slkinsey
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I like potatoes roasted with olive oil and herbs. But if you finish them with a knob of butter, they're even better. And I agree that poultry fat really brings out the best in potatoes.
I stopped roasting in olive oil after reading THIS article by Harold McGee. I get better results with canola oil. Ran a bunch of tests for a restaurant that I did some consulting for, olive oil wasn't the best fat for roasting potatoes. (we had to stick with vegetable oils for this application) In the blind taste tests I ran, olive oil was consistently rated worst in flavor and texture of the potato.
Some of this will come down to preference, of course, but I have to say that I don't entirely agree with McGee's way of testing the oils. Unless you're frying at high temperature, it's unclear to me that the oil will ever reach the temperatures McGee used in his tests. For example, there are plenty of times I've fried an egg in a big-flavored-but-moderately-priced extra virgin olive oil, and it was abundantly clear upon eating the egg that olive oil was used. Similarly, I've had potatoes roasted in oil where the olive oil flavor was present. I've even had fritto misto di pesce with a distinctive flavor that I discovered came from using olive oil as the frying medium rather than some other oil. So I think it very much depends on how you use the oil. I certainly wouldn't use olive oil to stir fry with, and clearly lower temperatures (and larger amounts of oil retained in the finished product) are best for olive oil whereas a high temperature technique with a light smear of oil would probably favor a different fat.
I have a hard time really trusting anyone who says that canola oil is "neutral." To my palate, it has a distinctive "fishy" component that I don't enjoy, and I never use it. For high temperature frying, I prefer grapeseed oil.
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Gluten intolerance is the new lactose intolerance? I remember in the mid-1980s when it seemed like every third person was claiming to have hypoglycemia.
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Ranch Dressing : Why do Americans love it so much?
This paragraph from the article pretty much tells the tale:
Once ranch was available in a bottle, Americans fell in love with its rich-yet-inoffensive taste. It is devoid of potentially objectionable ingredients, such as chili sauce (a key component in Thousand Island) or anchovies (found in Caesar and Green Goddess). And perhaps more important, ranch is fattier than humdrum Italian, which is basically a gussied-up vinaigrette. Ranch dressing, which arrived at a time when mayo had gained a reputation as a diet-buster, was essentially a socially acceptable form of the gloopy condiment. It quickly became the preferred way to infuse otherwise healthy dishes with a palatable amount of fat. The salads offered by chains such as Little Caesars or McDonald's were soon accompanied by packets of ranch, to the chagrin of nutritionists. -
The way this debate is being cast is sort of fascinating in and of itself: the pizza "deserves" better than dunking? What does that mean? How does the pizza "deserve" anything at all? Hot pepperoni pizza dunked into cold ranch dressing tastes good, in my opinion. I like the temperature, texture, and taste combination. I don't even think it's that unusual: ranch dressing is a pretty common dip for that appetizer that consists of pepperoni baked inside of dough (does that have a name?). The addition of cheese and tomato sauce doesn't seem like that fundamental a change, as to render the dipping offensive.
I would be the first person to say that you should eat what you like. It's hard to say that a foodstuff is "offensive" unless you're willing to lay down a few "standards" and of course not everyone will agree on those standards and the whole thing devolves into one of those tiresome "what is art" type conversations.
I personally, in my own aesthetic and tastes, find this sort of thing a bit horrifying. To me it represents a kind of college cafeteria derived layering of extra bland fat onto some other kind of fat. As if pizza piled high with meat and cheese isn't fatty enough. Fundamentally, a person might as well be dipping the pizza into sour cream. Or honey mustard. Or mayonnaise. Or whipped butter. Or cheese wiz. Or whatever a person's "universal dipping medium" might be. But why stop with pizza, right? Ranch dressing works just as well if you dip your breakfast sausage in there, or your roast turkey sandwich, or your strip steak, or your fried calamari, or your fried eggs, or your lasagna, or your braised pork belly, or your pot stickers or your carnitas taco. And so on. It's hard to think of anything that can't be a vehicle for the lightly-herbed, bland, creamy fattiness of ranch dressing if one is so inclined. But on some level all these practices boil down into vehicles for getting ranch dressing into one's mouth -- much in the same way that french fried potatoes for many people are fundamentally a vehicle for eating ketchup. And, of course, we all know people who will pretty much dip anything into ranch dressing (meaning, as far as I am concerned, that they more or less subsist on a diet of ranch dressing). I had a friend who, years ago, put mayonnaise on absolutely everything. Same deal.
