Fat Guy

Time was, you could go most anywhere and use any home oven. There was this big dial and you turned it to whatever temperature you wanted. The main exception was that if you went overseas you had to deal with a different scale. Today, most new ovens I see have digital controls that are hardly intuitive. In the past couple of months, I've been to several people's homes to cook and it has been nearly impossible to figure out how to work their ovens without a tutorial. Worse, in one case a meal was nearly ruined by the complexity of the controls, to wit who thought it was a good idea to shut the oven off automatically when the timer reaches zero? I would really like to see a return to sanity in oven controls.

As Alain Ducasse noted in the New York Times in 2002 (article here, discussed here), the standard American method of preparing steak involves high heat. I'd say that 99% of steaks I've had at steakhouses and in people's homes have been cooked either on a grill, under a broiler or in a very hot skillet. Yet, some of the best steaks I've ever had have been served at Ducasse's restaurants (and at other restaurants that use similar methods, such as Tom Colicchio's Craft places), where the steaks are prepared using relatively low heat. Demonstrating this method -- which I think is perhaps the best way to make a steak and has the advantage of being easy to do in the home kitchen with no special equipment -- is something I've been meaning to do for the past six years, ever since that article came out. The other day, though, inspired by the arrival of a USDA Prime 28-ounce dry-aged bone-in rib steak product sample from Lobel's, I decided to do it. Lobel's is arguably the world's preeminent butcher, and Ducasse the world's preeminent chef, so I thought it would be fitting to introduce the method to this fine piece of meat. One of the points Ducasse makes is that when you have a piece of meat this good, it's a shame to burn it. He prefers, as do I, to get a good crust on the steak with no charring. Once you char a steak, you're substituting the carbonized flavor of burnt flesh and fat for the, in my opinion, more delicious "roasty" flavor of the Maillard reaction and the beef itself. Okay, so here's the Ducasse method of making a rib steak, as interpreted by me. This is a 45-minute process, assuming you start with a steak that has been allowed to come up to room temperature or that at least has been out of the refrigerator long enough to take the chill off it. The method starts with a skillet -- in my case cast-iron but any good skillet works fine as does a pot like a rondeau -- heated to a medium heat. The steak is started on its edge. The reason for this is twofold: first, it renders the fat so you're able to cook the steak in beef fat (this echoes Ducasse's principles of flavor reinforcement, which are nearly universal in his cooking); second, it creates an appetizing appearance on the edges. Note that there was no salt or anything added to the steak before cooking, and that the pan is dry -- no oil etc. You're just putting the steak in the skillet on its edge. If you have a big fat steak (a lot of restaurants would call this a cote de boeuf) then at first it will stand on its edge without help. But eventually you'll have to get creative with the geometry by leaning and propping the steak against the sides of the skillet in order to keep it upright while exposing as many parts of the edge as possible to the heat. If you're willing to stand there with tongs and secure the meat in various positions for 10 minutes you'll get an even more uniform and beautiful crust. Here's how this process unfolds during the first 10 or so minutes of cooking: Now it's time to cook the steak on its flat faces, 10 minutes on a side. The way I prefer to do this, which is not exactly the same as how Ducasse recommends in the Times but is something I've seen done in restaurant kitchens, is to dump out enough of the beef fat so that there's a thin coating of it left in the pan, plop the steak on its flat face, and add a couple of tablespoons of butter. A lot of people recoil at the notion of using butter as a cooking fat with steak, but I've found that butter has two excellent properties: 1- butter, more than most any other fat I know of, is a huge aid to the Maillard reaction, and 2- the combination of butter and beef fat makes a tastier cooking medium for steak than oil. Meanwhile, I've been cooking some potatoes over medium heat in a nearby skillet. I should mention that if you're looking for a good, simple potato dish to accompany your steak then home fries are a possibility and happen to take the same 45 minutes that the steak takes to cook. There are a lot of ways to make home fries but this is a method that has worked for me and seems to make home fries that work particularly well with beef. You start with roughly chopped potatoes, salt, pepper and olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. The ratio I'm using here is two medium-size russet potatoes and half a large onion. The onion will go in later, though. If you start the onions and potatoes together, the onions will burn. Now, after about 10 minutes the butter has browned to the point where, if we don't do something, it's going to start imparting burnt flavors to the steak. In the first stages of browning, butter has desirable flavors. But eventually, even with medium heat, it breaks down. So it's time to renew the butter by dumping the cooking fat and adding another couple of tablespoons. I believe Ducasse recommends only adding the butter towards the end of cooking, but I think the steak comes out a little better when you use butter all the way through to coax a little more of the Maillard reaction from the steak. So we are at the 20-minute mark. We've browned our edges and cooked one side of the steak in a mixture of beef fat and butter for 10 minutes over medium heat. We've dumped the fat and flipped the steak. Witness the crust: Once I saw that crust -- beautifully browned but not at all charred -- for the first time I became a believer in the Ducasse method. But it gets better. Now you add some more butter, let it melt, and spoon it over the crust (aka basting). This is also when I sprinkle the steak liberally with coarse salt. I know this is much, much later in the cooking process than anybody will tell you to salt a steak, but I find that it yields good results. Here we are about to baste. And the crust gets even better after basting. Continue to cook for about another 10 minutes, basting occasionally if you like (though you've derived most of the basting benefit from the first baste). Meanwhile, our potatoes are coming along, with some browning happening here and there. It's still too soon to add the onions, though. Now we are almost at the 30-minute mark, so the last thing to do is flip the steak and baste (and salt) the other side. Now the steak will have to rest for 15 minutes in a warm place (the Ducasse rule of thumb is to rest meat for half as long as you cooked it) before being carved. I use a warm plate near the stove. A 150-degree oven is also an option, and if you use on oven you can rest even longer without worrying about the steak getting too cool to be appetizing. This is when I add the onions and some butter to the potatoes. It's a convenient timing mechanism: no onions until the steak is out of the pan. It prevents the onions from burning before the potatoes are done, and it also has the benefit of really forcing you to let the steak rest because your potatoes won't be done until the steak is fully rested. After 15 minutes our home fries are done and our steak is well rested. There are fancier ways to carve a rib steak than the way I do it, but this is really simple. You just cut out the bone with a paring knife, then slice the steak. Note that here I use a santoku knife but that's not an expression of personal preference. I don't really like santoku knives. It's just that this happens to be the most recently sharpened knife in my kitchen. If you look at the Times piece, there are some slight variants between the instructions there and the way I do it. In part that's because I'm not good at following instructions and in part it's because I've seen some variation in actual Ducasse restaurant kitchens where I've spent time watching the line cooks cook steaks. Most of all the method affords a lot of flexibility, so a little more or less flipping, turning and time won't have a huge impact the way it might on a super-hot charcoal grill or under a Jade upright broiler. A good variant of this method is the one Dave Scantland chronicles in the Daily Gullet in "The Chronicles of Chuck."

