Fat Guy

You can have the machine next week, Sam. Given that the thing roasts so much coffee so quickly, I'll be out of beans this weekend and will have so much stockpiled in the freezer that I won't need to roast again until summer. And I think you'll be better suited to evaluating its espresso-worthiness, since you make espresso all the time and I make it quarterly. You may need a team of Clydesdales to get it across the park, though.

Flash photos of roasts are a little misleading, because the strobe gives such an oily richness to the appearance of the beans. In real life, those beans look blacker, with more of a matte finish. They're darker than I'd normally roast for a whole batch (I'll cut these beans with some light-roasted beans for a nice blend). I know they don't exactly look it in the photo, but I'd characterize them as a Vienna roast.

I had no problem getting the drive shaft in, but it was sticky getting it out. I had to knock around in there a bit in order to be able to remove the drum. Maybe that's just first-time stickiness, but if not then I'll do some filing.

Having read the claims that the Behmor is no good for dark roasting, I of course decided for my first test to try a dark roast. I decided to go easy on the machine: I did only 1/2 pound, and I used decaf Colombian RSWP (there's little chaff with decaf). Based on past experience with other machines, and looking at the roasting curves, I took a wild guess that 1/2 pound on program P2 for time C (14 minutes) would get me a dark roast. Amazingly, I didn't have to add or subtract time at all. Really lucky guess. At exactly 14 minutes, when the machine switched to its cool-down cycle, the beans had just reached the rapid stage of the second crack. Here's what the finished beans look like in the drum: And here they are in a bowl: This first test was very positive. Not that I've actually tasted coffee made from these beans, but I've done this enough to be pretty sure they came out well. The machine is exceptionally quiet for a roaster -- if you've only ever used a hot-air machine you'll be amazed. It produces very little smoke, even roasting to the level I roasted to. So I'm not really sure what the concerns were about dark roasting. I guess you could push it darker, but I wouldn't really roast darker than that rapid-second-crack stage anyway. I'll see how a full pound of non-decaf works for dark roasting, but for my own purposes I don't think I'd ever want to roast more than 1/2 pound at a time anyway. It's not a zero-smoke product. I saw no visible smoke but smelled plenty, so you do still need some real ventilation. But it's much better smoke-wise than the other roasters I've used.

So, first a little backstory. In 2002, I was contacted by James from the Coffee Project. He wanted me to test out a FreshRoast roaster, and so he sent me a sample roaster and a bunch of beans. I had never roasted coffee before. I wrote up a report here. Since then, I've gone through another FreshRoast machine and am currently using an i-Roast. Recently, James saw a photo in a magazine of my i-Roast sitting in my kitchen and he emailed me. He has been selling the Behmor 1600 and one of the units that came in had a couple of dents that made it unsaleable but weren't likely to affect performance. So he offered it up to me for testing. The box arrived yesterday: The thing is large. It's substantially larger than an average toaster oven. Deeper too. It's also a significant, weighty piece of metal. I believe it weights about 20 pounds. The unit is packed with a drum, a chaff-collecting tray and a brush. Here are some photos of what you get in the box: You put the unit together like so: Here's a close-up of the keypad: The owner's manual (you can read it online on the Behmor website) suggests running the machine through a self-cleaning process before use. I did this three times. (Also recommended is a self-cleaning cycle after each five roasts.) This is how it looks during the self-cleaning process: I've got some beans in now and will do a few batches today and report back.

Isn't it weird that the desserts are the weak link in the menu?

As we speak, the Behemoth is sitting under my range hood and is on its second dry-burn pre-cleaning cycle.

It's possible that somebody out there is selling good refrigerated dough, but none of the ones I've tried have been acceptable to me. When you produce frozen dough, all you need to do is use basic ingredients. The refrigerated doughs I've seen have had a lot of junk in them. Even the ones that say "no preservatives" have longer ingredients lists than dough should have. I guess people are saying Trader Joe's has good refrigerated dough. I haven't tried it. I've been sticking with frozen. But sure, yes, if you can find a good source of refrigerated dough you may get a leg up especially if the packages are marked with expiration dates and you intentionally buy the oldest one.

