I use an immersion blender mostly for shearing hydrocolloids into liquids, foaming liquids, and emulsifying things. I rarely use it for pureeing, since they just don't do a very good job of pureeing (compared to a decent blender).

Should I go with a cheap consumer version, like this Cuisinart or this Kitchen-Aid (which is recommended by Cooks Illustrated)? A cordless immersion blender would be awesome, but I couldn't ever rely on it being charged at the moment I wanted it, so that's out.

Should I go with a professional model? If so, what brand? Waring makes a light duty model which is priced well, but at 100-watts seems like it might be too low-power (my Viking consumer model was 300-watt, and most consumer models are 200-watt). The next model up is significantly larger, and at 350 watts would definitely be adequately powered.

What about pro models by Robot Coupe, Dynamic, and Electrolux? Anyone have any experience with any of these, and can you recommend specific (small) models?

Pan-roasted Tokyo turnips with romesco, grilled spring onions (an homage to calçots and romesco), fried chickpeas, raw zucchini, and various greens on top. No molecular gastronomy here. Just a delicious and fairly traditional combination of stuff. In the photos, the turnips are hidden by all the foliage on top. The effect is more dramatic in person, since it's easier to see through the greens to the stuff below, which reveals itself further as one digs in.

The Tokyo turnips were blanched and shocked, then browned in a hot pan with olive oil, then chilled, then roasted in the oven to warm and finish just before serving. The fried chickpeas are super easy and delicious, and are made by draining canned chickpeas, then deep frying them at 300F until they've mostly stopped bubbling. Drain them on paper towels, then fry them again just before serving at around 350F, drain, and season. In this case I tossed the fried chickpeas with a mixture of salt, chopped parsley, and lemon zest. The zucchini gets shaved lengthwise then rolled up. The greens and mustard flowers are tossed with sweetened lemon juice.

Almost all of the produce is from County Line Harvest.

This was the vegetarian version of one of my recent Mission Street Food dishes. It was a delicious combo with scallop or with daikon, so I reprised the dish (a.k.a. used the leftovers) for a private vegetarian dinner a few days later.

First I made dashi with 20 grams of kombu per liter of water, circulated at 65C for an hour (which yields maximum glutamate extraction according to Cooking Issues). Then I poached daikon radish in the dashi (traditionally, on the stove) until tender but still with some bite, which took maybe an hour. Then the daikon was chilled until ready to use, sliced, and served at room temperature.

The swoop of light green sauce is a puree of arugula and silken tofu. This component was awesome, and really brought the dish together. The arugula gets blanched and shocked (and I throw in a few spinach leaves, which gives it a more vivid green color without affecting flavor). The ratio of tofu to arugula was quite high, though unfortunately I didn't measure. The puree was salted to taste, and I added a couple drops of pure lemon oil for extra brightness of flavor. The tofu ends up giving the puree a very light and buoyant texture--almost foamy--and it stays that way for days and days. I will definitely start using silken tofus in purees more often.

Finally, the crunchy black sesame crisps provide an interesting and delicious textural contrast, with their slight sweetness playing against the lingering bitterness of the radish. These are awesome, and are reminiscent of Oreo cookies (without the cream filling). I plan on utilizing them for post-dessert treats in the future as well: black sesame oreos with white sesame cream centers. Here is the recipe (and sub-recipes).

Black Sesame Powder
380g black sesame seeds
500g dashi
400g water

Pressure cook seeds, dashi, and water on high for approximately 50 minutes. Drain the seeds, reserving the cooking liquid. Add the seeds to a blender and puree on the highest setting, adding as much of the reserved liquid as is necessary to get the seeds to spin properly. Once pureed and fairly smooth, dehydrate the puree by spreading it thinly on Silpat and and baking at 200F for several hours. You'll be able to fit about 1/3 of the puree per half-size Silpat. Finally, break up the resulting brittle (which won't be very crunchy), and grind it in a spice grinder, then reserve in an airtight container.

Neutral Caramel Powder
2 parts liquid fondant
1 part powdered glucose
1 part powdered isomalt

Cook all three sugars to 320F, then pour out onto a Silpat-lined sheet pan. Let cool to room temperature, then break into smaller pieces and grind in a spice grinder. Transfer immediately to an airtight container, add a desiccant pack or two, and seal until ready to use.

