Fat Guy

Well yeah, except the same manufacturer's I.R.F.S. "Next Generation Food Safety Meter" has a big, fat, juicy C/F selector right on its face. I'm wondering if it's actually a food-safety issue: having a switch anywhere on the surface might get the thing unapproved by health agencies?

I wouldn't even call Noodle Bar a second choice or compromise. I've had meals at Noodle Bar that were better than meals I've had at Ssam Bar.

It's not usually worthwhile to order roasted coffee by mail. Perhaps for a totally exceptional place like La Colombe -- several of the top restaurants in New York use La Colombe even though La Colombe is in Philadelphia -- it's something worth trying. But if you have a place in town that's roasting coffee competently on premises and not letting it hang around in bins forever (or makes it possible for an enthusiastic customer to get freshly roasted beans regardless), and assuming you aren't willing to roast your own, locally roasted is the way to go.

One should basically never go to Ssam Bar for lunch, for the reason you've stated. The best bet at lunch has long been Noodle Bar. That said, I haven't yet been to the new Noodle Bar location so I can't vouch for it 100%.

I'm not sure I agree that All-Clad contributes to a better product. In some cases, more expensive equipment does contribute to a better product, in some cases it doesn't, and in other cases it does but only if you have a sufficient level of expertise to take advantage of it. So I like to determine whether a given product will actually help me improve my cooking. Of course there are other factors: convenience (a piece of equipment may make cooking easier, even if it doesn't make it better), elegance (some things just look nice), the gee-whiz factor (I like toys as much as the next person). Anyway . . . this morning I boiled a pot of water and stuck all four of my thermometers (the four I could find, at least) in there. The results were surprising. First the good news: Polder. I don't think they still make the exact model I have, though I do see it in the occasional store -- probably old ones still knocking around the shelves. The most similar current model I could find on the manufacturer's website was model 602-90 -- pretty much the same thing. This digital thermometer with an oven probe proved surprisingly accurate. It measured boiling water bang-on at 100 C. When I switched to F, it mostly stayed on 212 but oscillated between 211 and 213. I suppose there are convection issues within a pot of boiling water that can account for such fluctuations. In any event, that's accurate enough for me. Because the intended use of this thermometer is to probe an item in the oven for a long time, I don't hold it against the Polder that it took about a minute to settle on the final temperature reading. Now the bad news: all my other thermometers totally suck. Comark Dial Thermometer T220A. I had long wondered why my instant-read thermometer was so damn slow. I got it as a giveaway at a trade show, it has some corporate logo on it, and the vendor was proudly saying that they were free instant-read thermometers. But I got a little more suspicious than usual when, under this morning's controlled circumstances, it took more than 40 seconds for this shirt-pocket thermometer to reach its cruising altitude. So I found the model number on the bottom of the dial and looked it up on the manufacturer's website. It's not an instant-read thermometer! It also was highly inaccurate, measuring boiling water at 200 F on the nose. Reading further on the manufacturer's website, however, I found out that this thermometer has a calibration nut. The manufacturer recommends calibrating in ice water, but I used boiling water. Now it's working. It's not a particularly useful thermometer, though. Taylor. Again I couldn't find my exact thermometer in current production, however current model #5911N is very close. I have two of these. As far as I can tell they don't have a calibration option. And they are not accurate. They aren't even the same as one another, no less the same as the temperature of boiling water. One of them came sort of close at 208. The other was down at around 202. Both are going in the trash. The other bad news is that, after years of having the crap kicked out of it, my Polder is in its final days. You have to bang and knock it to get it to register the switch between C and F, and once in awhile it spontaneously shuts off and won't go back on until you jiggle the battery (more of a problem if you're using the timer function). So I am effectively down to no useful thermometers. This presents an opportunity, though: I can start from scratch. Now I just have to decide whether I'm going to try to pull this off for less than $50, or if I'm going to spend triple that or more. I've got to say I am very reluctant to buy a Thermapen. Even were I convinced of all other aspects of its utility, I'd be turned off by its inability to display both F and C. It's ridiculous that this isn't part of the feature set. I use too many charts and references from all over the world to be bothered with a thermometer that can't switch back and forth.

