Fat Guy

There are a lot of ways to go about making a stock from or with shrimp shells. Me, I'm largely in alignment with KennethT on making essentially a shellfish stock like one would use as the base for a classic bisque. In other words, a very rich, reddish stock that can stand up to cream and such. I prefer to use butter as the fat for "roasting" the shells but I doubt that claim would survive a blind taste test. I also think (and think this claim would survive blind tasting) shrimp stock is much better if you're working with head-on shrimp. Indeed, if you're not working with heads, it's probably sensible to throw in some other crustacean shells (lobster, crab -- whatever you've been, we hope, collecting in the freezer) and make more of a general shellfish stock. Unless you're specifically saucing a shrimp dish, in which case there's a specific argument for an all-shrimp stock, the mixed shellfish stock will pack more flavor. Another thing that can be done, ala Peterson, to punch up the flavor of a shrimp stock while preserving a clear shrimp flavor is to use fish stock as the liquid.

What would be a link to a reliable recipe?

The odd thing is that Colicchio already has multiple infrastructures in place for taking phone reservations at his twenty or so restaurants. At Ko they sort of had the excuse that they would have had to invest in a whole new phone infrastructure. But Tuesday Dinner could have just used the main line at Craft.

Maybe I could provide fresh OJ and a couple of those soccer-ball-size ice spheres for the punch bowls (how do you make them?). I was at a dinner party the other night and that sphere lasted all night with no appreciable shrinkage -- you could have crashed the Titanic into that thing. Brilliant name, by the way.

How much do you think that would suffer from being made with crap bar orange juice from concentrate? I figure that's what we're looking at if any fruit juices are utilized.

moderator's note: merged topic -- ca Our son's nursery school is having a big casino-night event in February as a fundraiser and one of the things they want to do is have a custom-designed cocktail. Or I suppose it could be a classic cocktail repurposed. There are two components here: the cocktail and the name. The cocktail has got to be something fairly straightforward that can be, most likely, batched and mixed by whatever bartenders happen to be sent over by whatever catering service (I imagine we're looking at 200-300 cocktails for the evening). It should utilize off-the-shelf, commonly available ingredients. Maybe there could be one specialized ingredient that I could acquire a bunch of and contribute to the mix. It should be a crowd pleaser that non-cocktailians will find accessible. And, while this is not typically a concern outside the walls of PDT, it needs to be kosher (no bacon-, shrimp- or cheeseburger-based beverages). In terms of the name, the name of the school is Habonim (ha-bow-neem, which I believe means "builders"), and it would be great to have a better name than "The Habonini" or "The Habotini." But Habonini or Habotini will do in a pinch. Any thoughts on how to approach this project?

I'm trying to get that number down from about 90% to about 80%. But seriously, I have been looking at the possibility of a prolonged period of reduced income and have been trying to hedge by reducing expenditures. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that one of the first things to go were most natural/organic/whatever groceries. For the past few years, despite my doubts about the merits of these products, I've been buying a lot of them in part because having become a parent I'm now more likely to make decisions on a "just in case" basis. But now I'm back to regular meat, milk, eggs and such. That move alone is saving probably $20-$30 a week on the grocery bill. The other night, for the first time in a long time, I rejected a dinner proposition because I knew it was going to be expensive and I felt that it would be irresponsible to spend the money. In the past I'd have just gone for it and tried to compensate later somehow. But I feel I don't have as much flexibility if indeed we are headed for a prolonged recession. If we're not, well, it never hurts to economize anyway. As a thought experiment, the other day I was thinking about how well it would be possible to eat for free in New York City. When you consider all the free samples, happy hours and the like that are available here, I think it would be possible to do pretty well. I mapped out a few eating itineraries that could yield several thousand calories a day of decent quality food. I imagine that won't be as easy to do if the economy stays really bad for a really long time, though. And really, anywhere you live, if you have a Costco membership you can live off the free samples.

It's not necessary to use a ton of cream, or any cream, when making chowders. As I understand it, old-school New England chowders were based on seafood, salt pork, butter and hardtack. But my suggestion would be to work from a milk-based chowder recipe like this one from the Washington Post earlier this year. Substituting shrimp stock for the recommended "2 1/2 cups fish stock or vegetable broth" can, I imagine, only improve the outcome.

