Fat Guy

I remember, in November, Charles was THE place on the mind of just about every local food writer I know. The night I was there I saw Alan Richman (who wrote about it here), Kate Krader from Food & Wine (who mentioned it here), Ben Leventhal and Lockhart Steele from Eater, and a couple of others I can't remember -- maybe Gael Greene or someone of that stature. It was a real food-media bonanza in there. I think everybody came because there was tremendous interest in the place, and few wrote about it because it was so utterly unremarkable. And I think Bruni's piece would have been appropriate in November or December of last year, if not so annoyingly written. But in April 2009, it's an anachronism.

We're in the middle of a 10-day beach vacation in North Carolina that I think we're going to get through on $20.64 worth of groceries. When we left home, we packed up a ton of the stuff that we never got to eat during the month-long challenge -- about 6 bags of groceries and one big cooler bag with ice packs. We went to the local Food Lion here to buy enough eggs, potatoes, onions and salad ingredients to last us most or all of the trip. I hear there's a farmer's market here on Wednesday so we might splurge on some produce there if they have anything good this early in the season. And sometimes there are ladies by the side of the road selling shrimp out of blue coolers for just a few dollars a pound -- we might invest in some of those, though again I'm not sure about the season. We'll see. The point being, in the past the food budget for a trip like this would have been more like $250. This time it could be as little as 10% of that and we'll probably wind up taking four bags of groceries back home anyway.

A chef's coat protects the entire upper body with a double-breasted closure that comes right up to the neck. A t-shirt or button-down shirt doesn't do that. There are quite a few utilitarian features of a chef's coat that you'll notice if you examine one. The sleeve design is nothing like that of a typical article of clothing. The double-breasted closure allows you to button it the other way if you splatter on the first exposed surface. It's designed to be cool while offering maximum protection. There's a pocket. All sorts of stuff.

The analogies to firefighters' uniforms and race-car drivers' protective jumpsuits seem weak. For one thing, were I going to fight a fire or drive a race-car, I'd of course want the appropriate protective gear. For another thing, those are highly specialized, expensive, bulky items that would indeed be silly to wear when, for example, driving to the grocery store. A $30 chef's coat, designed to be worn when cooking food, is not analogous. I'm a lot less concerned about a home cook using a piece of utilitarian professional gear for an appropriate purpose than I am about the legions of poseur cooks being churned out by the culinary schools today. These kids, who don't cook half as well as the average eGullet Society member, not only wear the uniform but also spend their shifts daydreaming about their careers as Food Network stars instead of paying attention to not overcooking the fish. If those people can wear chef's coats, so can all of us.

There was an offer of samples to take home but I was flying from Dulles to Hartford, attending a Passover seder, then driving home to New York City. I just didn't think it was a good idea to carry the stuff around through all that, even if I did manage to get it past airport security. So all I took away were my memories.

