Fat Guy

(Bouchon uses frozen French fries)

(If you order anything from Teitel Bros., be sure to order some Parmigiano Reggiano as well. They have the best price on three-year Parmigiano Reggiano I've seen anywhere.)

Here's the article from 2002 in the New York Times, where Florence Fabricant tested several of the FiveLeaf products. She concluded:

I was thinking conceptually along the summer rolls line too, but I thought maybe a soft taco setup. You know, lay out the three proteins as well as soft tortillas and various other stuff (lettuce, onions, salsa, beans, various hot sauces, etc.). Or burritos, fajitas, whatever.

Have a look at the FiveLeaf website. I think you'll be impressed.

Stew Leonard's, which has four farm-themed grocery stores in the Southern Connecticut and Westchester area, is a store I find myself returning to often, for various reasons. For one thing, we live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and thus have very good car access via the Madison Avenue Bridge to the Major Deegan Expressway and 87, which if you stay on course goes straight into Stew Leonard's parking lot (the exit, 6A, is called Stew Leonard Dr.). For another thing, Stew Leonard's shares a gigantic hillside shopping complex with Costco and Home Depot, so just about any imaginable product (and then some) can be acquired in that one location. Finally, both our two-year-old son and our six-year-old dog love the place. Stew Leonard's is not like a normal grocery store. It's not really like anything else. Out front and to the left of the store is a gigantic covered area that houses, among other things, a little farm ("Stew's Little Farm") with goats, turkeys, etc.; a garden center; an ice cream stand; and a food service operation where you can get a New England-style lobster dinner for $14.99 (a 1.25-pound lobster, fries, corn and a drink). The interior layout of the store is not the typical aisle layout of a supermarket. Rather, you enter in one place and weave through the entire store along a single path. Along the way, in addition to things like dry-aged beef, Stew's private-label dairy products, a bagel bakery, the photo-cake department and a lot of fresh produce, you're treated to songs and chants from animatronic displays such as "The Holstein Family Singers" and a dancing Chiquita banana (yes, singing that song). Stew's has a limited inventory compared to a supermarket. There's typically just one or two brand and size choices of a product (e.g. ketchup). Some of the products are average supermarket quality, and others are on par with the best available in this region. Last weekend we were up at Stew's in the afternoon and the parking lot was jammed. It turned out Lidia Bastianich was there for a demonstration and dinner. When we approached the store there was a huge display of apples out front, all from a local orchard called Fix Bros. I bought several Macouns -- the first of the season that I've seen -- and they were amazing, some of the best apples I've ever had and I'm extremely picky about apples. Also got some bagels -- you can watch them boiling and baking right there -- and a few pieces of Stew's very good fried chicken, which we ate at the picnic tables back by the farm with our bulldog at our feet. Anyway, so, in the spirit of the "Keeping tabs on: Fairway" topic, going forward I'm going to post various notes and observations gleaned from my occasional trips to Stew Leonard's in Yonkers. And I hope those of you who also go to Stew Leonard's will contribute too. Thus, together, we will be keeping tabs on Stew Leonard's. I was also thinking that we all have favorite places that we frequent, where we know the lay of the land better than the average person ever will. So why not start a "Keeping tabs on:" topic of your own?

Every year or so I try to pick up a gallon tin of Edda olive oil from Teitel Bros. wholesale in the Bronx. It's quite good -- certainly better than anything I've had from a regular supermarket or Costco. I use this olive oil for cooking, salad dressings and the like. They do ship, and their prices are great (though I don't know what they charge for shipping). http://teitelbros.com/ Click through to olive oil, then to "Edda Olive Oil 1 gallon"

Are you sure you're interpreting the ad correctly? It doesn't sound to me as though it's pro-aging.

I try not to keep spices or dried herbs around for more than a year or two. In most cases there is, in my experience, noticeable deterioration, especially of anything that's in ground form. So I would say the 15-year allowance is generous.

At this point in time it would be hard to argue that ketchup isn't one of the traditional topping choices in New York. The major New York hot dog places have ketchup and mustard out on the counters and many, many people use them. Nobody at Papaya King or Gray's Papaya looks at you funny if you do. For me, the issue isn't with ketchup use as such. It's with blanketing a hot dog in a thick coating of ketchup. A thin line of ketchup next to the mustard, that's just fine -- it's a nice balance. I don't top my hot dogs that way, but I've tried it and it tastes good. There's also a bit of a double standard evident in the hard-line anti-ketchup position. The objection boils down to ketchup being sweet. But what about sweet relish? And what about New York-style sweet onions in tomato sauce? Those items are, to me, just as one-dimensionally sweet as ketchup and do just as much to mask the flavor of a good hot dog. For me, a very little bit of brown mustard and a very little bit of sauerkraut are the way to go. However, if I had to add a third topping I'd choose a little ketchup over those sweet onions or sweet pickle relish any day.