Yeah, I mean if there's a critical mass of people who want to buy something, it doesn't really matter where that is. It's easy enough to put veal sides or subprimals on a truck and take them anywhere in the continental United States. But what I've noticed, traveling around and looking in supermarkets, is that in some regions of the country there are whole categories of meat that are simply absent from the display cases because consumers just won't buy enough to make it worth keeping that stuff in stock. In a lot of places, it's just beef, pork, chicken and the occasional turkey. You don't see any veal, lamb, duck or anything else. So in a place like that, the occasional upscale market that does have a little veal or lamb is likely going to get it as portioned cuts, not subprimals and certainly not sides.

I've written elsewhere that I think Paul Adams of the New York Sun is the best restaurant reviewer writing today, but rarely have I felt so completely in agreement with any restaurant review as I was with his review today of Graffiti. Paul Adams gets the place. He's enthusiastic about it, he understands what makes it impressive, but he also understands its flaws. Wherever I've had a dish, Paul Adams's analysis is spot-on, such that when I haven't had a dish I feel confident relying on his evaluation. He's not 100% positive. He nails it on the dessert point: I recommend the review to anyone who wants to get a really solid, favorable but not sentimental picture of this idiosyncratic restaurant. Meanwhile, I thought the New York Times didn't quite get the place. In his short review of Graffiti today, Peter Meehan summed up the food as "The restaurant serves a short menu of Asian fusion small plates, most with an Indian accent" -- a characterization with which I'm just not sure I can agree. He's overly dismissive of the physical space and the kitchen. I think there are certainly people who will feel that way about a tiny restaurant like Graffiti. But then there are people who won't. What some find claustrophobic others find intimate and charming. Put me in the latter camp.

The Behmor 1600 has arrived from the Coffee Project, and the second we opened the box and gazed upon its mass we nicknamed it "The Behemoth." This thing is serious. I haven't had time to pull it out and use it, but I extracted the owner's manual and will read that tonight. I'll try to do some roasting tomorrow.

Plastic zipper bag, air pressed out but not fanatically so, no oil. (You'll notice that the procedure I use is, from start to finish, a no-oil procedure -- although when you buy commercially produced dough it usually has some oil in it.) The dough can protest a bit when you take it out of the bag, but you should be able to invert the bag and plop the dough-ball out onto your sheet pan. Interestingly, the crummy generic bags seem to work better for this purpose than the higher-quality brand-name bags. What I really want to find, though, is a bag made from the same plastic that the commercial dough producers use. Nothing sticks to that stuff.

Ambra, I can virtually guarantee you that if you add a several-days-long retardation in the refrigerator, you'll enjoy that dough even more. Another thing that I think is well worth doing is making several batches of dough at once and freezing in one-pound portions, then staging it in the refrigerator a few days before actual use. This gives you a steady, no-effort supply of dough. There was a point, when I was in peak experimental mode, when I had so much dough in zipper bags in the freezer that I lost track of which was homemade and which was what brand. Following the method outlined here, I haven't had any problem getting the crust to cook through. I have had problems when not preheating the oven enough, putting too many toppings on, etc. I have no objection in principle to par-baking the dough, but have found that the other ingredients don't come together as well for me when I do that. If I am going to par bake, I've found that it works best to par bake with no toppings at all -- meaning with no sauce either. Also, I've found that the best technique for par-baking crust is the one that was recommended to me by Waldy Malouf, the chef at Beacon restaurant who also has a brick-oven pizza place called Waldy's. He par-bakes the crust then flips it over and puts the toppings on the "bottom" before finishing. It's hard to believe it works, but it does. That's what I'll do if someone comes over and we're putting a lot of toppings on the pizza. But for the normal sauce-cheese pie, I've had no cook-through problem when following all the instructions above.