All that said, I don't have a visceral reaction to dipping things in ranch dressing. It just depends on what it is that is being dipped. Something simple and unadorned that is designed to be adorned with a sauce (say, fried calamari or french fries or cut vegetables or even something like chicken nuggets) makes a certain amount of sense. But to my thinking, what makes dipping pizza into ranch dressing a little offensive to my personal sensibilities, is that pizza is a complete dish in and of itself that makes its own internal sense without the foreignness of the cool, bland, creamy fattiness of something like ranch dressing -- which to me in this context seems like an unwelcome "blanding down" and a gratuitous "fatting up" of an already whole food that should be delicious in its own right. If the pizza isn't delicious in its own right, that's a different problem of course. Personally, I'm not anxious to spend the calories on pizza that's not good enough to eat as-is. But I wonder: if this were a homemade pizza, if you had fermented the dough, ground the San Marzano tomatoes, sliced the artisinal soppressata, baked the pizza "Modernist Cuisine style" on a thick piece of aluminum under your broiler, etc... would you still be getting out the ranch dressing?
Again, in the interest of forestalling a potential flame-war, the above represents my own highly personal outlook which may not be relevant to most people. I'm sure I eat plenty of things that would horrify other people!
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There are a lot of different ways to make it and a lot of different aesthetics for the end product. By far the best FT I've ever had is at Landmarc. They take very thick (like 4 inches thick) slices of the ubiquitous NYC restaurant pane pugliese, soak in cream and eggs (most likely with some flavorings and some sugar added), and then cook. I have to imagine that their version spends some amount of time in the oven rather than spending all of its time on the stove. It turns out like bread pudding surrounded by a crust. The egg custard part of their FT is fairly loose, but the overall impression isn't soggy due to the inherent firmness of the bread they use.
The basic technique is pretty easy. Make the (uncooked) custard base of eggs and dairy. Add sugar (or maple syrup or whatever) if you want a sweeter result. Add other flavorings if you like (a touch of vanilla, or a grating of nutmeg or a pinch of cinnamon wouldn't go amiss). Saturate some slices of bread in the custard base and fry in plenty of butter to your desired level of doneness. For very thick slices and a larger crowd, some time in a low oven after the outer crusts have been established may be a good idea.
I personally prefer to use a very sturdy, peasant-y bread in thick slices because I'd like for the custard to have some moistness without having the FT seem soggy. But other people like to use very tender bread like challah. If you use a soft, tender bread you either had better like a wet result ("soggy" in my estimation) or you will have to cook the FT enough to cook out most of that moisture, which I think makes the FT a bit tough. Others may prefer sourdough, which I think is nice when you can get a sturdy one. Classically, this would be made with stale or day-old bread (hence "pain perdu" -- making something from the "lost bread"). Most important, if you want it to be flavorful above and beyond "eggy," is for the bread to be flavorful. Otherwise, you'll need to add flavorings to your custard base.
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That seems well into the danger zone for some unknown period of time. Tossing them was the right move.
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Recently I purchased a 5 gallon All-American pressure cooker/canner, primarily to make large volumes of stock. Not only does pressure cooking result in greater extraction and a crystal clear stock, but it also takes a fraction of the time. As a generality, I find that pressure-cooked stocks do not have to be reduced or clarified.
Why do I mention this in a thread about storing homemade stock? Because after you finish making the stock, you can decant it into canning jars and use the same piece of equipment to can the stock -- which is exactly what I have done. Once the stock is canned, you can put it wherever you want. Keep it under the bed, if you want! If you want to have stock that you only use by the tablespoonful every so often, just can some of it in one cup jars and once you open a jar you can store it in the freezer until you use it up. In the meantime, the other jars from the same batch can just sit on a shelf somewhere until you're ready to use them.
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Broiler?
