Fat Guy

One thing I've noticed about pantries is that, while some people make great use of them, most people just let a lot of junk accumulate -- junk they don't need, never use and eventually discard. I guess it depends on how rigorous and organized someone is, but I know for sure that most people don't benefit from more kitchen storage space. They may love it, but the benefits are illusory. Having less space -- not zero space, but a reasonable amount -- helps limit accumulation and waste, not just of food but also of equipment, paper goods, cleaning products, etc. In addition to 1- better availability of fresh foods, and 2- more meals eaten out or based on prepared products, another factor in the demise of the pantry is 3- families getting smaller. When you have three or four kids, a pantry becomes essential because you need to stock your home like a restaurant. When you have one kid, or none, you don't need that kind of inventory unless you're all the way at the end of the bell curve in terms of how much you entertain and the level at which you operate in the kitchen.

In the course of working on the op-ed someone told me that, when she was pregnant in France, she was told to avoid ice cream and raw fruit. It seems as though every country, culture and obstetrician has different advice about what pregnant women should and shouldn't eat, and that very little of it rests on any sort of factual basis.

I don't think apartment dwellers tend to shop that way (the ones who do have larger apartments than normal, or they have storage space in their buildings' basements), and people who live in suburban homes tend to have basements. I have several friends who have a row of Metro shelves (or the equivalent) somewhere in the basement where they keep all the bulk paper towels, toilet paper, canned tomatoes, laundry detergent, dog food, etc. Don't get me wrong, if I built a house it would of course have a pantry. But were I building a house designed to appeal to the average person, I wouldn't allocate 60 square feet to a pantry when I could put another bathroom there or make the living room or kitchen bigger.

I believe that article, from 1984, is about an outbreak of listeriosis in Auckland, New Zealand, that was as far as I know never conclusively linked to anything. It probably wouldn't have been linked to sushi under any circumstances, since Japanese restaurants had barely gained a toehold in New Zealand in the early 1980s, and if Japanese living in New Zealand had been making sushi at home and getting sick the hospitals would have figured out that all the people coming in were ethnically Japanese. If raw fish was to blame for that outbreak, it was probably raw mollusks like oysters -- they tend to be responsible for the overwhelming majority of seafood-related foodborne illnesses, but are not particularly used in sushi.

I've done the drive from NY to Ohio many times and in my experience the best road food on I-80 is Quaker Steak & Lube in Sharon, PA. Quaker Steak & Lube makes some of the best hot wings I've had anywhere, and it's a great place to hang out for a bit before finishing the drive. It's about six miles off I-80. Directions and such on the website: http://www.quakersteakandlube.com/

There's an op-ed in tomorrow's New York Times, by me, on Sushi and pregnancy, which developed out of the discussion here in the eG Forums. Thanks for all your assistance.

Just wanted to mention that there's an op-ed in tomorrow's New York Times, by me, on Sushi and pregnancy, which developed out of the discussion here in the eG Forums.

I think the demise of the pantry has a lot to do with the better availability of fresh food year-round. Most people, especially in apartments and small-lot suburban homes, just go to the supermarket once or twice a week to get whatever they need for consumption over the course of the next week. They're not putting up preserves, storing potatoes or buying half a cow for the chest freezer. When I think about the kind of stuff we had in our pantry in our country house in the 1970s, it's all stuff I'd never bother to keep around today: powdered milk, dozens of jars of preserves and cans and cans and cans of stuff. So the only people who really want pantries are hardcore advanced cooks who do crazy things like buy 50lb bags of flour and join the eGullet Society.

I just went to test this theory by comparing the taste of Annie's Cheddar Bunnies to Annie's White Cheddar Bunnies. You are certainly correct that the flavor distinction is between milder and sharper, at least it is with respect to the yellow/orange and white versions of this product. However, when it comes to real cheese, I see sharp yellow cheddars and mild white cheddars all the time, both from mass-market and high-end brands. Even with the traditional farmhouse Cheddar-related cheeses (Gloucester, Leicester, Cheshire, etc.) from England, you see a lot of yellow/orange ones and some that are nearly red.

My understanding is that cheddar cheese is white unless you add coloring to it, in which case it turns yellow/orange. The cheese is exactly the same. So why is "white cheddar" so often offered as a flavor claim on packaging? What does it all mean?

A CEO has such an obligation, but does that apply when nobody knows it's the CEO speaking? It seems to me that even if the statements are found to be materially misleading (which I'm not sure they are anyway), the use of a pseudonym actually protects Mackey and Whole Foods on the legal side. On the ethical side, however, I think it's like the aforementioned example of a restaurateur pseudonymously and deceptively reviewing his own restaurant.

