Fat Guy

I'm pretty sure Veggie Wash is a brand name, however I often hear folks using the terms "veggie wash" and "fruit and veggie wash" generically. In the grocery store where I shop, there have got to be five or six brands of this stuff available. The main ingredients in each seem to be "Surfactants," which, if I can take a wild guess at what that means, must be the things that act on the surface of the produce to remove wax, dirt, residues, whatever. Anecdotally, I think the stuff works. Maybe there's some chemical trickery here, but I can say for sure that when I put some fruit in a bowl, spray that stuff on, then fill with water, the water takes on a noticeable gray cast. This happens to a lesser extent, but still happens, even if you rinse the fruit with water first. So, maybe the stuff really works. If not, it at least leaves a pleasing citrus aroma. Maybe someone can explain how these surfactant things work. I'm curious as to the extent of surfactant adoption among eGullet Society members. Anybody know of any serious tests or studies on these products? Do they really work, or is it all psychological?

Whereas, I would remove all the scales from doctors' offices, forcing them to measure health instead of weight.

Every recipe I've ever seen for vinaigrette calls for a very high ratio of oil to vinegar, most commonly 4 to 1 and sometimes 3 to 1. But I've got to say, a vinaigrette made with 4 or 3 parts oil to 1 part vinegar tastes flat to me, and salads dressed with such a vinaigrette seem overly oily with too little acidity. In my kitchen, the ratio is 1 to 1. This produces a vinaigrette that's much more in line with my palate. (I also add a little mustard, a little dried oregano and a little salt and pepper, but that's not what this topic is about.) It's quite acidic if you drink it out of the jar (I use a recycled peanut jar for making vinaigrette), but when you add an appropriate amount of it to a salad and toss, it coats each leaf and distributes itself such that it provides balanced flavors. I'm actually wondering whether vinegar was more strongly flavored back in the day when Escoffier or whomever codified these recipes walked the Earth. Because today, even with high-end imported vinegars from Europe, I can't imagine 4 to 1 being a good ratio. The only time I adjust even as far as 2 to 1 is when using very powerful Sherry vinegar. I could see someone wanting to go to 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 on that, I guess. But for basic wine vinegar, forget it. No way.