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I have a feeling that there are a few reasons any someone might eat only the center of a pizza and leave the cornicione (aka "end crust") -- although the guy Steven describes is certainly on the extreme end of this practice:
First is that the crusts on most American "pizza parlor" style pizza baked in a deck oven (usually also in a pan) is insipid at best. So there is often nothing very good about the crust anyway, and the cornicione is a rind of dense, dry over baked bread. This stands in contrast to the pizza at wood and coal fired places, where the cornicione is an area of delicate, light, pillowy bread that would have appeal even were it not connected to the rest of the pizza. In a great deal of American pizza, if you're not going to eat the whole slice, one has to choose between the soggy tip or the desiccated end crust.
The second reason, and perhaps more important here, is that Americans tend to view pizza crust as being a vehicle for the toppings (toppings on a crust) whereas Italians view pizza toppings as being condiments for the crust (crust with some toppings). So, if your idea of pepperoni pizza is that pepperoni is the most important, cheese is the second most important, sauce is the third most important and crust is the least important... then it makes sense that you wouldn't eat the part of the slice that has only crust. I suppose if this is your outlook and you've ordered an entire large pizza for yourself, there's no reason to eat anything but the center of the pizza.
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Makes sense to me. A triangle test including preference would probably have been a better method.
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The answer is definitely complicated, but certainly starts with chemesthesis (also sometimes called by its old name, "common chemical sense"). It seems clear that ethanol is sensed this way, and likely that fusel alcohols are especially strongly sensed this way. Of course, these things will be sensed more strongly the higher the concentration, which explains why higher proof spirits produce a stronger chemesthetic sensation than lower proof spirits and also why "dirtier" spirits produce a stronger chemesthetic sensation than "cleaner" spirits. We also know that sensory perceptions are influenced by other sensory perceptions. For example, the perception of sweetness is reduced at lower temperatures, which is why warm cola tastes so much sweeter than cold cola (and also why frozen drinks need more sugar to taste balanced). I don't see any reason why the perception of chemesthetic sensations wouldn't also be influenced by other sensations. It's unclear to me the extent to which these interactions have been studied, however. Here (PDF) is an interesting paper to get started understanding it.
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And I hate to say it, but overall I really think commercial orgeat plays better in the Japanese than my homemade versions usually do.
Homemade orgeat does have a tendency to recede far into the background or disappear altogether. This is because homemade orgeat is made with sweet almonds and no bitter almonds. It is the benzaldehyde found in bitter almonds (among other places) that provides the "almond flavor" that cuts.
There are a number of techniques you can use to provide the missing benzaldehyde component in a homemade orgeat:
- You can find and use a percentage of actual bitter almonds (good luck finding any);
- You can use perhaps 10% apricot kernels. Remember that many almond flavored things, such as Amaretto DiSaronno, are actually flavored with apricot kernels. Bitter apricot kernels have higher amounts of benzaldehyde are probably best for this and can be found on the internet, but people report good results with sweet apricot kernels;
- You can add natural bitter almond extract/essence (more or less straight benzaldehyde from a natural source) to taste.
This is discussed fairly extensively upthread. Some people like to toast the almonds. I'm not particularly fond of this, as I think it reduces the versatility of the orgeat for use in white spirit drinks. I have had the best results by using blanched almonds, pulsing them roughly with water, soaking overnight, re-pulsing to a slightly finer consistency and then straining through cheesecloth. Looking at Katie's process, it would be interesting to do some side-by-side comparisons to see whether, for example, adding vodka actually did make any difference. Briefly infusing citrus zest in vodka certainly does make a difference when making things like grapefruit syrup. But I have my doubts as to whether adding vodka to something that is already mostly water would have an appreciable effect. Would be interesting to separate that out. I also wonder whether or not one really does "cook out" any special flavor by allowing the mixture to come to the boil when incorporating the sugar.
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It's not clear to me that orgeat is all about the oils. If that were true, then the best way to make orgeat would be to emulsify whatever blend of almond oils you like into sugar water and then stabilize it with something like Ticaloid 201 S (a blend of xanthan gum and gum arabic that stabilizes emulsions and provides suspension). It seems to me that part of almond milk and orgeat comes from suspended almond solids. Really, you should be able to radically increase the yield by using something like a rotor stator homogenizer to blend in 100% of the almond and then reduce the particle size down to something that would be below the tongue's detection threshold and would remain in colloidal suspension.