Black Sesame Crisps
70g neutral caramel powder
60g black sesame powder

Keeping neutral caramel powder sealed as much as possible, and working quickly, measure out two powders into a bowl and whisk them together, then sift the powders onto a Silpat evenly in a layer about 1/8 thick. Bake at 350F until melted together, about 5-7 minutes. Either wait for it to cool (about fifteen minutes) then break into shards, or else cut and/or shape the crisp while still hot, then let cool to set. Either way, store in an airtight container until ready to use.

This was a fantastically delicious dessert, with floral quince and the bitter burnt caramel providing the main flavors. I wanted to play with yeast and fermentation here, and several of the components on the plate have been partially fermented. The yeast doesn't hit you immediately when eating it, but it's there in the background. It's that extra unidentifiable something that keeps you coming back to the plate.

There's burnt caramel ice cream and gel, balls of poached quince, membrillo, a fluid gel made by fermenting the quince poaching liquid then setting with gellan and pureeing, vanilla-flavored yeast-whipped cream, puff pastry, and puff pastry crumbs. To partially ferment the quince-poaching liquid, I simply let it come to room temperature, put it into a large container with a tight-fitting lid, then added a bit of yeast to it and left it out for around six hours. Then I put it in the fridge overnight, and the next day I gelled it with .8% gellan gum and pureed it to form a fluid gel, passing it through a chinois to finish.

If I'd had more time, I would have made the puff pastry out of a yeast dough.

The burnt caramel ice cream had probably the best texture of any ice cream I've made yet, achieved by the wonder of mathematics. It was fanastic, staying soft and perfect for quenelles even at normal freezer temperatures of around 10-15F. It also had a deliciously nutty and bitter burnt caramel flavor. Here's the recipe.

Burnt Caramel Ice Cream
1000g whole milk
60g nonfat dry milk
200g sugar
60g glucose
40g trimoline
50g sugar
4g stabilizer
200g yolks
150g cream

Whisk dry milk powder into the milk and keep it handy. Add first measurement of sugar to large sauce pot. Cook the sugar over high heat until sugar begins to liquefy, then begin stirring occasionally in order to get sugar to caramelize evenly. Cook sugar to a dark caramel. As soon as the first few burnt spots appear, pour in the milk all at once, being careful to avoid the splattering. Bring the milk to a simmer while adding the glucose and trimoline. Meanwhile, combine the second measurement of sugar with the stabilizer and whisk into the yolks. Temper the milk into the yolks, then cook the whole thing to 84C (183F). Remove from the heat and whisk in heavy cream. Chill in an ice water bath then refrigerate. Allow to mature for 12 hours before freezing.

I recently made a quince dessert in which I wanted yeasty, fermented flavors to play a strong supporting role. I decided to simply take a few of the sweet liquid components I would have used anyway and add yeast to them, allowing them to begin to ferment. They turned out delicious, but the coolest and most delicious thing to come out of the experiment was the discovery that sweetened cream can be whipped (at least partially) just by the addition of yeast! That discovery opens the door to all sorts of other yeast foams.

Yeasts survive by metabolizing carbohydrates and, in many cases, releasing alcohol and carbon dioxide. When you introduce typical brewer's or baker's yeasts to an anaerobic or low-oxygen environment (such as a liquid), the yeasts begin to propagate, while feeding on the available sugars and reproducing, thereby "colonizing" the liquid. As the yeasts metabolize, they begin to release tiny bubbles which are molecules of carbon dioxide (as well as releasing molecules of ethanol). When these bubbles are trapped by, for example, capping a bottle that contains active yeasts and available sugars, you get a carbonated beverage (see, e.g., the champagne method of producing sparkling wines). But when a liquid contains a sufficient quantity of emulsifiers or solid particles for the liquid itself to trap the bubbles produced by the yeast, all those tiny bubbles actually start to foam the liquid.

This action can be observed somewhat when proofing yeast before making bread dough. One mixes a quantity of yeast in warm water. If the yeast is active, bubbles appear on the surface of the water. However, these bubbles are not very stable and disappear quickly, being replaced at a slow rate by more bubbles. If, however, one adds a sufficient quantity of emulsifer to the water--lecithin, for example--the yeast will produce a loose foam similar to what chefs these days call an "air."

This is an interesting discovery for me, though of course it has probably occurred to lots of people before. We are already in the habit of using stabilized bases in order to create various types of foams, from the more traditional sabayons and whipped cream, to the recently popular airs, espumas, and similar foams. This means we can use those same bases, but introduce air by the natural process of fermentation, instead of by manually whipping, blending, or charging with compressed gases.

