Fat Guy

The timeline of a kitchen renovation isn't much affected by the size of the kitchen. You have to do all the same things with 50, 100 or 400 square feet. Yes, the actual sheetrocking or whatever takes slightly longer to do for 400 square feet than it does for 50, but once the sheetrocking crew is in there it's the difference between a day and two days -- an insignificant difference. You still need plumbing, electrical and all the same appliances. You get a bigger refrigerator in a bigger kitchen, but so what? It doesn't take any longer to install, and even if you get two refrigerators that's only an extra hour.

Yes, most Barilla pasta sold in America is made in America, at a plant in Ames, Iowa. I've heard several Italians and Americans say the Barilla in Italy is better than the Barilla here, however the only people I know who've ever tested the theory by bringing some Italian Barilla to the US and doing a side-by-side tasting said they tasted exactly the same. Also, Barilla has a quality assurance program by which they constantly cross-train employees, formulate and test ingredients, and compare product samples from their different plants for consistency. Needless to say, most of the wheat probably comes from Canada and the US, no matter where the Barilla pasta is made. Most importantly, Barilla isn't very good anyway. It's no better than Ronzoni or most supermarket brands. In terms of artisan pasta being superior, I think the answer is a qualified yes. There are some brands that are fantastic, like Benedetto Cavalieri (my favorite) and Setaro. There are other brands that are nonsense. So, you really have to know the brands. One good indicator -- not perfect, but often correct -- of high quality is a visibly rough surface texture.

I wonder what would happen if, instead of the chopping blade, one were to use the shredding disc.

About 3/4 of the time, when we eat at home, I make us the following salad: lettuce (either Romaine or mixed greens), cucumber (usually those English hothouse cucumbers, quartered and diced), tomatoes (most of the year, Splendido brand grape tomatoes; local tomatoes in season), sprouts (we get an assortment, whatever looks good) and a mustard vinaigrette. I'd be interested to hear what everybody else's everyday salad is, in part because I'm just interested, and in part because I'm looking for some ideas.

I quite agree. Jared should be ashamed. Subway is mostly useful for tuna sandwiches in the middle of Manitoba.

Okay, so if you have to pack a lunch, fine, you have to make your sandwich ahead of time. But in this day and age -- in any day or age -- we shouldn't be supporting stores that sell pre-made sandwiches. A sandwich should be made to order. Not only do pre-made sandwiches deprive us of choice, but also they ruin the bread -- both through soggy contact with the ingredients and through refrigeration. The Earl of Sandwich, Rabbi Hillel and Jared from Subway all agree: sandwiches should be made to order.

I have a recent-model Cuisinart food processor with a super-sharp, barely used blade. I've cut meat into 1/2" dice and partially frozen it. And the results with a food processor still suck. The comparison between a food processor and a meat grinder is similar to the comparison between the results from a chopper-style coffee grinder and a conical burr grinder. When you use the chopper blade, you rip, shred and pulverize inconsistently. You wind up with a combination of goo and chunks (in coffee grinding they call it sand, pebbles and boulders). When you use a real grinder, you get consistent size and texture throughout. And the KitchenAid grinder attachment is simple to clean if you just put it in the dishwasher. If you already have a KitchenAid mixer, it's only $30-$35 to get the grinder attachment NIB or MIB on eBay.

That's easy. It's used to control the cursor on a computer. I'm not sure you should talk about the unintended use, though. This is a family website.

I wouldn't necessarily equate being organized -- especially just in the time frame of one shift or for handoff to another shift -- with being a planner. That stuff is tactical, it's a sprint. It's the next-week/month strategy, the distance running, that seems to be a problem for people in The Life. As in, making a date for the 15th of next month. I don't think just because someone keeps his station really neat and can keep track of 12 hot app orders at once, that he's a planner. He's just well organized.