Either way, there would be some benefit from using something like Ticaloid for stability. Using too much xanthan gum creates a ropey, slimy texture in my opinion.
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Question for all of you who disdain the need to use ingredients from an ocean away. Where is your olive oil coming from? Italy? Spain? Tunisia? Argentina? California? Pluto? My Bulls**t detector went off when I read that the age of an oven or the number of pizza's produced, in that oven, influeneces the taste. I can see an experienced pizzaiolo being important.
The pizzas I get in Naples (and elsewhere in Italy) all seem to have more char on the bottom, which influences the taste. I am guessing that the build-up of tens of thousands of pizzas has something to do with that char. It tastes different than the the VPN pizzas. Since the VPN pizzerias are using Italian flour and baked in ovens imported from Italy using "correct Neapolitan methods," something has to account for the difference.
It probably tastes different because it's baked a little differently, or because some of the ingredients are a bit different. I've been all over Italy and had pizza in most places I've stayed, and I wouldn't say that the generic "single-serving wood oven pizza" one has in Italy has all that much in common with Neapolitan pizza. In particular, Neapolitan and Neapolitan-style pizza is much puffier and wet. Meanwhile, if the pizza you get in Italy has more char on the bottom than you are getting in Neapolitan-style other places in the US, it is surely due to a difference in the temperature of the oven floor, or due to the construction of the ovens and the material used in the oven floor (the home pizza technique recommended in Modernist Cuisine, by the way, proves that it's possible to get plenty of char in a regular home oven).
Regardless, I don't see how any difference could possibly be due to some kind of spiritual residue of pizzas gone by. Most likely a major differentiating factor is experience. In most of the pizzerie in Italy, the pizzaiolo is an artisan who has been baking pizzas in the same oven for years and years, and is in many cases the owner of the establishment. Very few of the Neapolitan-style ovens in the US are fired and pizze baked by owners or pizzaioli with a decade-plus of experience and knowledge.
By the way, the most traditional New York City pizza has significantly more char on the bottom than any Neapolitan pizza. Why? Because the oven is coal-fired and the temperature of the oven floor is much higher.
As for sourcing ingredients from the other side of the globe, I'm certainly not against it. Where else are we going to get saffron, porcini and parmesan? But for common ingredients that can be sourced locally (or at least far more locally) like flour -- what's the point of bringing it in from Italy? The clock starts ticking the second it's milled.Actually, porcini mushrooms (aka Boletus edulis) grow all over the Northern hemisphere. I've foraged them myself in the United States. And it's not like American cheesemakers don't make granular cheeses in the style of Parmigiano-Reggiano. They just aren't nearly as good, so most people prefer P-R. So these are both "common ingredients that can be sourced locally."
As for flour, although I think you have a point I don't entirely agree. I think you're way underestimating the amount of time and other conditions experienced by American milled flour before it makes its way into your kitchen. And I think you're way overestimating the negative effect that these conditions can have on the milled flour. That said, I don't think you're wrong in believing that American grown and milled flour ought to be better than imported flour. If an American company were growing and otherwise processing flour in the Italian way to produce a very-finely-milled, highly-processed, 11% protein doppio zero flour, then it probably would be better than any imported flour. But the fact is that no one seems to be doing this. So there is a significant question as to which one will best give you the result you're after: American-style flour from America or Italian-style flour from Italy. Does the style of the flour trump the freshness, or is it the other way around? That strikes me as a somewhat open question, although as previously stated I personally don't think using imported 00 makes such a big difference in home pizza cookery.
