Fat Guy

Nobu also has excellent fish. I often hear people say, "Oh, you don't go to Nobu for sushi," but actually all three Nobu places have some great sushi. Not necessarily the selection you'd get at Yasuda or Kuruma, but what they have is top notch, as are the chefs.

I had a brief chat with one of the corn ladies and she indicated that Silver Princess, Silver Queen and Silver King are three different varieties that come in at slightly different times, in that order. That's just what I heard by the side of the road.

We're down in North Carolina on the Cape Fear coast, and when we go to drive around, every couple of miles we pass another person selling Silver Princess corn out of the back of a pickup truck. This stuff is awesome. It's complex, sweet, tender and, well, corny. I'm going to eat as much of it as I can this week, because I've never seen it for sale back up north.

I've spent a lot of time in restaurants researching my books and articles, and I can tell you that there's a big difference between setting up an appointment with a chef for a couple of hours to see him doing one thing, and actually working in a restaurant kitchen for a week or more. If you call up any chef and go in just to see a procedure, you'll be shown a staged, sanitized, politically correct, presentation version of the procedure. If you go work in the restaurant, they try to keep that up for about three hours and then they have to get their work done so they have no choice but to go back to normal. Here's what they really do in a lot of restaurants: Exhibit A: In a real working restaurant kitchen, when you might be prepping fifty or more lobsters for service for a Friday night, you don't have time to do any fancy BS supposedly humane euthanasia with a knife. You've got work to do. Exhibit B: In the better restaurants, they don't cook lobsters whole. Except for lobster shack and steakhouse type places, chances are you're going to get a plated dish where the meat has been removed from the lobster. So the claws and tails are cooked separately, because the tails and claws take different amounts of time to cook to the ideal degree of doneness. You cook claws almost twice as long as tails. Exhibit C: Separate cooking of claws and tails, plus the need for speed, equals you just dismember the lobsters while they're still alive. Yes, you take a live, struggling lobster, and you twist one of its arms right off and throw it in a bin. Then you twist the other arm off. Once you get the motion down, it's easy. They come right off -- after all, in the wild a lobster will "throw a claw" to escape if necessary. Then, you grasp the lobster firmly around the body and tail and you rip the tail off. You throw the tail in a different bin. Then you pull the lobster's guts out, setting aside any roe, and discarding the rest of the guts in a garbage pail. It's totally gross, because the lobster is still moving its little legs and antennae while you do this. You throw the body shells in another bin. After awhile, you have three bins and a small bowl: claws, tails, shells, roe. And all the lobsters are dead -- before cooking, even. Then you boil the claws and tail separately, so they're a little underdone. You remove all the meat with shears and various other tools, but mostly with brute force. You refrigerate. All the shells go into stock. The roe goes into whatever -- maybe a compound butter used to finish dishes. At service, when it's time to fire a lobster order, you take a claw from one lobster, a claw from another lobster and a tail from another lobster (because by now everything is all mixed up) and you finish them with a little heat to get them to done. Plate them, sauce them, send them out, move on. That's how restaurants cook lobster, okay?

What drives me batty is when people put their trash cans like a mile away from their workspaces, and they walk back and forth, back and forth, back and forth from the counter to the trash fifty times in the course of preparing the meal. Jeez, even Rachael Ray uses a "GB: garbage bowl!"

If you're like me, you go to someone else's house for a meal and, partly because you're curious and partly because you just feel comfortable there, you wind up in the kitchen. You watch the meal being prepared, the service, the cleanup. And, if you're like me, about a half-dozen things happen that make you scratch your head, or that have you on pins and needles wondering where the nearest fire extinguisher is to the stove and whether you'll be able to follow the instructions, the nearest psychiatrist is to prescribe you some anti-anxiety medication, and whether you remember the CPR class you took in high school well enough to keep an actual person alive until the ambulance arrives. Just today, I saw almost an entire set of Wusthof knives -- good ones -- go right into the dishwasher. Good thing they've never been sharpened, otherwise someone might get hurt taking them out. So what are some of the things you've witnessed that have raised your blood pressure?

There's a nice piece today in the Wall Street Journal on how to kill a lobster.

A few we've noted lately: Minnows = tomatoes Dunkles = dumplings Cook-cook = cookie Black-bear-bears = blackberries Straw-bear-bears = strawberries (and so on for various berries) Big-kiss = brisket Foon = spoon Ficy = spicy

As far as I know, kurobuta is Japanese for Berkshire.

"Berkshire pork" as a menu and marketing label is now firmly entrenched at the high end. But, without more, what does it really mean? Is there any sort of certification program that guarantees a standard, or is it just a breed of pig? Does the breed, without a certain diet and standards of care, actually produce better meat?

