The chocolate chunks they recommended are hard to find. 
Is it the one that uses “1-1/4 pounds bittersweet chocolate disks or fèves, at least 60 percent cacao content?”
It’s got everything then!
But have they been “curated”?!? :rolleyes:
In the interest of fairness, I have found it easy to eat in NYC without having to ingest truffle and gold leaf. Stay away from the dang hipster joints. (And hell yeah where did all those Artisans come from?)
But if we are going to do this pimp-my-food thing, may I suggest (overnight-brined in wine and oil) free range chicken salad sandwich with nitrogen-foamed mayo on alternating layers of one-inch squares of whole-triticale toast and casabe.
That doesn’t sound all that nuts to me. Mixing flours in cookies isn’t terribly unusual (bread flour makes for chewier cookies). It seems the main PITA is doing it the night before, so not the best if you want cookies now. I’m not sure why you’d want to do an overnight rest, but chilling cookie dough is typical (at least for me), so the butter is solid when you put it in the oven, and makes for a more contained/less spread out cookie.
I personally find Cooks Illustrated to be needlessly fussy much of the time, as if they’re trying hard to find a twist on a classic recipe so they don’t just print the same damned thing everyone else has. I love reading them to pick up new techniques, but I find the recipes a little too involved, sometimes. Which is funny, as Serious Eats kind of has a similar approach to Cooks Illustrated in finding new techniques and improving time-tested recipes, but I don’t find them as annoyingly fussy.
Actually, it looks like the Serious Eats recipe for chocolate chip cookies also calls for an overnight rest (though no blend of flours, just straight-up AP.) Guess the reason for the overnight rest is to allow “enzymes to break down large carbohydrates, enhancing the caramelization and browning process the next day to help the cookies develop deeper flavor.” Plus the solid butter thing so they don’t spread too much. They do have a somewhat fussy technique of taking the chocolate chip dough balls, tearing them in half, and then smooshing them back together so the torn edges face outward to create a rougher/craggier cookie. Huh. I’ll have to try that next time.
ETA: Ah, the NYTimes recipe is actually referenced in that article under "Cookie Fact #12"about flours.
Not to buzzkill, but I think that chilling dough overnight in the fridge isn’t merely a gratuitous tarting-up flourish. Nor is using different kinds of flour or weighing the amounts (which AFAIK is how most Europeans routinely measure baking ingredients anyway).
Chilled dough makes a different kind of cookie than standard drop-cookie batter. One isn’t necessarily better than the other, but that doesn’t mean that one is just an egregiously tarted-up version of the other, any more than a baguette or ciabatta is just an egregiously tarted-up version of a standard whole-wheat loaf. It’s a different type of dish, not just a standard dish with superfluous fancy extra features.
Even here in the US, if you’re doing a lot of baking, especially bread-like doughs, it doesn’t seem that unusual to go by baking percentages for consistency and reproducibility. Many of the domestic food forums I follow, especially pizzamaking.com, gives the dough recipes specifying at least the weight of the flour (and possibly a volume measurement as well), if not full-on baker’s percentages.
Tomato soup: simmer it with Spanish Saffron and steamed, diced artichoke hearts, and capers, then top with grated Asiago cheese, and a drizzle of plain kefir.
Bake baguettes (PM me for recipe) and serve them buttered and warmed with the soup. They are very good with a minimally sweetened apricot spread I will also PM you the recipe for.
Borscht: have beets and cabbage boiling over a medium setting until tender; meanwhile, broil two filet mignon to medium rare, dice them, and put them in the borscht. Add garlic, just a pinch of fresh dill, and vintage claret. Keep over the heat until the meat browns.
Juice a cucumber, and add it to 1 cup sour cream, and to this add buttermilk 1:1, and a 1/4 tsp. salt for each cup you make. Put 2 tblsp in each approx 1 & 1/2c. serving.
Bake a loaf of marble rye (PM me for recipe) and serve a slice with each bowl of soup. Put butter, or the cucumber/sour cream on the bread.
Mixing types of flour isn’t intrinsically crazy, except that by mixing pastry flour with bread flour they have effectively reproduced all purpose flour. (Check the percent gluten. What they aimed for is spot on King Arthur AP flour, and close to other brands of AP flour.) All purpose flour is what every other recipe calls for.