In New York we recently lost the New York Sun -- the whole newspaper stopped publishing -- which I thought had the best restaurant reviews in town as well as other interesting food coverage. I get the sense that the New York Daily News has cut its food coverage, or at least cut the budget supporting it. The New York Times seems thus far to be unaffected, and the New York Post seems to have more and better food coverage now than in the past. Go figure.

Strongly agree. ← I think that point can nearly always be made about wine, though, or really about any luxury item. Diminishing returns: that's just what you expect. Once you reach a certain point in the pricing progression, the curve of improvement flattens a lot. A $20 bottle of wine can be dramatically better than a $10 bottle of wine, but a $200 bottle of wine isn't likely to be radically better than a $100 bottle -- it's probably going to be a little bit better. The Ko $50 pairing establishes a very solid baseline. You get good, interesting, well-matched wines. You don't need to spend any more. The $85 pairing (which I've had once) is a little bit better -- I think if you're a serious wine aficionado it's worth the extra $35 (if you're me, it's an unnecessary indulgence). It's hard to quantify these things but let's say you get a 35% improvement in quality when you go from the $50 to the $85 pairing -- that's a 35% improvement for a 70% price increase. Not a bad deal if you care deeply about wine. The 200% price increase when you go from $50 to $150 (which I've done twice on occasions when someone else was paying), if I had to quantify the improvement for purposes of argument, I'd say is something on the order of a 50% quality improvement. To me, I'd have to be both wealthy and more serious about wine than I am in order for that to be a sensible investment. But I feel the same way about wine in general, which is why in a given year I might buy between zero and one bottles that cost more than $40 retail or $100 in a restaurant. Then again, for some people the $50 pairing isn't worth the money versus tap water. It all depends. So anyway, I went to Ko last night with some people who had never been and who are extremely serious, knowledgeable judges of cuisine. It was interesting to drop that sort of group into Ko at this stage of the restaurant's evolution because it made clear that Ko has been upping its game steadily since opening and is now a far more impressive restaurant than when it opened. More than half the dishes were new or heavily revised since my last visit and I felt that every new dish contributed to elevating the meal. I'm sorry I didn't take better notes (or photographs, ahem) but one example of a dish that I thought was more refined than anything I'd had before at Ko was the new iteration of the dashi course. This was a dashi with hand-torn pasta and thinly sliced matsutake mushrooms, and then it contained a number of enhancements to amplify the characteristics of said mushrooms including pine-needle oil (no, I never knew there was such a thing -- they extract it themselves in house) and Lagavulin 16-year Scotch. The restrained use of those two ingredients gives the most earthy, woodsy, peaty dimension to the soup -- I really got the sense that the key ingredients in the dish had been waiting since the dawn of time (or however long they've been making Scotch) to be brought together into this soup. The main course is now Millbrook venison, which I think is an improvement over the duck. The egg, the frozen foie, and the fluke-buttermilk courses are still there because those are true signatures and deserve to be there, but just about everything else has evolved or is entirely new (I'll try to fill in the blanks if I go again soon). Even the amuses were impressive. They've replaced the pork-fat English muffin with something even better: a butter biscuit with mirin. And there's now a foie-gras truffle as an amuse. Plus the symbolic pork rind, which isn't really symbolic of the food at Ko anymore but is still cute.

It's not disgusting. It's also not browned. Stepping back from the specific examples -- because I think there are many to refute the hypothesis -- I think the big problem with the browning-is-better hypothesis is that it's a one-size-fits-all hypothesis whereas cuisine is not a one-size-fits-all world. It's like taking a condiment -- chimichurri sauce, ketchup, whatever -- and saying that because that condiment is good it should be used on every dish in the world.

If you put browned meat in the chicken salad it would probably be disgusting. Flavoring unbrowned meat with pan juices is a different scenario. With respect to braised brisket and browning, I just tried a direct comparison in December and found no appreciable difference. I started with two briskets as close to the same as I could find: I browned one and didn't brown the other: (I browned it a bit more than that -- that's a photo in progress) I braised them in matching pots with the same amount of beef stock in each: I then cooled each, separated the meat from the stock, refrigerated overnight, defatted the stock, sliced the meat and reheated the meat in a reduction of the stock. It was possibly possible to tell the two apart, but not by flavor. The browned one had drier edges and that was about it.