Carr's Table Water crackers = "matzoh crackers"

I agree that, in this instance, there's nothing to save. Indeed, the pickle situation overall these days is much better than at any time in my lifetime. The quality of "refrigerator pickles" available at regular stores throughout New York is now quite high. You can go to Fairway, Zabar's, Whole Foods -- any supermarket above the level of a Food Emporium -- and get Guss'-on-a-good-day quality (remember Guss' was inconsistent) half-sour and dill pickles at a price much lower than I remember Guss' charging. All throughout the New York Metro area there are good pickles nowadays. Plus, the supermarket pickles you can get throughout the country have improved dramatically: I see Ba Tampte and similar quality brands all the time in the refrigerator sections of supermarkets in the middle of nowhere.

We're heading back to Oak Island soon, where we go to visit some friends who have a beach house there. For any really strong restaurants you need to drive up to Wilmington, however you can certainly get good retail seafood in Southport. Bernie is almost certainly talking about Clem's (Clem's Seafood, 4351 Long Beach Road SE), which definitely seems to be the best. Also there's a guy standing on the side of that road many mornings selling shrimp out of a cooler -- highly recommended. On Oak Island, the most enjoyable place we've found is the Fish House. It's in the Blue Point Marina on Oak Island. Totally casual, family-friendly, a little bit divey, simple, good-quality seafood. If we discover anything new this time around I'll be sure to mention it, but we tend to do a lot of cooking at the beach house, with just a meal or two out during the week.

Fun story on Time.com about American expat Lucille Crook and her American-style greasy spoon, Lucille's, in Cairo.

In my experience, the coarser the grind the better the burger. But, if you grind too coarse, you don't get even distribution of fat and you wind up with little chewy/crunchy/undesirable pockets of stuff. Double grinding allows you to use a coarse disc but still gets all that stuff integrated on the second go-round. For whatever reason, double coarse-grinding does not equate to fine grinding. I do think it's better. It seems to create a less dense, more loosely packed burger that to me has a more desirable texture and does a better job of basting itself internally.

Today I had a bizarre craving for rum raisin ice cream. But it was pouring out, and all I had was some Haagen Dazs vanilla ice cream. It occurred to me: I have raisins, and in my cabinet I have Tahitian vanilla that has been sitting in a jar of rum for the past four months. Surely I can do something here. I took a handful of raisins and about a teaspoon of the vanilla extract, and also added a little water and a little sugar. I stuck all that in the microwave for a minute and the raisins soaked up all the liquid. I let the ice cream soften a bit and mixed in the raisins as best I could, then put it back in the freezer to firm up. It was great!

I think the tasting thing falls into the same category of restaurant fantasy mythology as the myth of the chef always being in the kitchen and cooking all your food. We want to romanticize cooking and think of chefs as auteurs, but the reality is that chefs are chief executives who lead teams. Successful executives aren't the ones who are free of weaknesses -- everybody in the world has strengths and weaknesses. Rather, the successful executives know their weaknesses and work around them by delegating and otherwise filling the gaps in their knowledge and skills. If there's a knowledge gap about the taste of fish, you fill it through whatever means necessary: you maybe have a limited taste-memory of fish from the pre-allergy days; you study the literature and see what recipes have been made, what combinations the best chefs throughout history have settled on; you have sous-chefs you trust to tell you what fish dishes work and don't work; you accept the feedback of your educated customers and critics; you make it work. You probably don't want to become a sushi chef or the next chef at Le Bernardin or Maisons de Bricourt, but at just about any other restaurant you make it work. It's a minor disability that can be overcome.

I have no reason to believe either Keller or Ruhlman is lying -- why would they want to lie about something like that? It's an admission against interest, so it's hard to see why they'd make it up and say it out loud. The fantasy of a chef tasting, re-tasting and infinitely tinkering with dishes is not necessarily the reality in a working restaurant kitchen. I've been in a lot of restaurant kitchens in the course of doing research for my books, and I've seen plenty of dishes created without tasting. For example, most every day at a nice restaurant the chef and sous chef will look at available ingredients and design specials. They don't cook and taste sample plates of those specials. They just sit there and do it on paper. They already know their sauces, their techniques, and all that. They can create dishes through assembling those components. Maybe they cook up a sample for the staff meeting at 4:45pm, but by then it's a done deal.

A lot of people, both professionals and serious fisherfolk, use Forschner filleting knives. They come in a few sizes, like 10" for big fish like salmon, and 6"-8" for average-size fish. They're terrific knives and they're only about $20. Spell it with two "l"s when you Google.