I do agree that it would make more sense and would be more conducive to making a great pizza for the VPN people to promulgate a specification for the flour (e.g., milled to such-and-such, processed in such-and-such way, with such-and-such protein, etc.) rather than specifying that it has to be a special imported flour. 00 flour is, after all, a highly processed ingredient and it doesn't seem likely that terroir plays a huge role in its properties. However, the VPN people aren't necessarily about making it easy for people outside of Naples to make "certified true Neapolitan pizza." And it strikes me as somewhat reasonable for them to say that "if you want to call your product 'certified true Neapolitan pizza' then you have to abide by the same rules and use the same exact products as the guys in Napoli do." This would include the flour. And this would be why I generally think that VPN certification is nonsense.
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I have, point of fact, compared my Chontos to DOP San Marzanos, and the Chontos won hands down. I think freshness is the issue again, but also at stake is the manner in which the Chontos become sauce. I tend to lightly roast them whole over charcoal before using them to make paste, so there's a flavour there that's missing from the San Marzanos, which I can't really treat in the same manner due to their already processed nature.
So then that's what you should use, of course. Especially if you like them better. But this is a pretty specific and personal thing you're talking about now. I daresay that few people have access to a year-round supply of home-grown heirloom tomatoes grown at high altitude in volcanic soil, and of course the smoky charred flavors you get from roasting your tomatoes over coals have more the nature of a personal preference, as does a preference for fresh over canned tomatoes.
I think part of the point made in this thread is that making a high quality pizza at home with the "usual ingredients" can be quite expensive. And for the majority of people this means using canned tomatoes. It strikes me as a bit of a cop-out to suggest that making a high quality pizza doesn't need to be expensive "if you just decide that pizza should be made with this other ingredient over here instead of the one you're using." Of course that's true. But it's a bit like saying "making really high quality sushi at home doesn't have to be expensive if only you use copper river salmon belly instead of bluefin o-toro, and anyway I prefer copper river salmon, and by the way I live in Alaska so I catch my salmon from the copper river for free."
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I think you misunderstood. I'm not talking about importing canned anchovies to put on pizza.
I'm talking about flying fresh fish in from Italy to use in "hyper-realistic" Italian restaurants on the Las Vegas strip -- Mediterranean sea bass (branzini) for instance. To me, that flies in the face of the Italian tradition of sourcing local ingredients whenever possible. The closer the better. Surely striper could be substituted and save some Italian fish a trip on a 747 just so they can end up on a table at Rao's.
Same with the Vera Pizza Napoletana places in America. They are REQUIRED to import their flour. Otherwise, they lose their cool little VPN sign over the door. Flour! Our domestic millers are capable of making flour every bit as good as Italian 00. Why import it when our own wheat is so good?
My point is that we're happy to import the raw ingredients, but not the philosophy.
I think you have a bit of a point here, but not one that is particularly germane to this topic. No one is talking about flying in branzino from the other side of the world to make pizza. There are a number of approaches one may adopt in trying to cook a traditional cuisine from another area of the world. One of them is to try to slavishly duplicate that cuisine to the greatest extent possible. Since most traditional cuisines are informed by the local indigenous ingredients, duplicating them this way involves sourcing those ingredients that one thinks are important in replicating the tastes of the original. Another way is to think about the philosophies of the cooking tradition you are emulating and apply it to the new locale. This has brought us things as disparate as Italian-American "red sauce cooking" and also restaurants like Mario Batali's Babbo. But, to be clear, making "Italian food" not in Italy is not within the Italian cooking philosophy. They, of course, just think of it as "food."
Personally, I find the idea of VPN certification a little silly. But the point of VPN certification is that you are trying to replicate the exact pizza you would get at a traditional pizzeria in Napoli. That means slavishly duplicating the actual ingredients used in Napoli to the greatest extent possible. There is no other way. It's not practicable to import the mozzarella because age and refrigeration will reduce the quality of the product. But flour and canned tomatoes can be imported, so the VPN people require it. Meanwhile, I don't know of any VPN-certified places in the US that are considered among the very best in town to get pizza. If you want to make Neapolitan-style pizza that doesn't have a special label on the menu saying that it's VPN-certified then you can use any old flour you want.
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Larry would you put the can ingredients ,labeled on the can of 6 in 1 ground tomatoes ?
The web site says "vine-ripened, unpeeled ground tomatoes, extra-heavy purée and a touch of salt." "Extra heavy puree" is a reduced tomato product, being very close to a "light paste."
