jamesglu

Just went to the BN.com website to add it to my wishlist, and see the following on the listing: "Note: This item does not qualify for coupons or promotional discounts unless expressly stated." Bad news!!

@Gary I signed up for a B&N membership just in case they should repeat the 50% deal you got; did you ever get your book?

Shortly after I wrote my post I re-read the intro notes in the book and saw the answer right there, so sorry for not editing the post in time! And it's because of the botulism fear that I was reluctant to use the oil again. And you should definitely try the recipe--it's a real winner!

I have been making the Salmon in a Jar for months now, serving it regularly to guests as a starter (often with a small mixture of greens from the garden underneath) to rave reviews. I wonder, though, if it's possible to reuse the olive oil from either the salmon or the potato jar, whether for another batch of the same or for something else? Any ideas?

I decided to cook a ribeye (about 2kg) in my sous vide setup yesterday. I set my Sous Vide Magic to 55C, coated the ribeye with a mixture of rosemary, sage, oregano, garlic, salt and olive oil, vacuum sealed it up, and cooked it for 4 hours or so. Took it out, completely incredulous that it would be cooked through, but it was PERFECT (I cut the ribeye into two pieces and the centre was perfectly pink and beautiful). I then put the beef in the fridge to cool completely and sliced it as thin as I could manage to serve as open-faced sandwiches to some guests today. I got more compliments about that beef and how beautiful it looked than I ever expected. I don't think I'll ever cook beef in the oven again!

I decided to cook a ribeye (about 2kg) in my sous vide setup yesterday. I set my Sous Vide Magic to 55C, coated the ribeye with a mixture of rosemary, sage, oregano, garlic, salt and olive oil, vacuum sealed it up, and cooked it for 4 hours or so. Took it out, completely incredulous that it would be cooked through, but it was PERFECT (I cut the ribeye into two pieces and the centre was perfectly pink and beautiful). I then put the beef in the fridge to cool completely and sliced it as thin as I could manage to serve as open-faced sandwiches to some guests today. I got more compliments about that beef and how beautiful it looked than I ever expected. I don't think I'll ever cook beef in the oven again!

I agree about the sauce; I could not get the bone marrow (the butcher in town gave "my" bone marrow to someone to give to their dog), so mine was not too too rich, but just rich enough. I also think that I would not bother with cooking the beef along Heston's method again, preferring instead to sous-vide it (I have not sous-vide'd a whole rib roast with bone in before; is that what you did, Keith_W?). I made the lemon tart the other day and found that I had WAY more filling than my shell would accommodate, so I made a few extra tartlets with the leftover pastry and filing, and still had more filling to bake in ramekins. The tart is quite sweet, but has a lovely flavour and the texture is excellent.

Glad your results mirror mine, Markm. The gazpacho has been a regular feature as a starter for us for a few weeks now, and all but one pair of diners have loved it (the exceptions were a pair of diners for whom the very concept of 'cold soup' was anathema). I want to try the lemon tart and the whiskey ice cream soon, and the chicken with sherry.

Thanks for the link, it's very helpful! One of my pet projects is to write a glossary of British-American-Kiwi-Aussie terms for meats!

Thanks, Mjx, but is it just a slice of any old ham, or smoked ham, or cured ham, etc?

Olicollett, would you mind expalaining what is meant by "gammon" in a British context? I have had gammon steak in Scotland, but I am not sure what a NZ butcher would know it as, or indeed whether I'm likely to find it here.

Thanks for the tip, Keith_W, I just might use that as a side dish for New Year's Eve!

I think I am the only person spending part of the holiday on this board while everyone else enjoys time with friends and family! But I shall carry on, fulfilling this community service of preparing menus from this incredible book and reporting on the results. The red cabbage gazpacho with mustard ice cream made for an incredible presentation to two guests the other night; they took a look at the odd sight of a ball of ice cream sitting on a bed of diced cucumbers, and were bemused when they read the description of the dish on their menus--then when I poured the purple liquid over the ice cream they were clearly impressed, but also a bit unsure of what lay in store for them. But when they tasted it their faces beamed with pleasure, since the combination really does work well! The next thing I prepared was the brulee chicken liver parfaits. The preparation of the ingredients is a bit time-consuming (no surprise), especially the cooking down of the wine, madeira, port and shallots, and the end result is so minuscule that I wondered if it would really have any impact on the final dish. But indeed, despite it being a couple of tablespoons of winey lusciousness swimming in a murky sea of chicken livers, eggs and butter, you can indeed taste it. The recipe calls for passing the pureed liver gunk through two layers of muslin and a fine sieve, but I found that my sieve was fine enough on its own and did away with the muslin, other than for squeezing out the last remnants of liquid from the solids before decanting into my ramekins. The cooking process was simple enough, but a bit of water condensed onto the tops of the ramekins in the lidded pan, though this water poured off easily enough when the parfaits had reached 62C. The end result, with the bruleed sugar topping, made all the work worthwhile--this is a real show-stopper dish, even without the date-fig chutney (which I did make, but didn't want to open for my taste-test). Definitely a winner for the New Year's Eve menu I'm preparing for more guests!