I've just returned from a visit to a remarkable farm in Virginia. Ayrshire Farm is the brainchild of Sandy Lerner. The story runs that, in 1984, Sandy and her husband were working in a University of California computer lab. They got tired of exchanging files by schlepping disks from one computer to another, so they built a device to connect all the computers in the lab together and manage the communications. Thus the modern incarnation of the local area network was born, and Sandy and her husband founded Cisco Systems in order to manufacture this helpful router-like item. She later sold her share of Cisco and started a cosmetics business, which she then sold to one of the big global luxury brands. In 1996 she purchased Ayrshire Farm. The farm spans about 800 acres in Upperville, Virginia. If you fly to Dulles airport and drive due west for about an hour and a half you’ll get there. The farm started as a dairy operation in the 19th Century and, in 1921, the manor house (which is where we spent the night) was built. It was one of the first steel-reinforced structures of its kind. The farm and buildings fell into disrepair under the previous owner but after years of renovation by Sandy Lerner they have been restored to better-than-new condition. The goal of Ayrshire is to be a working model for sustainable, self-sufficient, organic, humane farming. Spending a couple of days there has altered some of my thinking about how farm animals are treated and the appropriate response to that. The trip was put together by Ayrshire Farm and the Certified Humane program. The Certified Humane program basically fills a big hole in the USDA's organic certification, because organic doesn’t necessarily mean animals are treated all that well. Under the Certified Humane program, which involves all sorts of inspections and regulations, animals get treated about as well as you could imagine. It’s a storybook farm existence, ending in as humane a slaughter as possible. There were several serious people on the trip -- David Chang, one of the guys from Stone Barns, a writer from Time -- and then there was me. I get on well with the publicist who coordinated the trip so one of the seats in the van got designated for me. We started with a tour of the farm. We visited the horses (Sandy Lerner is big into Shire horses, jousting and all that), which were the most impressive specimens of the equine world I’ve ever been close to. They make those Budweiser horses look wimpy. We saw chickens and turkeys in various stages of development, several herds of cattle of various heritage breeds, free-range veal calves and heritage-breed pigs, as well as the gardening operation. We spoke at length to the folks responsible for these animals and vegetables, and their enthusiasm was infectious. After the tour, we had a tasting of several of the types of animals we’d just enjoyed visiting. In my opinion, the two standout products of Ayrshire farm are the chicken and the veal. The chicken is as good a chicken as I’ve had in any country. To me it tasted as good as Bresse chicken, and better than the Label Rouge chicken that has been making the rounds of US restaurants. It’s great, great chicken. The veal is surprising because, though it is rosy in color on account of not being confined, it is as tender as and more flavorful than any veal I’ve had. If these two products penetrate the New York restaurant market, as I imagine they will eventually, they are really going to turn some heads. The pork we tried was quite good but not as good as a lot of pork I’ve had. It lacked the marbled fat of truly great pork. And the beef, while tasty, was not competitive with the top tier of the market. Now, I am hardly unaware of the horrors of factory farming. I have been inundated with literature, videos and pleas for ages. But none of that had much impact on me. My feeling has long been "If you're going to kill it and eat it anyway, who cares how it's treated when it's alive?" What affected me much more than all the factory-farming horror stories was seeing the opposite in action. The respect for animals radiated by every employee of Ayrshire is inspiring and really gets across the message that it does matter how animals are treated in life and at the time of slaughter. That this approach can also produce some pretty excellent products is also nice. Some people care about organic. The more I learn about organic the less I care about it. Some people care about local. That's another instance where the more I learn about issues like "food miles" the less important I think they are. (Though the system has many flaws as implemented now, in principle I’m in favor of a global, industrial agricultural system in large part because I think it’s good that 90 percent of us don’t have to work on farms, and I like getting fresh produce year-round.) But when it comes to humane treatment of animals I've been having the opposite reaction: the more I think about those issues the more I care about them. So I am going to try harder to buy meat that was humanely raised and slaughtered. I'm keenly aware of a few issues that limit my buy-in to the type of farming that Ayrshire practices. For one thing, food produced by these methods is expensive. Now some of that is because the marketplace is rigged by direct and indirect subsidies and schemes, and some of it is because industrial farms can externalize some of their costs, especially the environmental costs. But even accounting for all that, industrial agriculture is very efficient and allows even economically disadvantaged Americans to eat meat regularly. Yes, it is responsible for a lot of crappy junk food, but it is also the reason we can eat well and economically at excellent Chinese and other ethnic restaurants. So I’m not willing to rule out all but humanely raised meat from my diet, and I’m not going to push that decision on anybody else, especially not on poor people. But I’m going to try to be more sensitive to this issue, especially when I shop for meat. Then we had dinner at the nearby restaurant operated by Ayrshire Farm, called the Hunter's Head Tavern. The tavern occupies the Carr House, a 1750 log cabin in downtown Upperville. It’s an appealing structure: as we were driving into town for the first time, I felt like I wanted to eat there before I even made the connection with the farm. Hunter’s Head Tavern is the first Certified Humane restaurant. All the meat either comes from Ayrshire or from other Certified Humane operators. Most of the ingredients are also organic, and the fish is all caught responsibly and sustainably. As a restaurant, it’s also quite good. While not a temple of haute cuisine, the restaurant serves very good pub fare based on superb ingredients. The fried chicken, fried beautifully and based on that terrific Ayrshire chicken, was probably the best thing on the table, or at least the best of the half-dozen things I tried tastes of. The fish and chips were also great. As was the country-fried (aka chicken-fried) steak. That’s Sandy on the left, not the world’s best photo, blue shirt under white sweater, gesturing with her hand. The next morning we went and watched chickens being “processed.” The chickens are placed upside down in metal cones, and their heads stick out the bottom. This seems to calm them and they just kind of hang there. Then a guy comes along and slits their throats with at “stunning knife,” which is an electrified blade that somehow uses the current so that the chickens feel no pain. The chickens then expire without much fanfare, and are taken away to be scalded, de-feathered and otherwise made ready to be eaten. The cows and pigs and other large livestock are slaughtered off premises, at a Certified Humane facility a little ways up the road. We didn’t see that, thank goodness. Then we visited the third leg of the Ayrshire enterprise (the first two being the farm and the tavern): the Home Farm Store. This is a butcher, cheese and gourmet shop in nearby Middleburg, in a building that used to be a bank. To quote the literature, the store sells “Local meats, dairy products, fruits and vegetables, sustainably produced, mostly from Ayrshire Farm, such as certified humane and organic beef, pork, veal, chicken and sausage. The produce is sourced locally from area farms, including the Ayrshire Farm market garden.” At the store we met Justin Severino, the head butcher and charcutier, who took us through a charcuterie tasting of both dry and fresh items, all of which were highly enjoyable. And that was that. I wish we could have stayed a month.

I'm seeing words like "arrogant," "affectation," and "silly" used to describe the practice of wearing a chef's coat in the home kitchen. That, my friends, is "nonsense." Perhaps it would be an affectation to don an entire chef's uniform, including a tall toque, to prepare dinner for the family. But I think we have established that a chef's coat is above all a practical garment that protects the body and clothes from splatters and stains -- and does a far better job of it than an apron. In this regard, using a chef's coat at home is the same as using any appropriate piece of professional cooking equipment at home: it's smart. I'm not sure what motivates people to feel uncomfortable wearing a practical kitchen garment at home, and I'm not here to speculate as to motivation. But there's certainly no good reason to feel uncomfortable.

I own several chef's coats, acquired over the years in various ways (e.g., I have one from the French Culinary Institue/International Culinary Center because I'm teaching a class there, I have one from Joe Fortes restaurant in Vancouver because chef Brian Fowke gave it to me -- I also have one of Gray Kunz's monogrammed aprons from Lespinasse but that's a different story). I have found that chef's coats are categorically superior to aprons because they shield the entire upper body not just the chest and belly areas. So if you're wearing, say, a white shirt, a chef's coat protects the neck, sleeves and everything. An apron leaves the neck and sleeves exposed to splatters. You won't find me wearing a chef's coat at home often -- most of the time I'm wearing cheap t-shirts that are more disposable and easier to clean than a chef's coat anyway -- but whenever I'm hosting an event where I need to wear nice clothes I put on a chef's coat to protect my clothes. I should add that, in restaurants, cooks tend to wear both a chef's coat and a waist apron. And a side towel. I'm a big fan of those too.

