Fat Guy

A couple of new items well worth trying as summer produce really starts to rain down on us here in the Northeast: - Heirloom tomato salad with opal basil, pickled shallots and fried tofu. The little cubes of fried tofu are like trompe l'oeil croutons, and the quality of the tomatoes is amazing -- best I've had all summer, earthy and sweet, in a nice assortment. - Poached Mayan prawns with cantaloupe, cucumber, mint and lemon basil. This is, along with the heirloom tomato salad, one of the most visually stunning dishes I've seen at Momo-Ssam (or anywhere lately) and is, thankfully, not biased towards sweet in the way you might fear. The prawns, though they appear totally plain to the naked eye, are poached in some sort of court-bouillon and then marinated in fish sauce and spices. The spice balances out the sweetness of the cantaloupe balls, and the tiny cucumber balls (it's amazing how similar cucumber and cantaloupe are when they're denatured in this way) add some nice crunch. - As mentioned above, the renowned fried cauliflower is back, and it's great, with chilies, mint, delfino (which I believe is a variety of cilantro) and fish sauce. Overall the menu is now in full summer mode. There are Jonah crab claws from Maine, and a lobster dish with watermelon. While there's still plenty of pork and offal available, you could go to Momo-Ssam tonight and put together a 15-course meal built around fish, chicken, vegetables and fruits, all of which go nicely with a glass of sparkling Vouvray.

On the architecture point, it seems that for a couple of decades the trend turned towards smaller Asian restaurants with minimalist decor. But recently there has been a resurgence of gargantuan showpiece restaurants. I think places like Spice Market, Buddakan and Tao are the successors to the Polynesian-themed restaurants of old, at least in terms of design and decor. The details are different, but the grandiose aesthetic impulse seems similar. I wonder if, 30 years hence, they'll seem as kitschy as the Polynesian places seem to us now.

The Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I've been going pretty much all my life, Empire Szechuan, still has a pu pu platter on the menu, priced at $7.95, which I think is pretty much the same as what it cost in the 1980s. I haven't ordered one since the 1980s, so I'm not sure about what's on it these days, or what kind of serving vessel they use now (it used to be metal, a lot of places used wood, though I wouldn't be surprised to see ceramic platters in use today), or whether the Sterno is still part of the configuration. I looked on menupages.com, which has a menu search tool, and found that quite a lot of Chinese restaurants in New York City still have pu pu platters on their menus. On the Upper West Side alone, there are nine hits. For me the essential flaw in the pu pu platter was always the same as the problem with most mixed-seafood platters: it's just not within the ability of most low-end kitchens to cook five or six items so they're all ready at the same time, cooked properly and served hot. In my experience the Sterno never did anything to help either. My father was always adamantly opposed to the pu pu platter, insisting that we pick the best appetizers and order them separately. So it was really only something I had when I went out with friends' families. I enjoyed those occasions because of the rebellious aspect but in the end always found myself in reluctant agreement with my father's position on the matter.

Many grocery items come in bags, sometimes within boxes: cereal, crackers, chips, pretzels, etc. After opening, the challenge of keeping the bag sealed for freshness arises. I've seen a few different methods of addressing the problem: 1. Bag clips. These are often for sale on the checkout line, and work quite well. They are, however, ridiculously un-economical given the alternatives. 2. Binder clips. These (usually black) metal clips are what we use around the house, primarily because I have about a million of them left over from when I practiced law. 3. Clothespins. I'm not sure anybody still uses these for hanging clothes out to dry (placing them in the same category as pipe cleaners), but they sure are handy for keeping bags shut, and you can get a lifetime supply at the dollar store for, well, for a dollar. 4. Origami. Some people -- not me -- seem to have the preternatural ability to roll and fold bags such that they stay shut tight without any artificial support. Amazing. 5. Transfer. This isn't really a way to keep bags shut but is, rather, a way to avoid the issue altogether. I know a few people who just transfer everything they buy into Tupperware, RubberMaid, Zip-Loc, Glad, etc., containers. 6. Just not caring. Some people just kind of scrunch the bag semi-shut and hope for the best. 7. Buying products that come in self-sealing bags. In this day and age, every product should really come in some sort of resealable bag, but for now only a minority of products do -- and often the sealing mechanisms are about as effective as a damp Band-Aid. Any other methods you all employ or have seen?