In this case, I scraped a vanilla bean into some just-above-fridge-temperature heavy whipping cream, then stirred in enough sugar to make it nicely sweet. Finally, I added a small amount of active dry baker's yeast, covered the mixture, and left it out at room temperature for about an hour before returning it to the freezer. When I came back to the cream several hours later, it was partially whipped! This yeast was, apparently, a top-fermenting yeast, and indeed, the container of cream now had a thick layer on top of foamy cream with a unique whipped texture, with apparently unchanged cream below. The part that had been somewhat whipped was definitely less rigid even than what is referred to in cream whipping as "soft peaks," but instead it had much smaller and more uniform bubbles that gave it a delightful, "thick" texture. In fact, it was a lot like cappucino foam. It had the characteristic yeasty, complex flavors of fermented products, but the fullness of whipped cream. It was, in short, delicious.

I ended up taking the partially fermented cream and whipping it further with a whisk, all the way to stiff peaks. I then spooned it onto the quince dessert. It functioned much like normal whipped cream, but with a unique and tasty flavor. The proof of the deliciousness came after the dish had been served to the guests and I began the long process of cleaning up. Over the next hour or two, I ended up finishing off the leftover yeast-whipped vanilla cream straight from the mixing bowl, one finger-full at a time.

This course was quite simple, and was plated simply as well. It was just roasted tree oyster mushrooms, grits (set into cylinders--which is difficult to do, but the end result is simple), homemade ricotta, some amazing fuyu persimmon, a bit of arugula, maldon salt, and a drizzle of great olive oil. The extremely ripe persimmon and the soft, slightly tangy ricotta made this a good lead-in to dessert, while the heavily roasted mushrooms kept it firmly in the savory territory.

I pondered various sauces I could have used to tie the dish together, but in the end decided not to tie it together. I let everyone eat it as they wished, the elements remaining disparate. In that way, it was an unusual course for me, but I enjoyed the effect. Some people loved it, while some people didn't see how it fit together in the end. I doubt I'd serve this again in a fine-dining context, but it was an interesting experiment.

Ricotta
4 parts whole milk (raw if possible, otherwise avoid UHT-pasteurized milk)
1 part buttermilk

Combine the two milks and heat them on a stovetop to around 82C (180F). Turn off the heat and wait a couple minutes for the curds to fully form. Spoon or ladle the curds into a fine mesh strainer and let them drain until they've reached the desired consistency. For this application, I am guessing that I let them drain for around 10-15 minutes.

Cylindrical Grits

First, oil a sheet of acetate with a bit of olive oil. Then wipe off the acetate with a paper towel. The oil will leave a fine film. Then prepare cannoli molds by cutting pieces of the oiled acetate about half an inch longer than the cannoli molds, and about 1.5 times the inside circumference of the cannoli molds. Roll up each piece of acetate and put it inside a cannoli mold, pushing the acetate until it is flush with one end of the cannoli mold and sticking out slightly from the other end. The acetate will expand slightly to more or less fill the mold. Wrap the flush end of the cannoli mold with plastic wrap, secured with a rubber band. Then secure all of the cannoli molds in an upright position (I usually just stand them all up in a quart container packed tightly enough that they'll remain straight up and down).

1 part grits
1.5 parts whole milk, by volume
2 parts water, by volume
fresh thyme
salt to taste

Bring milk, water, thyme, and salt up to a simmer, then remove thyme sprigs. Whisk the grits into the simmering liquid over fairly low heat. Stir often. Once grits appear to have absorbed most of the free liquid but are still fairly loose and a bit hard, put on heat-proof kitchen gloves and, holding a disposable pastry bag with the gloves, pour out the liquid grits into the pastry bag. Insert a funnel into the first cannoli mold. Holding the pastry bag directly over the funnel (because the grits will come spurting out as soon as the tip of the bag is cut), cut the tip of the bag. Being as clean as possible, pipe (or drain) the grits into the cannoli molds, then leave at room temperature or in the refrigerator until fully set. Once fully set, pull the grits-filled acetate out of the molds and dump the cylinders out into an airtight container. Store for up to a week.

Roasted Tree Oyster Mushrooms

Without breaking up the clumps of the mushrooms, toss the hrooms with a large amount of olive oil and salt, then roast at 400F until the side touching the pan is nicely crispy and the other sides are fully cooked through but not quite crispy, about 30 minutes. Scrape the mushrooms off of the pan and reserve in any container for up to a week. Re-heat in a 400 degree oven for about ten minutes to get the mushrooms crispy again.