This grill retails for US$119 at Wal-Mart and can be had for less on sale: http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=5494014 It's a totally straightforward, low-tech grill, and it happens to be one of the best grills I've ever used. Some friends picked one up after their much more expensive grill failed to survive the coastal weather, and it's a huge improvement. It heats quickly, almost immediately. It has very high output at the high end of its range -- I don't know about the BTU measurement but the flames really kick (it's almost scary when it's on the highest setting) and the effective heat seems higher than any $2,000 grill I've used -- but also has the ability to go quite low. It maintains the heat predictably. It has a porcelain-coated grate. The technology under the grill is basically a flat piece of metal covering the burners, and it works as well as or better than any other system (lava rocks, elaborate grids of bars) I've seen for converting drippings into smoky flavor. It's not huge -- the cooking surface is 360 square inches -- but the space is all usable edge-to-edge and front-to-back with almost completely consistent heat. So you can cook quite a lot on it. Or you can just buy 20 of them for the price of one fancy stainless grill that isn't as good, and then you'll have all the space you want on the first three plus you can give the other 17 as gifts to friends.

There have been a couple of articles in the Wall Street Journal this week about John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods. He apparently spent eight years posting to stock discussion forums under a pseudonym. I don't believe the pieces from the Journal are accessible except to paid subscribers, though it might be worth trying the links. The gist of it: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1184187829...tml?mod=mostpop The Wild Oats bashing is perhaps the most intriguing part of the behavior, because Whole Foods is now trying to buy Wild Oats. In a related story the following day (yesterday) there was analysis of the legal and PR implications, as well as discussion of other CEOs who post on discussion forum sites or maintain blogs. One publicist had this to say about the possible implications of Mackey's behavior: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1184290557...e_whats_news_us The issue, it seems to me, is not that Mackey used a pseudonym. Plenty of people do, including most people posting to eG Forums discussions. The issue is that Mackey made self-interested comments pseudonymously. That's dishonest. I could even understand doing it eight years ago, when interactive online discussion was still not exactly mainstream. I think a lot of us, when first dipping our toes into the online world in the early days, experimented with the boundaries of conduct -- it's so easy to become someone else -- but today? And if you're the CEO of a company? Posting about that company? I'd be much more comfortable with Mackey posting porn pseudonymously -- I'd say, hey, it's his business. But posting about Whole Foods? That's not good. That's the same as a restaurateur posting positive reviews of his own restaurant, while pretending to be a customer who "Just happened to be walking by this place and it was the best meal I ever had!" At the same time, I think that publicist doesn't make a convincing claim. Unless Mackey gets charged with some sort of stock manipulation, this will probably all just go away soon enough.

Were I planning a catered event in New Jersey, I'd look to the Mirage catering facility on Oak Tree Road in Edison. It's owned by the Mehtani Restaurant Group, which operates the restaurants Moghul, Moghul Express, Moksha, Ming and Mithaas in Edison, and Mehndi, Ming II and SM23 in Morristown. At Mirage you can get first-rate Indian food, as well as Chinese and just about anything else. I've been trailing the team there for something I'm writing, and have been very impressed with the operation and, of course, the food.

So is a hot-dog cart a restaurant? The food-service industry wouldn't define it as such. A hot-dog cart would fall into the category of "Retail, Vending, Recreation, Mobile." There's also some gray area around drinking places. They don't become restaurants just by virtue of serving popcorn on the bar, at least not for industry categorization places. But something like McDonald's? Definitely a restaurant by industry definitions. Specifically, they call it a QSR: quick-service restaurant.

Sushi and sashimi developed along different historical timelines, and there are various debates about what can and can't be included in the definitions of each. In general, sushi equals rice with toppings or fillings. Those toppings or fillings can be raw fish, cooked fish, vegetables -- anything. The actual word sushi references the rice, so as a technical matter it's not sushi if it doesn't have rice. However, you will find the occasional maki made without rice, and that's probably considered to be sushi at this point. In any event, modern fresh raw-fish sushi with vinegared sweetened rice is a relatively recent innovation. Back in the day the fish was fermented in rice to preserve it. The vinegar came in to substitute for that fermented taste when fresh raw fish started to be used in sushi. In general, sashimi equals plain slices of raw fish, and has been around for much longer than fresh raw-fish sushi. But it's possible to slice up other things and call it sashimi, and have people understand what you mean. For example, you could say "avocado sashimi" and not be speaking nonsense. You probably couldn't cook a piece of fish and call it sashimi, though. Then again, a Nobu innovation was "new-style sashimi," which refers to sashimi that has been cooked -- it's laid out raw on the plate and hot oil is drizzled on top to cook it just slightly.

I've gone over the sushi-with-hands issue with several of the top Japanese sushi chefs in America, and they've all been strong advocates for eating with the hands. Both Yasuda and Shin Tsujimura at Nobu have, after we established rapport over the course of many meals, implored me to use hands especially for nigiri. Both independently told me that when they prepare sushi for someone using hands it gives them the flexibility to pack the rice very loose. If they send sushi out to the tables, or they serve people who are using chopsticks, they have no choice but to form a denser nigiri, which is undesirable. This is confirmed by the author's observations in the new book, "The Zen of Fish."

my understanding (which certainly could be wrong), is that chopsticks weren't used before the 19th century in Thailand either...they used fingers. chopsticks, throughout Asia, tended to arrive with Chinese merchants.....which I don't think really penetrated Thailand until the late 19th and early 20th centuries...(this is also when noodles first began to show up in Thai cooking) ← That may be. I'd love to find a source on that. I assumed the Chinese merchants brought them over in the 15th or so century, but what do I know?