If I'm cooking a simple meal for the family I just wear whatever I'm wearing and make adjustments for comfort (roll up sleeves, whatever). But if I'm doing a serious cooking project -- e.g., frying potato latkes for 30 people -- I always try to wear long sleeves so as to protect my forearms. I also prefer long sleeves whenever I cook in someone else's kitchen where I don't know the exact position of everything -- for me that's how most injuries happen. Just the other day I seared a nasty line into the sleeve of my shirt when I was taking something out of a friend's oven and my forearm hit the next grate up. That would have been my skin had I been cooking in short sleeves.

Cost of oil. I suppose if I deep fried often I'd develop more of a concern here, but vegetable oil is so cheap at places like Costco (something like $12 for 2 gallons) that I wind up using about $3-$4 worth of oil when I deep fry. Of course, if you deep fry often enough, you can reuse the oil. So either way it works out pretty economically. Plus, with this new-to-me method, I'm going to be able to use less oil because I'm not going to be worried about the temperature drop. Tempura. If you're just cooking a few small, thin pieces of battered stuff at a time then you don't really have to worry about much of a temperature drop. The temperature drop is more of an issue when you cook a whole bunch of fries, or several pieces of chicken at once.

When I was growing up, my parents used to buy a one-pound tin of Lazzaroni Amaretti di Saronno cookies about once a month. The distinctive square red-and-orange tins accumulated and my mother put them to good use: each one received a label and became the storage vessel for "string," "buttons," "pencils," you name it. To this day, there are probably a hundred of those tins in my mother's apartment, even though she hasn't bought the cookies in about 13 years. Last week I was looking for a food gift to bring to some cousins who were having us over for a party, and I spied the red-and-orange tins on the shelf of the market where I do my weekly shopping. They're not cheap: about $18, and that's about the lowest price you'll ever see (most places charge $20+). Once you have a tin, these days you can save a little money by buying refills in paper bags, but you only save a few dollars and you don't get the tin. It had been a long time since I tasted a Lazzaroni Amaretti di Saronno cookie. They were my father's favorite cookie, in part because he loved them and in part because at the end of his life he was on an uncompromising low-fat diet (this was when they thought low-fat/high-carb would spare you from heart disease). Lazzaroni Amaretti di Saronno cookies have only three ingredients: sugar, apricot kernels and egg whites. An "armelline" extract is made from the apricot kernels, and the finished cookies are a little bit biscotti-like, but not really. Within the tin, they come wrapped in paper, two small cookies to a packet. (They are, by the way, certified kosher by the O-U -- I checked because these cousins are very observant.) According to the marketing literature, Lazzaroni Amaretti di Saronno cookies are still made using the recipe created by Davide Lazzaroni in 1718. After my father passed away in 1995, the Lazzaroni Amaretti di Saronno cookies just weren't a part of our lives. I didn't consciously avoid them, but I guess something in me didn't want to encounter them. I think when I bought the gift I just assumed they'd go up on a shelf and be forgotten. I didn't imagine the cousins would open them right up and start passing cookies around. But there I was, an open tin of Lazzaroni Amaretti di Saronno being held out to me, the paper-wrapped cookie couples nestled together waiting to be eaten. I reached in, unwrapped, took a bite. Lazzaroni Amaretti di Saronno cookies are even better than I remember. They have a beautiful crunchy-chewy texture, the apricot-kernel flavor (which you probably would guess was almond) is haunting, they're not too sweet but they're sweet enough. The elegance of these cookies, formed from such simple ingredients, is astounding. And those tins! It's worth buying the cookies just to have the tins, and it's worth buying the tins just to have the cookies. Good thing they come together.

Sorry, what I meant was: where can I order a small quantity of 2,4-Dithiapentane from, in the US?