Early on Monday February 15th, fire severely damaged the kitchens at Mugaritz, the world-famous restaurant in Spain's Basque Country. Luckily, no-one was hurt. For the management and staff of Mugaritz, the destruction of their workplace was a tragedy. But for three other young people, this was also a calamity.

Stagières are unpaid apprentices, usually young, without whom no top restaurant can function. Driven by a common passion to learn from the world's best chefs, they travel from all corners of the globe to train at world-class restaurants. When the dust settled on Mugaritz after last Monday's inflagration, Mattias from Sweden, Diego from Guatemala and Greg from the US found themselves without their most valued possessions. Their precious knife sets, not covered by the restaurant's insurance, had been incinerated. Read Greg's story here.

Fellow food blogger Aidan Brooks of Aidan Brooks: Trainee Chef, his father Mike Green and I [John Sconzo, a.k.a. "DocSconz"] are setting up a special transatlantic fund to help them recover from their combined $2,500 losses and re-equip themselves for work. As Aidan says, "This is something I understand well - two and a half years ago I set off for Spain as a novice stagière myself. It's taken me years to put together my knife set, so I know exactly how devastated these lads must feel." Can you please help with a personal pledge? Donations will be so welcome, no matter how large or small. Email me at docsconz[at]gmail.com at with your pledge and we'll get back to you with details of exactly how you can contribute to the fund. Would food bloggers please copy part or all of this post and publish similar appeals. Together we can make so much difference to a group of people who really deserve our support.

The entries were somewhat varied, and mostly of high quality. I did not ask for camera type as was previously the norm because I think that as the photography skills of bloggers and food photographers has increased over the last few years, the type of camera used has become mostly irrelevant; great photos are often taken with mediocre cameras, and most photos are terrible no matter what camera is used.

The entries were judged in three categories: edibility, originality, and aesthetics.

In addition to myself, the other judges were Betty from Trouble With Toast, Michael from Chicken Fried Gourmet, Sudeshna from Cook Like A Bong (whose entry this month was received too late to be eligible), and Sygyzy. Each judge used his own aesthetic judgment, and likely had his own pet peeves. I certainly did.

For my part, photos shouldn't just be pretty to look at, they should usually tell a story in some way, or represent a moment in time. When the story you tell doesn't make sense, or has inconsistencies, then your photo suffers for it. Therefore, you should make sure that your photo stands up to scrutiny. To that end, here are some of my pet peeves:

• Stacking macarons in real life is stupid because they will always fall; doing so in photos is just as stupid. Plus, stacked macarons are so common in food photos as to be an eye-rolling cliche.
• For that matter, macarons are increasingly being thrown into food photos of something else to add visual interest, and it's starting to make any photo with macarons a cliche, no matter how presented. No one in real life spends hours making macarons just as a background garnish for their simple cake that took ten minutes of prep to make. The exception is, of course, if you are simply taking a photo of macarons.
• Mixing anything inedible or not intended to be eaten with the food has been taboo for a long time now. For instance, it's one thing to put a bunch of basil on a dish. It's another to put a bunch of sage or oregano, or a sprig of rosemary, all of which would completely overpower the dish and be disgusting if eaten as is. It's even worse when it's not even food, like a wine cork or something like that.
• Food is typically prepared in the kitchen and served at the table. Sometimes food is prepared on the table, but rarely would you have some nice, festive tablecloth on the table when doing so. Therefore, if you want to include prep in your shot (like prep bowls with spare ingredients, whisks, deliberately spilled ingredients, etc.) don't make it on a beautifully set table. It's contrived and incongruous. If you're more excited about your table than about having your photo make sense, it's easy to avoid this problem: just don't move the prep to the table for the photo. It'll actually save you time.
• Increasingly, a shot the subject of which is a single dish of food is styled with so many other things (plates, utensils, napkins, a serving dish, table, tablecloth, other completely irrelevant food, stray ribbons, etc.) that the photographer ends up zooming way out to capture all their precious bullshit, and we can barely see the food. Lay off the other crap. I don't need to see your collections of tablecloths, napkins, or impractical serving vessels (though a collection of tablecloths or napkins might make great subjects for their own photos) if seeing those means I can't see the food you're shooting.
• Don't use the on-camera flash. With very rare exceptions it's the quickest way to make an ugly photo.
• Sometimes, the photo just works despite violating any of these rules.

With all that out of the way, here are the winners.

