Fat Guy

The following is a true story. A couple of years ago when I was writing my Asian Dining Rules book I was in a Chinese restaurant and I spied, behind the cash register, a copy of a magazine called Chinese Restaurant News. I asked to look at it and, although the thing turned out to be in Chinese, I was able to extract an email address. This led me to Betty Xie (pronounced "shi-eh" or close to that), the editor-in-chief of Chinese Restaurant News, which is the industry journal for America's 43,000+ Chinese restaurants. I interviewed her and, in addition to an actual interview I included in the book, I found her to be a wealth of information about an industry that -- on account of the language barrier and the fact that the bulk of Chinese restaurants are small family businesses without publicists, investor-relations departments, public filings, etc. -- can be tricky to research. A little less than a year after that (this takes us to a little over a year ago), Betty invited me to something at the Javits Center in New York called the Top 100 Chinese Restaurants in the USA awards, followed by a gala banquet at the New Yorker hotel. I had never heard of the Top 100 Chinese Restaurants in the USA awards, but the invitation indicated that this was the fourth annual iteration of said awards. I thought to myself, "It's going to take a long time to give out 100 awards." (We call this "foreshadowing.") It was a spectacle of expectation-shattering proportions. The area of the Javits Center that was set aside for the awards ceremony -- and as you can imagine it was a large area -- could not contain the crowd. Martin Yan was there to present the awards, as was Miss Asia. It turned out that the Top 100 is a bit of a misnomer. It's actually the top 100 restaurants in each of 10 different categories (e.g., buffet, takeout, Chinese regional cuisine). This makes sense from a taxonomy standpoint, because you don't have buffets in Ohio competing in an apples v. oranges showdown with Grand Sichuan International in New York. Needless to say, giving out 1,000 awards takes a lot longer than giving out 100 awards, especially when the owners of each winning restaurant need to be photographed with Martin Yan and Miss Asia. Incidentally, I say Miss Asia singular because that's how it was represented, however there were actually six or seven Miss Asias in attendance representing various subdivisions of Asia. Miss India was particularly winsome. At the time I thought about using a photo of me with Miss India as the jacket photo for my book, but we opted to go with a cover design that didn't include a photo. The banquet was even more of an off-the-hook happening than the awards ceremony. It was like a cross between a wedding, an inauguration ball and a variety show on Chinese-language cable television. There were something like 10 very good courses of food and an incredible amount of beverage served to hundreds of people, and my editor Gail and I were I think the only two non-Chinese-speaking people in the room. All the speeches, videos and later the karaoke, were in Chinese. Occasionally I could pick out English words like, "New York City!" or "Martin Yan!" I kept thinking, "This spectacle is occurring here and no white people know about it." At the time I wrote a short front-of-the-book piece about the awards for a magazine (which I think still hasn't been published). In researching that story I learned a little about the awards process. A restaurant applies for an award and, presumably, pays a fee to cover the evaluation process. A "mystery diner" working for the AboutFace corporation visits the restaurant anonymously and files an extensive report, which forms a big percentage of a restaurant's score. There's also a consumer-feedback component and an editorial panel that evaluates the restaurant based on reputation, standing in the industry, etc. All these numbers are crunched together and the rankings come out of that. This past October my book came out. Soon after, Betty Xie contacted me and said she wanted to do a story in Chinese Restaurant News on me and the book. She interviewed me and a few weeks later the November issue of Chinese Restaurant News arrived in my mailbox. Some time in the course of the previous year or two, I had kind of forgotten that the magazine is in Chinese. Here's an idea of how the article looked: I thought it might be culturally insensitive to be as amused by seeing myself giving an interview in Chinese as I was, however I showed it to several Chinese people and they assured me they found it even more bizarre and hilarious than I did. Shortly after that, Betty contacted me again. The fifth annual awards were coming up and, she said, they're really planning to up their game this time (Chinese Restaurant News and its parent company, which also publishes several other industry magazines, are the driving force behind the awards). The awards ceremony and gala were to be held at the Rio hotel in Las Vegas. And, most relevant to me, they wanted to publish a dining guidebook covering all the award-winning restaurants, in English, and they wanted me to be the editor. It seemed like a fun opportunity, so I said yes. Within days I started getting emails from various staffers at Chinese Restaurant News, including one asking what flights I wanted to be on in order to give my speech in Las Vegas. What speech in Las Vegas, you may ask? I had no idea and, as I write this, I will be giving the speech in about 40 minutes and I'm still not quite sure what it's about. I mean, I know it's about the book but I'm not exactly sure what I'm expected to say. Then again, I was not sure what I was expecting to say last night either. At the welcome cocktail reception, Betty Xie got up to speak in Chinese. What I heard was along the lines of, "chinese... chinese... LAS VEGAS... chinese... chinese... RIO HOTEL!... chinese... chinese..." and then, ominously, "...chinese... chinese... DINING GUIDE... chinese... chinese... EDITOR... chinese... chinese... STEVEN SHAW!" All of a sudden she's motioning for me to come up on the stage. She thrusts a microphone into my hand and whispers "Say something Steven." So I give a little impromptu speech about what we're doing, then people applaud, then someone comes and gives my speech again, in Chinese. More applause. I go down to get off the stage and go get a drink, and a Chinese couple comes up to me. The matriarch says they own a restaurant in South Carolina, can she have a photograph with me? Sure, I say. So her husband photographs her with me, then she photographs her husband with me, then someone else photographs all three of us. By now a small line has formed of people wanting to be photographed with me. I estimate I was photographed with about 70 different people. It took about 40 minutes. I have to go give my speech now. I'll check in later with an update if I can. For now, I'll leave you with a page from the event brochure. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post: all true.

