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A couple months ago on eGullet, coauthor Maxime Bilet responded to a question about the best recipes for putting a thermomix to use. He suggested eggs or bases like ice cream or custard bases. Anybody have one? If you don't, anybody have a recipe they really wished they had a thermomix for?

Who has tried this? I've tried it twice and both times I've ended up mojito jelly, not spheres. I even have the benefit of being able to ask coauthor Maxime Bilet for tips...only to have him finally tell me it must have been some user error. I should have taken pictures, but, well, I was kind of embarrassed! I promise that next time I try them--and there will be a next time!--I'll take pics and post them here no matter the outcome. If you did finally get spheres, I envy you. But, I am also curious to know how you served them. As Max noted on eGullet a couple months ago, they don't actually serve them in a cocktail glass at the cooking lab. The photo of the sphere in the glass in the book is purely to demonstrate the fizziness. So, how did you give them to your guests?

A lot of people want to know how long this will keep. Coauthor Maxime Bilet answered this on eGullet a while back: "We can‚’t give you an exact time as we have not tested it ourselves. We do expect though that you will experience some syneresis, or ‚“weeping,” just as you do with any condiment kept in your fridge." He also suggests using a little xanthan gum to help this. Has anyone been keeping some stored in the back of their fridge? What's the result?

A while back, someone wrote in to ask us: "The section of vacuum filtering for essences/consommes I'm very intrigued by, but being charged by the L of water I use, the faucet aspirator although inexpensive may overall end up costing more due to the amount of water I use. So I've been looking and there are kit's being sold with the Buchner funnel, flask and all of the vacuum hoses and other accoutrements but they attach to a hand-held pump. Unfortunately it doesn't give an idea of the PSI it's able to achieve or anything really and I was just wondering if you had any experience using these." Anyone have any recommendations?

One reader wrote to us to ask: "I tried the kerala curry sauce (6-224). I tried to be as accurate as possible. Nonetheless I feel it didn't end the way it was supposed to be. 1. The recipe calls for curry leaves. I had dry ones. As I was pouring them I felt there were too many (5 grams!), then I thought, maybe they meant fresh curry leaves! Is that correct? 2. Second, my "sauce" ended like a curry paste. THere was no way I could "simmer" this for 45 minutes. In an attempt to recover what was clearly a failure, I added 200 g more of coconut milk and that seem to have averted a total failure. I checked egullet and somebody seem to have had the same problem: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?/topic/136959-cooking-with-modernist-cuisine/page__st__840 scroll to find the posting by anna: So it just seemed possible this morning to attempt an MC recipe and I chose the Goan Curry Sauce (page 224 of KM). [...] The last step in making the sauce is "Simmer for 45 minutes". At this stage of the recipe, and I followed it very closely, one ends up with a very small amount of "sludge"... So it seems that there might be a "bug" in these recipes, or the variability in the ingredients is not making them work for some of us. ----- Thanks again, for all the hard work, daniel german" From coauthor Maxime Bilet, and Anjana Shankar of the kitchen team, I received the following advice: 1. Yes, the curry leaves are supposed to be fresh. You can buy them at Indian or Asian grocery stores (personally, when I made the Masala curry, I bought mine at Uwajimaya in Seattle. Though I just tossed in the called for amount, I might have been better off chopping them up). 2. Thickness of sauce can depend on a variety of things, such as the actual heat of your range (even on low) and the width of your pan. How finely you chop the shallots called for in the recipe can also be a factor. While the goan sauce does indeed have an error in it (as noted on the errata page) in the amount of water, the amount of coconut milk called for in this recipe is correct. That doesn't mean that you can't use more, of course, especially if you are trying to balance out working with a particularly fickle stove, for instance. Has anyone else found this recipe to be too thick?

Has anyone had any experience with Sigma Aldrich? One reader wrote in to ask: "I want to purchase the xanthan gum and other ingredients and the easiest supplier I can find (based in India) is Sigma Aldrich. Their products are for tissue culture use. What is the difference between lab grade and food industry grade gums (including other gelling agents like alginate or carrageenan). Is it safe to use sigma aldrich products in food?"

Mac and Cheese has been one of the most discussed recipes from the book so far. Coauthor Maxime Bilet has already answered several questions about the recipe on eGullet's Cooking with Modernist Cuisine thread. He, along with several other eGulleters, noted that you can probably save the cheese in the freezer for about a month, and explained that the use of carageenan makes this possible. Later in the thread, however, he does note that if you are using all the cheese right away, you can omit the carageenan, but details some of the benefits of the constructed cheese. We hope that answers a few questions, but if not, please ask! We'd also love to see what you have done with your leftover cheese!

Hi all I was wondering if any of you think it would be feasible to make black garlic in a temp controlled water bath? I understand from reading an article on ehow that you need to pack the garlic loosely in a jar and heat them for 40 days at 140 degrees and that the garlic should remain humid. I was thinking of putting them in a sealed bag (not vacuumed) and then floating it on a 140 degree water bath for 40 days.