[Mike Nolan]

I won't comment on the shows themselves, as there are too many opportunities for spoilers.

The time limits are on the short side but are generally reasonable IF YOU ARE WELL-ORGANIZED AND YOU DON"T MAKE ANY MISTAKES! That's a pretty big if, though.

I watched last week's episode last night, I didn't find the hosts excessively intrusive in the show, no more than their British counterparts at least. Mary is still Mary and Johnny Luzzini is well known as a judge on American reality cooking shows and is fine, and not much got past the pair of them.

However, it looks like it did poorly in the ratings, perhaps because it had too much competition for the 'homemaker' market from the well-establshed Project Runway, I'm not sure what else is in that time slot. (NFL football, but the Thursday night games have been awful this year, and I don't see those viewers as likely bakers.)

Daily Mirror Article

[Mike Nolan]

My mother always used oatmeal as the binder in meat loaf, sometimes adding an egg.

I've got a recipe posted for meat loaf with a can of black beans and sauteed mushrooms, it's a bit high in carbs for my wife these days, but it's delicious.

[Mike Nolan]

I know it doesn't reconstitute, but would it work in a frosting?

[Mike Nolan]

My concern about using powdered milk from the store is the smell, how do you keep that from permeating the frosting?

[Mike Nolan]

An immersion circulation heater is used for sous vide cooking.

In some ways it's similar to a convection oven, but much more efficient because water conducts heat better than air. Because the water is always circulating it produces a constant heat at the specified temperature everywhere in the pot, as opposed to having a pot on a stove where the temperature at the bottom is going to be much warmer than at the top.

Fish and chicken are the most frequently mentioned proteins in sous vice cooking, but you can cook nearly anything this way.

For example, if you want a steak cooked to 135 degrees, you just put it in a boiling bag, set the immersion heater to 135 and when you're done it is a uniform 135 degrees throughout, which means it's the same degree of redness from edge to edge.

If you want a seared outside or grill marks on the outside, a minute or two in a pan or on the grill will finish it off.

By contract, when you cook a steak in a pan or on the grill, by the time the center gets to 135 degrees the outside is probably at 170 or higher.

Restaurants often use sous vide techniques to par-cook foods to save time later on and ensure consistent results.

Something I learned about cooking potatoes from Harold McGee's book On Food and Cooking is that if you cook them at 130-140 degrees for about 20 minutes then raise the temperature to finish cooking them, they'll stay firm even after they're fully cooked and diced. This makes for a nicer potato salad. In essence this is a sous vide technique.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

Sounds like the cooked flour frosting that was the one originally used on Red Velvet cakes before most bakeries switched over to using a cream cheese frosting on them.

Sarah Wirth recommends that frosting, I tried making it once and must have done something wrong, because we thought it was inedible.

[Mike Nolan]

We don't drink coffee, and the non-dairy stuff (which, btw, is generally NOT vegan) is awful in tea, so we never have it on hand. I wonder if the baker's dried milk that KAF sells would work? I'd probably use high ratio shortening, too.

[Mike Nolan]

Noting wrong with a point-and-shoot, all the shots I took at Chocolate Boot Camp were with a Nikon Coolpix S6200, that's also the camera I was using for shots on this site before mid-July when I bought my Canon T6i. My wife has an even older Coolpix that she uses all the time at work, taking shots of students in Agronomy and Horticulture at UNL.

With all the ornate Bundt pans that have come out in the past few years, I'm glad to know they work well.

[Mike Nolan]

It was opposite Project Runway, so I recorded it and hope to watch it this weekend.

[Mike Nolan]

Possibly the two most frequently televised techniques in molecular gastronomy are spherification and foams, the latter especially having been overused on multiple cooking reality shows.

Many techniques involve chemicals, but some involve new cooking tools.

The tool I'd love to play around with is an anti-griddle, which has a constant 30 below zero (F) surface that you can make ices on, but since they cost about $1500, that doesn't seem likely to be in my kitchen at any point.

Immersion circulation heaters have gotten very reasonably priced, though, one model of the Anova was selling for under $100 on Black Friday. (Kenji Lopez-Alt says you can do some sous vide cooking using a beer cooler, which costs even less.)

One technique I do NOT expect to play with is using liquid nitrogen, if mis-handled you can hurt yourself badly or cause major damage in your kitchen.

[Mike Nolan]

Can you post some pictures?

[Mike Nolan]

Molecular gastronomy is about exploring the limits of food properties and appearances. Let's face it, there's only so many ways to cook a steak before you're just repeating yourself.

[Mike Nolan]

Around the time that were first married (1972) someone gave us a small jar of brandied fruit. It was great on cake or ice cream. We would add canned fruit to it (usually fruit cocktail in sugar syrup) every now and then to keep it going, it didn't require refrigeration.

We even bought a big blue glass jar to keep it in. It moved with us to Nebraska and from the duplex we had when we first moved to Lincoln to our first house, and I think it was still going when we moved to this house in 1997.

At one point we must have screwed something up because it developed mold, we probably weren't using it enough. We threw out the fruit but kept the big blue jar, it currently has refrigerator dill pickles in it, not brandied fruit. Those pickles are probably about 10 years old at this point and are pretty potent!

[Mike Nolan]

I would assume the most important ingredient in a Winston Churchill fruitcake was brandy. Or given Sir Winston's reputation, maybe port?

[Mike Nolan]

I hope it is an improvement over the version that ran a few years ago, the 'host' tried too hard to be funny rather than let the humor and drama of the show drive itself.

Here's the Variety article on this show.

The 2 hour premier episode is running opposite Project Runway, which is likely to split the audience somewhat. I know which one I'll be watching!

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Mike Nolan.

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