Cuisine Solutions is a company with an impeccable reputation in the chef community. Bruno Goussault, the company's chief scientist, is the world's leading authority on sous-vide cookery. The products being offered by the subsidiary FiveLeaf are the creations of some of the world's top chefs: Antoine Westermann, Charlie Trotter, Daniel Boulud, Reine Sammut . . . . These are high-end products made with high-quality ingredients. The sous-vide technology makes this possible. Getting involved with a first-class venture like FiveLeaf is totally respectable. We're not talking about Rick Bayless or Rachael Ray designing a crummy sandwich for Burger King. We're talking about Thomas Keller doing lobster with orzo for Cuisine Solutions.

Needless to say, cast-iron cookware is an ancient technology. You can go to various museums and see cast-iron pots dating way back, from all over the world. And I think up through the 19th and into the 20th Century cast-iron cookware was common throughout the industrialized world, though I'd have to check a real source to be sure of that. Today, however, I'm not aware of a European manufacturer of unfinished (aka bare) cast-iron cookware. Maybe there is one, and if so I'd love to get my hands on some stuff to see how it compares to the American product, but I've not heard of one. What I've seen (mostly in France and England, which is where I've spent the most time in kitchen stores) is 1- enameled cast-iron cookware in the typical Le Creuset and Staub styles, 2- matte-enameled cast-iron cookware, which has a rustic unfinished-like appearance but is not actually unfinished (Staub makes this, and Le Creuset has picked up the style as an option), and 3- various forms of unfinished steel (French steel, blue steel) that behave a lot like unfinished cast-iron in that they need to be seasoned and cared for the same way, but they're not actually cast or nearly as heavy as a standard-issue Lodge utensil.

I think I'd have different answers in different circumstances. The apartment we live in doesn't have a dining room or separate dining area. The pine table in the living room is where we eat, open the mail, wrap presents, work on the scrapbook and otherwise do anything that you need a table for. There's no way we could protect the table without seriously cramping our style, so we just use a cheap table and let the damage occur as it may. When we eat as a family, we just put our plates on the table and eat. We don't even use coasters for glasses. When we have guests over, most of the time we do the same. Only for a special occasion like Passover do we put a tablecloth down. I don't even like tablecloths for home use (how many people at home bother to do what nice restaurants do with pads and underliners?), but it seems like the right thing to do for a formal meal. We're able to keep the table looking pretty decent by cleaning it with Murphy's, and once a few years ago when we refinished our wood floors we had the floor guy sand and refinish the top of the table -- so it looked really nice for a few weeks. Whereas, if we had a big house with a dedicated dining room and an eat-in kitchen, and we had most of our meals in the kitchen and only used the dining room for entertaining, I suppose we might be tempted to put a table in there that's more of an art object, since we'd have all-purpose tables elsewhere. Then again, the first thing I'd probably try to do to a dining room is break down some walls and make the living-room or kitchen bigger, or convert it into an office or bedroom. The house would need to be pretty damn big before I'd agree to let a dining room occupy a couple of hundred square feet of it.

Bruni gives every indication of being a long-lived critic. It seems he absolutely loves the job, and his interest in it seems to be increasing (he's also getting better at many aspects of it thanks to the inimitable on-the-job experience he's been accumulating, though he remains fundamentally tone-deaf to fine dining). I wouldn't be surprised to see him go to 2010 or beyond. Then again, these things can change quickly for many reasons. In any event, I think it's an interesting question: do restaurants plan around Bruni? Needless to say, most restaurants don't because most restaurants either don't get reviewed or don't expect reviews in the 2- to 4-star range. Even most restaurants that get 2-star reviews probably don't have the sophistication to do that sort of planning. But seriously ambitious restaurants take everything into account. I have been at business planning meetings where restaurateurs and backers have specifically discussed Bruni's preferences. I don't think anybody is predicating an entire restaurant concept on Bruni, but when it comes to minor decisions I do think they take him into account. At the same time, I think he's seen by the industry as an unpredictable critic -- one who doesn't play by a set of rules that anybody can discern. So a lot of the language of "we're designing a three-star restaurant" has moved away from thinking about the Times critic as a person and settled back at a more general conceptual level. Someone like Danny Meyer, when he opens his next New York restaurant, certainly isn't going to care about Bruni's preferences. He'll decide "this is going to be a three-star place" or "this is going to be a two-star place" and his team will pursue that vision. If Bruni gives some random review where he gives three stars to Bar Room and two to the Modern, that's just the way it is. More generally, I think sophisticated restaurants plan for media. The Times critic is one of many critics, and critics are only part of the food media. There can also be coverage beyond the food media. And the relative importance of the Times critic has, I think, decreased a lot over the years. It's now easy to put together a media strategy that ignores the Times critic. That's what you have to do these days if, for example, you want to do fine dining or Japanese or anything he just doesn't get. The Times review is a big emotional moment for every serious new restaurant, but restaurateurs know it's only one moment in a decade.

