slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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Doesn't Ed Mitchell have a new place in Ralleigh named The Pit?
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WRT the Mississippi Punch, here's a tidbit from Dave Wondrich posted on another thread:
On Sep 18 2007, 11:57 AM, Splificator said:. . . here's a recipe for Mississippi Punch (predating Jerry Thomas's by a couple of years) that calls for Batavia arrack; it's damned tasty, IMHO.
Shake well with plenty of cracked ice:
2 oz cognac (VSOP or better)
1 oz dark Jamaican-style rum (I like Coruba in this)
1/2 oz Batavia arrack (the van Oosten works wonderfully well)
juice of 1/2 lemon
1/2 oz rich simple syrup
Pour unstrained into tall glass, garnish with half-wheel of orange and a few raspberries or whatever else is in season. Approach with straw and have at it. -
The importer of Dolin is Haus Alpenz. I'm not sure who the distributor is.
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I should point out that carbon steel and cast iron, regardless of how well seasoned, are not "nonstick" in the same sense as PTFE coated cookware is "nonstick." There is a vast gulf between their food-releasing properties.
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Bob, if you're a cook, then you know you need the right tool for the job. Buying something like this "pasta rethermalizer" and trying to use it as an accurate water bath for precision sous vide cooking would not be the right tool for the job. Sure, it's "a piece of equpiment made for cooking food," but it's not made for cooking food this way. It would be like buying a frypan for making stock.
On the other hand, what is made for accurately and precisely controlling the temperature of a water bath? A laboratory recirculating water bath heater. It's not silent, but I wouldn't exactly call them noisy either. A very quiet "whirring" noise every second ot so is about as much noise as they make. But, if you want silent and you're willing to live without recirculation, you could still get much better performance out of a rice cooker or electric braiser and a PID for less than half the price.
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The whole "Ronzoni of Italy" issue interests me. Is this good or bad? Do we assume that the taste of the masses is flawed or are we to assume that Italians know their noodles?
What I meant by "Ronzoni of Italy" is just that Barilla is the most popular pasta brand in Italy, and by no means considered "something special."
I probably should have said that it was like the "American Italian Pasta Company of Italy," since AIPC makes more pasta than any other American company (although New World Pasta also claims they are "leading branded dry pasta manufacturer in the United States and Canada").
It's a perfectly decent quality industrial pasta, but not something I'd hold up as being oustanding in its class.
There is, in my opinion, a pretty large leap in quality from industrial dry pasta to artisanal dry pasta. Really only De Cecco, in my experience, has been able to meaningfully distinguish itself from other industrial dry pasta brands.
For all intents and purposes, any industrial extruded dry pasta made with durum flour and water will behave reasonably similarly for the purposes of evaluating a technique such as this. I cannot imagine that this technique would be "bad" when using Ronzoni and "good" when using Rustichella d'Abruzzo, for example.Is all Durum flour created equal, or is some higher in protein than others? Also, what about the mixing techniques, water temperature, used in manufacture, etc.? I wonder if any of these factors can have an effect on the way the pasta cooks.
It seems to me that some durum pastas hold their texture better than others. Some crappier ones I've used are a bit tricky to cook properly while the better ones seem almost invincible.
This is definitely true. But I think that the cooking technique variable is so radical in this case that it would obscure these differences. It's likely, for example, that Rustichella d'Abruzzo cooked using this technique would be better than Ronzoni cooked using this technique, but I am still betting that Rustichella d'Abruzzo cooked using a conventional technique would be far better than either one, and by a much larger magin (it's also likely that Ronzoni cooked using a conventional technique would be better than Rustichella d'Abruzzo cooked using a "cold start/low water" technique).
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Why spend 450 bucks on something like that, which at best would be a kludge for sous vide? You could get better thermal performance with a rice cooker, aquarium pump and an Auber PID. Or, if you're willing to spend the money, I have to believe it's possible to find a reconditioned laboratory recirculating water bath heater for $400 or less.
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I'll have to try it!
A few questions:
1. What kinds of prices are you seeing? FreshDirect has De Cecco organic spaghetti listed at $2.99 a pound (compared to $2.49 for the regular stuff). Both of these prices make Setaro from Buon Italia (around $6 for a 1 kilo package, meaning $2.72 a pound) competitive on a price basis -- and we both agree that Setaro is far superior.
2. What is the surface texture like? Is it any different from the surface on De Cecco's regular pasta?
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Right. Baguette dough has never seemed to ha high in hydration compared to my pane pugliese dough or ciabatta dough. And I never slash those. For the pane pugliese, I just poke my finger into the dough in a few places.