In his year-end roundup of the 10 best new restaurants of 2008 Frank Bruni of the New York Times chose Momofuku Ko as number 1 and called it "a paradigm-busting experiment that, like so much of what Mr. Chang has done, heeds and adjusts for what a new generation of discerning diners cares most about — and what fuss and frippery they can do without." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/dining/3...html?ref=dining

Lotus of Siam exceeded my expectations, which were already pretty high. We turned the ordering over to the kitchen -- John is a regular there, what else is new? -- and the kitchen delivered. We started with several flights of appetizers. First some house-made sausage with a great deal of kaffir-lime leaf and a variety of other herbs. Use of copious amounts of fresh herbs is a signature of the restaurant and when we asked about some of the herbs they always turned out to be things we'd never heard of. Standing alone, one herb (pia pia?) tasted a little like soap and another a little like fish, but as components of dishes they were wonderful. A number of dishes were also garnished with bunches of herbs and vegetables that were meant to be eaten with the dish and really served to enhance each dish. Shrimp, similar to Chinese salt-and-pepper shrimp: Along with a combination platter of Thai beef jerkey and bacon-wrapped fried shrimp. With our first group of appetizers we had the Donnhoff Riesling Kabinett 2007. As mentioned earlier, Lotus of Siam has an incredibly deep list of German wines (as well as lot of other wines -- but I've never seen anything close to this many German Rieslings in one place). Then green-papaya salad, a superb rendition: This is a puffed rice dish similar to Indian bhel puri. Sorry I'm not doing better with dish names, but maybe Dave Ross will come along with some of that later on. I was too busy eating and photographing to take notes. Soft-shell crabs: This was a pretty amazing dish, illustrating some of the chef's non-traditional bent: tuna tartare with cumin. We had another Riesling with that second wave of appetizers, a spatlese this time, 2004 Emrich Schonleber: We then had tom kai kai, the Thai coconut soup with chicken. The soup itself was the best rendition I've had of that soup, though the chicken itself was unfortunately dry and overcooked. We then moved into entrees, which were all surprising. They utilized first-rate proteins like you'd get at a fine Western restaurant, but they were interpreted in a rustic Thai style. This is actually advertised as a noodle dish with bamboo-stick noodles, but you can't see the noodles under the short rib meat. Once you serve the dish the noodles reveal themselves and they're delicious. Moist, tender duck: Thinly sliced ribeye steak on a bed of cabbage: Finally, the most beautifully cooked and excellent piece of sea bass I've ever had -- by a significant margin. For the entrees we allowed ourselves to be talked into a red wine, the Starlite Zinfandel 2003, a very limited-production wine that turned out to go very well with the flavors (except for the bass, for which I held on to some of the Riesling). For dessert, fried banana, ice cream and sticky rice: The restaurant has received a ton of press. I felt like the other places we visited today were discoveries, whereas here we were making a pilgrimage -- a pilgrimage that lives up to the hype. Here's our posse (David Ross, me and John Curtas with chef Saipin Chutima): Because the meal was so extensive, and because it was so good we had to eat it all, it ended our eating day. So we didn't get to hit the Vietnamese or Korean places we had hoped to visit to round out our Asian categories. Nor did we get to have bubble tea or a bunch of other stuff. Next time!