Yasuda is an imperfect restaurant. You can have all sorts of mediocre meal experiences there if you don't follow a very specific set of rules, some of which are totally unreasonable. It's sort of like an idiosyncratic family-run pizzeria where they make you jump through all sorts of hoops before rewarding you with a pie worth waiting for. From a customer-service standpoint, it's shameful. But, if you follow all the rules (two of which, in Yasuda's case, are don't go late and don't specify a budget -- both of which shouldn't be rules), you can get an amazing meal.

If you want to poke the thing you're cooking five times while standing there with the oven door open, I suppose you can take a bunch of measurements for practice, but then again you can do this with a cheap instant-read thermometer too -- it will just take a little longer. I'd be interested to know how much longer. If it's, for example, 30 seconds v. 1 minute to take 5 readings then that doesn't seem like a big deal. I guess the Thermapen has a thinner probe. This does introduce an idea, though. For just a few dollars (significantly less than the cost of a Thermapen, no less the two Thermapens I'd need in order to read F and C) I could buy a couple of cheapo supermarket chickens, stick them in the oven and use them for practice, poking and prodding them all over to take temperatures. Since I'd not be serving them whole (I'd probably make sandwiches or chicken salad from the mangled meat), I could really get in there and experiment. Hmm.

Someone has to be supplying live lobsters to, for example, Johnny Delmonico’s and Blue Marlin. I bet you can find that source. It's certainly worth a little asking around. Pre-cooked lobsters are not good. I've tried several. The only thing I'd sort of consider would be frozen raw lobster tails. They cook up pretty well. Not as well as live lobsters, but they can be tasty.

As I understand it, the compound 2,4-dithiapentane is the foremost flavor in white truffles. Similar to how vanillin is the dominant flavor in vanilla. Of course there are lots of other flavors, but you can get a lot of mileage out of just using the primary flavor. So . . . where can we get 2,4-dithiapentane? And once we have it, how do we convert it into fake white truffle oil? I mean, it's interesting to speculate but I'd like to order up some 2,4-dithiapentane, mix it with oil and taste it.

No but my fish connection just got nailed for $1 million in tax evasion and is headed off to prison. So I need to find a new supplier. But in the past I have done very well using restaurant suppliers for my larger fish orders -- like, when I've had to buy a couple of hundred dollars or more worth of product. As long as you make it easy for them, I've found that they're happy for the extra cash. Once you become high maintenance and behave like a retail consumer, though, they just hang up the phone.

The Thermapen certainly looks like a nice item, and the new models (3 and 7) accept oven probes -- they accept any type K thermocouple probe. But you're talking about a significant expenditure: $80 or more for the thermometer, plus $30 or more for the oven probe, plus whatever other probes you buy at $24 - $80 each. And the Thermapen isn't even switchable between F and C -- you have to choose one or the other forever when you buy it. So the question for me becomes what does a Thermapen do to address the issues that concern me better than the relatively cheap thermometers I already have? I have a $25 Polder thermometer with an oven probe (it switches between F and C, and it even has a timer) and a few non-electronic thermometers (instant-read, deep-frying/candy, etc.) that couldn't have cost more than $6 or so each. I'm sure they're neither as fast, accurate nor precise as a Thermapen, but they work. The problem is that they don't automatically place themselves in the exact right spot on a turkey, they have quirks in terms of what part of the thermometer actually takes the reading, and they don't work very well on, for example, a charcoal grill because the heat of the grill throws off the readings. Does a Thermapen address those issues? It seems to me that you can easily spend hundreds of dollars on a professional-level thermometer kit but it's not going to do an appreciably better job than a cheap thermometer unless you solve a number of other problems first.