I think also there's an accidental aspect to a lot of what we've referred to as "new paradigm" restaurants, ranging from the Momofukus to a place like O's. Chef Kleinman told us at one point something like, "We added the molecular menu as something fun to do on the side, but it has become the focal point of the restaurant."

I don't think there's a clear "MG" classification, at least not when it comes to several restaurants that offer MG experiences within larger operations. Cafe Atlantico, for example, is a large, three-story restaurant serving mostly a Latin-influenced menu. Within that operation is the 6-seat Minibar. To me that's similar to a large hotel restaurant offering a molecular tasting menu to a subset of customers each night. Most people think of Sean Brock as an MG practitioner, yet the McCrady's menu is pretty normal-seeming, with MG touches here and there and a tasting menu that seems to have more of those touches than the regular menu -- but overall it's all pretty low key. The universe of chefs practicing this sort of cooking at a high level is pretty small. Some have restaurants dedicated to it. Others do it within larger operations.

You were actually cited at the dinner table, when someone said "This is what John Sconzo means by 'techno-emotional'."

I wouldn't say my expectations were low. I mean, we were all curious enough to venture $90 in cab fare to check out an interesting-seeming chef. But yes, my expectations were definitely exceeded. Having one's expectations exceeded is more enjoyable than the opposite. I enjoyed having my expectations exceeded.

It was an absolutely world-class meal in every respect.

O's near Denver, Colorado, definitely makes the cut as a must-visit. I was there last night and was very impressed: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=123222