Too many of the desserts just haven't done it for me. What I said above was "Nancy Olson's desserts are good, but she hasn't come out swinging the way Michael Anthony has. Many of the desserts I've tried still need work. It's a question of the combinations and overall compositions, not the components. Everything I've tried has been technically excellent, especially the ice creams, however the overall effect of, for example, the chocolate peanut butter cake with frozen milk, which I've now tried twice, is too sticky and dry."

Coconut tapioca soup with cilantro syrup and passion-fruit sorbet has been a signature Gramercy Tavern dessert for many years. You can find the recipe on Page 109 of Claudia Fleming's 2001 book, "The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern," and I have notes from a meal at Gramercy Tavern in July of 1998 indicating that the dessert was a signature at that time. I mention this because, while I agree this is one of the best pastry items in town, thus far I have been overall disappointed with the new desserts at Gramercy Tavern under the Anthony-Olson regime.

Are you talking specifically about unfinished cast-iron cookware? Because cast-iron cookware is pretty popular in Europe, it just tends to be enameled in the manner of Le Creuset and Staub.

If cheese from unpasteurized milk is no more dangerous than cheese from pasteurized milk, then I think that meets the definition of "not dangerous." Unless, that is, we want to use a definition that says all cheese is dangerous, and that all food is dangerous unless it can be established to be in a zero-risk category. I have no doubt that there have been illnesses caused by unpasteurized cheeses, but there have also been illnesses caused by pasteurized cheeses. In years of reading and writing about this subject I've seen nothing to indicate that, as a practical matter, unpasteurized cheeses are proportionately more dangerous than pasteurized. And there is at least some information out there indicating that unpasteurized cheeses are more resistant to post-production contamination. There's also the argument that pasteurization generates complacency and therefore encourages carelessness in other aspects of production. I wouldn't call raw-milk cheese consumption in the U.S. "minuscule" -- not if we're including cheeses like Parmigiano-Reggiano in the count. And in the U.S., where we have the 60-day rule, there's no risk from young goat cheeses anyway. I also have my doubts about the abstracts cited, and the value of making a policy leap from such incidents even if they've been evaluated correctly. Associating an outbreak with unpasteurized cheese is different than saying the outbreak wouldn't have happened if the milk for that cheese had been pasteurized. Post-production contamination remains a possible explanation, especially on a farm where the milking and cheesemaking are the responsibility of the same people. If, for example, a farm is filthy, the milkers don't use proper hygienic procedures, the entire staff is sick but nobody does anything about it, and the animals are sick too, then reducing that to a claim that unpasteurized cheese is dangerous is irrational. The problems lie elsewhere. Otherwise it's like saying that pasteurized cheeses are dangerous because sick workers handled them and spread disease that way. I'll let this go now too.

Speaking for myself, I'd rather not eat any dishes that taste as if they were prepared for the first time. I'd prefer to eat the dish as prepared by a line cook who has made it a thousand times and has it down to a science.