My suggestion would be that you try to figure out what seafood purveyor is providing shellfish to the best restaurants in Madison. Most commercial operators, while not exactly user-friendly, will be perfectly happy to sell you a bunch of seafood for cash if you show up at the right place at the right time. You should be able to go out to some industrial park somewhere early Monday morning and pick up what you need. It's just a question of gathering the intel. One good code phrase to use when talking to restaurant suppliers is "I'm catering a dinner." Don't ask a lot of questions. Just be like "I need six two-pound lobsters Monday and I can come pick them up. Tell me what to do." That way the people on the phone will assume you're maybe not just a bumbling amateur, and they'll be less likely to blow you off.

While I don't think the sources I've seen have actually demonstrated that all truffle oil is fake, I nonetheless think this would be an interesting experiment. The chemical at issue is 2,4-dithiapentane. So, where does one get it and what do you have to do to it? Do you just put a few drops in some truffle oil or is there a process? And what's the recommended ratio?

Just a quick follow-up: there's no repeat scheduled as yet, but that doesn't mean much one way or the other. I wouldn't be surprised to see another one next year. Also, the music was courtesy of Jason Domnarski (piano) and Chris Hartway (guitar). Both musicians are Blue Smoke employees (server and bartender, respectively).

Maybe you're like me: I don't do a lot of deep frying. When I do it, I do it at home without any special equipment. I don't have a restaurant-quality fryer or even a home fryer. I just fill a pot with oil, stick a thermometer in, get the oil up to temperature and drop in whatever needs to be fried. If you're like me, you also experience a significant drop in temperature as soon as you add, say, cool chicken or potatoes or whatever to the pot of oil. The pot is small, the burner is weak, you don't have the kind of volume and energy of a dedicated fryer. So you heated the oil to maybe 350, assuming that's the called-for frying temperature for whatever you're frying, but as soon as you put the food in you suddenly have 275-degree oil. Ten minutes later it's back up to 350, but by then the food is irreversibly less crispy and more saturated with oil than is desirable. A comment by Rocco DiSpirito, however, has totally changed the way I fry. Rocco suggested that, if the oil drops 75 degrees (or whatever the number is in your case -- you'll have to experiment, but 75 is pretty normal) when you add food to oil, that you start by heating your oil 75 degrees hotter than you need it. So, if you want to fry at 350, you heat your oil to 425. You then add the food and -- voila! -- you have 350-degree oil. Then it's easy to hold the 350-degree temperature. So, the other day I tried this trick while making some breaded chicken cutlets. And it worked! For the first time I can remember, I achieved totally professional deep-frying results at home with no special equipment. It's really amazing how much better things come out when you preempt the temperature drop in this manner. Now feel free to tell me you always do it this way. But for me it was a revelation. Thanks Rocco. Needless to say, in order for this trick to work, you need to use an oil with a smoke point higher than 425 (assuming that's the magic number for your particular task and equipment -- it may be a little lower or higher for you). Most refined cooking oils (corn, peanut, Canola, safflower, whatever) will work just fine. Don't try it with unrefined oils, like virgin olive oil, though.

I know Garrett Oliver does beer dinners all over the place on a fairly regular basis, and I know Ken Callaghan does a few Blue Smoke theme dinners each year, but I don't know if or when their paths are scheduled to cross again. I'll ask.