I wasn't being jingoistic about the tomato, I was merely pointing out, in my own (admittedly oblique) way that it's kind of silly to be worrying about country of origin for the ingredients. If I have perfectly good Chonto Santa Cruz heirloom paste tomatoes growing in my garden, I'm hardly going to go out and purchase a can of Italian DOP tomatoes (as has been discussed) simply to make the dish more authentic. That's silly, in my book. The Chontos, which I have been babying, are going to taste better, and that's my primary concern with any dish. Equally, I won't buy imported Mozza when I can get really excellent cheese made fresh this morning from the cheesemaker up the street.I don't think too many people would disagree with that. The question is whether or not your perfectly good Chonto Santa Cruz heirloom paste tomatoes are as good as San Marzano D.O.P. tomatoes, not necessarily whether they are more or less "authentic" (whatever that means).
For what it's worth, I would argue that any locally-made, high-quality, hand-made, never-refrigerated, super-fresh mozzarella will beat any imported mozzarella you could possibly buy. Age and refrigeration are the enemies of mozzarella. But, going back to the original premise of this thread: this caliber of mozzarella is unlikely to be inexpensive. Nor, after you figure in all the costs including time, are truly exceptional homegrown tomatoes necessarily all that inexpensive either.
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I suppose it depends on your outlook. A non-local food would be unlikely to find its way into most traditional indigenous Italian culinary traditions, although this is not universally so. But a major point of canned tomatoes is that they travel and aren't dependent upon freshness, etc. As a generality, if there is some product that travels and is perceived as being the best, Italians will use it. Otherwise, there would never be dishes like risotto alla milanese with (non-local) saffron and (non-local) Parmigiano-Reggiano. So, I wouldn't necessarily say that it "goes against the spirit of Italian cooking" to use imported D.O.P. San Marzano tomatoes if you can't get your hands on any that approach being that good. After all, you're likely to get D.O.P. San Marzano tomatoes on your pizza in Milan or Rome, where they have been "imported" from Campania.
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I don't think it's anywhere written that one can't use tomatoes that are not D.O.P. San Marzano tomatoes. I think one argument being put forth is that these are generally speaking the best quality canned tomatoes one can buy. Could a company in the United States grow and process tomatoes that were just as good, it not better? Sure, it's possible. But right now, they aren't. I would think that lovingly home-grown and home-canned tomatoes grown in the right combination of climate and soil should be at least as good as any D.O.P. San Marzano tomatoes.
For the most part, this isn't the sort of thing we do in the United States, however. In Italy, for example, they have consortia that regulate not only the criteria and area of origin for various traditional foodstuffs and products, but also quality, etc. So if you get a wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano, you know where it was made, how it was made, what cows produced the milk, what those cows were fed, and have some idea as to the minimum quality and characteristic qualifications. Similarly, if you buy D.O.P. San Marzano tomatoes, you know that it has been grown in a certain climate in a certain soil, has been grown in a certain kind of way, and has met various criteria for size, shape, color, ripeness, pH, etc. We just don't have anything like this in America. "Wisconsin cheddar cheese" is, more or less, defined as "cheddar cheese that is produced in Wisconsin." The closest thing we might have are "Vidalia onions," which are any one of a number of yellow granex onion varietals grown in the production area around Vidalia, Georgia. But really it's more of a trade name, as these are simply onions with a low sulfur content and there is nothing that particularly distinguishes Vidalia onions from sweet onions sold under any number of other trade names, such as Walla Walla onions, Texas Sweet onions, etc.
When you do all the regulation and testing, etc. that the various Italian consortia do in order to ensure a certain standard of quality, that equals higher cost.
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I wouldn't call it a "commercial style pizza" just because it uses high quality canned tomatoes. Especially since 99.9% of commercial pizza in the United States is an abomination. He's not trying to make Pizza Hut or Domino's pizza at home. He's trying to make the best quality pizza he can make at home without changing things to the point that he has to step outside the traditional conception of pizza. Pizza made with a base of walnut and cilantro pesto and topped with Mexican cheese would be less expensive than using D.O.P. San Marzano tomatoes and handmade fresh mozzarella. And it might even be good. But at some point you're not really "making pizza at home" so much as you are "making something pizza-like at home."
