jackal10

Also don't wash the cloths. You can sterilize them by leavimg them in a warm (100C/200F) oven overnight...

My guess is you are using a recipe that started with more than just flour and water - maybe added sugar or grapes or the like, or even additivies in the flour you are using - Some King Arthur flour has added diastic malt, for example. What has happened is the yeast varieties that feed on such sugars have flourished, then run out of food. They are not the sort of yeasts you need in sourdough, where you are trying to promote a lactcobacillus/yeast symbiosis that can utilise wheat starch These are also less active the their sugary cousins. However they will dominate the culture in the end, and the sugar eaters drop out. Just keep it at 85F, and keep feeding it every 12 hours or so. I'm sure you can bake with your starter, it will just take quite a long time to rise at this stage. As time goes it it will improve as the desired strain gets more plentiful, and the flavour will adapt to your unique starter.

Good Balsamic Cooking Balsamic (Aspell's organic) White Balsamic (surprisingly good) Red wine (Dufrais) Red Wine (Homemade) White Wine (Dufrais) Cider Sherry White Malt non-brewed condiment (from the chip shop) Malt pickling 5% (in 1/2 gallon plstic jerrycan) Various flavoured vinegars: Chilli (Afterburner), Raspberry, Tarragon Unopened bottles of things that people have given us

Another Pimms thread Includes a recipe for fake Pimms: I expect the recipe for homemade or cheat's Pimms is well known, but I will repeat it anyway: two parts 40% gin two parts red vermouth one part orange Curacao (or other orange liquer like Cointreau) Some add 1 part sweet sherry or port. Some add bitters. Mix with lemonade etc like Pimms

Anything that promotes and glorifies one group of people over another must be wrong, so out with all nationalistic or religious festivals. Such times, with their false jollity and enforced visits to or from the family are naturally peak times for depression and suicides, so this would be a humanitarian measure as well. However keep the food, and the seasonality, but enact strict laws to prevent any Christmas (or Thanksgiving or Passover) goods being sold less than one week before the time when the festival would have been celebrated. Also extend this to dire penalties to anyone selling Asparagus or Strawberries or other seasonal foods before their local season...

Yes its smoking in my outdoor pizza/bread brick oven. The trick is to put a line of sawdust down and light it with a cook's blowtorch so it just smolders, and doesn't heat the oven. I use cherry and oak sawdust from a local joinery shop. A heap of sawdust around the inside edge about 3 inches wide smolders for about 24 hours - you can see it int he first smoking picture.

After about 48 hours in the smoke

What is the email for Alinea? I have a colleague who has some time in Chicago and would like to book, but the telephone is solid and the web site hopeless... Ross writes: Jack I think these people at alinea are absolute bastards. Look at the way they have blatantly manipulated egullet on the one hand (corruption? or is it just sponsorship?) and then listen to the condescending shit on their answerphone (if you can get through). I even tried to email and alinearestaurant.com is even bouncing emails to postmaster@ - in open defiance of IEFT standards and decent netiquette. I bet their game is marketing by scarcity. But the sort of thing that gets me really pissed off is when the rentabitch voice on the answerphone says things like `your call is valuable to us'. The reason people bank at places like Coutts is so that they never, never, never have to hear that. A place whose answerphone says `your call is valuable to us' is not carriage trade. In the large, maybe what's needed is an internet draft on service standards for online businesses - or maybe I will register the domain www.yourcallisvaluabletous.com which by some miracle appears to have escaped the attentions of the cybersquatters

Saucisson Smokin!

I hung the salami in one of what was meant to be a garage, but is now mostly full of junk, while the cars sit outside, for 5 days. They are more brown than red. Is that right? They are in the smoker now. I intend to mature them for about a month after smoking. I think you are right, and the flies got to the bacon before smoking. Next time I'll cover in muslin, or dry in the fridge. The bits I rescued were excellent and made a wonderful quiche.

GFG gives Sukiyaki in St Albans 6 Spencer St, just off the marketplace. The Battle Axes pub (Butterfly Lane, Aldenham) was a refuge when I was at school near there, but that was over 40 years ago...

Who first replaced the oil with water for the first cooking?

Please, please, please, can someone post a detailed description of each dish to go with the pictures. for those of us a long way away?