A few weeks ago I was invited to a dinner event at Blue Smoke: a "Beer-B-Que." It was a six-course meal, and each course was paired with a different beer from Brooklyn Brewery. Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery and one of the leading beer authorities in the world, was on hand to speak about the beers, the pairings and just about anything else. I lucked into the seat directly opposite Oliver, and the two other people in our quadrangle were beer neophytes, so I got to listen in on some great beer pedagogy. One thing I keep chuckling about now whenever I see a Champagne bottle is that, according to Oliver, what we think of as a Champagne bottle was actually a beer bottle first and was repurposed for sparkling wine later on. He pointed this out when one of the evening's beers was served in that type of bottle and a guy said, "That's a Champagne bottle!" And you should have seen the look on Oliver's face when a guy said his favorite beer was Stella Artois. I also found out that Oliver and I went to the same high school, though he's a few years older than I am. Anyway, it was a terrific meal. I think everybody there had a lot of fun. It was downstairs at the Jazz Standard and there was a guitar-piano duo playing the entire time. The guitar guy was amazing. Here's what we had at the "Blue Smoke Beer-B-Que!" on Monday 12 November 2007. Maryland oyster fritter with chipotle remoulade. This was the one dish of the evening that I thought was kind of a failure. For one thing, the nature of the beast -- serving this plated to a room full of people -- meant that it wasn't hot. For another thing, the breading ratio was too high so you could barely taste the oyster. And for still another thing, there was only one of them! (Old Woody Allen joke; references available upon request.) The oyster was paired with Brooklyn Pilsner. Not that there's anything wrong with Brooklyn Pilsner, but in terms of body, complexity and interest it suffered by comparison to the rest of the evening's selections. Brooklyn Pilsner is a great everyday beer but the beers to come were much more special. We had also been drinking the Brooklyn Pilsner -- with Blue Smoke's house-made barbecue potato chips and blue cheese dip -- for awhile before the dinner actually got started, so I was ready to move on to something else. Frisee with cabernet vinaigrette, cured duck and Maytag blue cheese. This dish was a triumph, as was everything else from here on in. As I recall there were three preparations of duck in the mix: smoked breast, confit and cracklings. It all came together beautifully with the cabernet vinaigrette and the chunks of Maytag blue. The dish was paired with Brooklyn Bright Golding, which was my favorite beer of the evening. It's an English style ale made with an old variety of hops (Kent Goldings, I believe). Very floral. I need to get some. Next, shrimp and grits, made from the inimitable Louisiana White Boot Brigade shrimp with organic corn grits. I've had a lot of shrimp-and-grits dishes around the South and I can't say I've ever had better than what Ken Callaghan prepared that night at Blue Smoke. There were a lot of Southern expats in the house and they all seemed pretty impressed. Paired with the excellent Brooklyn Local 1. Next, braised pork belly with crispy potatoes and natural jus. Speaks for itself. Here are both top and side views of the dish. Paired with Brooklyn Oktoberfest. The last savory course was a barbecue sampler: Memphis baby back ribs, pulled pork, smoked chicken and hot links. This is the fare I typically order at Blue Smoke, and was up to standard. Blue Smoke has come a long way over the years. Paired with Brooklyn Brown Ale, which was overwhelming to me after having so much beer already. But it was good. Dessert was sticky toffee pudding, a Blue Smoke signature from pastry chef Jennifer Giblin, paired with Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout. This was the most intriguing pairing of the evening. One of the points Oliver makes repeatedly is that beer is better with food than wine. He has actually conducted a series of "beer v. wine" tastings where he and a sommelier pick beers and wines respectively to pair with a meal. Then the people eating the meal vote for beer or wine. I believe Oliver is undefeated. All the beers were served in wine glasses. Oliver believes wine glasses are best for tasting high-quality beer. I was a guest of the restaurant, along with several other writers and assorted others, however if you'd paid the price of the dinner was $99 per person all in (including tax and gratuity). Here are a couple of unflattering photos of Ken Callaghan (chef of Blue Smoke, first) and Garrett Oliver (brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery, second).

I'm guessing that guess is wrong. Mariani wasn't doing original research as far as I can tell. He was summarizing what had been written elsewhere, many times.

