty good. A little noisy, chokes on a bean every so often and needs to be cleaned out, but great adjustment mechanism, and minimal mess compared to the Saeco. Moral to the story is that just about any burr grinder can grind your coffee to the texture you need it ground to... even the hand operated ceramic grinders do that... it is the externalities and how the engineering deals with them that is where the pricey grinders earn their value.

Sounds interesting... if only they left the cinnamon out. Might be tasty, but not worth the headaches cinnamon gives me.

So they're models of ethical salesmanship in your world?

What I'm most disillusioned about is that these guys succeeded in snookering the likes of Thomas Keller. Is the emperor naked?? Or were the Bros capable of generating chocolate good enough for TK's palate in extremely limited quantities, and were content to use that endorsement to flog their failed experiments to the public at insane prices?

Use rum instead of whiskey in a Sazerac, and you get a fine beverage.

It looks like they had all the gadgetry to play with making bean to bar chocolate... I'd guess they must have overpromised very early on and melted some Valrhona feves to cover... then they were stuck in a position of having to be equal to or better than Valrhona after people tasted, liked, and raved about that batch. Given that, I can imagine a snowball effect with lots of good intentions getting ground into fine paste under the weight of the earlier deceptions.

http://dallasfood.org/2015/12/mast-brothers-what-lies-behind-the-beards-part-1-tastetexture/ I'm surprised nobody has linked to this here yet. Some familiar names from eG from back in the day. I recall the Noka expose that this fellow did was heavily discussed here then. Who likes Mast Bros? I've never bothered to try them... I am of the opinion that since there exist a wide variety of mass produced chocolates that I enjoy, the need for artisan quirkyness at a premium price just isn't there for me.

Not the first time I've heard that said about this beer... Have not gone out of my way to confirm it. As to the what's a Nitro question, it is a method of serving. If you look, the tap real black Guinness comes out of is different than what ordinary beer comes out of. That is because the beer is under a higher pressure in the keg, but most of the gas causing that pressure is a Nitrogen heavy blend of N2 (a non-soluble gas) and CO2 rather than pure CO2, which dissolves into the beer and becomes bubbles. Nitro beers are beers that pour like Guinness, with the very fine cascading bubbles... that's because the dissolved CO2 acts differently under the pressure that the Nitrogen causes while it is weighing down on the beer without dissolving into it. Combine that with the extra moving bits in the special nitro taps, and you get a very different beer experience than you'd get from the same liquid pressurized with CO2 and pushed through a normal tap.

In my experience... when your grind is not tight enough, the water cascades through in 6 seconds and leaves you with a nasty underextracted shot. When it is too tight, the machine just chokes, so there is not a bad shot to deal with.

That's an interesting idea... thing to do would probably be to knock the underextracted puck and the shot into a french press with some cold water or some such and cold brew it overnight... certainly wouldn't want to drink nasty underextracted shots, even over ice with milk and sugar. The stuff that didn't get extracted is still in the puck, though...

Any reason another cream cheese wouldn't work in this recipe?

And keep in mind, "dialed in" is a moving target. Weather messes with your sweet spot. Your beans will mess with your sweet spot... if you switch between batches, you're in for a recalibration. Some beans grind so differently that it can be 8 or 10 twists on the adjustment screw on my Ascaso to go from one type to the next.