I'm not sure I buy the unpredictability/impossible-to-plan theory. Lots of jobs are unpredictable. Try being a litigation attorney, or working in a hospital, or for a newspaper, or administering a website that operates 24/7 (those are the other pools from which most of my friends derive). You make plans. If you have to cancel, you cancel. It's not hard. But I've found that restaurant people -- both FOH and BOH, and especially the ones without kids -- often feel it's too burdensome even to keep a calendar. So I think the business attracts that sort of person, in large part because of the reboot that happens each day, and then I think once in The Life the pattern is reinforced because the workplace culture favors it.

I was under the impression that "sweet-n-sour" mix was the same thing as Collins mix: basically sweetened lemon juice, sometimes with additional citrus accents. So, if you're looking for a pre-made mixer, I bet you can find sweet-n-sour. However, I certainly agree that cocktails taste best with fresh citrus. For a Collins, in addition to the lemon and lime, you can add a touch of grapefruit juice.

I just met someone who washes cans. You know, like if she's going to open a can of beans, she washes the can first. The theory being, when you puncture the can with a can opener, if there's bad stuff on the outside of the can, some of it can get in. I also know a lot of people who wash chicken and other meat, though I'm not sure I understand why. Then there are those triple-washed salads. Some people wash them, some don't. What about you? Spill.

Has anybody seen the actual complaint? I'd be interested to see the legal theory behind it.

Over the past decade I've acquired a few friends in the food-service business aka The Life. I guess this is the natural outcome of being in a related field, food writing, where there's so much interaction with those in the biz. I love my restaurant-industry friends -- one of them is even my BFF -- but I've noticed they almost all share certain personality attributes, some of which are just quirky and others of which make friendship harder work than it needs to be. For example, I've noticed that people in the business are overwhelmingly not planners. If you want to see them, you need to do it on a same-day basis -- usually a same-minute basis. You're not going to get a commitment for three weeks from now. I think The Life may attract non-planners in the first place, because each day in a restaurant you start fresh, and it also probably reinforces the trait because when people with a similar trait cluster together that tends to happen. Any other observations on restaurant-business personality traits?

I was thinking about ways to make this determination, and I decided to look at the labels on a few brands of both dry and fresh-refrigerated pasta in the supermarket. I though just looking at calorie count per ounce would go a long way towards removing the water from the equation. For dry pastas, the range of the brands I looked at was about 200-240 calories per 2-ounce serving (with egg noodles being the highest). For the fresh pastas, it was 230-240 calories per 3-ounce serving (I tried to look at the brands that didn't have oil and other crud in them -- just flour, eggs, water). So I think, as a first effort, we could maybe hypothesize a 2:3 ratio for dried:fresh.

Thomas Keller says he has never tasted his signature dish, "oysters and pearls." So, you know, it's certainly possible to be a great chef without tasting everything. Anyway, it's not as though line cooks taste the individual portions of fish they serve. Those are whole pieces, so you can't cut off a little piece to taste it. You judge doneness by time, temperature, touch, smell, sight, even sound -- but you don't taste fish portions any more than you'd be tasting a person's steak. What you need to taste are the sauces, risottos, stuff like that, and while the allergy may still limit a few of the things you can taste it's not the end of the world.

Thanks Leonard. I had the pleasure of spending the day yesterday at Kampuchea restaurant, the only Cambodian-style restaurant in New York right now. Because there's already a topic going on Kampuchea, I posted about it there. There was also a fascinating piece on Salon.com a few days ago by a guy I'm not familiar with, name of Matthew Fishbane, titled "Will Cambodian food ever catch on in America?" He talks to Ratha Chau, the chef at Kampuchea, and speculates about the relative unpopularity of Cambodian cuisine versus Thai and Vietnamese. He doesn't ultimately have an explanation -- actually I think he'd have been better off speculating more rather than relying on a perhaps too equivocal and cagey academic source -- but it's an interesting walk through the thought process, with detours in Lowell, Mass. (the highest-percentage Cambodian community in the US) and Phnom Penh.

Correct. Kampuchea is a tiny restaurant (900 square feet, plus a downstairs prep area), so there aren't many places to be alone. Ratha and Scott often go over to El Castillo de Jagua for a late lunch, in order to meet in private. In addition to having pretty good Latin food, El Castillo de Jagua makes a mean tuna sandwich.

