Fat Guy

My 20-quart stainless stockpot from A. Best Kitchen (not the Le Creuset shown above) in Chicago cost $59. http://www.akitchen.com/store/stock-pots.html I've had it for many years now. The price hasn't changed in something like a decade. If you get it shipped there's that expense as well, but there should be similar pots available in other large markets.

I do not recommend plain aluminum. It's just less versatile. When you clean it you scratch the heck out of it, and you probably won't want to use it to make anything seriously acidic. I had two aluminum stockpots and upgraded to stainless. The aluminum ones are in my basement, languishing -- 20 quarts of unrealized potential each. Were they not so bulky I'd mail one to you.

The ratio I wind up using is slightly off from the CIA-recommended ratio. It's more like 10:7 (10 pounds of chicken parts to 7 quarts of water). This ratio was not really arrived at scientifically. It's just that when I make stock I usually buy 4 of these approximately 2.5-pound packages of chicken parts that they sell at the place where I do my grocery shopping. At 50 cents a pound for Murray's chicken parts it's a great deal. The parts are mostly backs, frames and necks and have a ton of gelatin-providing bones as well as flavor-providing meat. Then I add the mirepoix, less than half as much by weight as the stock -- probably more like 1/3 -- but I mostly do it by feel. There's a lot of leeway here, by the way. Also, my mirepoix can vary by the intended use of the stock. For example, this one was going to be made into chicken soup, so I added mirepoix and herbs. For some intended uses the herbs would probably not be desirable, and for others I might dispense with mirepoix altogether. I have also taken to adding a tablespoon of salt or so to the pot, even though I'm not sure there's a reason to. Anyway . . . once I've done all that I just fill the rest of the pot with water. This is a 16-quart stockpot. It comfortably held about 7 quarts of water on top of the solid ingredients -- that of course doesn't all quite come up to the lip of the pot. You're only going to put so much in a pot, so its rated capacity is always greater than its usable capacity. And I did top off periodically with water, so in the end I had about as much as when I started.

That conversion sounds right to me. That depends. If you don't want it to be less, you can periodically top it off with water to maintain the same liquid amount. That ratio should provide a very flavorful stock without any reduction. But if your next step is going to be that you're going to reduce the strained stock, that's another story. I definitely recommend a bigger pot. Stock-making is no more difficult or time-consuming as you scale up in quantity. So if you can make more per batch you can do it less often. Stock freezes so well that it's worth just making as much as you can per batch.

Yes I think we need Lobel's to send over a bunch more of those steaks so we can do a comparison across all methods.

I'm not sure that link supports the claim that the question has been settled.

So I was at dinner tonight with someone who knows everything about food, and he made the statement that "lox is not smoked." When I said I always thought lox was smoked he looked at me as though he was going to have me summarily kicked out of the Jewish community. Can we settle this question first, then move on to other smoked and cured salmon terminology?

But what you're describing is not bones only. It's "necks, backs and a few wings," in other words a combination of meat and bones. In the poultry-stock category, I don't think I've ever seen a stock made from bones only. With beef and veal stocks, I've seen it done but rarely.

Most of the time I think you can call what you have stock or broth. However, a stock made only from bones probably couldn't be called a broth, and a broth made with just meat and no bones probably couldn't be called a stock. Since both are rare cases, the overlap between the two sets is pretty near complete.

We're continuing to see periodic server slowdowns that require manual restart. There's not a lot we can do on our end except ride this out and restart the server whenever we notice it slowing down, but we are assured that the situation will be resolved at the service-provider level soon.

Roellinger holds a special place in my heart because, approximately 10 years ago, his was the first serious restaurant my wife and I visited in France as adults. We flew in to Paris, spent the night somewhere along the way to Cancale, had breakfast at our cheap hotel, then arrived at Bricourt. These are my notes from the end of that trip, after we'd also visited several other two- and three-star places. At the time, the restaurant had two stars. I never did make it back, but I'll always remember.

They are also designed for people who never cook. The fancier and more complex the oven, the more likely it is to wind up in a trophy kitchen that never gets used.

Pro Chef 8 (aka The Professional Chef, 8th Edition, from the Culinary Institute of America) proposes the following ratio: 8 pounds bones 1 gallon water 1 pound mirepoix 1 bouquet garni The mirepoix, in turn, is 2:1:1 onions:carrots:celery This is I think as good a formula as any.

