slkinsey

Bean-related distress is largely caused by the indigestible sugars present in beans (oligosaccharides, primarily inulin). These are not digestible by humans but are digestible by the bacteria in our guts! Bean cooking water will contain some oligosaccharides, of course, but not as much as would be present in the cooked beans themselves. Meanwhile, bean cooking water has plenty of cooking applications. Using it to cook rice is a good idea. And it could be used as a base for any number of soups.

Further on the issue of handles... one of the advantages of traditional handles (such as you see on this piece, for example) is that you can grab the handle close to the body of the pan and brace the remainder of the handle against the underside of your forearm. This tranfers the load further up your arm and makes lifting heavy, full pans a lot easier on the hand and wrist.

...bacon in everything was new and exciting?

Granted, it would be easier to recognize her poolside... This puts me in mind of the time I spent half of a charity concert sitting next to an extremely charming, somewhat barrel-chested woman with whom I passed the time in between numbers with interesting conversation. It was only later when questioned by my friends that I realized I had been sitting next to Marilyn Horne! So, I think it's pretty clear that this is not a skill at which I excel. On the other hand, there are others who are remarkably skilled in this area. I remember being very impressed when, after having chatted with me for maybe 10 minutes some six months earlier, Dale DeGroff not only remembered my name but remembered some things about me the next time we met. Successful people in the hospitality business tend to be pretty good at this kind of thing.

Yea, it definitely shouldn't have taken that long. How deep was the vegetable mixture?

deltadoc, I don't quite understand your post. Are you saying that you had your mirepoix on the heat for 5 hours and it hadn't browned? What were you heating it with, a candle?

HUH? I thought that maillardization is what happens with proteins and caramelization was with sugars. I don't think onions have protein, but I know they're loaded with sugars. From What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained by Robert L. Wolke: He offers more in What Einstein Told His Cook 2: The Sequel: Further Adventures in Kitchen Science: This is the Maillard reaction working at a temperature where it is clear that caramelization can't happen. Perfect example.

We should understand, in case it is not clear, that we're talking about maillardization, not caramelization.

Discussion and some recipes here: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=113688

Canned tomatoes are a worthy ingredient in their own right. Most of the most popular tomato sauces are properly made with canned tomatoes (I'll have to disagree with Chris as to whether high quality canned tomatoes can make an outstanding simple tomato sauce with nothing more than canned tomatoes and butter). I would never be without several large cans of DOP San Marzano tomatoes in my cupboard. Additionally, some few other vegetables are traditionally and appropriately canned. For example, in Spain canned (jarred, usually) asparagus is quite traditional. Some other traditional canning preparations that are understood to be intentionally transformative are quite good. A few others (some legumes, posole) are not as good as "the real thing" but acceptably good when one is in a pinch. Others... well, it's either a mystery to me why anyone would buy them (potatoes? really?!) or I can't understand why you wouldn't rather buy frozen (corn, peas, etc.) at much higher quality.

First of all, Le Creuset is a bad choice for this task. The cast iron won't respond very quickly, so if your onions start cooking too quickly you will not be able to save them very easily. Additionally, enameled cast iron is notoriously not good for browning. And finally, Le Creuset really isn't thick enough to spread the heat around and avoid a "burn ring" when doing this sort of thing (I always use an aluminum disk under my Le Creuset to spread out the heat). Browning onions... it all depends on what you want the onions to be like. If you have a large amount of onions that you want meltingly tender and broken down almost to a mush, you can put them in a large, even-heating pan on very low heat with the lipid of your choice and a disk of parchment or wax paper cut to the size of the pan placed directly on top of the onions. Stir every so often, and resign yourself to the fact that this is a long process. Once the onions are softened and broken down to the degree you prefer, they will be mostly browned. If you want further browning, finish over high heat (you will need a responsive pan to avoid burning). If you want the onions to retain more texture (browned on the outside, but still with some resistance to the tooth) then there is no substitute for high heat and cooking in appropriately-sized batches.

Well, yes. And most French people would drink Cognac "neat" and not in a cocktail. Nevertheless, there is a strong American tradition of very long standing of making cocktails with both Cognac and genever.

