Fat Guy

That's an incredible price. Costco needs to start stocking these things. Then they'll be ten bucks.

Yeah but you're talking about 16 ounces of cold water in a 16-ounce water bottle. If you want 16 ounces of liquid in a glass, perhaps with ice, and you don't want to fill the glass so high that only the surface tension of the meniscus is keeping it from running onto the floor, then you actually need a much larger container. Indeed, I think my proposed 28-ounce glass size is just about ideal for 16 ounces of liquid plus a few ice cubes, leaving like 6 ounces worth of empty space at the top of the glass.

Okay, now this is pretty amazing. I bought this thing thinking there was a good chance it would wind up in the garbage. Instead, it turns out to be a surprisingly responsive and accurate device. The sampling rate is 2 x per second, and the included probe (which is a bead probe, not a needle probe -- I'm still waiting for the needle probe) is very fast. I've attached a 7-second video here where I stick the thing into a pot of boiling water. You can see the response time is almost instantaneous -- it goes from the ambient temperature near the pot (I was holding it above the pot so I could make a quick video) to an exact 212 degrees F in maybe 1 second. This is from a $19.95 thermocouple with the included probe. It takes any type-K probe. And it even comes with a totally usable, if a bit ugly, aquamarine zippered carrying case with a belt loop. thermocouple.mpg

Too much cumin in the chorizio. ← Wow, you are right about that. I bought some today. The Fra'Mani chorizo is a terribly unbalanced product. It's just not good. A waste of eight bucks. I'm really disappointed that Fra'Mani would allow something like this to go to market, and that Fairway would sell it. Once in a blue moon schedules require that I shop at Fairway on Saturday morning instead of Sunday morning. Sunday morning is much more pleasurable.

Shrimp cocktail

Deli containers: these seem to be the standard for professional cooks. They can't shatter, their pliable construction and the little ridge around the top means you can get grip them even with greasy hands, they're cost-free, and their wide flat bottoms make them hard to tip over. For home use, though, they sort of fall below the lowest acceptable aesthetic cutoff line. Mason jars: they're attractive bits of Americana, and these days you can even buy them with handles. They also come in the 28-ounce size, which is the size I really prefer (food-service plastic tumblers seem mostly jump from 24 to 32). But, I find them really unpleasant to drink from. There's a Texas-style barbecue restaurant in New York City called Hill Country that opened this year, and they use these "drinking jars" for lemonade and such. I love to look at them and hate to drink from them.

The beauty of πr²h is that a 32-ounce glass is not anywhere near twice the dimensions of a 16-ounce glass if you make them both out of the same materials. The reason those 32-ounce and 1-liter beer steins are so imposing is because they're thick-walled and have large handles. I have several 32-ounce tumblers made out of SAN plastic resin. I think they're used by poolside bars and by restaurants like Pizza Hut. They're hardly elegant but they're what we use around the house for water. They don't look all that big -- most people would I think be pretty surprised to hear they hold a whole quart. I just wish the glassware makers would get with the program and offer a range of tastefully designed large glasses.

I'm feeling profoundly uncreative here, given that it never occurred to me to do anything other than eat them as cookies. But now I'm thinking.

In the land of the 44-ounce soft drink, it's surprisingly difficult to fine large drinking glasses. If you go to most housewares stores, they sell, for example, sets of 36 glasses: 12 each in 9-, 12- and 16-ounce sizes. Occasionally you see 20-ounce glasses. Rarely anything much larger than that, unless it's something plastic designed for use at the beach. Me, I like a glass that's at least 28 ounces. I don't fill it all the way. Maybe I put 20 ounces of liquid in. But when I want a glass of water, I want enough in there such that I don't need to keep refilling it. And I'm not alone: the existence of these huge soft-drink sizes in every gas station and fast-food restaurant in America surely indicates that people like to drink a lot. Why this disconnect between how much we drink and how big our glasses are? Conspiracy theories welcome.

Dry aging affects texture and flavor. Texture: on the one hand, because the cellular structure of the meat breaks down during aging (both dry and wet aging), the meat becomes more tender. On the other hand, with dry aging (as opposed to wet aging), you also have a lot of moisture loss. So the meat becomes, essentially, firmer. As a result, a dry-aged steak is both firmer and more tender than an unaged steak. The texture, ideally, is a little bit like refrigerator-temperature butter. Flavor: the moisture loss alone leads to a concentration of flavor, so whatever flavors are in the meat are effectively amplified. The aging process itself also causes flavor development. It's not exactly easy to describe these flavors; they sort of have to be experienced. Some people react to their first aged steaks by thinking the meat has gone off, but it hasn't. Those funky, mature flavors are good, like the flavors of good cheeses and the like. That's normal. Don't worry about it. It just means the steak wasn't gassed and shrink-wrapped like they do with supermarket steaks. Supermarket steaks will stay red and beautiful even after they're rancid. Butcher steaks will develop gray areas while they're still quite fresh.

