jim loellbach

My wife Janet and I are driving from Chicago on Thursday, so I'm not sure when we'll arrive. I'd like to join for dinner Thurs, but can't promise. We'll have a car, and might be able to help shuttle people around, but Janet might be using it during the daytime while we're playing.

OK, I'll take the bar class at 1/2 price. Sorry, I've already paid for the conference. PM me and we can work out payment.

I'll bring Wybauw 3 (shelf life) and Morato. I also have Greweling and Notter (art of the chocolatier). Can easily bring them all. Made a soft caramel and 3 ganaches today, ready to dip and mold tomorrow.

Yes, Erika told me she heard him say that in the demo, but I missed it.

Sunday night, Bar Raval (tapas, sherry, vermouth, very nice but crowded and loud for a Sunday night), Monday: split a sausage roll from the Pie Commision, then Mother's Dumplings for late lunch (Chinese dumplings and scallion pancake). We had a dinner reservation for Richmond Station, but it was raining so we stayed closer to our B&B and had dinner at Local Kitchen and Wine Bar (very good prix fixe dinner, mussels and asparagus salad for starters, smoked gnocchi and trout for mains, lemon sorbet with rhubarb and cannoli for dessert, half priced bottles of wine). Tuesday, Momofuku for lunch before photo exhibits at Art Gallery of Toronto, then a long wander to St. Lawrence Market, then to Distillery District for sake tasting at Ontario Spring Water Sake Company and oysters at Pure Spirits. Also picked up a few bonbons at Soma. We had planned on dinner at Bar a Vin, but found out they were closed. Considered The Black Hoof, but also closed. So we ended up at Patria for a couple light dishes at the bar. Capped off the night with a taste of mezcal at the new El Rey on the edge of Kensington Market. Wednesday, I realized I'd been in Canada for a week and had had no poutine! So, yes, we had lunch at Poutini's House of Poutine (right near our B&B), but we got the "tiny" size portions, really! We figured out we walked about 8 miles on both Mon and Tues, and quite a bit on Wed, so we did burn off some of those calories! Got home Wednesday evening and went shopping for my macaron class on Thursday. Was a good time, 15 students, and they all had serviceable macarons at the end of the night. Here's a pic of my demos.

Hey, great meeting everybody this past weekend. I learned a lot and want to get home and try things out. And huge thanks to Kerry, Rodney, Kat, Jessica, Jess's dad for his food, and all the people who taxied me around! Erika, I owe you for an Uber ride, I can pay you back when you're in Chicago this summer. My wife and I have been eating our way through Toronto since. Heading home today. Thanks again, such a generous group of folks.

Kerry, I'm deciding how many US dollars to bring. You prefer US cash for pretty much everything, correct? The overall workshop, dinners on Friday and Saturday, and the master class. Am i missing anything?

I'm in for Thai.

These are places a friend recommended to me. Can't vouch for any of them, but I trust my friend's taste. My wife's joining me Saturday night and I'm staying til Wed 5/18 so we'll probably check some of them out later in the week. Then again, I love Thai. Local Kitchen & Wine Bar Cote de boeuf, tiny, kind of a dropby place, great for oysters, cheese/meat, wine Boralia Actinolite Alo, if you're looking for high end Yasu, sushi Bar Raval Blackhoof

Yeah, good point. The seriouseats article predated the CI one, but who knows when CI did the tests and when they published the article (same with SE). The rip-off could have worked the other way around! Or maybe it's like most everything else in cooking, it's all been done before.

Cook's Illustrated also recently did an article on hard cooked eggs and sticking shells. It looks like they totally ripped off seriouseats.com. Same tests, same results. I use the seriouseats method: eggs straight out of fridge into an already boiling pot of water or steamer. Have enough water that it doesn't stop boiling after adding the eggs. 6.5 minutes gives a good soft cooked yolk, 9 minutes gives a still translucent yolk good for ramen, 12 minutes gives a hard cooked yolk. Into ice water for 15 minutes (or just a minute or so if eating hot), helps to keep the shell from sticking.

Ditto on the giblets. You can make a nice chicken liver and gizzard cream sauce for pasta for 2 people from 1 bird. Shallots, giblets, mushrooms to bulk it up, a splash of cognac or whiskey, and cream. I like it best with pappardelle.

I can recommend this: http://www.amazon.com/Preserving-Japanese-Way-Traditions-Fermenting/dp/1449450881

Perhaps adding some glucose syrup to the recipe would help by preventing crystalization of the sugar in the chocolate. Greweling recommends between 10 and 40 percent glucose relative to the weight of cream. I usually use 20-25%. So for your recipe, you could use 1 to 1.25 oz of glucose syrup. You can also use corn syrup instead of glucose syrup (essentially the same thing except for maybe a different water content or dextrose equivalent). Add the glucose to the cream before heating it so it dissolves into the cream, then add to the chocolate as usual.