Overall WINNER

"Chocolate Buttercream Sponge Cake decorated with Blackberry & Raspberry Macarons" by Mowie Kay @ Mowielicious, London, UK

Great shot, and well styled with the only "extra" in the shot a sprig of currants. I don't know why the currants are there, but at least there aren't macaro--oh wait, there are macarons. But it works because the macarons are part of the subject! They are integrated into the cake, instead of just scattered about the frame because macarons look cool. I gave this high marks, and its blown out lighting really highlights the dark cake and the bright fruit (and macarons). I still would have preferred it sans macarons.

Overall 2nd Place

"fudge" by sara bardelli @ qualcosadirosso, from Italy

It's simple fudge, but on a squiggly plate. I liked this shot, but don't have much to say about it.

Overall 3rd Place

"Raspberry Jelly Swiss Roll Cake" by Dita Wistarini @ My Culina Sanctuarium, from Kuwait

This was my favorite photo this month. There's no extra nonsense in the shot, and while it obviously has been styled (with that strainer placed just so), that fact would never occur to anyone looking at it. It looks natural, like a real scene from prep. Its narrative is believable. On top of all of that, it looks very delicious.

Winner for EDIBILITY (overall winners excluded)

"Chocolate-Pomegranate Torte" by Fitri @ Rumah Manis from St. Louis, USA

This photo didn't really stand out to me, but I guess it did to the other judges. To me it's not nearly tight enough to the subject, and I can't help but roll my eyes at the ornaments strewn about, flowers next to the cake, very deliberate pattern of pomegranate seeds, etc. I also have trouble with it because I wouldn't want the texture of pomegranate seeds getting in the way of my smooth chocolate torte. Still, as long as I could scrape the seeds off first, I do kind of want to bury my face in the torte. It would have been nice if we could have seen the inside of the torte, like with a slice cut out.

Winner for ORIGINALITY (overall winners excluded)

"Pasta In Black" by Núria @ Spanish Recipes, from Barcelona, Spain

This is mostly compelling because of the angle of the fork and the oddness of the fact that all the ingredients stay on the fork. We all strive for that perfect bite when eating--the one where we get the perfect balance and a little of everything--and this shot accomplishes the same thing photographically. On the other hand, the placement of ingredients is so deliberate as to be inauthentic, which made this suffer a bit. In addition, the shot was perhaps too uniformly lit, which made it lose any inviting warmth, and too dry looking, which is why it lost on edibility.

Winner for AESTHETICS (overall winners excluded)

Ontbijtkoek/Breakfast Cake by Vania Samperuru @ Our Family Favorite Recipes from Jakarta, Indonesia

This was my second favorite photo this month. I loved this shot because of its simplicity: nothing on the table is superfluous. Unlike with most styled shots, the implements behind the cake (coffee mugs and carafe) are integral to the eating of the subject of the photo. I also love the blurred lights in the background, which make the shot more interesting. If it has one flaw, it's that the table is similar to the cake in color, which makes the cake look a little drab.

HOST'S Award

"Champagne macarons" by Julia @ Mélanger, from Brisbane, Australia

DMBLGiT hosts have the prerogative to award a special Host's award to any entries that did not receive other awards. I have decided to award a Host's award to this entry, "Champagne Macarons," because every judge but me loved it, and I think it should be acknowledged. It breaks nearly every rule I list above, but it is undeniably a compelling shot, and technically flawless. The trouble is that all I think about when I see it is the annoyance of removing a cork from the glass before eating, the difficulty of getting the macarons out of the flute to eat (hands won't fit into the flute--spoon them out one by one? dump them all out on the table, crumbs and all?). Still, I was apparently the only judge troubled by these things, and if my scores had been in line with those from other judges, this would certainly have won an award.

Thanks to everyone who entered! If anyone would like specific comments on their photo, please email me.

Next month's edition is at Snacksgiving.

• dashi-poached scallops, 50 degrees celsius, with grapefruit, silken tofu, arugula, and black sesame crisps, $11

• crispy-skinned chicken confit, with fried fingerling potatoes, kumquat-balsamic gastrique, chicken liver mousse, slow-cooked kumquats, sichuan peppercorn, and frisee, $12

• 36-hour beef short rib, medium-rare, with carrots two ways, pearl onion confit, black bread croutons, house-processed parmeggiano, and onion jus, $14

• house-made burnt caramel ice cream, with fresh blood orange, almond cake, powdered orange oil, chervil, and blood orange pate de fruit, $7

If those sound delicious, mark your calendars. If they don't sound delicious, please let me know so that I can rewrite the descriptions until they sound delicious. The full menu will be posted a couple days before at the Mission Street Food blog, at which time reservations will be available by emailing msfreservations@gmail.com with your name, time, and party size. We open for dinner at 6pm, and Mission Street Food is run out of Lung Shan Chinese Restaurant, at 2234 Mission St. in San Francisco. See you there!