It's not remotely like that dish, except for the bones part. The name of the dish was something like "sauteed chicken" -- very generic. It consisted of a whole lot of hacked up chicken with bones, skin and everything, stir-fried with hot peppers and a white vegetable we could neither identify nor get explained. It was tasty but a lot of work to eat. I filled a small plate with bones in order to get about an ounce of chicken. After the chicken incident we took a driving tour up and down Spring Mountain Road. The three-mile stretch of Spring Mountain Road that is Asian-dominated is quite dense with Asian-language signage and shopping centers full of shops, restaurants and massage parlors. If you study the photos you may catch a few details I found interesting. This is the unprepossessing restaurant Raku, which we will not be going to because they closed for the week after New Year's. It's a tiny izakaya that's very popular with local chefs. For our next food stop John took us to China Mama, where he said the dumplings (called "pastries" on the menu) are the thing. We had a variety of dumplings: 1- pork soup dumplings, 2- pan-fried pork potstickers, 3- steamed shrimp-and-egg dumplings, and 4- pork-and-leek buns. All top-of-the-form examples. The restaurant, it turns out, is also a Top 100 challenger and is conveniently located across from a massage parlor and a dumpster. This concludes the Chinese phase of the day. So far today we haven't had a bad dish. Granted, John Curtas carefully selected all the spots, and the dim-sum people knew we were coming and treated us like super-VIPs, but the Vegas Asian-dining scene, so far, has been quite impressive. We're now off to take an hour-long break before heading for Lotus of Siam.

Our day is programmed. I have little input. Yun Nan Garden, next door, was next. John strictly limited us to ordering two dishes, so we ordered three: cumin lamb, Yunnan-style pork with green beans and chicken with a whole lot of bones in it. Again, all terrific. Both restaurants incredibly cheap, by the way -- most entrees under $10. We also noticed that Yun Nan Garden is a candidate for Top 100 honors.

We left the Gold Coast (on Flamingo) via the back parking-lot exit and drove a mile north on Valley View to almost the intersection of Spring Mountain Road (the Little Asia area in Las Vegas lies along a three-mile stretch of Spring Mountain Road). We pulled into an unfortunately located shopping center -- you'd have to know about it to find it -- containing a Hunan and a Yunan restaurant: We started at the Hunan place, Dong Ting Spring, which is so humble they can't even afford to replace the old sign. We ordered a snack of 1- shredded pickled cabbage with hot peppers; 2- stir-fried smoked pig tongue; and 3- spicy fish fillets. Very impressive.

As we approached our first stop, things seemed inauspicious. The doubts about John’s leadership ability were palpable. We pulled into the parking lot of the least glamorous casino imaginable – the Gold Coast – and walked through a terribly depressing scene of people gambling away their disability checks at slot machines while chain smoking. The restaurant, for its part, was named Ping Pang Pong. The dim sum at Ping Pang Pong, however, turned out to be world class. An oasis. And here’s our guide, John Curtas, credibility restored.