Speaking of sushi, I got some good help both online (on this topic) and off from eGullet Society members in Japan, and thought I'd share the first draft of this thing: +++ WHAT DO PREGNANT WOMEN IN JAPAN EAT? When my wife was pregnant with our son, her obstetrician gave her a list of food dos and don’ts. Chief among the don’ts: alcohol, unpasteurized cheeses, and raw fish. Meanwhile, every French woman I know who has ever had a baby has consumed alcohol and unpasteurized cheese in moderation, and my friends in Japan laugh at the notion of avoiding sushi during pregnancy. The Japanese government, like many modern governments, publishes informational pamphlets for pregnant women, based on the latest medical research. There’s one about good nutrition during pregnancy, and there’s one about mercury in fish. But there isn’t one about sushi. It’s just a given that pregnant women in Japan will eat sushi made from raw fish. Indeed, it’s seen as part of good neonatal nutrition. It’s not as though Japanese babies or mothers are suffering from this approach. The Japanese, of all ages, are among the healthiest people on the planet by just about every available measure (the ground they’ve lost in the past couple of decades is largely attributable to increased consumption of Western foods). The Japanese government is fanatical about public health, and Japanese medical scientists are among the best in the world. You can be sure that, were there documented complications resulting from pregnant women eating sushi in Japan, there would be swift, massive government intervention. Yet, in the United States, it is taboo for a pregnant woman to eat raw fish. A pregnant woman seen eating any sushi other than a California roll or a cucumber roll will be summarily tried and convicted by her peers: she is clearly a delinquent mother. Why are pregnant women in the United States commanded to avoid sushi made from raw fish? It’s not because any study or scientific research has shown that unborn children have been damaged by it. Rather, it’s because the speculative risk of foodborne illnesses, especially parasites, has captured the public imagination. There are several reasons, however, that these fears are unfounded. While raw fish is culturally identified with sushi and Japan, Americans have been eating raw fish for centuries: namely, oysters and clams. And it is these raw mollusks, not the fish typically associated with sushi, that are responsible for the overwhelming majority of seafood-related illnesses. As the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Institute of Medicine concluded in its “Seafood Safety” report: “Most seafood-associated illness is reported from consumers of raw bivalve mollusks . . . . The majority of incidents are due to consumption of shellfish from fecally polluted water.” The main risk of illness from non-mollusks is not from anything having to do with the fish being raw. Rather, as the NAS reports, “A lesser risk of microbial disease associated with other seafoods – resulting from recontamination or cross-contamination of cooked by raw product, or to contamination from other sources – is usually associated with time/temperature abuse.” In other words, no matter what you order in a restaurant, if it’s not kept a proper temperature and protected from cross-contamination, you’re at risk. Conversely, if the restaurant observes good food safety practices, there is little to worry about. In my personal experience, having been inside the kitchens of dozens of restaurants of all kinds in the process of researching this and my other books, Japanese kitchens are on the whole the cleanest, most careful, most conscientious kitchens in the business. Moreover, sushi bars are out in the open for all to see, and anybody who has spent a few minutes observing a sushi bar and a typical American diner’s griddle area can tell you which type of restaurant has higher standards for cleanliness. Sushi may not be cooked, but it has for the most part been frozen. FDA guidelines require that, prior to being served as sushi or sashimi (or in any other raw form) fish be flash-frozen to destroy parasites. According to a New York Times article titled “Sushi Fresh From the Deep . . . the Deep Freeze,” published in April 2004, “if the sushi has not been frozen, it is illegal to serve it in the United States.” While the fish you see in the sushi-bar display case is fresh in appearance, it has almost certainly been frozen at some point in the distribution system. This freezing process kills any parasites as sure as cooking would. Most species used for sushi don’t have parasites anyway, though. Fish like tuna are not particularly susceptible to parasites because they dwell in very deep, very cold water, and most sushi restaurants use farmed salmon to avoid any of the parasite issues wild salmon are known to face. Most of the fish species that are likely to have parasites, such as cod and whitefish, aren’t generally used in sushi-making. As the NAS observes: “Seafood-related parasitic infections are even less common than bacterial and viral infections . . . . In general, parasitic infections have resulted from consumption of raw or partially cooked fresh- and salt-water fish of particular species (e.g., whitefish, salmon).” Nor does pregnancy increase susceptibility to parasites. Healthy women who’ve been eating sushi when not pregnant and having no problems are not at increased risk when pregnant. The same resistance and immunities function before, during, and after pregnancy. But rational analysis doesn’t hold sway with the pregnancy police. “Why take any risk?” they ask. The medical establishment and the culture at large have twisted logic around to the point where zero risk – which is simply impossible – is taken seriously as a concept. So powerful is this Puritanical impulse that, once a health objection is raised, however irrational the recommended behavior, it’s considered irresponsible to behave any other way. There’s a temptation to say there’s no harm in this type of thinking – that women should simply not eat sushi for nine months, that it’s no big deal. There are, however, several problems with this approach. For one thing, the sure fire way to harm a fetus is through under-nourishment. When you add up all the irrational health scares – remember, raw fish is only one target; there’s also a whole body of unfounded mercury scares – it turns out pregnant women are being scared off fish altogether. And that’s bad news, since the Omega fatty acids in fish are the ideal nourishment for a developing baby. For another thing, pregnancy should be a time of joy, not stress. The sum total of the over-regulated pregnancy is stress, fear and negativity. And for still another thing, it’s insulting to Japanese culture, and speaks of ignorance and prejudice, to reject one of that culture’s foundational foods based on unfounded health claims. +++

Thanks for all the information guys. I've written up a little essay on this issue, and will post the draft over on the book topic here in a few minutes.

I wouldn't exactly sanction that bump up in price, but I do think there's some ambiguity introduced by the question "What are you drinking?" I think it may arguably take the interaction out of the category of an upsell.

The most notorious CDC lie was the 400,000 deaths claim, which has been thoroughly debunked but it still blindly parroted by medical professionals. There are hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles tracking the original false claim and all the backtracking. This is just one of them, from the San Francisco Chronicle: I highly recommend two books to anybody who's interested in tracking the insanity of the conventional wisdom about weight and health, diet and nutrition: "The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health," by Paul Campos and "Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss--and the Myths and Realities of Dieting," by Gina Kolata The Kolata oeuvre is particularly significant. Her articles in the New York times have systematically dismantled several major AMA and CDC claims about obesity made over the past decade and, taken together, make a strong argument that when it comes to obesity the cure is worse than the disease.

Because: In that dialog, the customer arguably made the invitation to go off program.

I don't know about Per Se specifically, but there are several fine-dining restaurants that don't take 7-7:30 reservations at all. It's a pretty standard flow-control procedure.

That's an unconscionable upsell under most circumstances, but I think here it may have been invited by the customer. Though I wasn't thrilled with the beverage program pricing, especially the Champagne, we experienced good behavior. We were at about $40 and got upsold to about $55, which I think is fine especially since he presented several options in the $40-$60 range. I liked the guy. I believe A Voce is owned by some British restaurant group -- at least that's what I think I remember hearing when the project was in its early stages. I'll have to check.