A recipe like that might work if I decide to go the route of preparing the dough in advance, however if the kids are going to get hands-on then I think it would work better to have the fewest possible ingredients and a dough that can be mixed without a KitchenAid-type mixer. Is that just impossible for shortbread, or is there a variant of shortbread recipe that can be manipulated by hand, with a spoon or perhaps with a non-electric hand mixer?

Lactose intolerance and dairy allergy are two different things. Dairy allergy has to do with casein and such, I think. In any event, I'm just following the rules here, because I'm good. What's a good shortbread recipe?

I don't think there's any institutional preference for sweet or savory, but I think a tofu-and-vegetable project is a risky proposition in terms of the kids' preferences. Regarding a couple of earlier suggestions, there isn't much available in terms of special equipment like a food processor. So far the ideas that strike me as most likely to appeal to the kids are the ones that involve decorating stuff. Something that involves a dough -- preferably one the kids can be involved in mixing -- that gets portioned out, they can decorate it with various stuff, I guess each kid's creation gets put on a piece of wax paper with his or her name on it, then it gets baked in the oven in the kitchen upstairs, and a little while later the kids can have their masterpieces.

Oooh. I definitely need to test that recipe.

Eleven kids, three teachers, and me. There's no set time limit but we're talking about three-year-olds. I imagine 15 or so minutes would be best, attention-span wise.

It's an allergy issue.

I have to go in to my son's nursery school later this month and demonstrate a talent. Since I have no talents, I figured at least I could cook something. The school has a kitchen, however any prep or whatever would have to be done in the classroom. Example: it would be possible to have each kid decorate a cookie, then I could take them up to the kitchen and bake them. Except (see below) most cookie recipes could be tough. No knives. There's also a portable burner that could be used in a classroom, for what I have no idea. In terms of allergy and dietary restrictions: no nuts or seeds, no dairy (that means no eggs either), everything has to be kosher. I was told no flaming desserts either. Given that my top picks -- made-to-order omelettes, bananas Foster -- are out of the question does anybody have any ideas?