I have mail-ordered (once; I even had the steaks shipped to another person's house in another state) and purchased "blind" from the Lobel's store (several times -- I happen to live just a few blocks away from the store) and believe strongly that it is the best butcher shop in the world, or at least the best I've ever been to or tasted meat from. Not the best value (as I've mentioned, I think DeBragga provides great steak at a reasonable price), but the best. It's the only butcher shop that I think consistently delivers steak that's as good or better than what's served at the very best steakhouses.

Ducasse calls for 1.5 inches in his written recipe, linked to above. I wouldn't go much thinner than that, but you never know. You could get lucky.

To be clear, it is not "Fat Guy's method." This is the method, with minor variation, favored by Alain Ducasse, who I consider to be the world's preeminent chef. Another chef I respect greatly, Tom Colicchio, had this to say on the subject: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3190/is_/ai_n16497977 I have tried this method on lesser steaks. It works just as well. I apologize for creating a red herring by demonstrating on a Lobel's steak, however the results are excellent with a supermarket steak as well -- if you can find a nice thick one or get one cut to order.

I think it comes down to the distinction between char and crust. What the Ducasse method accomplishes is a beautiful crust thanks to the Maillard reaction, without charring. In my experience the process of butter burning is something that happens in phases. Along the way to burning, butter gets brown, and brown butter is a really delicious thing. At some point, the butter then breaks down to the point where it has a burnt taste. That's when it's time to ditch it and start with new butter.

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If anything, this method keeps the sub-surface layer in better shape than high-heat blasting methods. But to clarify, the steak is not cooked for 45 minutes. It's cooked for 10 minutes on a side. Prior to that the edge fat is rendered for 10 minutes. And at the end it's allowed to rest for 15 minutes.

Quicker = higher heat. At some point you cross the line into charring, which is not the desired result. You also burn the butter. So you can speed it up a bit but not a ton. If you're cooking thinner steaks, quicker-cooking methods are I think most likely to give you a good crust while maintaining a pink interior, though I still recommend basting with butter at the end of cooking.

The steak I got was one of the best-marbled steaks I've ever seen. It was butchered differently from the photo too -- no big bone sticking out, etc. One thing I should note, though, is that the quality of the steak does not affect the efficacy of this method. Thickness is the bigger issue. If you get a nice thick rib steak from the supermarket, this method works just as well. In other words, it will make that steak as good a steak as it can be.

One problem with the Ducasse method, from a restaurant standpoint, is that it takes 45 minutes. That's just not acceptable for most restaurants, where they want to get your entrees on the table within about 30 minutes of you walking in the door. A 45-50 minute lag between ordering and receiving an entree only works in a Michelin three-star kind of setting where people are already planning for 2-3 hours in the restaurant. So it's understandable why steakhouses focus on quick-cooking methods. Which doesn't mean those methods are best.

Garlic was part of the plan but when I went to grab my one remaining garlic bulb, which had been sitting around for many moons, I found that all the cloves had dried out and shriveled up within the bulb. To the naked eye the bulb looked great, but as soon as I grabbed it I realized it was a gutted shell of its former self.

I've tried that -- in the firm belief that it would be a brilliant innovation -- and just didn't like the flavor. The potatoes absorb a lot of fat and the flavor of rendered beef fat in that amount isn't to my liking. With the steak, which absorbs little fat, it's different. It would probably work well with duck fat or lard but for some reason beef fat is an outlier, at least to my palate.

A couple of things Paul. First, just to be clear, this steak was a product sample -- as in they sent it to me for free (as well as a New York strip). The great thing about being a food writer is that even as you constantly teeter on the edge of bankruptcy you can dine like a billionaire. Specifically Lobel's is promoting its meat-of-the-month club. I got a two-month sample. If anybody would like to buy me a subscription for the whole year, I'll be your best friend. Second, the specific product was this: "USDA Prime Dry-Aged Bone-In Rib Steak." The retail, if you're paying, is $62.98. Lobel's is not cheap but offers the best. In terms of the timing, there are a two main issues. First of all, the 10 minutes spent rendering the edge fat does not contribute significantly to cooking. And second, the steak is really thick -- it's almost roast-like. The Ducasse method only works well on steaks that are thicker than about 1.5 inches, because you need some time to develop that crust. In terms of resting in a 150 degree oven, medium-rare is, according to most charts, 145 in the center and I think my steak was about 140 so it's going to take a long time for a thick steak like that to come up in temperature in a 150-degree oven. In fact I think the outside parts are well above 150 so the heat exchange at least for a little while will go the other way. Peter, long ago I used a thermometer but after the first couple of times I just went on faith. The finger poke doesn't work because that crust makes such a firm shell -- the steak doesn't feel the way you expect a steak to feel.