Steak tartare.

The reason I'm harping on the chicken salad example is that I'm trying to establish basic refutation of the hypothesis (which only requires one solid example), however I don't even think the claim is true as a general sense. There are in my opinion whole categories of dishes that taste better when not browned. For example, soup. Chicken soup with skin -- particularly browned skin -- just wouldn't be right. In addition, there are a lot of dishes where there's a flavor you don't want overwhelmed by browning. For example, earlier this year during truffle season I was at L'Absinthe, a French place here in New York, and had this dish: There are a few reasons why roasted/browned chicken would have been the wrong choice for this dish. First, because those browned-skin flavors would have competed too much with the truffles. Second, because the dish is basically served in a broth a crispy skin would have been made soggy. Finally, the chicken is cooked in a broth, which infuses it with flavors that probably wouldn't come through in a roasting scenario.

Chicken salad? ← Actually Steven, This applies to Chicken salad too. I took a hint from Ina Garden ( Barefoot Contessa) who said she's tested every single way to make chicken for chicken salad and roasting bone-in breasts was the best. Does she include the skin? I've heard the argument for roasted chicken but the way I've heard it the idea is that cooking the chicken bone- and skin-on holds in the moisture. But then the skin and bones are discarded. So there's nothing browned in the chicken salad. Just moist, white, boneless, skinless chicken chunks. My guess -- not that I've tried it -- is that chicken salad with skin would be kind of gross.

Chicken salad?

You can lead a horse to water . . .

As of today, Diner's Journal is captioned, "The New York Times Blog on Dining Out," so they've taken Bruni's name out of the masthead. Over time, Bruni's contribution has shrunk, and other people's have grown. This seems to be another step in that direction. ← If you go to the Dining main page and look at the link to Diner's Journal, it uses the language I quoted above.

We discussed it, and indeed the photographer (Chinese-American) was eating that way, but I wasn't going to browbeat everybody into eating a certain way. It's also in the book:

$4.6 million judgment against Saigon Grill. Edited to add: I saw this on Grub Street a couple of days ago, then yesterday the story was on the front page of the New York Post ("Fall of Saigon") and there was the above-linked feature in the Times. It was covered in other outlets as well. Assuming the judgment represents a correct application of the law to the facts then it will send a huge signal to the industry that you can't get away with substandard treatment of your workers just because you're an ethnic restaurant.

You can now go to the HarperCollins website and get a small taste of the book. You can read the whole introduction and the first couple of pages of each chapter.

Carla Spartos from the New York Post went with me to Moksha, the South Indian restaurant in Edison, NJ, last week. We got stuck in traffic for HOURS. But she still wrote a flattering story and they also found some sort of lens for the camera that makes me look 30 pounds lighter.

My thesis is exactly that the blog is by Bruni and "other people." In other words it's Bruni's blog with guest pieces by other writers. Certainly, although when you add up all the posts by everyone else it's a greater number than Bruni's tally, his is the most prominent voice by far. Even the Times characterizes it as "Diner's Journal: A blog by Frank Bruni and other Dining section writers on restaurants and food." I agree, though it remains to be seen how Grub Street will shape up now that Josh Ozersky has migrated over to The Feedbag.

A couple of weeks back I went with a food writer named Kelly Dobkin to a place called Grand Sichuan House, in Bay Ridge (that's in Brooklyn, way the heck out there). We had a terrific meal and, even better, she wrote this story about it. The story chronicles our meal, illuminated by some terrific photos by Melissa Hom.

But again I don't think the Diner's Journal blog is part of the set that includes Eater and Grub Street. The Diner's Journal blog, despite contributions from others, is to me really just the personal blog of Frank Bruni -- an extension of what he does in the paper. It's also not updated with anywhere near the frequency of Eater, Grub Street, et al. I think the Eater/Grub Street axis represents something actually new in the world of food-news coverage. Diner's Journal is a standard-issue newspaper companion-blog.