I recently had my first-ever Fra'Mani disappointment, however I'm pretty sure it was a shipping issue. It seemed that the salume had been exposed to water or something, because the normally white, almost powdery exterior was brown and mushy. I returned it to the store where I bought it. I'll try to pick up another one soon, for a reality check.

Really interesting piece on Salon.com a few days ago by Matthew Fishbane (no I'd never heard of him either, but based on this sample it seems his food writing is quite good) titled "Will Cambodian food ever catch on in America?" He talks to Ratha Chau and also gives some information on the fate (still undetermined) of the Cambodian Cuisine restaurant that's supposed to be relocating from Brooklyn to Manhattan.

Most people who have lived through kitchen renovations have experienced this, and the only way to survive it is to adjust your expectations way down and do whatever you have to do to stay calm. The anger, the frustration, the rage . . . they only harm you, and accomplish nothing or are net counterproductive to the venture. Get drugs, see a therapist, whatever you have to do -- we've all been there and this is how it goes.

It's not normal. Four weeks is incredibly fast for the work you're describing, especially for a small renovation job in Manhattan. Six to eight months would be normal.

Well, Ratha does have a two-year-old . . . . It truly baffles me. I can think of two possibilities: 1- The restaurant screwed up, or 2- You're nuts. (Or maybe both of those things are true!) Seriously, I watched the preparation of many noodles. They get the noodles from various Asian suppliers. They have two water baths going in the kitchen -- one with boiling water to cook the noodles and one with very hot water to rinse the starch from the noodles. For the flat noodles for that dish you're talking about, they boil, they rinse, they tranfer the noodles to a Cambro square tub, they dose it with oil and toss, and that's the end of it. I totally forgot to ask about the woody thing you got in the garnish. I do think it's still a young restaurant prone to make mistakes. There is a lot of prep going on there: many, many steps and techniques, and a total staff smaller than the dishwashing crew at Buddakan. It would not surprise me to see a step forgotten here and there, only six or so months in. But these people aren't hobbyists. Whatever the peak level of performance is, they'll get to it, I think. One thing I noted in reading your description of that noodle dish, though, is that you were trying to mix and combine the ingredients. That particular dish is intentionally a deconstructed dish and isn't meant to be mixed. That wouldn't explain gluey noodles; then again I had the opposite issue: the noodles were so slippery it was hard for me to get a handle on them.

