Fat Guy

I'm eager to learn the truth, though I have a lot of faith in Korin. If you look at most of the other double-edged knives on the Korin site it offers a left-handed option, but on the Tojiro page it says "Blade: Double-Edged (50/50 balanced)" and "Knives with a 50/50 balanced, two-sided blade do not need to be altered for left-handed use." I have to play with the machine more. I'm wondering if it's really necessary to use the machine's angles or if with the aid of a spacer (or freehand) one can do steeper angles.

This just in:

Very, very, very few top restaurants do Sunday lunch. Even the few top-tier restaurants that are open midday Sunday (e.g., Aquavit) are typically doing brunch. One noteworthy exception is Bouley, which has long served lunch 7 days a week. Per Se and Momofuku Ko are also options, though tough to book.

The Tojiro is 50/50 according to the Korin website.

I've sent an email and I'll see what I can do about a macro shot. You're also free to borrow the thing if you'd like to test-drive it. (The again you're in California!)

In my opinion the best macarons in the city are coming out of the pastry kitchen at the Modern. Adour's macarons are superb as well, though maybe not quite at the level of the Essex House macarons that were the best in town during that restaurant's lifetime. Per Se also puts out great macarons, even though the ones at Bouchon Bakery are not noteworthy (go figure). However, those are all restaurant macarons, produced in small quantity by a restaurant's pastry kitchen -- that's very hard to match. The only place I know of where you can walk in and buy macarons retail that are as good as what you might get at Laduree is La Maison du Chocolat.

The literature says "Grinds at optimum angle recommended by knife manufacturers (18 to 22 degrees)." I wonder if that means 22 for the coarse and 18 for the fine. How would that differ from the recommended angles for a double-edged 50/50-balanced Japanese knife?

That will be an interesting experiment, then. I guess worst-case scenario is I take the damaged blade to Korin and they fix it up. How does it compare in hardness to my Wusthof?

Tonight the knife passed the ripe tomato test with flying colors. No this wasn't a vine-ripened August tomato, but it was pretty soft after about 8 days on my kitchen counter. I am so pleased with the electric sharpener that I am reevaluating my future knife-purchasing plans. I think I'll simply go with bolster-free knives from here on in. I've been meaning to pick up a 24cm Tojiro-DP Gyutou, and I think this is the push I need.

And here is the audio, for those who wish to listen at their leisure: http://wunc.org/tsot/archive/sot1203c08.mp3/view

For those interested I will be discussing the book on NPR's "The State of Things" with Frank Stasio around 12:40pm Eastern time today. Easiest way to listen is online via WUNC, where that show originates: http://wunc.org/programs/tsot

Dear eGullet Society Members, Supporters and Fellow Travelers, As you may have read yesterday, the National Bureau of Economic Research has announced that the US economy has been in a recession since December of 2007. This recession has been unkind to many people, including too many of our members in the US and around the world. It has also been a difficult time, financially, for nonprofit organizations. This "nonprofit recession," as many are calling it, is unfortunate in that it deprives those who need help at the exact moment they most need it. The eGullet Society had slowly been feeling the pinch all year, but with September's accelerated downturn the situation has become more acute. A number of donors looking to save discretionary income have chosen not to renew for the coming year, and new donors have become few and far between (in the past, we have always seen the latter number outstrip the former). Our operations are not immediately in jeopardy, however our scholarship program is. Each year the Society has funded $20,000 in culinary arts scholarships. Each year we receive heartfelt notes of thanks from the students, writers and cooks who, thanks to the eG Scholarships program, were able to pursue educational and research opportunities that would have been unavailable to them without a grant. In order to continue to award scholarships at a time when people most need the help, we are going to need to raise substantially more money in the coming year than we have in the past year. We are beginning our year-end fundraising drive and hope to raise $10,000 by the end of December -- $5,000 to underwrite a scholarship and $5,000 to fund the Society's operations. Those of you who are active, participating members can expect to be contacted personally by a member of our volunteer team. But you don't have to wait to donate, nor do you have to be a member. I urge you to pause for a moment to consider, if you have not already, how the Society finances its work. An organization of this scale cannot operate without money. Though we have a large and wonderful team of volunteers and very low overhead, every month in order to provide our community with its online home we have Web hosting and other operations expenses, and our scholarship program requires large cash outlays. Our "business model" is similar to that of PBS or NPR: we "broadcast" for free to anybody who wishes to tune in to our channel. We feel it is very important to keep basic participating membership free. At the same time, we depend on a percentage of our members to make voluntary donations of $50, $100 or $250 per year. Without a sufficient portion of our members making voluntary donations, we could not function. Member donations are our largest source of revenue, supplemented by a few smaller revenue streams such as institutional sponsorships and merchandise sales. 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, depending on which package they select, increased personal messenger storage allotments; increased ImageGullet storage; additional features, including personal messenger with carbon copy and attachments, unlimited searching without flood control, and priority access to new features upon release; exclusive gift items; and most importantly the knowledge that they are supporting the eG Scholarships and other program services of the eGullet Society. For higher levels of support, please contact me directly: sshaw@eGullet.org or 212.828.0133. All donations are tax deductible to the full extent of US law. If your employer has a charitable-gift matching program we can help you with that paperwork. There are many other ways you can help as well: host a Chinese New Year fundraising dinner at the end of January, purchase your holiday gifts through our Amazon.com commission links, or become a Society volunteer. Here's a list of ten ways you can help. With relish,