Since we're discussing hydration, we should also point out that not all hydration is equal. Higher gluten doughs are "dryer" (firmer?) at the same percent hydration compared to lower gluten doughs. So, for example, a 68% hydration dough made with bread flour will be fairly firm whereas a 68% hydration dough made with a 70/30 mix of AP and cake flour will be quite wet and runny.
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I wouldn't think that washing a cazuela in the dishwasher is such a hot idea.
My understanding is that they should be cleaned more or less the same way you might clean cast iron. This is echoed in La Tienda's instructions, which they say came from Paula Wolfert.
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Again... if you want something that works more or less like the old US NP, seek out Dolin Dry.
I was chatting with Audrey Saunders a few nights ago, and among the million or so topics we usually cover when we're together, we touched on Noilly Prat. We agreed that the new product is a quality product with some interesting potential of its own. The problem is exactly what Phil mentions in the first post in the thread: What about the dozens of carefully-calibrated cocktails designed around the old US Noilly Prat? Those are all different now and, even if some of them work with the new formula, at the very least they all need to be recalibrated to account for the higher perceived richness, herbal character, etc. of the new product. This is a huge undertaking.
In the long run, it's nice to have another quality vermouth, and it's especially nice to have one in the Marseilles style. But, of course, it's really to bad to have lost what was an excellent product. Fortunately, Dolin is positioned to step into the breech.
Here are a few interesting questions: When did Noilly Prat begin exporting a special formula for the US? Looking at historical cocktail formulae with dry French vermouth, at what point would these have been made with a style similar to the old US version of NP? Also, if we're looking at a cocktail recipe calling for dry French vermouth that originated in Europe, wouldn't this cocktail have been made with a vermouth like the NP we're getting now?
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Why slash ciabatta?
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I'm not talking about the shapes, I'm talking about the ingredients and manufacturing methods. A "Good" pasta like Barillo or DeCecco is only made with semolina flour and water, and extruded through bronze dies. No manufacturer will tell us exactly HOW the pasta is dried prior packaging either.
I've always thought it was interesting to hear Barillia described as a top pasta brand, considering that it's the "Ronzoni of Italy." It's also worthy of note that not all "bronze die" processes are the same. De Cecco pasta has hardly more external texture than pasta coming out of a teflon die, and certainly nowhere near to the surface texture of pastas such as Latini, Setaro, etc.
For all intents and purposes, any industrial extruded dry pasta made with durum flour and water will behave reasonably similarly for the purposes of evaluating a technique such as this. I cannot imagine that this technique would be "bad" when using Ronzoni and "good" when using Rustichella d'Abruzzo, for example. If anything, what makes the artisanal pastas so great is precisely the gradation of textures Lidia mentions, and the rough external texture is a bag part of that. You start with cold water, and you take this away.
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Thank you. And, I could probably make the claim sooner since I've noticed more and morre organic products are stating contents such as "90% organic ingredients" suggesting 10% non-organic. I'll do my math and get the new signage.
Depending on your percent inoculum (e.g., what percentage of the flour in your bread formula comes from the starter) you should be able to make a claim of 90% more or less right away. Again, this is a simple matter of math. If you start off with your "not organic" starter and refresh it with a 10-fold dilution using organic flour, then use the refreshed starter as a 20% inoculum for your bread, you already have bread that is around "98% organic" -- this is a claim you could make for bread baked that evening with a starter that began as "100% not organic" that morning (provided it is a sufficiently active culture to do all your leavening in that amount of time).
It might be more fitting to say "Made with 100% organic flour" if that is what you are doing, if the salt or other ingredients are do not follow suit.gfron's issue is that the starter contains not-organic flour. So you can't make a claim of "100% organic flour" until you can make that claim about the starter. However, as I showed above, it doesn't take too many "organic" generations of the starter before you can make a claim of "greater than 99% organic flour."
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It's really just a matter of math. Understand that every time you refresh your starter with organic flour, you are in effect diluting the not-organic flour. There is a law in chemistry relating to how much a substance can be diluted without losing that substance entirely. This limit is related to Avogadro's Constant (aka the number of atoms in a mole). For practical purposes, let's say a dilution of 1 part in 10^24.
Let's say that you are doing a ten-fold dilution every time you feed the starter. This is to say, for example, that you hold back approximately 5 grams of starter and feed that with 50 grams of "new food" every time you refresh (this would be a very good way to feed your starter, by the way). After 24 such feedings, you would have diluted the not-organic starter by a factor of 1 part in 10^24. This would mean that there is practically no chance that even a single molecule of the original not-organic starter remains. If you refresh the starter twice a day, figure two weeks. At this point, I would think that even the most dogmatic organic person would have to understand that there would be more "not organic" material in the starter from dust in the air than there would be from the original starter.