The Thomas' Sahara ones have 170 calories, but they're not 12". Probably more like 8" -- I'd have to measure. With bread, it pretty much comes down to weight. A good rule of thumb is 80 calories per ounce. It doesn't matter how fluffy or flat it is -- it can be a cracker or it can be a hamburger bun -- it's still going to be around 80 calories per ounce unless it's manipulated in some way or another (still, many low-carb/low-calorie bread products achieve their reduction in calories and carbs by increasing gluten and therefore leavening so as to have less weight per piece). So I guess a 12" wrap Mission wrap is weighing in at about 4 ounces. Standard supermarket bread is about 1 ounce per slice, so it's the equivalent of 4 slices of bread. I wonder how much sandwich stuffing can go into two sandwiches, versus a wrap. Hero rolls vary widely in weight, but I think a medium-size one is probably about 4-5 ounces. When I used to pack lunch for work, during the phases when I was trying to limit calories, I was a big fan of packing a salad (with lots of veggies and some meat and cheese) in a Rubbermaid or equivalent container (with a separate container for dressing) and having a couple of small rolls on the side. I also made a lot of pita sandwiches. I never got into wraps, though. Even the best tortillas, when cold, don't really appeal to me. Not that I ever lost any weight.

I don't like the short break-apart ones that are prevalent today, but I do like the longer bamboo chopsticks that used to be the norm in Chinese restaurants. They used to come in red packets with instructions on them, written in English so bad it's the stuff of legends. ("Welcome to Chinese Restaurant. Please try your Nice Chinese Food With Chopsticks the traditional and typical of Chinese glonous history and cultual.")

I personally find metal chopsticks difficult to work with because their surfaces are so slippery. They don't get a good grip on the food and I don't get a good grip on them. I feel the same way about plastic, and about fancy lacquered ones like a lot of Japanese folks seem to favor. I like unfinished wooden chopsticks with a rough texture. I don't like the ones you have to break apart, though. I've never figured out a way to get 100% success on that procedure.

I've heard this stated many times, particularly in the context of food-and-nutrition discussions (you can Google and find thousands of variants of the statement "Rice is the main dish, the other stuff with the meat and sauce is just the topping"), but is it actually correct? I can see how if you're a peasant eking out your existence in an infertile, inland area there's no choice: you eat starches to survive and you get whatever bits of meat and vegetables you can. But if you go to a restaurant in Asia, or a middle class home, you don't see people eating huge piles of rice and using meat as garnish. You sometimes don't even see a plain starch item on the table at all. If anything, what I've noticed is that Americans eat more rice than Asians. Especially at these buffet places, I constantly see white people loading up their plates with a thick layer of rice, then putting the other food on top of that and eating it all in a gloppy mess. Another thought about chopsticks, pertaining to rice (I'm accumulating a good list of "things you didn't know about chopsticks" here, so I welcome ideas), is that a lot of non-Asians try to eat rice from a flat plate with chopsticks, and they continually drop rice and stuff all over the place. They don't seem to get that you're supposed to use a bowl for that sort of eating. You put some food on top of the rice in the bowl and bring the bowl to your face and sort of push the food in. At least, that's how I've seen Chinese people doing it, especially during staff meal at restaurants.

Another weird chopstick behavior: eating sushi with chopsticks. Again, it's just easier to do it with your hands -- and hands are the appropriate tool from the standpoint of Japanese etiquette. Yet, a lot of folks bend over backwards to use chopsticks.

Good point, Peter. One thing I've found that's kind of weird is that Americans expect -- nay, demand -- chopsticks in Southeast Asian restaurants. Yet, in Southeast Asia, you don't really see chopsticks -- except in Chinese restaurants (or restaurants serving Chinese-derived noodle dishes). It's kind of amusing when people choose to struggle with chopsticks in a Thai restaurant because they feel they're being faithful to the tradition.

You were robbed! The Champagne-by-the-glass prices are outrageous, by the way.

It seems to me that, quietly, some of the top restaurants in the US have switched over from the gratuity model to the service charge model. Without passing judgment (we have several topics on that), I was hoping we could create a list of top restaurants that now have service charges. I'm talking about a service charge for all tables, not just for large parties. French Laundry Per Se Charlie Trotter's Others?

It would be typical for a large wrap -- the bread product itself -- to have 170 calories. A slice of standard commercial bread is usually around 80 calories. So there's no particular difference between a wrap and two slices of bread. Some wraps might be a little more or less, some slices of bread a little more or less, but the caloric difference is going to be slight pretty much no matter what. Carbs are also roughly equivalent -- there's nothing about a wrap that makes it have fewer carbs than a piece of bread. The bread is just leavened with yeast, which gives it more volume -- but leavening doesn't create carbs that weren't there in the flour to begin with. My impression based on looking at a bunch of packages is that wraps tend to have more fat than bread, though, presumably because they need a lot of oil to maintain their flexibility on the shelf.

