Fat Guy

I think there may be an analogy here to cooking with wine. It seems to me that if you cook with awful wine, that's going to drag your food down. And if you cook with water, you're not going to get the same result as cooking with wine. But then you go through a range of wine from good through very good through world class, and once you've cooked with it the higher-cost stuff is denuded of the characteristics that made it expensive in the first place: the subtle aromatics are gone and you're down to the more basic properties of good wine.

In most cases, such ingredients are used to mask or enhance inferior cheese, and in most of the rest of the cases such ingredients mask the flavors of good cheese. I would not, however, make a blanket statement against adding anything to cheese ever. There are, for example, several delicious Italian cheeses that incorporate truffles.

With a ceiling height of 7', you can certainly do a hood but you won't be able to do much in the way of putting a cabinet above it.

He is a recovering alcoholic, so that would follow ("he was an alcoholic until the age of 30"). I can't imagine it's all that big a deal for any critic, but certainly it's not a big deal for Gill since he barely writes about food anyway.

Point of nomenclature: the preferred terms for these sorts of hoods are recirculating, ductless and unvented. I haven't heard recycled uses much. Bad news: don't get your hopes up. Recirculating hoods can remove some particles from the air with their filters, but if you don't have ducted hood (or a window right by the stove) you can only do so much before your apartment fills with smoke or grease. You'll have to adapt your cooking style to the constraints of the hood, so there are various restaurant techniques you'll want to avoid, like doing a hard sear in a super-hot cast-iron skillet. You'll also want to get in the habit of using splatter screens, partially covered pots and the oven broiler as a stand-in for some searing techniques. That said, I'd recommend something like the Broan 88000 Series. You should be able to pick one up in the $350 range, plus you need the Microtek filters and some hardware, which adds another $75 or so to the price. Here's one vendor. I have a Broan ducted hood and it performs as well as plenty of more expensive, fancier hoods. Broan makes a good product at a reasonable price. I'd also recommend getting a couple of basic HEPA filters from Costco, Home Depot or the equivalent and placing one in the kitchen and one near the entryway to the kitchen. Run them at full when you cook, and set them to low for a couple of hours after you cook. These can help limit the accumulation of grease and other pollutants.

(While it did spring wholly formed out of my mind, I see there are 518 Google hits on the same phrase.)

It's standard procedure at several Korean restaurants I've been to: they don't want to set up the tabletop grill for just one order of barbecue.

Free deer! That's what you need. Free is even better than cheap. For stuff you get from friends who hunt, for roadkill, for the wild turkey the farmer next door shot . . . for all those things I recommend grinding them up, adding spices and maybe an egg, and making patty sausages, meatballs, etc.

Nobu 57 is right there.

Shacktoberfest coming up. From the PR department:

I started a topic in the Japan forum, but thought I'd also mention here that there was just an article in the Wall Street Journal about an American-owned ramen shop in Japan that was inspired by Momofuku Noodle Bar. Topic here.

If you do a finger-food event, shot glasses of squash soup work brilliantly -- if you have enough shot glasses (demitasse cups work too). Pretty much any dish layered in a shot glass seems fancy.

There was just an article in the Wall Street Journal about an American, Ivan Orkin, who runs a ramen shop in the Tokyo suburbs. The place is called Ivan Ramen. Apparently Mr. Orkin, an American expat living in Japan with his Japanese wife, was inspired by Momofuku in New York: Has anybody been to Ivan Ramen?

Here you go: Quality of olive oil and its effects in cooking

Over here, we've been discussing suggestions for "everyday" olive oil. A side discussion got started on the question of how much impact the quality of your everyday oil has on cooking. I did three very casual comparisons tonight, using my everyday olive oil and one recommended by slkinsey that was three times as expensive. My everyday is Edda, an olive oil from Lucca. The more expensive one is Frantoia, from Sicily. Edda is US$20/gallon (well, $19.99) and Frantoia is about $60/gallon (computed out from its $15.99/liter price). Test number one was trying both drizzled on a piece of bread. The Frantoia was better. Not that the Edda was bad. They were also not entirely on-point comparable. The Frantoia has a strong olive fruit flavor, whereas the Edda is stronger on the peppery notes. But the Frantoia also has a cleaner taste, and the Edda has a somewhat greasy mouthfeel. Test number two was vinaigrette. Here I would not necessarily have picked one over the other. The peppery component of the Edda came through clearly, whereas its negative qualities were masked. The Frantoia's fruitiness was diminished a lot by being in a vinaigrette, and most of its subtlety and structure were not easily detectable. It would have been very easy to pick the samples blind, so there was a difference, however the characteristics that make a naked olive oil better did not entirely translate into vinaigrette superiority. I also cooked two batches of home fried potatoes (chopped potatoes, onions, salt, pepper and olive oil). I was making them for dinner anyway, so I just did it in two pans. I made the mistake of eyeballing rather than measuring the oil, so it's not clear to me that I had the same quantity in each sample. I wasn't particularly able to tell the difference between the two batches. I think it's possible that the peppery component of the Edda was masked by the fact that there was actual pepper in the preparation. Not a flavor characteristic as such, I did think the Edda batch was oilier/greasier. I'm guessing I just used more, but maybe not. I then combined the batches, doubled back and made three piles of home fries on my plate. On each pile of warm home fries I drizzled a little olive oil: Frantoia on one, Edda on the other, and some very expensive French (L'Ostal Cazes, $48 per liter) olive oil that I just got the other day on the other. Here the hierachy asserted itself very clearly -- moreso even than when I had tastes the Edda and Frantoia raw. The little bit of heat really activated the aromas and showed each oil's good traits clearly. These are just some casual observations to get the discussion started. I'd love to hear any observations you all have had in this area.