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Honestly, I don't know why it is an issue of debate that many, many absinthe-makers are trading on the "mystique" relating to absinthe in their labeling and promotions. Indeed, with the strong historical perceived relationship of absinthe and its characteristic artwork with "special inebriation," I can hardly see how this could fail to be the case. A producer of absinthe would have to take deliberate steps in its artwork and packaging to avoid such an association.
To suggest that artwork reproducing or evoking classic absinthe-related artwork from the past doesn't associate that absinthe with the image of "absinthe as a drug," whether knowingly and willfully or not, is like suggesting that a product calling itself "Electric Koolade" with a label reproducing/evoking the elements of a classic Jimi Hendrix poster from the mid 1960s is not automatically associated with LSD -- especially if people had various legendary, albeit false reasons to suppose that the drink just might contain some hallucinogenic. This, needless to say, would be a ridiculous position to take.
Sure, the US government is being very strict in its labeling requirements. But, you know... these guys want to sell their products. And the fact is that college kids who think they're going to get a "special high" remains, as always, a lucrative market. As for La Muse Vert in particular, I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to understand that this label, while evocative of older artwork (much of which, not for nothing, played up the presumed "extra affects" of absinthe) is evocative of the "drug culture" side of absinthe in a way that this label is not (I have also found this image for La Muse Vert, but it appears to be a pastis label).
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As to home roasts being uniformly better? I've been a judge at several barista competitions and have had home roasters pull me shots of what, in their opinion, was the best espresso I'd ever taste. They weren't. Ever. And it wasn't the equipment.
This is not a huge surprise. It would be shocking if the very best artisinal coffee roasters weren't able to outdo home roasters when freshness is equal. The problem is that freshness usually isn't equal for the home coffee enthusiast. Sure, there are probably some specialty coffee shops that are getting their Black Cat the very next day after it's roasted. But even if you're willing to pay the $14 per pound plus shipping, by the time you get that Black Cat into your espresso machine, it's already around 4 days old. And, of course, you have to order the stuff at least once a week to have a decent supply of truly fresh coffee -- something few people are willing or able to do.
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Yea, I think most any bread bakery that is making sourdough as an every-day production item will have sufficient consistency that they don't need to slip in any commercial yeast to get the results they want. That said, it also tends to be the case that, say, the sourdough baguettes are not as puffy as the same bakery's commercial yeast baguettes.
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Virtually all sourdough cultures "with a tradition of continuous propagation" have Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis (note the spelling) as the dominant lactobacillus.
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blancs or biancos are vermouths decolored with carbon.
Where did you get this information?
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Usually, yea. But I find that refrigeration makes more difference than anything.
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I've found that Carpano Antica Formula holds up very well over time, so long as it is kept under refrigeration.
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Right. It's a brick because acid degrades gluten, and gluten is what makes bread light. I don't know that I've ever had truly sour bread that was also light with an open crumb.
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I think I can get Noilly Prat sweet or Dolin sweet. Not much has been said about Noilly Prat sweet, so I'm wondering what people think of it. The accolades for Carpano Antica make it sound tempting, but wow, $30 for vermouth. Is it really worth that much?
Noilly Prat sweet is awful. Dolin sweet is very good and worth having, but it doesn't really work exactly like most sweet red vermouths.
For most everyone I know, if they were forced to only use one sweet vermouth for the rest of their lives, they would pick Carpano Antica Formula without hesitation. I know I would.
If you can find it, Casa Martelletti also makes a very good sweet red vermouth.
Non-Stick Cooking Surfaces
in Kitchen Consumer
Posted
There is a rather extensive thread on polytetrafluoroethylene exploring and clarifying many of these issues, which may be found here.
Just to clarify this point: PTFE doesn't produce "gaseous chemicals." (I'm not sure that a chemical can be "gaseous" to begin with, but that's neither here nor there and largely a matter of definition and usage.) When PTFE is heated to very high temperature, it can "shed ultrafine particles" into the atmosphere. In certain animals with very small and/or fragile respiratory apparatus, these ultrafine particles can clog up the works and produce symptoms up to and including death. It is not a great idea to keep your parakeet in the kitchen for a variety of reasons, and this is one more of them. My understanding is that it is the "ultrafine-ness" of the particles that makes them harmful, not necessarily the fact that these particles are composed of PTFE. Once the particles are inside your lungs, they're no better or worse than a similar coating of, say, ultrafine dust particles or wheat flour particles would be.