Anybody who has picked up a Zagat survey, looked at the cost-of-meal estimate for a given restaurant and then dined at that restaurant knows that the prices listed in Zagat bear little resemblance to the price actually paid for a meal. But the accuracy problem in restaurant-price descriptions extends far beyond Zagat. I don't think I've ever seen a satisfactory shorthand expression of the cost of a meal. Sure, you can just publish the menu, the wine list, the cocktail list, etc., and that will give a good indication of price. But once you start summarizing, things get complicated. (Things are even complicated if you've seen all the menus, but let's get to that later.) You can give appetizer, entree and dessert price ranges but at plenty of restaurants the entree price range is $16-$39. That's not terribly helpful. You can give averages but averages can be thrown off by outliers like caviar. Prix-fixe menus seem simple but many have supplements, and depending on the restaurant those supplements may be more or less compelling. One thing I'd love to know about every restaurant I visit is the actual cover average broken down by food and beverage. That to me says a lot. Two restaurants with seemingly similar prices on paper -- even if you've read the whole menu and all the accompanying documents -- can vary greatly in terms of how customers actually spend money (and how servers sell the experience). One restaurant might be taking in an average of $70 per cover on food and $25 on beverages. Another might be taking in $90 and $90. That tells me that in order to get the restaurant's intended experience people are spending in a certain range -- otherwise they're not eating within the restaurant's intended parameters. Sometimes you can break out of those parameters without incident, other times you can't. How do you prefer to hear about restaurant prices? Do you find that you're able to anticipate the cost of a meal with some degree of accuracy, or are you often surprised at how much you've spent? Is there a best shorthand way to say how much it costs to eat at a place?

I was re-reading Daniel Patterson's excellent essay from Food & Wine magazine, "Do Recipes Make You a Better Cook?," and I was reminded that, in that essay, Patterson said one of the smartest things to be said about food last year: When you're cooking thin fish fillets in a skillet or under the broiler, there's really no objective measure that can be applied. You need to be able to figure out doneness by examining a variety of other factors. Time is relevant, but only as a rough guideline to help you know when to start collecting other information. But when it comes to cooking bigger pieces of meat, things change, because we have thermometers to work with. Because Patterson is trying to make a certain point, he doesn't even mention the existence of thermometers. Yet a thermometer is the key to accurate meat cookery. Veteran cooks can talk all they want about how they can judge doneness by pressing on a piece of meat, but that's never going to be as accurate as a thermometer. Still, thermometers aren't foolproof. In many ways, it takes more skill to use a thermometer than it does to press on meat. Here are a few issues that arise: - Thermometer placement is the big one. You can only measure whatever the thermometer is touching. So if you don't get it placed dead center in your roast, you're not going to be taking the correct reading. This is especially problematic with irregular items like whole birds. You can't just plunge it in anywhere, unless you're doing certain types of slow cooking where the idea is to get the whole product to a uniform temperature. - There are variations in the way individual thermometers behave, especially at the consumer level. While expensive professional thermocouple thermometers tend to be both accurate and precise, consumer thermometers are often neither. Also, different thermometers have different properties in terms of what part of the thermometer's probe is taking the actual reading: just the very tip, the first half inch, the first inch. - In some situations there are bleed-through effects from a grill, a broiler or a burner. So the temperature the thermometer shows is altered by factors other than the temperature of what you're actually trying to measure. I mean, when I go over to a friend's house and we do something like cook a roast, I look at that thermometer and I just don't trust it. I think, oh man, it says 140 but we're going to pull this thing out and it's going to be totally different. Those of you who are fans of thermometers: how do you address those issues in order to achieve a high level of confidence in your thermometers? What other issues come up, and how do you address those?

I was torn between two books. I ultimately chose the Culinary Institute of America's "The Professional Chef" (8th Ed.) for my contribution to the roundup. If I'd had a second slot (and now I see some of the contributors cheated and chose more than one book!), I'd have added James Beard's "Theory and Practice of Good Cooking." It's a book I often refer back to for the basics. The other thing I wish I'd had the opportunity to mention is not a book but a series of books: Knopf Cooks American. Masterminded by the great editor Judith Jones, but with each book written by a different author in a personal style, the 18-volume Knopf Cooks American series represents, to me, the best work ever done on American regional cuisines. I have most of them; I'd like to have them all some day. I'm the proud owner of a copy of "The River Cottage Meat Book," but I'm not sure I've actually gotten much out of it. It's surprising to me that such an eclectic book got picked twice.