A good example of a cocktail bar that passes the speed test is Flatiron Lounge in New York City. They do huge volume, they make those drinks super-fast, yet quality is impressively high. As a result, Flatiron is incredibly popular and I wouldn't be surprised if it's the most profitable of the serious cocktail bars. And it is exactly for those reasons that I much prefer PDT and the other slow cocktail bars. I think Dale comes from a culture of barmen where the gold standard is that you walk into a bar, you sit down, someone takes your drink order promptly, and within a very short time frame you have a well-made drink in your hand. A place like PDT is operating much more like a serious restaurant for cocktails: you come in, you sit down, a server brings you a menu, you place an order, the kitchen prepares your order with care, and eventually a cocktail is placed on the table in front of you. It can easily be 10-15 minutes from the time you walk in the door until the time you have a cocktail in front of you. That situation would drive Dale crazy, I'm sure, and it would probably drive a lot of customers crazy too. In fact last night at Pegu one of my friends was clearly annoyed by the fact that it takes more than 2 minutes to get a drink there. But these places are designed exactly to appeal to some customers and not others. Right? (The jigger issue seems like a red herring.)

Just saw this story ("Michelin Hong Kong Gives 3 Stars to 2 Restaurants") on Bloomberg.com: "Robuchon’s latest haul boosts his total star tally to 23, pulling ahead of Alain Ducasse, who’s unchanged at 16. Ducasse’s Spoon at the Intercontinental Hotel didn’t make the list." I didn't realize Robuchon had accumulated so many stars.

At this point one would kind of have to be living under a rock -- or be in nursery school -- not to know about factory farming, battery hens, etc. It's more likely that most people just don't care, or don't care enough or have the financial flexibility to pay more for food than they have to. In any event, aware or no, those of us in Western industrialized nations are living in societies where all food is created by about two percent of the population. If one lives in Tanzania then 80 percent of the population is involved in agriculture. I happen to think the former is preferable. Moreover, lack of involvement in the agricultural process may be more likely to make people vegetarians than anything else.

I don't necessarily buy in to the logic that it's somehow hypocritical to eat meat but not be willing to kill animals. There are lots of goods and services I utilize that I wouldn't build or perform myself. I'm not going to go out my window wearing a harness, but I have no moral qualms about paying a guy to wash my windows. I'd be totally grossed out by performing open-heart surgery, but if I ever need it I'll happily let my insurance company pay a doctor to perform said surgery. And I have no problem paying a farmer to farm, or a slaughterer to slaughter, or a butcher to butcher. If they ever need someone to write something, they can hire me.

I was thinking the knife was a little sharper than when I do it by hand on a stone. I chopped an onion and it felt a little sharper. I carved up a leftover turkey breast and it felt a little sharper. I cut some salad ingredients and it felt a little sharper. But today I sliced up some Citterio Abruzzese dry sausage and realized the knife is a lot sharper. Which may be an equivocal statement, given that I'm not the most talented by-hand sharpener. Still, I've got to figure that I'm better at it than 99% of the population, so if the electric sharpener offers an improvement over what I can do by hand then it's certainly a good general-use product.

Yes it does. The book has already been published, though, so I'm no longer entertaining candidates for inclusion!

I've been trying to figure out a way to take some useful photos. Camera didn't work so well so I tried my scanner, which also didn't work so well. Anyway, here's the Sabatier knife I used for my first attempt: Here's a closer view: And here's the closest view I was able to get: I think it's possible to see the two strata of the edge -- the coarse-ground one topped with the fine-ground one. You can also see I need some practice with the machine to get them a little more uniform where the blade curves. Still, this edge works very well indeed. You can also see it's a fairly smooth edge. And it's not like the machine takes off a ton of metal. It's only going to be significant over a period of many years, I imagine.

A capital idea. I can probably keep my Wusthof chef's knife going for 100 years this way, until it is a paring knife with a very big handle. Now how the heck do I find such a place in Manhattan?