For most of the world's residents, Denver, Colorado, is remote. But even using Denver's level of remoteness as a baseline, Westminster, Colorado feels pretty out there. Situated in the vast (as in, you could stick an extra European country in there) no man's land between Denver and Boulder, Westminster is a cluster of strip malls and low-rise office parks that appear mostly to service the high-tech sector. A year or so ago, when I was circulating an early version of my (to this day, unsold) proposal for a book about culinary creativity around the world, one piece of feedback I heard was that it was "too niche" because there are no creative restaurants outside the big cities where you'd expect to find such cutting-edge arts stuff. Sure, editors told me, the big city-slicker cities boast restaurants like Alinea in Chicago and WD-50 in New York, but normal America only has Cheesecake Factory. I offered counterexamples aplenty of far-flung chefs and restaurants that had planted the flag of the creative revolution in gastronomy: Richard Blais in Atlanta, Sean Brock in Charleston, the ill-fated Interlude in Australia, Tapas Molecular Bar in Japan, even places in Russia and New Jersey. El Bulli and the Fat Duck are also not exactly in urban centers. Around that time, I saw a review of a restaurant near Denver called O's Steak & Seafood where, allegedly, a chef named Ian Kleinman was offering a "Molecular Tasting Menu" in a Westin hotel dining room. I noted it for the record, cited the example to no avail in the next draft of my proposal (did I mention that every person who watched 30 seconds of Top Chef season 4 knows about molecular gastronomy?) and moved on to edit a Chinese-restaurant guidebook. But fate brought me to Denver this weekend for the IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals) conference, where I was to be on a panel about food blogging. Janet Zimmerman ("JAZ") was moderating the panel, and Dave Scantland ("Dave the Cook") was both moderating a panel (his was on "food miles") and hoping to win an IACP journalism award for his Daily Gullet essay "One Man's Meat." This was one of four finalists, up against entries from Gourmet and Saveur. So, not a finalist in some internet category. A finalist in the overall essay category. We decided to make it our mission in Denver to check in on Ian Kleinman, so we made a late reservation for after the Saturday-night awards gala. (I was only to be in town Friday night through Sunday morning.) My secondary mission was to have a Denver omelet in Denver. The seemingly endless taxi ride from downtown Denver to the Westin in Westminster, with zero traffic, took 45 minutes and cost $45. Our driver had never even heard of the place. At one point the GPS routed us through a shopping-mall parking lot. I could go on. Suffice it to say that were I a smoker I couldn't have lasted the ride without a cigarette. The Westin Westminster, if you can make it there in one piece, is a pretty spectacular hotel in what is or should be called the Western Modern style: soaring exposed-beam ceilings, Western and Native American art, and a hilarious (to this New Yorker) expanse of square footage. The restaurant itself is spacious by any standard, with high-back leather banquettes and a clientele consisting of us, attendees at a Metaphysics conference, an big unidentified group (I'm guessing defense contractors at a sales conference) and a smattering of locals. Most people were there for the steak-and-seafood menu. Only one table other than ours had the molecular menu that evening (and this on a night when a convention of culinary professionals happened to be in Denver). On Thursday and Friday nights -- the other two nights on which they do the molecular menu -- they have more of a professional crowd and serve the molecular menu to more like 30+ customers. I hardly expected Ian Kleinman's molecular tasting menu to be fantastic. I especially didn't expect it to be my best meal of the year so far and one of the handful of most enjoyable dining experiences I've had in the past couple of years. Ian Kleinman has pulled off a Rocky Mountain molecular miracle (maybe they'll quote that in the press kit), combining top-level avant-garde cooking techniques with a relaxed, accessible, and utterly unpretentious sensibility. For anybody looking to cover the top molecular-gastronomy destinations, this is a must add. So unexpected was the success of this meal that, in planning for the journey, I didn't bring anything like a camera or a notebook. So for recall of some of the details (there are many) of some of the dishes I'm hoping that between the three of us we can piece it all together. I also took two very poor cell-phone photos, which I will post despite personal embarrassment. O's doesn't serve, as has become the prevailing style, a 20-course small-bites menu. It's three savory courses -- whole composed plates of food -- plus dessert and an intermezzo between the second and third courses. The most impressive of the courses (all were impressive but none more so than this one) was the middle of the three savory courses, described as "Berebere pulled pork, sopaipilla, smoked grapes and fried sour cream." The foundation of the dish, a Zagat-survey-size sopaipilla (like I said, these are full plates of food the size of regular restaurant appetizers or maybe a little bigger than that), was a faultlessly executed sopaipilla. Not molecular at all, just an example of great execution of a traditional technique -- demonstrating that Ian Kleinman is not just an avant-garde culinary artist but also a really good cook. (Along the way to his current position, the Colorado native spent some time at a Southwestern restaurant where he mastered many of those techniques.) Then, spice-infused chunks of pork, moist and tender and good enough on their own to be a successful dish, were enhanced immeasurably (upstaged, even) by smoked grapes and little pockets of fried sour cream. The red seedless grapes tasted totally fresh and just like normal grapes except with the addition of the aromatics I associate with the last embers of the fires we build in our ski cabin in Vermont that we don't have. Upon reflection I'm questioning whether these grapes ever saw the inside of a smoker. Perhaps, as Momofuku Ko does with its "smoked hen egg," the grapes are soaked in a smoke-water solution. I don't know and should have asked. The sour cream was presumably encapsulated with some agent before being deep fried into creamy-centered crouton-like pouches. There were several tertiary elements on the plate as well: some hot peppers, a creamy sauce under the meat and a few other things I can't recall. Everything in the composition enhanced everything else. The dish remained captivating through every bite of a full portion. I can't necessarily say that would be true of many of the two-bite dishes that make up a lot of modern tasting menus, were they expanded to full-plate servings. I thought the other two savory courses were tied with one another for excellence but the overall leaning of the table was that the better of the two was "Grilled butter shrimp, Old Bay popcorn, mint taboulleh and rainbow caviar." I'm thinking the shrimp were maybe poached in butter and finished on the plancha? The popcorn was dusted with Old Bay seasoning, tricking the mind (my mind at least) into thinking the chunks of shrimp were big hunks of crabmeat from giant crabs living in an ocean of butter. The bed of taboulleh, in addition to tasting good alone, served to soak up the drippings from the other ingredients. There were a few colors of "caviar" (liquid gels that have undergone spherification) sprinkled around the plate including one that I think they said was made from beets. There were also puddles of a vibrant, chilled beet sauce. The other savory course was "Sous-vide duck, honey and clove, cranberry beans, warm root vegetable brulee and soy sugar." The first time I ever knowingly ate a sous-vide dish was when Alain Ducasse, an early adopter of the method, used it for squab. He got the squab to medium-rare in the water bath, then crisped the skin with a torch. Every example of sous-vide cooking I had since, for something like a decade, was a step down. Until last night's duck, which was emblematic of Ian Kleinman's approach of using modern techniques not as ends in themselves but as means of making food better, more interesting, more enjoyable (there were also a couple of moments of pure entertainment but never to the detriment of flavor). The duck tasted like Ducasse's squab except it was duck. The slices of duck were on top of cranberry beans. There was also a neat trick with some gel made from the Mae Ploy brand of hoisin sauce. The other component on the plate was a terrific elongated, layered brick of root-vegetable gratin (rutabaga, beets, parsnips, potatoes, some other stuff), topped with soy sugar and bruleed. I asked how one makes soy sugar but the answer was so complex I didn't retain the information. The printed menu listed, between the second and third courses, an intermezzo described simply as "Ice wine sorbet." Ho hum, I concluded. Whatever. I guess a little sorbet can't hurt. Then the chef appeared with a gueridon full of ingredients and equipment, including a steaming stainless-steel pitcher of liquid nitrogen. He proceeded to hand-mix the ice-wine sorbet in a great bit of tableside showmanship. The sorbet was also delicious. I've had nitro ice creams and sorbets maybe six or seven times before but never an example where I thought the method yielded better results than traditional recipes (or a Pacojet). It was preternaturally creamy. Had I not seen it made before my eyes I'd never have believed this texture could be accomplished using just Inniskillin ice-wine, simple syrup and an egg white. After the duck course we had a pre-dessert of meringues in the shape of long breadsticks. And the chef gave us a demo of his "floating plate" concept. There was no floating-plate dish on the menu last night but he wanted us to see the presentation technology. Using the same technology as supercooled mag-lev trains, he uses liquid nitrogen to freeze a block of titanium alloy. He then floats a steel ring on top of that and it hovers and spins. You can apply significant downward force to the ring and it stays levitated. It's also very stable, as the chef demonstrated with an egg. At this point I was inspired to take my first bad snapshot of the evening. For dessert the chef returned with his sorbet cart, but this time for ice cream: "Mexican vanilla ice cream, cinnamon tortilla and caramel powder." Collectively, the ingredients tasted like a great caramel apple pie without the apples. I thought the sorbet had been creamy, but this stuff -- made with cream -- was of a different order of creaminess. Second horrible snapshot: Ian Kleinman making some nitro ice cream. Finally, as a meal-end bonus, we got to try Miracle Fruit. I had read about Miracle Fruit, which interferes with the normal function of the tastebuds, but this was my first taste. We were instructed to chew the little berry-sized fruits, after removing the pits, and let the fruit come in contact with as much of our tongues as possible, then wait five minutes. The chef then brought a bowl of citrus wedges and asked us to take a big bite of lemon. It tasted like candy! The miracle fruit had confused the taste-buds into perceiving the lemon as purely sweet. This experiment remained amusing with grapefrui and lime slices, until our taxi arrived. The restaurant refused to present us with a bill, which was generous but not as generous as the standard pricing: the molecular menu is (are you ready for this?) . . . FIFTY DOLLARS If you want wine pairings, it's a little more: $75. Seriously. I never had a Denver omelet in Denver, and Dave didn't win the IACP award (though he should have). But dinner at O's was a consolation prize that did far more than console us. O’s Steak & Seafood 10600 Westminster Boulevard Westminster, CO 80020 303 410 5000 http://www.westindenverboulder.com/page.php?url=restaurant Ian Kleinman also maintains a blog at: http://food102.blogspot.com/ (Note: Rarely am I so excited about a new-to-me restaurant. As evidence, I note that I typed this whole post on the little keyboard of my handheld smartphone contraption while flying from Denver to New York -- I couldn't wait to get home.)