My friend and colleague Bob Lape is an Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist and food writer who has visited more than -- get this -- 9,000 restaurants. He writes the weekly restaurant reviews for Crain’s New York Business, and over the past several decades has covered food for countless journals and broadcast media outlets, including the Today Show. He has been referred to on occasion as "The Restaurant Encyclopedia." I’ve known Bob Lape for about ten years, and I thought I knew a lot about Bob. But a few weeks ago I learned something new about Bob. He sent me an email and just casually mentioned, like it was no big deal, that . . . well, you know how he has been to 9,000 restaurants over a period of decades stretching back to around the time I was born? It turns out he has been collecting matchbooks from those restaurants. So in addition to being "The Restaurant Encyclopedia," Bob is also the Living Museum of the Restaurant Matchbook. This incredible collection is a walk down memory lane of restaurants great and small, and recently I spent some time with Bob Lape walking down that lane. In a recording session at Porter House New York, Bob reminisced about several of the matchbooks in his collection. Michael Lomonaco, the chef at Porter House, also joined us for a bit -- it turns out he too is an aficionado of the restaurant matchbook. But that's not all. After we recorded the audio, we took the matchbooks we discussed back to eGullet Society World Headquarters across town. We scanned them on the eGullet Society high-resolution flatbed scanner. And eG Features director Dave "the Cook" Scantland created an incredibly nifty flash thingy, which you'll see below. It has all the matchbook images (all the ones we discussed, that is -- there are hundreds more in the collection), and a place at the bottom right to click to hear the audio. Hope you enjoy. <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0" width="800" height="550" id="restaurant_matchbook" align="middle"> <param name="allowScriptAccess"> <param name="movie" value="restaurant_matchbook.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#999999" /><embed src="http://www.egullet.org/flash/restaurant_matchbook.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#999999" width="800" height="550" name="restaurant_matchbook" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /> </object>

Just for the record, this is the relevant excerpt from Michael Ruhlman's "Soul of a Chef":

On Eater and Snack recently, the "sushi spreadsheet" has been revived as a topic of reportage. You can go here to download it. Here's a little more information from Eater, with various links to Wikipedia and such. The thing that I haven't noticed written about the sushi spreadsheet is how monumentally ill-informed it is. Here, in order, are what the keepers of the sushi spreadsheet would have us believe are the top 20 sushi places in New York: Jewel Bako 15 East Sushi Yasuda Kuruma Zushi Masa Upstairs at Bouley Bakery Blue Ribbon Sushi Sushi Gari Tomoe Sushi Hatsuhana Sushi-seki Maki Mono Bar Masa Nobu Morimoto Riingo Taka Tsuki Bond Street Hedeh Yes, Jewel Bako and 15 East are ranked ahead of Sushi Yasuda, Kuruma Zushi and Masa. I'm sorry, but while Jewel Bako can occasionally put out some excellent sushi, it's just not playing on the same field as Yasuda, Kuruma, Masa or even Hatsuhana. But it gets worse: Bouley Upstairs in the top 20? Tomoe? Give me a break. And not even a mention of Kano Yama, which, if you ask any ten Japanese art dealers for a sushi recommendation, you'll hear about from five of them. The keepers of the spreadsheet get as far as figuring out that Iso was replaced by Koi, but then the trail goes cold and they miss a top-ten, maybe top-five spot. I can't even figure out some of the comments, for example about number four, Kuruma Zushi, "Very very Expensive. Only go on an expense account. Very good but not top 4." Well, it's number four, so it sort of is top four, isn't it? The whole effort seems even less reliable than the Zagat survey.

Interesting. I've found the opposite to be true of both Setaro and Latini, both of which seem to have a wider window of "perfect" cooking times. That's also my experience. Indeed, I find it extremely difficult to get Barilla done right -- it seems to go from crunchy to mushy with no stops in between -- and easy to get the good artisan brands to come out al dente.

In my experience the best American source for both real balsamico and the highest quality olive oils is the Rare Wine Co. http://rarewineco.com/ There really is no comparison, no amount of fancy sales language that can be used to make other offerings actually taste as good as what Rare Wine Co. sells. There are a few people out there who import a single brand of olive oil that's competitive, but nobody matches Rare Wine Co.'s portfolio. You need to place your order the second the annual mailings come out, otherwise you won't have access to the full selection. If money is no object, Peck is amazing and ships to the US, plus the English website is simple to navigate. http://www.peck.it/ Because Peck is actually in Italy, you get incredible Parmigiano Reggiano and such -- but it's really, really expensive. If you're looking for value on Italian products in the US, you can't beat Teitel Bros. on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. http://www.teitelbros.com/ $8.99 a pound for three-year Parmigiano, respectable cold-pressed unfiltered Sicilian olive oil for $7.99 a liter . . . not in the same league as the above sources but very good and incredible value.

Yes. They're the French and Italian terms for Boletus edulis.