Sorry I missed this topic. I have long been a fan of Sweet Chef Southern Styles Bakery in Hamilton Heights, and their pies are also sold at West Side Market and Fairway. Or at least they were last time I bought one.

We didn't have pie for breakfast the morning after, simply because we didn't have access to pie. We'd been at my mother's for Thanksgiving and we didn't take home any leftovers because we were heading out of town for two days (we picked up the leftovers Sunday morning and have been making up for lost time, however). But on Friday night we visited some friends in Connecticut, and they had so much pie in their house that I feared the sheer quantity of pie would create a rip in the space-pie continuum -- a pie wormhole or other pie singularity. There must have had ten pies, only a couple of which had even been started on Thanksgiving. There were homemade pies, store-bought pies and farm-stand pies. There were three species of pecan pies, a couple of pumpkin pie variants, a coconut cream pie and a bunch of other pies. Had we consumed any more pie we surely would have required treatment at a tertiary care center.

I was at Tuesday Morning over the weekend and noticed, on the clearance rack, a number of new-in-box Waring Pro electric knife-sharpening machines (Model KS80). These were marked as $160 retail (though the street price is more like $100). The sale price at Tuesday Morning was $50, and the clearance price was $40. In addition, we had coupons for 50% off any clearance item, making the final price $20. I have long been skeptical of electric knife-sharpening systems but, given that I was faced with the prospect of acquiring what seemed like a pretty nice one at a price essentially tantamount to free, I felt compelled to buy it even if it just meant testing it on a crummy knife and posting about my results. The unit is brushed stainless and black. It is a three-stage sharpening system. There's a coarse wheel, a fine wheel and a stropping wheel that is somehow geared to turn in the opposite direction of the other two wheels (the packaging touts this as a great benefit). There are two plastic guides for each wheel that maintain the preferred angles for the left and right sides of the blade. You turn on the machine, place the knife in one of the guides and pull it slowly along the length of the knife, tilting slightly upward as you get to the curve of the tip. (The instruction manual recommends the number of seconds for different size knives). You do this with coarse left and right twice, fine left and right twice and stropping wheel left and right twice. More repetitions may be necessary on stubborn knives, the instructions say. The whole process takes about 30 seconds. Subsequent sharpenings are supposed to need only the fine and stropping stages. The coarse is basically to establish the edge and angles that this machine uses, and to rejuvenate knives that have become very dull. For my first experiment I chose a decent but underutilized knife, a Sabatier 8" chef's knife from Thiers-Issard. Not a fancy knife -- this is surely a stamped knife and was not expensive -- but one that does good work and hadn't been sharpened in a while. I was absolutely astounded with the results. In just a few seconds, with little effort and less skill, I got better results than I get with a stone. A very sharp, smooth edge -- at least by the standards of an amateur sharpener like me. Was it a samurai sword? No. Did it come out as sharp as if Chad Ward had sharpened it, or that guy at Korin, or even the average Edge Pro aficionado? Not likely. But it cut an onion like nobody's business. I was so pleased with the results, and so pleasantly surprised, that I felt compelled to try it on some better knives. So I took my workhorse 10" Wusthof chef's knife and my Wusthof bird's beak paring knife and ran them through the system. I think the edge on the better knives came out even better. The stropping stage really seems to contribute a lot, in particular. The device is not perfect. On the big-ass chef's knife there's about 1/2" of knife right near the bolster that the machine can't reach. I don't actually cut anything with that part of the blade, however over time I expect the electric sharpener will create a weird blade shape. Not that I get very good results down at that end of the knife when sharpening by hand on a stone either. In addition, needless to say, the powerful spinning stones on the electric sharpener take more metal off the blade than hand sharpening does. Still, it's not a terribly significant amount -- especially when you're only talking about the fine wheel and the stropping wheel (you only have to use the coarse wheel once ever per knife, assuming you keep it sharp thereafter). Those two issues come down to a question of the desired longevity of your knife. I like the romantic notion of owning a knife for 50 years but I'm happy to replace $100 knives (which are the most expensive knives I own) every, say, 10 or 15 or 20 years. No problem. I also think, when purchasing knives in the future, I'll gravitate towards ones without a bolster. I assume this machine does not have the right angles for Asian-style knife edges, but I know less than nothing about that.

A press release came around today that begins: "The owners of Grayz announced today that they will unveil a new concept in early 2009 under the name Gneiss and that Chef Gray Kunz, who is expanding into international markets, will no longer be associated with the restaurant. "

With the right combination of pot, oil and temperature, there should be no burning at the bottom of the pot (and very few unpopped kernels). If I can muster up the resources to do some photography next time I pop popcorn I'll demonstrate.