← If these statements are true, and nobody has presented a reason to doubt them, then what Padma did by making this ad is exactly the opposite of "shilling" or "selling out." We should all be so lucky as to get paid to advocate for products we love. I'm still waiting for my call from the Munchos people.

Why look a gift horse in the mouth? I guess if it's a struggling mom-and-pop place, or if the cost of the meal is going to be charged against the manager's salary, that should give you pause, but otherwise I say go for it.

Here we go: http://www.wawwj.com/2009/ran_vinos_en.php

Interesting addendum: today the World Association Wine and Spirit Writers and Journalists (WAWWJ) announced its top 100 wines, and two of the wines from our tasting the other night made the cut at number 3 (the Tishbi Sde Boker) and number 18 (Tishbi Shiraz). The WAWWJ list from what I know of it is a composite of international competition results from around the world during the preceding year. Each competition has a point value based on its prestige, and the wines that win the most awards and the most prestigious ones are the wines that make the cut for WAWWJ. Needless to say this is not the be-all-end-all way to rank wines, it may not even be a smart way, and you will see many great wines missing from this list. Still, to see some of the wines from our tasting on this list is kind of cool. The list isn't online yet but when it is I'll post a link.

I didn't say that. I said that I now think of kosher Israeli wines as Israeli wines rather than kosher wines. There are of course kosher wines from all over. We had wines from California and New Zealand at our tasting, for example. I didn't say they were. What I said, which is true, is that the overwhelming majority of kosher wines sold outside of Israel are mevushal. That's what consumers demand. Even many Israeli kosher wines that are non-mevushal are produced in special mevushal batches for export.