These are not instructions for making the best possible homemade pizza. If you want to do that, you need to commit to a lot more effort and mess -- pizza stones, flour and cornmeal that need to be cleaned up from the oven floor and kitchen floor, etc. -- than the following method requires. What I'm documenting here is the result of several months of refining a home pizza-making method to achieve the following goals: 1 - Uses store-bought frozen pizza dough 2 - Doesn't require use of a pizza stone 3 - Doesn't require use of flour to handle and form the dough 4 - Uses ready-made tomato sauce and readily available cheeses 5 - Contains the entire pizza in a sheet pan for reduction of mess 6 - Produces an acceptable crust and attractive finished product 7 - Is good enough that people who are serious about pizza won't be offended by it 8 - A single pie is large enough to feed my family (2 adults and 1 toddler) I've probably made 50 pizzas now, exploring the various permutations. Here's what I've found: 1 - Uses store-bought frozen pizza dough Store-bought frozen pizza dough is quite good, if you can find a product with a simple ingredients list. I've been getting a very good product from the "House of Pasta" brand, made in Trenton, NJ, by the Landolfi Food Company and sold at various Manhattan grocery stores. I've made my own dough for comparison, and it's possibly, arguably, maybe a little better when I make it myself. But not enough to justify doing it for any reason other than the pure enjoyment of making dough. One pound seems to be the standard supermarket unit of dough, and that works just right for my purposes. As I've documented on the "Old dough" topic, the trick with pizza dough is to "retard" it in the refrigerator for several days before use. I can't overstate what a big difference this makes. It not only makes the dough easier to work with, but also creates a slightly sour (in the good, bready sense) and crispier crust. If you buy frozen dough, put it in the refrigerator -- not the freezer -- and let it sit for several days. And I mean several days. I recently got my best results ever with nine-day-refrigerated dough. This evening I used five-day refrigerated dough and it was great -- much better than if you use it the day you get it or, if you're making homemade, the day you make it. 2 - Doesn't require use of a pizza stone Pizza stones are great, but they have a few drawbacks: 1- they can't accommodate a particularly large pizza, so if you're feeding a family you have to bake two or three pizzas, 2- they're messy because you need to use flour and/or cornmeal to lubricate the pizza peel and stone, so you wind up with flour and/or cornmeal on the floor of the oven and the floor of the kitchen, and 3- there's always some risk that, as an amateur, you're going to screw up the transfer of the pizza to and from the stone and end up with a pizza on the floor. So, I started experimenting with the capabilities of my oven and found that, while you can't get real hearth-baked results without a stone, you can do pretty well if you push your oven to its limits. That means you set the oven to its maximum 500-degree setting (some ovens do 525 or 550, even better) and start preheating about 40 minutes before it's time to bake the pizza. There's no shortcut here -- if you only preheat for 20 minutes your oven will reach 500 but it won't have the retained heat in the oven walls that gives that extra push to the baking process. If you have convection, turn it on -- it helps. You want to position your lowest rack as low as it can go, so you're baking the pizza almost on the bottom of the oven. 3 - Doesn't require use of flour to handle and form the dough I hate working with floured surfaces, because as you toss, punch and knead you get flour dust flying all up and over the place. If you have toddler assistance in the kitchen, it's even more of a disaster when you use flour. I've found that cornmeal works just as well and doesn't create any sort of dust. I also like the little bits of cornmeal that get embedded in the dough when you work this way. It reminds me of the pizzas in New Haven at Sally's, which derive part of their interest from the baked-in cornmeal on the bottoms of the crusts. Here's the basic pizza-making mise-en-place I use. This is at the point where the dough has been stretched. You should be able to make out the little bits of cornmeal. 4 - Uses ready-made tomato sauce and readily available cheeses I've experimented with at least a dozen commercially available tomato-sauce products and one stands head and shoulders above all the others for use as pizza sauce: Pomi Strained Tomatoes. Not the Pomi Chopped Tomatoes. Not the Pomi Marinara Sauce. I've tried those too and they don't work as well. What you want are the Pomi Strained Tomatoes in aseptic packaging. They have a wonderful, natural tomato taste. The moisture content is just right for pizza making. You don't have to do anything: you just spread the stuff right on the pizza. There's no oil, no weird stuff, no off flavors from a can. I find that the Pomi Strained Tomato product makes a better pizza sauce than what even some very good New York pizzerias are using. It's also a very efficient product. One 26-ounce box of Pomi Strained Tomatoes is enough for four -- yes, four -- entire large pizzas of the kind I make. You just have to transfer it to other containers in order to keep it around. It freezes well, so if you're not going to use it within a few days you can just freeze in one-pizza-size portions in deli containers or even zipper bags, then put it in the fridge the night before use and take it out when you start preheating the oven. Pomi tomatoes, on account of the packaging process, don't need to contain a lot of salt. So, out of the box, they're a bit bland. I've found that the salt from the mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses brings the salt level of the pizza up to just about where it should be, though. So all you really need to do is shake a little salt on the pizza right after you spread the sauce and you'll be all set. In terms of cheese, I've found that the typical