Yea. I've always been given to understand that any distinctive "individual character" in a premium vodka came not from the primary ingredients or any careful distilling, since the primary effect of quadruple rectification and charcoal/quartz filtering would be to remove all of that stuff, but rather from small amounts of sweeteners, glycerine and other flavorings added at the end (and the water used to cut it down to bottle proof, of course).

Any "straight" whiskey.

Right. The direction of the lateral movement isn't important in a shearing cut. Just that there is some. And, with most cooks who have good knife technique, there is always a certain amount of lateral movement. In the grand scheme of things few kitchen knife, even the ones with acute angles and microfine polished edges, are optimized for true push-cutting. For this, you want something like a razor or a scalpel. The geometry and fineness of grain, etc. that you want in a true push-cutting knife would not be so great in the kitchen anyway. What you can notice is that the thinner the kitchen knife, the more acute and polished the edge, the less lateral movement is required (this is also why these knives need very frequent touchups and polishing to maintain these desired properties). But some lateral movement is usually going to be good. This is one reason that I think so many people are disappointed with the santoku design, because the flat edge almost forces the user to push cut. It's interesting to see how different blades and different sharpening strategies do the same things. I have some acutely angled and highly polished Japanese knives that fly through food with very little lateral movement. I also have some less-acutely angled cast steel knives with big fat carbide crystals and a much lower level of polish that fly through food just as much, but require more lateral motion to "bite."

Which categories? Also, aren't makers of Scotch allowed to add caramel, etc? (Yes, I know this is whisky and not whiskey.)

So... it's used in rotgut to balance out added sweetness. Is there any reason anyone who was distilling carefully enough to make a spirit that you could at least choke down straight would want to do this? Part of what I gather is bostonapothecary's point is that he's contending that makers of quality spirits are adding acid. I can't see why someone selling at more than the rock-bottom level would want to do this (especially when, as you point out, acidity and sweetness can be tweaked with careful distilling and aging).

What spirits have added citric acid? I assume that some vodkas have trace amounts added, depending on how they want to tweak their flavor profile.

There are essentially three ways that a knife can cut. There is the push cut, in which the blade has no side-to-side motion and force is applied downward. There is the slice, in which the blade moves in a side-to-side motion and minimal force is applied downward. There is the shearing cut, which involves both significant downward force and slicing motion. Most of what we do in the kitchen is a shearing cut of one kind or another.

The doufeu design and concept has been around since before Staub even existed as a company.

If it's relatively clean beef fat or chicken fat from stock-making, I'm likely to filter and freeze it for future use.

You know... it's so rare that I have enough leftover cooking oil that I had to think about what I do with it. I guess that the few times I have more than perhaps a tablespoon of leftover oil to discard (which does tend to go into the drain), I tend to have a lot of leftover oil because I've been making fried chicken or latkes or something. That either goes into a container and into the trash or, if it's still in decent shape, filtered back into the container and saved for reuse in the next frying project.

You mean the Chicago "pizza style" casserole? It's tasty enough, but it isn't pizza. Is it too late for burning at the stake?

Absolutely. And you do need very high heat for this technique to work that well. Extremely high heat will give you a nicely maillardized crust on the outside without very much penetration into the steak.

Soot?!?! Really? Try the method and get back to me on how much soot you detect in the flavor. Make sure you take a pic of the outside as well so we can tell if you did it correctly... Yes!!!! Really! This is pretty easy to see, just by looking a the underside of a pan you have used over a dirty flame (as opposed to a clean flame like from a gas stove). And the effects of a dirty flame on flavor are well-understood, which is why good kitchens don't want their cooks flaming pans for more than a few seconds Some people like that flavor, so whatever floats your boat. Burger King, for example, differentiates itself on the basis of putting a little soot on its burgers. I can't say that I mind it myself in every context, but it's not something I'd be likely to do with an expensive dry-aged prime steak. More to the point, you don't really need the flame to get the extra-high heat you want for searing. I'd much rather have the high heat from properly configured and tended coals instead. Although it does produce flame, it's not clear to me that dumping the vegetable oil is boosting heat all that much.