Last night I took part in an unusual event: a Passover-themed kosher-wine tasting for a few members of my synagogue. I was in charge of preparing the food, and helping to select kosher wines to pair with the foods. There were a few challenges. The first challenge was that I know less about kosher wine than I know about mainstream wine, and less about mainstream wine than people who really know about it. I do know this about kosher wine, though: several years ago we were eating at Gramercy Tavern with dear friends from North Carolina and we asked our captain, Christopher Russell, to select our wines. For one of the red selections, he brought the wine to the table in a decanter and didn’t show us the bottle. So we did the blind-tasting routine where, I have learned over the years by taking various classes and attending industry tastings, your best bet is to look, smell, drink and ask yourself a series of binary and multiple-choice questions: “Old world or new world?” “What grape?” That sort of thing. All of us guessed that we were drinking a California Cabernet in the $50 (retail) range. The bottle was revealed to be an Israeli wine, a Cabernet Sauvignon in the new-world style (at least I got that much right) from Yarden, with a retail price of $30. I had for most of my life experienced kosher wine mostly as Manischewitz, one of the world’s most cloying libations. I also, in the 1990s, tasted a few acceptable dry kosher wines but upon seeing their prices (very high) concluded that there are very few good kosher wines and the ones that are good are a total ripoff. But that Gramercy Tavern blind-tasting experience totally changed my view of kosher wine, and particularly Israeli kosher wine. I stopped thinking of it as kosher wine, and just started thinking of it as Israeli wine. And they have, after all, been growing wine in that part of the world for quite some time. A few years later, when I was working on my first book (well, my first book ever to be published). Christopher Russell had moved over to Union Square Café as general manager. He invited me to join him for a tasting in the cellar there, with a guy from Admiral Imports named Yoav Sisley. We had fun, much wine was consumed, and life went on. Fast forward to present day. When presented with this wine-tasting challenge the first thing I did was reach out to Christopher Russell and ask “Do you know anybody in the kosher-wine business?” And his reply was something along the lines of yes, idiot, you already know Yoav Sisley. Yoav Sisley, who is Israeli, distributes many brands of wine but one of the brands in his portfolio is an Israeli brand called Tishbi. The Tishbi family has been producing wine in what is now Israel since 1882, when Baron Edmond de Rothschild commissioned the current Tishbi generation’s great grandparents to plant the first modern vineyards there. Before reaching out to Yoav, I picked up a couple of bottles of Tishbi wines to make sure they were legit. I was very impressed by the price-quality proposition, which seemed to me similar to what Yarden had offered that night at Gramercy Tavern. So I sent Yoav an email message asking for some advice. Yoav’s response was to 1- get me and the rabbi tickets to the world’s largest kosher-wine-tasting event, which happened to be coming up the next weekend, 2- provide us with 8 different Tishbi samples for our event, and 3- actually come to the event to help guide the tasting. That made my job easier. The sixth annual Kosher Wine Extravaganza turned out to be a tasting of 353 kosher wines from around the world. The tickets Yoav left for me and Rabbi Josh turned out to be the better of the two breeds of tickets, so we got access to a private tasting of 18 additional wines led by a Greek guy (not Jewish) named Costas who apparently knows more about the kosher wines of the world than almost anyone. We got to taste several blockbuster kosher wines including Covenant and Generation XIII, which are boutique California Cabernets. So, what makes wine kosher or not kosher? Two things. First, for wine to be kosher it needs to be produced by Jews (there are other requirements, like it can’t have bacon in it, but the handled-by-Jews one is the big one). That is not the case with kosher food; just with kosher wine. This is not something I support; I’m just reporting the orthodox position. It’s pretty easy to make kosher wine in Israel. If you make it elsewhere, it’s less convenient but you can pull together a crew. They even do it in New Zealand. Second, there is a process called “mevushal” that, while for various reasons is not absolutely required, is applied to pretty much all kosher wines especially those produced or sold outside of Israel. Mevushal literally means cooked, and once wine is cooked it can be handled by and shared with gentiles without losing its kosher status. Whatever. The question is, what does “cooked” mean and how does it affect the wine? Needless to say, if you take a bottle of wine and boil it you will mess up the wine. But the requirements of mevushal can be satisfied with what is essentially flash pasteurization—a momentary heating of wine to 185 degrees F. This is what Louis Latour (needless to say, not a kosher producer) does to all its reds in order to stabilize them. And depending on when and how the process is implemented along the chain of production it can be transparent. I myself have not been able to detect mevushal wines in blind tasting. Costas, the guy who really knows, says he can’t tell. I’m told UC Davis has studied the matter and concluded the same. I think there is some question of, maybe you can’t tell now but it will change the way the wine ages. But we did taste some 10+ year-old bottles of mevushal wine and they were great. Would they have been better if not heat treated? I have no way of knowing. I doubt it. So Yoav was going to bring 8 Tishbi wines for us, and armed with the knowledge picked up at the Kosher Wine Extravaganza we pulled together 8 non-Tishbi wines so that in each flight of our tasting we’d have a Tishbi wine and a non-Tishbi wine. Having been so impressed by today’s kosher wines, my intent at the tasting was to convince the guests—skeptics all—that today’s kosher wines, at least those in the new-world style, are competitive with mainstream wines, dollar for dollar and grape for grape. Then it was time to plan a menu with those wines in mind, which brought us to the second challenge: the food had to be kosher. And the third challenge: it had to be kosher for Passover (meaning no bread products or products from an extended list of bread-like things such as corn). And the fourth challenge: we had to prepare all the food at Rabbi Josh’s apartment the night before the event and bring it to the venue the next day, and serve on disposable plates with disposable utensils etc. I’ll stop listing challenges, but you can do the math on how many glasses you need when you pour 16 different wines for 16 guests . . . We started with chopped liver on little matzoh crackers as a standing hors d’oeuvre. With that we tried two