store-made fresh mozzarella is too wet and just doesn't make particularly useful pizza cheese unless you have a professional stone oven. At the same time, I've found that Polly-O and the like just don't taste very good. What I've had the best luck with is something in the middle: "fresh" mozzarella that's not actually fresh. As in, packaged fresh mozzarella. It will say "fresh" on the label, but it was packed in some factory somewhere and has a shelf life so it's not the same as the store-made products. It has lower moisture than real fresh mozzarella but has good flavor. The brand I've been using is Cappiello, which is made in upstate New York. There are a couple of other brands I've tried, like BelGioioso, that work fine. Every Costco in every region seems to have some version of packaged fresh mozzarella that has the right moisture content for home pizza making. I've found that if you slice the cheese it doesn't melt well enough to distribute evenly, but that grating the cheese is a waste of time. I just do a rough dice. On top of the mozzarella, some Parmesan cheese helps with both flavor and browning. It's not necessary to use Parmigiano Reggiano. Grated and baked in this application, I haven't been able to tell the difference between Parmigiano Reggiano and imitations that cost half as much such as the "Reggianato" cheese from Argentina that I've been using. Some sort of actual cheese is necessary, though -- the stuff in the green can isn't the same (though it will do in a pinch). Of course, you can use real Parmigiano Reggiano too. I don't use a ton of cheese. Maybe 6 ounces of mozzarella for a whole pie, plus some grated Parmesan. 5 - Contains the entire pizza in a sheet pan for reduction of mess I have several cheapo aluminum half-sheet pans that I got at a restaurant-supply place many years ago. They're infinitely useful and they work great for pizza. The term "sheet pan" is a standard term in commercial cooking. A full-sheet pan is 18"x26". A half-sheet pan is 18"x13". The lip around the edge is about 3/4" high -- maybe 1" if you measure from the outside. Aluminum sheet pans are incredibly durable -- you can heat and beat the crap out of them and they don't warp or buckle at all. And, if you pay more than $6 for one, you're paying too much. I do all the work inside the sheet pan. This contains the mess down to just about zero. I start by spreading a palmful of cornmeal in the half-sheet pan, then I plop the ball of dough in the middle and roll it around so it picks up a bunch of the cornmeal. Once you do that, it becomes very easy to stretch the dough without it sticking to your hands or the sheet pan. In terms of dough-stretching, patience is key. If you try to go from a ball of dough to a pizza in one session you need skill. But if you take three breaks of about two minutes each, you'll have no problem. First, stretch the dough to about half the size of the pan -- that's easy. (Just pick up the dough and, with both hands, start pulling, first from the center and then from the edges -- the weight of the dough will do a lot of the work for you if you just kind of make a wheel with it and hold it with your fingertips from the top of the wheel and rotate it around like your fingers are gears.) Then leave it for about two minutes. Next, pick up and stretch to about three quarters the size of the pan. Easy again. Two-minute rest. Finally, pick it up again and you should be able to stretch it to the full size of the pan, or close. From there, you don't need to pick up the dough again. You can just kind of manipulate it out to the edges and corners if there are still gaps. If you've used enough cornmeal, you don't actually need any oil on the pan. The finished pizza will release without too much struggle. However, if you want to make life easier, when you do your last stretching you can drape the dough over one arm and spray the sheet pan with a little olive oil spray (or any nonstick cooking spray). 6 - Produces an acceptable crust and attractive finished product Here are some photos of finished pizzas from the past few times I've made it using this method. In my oven, at 500 degrees with convection on, the magic number is 11 minutes. That may vary by oven. But you've got to let it go until it almost burns -- actually, until it starts to burn. If you pull it too early, you won't be as happy with the results. 7 - Is good enough that people who are serious about pizza won't be offended by it I've been getting pretty good feedback on this pizza from people I trust -- people who would tell me if it sucked. It's not as good as what you can produce if you use a pizza stone if you do everything right, but it's a lot better than what most people actually do produce with a pizza stone. It's not as good as pizza from a good pizzeria, but it's much better than pizza from a mediocre pizzeria. I just had a friend over who is one of the pickier eaters I know and I couldn't believe how much pizza he ate. It was scary. I thought we were going to run out, even though I had made two large pies (13" x 18", or nearly that big). 8 - A single pie is large enough to feed my family (2 adults and 1 toddler) No problem there. With a salad, one pie is plenty for a casual dinner and we usually have a slice left over for our son's lunch the next day. It does take a little time to do everything. The prep time works out to about 40 minutes if you're also making salad, sauteeing a vegetable, setting the table, checking email, answering the phone, entertaining a child and a dog, etc., and the cooking time is of course 11 minutes. You just start heating the oven, get all your mise-en-place dealt with, do a preliminary stretching of the dough, work on the rest of dinner (washing lettuce, preparing a veg, setting the table, etc.), stretch again, finish up the other stuff you're doing, do the final stretching, assemble the pie, put it in the oven. Now you have enough time to sautee some greens or mushrooms or whatever. It helps to let the pizza cool for about 5 minutes after it's out of the oven, otherwise it's hard to cut and separate. A pizza cutter is also a very useful tool to have.