You may get strange looks from Americans, but certainly not from any Japanese person. You're doing it the right way. You're kickin' it old school. Americans do a lot of silly things with chopsticks. For example, I’ve met many people who insist on using chopsticks in Thai restaurants, in order to be respectful of that culture. They are, however, overcompensating: in Thailand people eat with forks and spoons. The only time you’d receive chopsticks in a restaurant in Thailand would be if it was a Chinese restaurant, or you were being served a Chinese noodle dish. Otherwise, they haven’t been using chopsticks in Thailand since King Rama V introduced Western-style utensils there back in the 19th century. Whenever I’ve asked Thai restaurant owners in North America why they put chopsticks on the tables if chopsticks aren’t used in Thailand, they’ve told me it’s because customers expect and demand them. Nor are chopsticks required in Japan to eat sushi. Sashimi, yes, but sushi is made with the hands and can be eaten with the hands. I know when I go to Japanese restaurants and eat my sushi with my hands, the people eating their sushi with chopsticks look at me like I’m a cretin. But the sushi chefs know it’s the traditional way. Eating sushi with your hands also has the benefit of being much easier than eating sushi with chopsticks. Especially when it comes to dipping nigiri in a little soy sauce, I find the chopstick maneuver almost impossible, because you're supposed to invert the piece and dip the fish, not dip the rice as many do.

Brent, I think Pioneer on Columbus qualifies as great. I've been buying beer there for about 25 years (yes, I was way underage at the time, but it was a different time) and the selection has always been diverse and interesting. Plus they sell everything as single bottles, which is a real pleasure. Most people I take in there are pretty impressed.

If the issues are temperature and time, it doesn't matter how good the place is. You're still going to get better sushi at the sushi bar. Even at the best places -- perhaps especially at the best places -- you hear all the time that the table experience is inferior to the sushi bar experience. I send people to Yasuda and if they sit at a table they think it's nothing special, whereas if they sit at the sushi bar they think it's the best they've had. The New York Times even, on the first go-round, suggested Masa should get a different number of stars for table and counter service. This passage from the recent book "The Zen of Fish" illustrates the time point with respect to maki-sushi:

With shellfish, yes, you can tell the difference between live and killed hours ago -- not that you'd eat raw shellfish killed hours ago. The issue is that there's not much difference between killed a few minutes before you eat it, and eating it alive, flavor/texture-wise. With fin fish, I doubt I could tell blindfolded, but that's just because I'm ignorant. There is definitely a cycle of rigor mortis and decomposition that changes the texture of fish over the course of a few days. In some cases, such as with tuna, this curing is desirable. The other thing to note is that fish kept alive in tanks are not necessarily the best fish to eat. A lot of chefs will tell you they'd choose a killed-at-the-source, immediately-iced-down, express-shipped fish over one that has been living in a tank for days or weeks.

Maybe we need a whole topic on whether and why it's better to sit at the sushi bar. I think there are several reasons why the sushi bar is better, and they become more compelling as you go up the ladder of quality. In brief, the two major reasons are information and time. Information: you need the direct conduit to the sushi chef in order to get the best stuff; you just don't get that information from a waiter. Time: as soon as a piece of sushi is assembled it's a race against time; nigiri drop down rapidly towards room temperature rather than body temperature; the nori in the maki wrapper gets soggy and rubbery. When you're at the sushi bar, the chef makes a piece of sushi and immediately places it before you. Five minutes later, it's just not as good as if you eat it right away. When you order at a table, you get a platter of sushi. The first pieces placed on the platter can easily be there for 10-15 minutes while the rest of the platter is assembled. It's just not as good. I'll sit at a table at a sushi place if I have to, because once your group size gets above 3 the sushi bar isn't pleasant (though if you can get at the corner of an L-shaped bar you can pull off 4), but I won't invest heavily in sushi that night.

That's rule number one of sushi: you have to sit at the sushi bar.

Oysters and clams on the half shell are alive when you eat them. Go ahead and poke an oyster and you should see it twitch. So the experience of eating live food shouldn't come across as new or different to anybody who has eaten oysters or clams on the half shell. The most dramatic live dish I've had has been at Nobu in New York City, where they serve a live Florida spiny lobster. The head and body are separated from the tail. The tail meat is removed, cut into chunks, iced down and replaced in the tail cavity. The body and head are propped up on a platter. The whole thing is elaborately garnished and secured, and you eat the meat out of the tail-cavity serving vessel while the lobster watches you and flails around. It's disturbing, and delicious. The live-food taboo, in the West at least, may come from the Bible. Genesis 9:4 says "But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat." This, and several other versions of the same phrase in other places in the Old Testament, is interpreted as a prohibition against eating the limb of a live animal.