I've posted separately about Tammy's chocolate tastings here.

At this year's member-organized Heartland gathering, several of us spent the afternoon participating in three chocolate-related events. Tammylc (aka Tammy Coxen), who runs a chocolate business in Ann Arbor (her website is here), was kind enough to lead a chocolate tasting, followed by a chocolate-and-wine tasting, followed by a truffle-making demonstration. I was present for the first two, but was only able to catch parts of the third, so I'll report only on the tastings. For the chocolate tasting, Tammy led us through tasting eight chocolate samples in ascending order of chocolate percentage. She explained about various attributes to focus on (snap, mouthfeel) and also noted that cocoa percentage is not a totally clear measure of chocolate-ness since that percentage can be made up of varying ratios of cocoa butter to cocoa. The chocolates we sampled were: 1. Scharffen Berger, Blend, 62% 2. Vintage Plantations, Ecuador, 65% 3. Valrhona “Manjari” Madagascar 64% 4. Michel Cluizel “Mangaro” Madagascar 65% 5. Michel Cluizel “Maralumi” Papau-New Guinea 64% 6. Michel Cluizel “Concepcion” Venezula 66% 7. Michel Cluizel “Tamarina” Sao Tome 70% 8. Pralus Indonesie 75% It was interesting to see the varied reactions to some of the chocolates, especially at the higher percentages. Pralus, a controversial brand because Francois Pralus is fond of very heavy roasting of beans, was my favorite, and also one of the only chocolates that a significant number of tasters hated. There was also a chocolate that tasted like broccoli and asparagus, I believe the Michel Cluizel from Sao Tome, and I thought it was just awful -- yet several tasters loved it. Tammy gave out sheets with grids for tasting notes, and spoke throughout about various aspects of chocolate. It was fascinating to taste so many interesting chocolates all together. I wish we'd had a Hershey bar in the mix just for a baseline. Next, those who participated in the wine tasting circled back and tasted all of the above with the following four wines: 1. Quady Elysium California Black Muscat 2. Warres Optima 10 yr Tawny Port 3. 2001 Clos de Paulilles Banyuls Rimage 4. Mas Amiel Maury 6 ans d'age Vin Doux Natural I've heard many wine professionals say that pairing wine with chocolate at all is a waste of wine, chocolate and time, but I thought some of the pairings raised strong challenges to that attitude. What I did come away thinking is that pairing Port and Banyuls -- the traditional preferences -- with chocolate is not necessarily a great idea. At the same time, the Quady black muscat, when paired with several of the chocolate samples, did exactly what wine is supposed to do when paired well with food: the wine was delicious, the chocolate was delicious, and when taken together the whole was more delicious than the sum of its parts. The Mas Amiel, as well, really worked for me as a pairing. It was very kind of Tammy, who works in chocolate professionally, to do these tastings for us at no charge (we only chipped in to pay for the actual chocolate). Maybe some other folks who were there will have some details to add.

