A top Federal Reserve official reiterated Friday that improving economic growth will not deter the central bank from following through to its end a $600 billion bond buying program, as he faced an audience skeptical the Fed has a handle on the economy’s true inflation dynamics.

“We provided additional monetary policy stimulus via the asset purchase program to help ensure that the recovery regained momentum,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York President William Dudley said. “A stronger recovery with more rapid progress toward our dual mandate objectives is what we have been seeking. This is welcome and not a reason to reverse course” on policy, he said.

Dudley’s expression of continued support for the program, popularly known as QE2, came in a speech that largely reprised an address the central banker gave at the end of February. His comments came from his remarks and responses to audience questions at an event held by the Queens Chamber of Commerce, in Queens, N.Y.

Dudley has a permanent voting role on the monetary policy setting Federal Open Market Committee. That body meets next week, when there’s a decent chance that the officials will upgrade ever so slightly their outlook for the economy. But most economists agree there’s little chance the central bank will change course on the bond buying program slated to end in the summer.

Still, there’s growing worry that rising commodity and energy prices will generate more inflationary pressure than policymakers want to see. Some on the Fed have fretted about this and are concerned about its stimulus while the economy is growing. But Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Dudley and others reckon the risk of a price surge is low while unemployment is so high, capping the ability of workers to push for higher wages.

The central banker repeated in his speech his view that inflation is unlikely to become problematic any time soon, and he downplayed the recent jump in commodity prices. Core inflation, which strips out food and energy, is “stabilizing” and large levels of economic slack will likely “dampen” price pressures “in the near term.”

“While rising commodity prices may be giving some of you a bad headache, they are not likely to lead to a sustained rise in inflation to levels inconsistent with our dual mandate,” Dudley said. He reckons there’s a good chance the gains could be temporary and observed these sort of prices play a diminished role in the overall U.S. economic landscape, and said it would be “unwise for the Federal Reserve to over-react to recent commodity price pressures by raising interest rates soon.”

Dudley’s confidence that price pressures won’t prove problematic did not go down well with the audience. He was challenged by one audience member “when was the last time, sir, you went grocery shopping?”

Dudley responded: “I certainly acknowledge food prices have gone up.” But he added some prices are lower and he noted “today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1, that’s twice as powerful,” as an example of favorable price dynamics.

His example was greeted with widespread grumbling, in an unusual display of discontent at a Fed speech. The audience reaction also points to the  different way economists look at inflation compared to everyday people and suggests the Fed is struggling to convince many that inflation is not a problem.

Dudley repeated his view the economy’s prospects are looking up.

“The economic outlook has improved considerably in the past six months,” he said. “Despite this, we are still very far away from achieving our dual mandate of maximum sustainable employment and price stability,” and “faster progress toward these objectives would be very welcome.”

The central banker noted last week’s release of the February jobs data, which showed a pickup in job growth and a drop in the unemployment rate, helped “resolve some conflicting signals” about the state of the labor market.

While admitting to uncertainty over the pace of labor market recovery, Dudley said he expects “job growth will increase considerably more rapidly in the coming months.” But he added the amount of jobs lost over the course of the recession mean there’s a lot of lost ground to cover: “Even if we were to generate growth of 300,000 jobs per month, we would still likely have considerable slack in the labor market at the end of 2012.”