[Mike Nolan]

I think this may be the same course they ran about 2 years ago, or at least very similar. I tried to get started in that, but it had a weekly time requirement that I estimated at 10 hours or more a week, and I just didn't have that much time available back then. Now that I'm retired, maybe I'll have more time. 🙂

[Mike Nolan]

I haven't looked at the crock pot chocolate recipe, but based on what I learned at Chocolate Boot Camp I'd be very wary of the temperatures, monitoring them closely, infrared thermometers work well for this

Chocolate will scorch if it gets much over 50 degrees (C), lower for milk and white chocolate The temperatures to create and maintain well-tempered chocolate are rather precise (between 28 and 34 degrees C for dark chocolate, a little lower for milk chocolate and even lower for white chocolate), and most crock pots don't have heat controls that are that accurate.

A few days after I got home from Chocolate Boot Camp I ordered a Martellato Mini Meltinchoc pot for my chocolate work. This was about the lowest priced tool I could find that I felt was sufficiently accurate for chocolate work.

[Mike Nolan]

When we built our house in 1996-97, we built one of the first smart homes in Nebraska, doing what was then state-of-the-art in home automation, so there are around 70 devices, mostly lights and outlets, that can be turned on from programmable button panels around the house. Light sensors and timers control what 'phase of the day' various areas of the house are in, morning, day, evening or night.

One touch of a button in the bedroom, for example, and all the outdoor lights come on. Really good for bump-in-the-night noises.

We also put in quite a few motion sensors, so that in most rooms lights come on automatically as needed and go off after a few minutes. It's also tied to our security system, so when you open doors lights come on, etc. The house also 'talks', so it announces when doors open. Very hard to sneak in or out of this house.

By current standards, it's probably a bit primitive, though, and it's not web-enabled.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 3 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

I've seen some printers for making cocoa butter transfer sheets, similar to doing dry transfer lettering for t-shirts, I guess. The best of them aren't available in the USA because the printer cartridges won't work on the printers that are available here, but I'm told they're not TOO expensive in Europe, if you're into doing transfer sheets for your chocolates.

There are also ones for doing cake decorating with pictures, sort of a fancied up airbrush, I assume.

[Mike Nolan]

I could probably find counter space for one, since we actually have 2 microwaves in the kitchen, but this seems like an appliance whose time hasn't quite arrived yet.

But in a few years, this technology will almost certainly be more affordable, more mature and more refined. Look what happened with microwave oven prices over the years. We spent something something in excess of $300 for our first microwave oven 25 years ago, and these days they're under $100.

And immersion circulation heaters for sous vide cooking were until recently only available for $1000 or more, now there are several models that are under $200, sometimes under $100.

The 3D food printer is the technology that will eventually redefine cooking, the food replicators of the Star Trek world are coming!

[Mike Nolan]

Well, it doesn't appear that our current Cuisinart is on the recall list, so at least I don't have to spend time trying to get that taken care of. I don't use it a lot, but there are some tasks for which a food processor is the best tool to use.

[Mike Nolan]

I was at Target the other day, and they had 5 speed hand mixers on sale for around $31. I don't remember if they were KA or Cuisinart.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm not the pancake expert, but I've thought that thicker batter generally doesn't bubble, but if you're happy with the pancakes, don't worry about whether or not they bubble.

[Mike Nolan]

I ordered custom cut stainless steel candymaker's bars from a steel company in Wisconsin several years ago, there are many types and grades of steel and not all of them are kitchen-safe.

[Mike Nolan]

I've got the $100 thermopen, it's great. I will probably buy another meat thermometer (the kind that plugs in) at some point, I had two Polder meat thermometers/timers and the probe went bad on one of them. The other one still works fine, I used it for the turkey on Thanksgiving and for an eye of round roast yesterday.

[Mike Nolan]

I buy mostly Basmati white rice, though I do have some Arborio for things like risotto. My wife, who didn't eat much rice before she went on a low-carb diet, doesn't like the smell of jasmine rice, when I bought a bag of it several years ago I wound up giving most of it away.

I also have some wild rice, which I don't think is technically a form of rice.

[Mike Nolan]

I'd treat your jasmine as a medium-grain rice. However, the amount of water rice absorbs is not just a function of grain size.

I just rinse the rice off once or twice in the rice cooker's pan. A family friend says her mother ate rice every day for most of her life and she never rinsed rice off.

[Mike Nolan]

I started a technical thread on image size issues.

[Mike Nolan]

You may be overworking your pie dough, I think that was my biggest problem.

Something they had us do in pastry school a couple of times was cut the butter into the flour using a sharp kitchen knife on a marble surface. I wouldn't recommend doing this a lot, because it is very time-consuming, and it's not good for your knives, either, but it taught me what to look for with other methods of cutting in the fat.

We made both 'mealy' and 'flaky' pie crust dough this way, the main difference being how small the pieces of butter get.

The Kenji Lopez-Alt method works well and may be as close to foolproof as any pie dough method can be.

Something I've come up with on my own is I went out and got a 6" diameter round cookie cutter. I line it with plastic wrap and use it to pre-shape the pie dough into a disc before letting it rest. The main advantage this has is that you're close to half-done rolling out the dough already, and that's where I was really over-working my dough. (Recently I've been using a 5" diameter cookie cutter for the top crust and a 60/40 ratio between the weight of the bottom crust and the weight of the top crust.)

[Mike Nolan]

I don't know what the upper limit is on images, I'll have to see if I can find out what it is and whether it can be changed.

I've never made, and as far as I can recall I've never had, a chess pie. What recipe do you use?

I mangled pie crusts for years, but my week of pastry school is still paying dividends. I've used 3 or 4 different recipes since then, they've all been pretty successful.

Kenji Lopez-Alt's article on the Science of Pie Dough is worth reading, I've used his method more than once, I just tend to prefer the recipe/method I learned at SFBI--with one trick from Kenji's method, I hold back about 1/3 cup of pastry flour to add in after the butter is cut in.

I think the SFBI recipe is just a little flakier and more buttery.

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