I enjoyed Ratatouille but thought it fell far short of greatness. I'm no stickler for realism in cinema, but I'm pretty surprised that so many foodies are praising Ratatouille's accuracy. While many of the kitchen scenes are brilliantly done (the introductions of the members of the brigade, Colette's tough-girl speech, and the portrayal of Skinner the Napoleonic nightmare chef, were my favorites, though the decision to make Skinner so swarthy was a bit troublesome), the portrayal of the restaurant overall is painfully unrealistic. They spent all this time consulting with cooks, but maybe they should have put a little effort into consulting with a server or two, or even a critic, or a restaurant designer. As a result of those accuracy gaps, the restaurant portrayed is barely reminiscent of anyplace where someone would actually eat. And, as mentioned above, the repeated confusion of herbs and spices is cringe-worthy, as are the five-star rating system and the portrayal of restaurant service on roller skates. Accuracy aside, though (because this is after all a cartoon and if you buy the cooking rat you can't be such a stickler for accuracy), there are some pretty deep flaws. The arc of the number two character in the film, Linguine, is barely coherent. The device of controlling Linguine by his hair is foolish -- surely someone could have come up with something better. Anton Ego's "review," read allowed towards the end of Ratatouille, is surely one of the worst pieces of food writing ever. And the positioning of heartless critic Anton Ego and corporate frozen-food interests as the restaurants' twin nemeses reflects a lack of imagination in screenwriting that no amount of clever animation can overcome.

What words am I twisting, and what absurd indefensible point am I trying to make? I never said either of those things. I've had amazing soft cheeses made in the US, for example from Bobolink, and have written exactly that on the topic you're referencing. However, I also think the overall state of the soft cheese business is pretty dismal, so I mostly buy hard cheeses. But I don't think we should give up and just buy all our soft cheeses from Europe forever. Eventually, I hope we'll figure out how to do a better job. Don't you hope so too? As for the quality of imported Parmigiano, no, I didn't say it's all C-level. I said most of it is, and surely that's correct. I haven't been to Italy in forever, but as I mentioned above I get occasional hand deliveries from cheese shops in Reggio Emilia and I have never, ever had Parmigiano Reggiano in America that has been as good. I think it's correct to say that most Parmigiano Reggiano sold in the US is C-level, some is B-level, a very little bit of it is what Sam calls high-B-level (that's what you get at the better New York cheese places), and none that I've seen has been A-level. There may be some out there, but if it is out there it's pretty rare because I do get around to a lot of the best cheese shops and it has never crossed my path.

I wouldn't be able to say for sure without tasting it. We get B-level cheese here in New York for $8.99 (US) a pound at the place I shop, so it's certainly possible to sell pretty good Parmigiano Reggiano at that price. And if anyone has the buying power and cleverness to do that on a large scale, it's Costco. However, in the US, outside of New York City, I've never actually seen it happen.

Growing vegetables has been the same as making cheese for as long as growing truffles has been the same as making cheese. If I understand your point correctly, you're trying to say that nobody outside of Italy should ever attempt to produce the four things you've listed. You can't possibly have such a narrow view of culinary history. Products, methods and crops from all over the world have migrated from place to place since the beginning of civilization. Maybe the American wine industry should never have bothered. Maybe we should have just said, nah, we shouldn't make wine here, because "some things are just better when they're there made by the people that have always made them in the place that they have always been made." Maybe we shouldn't make any olive oil in California, or any foie gras in the Hudson Valley, or any cheddar cheese at Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont. Maybe those things should have been left to the people who had always been doing them.

It's real, yes. Nuova Castelli S.p.A., the wholesaler, is somewhat infamous as the defendant in the Parmigiano Reggiano trademark (or whatever they call it in Italy) case, however it's a legitimate wholesaler of the real thing. If that's $19.99 Canadian a kilogram, that's an amazing price even for C-level Parmigiano Reggiano.

I guess they shouldn't grow tomatoes or corn in Italy, since those things weren't "always" there.

It's not the customer's fault if a piece of sushi is too big to eat in one bite. It's the restaurant's fault. So it's no breach of etiquette for the customer to bite it in half.

We feed whey to pigs in America too. It takes a lot of milk to make any aged, hard cheese. Yet we make plenty of them in America. Were it true as a general proposition that "if it could be done, someone would be doing it," there would be no progress, ever, in anything. There are plenty of great cheeses being made in the United States today that weren't being made here ten or twenty years ago. I'm sure there was somebody saying it was impossible, right up until the moment those cheeses were made.