On the risotto, I would cut some slack for that, I have done it, you need to know how, though. When I was just starting in culinary school, we had risotto in class for the first time and we were instructed to use stock from a giant communal stockpot (made by a different class) to make it. As a vegetarian, I decided to experiment, which is normally not a good idea in school -you make the dish as demonstrated. I made my risotto with water to which I heated with salt and a couple tablespoons of fresh herbs in a bouquet garni, so, I guess it was technically a tisane, not just water. Anyway, I told no one, and placed it for grading with the other students' plates. I got an A and a commendation for best dish of the day. I was baffled by Jeremy's risotto. He works for Jean-Georges! I was a sous at the Pump Room in Chicago (a JG place) for a few years and we used herb water infusions for lots of things, specifically risotto! It takes zero time and can add so much flavor without weighing down a dish (and a great idea for vegan cuisine). Congrats on your dish, Lisa! And yeah, Kwame's frozen waffles.

I recently got rid of an Epicurean a few years old. It was black, and I started noticing small black particles when I minced garlic, shallots, onions, etc. It was enough to be noticeable, and I saw the board itself was very scuffed up from knife marks. I was in the Container Store and I picked up one of these: http://www.containerstore.com/s/eco-smart-cutting-board/d?productId=10029494&q=cutting%20board I got the brown one. It's polypropylene with flax husks mixed in to make it (a little) greener. Much softer material and nicer to the knife. No warping yet, which was the best thing about the Epicurean (it stayed dead flat since I bought it). Anyway, it's a fine utilitarian cutting board, but after reviewing this thread and seeing the Boardsmiths, I want one!

Please count me in for Morato on Thursday and everything else through Sunday.

Here's one I made roughly following the recipe for Ramen with Chashu Pork in the book Hiroku's American Kitchen (sorry, I can't find a link to the recipe online, I just have her book). I like this recipe because everything for the prep goes into the final ramen. The liquid used to initially cook the pork is used as the main stock for the soup. The tare used to finish the pork and season it is used to season the boiled eggs (they soak in it overnight), and is the used to season the final stock. For the noodles, I used angel hair pasta with baking soda according to Serious Eats here: http://www.seriouseats.com/2014/10/baking-soda-ramen-noodle-spaghetti-hack.html Other ingredients are shiitakes, scallions, nori. It was great on a cold winter night!

I'll be there from Thursday night through Sunday and later. Turns out my wife has to be in Toronto later in the week, so I'm extending my stay. Anybody who wants to have dinner Sunday night, let's get together. She'd (and I'd) like to meet any or all of you.

How much do you have? You could make beer, just need some yeast and hops. You could use it in place of honey in any bread or most other recipes that call for it.

Regarding the original concept of the OP, I have to say it sounds like a bad idea. Every aspect of a restaurant's operation is based on a single document: the menu. Ordering, inventory, food cost, staffing, labor cost, prep sheets, pricing, table turn rate, etc. all have to be balanced with respect to the menu. I've worked in several restaurants that change almost the entire menu quarterly, and it's a major disruption to the operation each time (although necessary to keep customers interested and utilize seasonal products). And then it takes a few weeks of actually producing the new menu to readjust ordering and inventory levels, and maybe staffing, to get costs back in line. IMO, the profit margins in restaurants are just too low to make such a free-form concept viable.

Count me as definite. Looking forward to it.

Sounds great. What's the cost for the conference?

Kerry, Yes, please put me down as almost definite. Is there a full itinerary posted anywhere?

Hi, I'm new tp posting here but I've lurked the forums off and on for a while now. I wanted to relate my own experience with a home-brewed version of the EZtemper that I made after reading most of this thread. I have a temperature-controlled box that I made for fermenting sausages, pickles, kimchi, and for drying charcuterie. The box itself is a Coleman cooler that I bought on ebay. It has a thermo-electric plate and fan inside that can either heat or cool depending on how you connect the 12-volt DC power supply. It has no temperature control (it either heats or cools constantly) but I made a temp control using a temperature sensor and relay connected to a small BasicStamp microcontroller. I can program any temperature that the box is capable of attaining, and the controller reads the temperature from the sensor and turns the heater/cooler on or off as needed. It will get about 30 degrees F cooler/hotter than ambient temperature, so around 40F to 100F. I set the temp to 33.5C with the box in heating mode and put a half-pint jar with solid chunks of cocoa butter inside. After 12 hours, I needed to stir, and the cocoa butter was not soft and smooth, but after another 4 hours or so with stirring, it got to the mayo-like consistency described above. Melted 500 g of dark chocolate, let it cool to 33C, and added 5 g of the cocoa butter. Temper tested well, and I tried a few applications: cast a few half-sphere bonbon shells, and cast some bars. Resulting snap and shine were both very good. I can't remember how well the bonbon shells released, but I don't remember any problems (I'm trying to resolve some problems with shells sticking). Anyway, this does seem like a really good way of tempering. My usual method of choice is to add 1% of microplaned chocolate when the melted chocolate reaches 33C. The advantage of the cocoa butter silk is that you know there will be no unmelted lumps (even with microplaned chocolate, I seem to still see very small grains after tempering unless I stir, stir, hit with heat gun, stir, stir). I've recently been evaluating different degrees of pre-crystalization with a jerry-rigged temper meter (shot glass with chocolate sample in ice bath in the fridge and a USB thermometer plugged into my laptop outside the fridge logging temp vs time). I'm looking at the curves resulting from adding different amounts of microplaned chocolate or silk. Interesting results so far, I'll post something soon.