As I type this I’m sitting on the tarmac near JFK airport’s new terminal 5, aka T5 (which incidentally represents the new pinnacle of human aeronautic achievement), on JetBlue flight 187, soon to take off for Las Vegas. I’m going to Las Vegas primarily to attend the Top 100 Chinese Restaurants in the USA awards ceremony (edited to add: click that link for companion topic), conference and gala on Monday (5 January 2009), about which I’ll post separately when the time comes. However, I’m flying out a couple of days early in order to explore some Las Vegas Asian dining spots. Today’s plan is to meet up with two fine gentleman, John Curtas and David Ross, and together visit an unholy number of Asian restaurants. I intend to post updates and photos throughout the day. I have already warned John and David that at the conclusion of each snacking event I will need a few minutes to upload photos and key in comments. Actually, I think I forgot to tell them that. David Ross is, among other things, the newest addition to the eG Forums hosting team. It’s a great pleasure to have him on board. David lives in Seattle, but thanks to his storied career as an “in-flight supervisor” with one of the airlines he’s able to jet to and fro at his pleasure. I won’t know, until shortly after I land in Las Vegas, whether David was able to escape from Seattle (the meteorological situation there has been grim of late), but I’m optimistic that if even one aircraft makes it out of Seattle today it will be the one that carries David Ross. I don’t quite know how to describe John Curtas. He seems to have a hand in just about everything. He’s a food writer, radio-and-television personality and blogger. He’s a relentless advocate for Las Vegas dining. There always seems to be at least one depressed, out-of-work New York or California chef crashing in his extra bedroom. He’s also an attorney. I think for a time he was a judge. He hangs around with people in law enforcement; if you get a parking ticket in Las Vegas he’s the guy to talk to. He’s somewhere between the ages of 35 and 90 – nobody is sure. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he has no children, or eleven. He dresses well. He knows everybody. He has unpopular political views. Needless to say he has a gorgeous girlfriend despite being not the least bit gorgeous himself. Las Vegas is full of luxury restaurant properties, based in the casino hotels. I’d love some day to dine at Robuchon et al., but that will have to wait for another trip. For years now, ever since my friend Matt Seeber moved out to Las Vegas to take the executive chef position at Tom Colicchio’s Craftsteak, I’ve been hearing bits and pieces about the “real” Las Vegas that lies beyond the strip: the part of Las Vegas where all the people who work in the casino hotels, not to mention the attorneys, judges and food critics, live, raise their children and eat. And I have a particular interest in Asian restaurants at the moment. I’m currently working on my second Asian-restaurant book project. Shortly after the publication of “Asian Dining Rules,” the editors of Chinese Restaurant News (the industry journal for America’s more than 43,000 Chinese restaurants) contacted me to ask me to do a book project for them: a Chinese-restaurant guidebook based on the annual Top 100 Chinese Restaurants awards (it’s actually 100 restaurants in each of 10 categories). So I have a great excuse to continue my life-long habit of eating more Asian food each day than any real Asian person. For professional reasons, of course. I’ve known for some time about a Las Vegas restaurant called Lotus of Siam, a Thai restaurant in a shopping center. Many reliable people have represented to me that it’s the best Thai restaurant outside of Thailand. John has promised us dinner there. The rest of what we’ll do today will be uncharted territory for me. There is, according to John, a several-mile stretch of Las Vegas-area highway that has in recent times developed into a Little Asia, with restaurants and shops representing all the usual suspects and then some. This is the area through which John will be leading our expedition today. John sent me an itinerary enumerating all our planned stops. It’s not clear to me whether he’s serious. If he is serious, it’s unlikely that we’ll survive the day. If we make half the stops, we’ll probably make it despite severe gastrointestinal distress. When we land I’ll post this, find John Curtas’s blue Acura at the passenger pick-up area, track down David Ross (whose flight arrives around the same time as mine) and we’ll be on our way. In the meantime I will resist the temptation to consume delicious in-flight snacks, so as to begin the campaign on an empty stomach. (A shout out to my dear friend and colleague Chris Amirault for the topic title.)

The authors Page and Dornenburg ( http://www.becomingachef.com/ ) have done a lot of stuff like that in their books, including a book-length treatment in their latest, "The Flavor Bible."

At one of the markets where I shop there's always a rack of about-to-disintegrate fruits and vegetables for a dollar a bag. Sometimes you can get like six eggplants for a dollar, or a ton of apples. I recently saw a bag of about a dozen zucchini and yellow squash on the rack and decided to build a vegetable curry around that. I made so damn much of it, it must have worked out to about one cent per serving.

Food is a big percentage of our household budget, and I imagine some people would think our food budget is ridiculously high, but in any case the operative term is budget. Abstract ideas for saving money just can't compete with a weekly budget with a hard spending limit. When I've tried to economize, I've gone to the grocery store once a week with $X and resolved not to spend more than that. I keep a running estimated tally while selecting groceries for the cart, and prioritize at the checkout. Usually I'm within the limit, but if the subtotal gets up to the limit then I 86 whatever is still on the conveyor belt (thus the need to prioritize at checkout). That's it. No more groceries for the week. You can actually eat quite well this way, even on a tiny budget. You can do a couple of splurge (splurge as in taking up a larger percentage of the budget, whatever the budget is, than other meals) dishes (fish, grilled meat, etc.) at the beginning of the weekly cycle, then you get into the cheaper slow-cooked and soup/casserole-type stuff mid-week. By the time Friday comes along (I shop on Sunday) you're into leftovers and staple starch items like pasta, potatoes and rice. It's also helpful to do an analysis of what you eat for breakfast and lunch. Assuming dinner is the big meal of the day, it's often surprising how much money can be wasted on breakfast cereals, deli stuff for lunch, etc. Yet these meals can be extremely low-budget if planned well.

