Quote:
Originally Posted by Manton 
Keller is hilarious. I got his new ad hoc book for Christmas. This is supposed to be the "simple" book, geared to traditional home recipes. Right. Keller is constitutionally incapable of doing simple. The burger recipe, for instance, has you buy three different cuts of beef and grind it yourself. He says that to brown a prime rib you need to go to Home Depot and get a welder's blow torch. I am doing the short ribs recipe now, and it is more complicated than the one from Balthazar (which already has ten million steps).
The Platonic ideal of a Keller recipe would, I think, begin by telling you the latitude and longitude of the farm you need to buy in order to grow the ingredients. It would proceed from there to tell you what type of grass to plant, and the breed of cow to raise.
The Platonic ideal of a Keller recipe would, I think, begin by telling you the latitude and longitude of the farm you need to buy in order to grow the ingredients. It would proceed from there to tell you what type of grass to plant, and the breed of cow to raise.
Does Keller explain the rationale behind the three cuts of meat for the burger?
Also, home cooks can be successful with these very complex recipes if they understand the science behind the steps/processes and also know what the end product of those steps are supposed to look/feel/taste/smell like. For example, buttermilk biscuits are easy enough on paper, but you need to know the dough's ideal consistency as well as how long you should let it sit there, before putting in the oven, for the baking soda to do its job. You take that simple process, like making biscuits, and multiply it by several times to result in a Keller dish.
And on that note, I think i'm gonna start some boeuf bourguinon to eat in a couple of days' time.