inexpensive (under-$10) kosher whites: Tishbi Vineyard Emerald Riesling 2008 from Israel, and Baron Herzog Chenin Blanc 2007 from California. I particularly liked the Riesling, very floral and melony but not crazy sweet (the Chenin Blanc was just a bit on the sweet-seeming side for me), but both were wines I wouldn’t hesitate to order a case of for a party. There are some mainstream restaurants around New York using these wines as house whites. They don’t even tell you they’re kosher wines. So if you see “Herzog Chenin Blanc” listed somewhere as a house white, now you know. For the first seated course I put together a trio of smoked and cured fish. On each plate, a curled up slice of smoked salmon, a small rectangle of smoked trout, and a couple of little pieces of pickled herring. I topped the smoked salmon with salmon roe, the trout with whitefish roe and the herring with fresh dill. With those we tasted Tishbi Estate Chardonnay 2007 (very nice for a $16 Chardonnay, lots of dried fruit aromas and clearly aged in oak but not aggressively so) and Goose Bay Viognier 2007 (from New Zealand, retailing at around $26, maybe not worth that much but very tasty: “crisp, lemony, tasty” is what I scribbled between doing a million other things). For the next course I did a Moroccan-inspired meat pie with ground beef and veal, cashews, raisins, olives, cinnamon, allspice and a matzoh crust. We tried four wines with this course: Tishbi Estate Pinot Noir 2005, Tishbi Special Reserve Merlot 2002, Yarden Cabernet Sauvignon Galilee 2005 and Covenant Estate Cabernet Sauvignon Napa 2006 (the most expensive wine of the evening at $100 retail). I thought the Covenant was delicious but not worth $100, the Yarden continues to provide amazing Cabernet value, it’s still $30 retail, and it’s the wine I will continue to use to “convert” people to kosher wine. Of the Tishbis, the Special Reserve Merlot was the more impressive, predictably so because it’s from the “special reserve” line and costs more ($60 as opposed to $22). Lots of berry aromas, nicely oaked. The last savory course I came up with thanks to some late-night instant-messenger consulting help from fellow eGullet Society manager Dave Scantland (“Dave the Cook”). I didn’t want to do brisket, because brisket is such a predictable Passover dish and also because the laws of supply and demand make kosher brisket stupidly expensive around Passover time because everybody wants to serve it. So I decided I’d get some chuck, which remains relatively cheap this time of year, and kind of treat it like braised brisket but make a stew of sorts. Then I thought about beef Bourgignon. The two problems with beef Bourgignon, from a kosher-for-Passover perspective, are that it’s made with bacon and that the beef is dredged in flour (remember, no flour on Passover) before being browned. I personally think dredging in flour is overrated, so I didn’t mind skipping that step. But what about the bacon? After talking about a few possibilities with Dave (pastrami, chipotle peppers) I settled on smoked paprika as a seasoning. It definitely provided some of the flavor profile of a smoked pork product but without the pork. Then, when I was doing the final shopping, right next to the beef chuck, they had kosher bison chuck. Hey, “Bison Bourgignon.” I bought the bison. For the mirepoix I used onions, carrots and fennel. Added garlic and a whole lot of smoked paprika. Browned the bison in a separate skillet and added that to the pot. Deglazed the skillet with Zinfandel and added that to the pot. Added the rest of the bottle of wine, a can of chopped tomatoes, lots of carrots, pearl onions, quartered mushrooms, fresh marjoram, bay leaves, stock. Simmered for a couple of hours, refrigerated overnight, defatted, reheated at the event venue (the beautiful apartment of two synagogue members) and served. I thought it came out well. Some people came into the kitchen for seconds and every drop got eaten, which was nice. We had six wines with the bison: Tishbi Estate Shiraz 2006, Herzog Zinfandel Lodi 2004 (that’s the same wine I used in cooking the dish), Tishbi Special Reserve Cabernet Blend from Sde Boker (that’s the name of Ben Gurion’s kibbutz in Israel) 2004, Jerusalem Heights Cabernet-Merlot 2002, Pardess Hevron Merlot 2002 and Baron Herzog 2005 Special Reserve Merlot. The Herzog Zinfandel, at $13.99, struck me as perhaps the most impressive value of the evening. A very respectable California old-vines Zinfandel brimming with vanilla, spice and dark berry. The Tishbi Special Reserve from Sde Boker, at around $50, was a champion. I thought it was fully as worthy as the $100 Covenant, and at $50 it offered a value proposition that Covenant could not. The Sde Boker is 50% Cabernet Sauvignon, 40% Merlot and 10% Cabernet Franc. Cassis, vanilla, a little mint, terrific. The other wines were appropriate for price and grape, except for the $40 Pardess Merlot, which I thought was the weakest wine of the evening. For dessert I made a compote of stewed chopped dried fruits (apricots, dates, figs) with apples, walnuts and sweet wine. (This is a Sephardic recipe for haroset, which at a Passover seder would come at the beginning but we used it as a dessert). On the side, some kosher-for-Passover dark-chocolate-covered candied orange peels that I found in a store and that were delicious. With dessert we had the Tishbi Vineyard Red Muscat 2006 (at $14, an excellent value in a fortified dessert wine), and the Jonathan Tishbi Barbera Zinfandel 2006. That last one is not available for sale in the US yet. Yoav scored us the only bottle on these shores. It’s a Port/Banyuls-style wine that will probably retail for around $75 and is great. I got plum, caramel, chocolate, nuts and more other sensory information than I could write down at that point. Were our guests sold on the idea of kosher wine? I can surely say that every single person departed the event with a much higher opinion of kosher wine than he or she had upon arrival. I threw together these recipe narratives for the attendees, in case anybody is interested: Moroccan-style meat pie. (Adapted from a recipe by my mother-in-law.) For a pie the size we had last night, which was probably enough for 12 entrée-size portions: Begin with 2 finely chopped medium onions and sautee in oil or schmaltz over medium heat in a big sautee pan or stockpot (you will be adding 4 pounds of meat, so do choose a big one) until translucent and then a few minutes beyond that. Add 4 pounds of ground meat; you can use beef, veal, turkey, lamb or a combination thereof. If it’s kosher meat don’t add any salt, otherwise do add some at this point. Add four crushed garlic cloves. Sautee the meat, onions and garlic, repeatedly breaking up the meat with the spatula or spoon, until you have a cooked-through pot of meat. At this point if there’s excess liquid fat in the pot try to drain it off; if you’ve used lean meat there may not be any, though. Stir in 2 tablespoons ground cinnamon, 2 tablespoons ground allspice, 2 cups raisins, 2 cups nuts (cashews, pine nuts, etc.), 6 