slkinsey

Why would a South African wine bar name itself after a town that is not in South Africa? It's like having a French restaurant and naming it "Milano."

I suppose it's a bit predictable that an article picking nits as to pronunciation should contain a mispronunciation. The proper Italian pronunciation of "Sfoglia" would be [sfɔʎʎa] in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The letter combination "gli" in Italian has a special pronunciation that doesn't exist in English, and I suppose can best be described with the spelling "lyi." A reasonable approximation of this phoneme for English speakers would be "li," which is what she has above. What I don't understand is where she gets the idea that the "s" is silent. It is not. The correct pronunciation for English speakers would be "sfaw-lya." (ETA: I see Michaela beat me to the punch on that one.) Another often mispronounced restaurant name is Così. It is correctly pronounced "coh-see" and not "cozy." Also acceptable would be "coh-zee" -- this is technically a mispronunciation even in Italian (così is a contraction of "come sì" meaning "like that") but most Italians pronounce the "s" as a "z" anyway.

Also known as meat juices from the sous vide bag. This stuff definitely exhibits strange boiling behavior similar to what you describe: very little activity, then violent localized bubbling, then back down to very little activity, etc. This is true across a range of starting temperatures, and generally speaking I am only using small volumes.

breadguy, I am not quite clear on your technique. What is it that you are fermenting for 18 hours? A sponge? Or the whole dough? Are you including some amount of "sourdough starter" in your recipe? If so, how much? If not, I'm not sure why you reference "wild yeast starter." Anyway, yes it is true that rye flour has enzymes in it that convert starch to sugar more rapidly and effectively than those present in wheat flour. It is entirely possible that, by including rye flour in your dough and fermenting it for 18 hours that the rye enzymes have done their work so effectively that there is not very much food remaining for the yeast to eat in order to create the final rise after the loaves are shaped. The only ways to get around this are either a shorter bulk ferment or leaving out the rye flour for the bulk fermentation step. To answer the other issue you raise: to the best of my knowledge there is nothing about acid or leavening with natural yeast/bacteria that would inhibit the action of these enzymes. And in fact there are other things about leavening with natural yeast/bacteria that militate against long rises: namely that longer rises lead to more accumulation of acid in the dough, and acid degrades gluten.

I've had weird, violent boiling behavior when reducing osmazome. I wonder if it has to do with % of some dissolved substance.

Here is something I wrote back in 2005:

Vialone nano is a rice variety from the Veneto, and it's more suited to keeping a bit of bite in the Venetian-style soupy risotto (sull'onda) than the creamy-style of risotto that is more well-known in the US.

Not necessarily any different from the very best foamed milk with no additions. Just more consistently there. If I was hitting a 10 out of 10 maybe 60% of the time before, now it's 95% with a touch of sugar added. ETA: to be more clear... before a typical problem might be milk with lots of medium-sized bubbles that would't break down, and an overall separation of the foam top from the milk below even in the pitcher. What you want is something that feels like thick milk, where there are tiny bubbles throughout, all of the milk is part of the foam, you can easily knock out a few larger bubbles and swirl everything together into a uniform pourable mass.

Right. But if you are softening the vegetables separately and reserving them, then frying the rice in hot oil (albeit briefly), then adding the reserved vegetable base back in, then starting your liquid additions... this is already a deviation from the traditional technique. (Or are you saying that the rice goes into the pot together with the vegetables and fat?) To the extent that anyone notices a reduction in creaminess when the rice is "toasted" compared to "not-toasted" this may reflect a misunderstanding of the traditional technique, because the rice isn't supposed to be fried. All you really want to do when you add the rice is stir it around enough to coat it with fat. Even lightly frying the rice in the fat by itself would, I think, lead to some reduction in creaminess. Also, if one is not interested in browning the rice slightly, there is no reason to go to the special trouble of frying the rice separately. I might as well point out that tostare in Italian doesn't exactly mean "toasted" like we think. It is often used to mean something like "cooked a while in the fat." If you have a look at this YouTube video you will hear the chef say variations of tostare a number of times, and yet it's quite clear that nothing is being browned or fried (also note that the rice is added to the pot together with the butter and onions).

