Recent content by Michael Cook

Yes it is available for lefties The Damascus on shun knives is a tougher more stain resistant steel on the outside with the more edge retaining vg-10 steel making up the core that's actually sharpened.

Seki city is one of the blade steel meccas. Vg-10 comes from Seki city and is one of the best knife steels out there for those of us who can't afford zdp189 steel. Here's a commercial Alton brown made for Shun knives http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-2611989298700188336&hl=en

Are you using bacon lardon or salt-pork lardon? Lardon is just the matchstich shaped cut, no?

That's some pricey fat.

I love Good eats, Alton gives you the why behind cooking and understanding why things work is so much more important than collecting large numbers of recipies. My wife likes Paula Deen and Rachael Ray but they drive me crazy with their terrrible hand washing techniques. I have a hard time...

I leave my heavy cast iron grill pan in the bottom rack of the oven as a heat sink to even out my oven temp.

Judging from the names of saucier and Windsor they are french and english answers to the same issue of reduction sauce making.

informed choices are better choices Of course you don't, but if you currently have a blade with the combination of steel charactaristics you enjoy such as edge retention, corosion resistance, toughness, ease of resharpening, even edge geometry is determined to a major extent by the steel...

This is the one!

I ordered a 4 1/2 quart soup pot today off Amazon. It was between this or the mario batali for 30 bucks less and I figured for 30 bucks I'll go for the more established name and warrantee. Nobody ever seems disappointed with Le creuset so I'm pretty excited.

Are you sauteing or pan frying?

wash your hands properly! ok, I just grabbed my serve save book (fourth edition) page 8-15, I was being more conservative than I thought, they list it as 135 to 70F within two hours and then from 70 to 41 F in the next four hours, a two stage process of two hours plus four hours. Just goes to...

One hour to get from 140 to 70. Two additional hours to get from 70 to 41 for three hours total.

food is science! Well, I dunno about urban myth, it's still taught in servesafe training. Still, if you've got data that debunks this I'd like to see it. With verifiable and repeatable data ANSI would probably update their next textbook! That's engaged cooking! Have you put hot stock or other...

I think they might be called blast chillers not chill blasters, you can see them on "iron chef"; restaurant style fridges with super cold/super fast cooling. I'm sure there's restaurant supply websites you can google that'll describe it better