beaten eggs, 1/2 cup fresh chopped flat-leaf parsley, and 1 cup non-salty pitted olives (or skip the olives). Cook for another five or so minutes just to heat through those latest additions. While that’s happening, wet a few squares of matzoh, then drench them in egg (just like you’re making matzoh brie). Line the bottom of a deep 9x12 casserole (or some size in that neighborhood) with matzoh, top with the meat mixture, then top with another layer of matzoh. Cook, covered with foil, for about 30 minutes at 350 degrees. Or, you can make the meat mixture a day ahead, refrigerate it, then build the pie the next day, in which case you’ll need more like 50 minutes in the oven if you’re starting with cold ingredients. Present the whole pie at the table, because it’s ugly otherwise. Bison “Bourgignon.” For about a dozen entrée-size portions I’d suggest starting with 4 pounds of stew meat in 1-inch cubes or thereabouts. We used bison but of course this dish would work with beef stew meat, or lamb, or any other stewable meat, even something like chicken thighs. But first, start with 2 finely chopped medium onions in a stockpot (8 or 10 quart size is good) and sautee in oil or schmaltz for a good long time over medium heat. You don’t want to burn them but you want to cook them way, way down to extract maximum flavor. Some salt and fresh-ground pepper at this point wouldn’t hurt, more or less depending on whether you’re using kosher meat. Add ½ cup finely chopped carrots (more carrots come later) and ½ cup finely chopped fennel. When the carrots and fennel have softened add 4 crushed garlic cloves, 4 bay leaves and 4 tablespoons smoked paprika. Let this whole mixture (aka mirepoix) simmer a bit, then add 2 cups of red wine (hold on to the rest of the wine in the bottle to use later). As that is heating, get a wide skillet (12” if you have, smaller if you don’t) good and hot, add some oil or schmaltz (guess which tastes better?) and brown the cubes of meat in batches (don’t crowd the skillet), turning with tongs to brown all sizes, then transferring the pieces of meat to the main pot (with the onions, wine, etc.) as they’re ready. Once all the meat is cooked, there will be some fat in the skillet as well as a lot of brown bits of goodness. Try to get rid of the fat but leave behind the brown bits (aka “fond”). Then pour the rest of the wine (there should be about a cup left) into the skillet and use a spatula to scrape up the brown bits and mix them into the wine so you get a nice pan sauce (the process known as deglazing). Dump that pan sauce into the main pot (we’re doing all this because we need to find every available source of flavor in order to compensate for this being a bacon-free version of Bourgignon). Add about 2 quarts of liquid, either water or stock (chicken, beef, veal, it doesn’t matter a whole lot). Once that comes up to a simmer (you don’t want a full-on boil), add about ½ pound roughly chopped carrots, 2 standard size (8 or 10 oz) boxes of mushrooms (quartered; white button are fine, though we used “baby bella” mushrooms because I was taken in by the marketing mumbo jumbo), and 2 pounds of peeled pearl onions. (Edited to add: and a can of chopped tomatoes.) You may at this point want to add more liquid. It depends. You want the dish right now to be like a thin soup; it will cook down to a thick stew over time. Once everything is in the pot and it returns to a simmer, turn down the heat to very low (just enough flame to maintain a slow, slow simmer) and cook, uncovered, for about 3 hours (or until the meat is nice and tender). If you’re serving it the next day (and it will be better if you do it this way), go for something more like 2.5 hours and then refrigerate overnight (if you can fit the whole pot in the refrigerator that’s the most convenient approach, though do let the pot cool to lukewarm on the stovetop before you put it in the fridge, covered). If you’ve refrigerated overnight, skim off the fat that has collected at the top of the pot. Then reheat until you’re back up to a simmer, add about a cup of fresh chopped herbs (we used marjoram and parsley; you can also use thyme, oregano, whatever strikes your fancy) and simmer for another half hour, though you can also simmer gently for longer if that works well with the timing of your meal. When serving (in bowls), remember to give everybody a little bit of everything: meat, carrots, mushrooms, onions, sauce, but don’t give anyone a bay leaf. Sephardic haroset (my wife’s recipe). For enough haroset for a really big seder, start with about 2 cups each (this is very approximate; if your package sizes are bigger or smaller, don’t worry about it) of dried figs, pitted dates and dried apricots (you can also improvise with other dried fruits, like prunes, raisins, cranberries, etc.), and about 4 large apples, peeled, cored and roughly chopped. Put all that in a saucepan and cover with water. Bring to a boil, turn down the heat a bit and simmer for about 15 minutes. Drain off the water (it’s pretty flavorful; you may want to keep it, cook it down to a syrup and add it back in to the haroset). Dump the cooked fruit-apple mixture into a food processor fitted with the chopping blade. Pulse it just enough to get a rough, rustic mixture. Put everything in a bowl and stir in about ½ cup of sweet wine (Manischewitz works very well here, or you can use most anything red and sweet) and about 2 cups of chopped walnuts (or a standard supermarket bag of chopped walnuts). If you’re planning to make this ahead and serve it a day or two later, hold off on the walnuts until the day of service, so they stay crunchy.

Most beef for steaks is aged. It's a question of dry aged versus wet aged. And I would not cook them differently. One thing worth clarifying is what is meant by "sirloin." Is it actually a piece of sirloin or is it actually a strip steak? That's a common ambiguity in steak terminology. My favorite way to cook a strip or a ribeye: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=119838

The latest on this is that we're probably looking at Thursday! I'm going to do everybody a favor and stop posting updates until there's an actual airing, after which there should be a link to the video available.

Last-minute scheduling changes have happened, as is often the case with the taped segments (so I'm told), so we're now supposed to be up for Monday. I'll post an update if and when I learn more!

Those of you who have been a part of this, and those who haven't, may be pleased to learn that tomorrow morning Good Morning America is scheduled to do a segment about the no-shopping challenge. Tomorrow (Friday) morning, unless there are last-minute scheduling changes or any real news happens, the segment will run on ABC's Good Morning America during the 8am-9am (Eastern time) hour. Not for the whole hour, probably just for a couple of minutes, but still you might find it entertaining to set your DVR or otherwise make arrangements to see the segment. If there is a web-video link available after the show, I'll post that when it pops up.