A few recent meals, where dishes drew on a global larder, got me thinking. The term "fusion" has been used to denote any mixing of cuisines, but it seems to me it may be helpful to reference three distinct phenomena: The first I'll call migration. This is a historical phenomenon whereby agricultural and cultural exchange make new ingredients and techniques available. For example, tomatoes in Italy, hot peppers in Asia, potatoes in Ireland, chocolate in Europe, deep frying in Japan. This tends to be a relatively gradual process where an ingredient or technique gets absorbed by a new culture and becomes part of that culture's cuisine. Second, there's fusion. For example, French-Asian fusion (the most common early example of the genre) or Indian-Latin fusion (as at a newly opened New York restaurant). In some circles fusion is now passe. But I just Googled the word fusion and was amazed at how many restaurants, at least here in the US, claim to serve "fusion" cuisine as part of their very brand identity, all over the place: Fusion On Main, Flemington, New Jersey Madeleine's, A Fusion Restaurant, Evansville, Indiana ROCC Asian Fusion Restaurant, Dallas, Texas Cibo Fusion, Marion, Iowa The search results go on and on. What seems to be the tie that binds all these places is, I think, that they're doing something very self-conscious: it's all about a deliberate injection of elements of one cuisine into another, or a blending of a few cuisines. Third, I think we are now seeing a post-fusion movement in cuisine that for the moment I'll call "convergence." There are a couple of terms floating around out there like "eclectic" and the notion of "pan-" but I'm not sure they do justice to the phenomenon. Culinary convergence, to my way of thinking, happens not when a chef tries to combine French and Asian cuisines, but rather when a chef cooks without any regard for those distinctions. No doubt, we are seeing a new generation of globally minded chefs. So for example if you go to any of the Momofuku restaurants in New York City you will be hard pressed to label the cuisine. You can try to call it fusion but it isn't really fusion because it is so un-artificial. The cop-out is to call it "eclectic." And it is eclectic in the sense that it is heterogenous, but I think calling it eclectic trivializes the phenomenon and places it on par with crummy restaurants that serve "food from around the world." It seems to me we're looking at convergence: the merging of distinct cuisines into a unified cuisine. Before we sound all the standard "I don't want every restaurant to be the same" alarms, let's remember that we're not talking about every restaurant in the world being the same under some sort of evil corporate regime of forced gastronomic globalization. Some restaurants are regional, some are local, some are both, some are whatever. But right now I think one of the most important and delicious phenomena in cuisine is this notion of convergence. Nor does a unified cuisine mean that every practitioner of that cuisine will serve the same thing. To the contrary, that's mostly the case with regional cuisines. In the era of convergence, where there are no rules, chefs need be limited only by their creativity and their notions of what tastes great.

Ice-cream cakes seem to be hopelessly out-of-style. But I think they're great. Not the crap ones you buy in the supermarket or at the chain soft-serve places, but real ice-cream cake made at home from respectable ice cream. Will anybody join me in championing the humble ice-cream cake in 2009? I like to use two flavors of ice cream and a standard metal brownie pan. You let flavor number 1 soften enough to be spreadable, fill the pan a little less than half way with that flavor, then put it in the freezer to firm up while you soften flavor number 2. Then you can add flavor number 2, leaving some space at the top. It's also possible to put crumbled cookies, etc. in between the layers at this time. Then back in the freezer to firm up the top layer. Then the top can be drizzled with all sorts of toppings, like chocolate or butterscotch sauce, and decorated according to the whim of the ice-cream-cake chef. Freeze again. Take out of the freezer about 20 minutes before serving. I can't tell you how many times I've heard "I haven't had ice-cream cake in so long; I can't believe how great it is!"

The New York City restaurant economy has been surviving a year of recession pretty well for, I think, two reasons: First, for a significant portion of 2008 foreign money poured into the system on account of currency valuations, providing restaurants with substitute customers even as domestic clients spent less. (Also, overseas investors supported several new ventures.) Second, just as the foreign currencies (and economies) started declining, holiday season was upon us. So, while revenues have been down for restaurants we have not seen a large-scale die-off in New York restaurants. Now it's January. What's going to happen? I thought we could use this topic to speculate and also to track significant economic events in the New York restaurant business during this first part of the year.