I don't have enough information to answer. I didn't even realize one wasn't allowed to say Cajun-Creole! (I'm also not sure why the answer matters to the conversation.)

Sam: Yes, I would absolutely say that curry is a part of English cuisine. (Would any English people care to note their perceptions on that issue?) And I don't see why French haute cuisine should be dismissed as irrelevant to the discussion of authenticity. Rather, French haute cuisine (and other globalized, not-regionally-dependent cuisines, e.g., sushi) demonstrates why the concept is untenable. In terms of Cajun-Creole, would it make any difference to you if France had maintained sovereignty over Louisiana? Or, if all the 5+ million Italians who came to America had instead settled in one place in Africa and called it a colony of Italy -- would that then count as a regional Italian cuisine? Or do all nations and cuisines need to be contiguous?

Your definition of authentic was "what is currently being done in the cuisine's culture of origin." The example you gave was "If Thai people in Thailand are using ketchup, then it would be 'authentic' to do so in a restaurant here." So on top of that, are you now saying: "If Thai people in Thailand are using ketchup, then it would be 'authentic' to do so in a restaurant here, but only if Thai people in Thailand would consider it to be authentic Thai cuisine"? That seems like a pretty difficult definition to measure. What do we do if two Thai people disagree on that belief (indeed, there is disagreement among Thai people about exactly that)? Do we have a majority belief rule? A plurality belief rule? Decision by experts? Or do we go back to "A lot of people over there are using it, therefore it's authentic, period"? And if so, what does the definition accomplish? It seems a pretty empty concept: inauthentic becomes authentic so long as somebody in the country of origin is doing it. The Italian model, moreover, is not the only model of a cuisine or cuisines. I actually would say that Italian-American cuisine is a regional Italian cuisine, with the region being America, however I understand that's a minority position. But I wouldn't presume to say the Italian region-based concept of authenticity is appropriate for China, or for France. Does a restaurant like Daniel in New York serve "authentic" French food? I'm not sure the question can even be asked -- French haute cuisine doesn't operate under that set of assumptions. It's much more of an anything-goes cuisine. There are French regional cuisines, but haute cuisine is much less attached to regions (or, rather, haute cuisine chefs have a lot of leeway: some are regional in orientation, others are international). There may be people in France saying that what Pierre Gagnaire serves isn't authentic, however just about every chef in France is going to tell you that Pierre Gagnaire is one of the undisputed leaders in French haute cuisine. And most of them will tell you that Daniel Boulud is serving French haute cuisine. Chinese cuisine, especially at the imperial level (as opposed to the regionally derived peasant cuisine), is much more like French haute cuisine than it is like Italian regional cuisine. I don't really know what people in Shanghai would say about RBL or the dozens of other internationally influenced restaurants in Shanghai. They may not say they're Shanghainese, but they may very well say they're Chinese. Or they may say they're "New Shanghainese" or some equivalent concept that makes trying to measure authenticity pretty silly. One thing worth noting, though, is that in my experience Asian chefs tend not to obsess about authenticity the way American foodies do. The trend towards pan-Asian and global cuisine is quite strong in most every modern country in Asia.

One short book, about 240 pages. Also, it's not a book about Asia or Asian cuisine. It's a book about getting the most out of Asian restaurants in North America. There won't be any recipes or elaborate histories (and what histories there are will mostly be about immigrant cultures in North America). A comparison of tofu across Asian restaurant types might be as simple as a chart -- you open up two facing pages and there's a comparison of what each type of restaurant calls tofu, and listings of some examples of how it's prepared, with brief descriptions. The point isn't to teach people how to cook the stuff or be experts about it; it's to help them order when they visit a restaurant.

I'm not so sure a pure geographic definition of authenticity makes sense, especially not when you're talking about cultures where not just a few people but millions are living in the diaspora. But assuming a geographic definition, to put it in context one has to note that today's Asia is incredibly modern and international. If you look at a major Chinese city like Shanghai, international influences are the norm in the newer restaurants. I have a file of about 50 clips like this one from Travel + Leisure: (My emphasis.)Today it is not particularly remarkable for a chef named Max Levy to serve sashimi and truffles in Shanghai. The people I know who've traveled to Shanghai recently have reported that saffron is all the rage, and that Western-style platings and service are becoming standard at the newer, upscale establishments.

Rice. Check.