I've had pretty much the full line of Zingerman's cheeses. Two years ago at the Heartland gathering we took a tour of the Zingerman's creamery and did a bunch of tasting, and also purchased a number of cheeses. I liked the people there, but it was clear to me that they were in a learning phase, not a competitive-with-Europe phase. Maybe their cheeses have improved so much in two years that they're now in the same league as the Europeans, but it seems incredible.

Who wouldn't buy it? The trend towards buying local is one of the strongest in high-end American food retailing. Every chef I know would, I'm sure, love to get hold of a locally produced substitute for Parmigiano Reggiano. It would simply need to be good.

John, I've tried about 2/3 of those cheeses, and with the exception of the blue cheese from Rogue Creamery (which I would not characterize as a soft cheese), I think terms like "sensational" and "revolution" are overstatements. For one thing, the sum total of every example of good soft cheese in the US represents a pathetically small share of the market. For another thing, the few good cheeses out there are quite difficult to come by, often available only at farmer's markets or by mail order. And for still another thing, most of the good American soft cheeses are good but not competitive with the best cheeses in Europe -- there's a pretty striking gap. But most importantly, soft cheeses are way behind the curve compared to hard cheeses -- and that was the thesis of the topic. It's just not possible to compile a list of American soft cheeses -- or even a list of imported soft cheeses available in America -- that compares favorably to a list of hard cheeses like Jasper Hill Farms cloth-wrapped cheddar, cave-aged Orb Weaver, or Crowley Colby. The kind of stuff you can just walk into Murray's or Artisanal and buy.

The quality of Parmigiano Reggiano at the average American supermarket isn't particularly good. Those regulations and practices aren't resulting in uniformly great cheese. They are, however, resulting in uniformly expensive cheese. So it should be possible for someone with a little creativity to move in somewhere above the average in quality and below the average in price. To generalize, I'd say there are three levels of Parmigiano Reggiano quality (I'm not referring to age -- you can get most of the age permutations at all three levels): At the "A" level you've got the cheese you'd get at a good cheese shop in Reggio Emilia. This is the stuff that might actually be made artisanally, from red cows, etc. (Most P-R is not; I recommend Art of Eating no. 54, "Emilia Romagna: The Resurgent Red Cows of Parmigiano Reggiano and Other Stories from the Region Whose Cuisine Has Always Been Called Italy's Richest and Best," on this subject). My mother-in-law, who occasionally goes to the big educator's conference there, usually brings back a block and it's always far and away superior to what we get at the best American cheese shops: much, much, much better than Murray's, DiPalo's, Zabar's, Dean & DeLuca, Zingerman's, Central Market, you name it. This is the stuff where you taste it and say, hey, there's absolutely no way I'm going to grate this. I'm going to eat it like real cheese. You might, on a very lucky day, see a piece of cheese this good at DiPalo's or Murray's, but in my experience there's no guarantee of a consistent supply. At the "B" level you've got the stuff sold by the average store in Italy, which is roughly the equivalent of what the best American places are selling (and also what I've seen in markets in places like London -- though I think you do a little better in the UK than in the US). This is edible as eating cheese, but you'd mostly use it for grating -- it's great grated. At the "C" level you've got the stuff sold at the average American supermarket. This just isn't all that good. You certainly wouldn't want to use it for anything other than grating and melting. And it's expensive. I was just in Stop & Shop in New Haven, CT, and the mediocre Parmigiano Reggiano sold under the Il Villaggio label (which is what you see at a lot of supermarket-level places) was $16.99 a pound. New Yorkers may be accustomed to getting C-level Parmigiano Reggiano in the range of $9.99 a pound, and B-level for $14.99 a pound, but this isn't the norm. Usually, you pay $16.99 a pound for nothing special. So what I'm saying is that it should be possible to produce above-C-level cheese in the style of Parmigiano Reggiano and price it at $8.99 a pound. Yet, it doesn't seem that anyone is doing it. Not that I know of, at least.