Agreed. That skillet I'm using is 12", which I've found is larger than what most people have (the average largest skillet in a normal person's house, in my experience, is 10" or 10.5"). And even then I'm not putting a ton of mushrooms in there. You can fill the pan about as much as I did in the first photo -- it doesn't have to be a true single layer, because you're going to get almost immediate shrinkage. But if you crowd it too much then you're going to have major troubles.

That's a non-stick pan you're looking at in the photos (Calphalon Commercial Nonstick). I've done it with less oil but I like the taste of the olive oil and I think it aids the browning process. I like to drizzle the finished mushrooms with a little higher-quality olive oil too, when I'm allowed to do so.

I was preparing to cook some mushrooms as an accompaniment to dinner this evening, so I thought I'd take a crack at photographing my standard method. I'm not sure if this is a valuable illustration or not, but here goes. This is a well-preheated 12" skillet, into which I've put about a tablespoon of olive oil, an assortment of standard supermarket cultivated mushrooms, and some salt. Then I just shake/toss thoroughly every 30 seconds or so. The time stamp on the first photo is 17:58:18 (5:58pm and 18 seconds). The last photo is 18:02:13 (6:02pm and 13 seconds). So, you're looking at about 4 minutes of evolution here: On the plate: The point here is that when you apply high heat to mushrooms you don't get wet, limp mushrooms the way so many people do when they use medium heat. With high heat, you push the water out quickly enough that it doesn't interfere with the browning, and you get attractive mushrooms with nice texture and flavor. It's easy and quick. If you want to make your mushrooms "pop," it really is this simple.