The resting over night is supposed to make the cookies chewier, per the recipe. I happen to prefer crunchy cookies. But I observe that you can get nearly the same effect by slightly undercooking the cookies, and/or by slightly reducing the sugar and using larger eggs.
Yes, the chocolate feves give the resulting cookie a different feel, at the cost of requiring each cookie to be carefully hand-shaped.
A lot of tarted-up recipes have nice features.
This remains an extremely complex way to make a cookie that’s nearly as good as the tollhouse cookie you could complete in half an hour. Or, depending on your tastes, a slightly better cookie than a tollhouse cookie.
I’d rather have fancy cheese in my grilled cheese sandwich.
Alton Brown has a great fajitas recipe, which I use a few times a year to make killer fajitas.
Except for the part where you grill them by getting your charcoal to the ash stage, blowing the ash off the coals with a hairdryer, and grilling the meat directly on the coals.
Yeah, I don’t think so. I grill the meat on the rack above the coals, and it’s just fine. Maybe it’d be super duper fine if I broke out the freakin’ hairdryer, but just fine is just fine.
But you asked for mine. How about a chocolate pie?
Made with orange-butter tart crust?
With cinnamon and orange zest in the filling, in addition to the chocolate?
With cinnamon in the whipped cream topping?
Decorated with candied orange peel and bitter chocolate shavings, arranged in a vaguely Aztec sun motif?
I made that pie once, twenty years ago, and it’s among my crowning fussy baking achievements :).
Ah, yes. The fajitas recipe. My brother once made it when we were all over having dinner at my parents’ house, and al involved just thought, well, what was the point of that? I mean, both my brother and I are avid home cooks (with his tastes a bit more towards the fancy and experimental), and we get the theory/idea behind it (quick 40-50 second sear over high heat on each side), but none of us thought it was any better than just searing it on a grill the normal way. I suppose you expose more surface area, but it really didn’t make that much a difference in this application. Or at least none of us thought so. The reviews of his recipe are almost uniformly positive, but it was a shoulder shrug for us. (We did like his tuna over the chimney starter recipe, though.)
Banana bread-pastrami-cottage cheese sandwich. it severely ruined my reputation
(apologies to Mitch Hedberg)
IIRC it depends on how thin the cut is. dropping it right on the coals exposes it to such high (nearly direct) heat that the outside can sear before the inside cooks through and dries out or gets tough.
I think there’s a difference between putting something interesting on a burger and the full over-the-top ‘what even is this’ concoctions that places come up with. Adding an interesting flavor or two (especially if it’s 'interesting aoli instead of mayo or mustard) or swapping cheddar/swiss for something slightly less common still feels like a burger to me, but things definitely hit a point where they no longer feel like a burger and instead are just some burger-like concoction. I don’t really know exactly where the line is though. Also a number of the ‘high-end’ recipes don’t seem to do anything interesting, they just tack on ‘bling’ like caviar or gold foil.
Yeah, that was my first thought. I actually wish most of those spam thread titles would spawn real discussion on the topic, a lot of them look interesting!
Sure, like I said, we get the theory, but the results weren’t all that differs from more conventional methods. Besides, you can get a pretty even sear very even doneness inside using the frequent flipping technique.
That’s not even a grilled cheese. That’s a grilled ham and cheese. A grilled cheese only has three ingredients: Bread, butter or margarine, and cheese. Anything else and it ceases to be a grilled cheese sandwich.
I have a hard time trusting any eating establishmnt that doesn’t understand basic foods.
I never even tried it.
As an adolescent, I was big into Alaister Crowley (and you can shut up, you were probably into Debbie Gibson, we all have our shames). He wrote books of magick with a K, but he was famous for slipping deliberately wrong directions into his formulae, with the idea being that dabblers who tried his magick with a k wouldn’t be able to recognize the duds and would therefore miscast the spells; expert practitioners would know which directions to toss or modify so that the magick with a k would work.
I kinda figured that the blow dryer was one of those things, and didn’t use it. That marinade, though, was excellent.
Okay, I gotta push back. Sure, with ham it’s ham and cheese. But a grilled cheese can have herbs and spices added to the mix and stay a grilled cheese. I like garlic powder and cayenne, but oregano and thyme are also delicious.
Yes, that has become one of our standard marinades for skirt steak.
Try this Elvis Sandwich: