Michael Ruhlman

After it's cooled overnight, rewrap it well and it will be good for several days in the fridge.

You cannot get kosher salt in Australia (at least, I've never seen it). Flaked sea salt would be way to expensive to use in that manner, just get normal, non-iodised table salt. ← and please try to weigh your salt rather than measure by volume.

that's a perfect description of a broken forcemeat. possible problems are dull blade or the meat and fat got too warm. try bringing ground meat and fat to near freezing before mixing. or try the paddle method for emulsifying, which is better than food processor because of power and blades. sorry for the broken sausage, that's really frustrating!

jbprince.com has a number of good inexpensive molds. i did a pate de campagne last week and because i had some rich pork stock, the mold i used was cheesecloth and i poached and cooled the pate in the stock. the cheapest and one of the best molds there is of course is plastic wrap.

use a strong brine to wash the salamis off with. i'd never heard of putting good mold in a bottle and spraying it. fascinating. in either case, i suspect that the main benefit of good mold is its ability to keep the bad mold off.

surely a grocery store sells veal breast--which should be inexpensive, with a good mix of meat cartilage and bone....?

beef doesn't drop a lot of liquid like pork or salmon. and i'd be surprised if you had a problem with too much humidity; you need good humidity so the exterior doesn't dry out.

I recommend not "pulling" the confited pork. Yes you can shred it and serve it like a potted meat, but please try cutting a small block of it and sauteing it or roasting it as you would a leg of duck confit. Drohman deep fries his gives it a crisp exteriorand a melting exterior. and thanks for your comments, over the top, of course, but we'll take em.

those are great shots. glad you liked the salmon. in another post somewhere someone asked if brian could comment. I'm sure i could encourage him if people had questions for him.

In my experience the keys to great stock are a good mix of meat for flavor and bones for gelatin/body (joints and feet are especially rich in collagen), a long slow heat (too hot to touch but almost no bubbles rising to the surface), adding aromatic vegetables and herbs at the end, and straining immediately. I'm curious: of all you stock makers out there, do any of you make veal stock, and a related question, do any of you make stock specifically for sauces?

they're brand names for the same product, sodium nitrite (#1) and, for dry-cured sausages, sodium nitrate (#2, which in effect is sodium nitrite with a tiny amount of nitrate added). They are curing salts, not spice mixtures; they are dangerous if consumed in large quantities and so tinted pink, but in small quantites they prevent the growth of harmful bacterial, help the meat maintain a rosy hue, help prevent fat from becoming rancid and add a piquant flavor.

in our charcuterie book, we use 1 teaspoon of #2 salt for 5 pounds of sausage. #2 is used exclusively in items that will be dry-cured for days at above refrigeration temps. DC Cure #1 is used for meat or sausages that will be smoked or in some way cooked after it's cured, such as bacon, smoked sausage, or corned beef. (#2 contains NITRATE which converts over time to NITRITE which does the curing. Saltpeter is potassium nitrate and hasn't been used in the US for years, though it's still common in Europe)

This is the key difference in how you cook with the two fats. Suet is always added shredded and not cut in or rubbed in as for shortcrust pastry, nor is the dough rolled and turned like flaky pastry. It is a much more rustic type of pastry and does taste much fattier and more savoury although it is very good in jam roly poly too! Jack, that pudding looks wonderful. ← don't you render the suet first? there's connective tissue and other stuff, no?

Well, versus butter, lard is pure fat, no water. I can't say about versus any other fats. I am not a baker so I don't have a lot of experience with the other fats. ← of course, what knucklehead i am. thanks. i've tried making a dough using duck fat--i was hoping to make a laminated dough with it, but it's just too soft at room temp. and that's interesting about the deer suet--i'll try to get some from my hunter friends.

great comments and excellent visuals in the recipe. shows the difference between pork fat that is rendered, the white stuff, fat that has cooked and gotten brown and will have a roasted flavor. I didn't know about the third rendering. Now: tell me, fifi, why does it seem as though lard has such a greater shortening capacity when you cut it into flour than butter or any other kind of fat used for pastry. ??? Also, suet is regularly at my cleveland grocery store. have your grocery store get it for you, at the very least. won't be grass fed but it will hard and crystalline.

one of the many reasons i love this site, this discussion of fat. rendered beef fat is fantastic to cook with. it's highly saturated (why it's so hard at room temp). It's great to cook potatoes in, and adds great flavor to Yorkshire pudding. preferred fat for pastry is rendered pork fat, lard.