Surely a professional bartender has certain needs -- speed chief among them. A very serious home bartender probably has some need for speed too. Accuracy is probably a concern for everyone. But if you're someone who just makes the occasional cocktail and you don't want to be loaded down with a lot of equipment I think the setup I have is quite space-efficient and simple: Increments of 1 ounce can be measured in the glass part of the Boston shaker, which is especially convenient when you need 2 ounces of X, 1 ounce of Y and 1 ounce of Z -- it's like using a kitchen scale almost, in that you just keep adding to the glass: X to 2, Y to 3, Z to 4. For anything smaller than an ounce, the measuring shot-glass can measure several different ways. (The markings appear to be blue, not red as I suggested earlier.) Both (along with a strainer) nest inside the metal part of the Boston shaker so you have those core essential cocktail tools all filling only the space of one glass on the shelf. A good setup for the dabbler, I think. Also, I just measured against the markings on the glasses with a better-quality one-ounce liquid measure. I didn't do it by specific gravity, so this isn't a totally reliable way to test, but the markings seem a lot more accurate than I'd have assumed.

With a magic marker, finding the factory angle and following that.

Our friend David ordered an insane amount of sushi for 8 people and then only 6 people came for dinner. (That was after David and I each ate about 40% of an antipasto platter for 10.)

As a non-serious home non-mixologist, I'll throw in that when I occasionally measure quantities less than the increments on the side of my Boston shaker (which are presumably not very accurate, which is presumably one of many reasons my cocktails are lame) I use a thing that looks like a shot glass with four sets of red markings: oz, ml, tsp and tbsp. It says MINI MEASURE on it.

It's also worth remembering that the perceived size of a knife varies a lot with how you hold and use it and with the design of the blade. If you're accustomed to a pinch grip, a10" knife is not going to seem longer relative you your hand than an all-other-things-equal 8" knife being held by the handle. You can also hold two different 10" knives and one will seem (and be) larger than the other in all dimensions save for blade length. Also, whatever knife you're accustomed to using becomes your benchmark. I have used a 10" Wusthof for years, but I recently spent a few weeks using a 8" Sabatier as my primary knife on account of some sharpening experiments I was doing. When I went back to a 10" knife, it seemed huge. It took several days to readjust. As mentioned before, the advantage of a larger knife is that you can cut larger stuff more easily with it. The advantage of a smaller knife is that you can fake it more easily for paring-type tasks -- stuff where you're working mostly with the tip area of the knife.

"Before eGullet, we would share our culinary queries with our friends and family. In the eGullet era, we can cast our questions and opinions -- whether they be about soup dumpling recipes or the best cuts of meat sold at a local Costco -- into the world at large. And the world answers." We're very pleased that Saveur magazine has included the eGullet Society in its Saveur 100 for 2009. This acknowledgment, from such a respected journal, is a great New Year's gift for all the volunteers, members and fellow travelers who have lent a hand in creating our one-of-a-kind organization. Many thanks to all of you for making this possible. We would also like to thank those who have provided the Society with much-needed financial support. As you know, we are a nonprofit public charity funded solely by donations. As 2008 comes to an end, those of you who itemize deductions in the US may wish to take advantage of a few more hours to support the Society tax-free for this year. All donations are tax-deductible to the full extent of US law. To make a one-time donation in any amount, please follow this link. To support the eGullet Society at the $50, $100 or $250 per year level, please sign up for a Society donor membership (note: you must already be an eGullet Society member in order to upgrade to a Society donor membership; if you are not a member please join). Society donor members receive an assortment of goodies, depending on which package they select. If you wish to share congratulations, please do so in this Member News topic. Wishing you a happy, healthy and delicious 2009. With relish,

