{"id":41,"date":"2008-01-07T21:51:57","date_gmt":"2008-01-08T02:51:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/2008\/01\/07\/fondue-thoughts\/"},"modified":"2008-01-07T21:53:51","modified_gmt":"2008-01-08T02:53:51","slug":"fondue-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/2008\/01\/07\/fondue-thoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"Fondue thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few years ago, for Christmas, we got a fondue set from my brother and sister-in-law. With everyone here for Christmas this year, we decided to echo a tradition of the sister-in-law&#8217;s family and have fondue on Christmas day; as per our family&#8217;s tradition, we do the turkey Christmas eve so that we aren&#8217;t spending all of Christmas day roasting a turkey.<\/p>\n<p>We did discover that a sterno-powered fondue pot, although fine with cheese and chocolate fondue, in which you coat a piece of bread or fruit or cake with a thick yummy liquid, isn&#8217;t up to the broth (or oil) fondue in which you actually cook a bit of meat or vegetable in a simmering liquid. We were thinking, though, that it would have been nice to have had an electric fondue pot as well, but unless you&#8217;re really into fondue, do you really want to have two (or more) fondue pots around all the time?<\/p>\n<p>Wouldn&#8217;t it be nice, that is, if there was some sort of small appliance &#8220;library,&#8221; or community registry of small appliances that people could borrow for a day? Crock pots, chafing dishes, large coffeemakers: all things that are very useful on occasion, but I don&#8217;t know that I want to devote shelf space to all of them. <\/p>\n<p>Grating the Gruyere and Emmentaler, I realized that the density of grated cheese can vary tremendously, and was sort of annoyed that the recipe in my Fondue cookbook gave only volumetric measures for cheese, not weight. I looked up two other cheese fondue recipes, and found, for the basic ratio of cheese to white wine:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Fondue cookbook: 4 cups cheese to 2\/3 cup wine<\/li>\n<li>Joy of Cooking: 1 pound cheese to 2 cups wine<\/li>\n<li>Fannie Farmer: 1 pound cheese to 1 cup wine<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Fannie Farmer further states that 1 pound of cheese is &#8220;about 2 1\/2 cups.&#8221; In the back of the Joy of Cooking, you can find that 1 pound cheese is 4 cups grated, and this ratio, 4 ounces grated cheese per cup, is also given in several Cooks Illustrated recipes, although they don&#8217;t have a cheese fondue. Thus it looks like all the fondue recipes are talking about the same amount of cheese, but with a factor of 3 in the cheese:wine ratio.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In a sense, it is this wild variation in recipes from trusted, standard sources that leads Cooks Illustrated to try 50 variations of a recipe before publishing the one they find to be the best. But there&#8217;s another lesson here, which I eventually took in: if you melt some swiss cheese with some wine, and throw in a bit of kirsch and a little nutmeg, salt, and paprika, you&#8217;ll get something very tasty, and if you&#8217;re still worrying about the ratio of cheese to wine, then you haven&#8217;t had enough wine yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few years ago, for Christmas, we got a fondue set from my brother and sister-in-law. With everyone here for Christmas this year, we decided to echo a tradition of the sister-in-law&#8217;s family and have fondue on Christmas day; as per our family&#8217;s tradition, we do the turkey Christmas eve so that we aren&#8217;t spending [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,12,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consumer-society","category-doing-the-math","category-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}