Mojoman, the CDC often concludes that a given outbreak, or a sporadic case, was due to a specific food product. Otherwise how would we know that spinach caused a given outbreak? However, there doesn't seem to be any sort of frightful body of evidence to indicate that raw-milk cheeses are a problem. Indeed, the two major instances I've read about were attributed not to unpasteurized milk but to post-production contamination of pasteurized milk. In addition, in the literature there is discussion of the "Jamison effect," which is the proposition that the beneficial microbes in unpasteurized cheese can help protect against post-production contamination, whereas those beneficial microbes are killed by pasteurization. The question of acceptable level of bacteria is one that's not so easily summed up as "the number of viable organisms necessary to cause clinical disease is known." Especially when "All cheeses graded as unacceptable and potentially hazardous were soft or semisoft cheeses made with ewe’s and goat’s milk, with the exception of two hard cheeses made with cow’s milk. E. coli O157 was not detected in any of the cheeses." And clinical disease in what population? Newborns and the elderly? That's not relevant because those people can be told to stay away from certain foods, just as they're currently told to stay away from raw oysters. In addition, the findings in the study don't even cross the threshold of common sense. If 11 of 70 raw-milk cheeses (almost 16%) have enough organisms to cause clinical disease, then why aren't Portugal's emergency rooms flooded with food-poisoning cases? We do need to extrapolate from scientific data when making policy, however we have to be certain that the data are as complete as we can possibly make them, and we need to extrapolate in a meaningful, sensible way. We still need to know the risks from pasteurized cheeses. We still need to know if there are any actual outbreaks associated with raw-milk cheeses, and how they compare in number to outbreaks associated with pasteurized cheeses. Then we need to ask whether, assuming the truth of the extrapolated scenario, a ban is the answer, or whether there are less intrusive mechanisms available: production safeguards, testing, inspection, warning labels, etc.

Right. Same thing. "I don't actually want to try anything new." The difference being that members of the latter group want to pretend they're forward thinking when in reality they're being just as unadventurous as the crowd at Elio's. Wednesday.

The question is: are people in the real world getting sick from eating these cheeses? If the answer is no then who cares what some study classifies as "satisfactory"? And in the case of the Almeida study, it also says, "All cheeses graded as unacceptable and potentially hazardous were soft or semisoft cheeses made with ewe’s and goat’s milk, with the exception of two hard cheeses made with cow’s milk. E. coli O157 was not detected in any of the cheeses." The soft and semisoft cheeses are already illegal in the US. In addition, we have no basis for comparison to pasteurized cheeses. What percentage of those cheeses have harmful microbes present, and in what quantities? Without that relative measure, the findings are not meaningful. The concern that studies like this Almeida study present is that policy will be made on the basis of theoretical "risk profiles" rather than real-world impacts. Once you go down that path, you can find a reason to outlaw just about any food -- especially if that food doesn't have a well-funded lobby behind it.

I'm not sure it's any more difficult to buy off government bureaucracies than it is to buy off private corporations, however it's beside the point. The reality is that there's no reason we have to trade the right to food choice for the privilege of safe food. Because raw-milk cheeses are not dangerous. All we have to do is look at Europe to know that. Even were raw-milk cheeses potentially dangerous, like pretty much every food (eggs, chicken, fish), the answer would be to ensure that the producers follow rational safety guidelines -- because, again, we know that raw-milk cheese can be produced safely. An outright ban is not the logical response in that situation. And at the most basic level, even if there is a small risk from these products, the choice could simply be made clear, just as it's made clear with cigarettes, alcohol, etc.

Seems like the same sense to me. Taken together, the two points paint a single picture: familiarity is not just the crutch of the older, more conservative crowd, but also of the younger, ostensibly trendier set.

Matt, am I to understand that your intent is to find a commercial publisher to put this book in print? If so, I think there are a few issues with your approach. First, the book you're designing has full-color photography on every page. That's an expensive book to produce. Most publishers won't do that for anybody other than an established celebrity. Second, most major publishers aren't in the business of buying fully designed books that they just print up and sell. That's essentially the premise of the self-publishing industry. Regular publishers want to be involved in the creation and production of the works they promote, which is why they have editors and designers on staff. There are exceptions, but again they're generally for celebrity authors. And of course if you self publish you're back to the issue of this approach yielding a very expensive book. So you may want to think about a design that's less reliant on color photography. While your photos are beautiful, most of them are not essential, and the few truly instructive ones (like the risotto shots) could work in grayscale, which can be printed in a standard book without additional expense. In terms of the content, two thoughts struck me right away. First, I think the introduction is weak. I don't see the point of opening with "So what right does an amateur cook have making a cookbook? I guess none really. I have had no formal training and never worked in a restaurant. I do however truly believe that you can be passionate about good real food without either." That doesn't give the reader confidence. Related to that, I think the book needs a better selling proposition than just "Matt Wright, blogger, cooks nice food with a Pacific Northwest twist." I think you should brainstorm and really define your style, and then figure out how to pitch that as somehow unique. There are a lot of cookbooks out there, tell us why we should care about yours? Second, if you're going to use an approach that calls for very few recipes, you might not want to start right off with two tomato-on-bread recipes. There's also a disconnect between the whole natural, organic, Pacific Northwest rap and your advice that winter tomatoes are just dandy. I think that goes, again, to the point that there's not a sufficiently focused vision being presented.