The idea from this course came from my favorite way to eat baked potatoes as a kid. We had baked potatoes whenever my Dad grilled steaks, and when he grilled steaks, he always glazed them with barbecue sauce as they cooked. When they were finished, he'd put all the steaks on a big plate to hold until we sat down to eat them. In the couple minutes it took us to wash up and gather at the table, the steaks would (it turns out) rest, which helped them stay juicy, but as they rested some of their juices would collect in the pan and commingle with the grilled barbecue sauce glaze. After we all took our steaks, my father would split open his baked potato, add butter, and then pour all those accumulated beef and barbecue juices all over the baked potato. It was delicious, and I started doing it, too.

This dish started out as a way to play on that taste memory. Instead of baked potatoes I used sunchokes and, since this was for a vegetarian dinner I couldn't use any beef juices. I tweaked this in a number of ways, but the end result indeed a good tribute to the baked potatoes of my youth.

The sunchokes were peeled, with all their knobby parts removed in the process, and held in cold water until used (to reduce oxidation). All the sunchokes were then vacuum-sealed in bags with salted whey (the byproduct of making the ricotta for the next dish at the dinner). They were cooked sous vide at 85C for 50 minutes, then chilled, drained and dried on paper towels just before serving, then sauteed and basted in lots of butter.

I also made sunchoke chips by slicing the sunchokes thinly on a mandoline then deep-frying at about 325F until fully golden and dried. Don't worry about peeling them before slicing if you're just making chips. Drain them on paper towels, then put them in an airtight container with desiccant packs. They'll keep for a week or so.

Along with the sunchokes I served a buttermilk gel (recipe below--a bit of a feat to use gellan for something with so much calcium), a barbecue gel (barbecue sauce and water in an equal proportion, so that the BBQ flavor wouldn't be completely overpowering but it would maintain the look of barbecue sauce, gelled with .7% gellan F then pureed and pushed through a chinois), a barbecue streusel, and buttermilk powder (olive oil, tapioca maltodextrin, salt, and powdered buttermilk).

The celery is not just a garnish. It really ties the whole plate together with the fresh, crisp texture and strong flavor.

Buttermilk Gel
190g water
310g buttermilk
1g sodium citrate
.5g sodium hexametaphosphate
3.5g gellan "F"

Calcium interferes pretty badly with gellan gum, so this recipe sequesters the calcium using two sequestrants: sodium citrate and sodium hexametaphosphate. Shear the sequestrants into the buttermilk. Shear the gellan into the water. Then shear the water and buttermilk together. Heat the mixture to at least 200F in a saucepan, stirring constantly once bubbles appear around the outside of the pan. Immediately pour the hot mixture into a shallow dish and refrigerate until fully gelled, which won't take more than twenty minutes or so, and will start happening immediately. Once fully gelled, cut the gel into inch cubes and puree them in a blender, doing whatever is necessary to get them to spin (this works best if you are making a larger quantity, such as twice the quantity listed here), such as picking up the blender and shaking it vigorously while it's on. Once it's fully pureed, push the resulting fluid gel through a chinois or tamis and refrigerate for up to two weeks.

A bunch of people have asked me about the slate plate I used for my MasterChef audition dish, as seen in this post, wondering where they could get them, etc. Well, you can't get them anywhere, because I made them. Yeah, I made the dish.

That's not to say there aren't options around for slate dishes. Crate and Barrel, for instance, sells some for as much as $25. For a long time I was really liking the idea of presenting on slate plates, but didn't want to spend what they cost from Crate and Barrel. I also felt that the Crate and Barrel ones were a bit too squared, rather than natural-looking.

Increasingly I find that the places to go for innovative service pieces, and to buy unusual equipment are not kitchenware stores, not Crate and Barrel or Bed Bath and Beyond, not even restaurant supply stores. And they definitely are not a Front Of The House catalog. The places to go for interesting equipment and service pieces are Home Depot, hardware stores, lumber yards, Michael's art supply stores, TAP Plastics, science supply stores, library supply stores, etc. Those are the places where you're going to be inspired.

