nonkeyman

I am always curious how some chefs create their new dishes. I personally tended to either follow a bottom up or top down approach. So I would either start with one ingredient and build a dish, or start with a concept and build a dish. Does anyone else have a different method? How do you iterate, or track your ideas? One way to start bottom up is demonstrated by Grant Achatz below

That looks gorgeous!

I would recommend Anova. I am more used to using the Polysci, and we used to load baths up with 20 pounds of meat and then have hot water to add, just in case. In addition, if the bath was really big, we would have two circulators. It really depends on the amount of product. I would make sure to get an actual circulator that is temperature regulated. Otherwise, it is a crap shoot.

strawberries in winter! Hahaha, yes the list goes on forever! It is what happens when food becomes corporate.. Working at my last place was interesting because we were never allowed to use anything that wasn't PNW. In addition, once a year we ran a menu that limited all our products to a 100 mile radius of our location. We had to make our own baking powder, salt and a couple other things that were kind of a pain. I was so glad when we actually found a wheat that was grown locally that wasn't super coarse. I had spent the previous year working with flour that could barely develop gluten because of the grind...

Thank you...almost all the chicken I buy is ...well...questionable... I get it, it's been put in brine to keep it longer...but it also creates an illusion of size, and yeah...I can't get over the slime that comes off packaged chicken..

It's ok! You can send you anger to their complaints inbox.. and get a concerned canned email back! I remember getting the exact same email from a company when I tried to clarify what the first one meant a few days later. Maybe they wanted me to think that they looked at the problem(this was not a "Do not reply email).

That book looks awesome! I can't wait to read your future posts!

We used to take beef trim, roast it and throw it into stock. I can't say we did this we aged beef. However, we did it with aged pork products when we made brodo. Then would take hunks of cured and aged pork and throw it in..

Besides dilution, which is either using bland stock, or throwing a potato in(really, you are just add a product that requires a lot of seasoning, so it can help reduce the ratio of salt to other stuff). You could also try increasing the fat content, this depends on the soup. Adding cream both dilutes and also coats the saltiness on the palette). You can also try balancing it with some of the other major tastes e.g. sour, sweet and bitter. This won't reduce the salty flavor, it will just balance what you are tasting. Of course, it also runs the risk of making your soup to sweet, sour, or bitter. Dilution is probably the best method personally.

I think you are correct! Chew the meat and spit out the bones

Thank you! Those look great. I will switch them out either today or tomorrow! Yup those plates are made of bamboo...it was great because it made clean up easy. it was all compost.

Vacing a bunch of marbles in a bag for weight is genius!

Yup They did....I was asked before that happened.. My friend was one of their culinary managers

Yup! I loved it. It was a great way to just try things. I always thought of it like Googles 20% time.

Luckily the logistics was handled by the company who requested I do the dinner. My main job was to come up with the menu and execute. We charged $85, and the promotion was handled by the company. They already had a list of people who they knew would most likely want to come. I have been wanting to do this again, and trying to handle all the details is hectic.