Of that list I've been to: Alice's Tea Cup - New York, New York Butchart Gardens - Victoria, British Columbia The Fairmont Chateu Lake Louise - Lake Louise, Alberta The Fairmont Empress Hotel - Victoria, British Columbia The St. Regis Hotel - New York, New York I'm not sure what the criteria are for declaring a tea room's greatness. Certainly from a tea connoisseur's perspective (that would not be me, but I know the breed) these places don't serve tea that's all that remarkable. But if you're talking about the whole experience of the setting, the little sandwiches and all that then these (as well as probably most places on the list) seem like valid choices. There are probably some others I'd add too, such as the Waldorf=Astoria in New York and the Wedgewood in Vancouver. Also the Tea Box Cafe at Takashimaya in New York. The only restaurants I've been to where I felt the tea experience -- tea as in the beverage itself -- exceeded what I could easily accomplish at home are the Alain Ducasse signature restaurants. There, if you order mint tea, they prepare a beverage for you that consists of black tea, dried mint, and fresh mint snipped tableside from a live plant. Also they have (or in the case of the New York restaurant, which is now closed, had) a lapsang souchong that was so potent it bordered on tasting like bacon. I've never had one as good. Probably the best tea I've had in a commercial setting was at the Yixing Xuan Teahouse in Singapore. The owner, a guy named Victor Low, is a tea-appreciation fanatic. But there are no sandwiches or anything like that, so I'm not sure how the place would be categorized.

A couple of bar owners I've talked to about these machines have said the best option is to lease them from a company that takes responsibility for maintenance.

I've usually had quite good food at the original Blue Ribbon, and at the other Blue Ribbon establishments, but I think at this point it has been bypassed by many other restaurants. To me the significance of Blue Ribbon is that it was a very early foray into what we can now see as the new paradigm for restaurants. It was perhaps the first restaurant I can recall where the cuisine was totally untethered from the other trappings of the restaurant. Eric and Bruce Bromberg are both Cordon Bleu graduates (as in, Cordon Bleu in France), and Bruce even trained at Pierre Gagnaire. The restaurant opened in 1992. I probably ate there for the first time in around 1994. I remember at the time having the same conversation with friends, cooks, servers -- a lot of people who ate there felt that Blue Ribbon did what it did at the highest level, that it was essentially a top-tier kitchen in terms of talent but was putting out deceptively haute-rustic food in a zero-ambiance setting. A decade and a half later, Momofuku became the banner restaurant of a generation by operating along similar lines.

There have also been a number of contradictory study results (as noted in the document you've linked to). Up until pretty recently, I'd have dismissed all support for wet aging as uninformed, however a meal at Table 31 -- a steakhouse in Philadelphia -- demonstrated that a lot can be accomplished with wet aging.

Gael Greene went to Do Hwa last week and had this to say: http://www.insatiable-critic.com/Article.a...t/Easy%20Korean Scroll down to: "Deep Into Korean Eats with the eGullet King" (Hey, I didn't write the headline . . .)

I had a lovely meal with Gael Greene last week. This is her blog entry about the experience: http://www.insatiable-critic.com/Article.a...t/Easy%20Korean Scroll down to: "Deep Into Korean Eats with the eGullet King" (stop laughing)

Some people only like a certain amount of mineraly funkiness to a steak, or none at all. For those who love that taste and aroma, the best steak is the one that's aged as much as possible before it rots. For others, a more moderate amount of aging is preferable -- I think that's most people; in fact most people probably prefer the "fresh" taste of wet aged. Who doesn't?