So, as is my wont, I went to the Home Depot and found a relatively large selection of slate tiles. I bought the tiles (about $1.60 each) and some tile sealer/enhancer (to make the porous slate waterproof and food-safe), and went home and got to work. I tried using a manual tile cutter, but it was extremely difficult and I didn't want such square edges anyway. Rather than renting an electric tile saw, I decided to just go at the tiles with a hammer. I figured out a way to get somewhat straight lines when cracking tiles by clamping boards along the break point. Then I whack all the edges carefully with the hammer in order to rough them up and get unexpected and natural looking lines. Finally, I seal the tiles with several coats of sealer/enhancer. Give them a nice wash and they're ready to go! I yield about one dish per tile, because the desired dish size is about half the size of the tiles (so, 12" x 6"), but I get a lot of breakage. That makes the total cost of these dishes around $2 each.

Now that I have the process down, and bought the necessary sealer and enhancer (which comes in a large enough quantity to make hundreds of these), I could make tons of them pretty easily. Anyone want to buy some?

I rarely repeat dishes, but this was a reprise of a dish from a previous dinner. The first time was with "deep-fried chicken stock", but this time I used brown butter solids. Brown butter solids definitely have a different flavor profile from the chicken stock solids, which are almost coffee-like in the level of brown-ness. In fact, if I make this again and it has to be vegetarian again, maybe I'll add some coffee component.

Otherwise, the dish is just roasted cauliflower, a puree of roasted cauliflower with vadouvan spices (pressure-cooked together briefly in order to soften them adequately to make the smoothest puree), and a bit of cilantro. My vadouvan is loosely based on this formula, but I add a bit more sweetness and cut out the heat. Tasty and simple.

This is probably the simplest dish I've done for Lazy Bear.

Simplified Vadouvan

This version of Vadouvan doesn't have any chilis in it, hence it is not "spicy" in the normal terminology. If you want it spicy, throw in a bit of dried chili). It also isn't fermented, as many high-quality vadouvans are.

900g minced onions
450g minced shallots
80g minced garlic
55g vegetable oil
15g salt
5g fenugreek seeds
5g cumin seeds
2g cardamom pods
4g brown mustard seeds
2.5g turmeric
1g nutmeg
.7g cloves

Slowly saute the onion and shallots in a pot with the oil until golden and a bit browned, adding the garlic for the last ten minutes or so. It should take about half an hour total.

Toast spices, then grind them finely and add to allium mixture, along with the salt. Transfer the whole mixture to a parchment lined sheet pan and spread thinly and evenly. Bake in a medium oven (350F or so), stirring occasionally to seperate the ingredients (or else they'll clump too much and dry that way), until well browned and barely moist. It'll take around an hour.

So, this is all pretty funny and slightly embarrassing.

Today I went to a casting call for a new Gordon Ramsay show, MasterChef. They're supposedly looking for the best amateur chefs around, and I still qualify. After a ton of people sent me links to the casting calls. All the applicants had to fill out a very long application in advance, and had to bring a dish to be plated at the audition, at room temperature. I hated the idea of serving something cold that is supposed to be hot, even if they will take that into account for the judging. I decided to do a chilled scallop dish.

I ended up getting the maximum possible score in the judging, and was supposedly the only person to get that score in San Francisco. I'm through to interviews on Tuesday, and I have to bring a bunch of pictures of me in the kitchen and with finished dishes. So, when I got home and had lots of mise en place left, I decided to plate the dish again to get some photos. We also took some photos of me plating. Ha!

This is a scallop poached sous vide in olive oil for half an hour at 50C, then chilled. Served below room temperature. While in line and waiting to be seen, I held them in a container on ice.

I served it with, basically, a beet and citrus salad. There are little cubes of roasted beet, little cubes of raw daikon, a bit of thyme, and little cubes of Meyer lemon gel set with gellan. I don't know the percentage because--get this--my scale broke a couple days ago when I dropped it, so I had to just eye it with the gellan! I couldn't measure. Based on the firmness with which it set up, I'm guessing it was about .6-.7% gellan. Perfect. I was actually really lucky with that, and proud that I'm experienced enough with gellan to just guess like that.

I sauced it with a kumquat puree. To make that, I slice kumquats in half and fish out all the seeds, then throw the entire kumquat halves into the blender. I add a bit of lemon juice, orange juice, and water (just enough liquid with a fairly neutral citrusy flavor to get everything to spin fully in a blender). Let it blend for at least a few minutes, then adjust the salt, sugar, and acid. Finally, push it through a chinois with a ladle.

Last, I garnished with some nasturtium leaves, good olive oil, and Maldon.