This summer, after being closed for about three years, the West Side Market reopened at the corner of 110th and Broadway. I stuck my head in this morning and the new digs look great.

Bourdain wrote the introduction. I don't think he's a co-author. There isn't much information available about the book on the Simon & Schuster website yet. I assume the marketing push will come in August, at which point we'll know more. I love this sort of book, which judging from the title is in the tradition of the 1992 book "The Chef's Art: Secrets of Four-Star Cooking at Home," by Wayne Gisslen. Books about the fundamentals of cooking are, in my opinion, far more interesting than cookbooks. It will be interesting to read Ruhlman's take on the subject.

Even if we didn't have sushi chefs and Japanese foodies telling us "Yes, customers at the sushi bar get better fish," it would still be easy to believe just based on logic. We know that a fish is not a monolithic thing like a block of tofu. We know there are more and less desirable pieces of every fish, and there are more and less desirable fish in every order of fish. There must, therefore, be some sort of decision criteria used to allocate the better and worse fish. In some cases, it's possible to price and label the different cuts differently, as with toro. But you're still going to have better and worse fish, no matter how narrowly you categorize, unless you literally price every individual slice of fish differently. You could use random selection as your only decision criterion, but no sane businessperson would do that. Instead, you're going to try to maximize customer satisfaction, and the way to do that is to give the best fish to the customers most likely to appreciate it, and the worst fish to the customers least likely to be able to differentiate. At a good sushi place, we're not talking about rotten crap going out to the tables. We're talking about the difference between A-, A and A+ fish. But it's a difference. For the most part, it's a reasonable assumption that the more serious sushi eaters are going to be at the sushi bar. Yes, there will be the occasional serious sushi eater at a table. Yes, there will be the occasional undiscriminating eater at the sushi bar. In general, it stands to reason, the serious sushi eater suffers for being at the table and the undiscriminating eater benefits from being at the sushi bar. Presumably, there are things you can do at a table to get a better meal. If you're known to the restaurant as a sushi-bar customer but you're at a table because you came with six people, the sushi chef is probably going to be able to figure that out, especially if you go over and say hello at the beginning of the meal. I'm not sure it's possible through casual observation to know who's getting what quality of fish. A lot of the bases for differentiation aren't evident to the naked eye, especially the naked eye that's not professionally trained.

I'd be willing to try a gyuto, and comparison test drive it against my 10" Wusthof chef's knife (my workhorse), but I'm lazy. Can some knowledgeable person just give me a link to an under-$100 gyuto of decent quality that will be similar in size to my Wusthof?

Okay, I've looked it up on like a dozen websites and about half of them seem to say to do what I did, and the other half say to heat the vinegar and sugar in a saucepan until the sugar dissolves. But since the sugar dissolved at room temperature, I'm not sure what the point of heating it would have been. What am I missing?

I think it's safe to say that, in pastry and baking, most people measure everything. They may measure in more or less effective ways (volume is not as good as weight, X number of egg yolks won't work as well as Y grams of egg yolks, etc.), but they measure. When it comes to savory cooking, though, it seems the scales and measuring cups don't really come out all that often. At least in my kitchen, I just put some oil in a pan, chop up some onions, etc. I don't use 2 tablespoons of oil or 1 pound of onions. How about you all? What do you measure, and what do you just sort of play by ear?

According to Trevor Corson's book, "The Zen of Fish," (pages 318-319) there are three ways to order sushi: "Okimari" = "It's been decided" = the customer is ordering one of the restaurant's set menu items (the "sushi deluxe" platter, etc.) "Okonomi" = "As I like it" = the customer is going to order what he or she wants from the sushi chef "Omakase" = "I leave it up to you" = chef's choice