I'll divide this post into two parts: first a quick report on the food served at the pre-release party for my book, ASIAN DINING RULES, which I hardly got to taste; and second some comments on Bryan's post. I should preface all this by saying that Kampuchea hosted my book-release party, which in plain language means that Ratha Chau threw me an awesome party for free. I should also note that when Bryan says "I sampled enough that I felt the need to go back for a full meal" he means he was the seven-foot-tall guy parked right by where all the food came out of the kitchen (where, coincidentally, most of the eGullet people at the party congregated). There were not a ton of food photos taken at the party, because the photography was mostly about me mugging with various guests (you can see it here in all its shamelessness if you're a glutton for punishment), however our photographer did capture a few food images. These are the tamarind baby-back ribs, made from Duroc pork. They're served with a lime-cilantro dressing. These are, in process, miniature versions of the num pang (sandwiches) that appear on the restaurant's menu and that are also forming the core of the menu at the Cambodian sandwich offshoot that Kampuchea is soon opening. This one is with grilled cauliflower atop eggplant spread: And this one is with honey-soy peppercorn catfish: These are deviled eggs with sambal chiles and scallions, topped with miniature fried anchovies: Corn fritters with rice flour crust and a honey-chile drizzle: Desserts were provided by the Mehtani Restaurant Group, the Indian-restaurant group based in Edison, New Jersey, about which I've written plenty (Kampuchea doesn't do desserts): Here we have Ratha Chau and Scott Burnett, the co executive chefs and partners at Kampuchea: There were a bunch of other things served at the party that were not photographed. Maybe Bryan remembers some of them. For me it was like an accelerated version of a wedding where you never get to eat anything at your own wedding (I think I had about half a sandwich and a deviled egg). Anyway, back to Bryan's comments about the food at Kampuchea. I think, based on his order, his comments mostly make sense, though I'm particularly interested in his impressions of the sweetbread dish upon which he has yet to elaborate. I think of Kampuchea much the same way I think about Momofuku Noodle Bar: the menu covers the spectrum from hearty-rustic to haute-refined. I'd place most of Bryan's picks towards the hearty-rustic end of the spectrum, save for the sweetbreads which I think are more towards the haute-refined end. For those interested in the more haute-refined items on the menu, the ones I recommend from the current crop are: The spicy organic chicken salad with cabbage, shallots, bell peppers and crushed peanuts. I've had this twice now and think it's way beyond anything the name of the dish -- "chicken salad" -- implies. The seared sweetbreads with shiitake mushroom broth, enoki mushrooms and basil salad The seared monkfish liver with beef jus, macerated spicy red plums, pickled daikons and basil. The thinly sliced house-cured duck breast with shaved green papaya, dried shrimp, basil salad and lime-chili dressing. The whole head-on grilled Spanish mackerel with lime-lemongrass Thai chile dip (if you like mackerel). The sauteed-in-rum blue crabs with chives, red onions and honey soy sauce. These are a pain to eat and don't yield a lot of meat but are delicious. The crispy pork belly with honey, scallions and apple cider. Lined up as four cubes on a rectangular plate, this is the most refined presentation of any dish on the menu, and it's one of the best pork-belly dishes I've had. Balancing that out with some of the more rustic dishes on the menu, I'd recommend some sandwiches above others. I think the best deployment of oxtail on the menu is in sandwich form not the stew (I agree with Bryan that the stew is unwieldy enough to deter me from ordering it again). The sandwich contains sweet pulled oxtail meat with a tamarind-shrimp sauce (plus the standard toppings of pickled carrots, cucumbers, cilantro and chile mayo). It is awesome. Also impressive is "The Kampuchea," with house-made pork pate and headcheese terrine. Were I getting a three-sandwich tasting I'd get those two plus the house-cured bacon with charred whole pickled Thai chiles and red onion. Although, the veal meatballs are a serious contender as well. My usual noodle order is what I think Bryan got: chilled flat noodles with seared chili tiger shrimp, crispy pork belly, chives, cucumber, lettuce hearts, hoisin and chile sauce. I think now that it's winter, on my next visit I'll try the Duroc pork katiev (pronounced "k'thee-yew"), which is a hot soup with flat noodles, pork broth, braised pork belly, salted pork shoulder, sauteed pickled mustard greens, sprouts and herbs . I haven't tried it yet. Last week four of us went and ordered an insane amount of food, five beers and a fruit juice and the tab was $170.

Does anybody have any information on Cecil's whereabouts these days?

This also seems a little user-unfriendly. Just let people leave messages with their requests, and call them back with yea or nay. I think these in-demand, limited-seating restaurants just are not doing a great job of dealing with the demand. There seems to be little imagination being utilized. Clearly, it's not possible to meet the demand at the precise time the demand wants to be met, so some people are going to be disappointed. But this is the hospitality industry. Find a way to disappoint them in as nice a way as possible, or find a way to say no without saying no, e.g., a longer waiting list where you make clear it's a long shot. And don't waste people's time.

I was searching around for some credible punch recipes and came across this one for Rocky Mountain Punch in a piece by Julie Besonen in the New York Daily News. It appears to be an old recipe handed down by Dave Wondrich. I wonder if this might be appealing to a mass audience.

It's poured in to the hot soup at the moment of service. Just a tiny bit. When it's first served there's the distinct (though not huge) flavor of alcohol and as you eat the soup and the alcohol mostly evaporates the flavors change.

I too just got the third edition, and the second edition also one of my favorite books, but I have barely looked at it yet. Indeed, I went to look something up today and I grabbed the second edition. Looking forward to discovering the third edition with you, Paul.

PopsicleToze, as I understand it, you would poach the shrimp in the stock instead of boiling them in water. It's just a way to reinforce the shrimp flavor.

In Peterson's shrimp and smoked salmon sauce, on page 213 of SAUCES, he starts by cooking the shrimp shells in (regular) butter for approximately 10 minutes. I've tried the same as a base for stock (a lot of the sauces in the book start with a stock, as this one does) and it has seemed nice to me. I think if you totally blast the heat you'll burn the butter, but if you use mild heat it's not really an issue.

The trouble is that any prepared items to be consumed at the venue will have to be prepared in the venue's kosher kitchen that afternoon. And I doubt I can claim much if any space there -- it's really small. I might be able to do ice soccer balls at home but probably not syrups and such.