Where does this idea of "toasting" the rice to brown it come from? It's not anything I've ever seen done for risotto. Normally the process is that you melt your fat and soften your aromatic vegetable base, then you add the rice and stir it around until the rice is evenly coated with fat, and then you start adding the liquid. The idea that the rice should be browned in the fat is an entirely new concept to me, and not one that seems traditional at all. Is this some new practice that has become fashionable? I flipped through Hazan's seminal book, and although it says that the rice is "lightly toasted" in the overall description of risotto technique, I wonder if this may be a mistake of translation since all of her actual recipes merely specify that the rice is mixed with the fat and vegetable base only until it is evenly coated with fat before the first addition of liquid. I think it's interesting how certain relatively recent innovations or tweaks to old traditional preparations have become "standard practice" in some people's minds. Browning gnocchi is one such practice that immediately comes to mind. Never heard of it until perhaps a decade ago, and now many people seem to believe that this is just part of how you make gnocchi.

Let's just change that to "never had a good one in a restaurant" and be done with it. Risotto is an a la minute dish, not something you par cook and then sit for hours finishing it off in a blaze of glory. Sorry guys, it just doesn't seem to work. The risotto I had at Per Se was pretty damn good. Although given the price point and the meal structure, I suppose it's quite possible that their risotto is made from scratch for each table. I've also been to restaurants in Italy that made very good risotto, although these always said that it would take around 30 minutes for preparation.

So, like many people I've been trying to get better at producing the right kind of pourable "latte art" milk foam over the years. This has involved such refinements as installing a three-hole steam tip on my Rancilio Silvia and switching from the "standard" 20 ounce milk pitcher to a much smaller 12 ounce milk pitcher. Both had a notable impact on my ability to consistently produce high quality milk foam. But still, perhaps depending on the quality, age and fat content of the milk I used, I wasn't able to get the creamy pourable microfoamed milk I wanted. Until now. One day I was making cappuccino for myself and Mrs. slkinsey and realized we were out of clean demitasse spoons. And I figured that since we would ordinarily put a touch of sugar into the cup, why not add the sugar to the pitcher and steam it in to the milk. Well, this made a tremendous difference. The milk foam was the best I've made. I've continued this practice, and the consistency and quality of my milk foam has increased greatly. Anyone try this? Observe this? Have any ideas why this might be so?

Calvados is like cognac : smooth, subtle, refined, etc. (all words that might be used to describe cognac) Applejack is like whiskey : rough around the edges, emphatically flavored, etc. (all words that might be used to describe whiskey) In my experience, as a generality, applejack is better for mixing and calvados for sipping. Personally I find that calvados tends to get lost is cocktails, although this may also be an effect of proof (Martin Doudoroff and I did some interesting experiments comparing cocktails made with 53% abv cognac against the same cognac diluted down to the usual 40% and the difference in quality was striking).

Very interesting Mayur! Is this more or less a Suze-alike? Or similar enough/in the same family enough to make a workable substitution (like, say, using Cinzano sweet vermouth instead of M&R)? Or is it more of a unique product?

I have actually not found N2O cavitation to work all that well with mint, but as with all things YMMV.

That might be it, Celeste. I was fermenting it in a round stainless bowl with a tight-fitting lid. Perhaps what happened is that condensation collected on the underside of the lid and dripped down the sides, making the bottom of the dough wet.

Huh. Maybe that's it. I usually use SAF Red, but I thought I'd use up some Gold I had around.

I just noticed something interesting with respect to a pizza dough I started fermenting around 24 hours ago, and am preparing to use. I prepare this dough with a "no-knead" technique due to the long fermenting time. I used King Arthur AP flour, 67% hydration, 2% salt and 0.5% slow-rising SAF Gold yeast. As is usual, when the dough was first mixed it was quite dry. But within around an hour or so, the dough had distributed the water around and was nicely soft and pillowy. Every so often I deflate the fermenting dough and turn it around a few times. One thing I noticed was that after around 12 hours, the dough no longer seemed soft and pillowy, but had become damp to the touch. Just recently I turned over the dough again, and underneath the dough where it contacted the metal rising bowl was positively wet -- as in, water had collected down there under the dough. What would be the reason for this? If I am planning to rise a dough 24 hours, does this mean I have to do lower hydration?

