slkinsey

Seems sweet enough to me that it I would consider it a liqueur. Certainly you're not going to use it as the base spirit in a cocktail.

See here.

From what I have been able to glean, Monel is actually better described as a copper-nickel alloy, being comprised of up to 67% nickel). It is extremely hard and durable, but has terrible thermal conductivity, somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.26 W/cm/K compared to around 4.01 for copper. Better than stainless steel, but barely.

Is anyone making cookware out of this material?

It should be noted that cooking the tomato paste by itself until it browns a bit and then adding liquid produces a flavor entirely different from putting tomato paste into the liquid and then cooking the liquid sufficiently to cook out the raw flavor from the tomato paste.

Probably a rant for another thread, but is anyone else annoyed by the rampant wrong use of "caramelized?" It wouldn't be so bad, except, 1) the biggest offenders are chefs, who should know better, and 2) it's a whole lot easier to just say "browned." I think this probably stems from the fact that the Maillard reaction has really only come to common culinary parlance in relatively recent times. Also because most cooks are familiar with caramelization from, well, making caramel. You take the observed browning (just like making caramel!) and the fact that Maillardization often produces some sweetness (hey! caramel is sweet too!), and it's easy to see how this got started. Then, once one person said "caramelized onions" it was off to the races.

Hmm. Pincé means "stiff" in French; pincée is the past participle of pincer ("to pinch"), meaning "pinched."

What language is this, out of curiosity? I've never heard this term. Italians might call this rosolare ("to brown"). Actually, tomatoes (generalized) contain around 2.6 grams of sugars and 1 gram or protein per 100 grams. So, we're talking about maillard reactions.

The fundamental difference between ricotta and cottage cheese is that ricotta is produced from the second curdling of whey from which curds have already been extracted, whereas cottage cheese is from the primary curdling of milk. Homemade "ricotta" is actually homemade cottage cheese. A salient practical difference is the fact that you can get much better quality ricotta than you can get cottage cheese.

I think that copper or aluminum disks make some sense as flame-tamers or ways to even out the heat for low/slow cooking with cookware that might not have perfectly even heat. For example, I always use an aluminum disk underneath my Le Creuset enameled cast iron casseroles. Whether it could be used as the "thermal layer" with cheap, thin stainless cookware. I don't think it would work very well. Once you put down the metal disk over the burner, essentially what you have is not that different from one of those flat electric cooktops.

From The Microbiological Safety and Quality of Food By Barbara M. Lund, Tony C. Baird-Parker, Grahame Warwick Gould:

I get my extra virgin olive oil for between 16 and 21 a liter, depending on how it's being priced at the market. It usually takes us around 2 months to burn through a liter. So, I don't consider this expensive enough to bother with keeping a big bottle of something cheaper around for frequent use (especially with limited space in a NYC apartment kitchen). I keep some highly refined grapeseed oil around for the few times when I'm concerned about off flavors from heating the oil. I should probably amend my previous remarks to say that, if there are times I'm concerned about burning extra virgin olive oil in a high-heat sauté but still want to use olive oil, I find it easy to throw the vegetables in the pan first, followed by the oil.

Possibly: http://www.amazon.com/Pasta-Bible-Definiti...s/dp/0785819096

If you want it to stay the same, you need to reheat it in the water bath (not strictly true, but true as a practical matter). That said, getting things just up to temperature is pretty fast if they're already cooked and don't need to spend time at temperature. Also, a lot of the time you can reheat certain things CSV via more conventional means and still keep the benefits of SV cooking. I occasionally use SV chicken breast in omelets and things like that, and they seem to keep their SV juiciness and tenderness through the reheating with the eggs (probably what this means is that they wouldn't be fully cooked if I were using raw chicken in the same recipe). IMO, it doesn't make much sense to cook-and-chill SV at home unless you are (1) planning on reheating in the water bath; (2) planning on serving the food cold; (3) it's something hammered through like SV duck confit; or (4) it's something you always planned on cooking partially SV and partially via conventional means (this is something that Keller does a few times in "Under Pressure" -- cook, say, veal breast a long time SV to convert the collagen without drying it out, then later on cooking it to a more conventional "doneness" to finish it for service).

I've thought of retarding the bulk stage instead of the loaf stage, which I imagine is probably better. But, since I have to work my bread making around a work day and bake in the evening, I'd have to shape the loaves after I got home from work and would end up baking them at midnight or something like that.

I'd put it somewhere else, but built-in if you can. Often people with separate built-in ovens will have the microwave on top of the "oven stack." The problem with putting it over the stove, IMO, is that since you have a recirculating hood, you will be guaranteed to get kitchen grease all over the microwave.

Parchment is 100% necessary for ciabatta, I think. How else to do it?

Lisa: What hydration are you doing? I usually do between 67% and 70% for a boule (which I am also doing sourdough, with the expected consequences as to fragility) and don't have any troubles with deflation unless I misjudge and overproof. Do you slash? I find that it's really the slashing that seems to deflate a fragile dough much more than inverting. I don't do the dutch oven method at present, but I could envision inverting the banneton onto parchment, slashing the dough and then using the parchment to lower it into the dutch oven without flopping it in there.

Yea. I'm not fond in general of non-inverted boules. Something about them doesn't come out quite to my aesthetic sense.

So you proof seam-side down and don't invert the dough for baking?

Parchment? Don't you find that the parchment sticks to the dough?

The difficulty is in finding an oval banneton.

My experience is that, unless you are cooking in enough oil that there is a layer of oil in the pan including exposed areas not covered with food, the whole smoke point thing is a red herring. I've heated a heavy copper pan on full heat for 10 minutes, then thrown in a tablespoon or two of unfiltered, dark yellow-green extra virgin olive oil immediately followed by mushrooms or onions or whatever, and never got any smoking or off flavors. So long as the food is there to suck thermal energy out of the pan through the oil, there shouldn't be any problem. I only turn to high smoke point oils when I know I'm going to be using enough that there will be significant areas not covered by food (e.g., if I'm putting a high-heat surface sear on a single large piece of meat).

gfron1: Is your bâtard more like a short, thick baguette or more like an elongated boule? I guess I'd call what I baked above bâtards rather than baguettes, and they aren't ideal for toasting in my slice toaster. The boule slices much better for that (although perhaps 5% on each "skinny side" of the boule isn't great). On the other hand, something that is more like an oval boule is very good for slicing and toasting.

I usually pull out the steam half-way through the baking process. I am still refining that, actually. I've been leaving in the heavy slate that I normally use for pizza, but am thinking that it may be too much stored heat for something that needs to bake for more than 120 seconds. So I'm going to swap out the slate for regular "baking stones" when I bake bread. I'd like the Dutch oven method, but don't currently have anything small enough. Maybe it's time to get that medium-sized Staub?