Raoul, if you gather a few price examples from your area, it might make an interesting topic for you to post them and ask others to compare. I can find price equivalents in NYC for starters. Also probably worth its own topic, which I'll start soon, is the question of how much of a difference it makes if you cook with a better olive oil. I did three quick experiments tonight that could help get that conversation started.

It seems to me that a very high percentage of the Japanese middle class lunch customers there are ordering katsu curry. Which, by the way, I find questionable. That's not to take anything away from the restaurant. I think this particular food item may simply not be all that great, despite the fact that Japanese are crazy for it. The gloppy brown curry sauce is a far cry from a good, complex, subtle curry. It's just one-dimensionally curry-ish, like a gravy version of the curry powder sold in grocery stores, though with a somewhat different flavor. Not to mention, it ruins the crust of the katsu. (The Japanese penchant for taking crispy fried items and making them wet -- in soups, under sauces -- also eludes my comprehension.)

So the bread at dinner is fresher when the restaurant is in critic-alert mode. Big deal. There was recently a piece on NPR's "On the Media" about the Craig LaBan "outing" incident in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Inquirer and LaBan were sued for defamation over a comment in a review. LaBan tried to wear a disguise at the videotaped deposition. The judge said no. Philadelphia Magazine then printed a photo of LaBan when covering the story. NPR "On the Media" had Larry Platt, editor of Philadelphia Magazine on and asked him to defend the decisions. Here are a few points he made:

Shrimp have a high perceived value, yet smaller shrimp are quite inexpensive and there are a lot of things you can do with them. Eggs are super cheap, yet can form the basis for some very elegant dishes.

I remember reading that Ed Brown had somehow become involved with the Grand Tier operation, maybe last year. Am I imagining that? We dined there a few years ago and thought the food was above average for catering, though not as good as a real restaurant. I think the reason a lot of folks choose it is that you can pre-order and eat during intermissions. My memory is fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure we had appetizers before the opera, entrees during the first intermission and desserts during the second intermission. A lot of folks just don't like to do a whole pre- or post-opera dinner, with the very long evening that creates. And especially the older folks and others with limited mobility -- it's great for them.

Right, my friends who live in the Akron area, and have more money than we do, and have a large, expensive house, and are pretty into food, simply would not spend that much on an everyday oil. As a result, you're just not going to find a great selection of oils in that price range in that area, and what you will find is expensive and sold at low turnover gourmet shops. Then again, our friends from Venice (who are also pretty well off) wouldn't spend that much on an everyday oil. I think it's pretty typical for home cooks in Italy simply not to use extra-virgin olive oil for cooking. Then again the standard for labeling an oil extra-virgin is different over there.

Yeah, gelatinous and drizzle seem like useful words to me. Ditto unctuous and mouthfeel. Those don't seem hackneyed to me. I also can't understand the objection to beverages, or to fine dining.

I think the major caveat here is that some ingredients are perceived as cheap fillers, and if you put too many of them on a menu your meal is perceived as cheap. You don't want to be serving a meal of potatoes, beans, farmed Atlantic salmon, chicken thighs, cabbage and pasta. You know? So I think the trick, when catering on a budget, is to find cheap stuff that's not perceived as cheap, and to use noticeably cheap stuff in combinations that minimize it. For example last night at Tabla's Bread Bar in New York I had a great fall menu item, apple-potato chat. It was chunks of crisp local apples and waxy potatoes mixed with tamarind, lime and chili, and topped with crispy chickpea-flour noodles. I imagine the food cost on the dish was quite low, but in eating it one didn't get the impression of being served filler at all. That's the trick.

It works out to $60.52 a gallon if you buy it where I did, at $15.99 a liter. Whether that's an everyday oil price kind of depends on how much olive oil you use and how much money you have. For example, I use about a gallon of olive oil a year for cooking and other non-drizzling/dipping uses. I've been buying $19.99/gallon oil rather than $60.52/gallon oil. But really, I'm not sure if $40.53/year is enough of a difference to matter to me, given that the $60.52/gallon oil tastes much better. Then again, for cooking you may not need a better oil -- it's not clear to me that there's much flavor difference; it's something I'd have to test under controlled circumstances. And I get some very expensive olive oils to have for drizzling, dipping and other uncooked uses (though for most salad dressings I actually use the cheap stuff). So, I don't know. I imagine this issue is much more critical for someone with a large family who cooks every day and uses olive oil as the primary cooking fat. When you use 10 gallons of olive oil a year, that $40.53 difference becomes a $405.30 difference. When you have one kid, dine out a lot, cook with a variety of fats and never use olive oil for deep frying, you can afford to define everyday up.

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