That makes sense. On the issue of what to wash produce with, we have a topic going on veggie wash.

So, I must say, the Comark P250 is pretty cool. Now I have to borrow a Thermapen, and maybe a cheaper thermometer, and do some comparisons.

I'm just amazed at Mark Bittman's ability to pull together such huge numbers of ideas. That being said, I don't think this was one of his best pieces. Maybe it's just personal taste, but on the entire list there wasn't a single one that jumped out at me as a must-make item for my next party.

Don't let an efficiency expert anywhere near that place.

Inagiku's tempura is technically excellent, but limited. At least it was last time I was there. Whereas Nobu has a very good selection -- probably 25 choices if you add the tempura section of the menu to the various tempura stragglers elsewhere on the menu -- including the amazing sea urchin tempura and the signature rock-shrimp tempura.

The problem with Kano Yama is that it closes at 12. I would be very reluctant to go to any sushi place anywhere near within half an hour of its stated closing time. There was just a tale of woe told on the Yasuda topic of an experience torpedoed by the bum's rush. This is an unfortunate cultural issue that I've never found a good way around. So unless you want to run the risk that you'll be sitting there while they clean up the sushi bar and hover for your order, I'd go someplace that's open later.

I've always had good luck with Blue Ribbon Sushi.

You're correct on all counts. Small pieces of rye or black bread, or both. Chopped or sliced red onion. Chopped hard-boiled egg yolks basically as a garnish to decorate the platter. Also, little pickles or pickle spears are nice. Olives. Tomato wedges, slices or halved grape tomatoes. Here's a photo of how the Stage Deli presents chopped liver. I'm sure you can do better.

Yes, fresh squishy dinner roll variants are excellent candidates for the method as are yeast-based pastry items.

Yeah the 5-minute book has come up on a couple of other topics. But the idea there is that you spend an average of 5 minutes a day on a process that takes several days to complete. It's a long-fermentation process with limited prep time, as opposed to a quick process start-to-finish.

My "I need bread NOW" technique is to go to Le Pain Quotidien, which is a few minutes walk from my apartment, where I can buy a baguette à l'ancienne that's approximately five times as good as the best bread I'll ever make at home using any method known to humankind. I only know one person -- and I know a lot of serious amateur bakers -- who consistently produces bread at home that's as good as the bread from the better New York bakeries. Fundamentally, baking bread at home when you live in a major city with access to good bread is kind of nutty. But still, sometimes you want to do it. And sometimes you want to do it fast.

I agree that Artisanal's online selection is pretty good. There are even some interesting cheeses on the ready-to-eat page. But compared to the actual store? Fuhgeddaboudit. And for what Artisanal charges for shipping, hey, call me up and I'll go to the store for you, ship the stuff, and wash your car.

Anna, this method works particularly well for softer loaves that don't strive for that artisan, crusty, hearth-baked look and flavor. So, for example, pain de mie. There's an excellent recipe for pain de mie in the book -- I've used it successfully several times -- that not only gets the job done in 90 minutes but also avoids use of a specialty pain de mie loaf pan. Instead it uses two glass loaf pans, one slightly larger than the other. You make the loaf in the smaller pan, then put the larger pan on top, then weigh it down with dry beans or pie weights. Incidentally, for those who care about this sort of thing, the book "Bread in Half the Time" won the 1991 Julia Child Award (IACP) for Best Cookbook in America.

John, I think one issue is that the more successful of the mail-order cheese vendors have done much to standardize and scale up their operations. So they're mostly selling the cheeses that they get a lot of on a regular basis. The erratically available, interesting, limited-supply cheeses don't necessarily make it onto the websites. I mean, if you go into Artisanal it looks like there are several times as many cheeses on offer as you see on the website. I'm wondering what would happen if you called up one of the smaller shops, like Ideal, where they have an excellent selection but not a huge mail-order operation. Maybe you'd be able to talk to someone who actually handles the cheese and can get past the generic offerings to find you some really good stuff. In any event, I'd try the phone with all these places.

P.S. if it's just your hands you're worried about, you can wear latex gloves and do the hand-picking method that way.