Most circulators have a component where you set a temperature and it shuts down if the temperature gets any higher than that. What you describe can often happen if the temperature setting of the safety cut-off is close to or below the temperature at which you would like to cook.

Every technological advance in cooking has been met with some doubters. Let's rephrase some of the OP, and you get the idea: "I don’t understand the trend to making cooking complicated, expensive and time consuming. I’m referring to sous vide technique stoves, pots and pans, and other so called technological advances. I am not a luddite. I embrace technological advances. However, for me the most important issue is what ends up on the plate. I have eaten sous vide cooked meats cooked on a stove at highly regarded restaurants. It was OK. I can do as well or better with traditional methods using a sharp stick, some hot rocks and an open campfire. What am I missing?"

Some of this will depend on what you consider a "liqueur" and what you consider "essential." Things like Campari and absinthe are not, in my opinion, liqueurs. The essentials: Cointreau - this is the single most important liqueur in cocktails Maraschino liqueur - Luxardo is the brand to have After that come these, which will get plenty of of use: Apricot liqueur - I prefer Apry but others prefer the Rothman & Winter product Chartreuse - green is more important than yellow, but it's good to have both Cherry brandy (sweet) - Cherry Heering is the classic, but I prefer Luxardo's Sangue Morlacco Others for an expanded selection: Amaretto - DiSaronno is the most well known brand, but Luxardo's is better Barenschlager - good for tiki Benedictine Coffee liqueur - Kahlua is the most well know, but there are many brands out there Creme de cacao - the Brizard bottling is best, IMO. Useful for the Twentieth Century cocktail and its derivatives Creme de violette - when the R&W product first came out, everyone and their dog was making violet-flavored cocktails. That wore thin pretty quickly Creme Yvette Drambuie Grand Marnier Kummel Orange curacao - both Senior Curacao of Curacao and the Brizard bottlings are good St. Germaine - aptly described as "bartender's ketchup" but, like ketchup it has its uses Vanilla liqueur - Cuarenta y Tres is a good one

I think he misspeaks a bit in that first excerpt and then corrects himself in the second book where he says ". . . If we cook the onions uncovered, the released cel juices will quickly boil off and the temperature will rise from around 212F (100C) to perhaps 300F (149C) where the Maillard browning reactions proceed rapidly. The fact that some of the Maillard reactions are sweet is perhaps one reason why cooks are enticed into using the sugar word caramelize for this process. What they really mean, however, is taking the onions to a soft, golden tan -- the color of caramel candies -- but stopping short of actually browning them. . ." and most definitively where he says ". . . meat, poultry, fish, vegetables, and other protein-containing foods to not caramelize. They simply brown." (The emphasis is mine.)

And there is your difference explained: the ones that are cooked longer are more... well, cooked. Which is to say that the cell walls are more thoroughly broken down, etc. This is effectively the only difference. With quick-cooked onions, you are only really cooking and getting Maillard reactions on the surface of the onion while the interior is relatively unaltered, whereas with long-cooked onions you are getting reactions and temperature changes throughout the whole piece of onion. The browning reaction, meanwhile, is pretty much the same in both cases. Your question is a bit like asking: "why are greens cooked for 1 minute different from greens cooked for an hour?" They're different because one is much more broken down by cooking than the other.

When I use my WACFO All-American pressure canner (which vents, as needed for pressure-canning) as a cooker to make stock, I simply put the weight at 15 PSI and stack two quarters on top of it. Then I watch the gauge and when the pressure gets up to 15 PSI over atmospheric, I turn down and regulate the heat to keep it right around there. Et voila! No-venting cooking from a non-venting pressure cooker. Meanwhile, this design doesn't need a rubber gasket.

I've been playing around with mine a bit. My initial reaction is that it is not the magic bullet every one supposed it would be. Some things infuse much better by NO2 cavitation than others. I've had some limited success at infusing coconut into rum, but it really took a while for the flavors to develop post-infusion (as in, it was much stronger after a day). I got good results infusing basil into gin. Poor results infusing mint into rye whiskey. Although with both herbs one wonders whether I could have obtained a greater effect just by muddling.