What Elements says is excerpted in the first post on this topic. Folks can go back and read it and decide for themselves whether my characterization of Ruhlman's essay as "the home cook must, must, must use" veal stock is accurate. However, I did not attribute the statement "one's cooking is crap unless one can source veal bones" to Ruhlman.

The train has already left the station on the issue of dumbing down and subbing. As Ruhlman notes, many of the top professionals rejected veal stock long ago: "But, of course, Vongerichten and Rodgers can work wonders with plain water. It’s the non-pro who stands to gain the most from veal stock, the home cook." So the assumption that home cooks can't cook like professional cooks is already out there. The question is, does it make sense to draw this arbitrary line at veal stock? On the one hand, the professionals Ruhlman admires most aren't actually using the recipe he recommends. On the other hand, he's saying the home cook must, must, must use it. Well, I think the home cook who's having trouble getting veal, or who has to pay $30 to get enough of it to make a pot of stock, should maybe take a step back and evaluate the intended purpose of a stock. Planning to make a sauce for beef with it? Well, certainly beef stock is fine for that. Mushrooms? Beef is going to work really well for that too. Chicken? Maybe a poultry stock would be preferable, then again I bet beef stock would work pretty well. Worth trying, especially if you make your beef stock mostly from bones such that it approaches the "neutrality" of veal stock. A sauce for fish? Well, I don't particularly enjoy most veal-stock-based fish sauces anyway.

If you want innovation instead of stagnation, you need to have tolerance for risk. Of every thousand new dishes, perhaps only one -- if that -- will represent a meaningful contribution to culinary history. But if you don't try to make, serve and gauge reactions to the thousand, you can't get the one.

Agreed. Likewise with a high level of sweetness, due to the abundance of corn syrup in those foods. ← I'm not sure there is an "American palate" that would be applicable to this particular discussion. If anything there are several American palates. The people who worry about salt levels at the kinds of restaurants that don't put salt on the table just aren't eating enough Doritos, Twinkies and Whoppers to have the mass-market-influenced palate that is accustomed to extremely high levels of salt and sugar. I've found that most Americans who bother to join the eGullet Society find Doritos, Twinkies and Whoppers just as overwhelmingly salty, sugary and fatty as Japanese and European gourmets do. Not that you can't get those things in Europe and Japan. On the larger point, I have a very wide range of salt levels that I'll call acceptably salted. You have to go pretty far in one direction or the other to qualify as over- or under-salted in my book. Even allowing for the palate recalibration that occurs when you eat food with a certain salt level (or sweetness level) over a period of time, I think it's possible to get perspective on the range of acceptable salting (or sweetening). Given all that, I agree with Vinotas that we're seeing an oversalting trendlet in gastronomic restaurants (where, a decade ago, we saw an undersalting trend).

It was in a Zip-loc bag with the air pressed out but not religiously so. No coating of oil, just the dough in the bag. There was no skin problem, but the dough was pretty sticky. It resisted coming out of the bag, and was a little stubborn coming off the sheet pan when I cut and served the pizza.

Ned, what kind of grind are you trying to achieve?

See I think the shmura matzohs taste terrible. I actually think that's by design. That the in large part the objection to supermarket matzohs is that they aren't truly unleavened bread -- that they're more like Carr's Table Water crackers and are relatively pleasant to eat. That to have the truly virtuous experience of suffering like the Hebrew nation on the run in the desert, you have to eat these awful-tasting shmura matzohs that sit in your gut like lead pellets. That only the elderly and infirm get dispensation to eat the supermarket kind.

I imagine the "pro-industry" argument is simply that if you pay an extra cent here and an extra cent there, eventually it adds up to real money. I don't disagree with that position as a general theory of doing business, but this is pretty clearly a case where it has been taken too far. McDonald's and Taco Bell are already paying the penny. This was a silly place for Burger King to draw the line, and Burger King got busted on it. At this point, the decision will probably cost Burger King more than it ever could have saved. Just the fees Burger King is probably paying to communications companies this month for crisis management advice on this issue could easily exceed $250,000. So it will have been, in the end, a bad business decision.