Manresa Los Gatos Picnic (and tasting) at Ridge Vinyard, weekend lunctimes

Great blog! Samosa's look lovely, but round here samosa's are in filo, usually fried, not puff pastry. Filling looks right though, but like spring rolls you can have all sorts of fillings.

I tried making bacon according to http://muextension.missouri.edu/xplor/aggu...nsci/g02528.htm I cold smoked it for 36 hours, but when I removed it from the smoke it was crawling with blow-fly maggots. Aside from general strictures about cleanliness and keeping flies out, I'm surprised they survived the high salt/sugar/saltpetre/smoke. What did I do wrong? Should I have smoked for a shorter time?

It was raining, and I finally sourced some back fat so it seemed auspicious to start making Saucisson menage fume, roughly following the Grigson recipe. 2lbs shoulder pork 1 lb hard back fat 4 cloves garlic, crushed 2oz salt (2 heaped Tbs) 1 tsp saltpetre, 1 tsp quatre epices, 2 tsp pepper 3 tsp sugar Ingredients (The Marmite is not included, but left over from breakfast); Skins packed in salt; Soak and wash the skins inside and out; cut up the pork shoulder Mince the meat and cut the fat into small cubes. I had a great difficulty finding pork back fat ("No call for it Sir. We make all ours into sausages") but the excellent Mr Waller, a paragon amongst butchers cut me some. Wallers is a really excellent old-fashioned butchers, so they don't have a web site, but they have been written up in Henrietta Green's Food Lovers Guide to Britain He only charged £1 (about $1.90) for 500g (a bit over one pound). Very cheap, since the supermarket "outdoor reared" pork shoulder cost £4 for 2lbs. Wallers write-up. I added a magic soupcon (0.5g) of lactobacillus starter. This promotes an acid environment to keep botulism at bay, besides adding flavour notes. Blend well, then stuff. Saucissons hanging in the garage to redden for 3-5 days, They will then be cold smoked, and left to mature for a month. The thermometer on the shelf says 57F, which is near enough the desired 60F to incubate the lactobacillus. Tasting the sausagemeat it seemed a little salty, but I guess its needed for preservation, and may mellow. Comments?

Traditionally three of fizzy lemonade to one of Pimms; ice. Strips of cucumber (the skin, not slices), and blue borage flowers. Some add mint, orange slices and other fruit, but its a mistake. Originally (well, not originally, but in th late 1940's after the war) No. 1 cup is Gin based. No. 2 Scotch, No. 3 Brandy, No. 4 rum, No. 5 rye No. 6 vodka. The only one of the variants, besides No. 1 still in production is No. 6, although this is made in much smaller quantities than the original No. 1 cup. No number, just has "Vodka base" as a diagonal purple stripe on the label.

Fishy nibbles Roast Asparagus, drawn butter 14 hour cooked lamb; Jersey Royal potatoes, roast cauliflower, carrots and fresh peas; purple sprouting broccoli; jus and mint sauce Rhubarb strawberries ; treacle pudding; custard Breads and cheeses

Menieure: Skin (both sides) pan fry in plenty of butter. Fresh butter, parsley optional Deep fry: coat in egg and matzo meal. Eat warm or cold, not hot, Tartare sauce. Goujons: Same only with strips of fillet

How do you stop the top of the egg drying out and toughening when you cook the egg on the pizza in the oven? Lots of cheeae on top?

Vinegar (1 tsp per 4 egg whites)

Yes. I can use my brick bread oven as a cold smoker. I'm in the UK and the weather is about 50F; Misture of cherry and oak sawdust.

I'm also making bacon. Converted from http://muextension.missouri.edu/xplor/aggu...nsci/g02528.htm Formula is for 7lbs/3.2Kg meat (1/2 oz per lb) or (33g per kg) 66g salt 33g sugar 1g saltpeter Cure for 7 days, dry for 3 days, smoke for 48 hours. So far I'm just getting to the end of the cure. What surprised me was hpow little of the curing mixture is needed.

I think the suggestion of a culinary iTunes has great merit. You could make deals with cookbook publishers to allow you to digitise the recipes, that users could download for a small fee (or an annual subscription), Add an index and some editorial choices, and the usual user rating system and collaborative filtering (users who liked this recipe also liked..), and some linking back to basic recipes...... Oh Masters, what about an eG iRecipe?