OK, I have now got a few more HB recipes under my belt (in more ways than one). The Slow Roasted Rib Roast was delicious, but took closer to 8 hours than 6 to cook (and it was a three-bone roast, just like in his book), and, while it was picture-perfect when I sliced it, five minutes later the beautiful pink had turned almost completely grey. I had cooked it to 55C (as determined by not one but two digital probe thermometers that remained in the meat during cooking), and while resting it had climbed to 60C. I covered the greyness with sauce (made without bone marrow as my butcher gave my bone marrow to someone else to give to their dogs!!), and no one was the wiser. Today I am making the red cabbage gazpacho with mustard ice cream, which looks like it will be gorgeous (the i/c is not nearly as strongly mustardy as I had expected) which I'm following with the sous vide salmon with crushed potatoes and choucroute. The salmon, potatoes and choucroute are repeats for me, but will be a new one for guests, so we'll see how they respond.

The pork belly was fantastic! I ended up serving it with roasted potatoes instead of the crushed ones, and with some of the choucroute as a side dish. It was definitely a do-again-sometime-when-I-have-a-spare-18-hours recipe...

I have given cookbooks as gifts (in fact, I have some friends for whom that's nearly the only gift I ever give) but only to people who I know are going to use and enjoy (and don't already have) them. The only exception to this rule is to young people who are just setting up their own household, to whom I might give a fairly general cookbook along the lines of a Joy of Cooking or a Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything if I don't know their level of competency in the kitchen.

@Nickrey, I doubt I'll be seeing the banana shallots anytime soon here but I find that if I dip regular shallots for a few seconds in boiling water and then refresh in cold water they peel easily enough. @Olicollett, the first 13 hours of the cooking process ended about an hour ago, so now the skin is in the oven for the last five hours. It's certainly a long process to get this recipe finished! I plan to serve it with the Szechuan consomme (which I made a few days ago, and which is now in day two of its two-day ice-filtration process) and duck dumplings as a starter, and possibly the crushed potatoes as a side. Those potatoes were stellar with the sous vide salmon, and I think they'd go with the pork belly nicely.

I'm going to be trying Heston Blumenthal's slow rib roast recipe on Christmas day (the beef is already dry-aging in my chiller), and I'll happily post my findings afterwards; does anyone have any pointers to share before I undertake this task?

I have the good fortune to have a large plot of land behind our house where we plant a pretty broad range of vegetables. One of the vegetables that we have in profusion is fava (aka broad) beans, which is something I have never really done all that much with in the past. My question boils down to this: I understand that when you have a young fava bean pod you don't need to double-peel the beans inside (that is, you just remove them from the pods and then they're good to go). But how do you know whether your bean is truly up to that sort of preparation, and what is the downside of getting it wrong? Are the bean wrappers indigestible, or is it just that they're a pain to deal with? And what is a good way to save the bumper crop of beans that I seem to be producing?

Been at it again with HB's book. Just finished a (small) batch of tea-smoked salmon and the crisp-skinned pork belly is in the oven for its 18-hour cooking process. Also a batch of lamb stock is on the stove. The salmon is good, but I think it has too much smoke flavour; perhaps when using a small piece of fish I should have smoked it for less time. The lamb stock smells fantastic, even though it's in a pressure cooker, and it's too early to tell anything about the pork belly. One question though; he uses a lot of banana shallots in the book, which cursory internet research reveals is a hip new thing in the UK. That means we in New Zealand won't see them for another 15-20 years, so is there any compelling reason for me not to just continue my current practice of using regular shallots? Seems to work fine to me.

Thanks everyone for your help; just thought I'd report that the 25 second time makes a world of difference--the bags are now tight as and the seal is great. Much better than my old FoodSaver system!

Herzog still has very good food according to all reports I have heard. And not many people in NZ realise that 'clafoutis' does not mean any French-style tart that includes cherries, and even fewer know that a 'clafoutis' made with any other fruit besides cherries is called something else (e.g. 'flognarde').

I bought this book and have found it to be a bit of a disappointment. There are indeed a lot of recipes in it, but there are still a lot of holes in its range and it's not particularly well organised.

The salmon was delicious, and went great with the potatoes and the bois bourdan sauce. Definitely will make again!

Thanks, I'll give your tips a try!