This Hanukkah I had latkes -- prepared either by me or by our various hosts -- on six nights. I was able to observe and attempt a variety of techniques and thought I'd report a few observations, conclusions and instructions: - My ideal latke has a coarse potato texture but is not a nest of shredded potatoes. I'm not a fan, relatively speaking, of latkes made from a "batter" that has no identifiable potato texture. In other words, I like something in between those extremes. - There is no blade on the Cuisinart that achieves this texture. The fine grater makes batter and the coarse grater makes shredded-potato nests. The chopping blade is not reliable at producing a consistent, predictable texture. - The best way to get the desired texture is with a hand grater. The same size holes on the hand grater (either a box grater or a cheap imitation made-in-China "mandoline") that are too large on the Cuisinart medium grating disc are ideal when rendered on the hand grater. The hand grater tears and shreds, creating a lot of variation in texture. The Cuisinart blade, because it spins so quickly and is so sharp, just produces uniform shreds. - There are a couple of cheats available to get from the Cuisinart texture to the hand-grater texture. First, you can shred with the Cuisinart medium disc, run about a third of the product through the blender (or the chopping blade) and recombine. Second, you can shred about two thirds with the medium disc and one third with the fine disc. Both of these tricks are pretty effective, and necessary for production of any significant quantity of latkes, but assuming my ideal the hand grater produces a slightly more desirable end product. - Most people don't use enough onions. - Straining to remove the extra water is not necessary, since you can remove the excess water by hand as you form each latke. Saving and recombining the starch makes little or no noticeable difference in the end product. - Oil temperature is difficult to judge and maintain when shallow frying because only the very tip of the thermometer gets into the oil. So your thermometer may read 225 when your oil is actually at the ideal mid-300s frying temperature. You have to make a judgment call about what apparent thermometer temperature corresponds to a really good frying temperature. Of course, using a thermometer is essential unless you have magic powers. - Because you're shallow frying (of course many people either don't use enough oil to shallow fry, or use so much oil the they're deep frying -- but those approaches don't produce my ideal latke or anything close to it), there is a drastic temperature drop when you add the latkes. The situation can be helped by using as many pans simultaneously as possible, getting the oil temperature up a bit over the target before adding the latkes, not trying to use every square centimeter of available pan space and turning the heat to full blast once the latkes are in and until the temperature recovers. - Freezing and reheating is convenient and can maintain pretty good latkes, but there is enough of a loss in quality that I wouldn't do it unless preparing latkes for a huge party. - The oil debate is overblown. Most of them taste the same, that is to say they taste like nothing. Even the type of olive oil one would use for frying (i.e. not extra-virgin) has little identifiable taste. Peanut oil has a somewhat distinctive taste. Of the oils I tried I preferred peanut oil by a little bit but wouldn't bother to seek it out. Animal fats -- chicken or duck fat -- improve flavor substantially but most people aren't going to use them, either because of convenience, perceived health issues or the fact that you can't use animal fats with a dairy meal if you want the meal to be kosher. Still, if you're interested in latke-making, you owe it to yourself to try a blend of half poultry fat and half vegetable oil at least once. - Sprinkling the latkes with salt upon completion of cooking makes them taste better. - Don't be cheap with the paper towels. The latkes are better if thoroughly blotted. - DO NOT ADD OIL while cooking. This drops the temperature way down and creates greasy latkes. If you need to add oil -- which you will likely need to do -- add it between batches and then let the system come back up to temperature. - Keep the oil as clean as possible by running a straining utensil through it to remove the burnt bits and floaters. This will significantly reduce your odor problem and reduce the likelihood of a burnt taste in the later batches.

The thinness, lightness, blade shape and handle design of the Takeda ruled it out, for me, as a general-purpose knife. So a bigger one probably wouldn't have appealed to me -- I'd have likely discarded it along with the Kumagoro. The small Takeda proved great for dicing onions and, later, for slicing tomatoes -- precision tasks that don't require much force, rock chopping or blade length. I would really like to have a Takeda in that size just for those tasks. (This particular knife actually came from Takeda at a knife show, so Takeda did extra sharpening at the time.)

As Conal suggested, the 10-degree angle made a huge difference. So much so that it immediately ended the experiment: the Blazen sharpened to a 10-degree angle is such a formidable cutting machine that it completely outclassed every other knife we tried. Which reinforces the point that evaluating knives out of the box with factory angles only tells you how knives cut out of the box with factory angles. So my current opinion is that for someone who is going to use factory angles there's little point in upgrading from a Shun to a Blazen, but if you're willing to put in time with the Edge Pro to redefine the edge of the Blazen it's a superior knife. How well that 10-degree edge will hold up is an open question. (We also didn't try sharpening the Shun to 10 degrees but we didn't think that was worth the time.)

We have learned respect for the Blazen's steel. It has taken almost an hour of gentle coaxing with the 120 stone to raise a burr on a 10-degree edge. Now we're going to run it through the rest of the sequence, which should be much more straightforward. Later, when it's time to prepare dinner, we'll chop some potatoes and such.

We are setting up the Edge Pro and aligning to the black dot in preparation for putting a 10-degree (each side) edge on the Blazen.