If you had the misfortune of dining at Kampuchea tonight, you may have noticed that the house chili-lime-tomatillo hot sauce was a little off. That’s because I was entrusted with its production. I spent the day with Ratha Chau and his chef de cuisine, Scott Burnett, at Kampuchea today and only screwed up a few things. I also came away even more of a zealot for Kampuchea than before. The hot sauce starts with whole limes, peeled but with some of the white part of the rind left on (this adds a little desirable bitterness to the finished sauce). The limes are liquefied in a blender (this requires a lot of pulsing and knocking around of the blender, because Ratha is adamantly opposed to adding any water). Then a fistful of whole little green birdseye peppers, also pureed. Then several whole tomatillos, also blended into the mixture. This all gets repeated until you have a bucket of the stuff, then you leave a cup or so of the stuff in the blender and add garlic, ginger, mint and red onion, and combine that with the main batch. Then a lot of salt and a little bit of sugar. The sauce is great when fresh out of the blender, and about an hour later the flavors meld into a more unified sauce. If I’m ever called upon to make a gallon of hot sauce, I now know I’ll be able to do it. The hot sauce isn’t something Kampuchea sells as part of any dish. They just give it to you as a condiment on the table if you want hot sauce. Time and again today I saw food being prepared with extraordinary integrity. For example, the “house dressing” aka the dipping sauce you get with one of those crepes: this is something where, going into the situation, my palate just wasn’t well versed enough to identify the difference between a commercial sauce and one made at the restaurant. You could have served me something from a can and I’d have been happy, as I have I’m sure been at plenty of restaurants. But now that I’ve tasted the difference and seen how it’s made, I never want to go back. The house dressing starts with fish sauce, plus vinegar, water, garlic, ginger and salt. That’s all simmered for three or four hours. After it’s cooled, they add shredded green mango, shredded carrots and fresh chopped garlic, ginger and red onions. Then, for service, it’s given a shot of lime juice. The quality of ingredients coming in the back of Kampuchea is first-rate, exceeding what you'd get at plenty of starred restaurants (Kampuchea, I assume, will get $25 and Under treatment if and when it gets reviewed). For example, the seafood comes from Down East Seafood, one of the best restaurant suppliers. I'm not sure there's another restaurant at Kampuchea's price point using Down East and equivalent suppliers for vegetables, meat, etc. Surely not the restaurants in Chinatown. Probably the most impressive thing I saw, however, was the stock-making operation. Because I actually know something about stock, I’m in a better position to evaluate this aspect of the prep than any other. The Kampuchea chicken stock is the most concentrated, extracted chicken stock I’ve ever had in a restaurant. It’s a double stock, meaning that first chicken is simmered in water, then that chicken is removed and new chicken is added, which is then simmered in the stock to create a double stock. But this double stock also is made with a very low ratio of water to chicken parts, so it’s super rich. In the giant stockpot, for the first round, goes 200 pounds of chicken parts (5 x 40-pound buckets), with water just barely to cover. No mirepoix or anything in this step. For the second simmering, 120 pounds of chicken parts are used, along with onions, garlic, ginger, carrots and celery. That’s just one stock for one day of this tiny restaurant’s operations – they also make a beef stock and a vegetable stock. The chicken soup that results from this double stock is amazing. If you didn’t see the stock being made, you’d be tempted to say the richness and concentration of the broth was achieved through some sort of trickery. It isn’t. All you’re getting in the chicken soup is that super-rich broth garnished with a little lime-leaf oil (plus the noodles, chicken meat and various other things). I didn’t try a lot of new dishes today – actually for lunch we had Dominican food nearby – but one dish I did get to sample (aside from the chicken soup) was the butter filet mignon. This is a piece of rare tenderloin served cold, pounded thin and drizzled with a little butter. It’s served under a salad of green mango, cilantro, crispy shallots, and scallions sautéed with red onion, garlic and ginger, all dressed with fish sauce, soy sauce, lime and olive oil. Also, on the side of the plate, some of the house chili sauce (not the same as the hot sauce I made). I chatted at length with Ratha Chau about what he’s trying to do at Kampuchea, and he’s well aware that he had a weak opening (I believe his word was “hellish”). His background is as a front-of-the-house manager, not as a kitchen manager, so his learning curve was steep. And the concept of the restaurant has evolved into less of a noodle bar and more of a postmodern Asian street food orientation. There’s little question in my mind that, given the earnestness, integrity and competence of Ratha, Scott and the rest of the team, Kampuchea will continue to improve and gain back the media credibility that was lost at opening time, and then some. Now, if you’ve read this far, I’m going to tell you a secret. This is a hardcore underground gourmet secret. Don’t tell Ben Leventhal. Don’t tell Mr. Cutlets. Don’t tell PETA. This isn’t supposed to get out: Kampuchea has a small, occasional supply of embryonic duck eggs – in other words, duck eggs that are almost but not quite hatched. In one of the most extreme eating experiences of my life, I ate one tonight. It was an alarming, disorienting, wonderful, delicious, disgusting, awe-inspiring, remorseful, celebratory moment. The egg was poached, the top cut off and a little lime and vinegar dressing added. I won’t go into an exact description of the taste, texture and appearance – part of the joy and horror of this experience is the surprise of it all. Every cook in the restaurant has gone through this Cambodian hazing ritual, which if you can handle without passing out earns you the title of “Honorary Cambodian.” If you call Ratha and arrange it in advance, and swear yourself to secrecy, he may be willing prepare one of these eggs for you. Again, don’t tell anyone.

I really want to make the cranberry bars. Maybe this fall.