As for canned versus fresh tomatoes... if you like the taste of fresh tomatoes on your pizza, then by all means that is what you should use. But cooking tomatoes for a length of time (which with canned tomatoes happens inside the can as they're being pasteurized) creates some significant flavor compounds that are not present in fresh tomatoes. This is why you have to cook the sauce for such a long time in order to get the traditional "cooked tomato sauce" flavor when you use fresh tomatoes instead of canned. It's also a good reason to only use fresh tomatoes in a "fresh tomato sauce" and not in one that is traditionally a cooked tomato sauce. So, for example, you wouldn't want to use fresh tomatoes when making bucatini all'amatriciana because it wouldn't taste right.
As for pizza, a significant element of the traditional flavor profile comes from using cooked (but not overcooked!) tomatoes. Fresh tomatoes do not provide the traditional flavor profile. As with all things, you should let your own tastes and preferences guide your cooking. Personally, I do not particularly care for the fresh tomato flavor in pizza. More to the point, it seems clear that Steven and most of the rest of us are talking about the expense and challenges of making pizza at home that fits within the general model of traditional pizza, which is to say canned tomatoes, mozzarella and yeast-risen dough. Pizza with a fresh tomato base instead of a canned tomato base simply doesn't have that "pizza" taste. Of course it's possible to make pizza at home much less expensively if your idea of homemade pizza means using nontraditional ingredients.
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If you're in New York, an interesting tiki drink to try is Audrey's "Re-Animator" down at Pegu Club. It's got La Favorite Blanc, Lemon Hart 151, Green Chartreuse, house-made ginger beer, lime juice, demerara syrup, Cholula hot sauce, Angostura bitters and freshly grated nutmeg. It packs 3 1/2 ounces of booze, and the "weakest" spirit is 100 proof! Anyway, it's a fun drink and interesting for being a tiki drink that clearly still has a foot in the Pegu Club cocktail aesthetic.
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I was googling for chili recipes and stumbled across the Terlingua International Chili Championship Winner Recipes. These recipes seem to be from a completely different world of cooking than the one I'm used to. They rely on canned broths & bouillon cubes, store bought spice mixes and onion & garlic powders. I can't help but think they would taste better with a great home made stock, real onions & garlic and chiles which you toast, grind and blend yourself.
Is there something I'm missing about competition chili?
One of the reasons is that there is the rule that the chili must be cooked entirely on-site, in the open and "from scratch." Chili powders (but not "chili mixes") are allowed.
This would generally militate against any complicated contributing preparation such as a homemade stock, because the stock would have to be produced on-site entirely from scratch. Bringing a container of homemade stock from home is against the rules. Similarly, it may simply be too much work to start with dry chilies, hydrate them, and then run them through a food mill all on-site to obtain a high quality chili paste in the amounts required for a competition such as this.
This seems like a rule that probably has some weird effects. For example, clearly you can use a pre-made stock so long as someone else has made it commercially, because canned stock and bouillon cubes are considered "ingredients." And while you would not be allowed to make a chili paste at home, you could probably bring a commercial ancho chili paste and use that.
I'm not quite sure why they would use garlic powder and onion powder, except that I would point out that these have a distinctive flavor that is actually what you really want to use in certain dishes and styles of cuisine. I think you probably make the best point with respect to things like toasting cumin seeds. Except, how are they going to grind them on-site?
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Wouldn't the Thermomix also aerate the chocolate?
Anyway, a major limitation of the Thermomix is that the temperature control is not very tight and you have a swing of as much as 10 degrees C. So, for example, if you are setting it to 50 degrees that doesn't necessarily mean that it is actually 50 degrees, and it is likely to swing between 45 and 55 degrees.
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I've used a local fresh mozz made by a retired physician and while it was tasty it was just to "wet" for my pizza. Invariably it left the dough soggy and detracted from the overall pizza.
Depends on what you want, I guess. I like mine to look like this.
The best fat for the job
in Cooking
Posted
It's not a moot point when it comes to sauteing, however. Pan temperatures certainly get up to 400 degrees or more.