no, but i can think of a couple of other names that might make a very big difference in this specific case. maybe that's not what happened here at all. maybe this rocketman is nothing but a troll--they've certainly turned up on other online fora i've been on. but we have no way of knowing that. and sorry fat guy, but the fact that YOU know who it is does not provide the kind of transparency that would reassure me. again, maybe the real answer isn't the forbidding of anonymity, but the moderators taking a more active role against anonymous slagging. if you prefer to post anonymously for any of the reasons that have been discussed, then that is your choice. but i would think that good manners would dictate that you would then temper some of your comments. ← Ah, the crux of the matter. Russ was right that this thread came about because of a single poster—but there are more components than that, which he rightly brings up here. To put it more explicitly: say, hypothetically, the person calling themselves rocketman were in fact Michael Psaltis—let me continue! This is only hypothetical. Well if it were or if the brother of the maligned/defended chef were posting through a pal, it would very much change the meaning. One person who monitors this thread, comments at length on it, and has the ability to edit and censor, namely Fat Guy, happens to be the client and friend of Michael Psaltis—this is a clear conflict of interest in a thread devoted to Michael's brother. Combine this with comments I’ve been hearing off eGullet from current and former eGullet team members about unfair censoring (and an unexplained deletion of a comment of mine that I’m sure Steven didn’t care for, one supporting something russ had to say)…well, I smelled a skunk. But more important: if this could happen, what else could? If the eGullet ringleaders knew someone to be a shill or a slanderer, would they still allow them to continue to post? Will a friend of Steven Shaw who wants to promote his book on egullet be more likely to have it done than someone who doesn’t know him or Jason or whomever. And if Steven doesn’t like someone, say he’s annoyed by some of the things I say, is it less likely I’ll be able to have eGullet excerpt my next book if I ask for consideration? I don’t know how management makes decisions but I’ve heard enough upset people who care about egullet and felt my own radar on high enough alert, to need to be skeptical and to want to know how it works. I’ve never argued that people should be forced to reveal themselves (this stalking issue is unnerving), but perhaps there are some instances in which managemnt might require people to use real names. Those who for whatever reasons wish or need to maintain anonymity would have to watch from the sidelines in those rare instances. Anonymity comes with a price too. Perhaps those who post on tendentious issues, shouldn’t be allowed to moderate and censor as well. Steven’s most salient point in all this was his comment that this is a new medium. Indeed it is and I want it to work and develop meaningfully. I don’t think you need a Public Editor, but maybe some sort of cyberspace version of it. I’m grateful for all these posts, too much to comment on--smart and interesting comments for and against anonymity by so many people.

Thanks for this public response. I hope everyone who can, will update their info. The more people who do this, the less influential anonymity will be. Now, how about sending reasons to the person in question when deleting their post. I was really pissed. Not that it was done, but that it was done anonymously. For instance, the title and subtitle of this thread was changed, why I have no idea, but it would have been appropriate to ask me for a revision, wouldn't it? But then, here I've gone and asked you to behave more like conventional editors, and that's what you're doing! Fixing my copy!

names may not build credibility but they do ensure that people are accountable for what they say.

Yesterday Russ Parsons wrote: "this is the problem with the whole blind posting thing. i post under my own name because my momma taught me not to say anything behind someone's back that i wouldn't say to their face. this isn't true of all of our "nom-ed" posters: there are plenty of them, like fat guy, bux, pan, etc., who are very clear about their identities and, therefore, there special interests and potential conflicts thereof." Egullet has proven to be influential in the food community. The heated debate of a chef memoir, a restaurant critic's methods, the foie gras controversy in, of all places, Chicago, have influenced national coverage of these issues. The seriousness of intent, the intelligence of the dialogue, from highbrow to comical, and the general good will of the site have lured a wide range of voices, from outside the professional food community and inside. It’s become influential enough that I wonder if its moderators ought to begin functioning a little more like conventional media editors in how they manage information, and its posters ought to behave more like contributors to conventional media. There’s a reason why newspapers and magazines don’t allow anonymous contributors. Egullet should consider requiring all contributors to file under their actual names. This post was elicited by the psaltis thread, and while where you stand on the subject is not important, its example is. If a the pro-Psaltis poster called Rocketman is, say, a relative or a close friend, his words mean something different to the reader than were he, say, a horticulturist in north carolina who happened to be fascinated by the chef world. The same burdens should fall on the moderators. I had a post removed from that thread, though it was not mean, untrue, profane and was on the subject. I was offered no explanation and don't know who did it. If one or two people are able to censor comments by fiat, and anonymously, at that, this too will undermine the credibility of this site. As more and more people in the food world watch the dialogues on eGullet, the people who run egullet and the people who post on it must give up anonymity and accept the responsibility of accountability. Otherwise this section of the eGullet site, arguably one of it’s most important, will become irrelevant. This is far too serious for a Friday afternoon post, but there it is. I’d love hear anyone who would make a case in favor of maintaining anonymity.

A question for sous viders using vacuum sealer but not immersion heaters. How difficult has it been to maintain consistant water temps of say 130, 150, 170? And how have you done it?

don't add too much. if it's old you might want to buy DQ Curing Salt from butcher-packer.com, costs $1.50, sodium nitrite, works better and is more reliable.

sodium nitrite is now sold under various names--butcher-packer.com sells it cheapest and best. saltpeter is postassium nitrate, a different salt that isn't used much in the states anymore. Nitrates are required to prevent botulism in dry-cured sauages. nitrite is not needed for this kind of pork preparation, but it will keep it bright pink and give the pork a distinclty hammy flavor.

looks like the B's have it. thanks, and thanks for the above cook off thread

which is it, is there a preferred spelling for here in the US? I'm referring of course to the korean rice dish that means thrown together, or so i was told. Can anyone help me with a definitive spelling? Thanks.