We don't always think about the role that drama plays in our enjoyment of food, but it's an important thing to consider. Whether it's presenting a whole roasted turkey at Thanksgiving that is carved at the table, the armor of bruleed sugar that encloses the delicate creme underneath, the smells wafting through a dining room as a particular course gets brought to another table, the traditional cloche covering up the dish as it is set before us and then revealed, we like our food to play coy with us. When that whole turkey comes out at Thanksgiving, or that whole chicken on Tuesday night, it's playing hard to get. We don't get to dig in immediately. We have to stare at it as our anticipation builds. Basically, we like food that keeps its secrets until the last possible moment, food that leaves something to the imagination, food that doesn't put out on the first date.

Sometimes we work hard to construct the drama, and sometimes--rarely--nature does it for us. This soup course comes with a bit of drama in several forms, some of which we created, and some of it was nature. The first kind of drama is built with the menu, which is definitely an avenue of drama that most chefs overlook. They use menus only to entice diners to order, rather than using menus to manipulate diners' expectations in a way that will keep them engaged once the course arrives.

In this case, the title of the dish is "Two Cabbages," but when the course arrives, there is nothing that the guest recognizes as cabbage. Not all the guests will even recognize the green hash as brussels sprouts, and of those, few will realize that brussels sprouts are a cabbage. Second, the dense white foam on the plate, studded with nigella seeds, does not look like anything recognizable, and also does not seem to represent anything that was on the menu.

Third, a short time after the bowl is set down (giving them a few seconds to be puzzled), they get a graduated cylinder of a blue-ish purple liquid. At that point, the course is described somewhat: "In the bowl is a brussels sprout hash with marcona almonds, and whipped Meyer lemon juice studded with nigella seeds. In the graduated cylinder is a red cabbage soup. Pour the soup into the bowl around the foam, then pay attention as you stir the foam into the soup." Any time the diner gets to do something to "finish" the construction of the dish, it gets them very engaged. People love that.

Fourth, what a dramatic description. "Pay attention?" "What will happen?" We don't answer the questions. Then people stir in the foam, and as they do the soup almost instantly turns from blue-ish purple to hot pink. It goes from liquid to silky and airy. Drama.

Oh, and also, it tastes good.

The color change happens because the pigment in red cabbage is a pH indicator, meaning that its color changes as the pH changes. The soup starts out blue-ish purple based on the pH of the water with which it is pureed. When the Meyer lemon foam gets stirred in, the pH lower dramatically from the lemon juice, and the color turns hot pink. The funny thing is that I initially conceived this course without realizing that the color change would happen. It was serendipitous.

When I first conceived the dish, I began testing red cabbage soups. I was very concerned with ensuring that the beautiful pink of red cabbage would be preserved in the pureed soup. I wasn't sure whether I'd need to cook the cabbage briefly, or blanch and shock, or blanch with acidified water, etc. The first method I tested was to simply boil the red cabbage and then puree. It turned a fairly ugly shade of blue-ish purple. But I noticed that when I poured it into the sink and ran the water it seemed to turn even more blue. That set my experimentation and research into motion. I figured out that if I wanted the bright pink color, I needed to acidify the soup. But then I realized that I could make that color change happen in front of the diner. Awesome. Everyone loved this dish, both nights.

Brussels Sprouts Hash

To shred brussels sprouts, cut sprouts in half from pole to pole, then lay the two halves next to each other so that you can cut both at once, and cut into 1/8" thick slices, stopping before you include the stem. Repeat until you have enough shredded brussels sprouts. Get a saute pan very hot, then add a film of olive oil. Once smoking, add the sprouts all at once and then season with salt. Toss occasionally. Cook for 3-4 minutes on high heat, adding almonds during the last minute.

Whipped Meyer lemon

100g Meyer lemon juice
50g water
3g Versawhip
1.5g xanthan gum
salt and sugar to taste

Combine all ingredients with immersion blender, then transfer to stand mixer and whip on medium-high until maximum foaminess is achieved. You can't over-whip Versawhip whips, so don't be too concerned.

Red Cabbage Soup

Make a vegetable stock with plenty of onion and spices, but no acidic ingredients like tomato. Chop cabbage into manage pieces, and simmer the pieces for ten minutes or so in salted water. Drain the cabbage and transfer to blender. Blend, adding plenty of veggie stock to get the puree to blend smoothly in a proper vortex. Salt the soup, and adjust the consistency by adding extra vegetable stock if necessary. Strain through a chinois. The soup will keep, refrigerated, for a week or so, and its color won't suffer from reheating.