Fat Guy

Latest tests from the FDA say that scallions may not have been the problem! The New York Times reported today that:

There's a mention of "roasted fuyu persimmon with sheep cheese" in the New York Times "Off the Menu" item on Varietal. Maybe it's something along those lines? By the way for those who are interested, it's Varietal, 138 West 25th Street, 212.633.1800.

Sorry, dude, I have seniority there.

Hey!

Taco Bell may very well be one of the safest places in America to eat right now. The stocks have been cycled, the restaurants have been disinfected and the whole operation is under the magnifying glass. My only issue is that so much of the food at Taco Bell, which isn't particularly good to begin with, is being served without scallions right now -- that can't help its already limited flavor.

The most significant improvement almost any home cook can make with respect to food safety is to get serious about hand washing. At least one credible source (American Dietetic Association) says foodborne illnesses could be cut in half if everybody observed proper hand washing protocols. You need to wash your hands vigorously for 20+ seconds using soap and water -- just rinsing doesn't work. And you need to do it before working in the kitchen as well as between working with, for example, meat and vegetables. And you need to do it after. Hand sanitizer is also a good product. Some other problem areas are: sponges, dishtowels, cutting boards (all of these need to be kept clean, and there are different procedures depending on the nature of the item and the temperature of your hot tap water), improper refrigerator arrangements (for example, meat should go on the bottom so stray juices can't drip down on anything else), failure to chill foods quickly enough, failure to defrost properly and various other temperature considerations. Take it from the expert.

It says so on TV. It must be true. One thing I hear a lot from people is that they "can tell how safe a restaurant is by how clean it looks." This myth has been repeated several times throughout this recent news cycle -- I think the source may actually have been somebody at the FDA who should have known better. The visual appearance of cleanliness and the reality of safe food can be totally unrelated, or even in some cases inversely related. One of the most telling examples appeared in a New York Times piece by Amanda Hesser awhile back: In addition, it is of course the case that in the two recent high-profile instances (spinach, scallions) the food was contaminated before it ever entered a restaurant or other retail outlet, and this sort of bacteria don't just come off when you wash something -- so no amount of rinsing, scrubbing and cleaning of the food or the restaurant would have made a bit of difference.

Nobody I've turned on to this stuff has had such a problem, though I do know people with disk-bottom cookware (other brands) that have had the bottoms separate. The story I've heard a few times is that the bottoms pop off when you run a hot pan under cold water. The disk-bottom design is not a smart design for high-heat cooking and rapid cooling. The only pieces I have in my kitchen that have disk bottoms are a stockpot (where the disk bottom is the best design because it saves so much weight) and two small saucepans (which are rarely subjected to extreme temperatures). For a skillet or other workhorse piece, forget about it.

When I do radio appearances on call-in shows, it's almost inevitable that someone will call up and express the view that this sort of dining advice is only applicable to fine-dining restaurants in a few major cities. But, as you've experienced, you can derive great benefits from being a regular at most any restaurant; in any city, suburb, strip, small town or subdivision; at any price point.

So how are the components (egg, oil, rice) of this emulsion interacting? ← Moisture on the surface of each grain of rice, runny egg, and oil interact with one another to make thin coating on the surface of each grain of rice. The egg has to be runny and be stirred with rice quickly enough, before it is set. Otherwise, the resulting chahan will get greasy. ← So each grain of rice is coated with an emulsion of water, egg and oil. Is that the idea?

There was an interesting study reported in 2004, conducted by Janet Anderson of Utah State University. She filmed 100 people preparing a meat entree and a salad at home. The people were told they were being observed for recipes, but the study was actually about food safety. Of the 100 people, as reported in Nutrition Action Healthletter:

Some emulsion vocabulary we haven't touched on yet. I just love the word "immiscible," which refers to substances that can't be blended together, like oil and water. Also, we should tip our hats to "colloid." Emulsions are, as I understand it, a subset of colloids. (Actually, maybe some science-knowledgeable person can speak to this, but I thought emulsions had to be liquid whereas something like the aforementioned sausage stuffing would be a colloid.) And let us not forget "flocculation," one of the ways in which emulsions break (in this case, by clumping).

If you caught ABC World News Tonight last night or Good Morning America this morning, you may have noticed an approximately five-second clip of me talking about this subject. It was an utterly bizarre experience, talking to them on camera for about 45 minutes and then watching which few seconds they'd pick out of all that material and how they'd work it into their stories. On World News Tonight, I was referenced as "food safety expert, Steven Shaw," which has fast-tracked its way to being a permanent joke among my family and friends, and it seemed I was explaining why fast food is unsafe. On Good Morning America (those in the know call it "GMA," I hear), I was "Steven Shaw, an award-winning food critic and author" and it seemed I was explaining why fast food is safe. I'm in possession of hate email from folks who disagree with both positions. The people at ABC are kind enough to archive their video clips online, so at least for the time being you can watch the World News Tonight clip here and the Good Morning America clip here (you will have to view a 30-second ad before the news clip starts). Thanks, Steven Shaw: food safety expert

I had a frustrating emulsion-related experience today. I was served a salad with a bottle of vinegar and a bottle of olive oil on the side. I poured a little of each on the salad, and the overall effect was awful: almost all the vinegar settled on the bottom of the salad dish, and the lettuce mostly just had oil on it. (Not to mention, when you dress an individual plate of salad at the table it's impossible to toss it properly -- but that's another issue.) Yesterday, by contrast, I made a salad at home. I took a small glass jar and filled it with oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, a little dried oregano (hand-schlepped from Sicily by a friend -- it's awesome) and a little mustard. I shook it for just a few seconds and, like magic, it was all of a sudden an emulsion. I put the salad in a large bowl, poured a little of this emulsion on, tossed it and then transferred it to a smaller plate for eating. It was delicious, though I should have used a little more vinegar. The point being, emulsions have amazing transformative powers. I mean, if somebody put a raw egg, some oil, some lemon juice and some mustard on your sandwich you'd probably punch him in the nose. But emulsify those ingredients into mayonnaise and you've got a billion dollar industry. I still have enough salad dressing left in the jar for three or four more salads. The components of the emulsion have now separated and stratified, but all I have to do is shake the jar a few times before use and the emulsion returns. I imagine vinaigrette and related salad dressings are the simplest emulsions most cooks deal with, so I thought they deserved an early mention on this topic.

I definitely agree about irradiation. It seems like it, or an equivalent technology, will have to be brought into play in order to take food safety to the next level. It's possible to make incremental changes within the current system, but widespread irradiation would be a quantum leap. In terms of centralized distribution, it certainly exacerbates the potential scope of an outbreak. It's not unique to fast food places, though. It's the way the system works at every level except the farm-to-table fancy-restaurant/greenmarket/small-gourmet-shop level. I mean, Chez Annie's is probably getting its products from distributors like Sysco or US Foodservice, which aren't all that different than the distribution companies that supply the fast food chains -- indeed there's probably a lot of supplier overlap. Likewise, most supermarkets are getting their inventory through similarly organized channels.

This is an interesting statistic, though it is not documented in any way -- I have no idea where this government agency got it from: http://www.metrokc.gov/health/foodsfty/kitchensafety.htm

Fascinating. I wonder, though, whether litigated claims are much of a measure of actual illnesses. There seem to be a lot of questions of evidence, likelihood of success, a defendant who can pay, etc., that would tend to skew statistics derived from litigated claims as opposed to, say, hospital admissions. Also, once we know the raw number of cases from a segment, the first adjustment that would have to be made would be for number of meals served: how many meals are served by fast-food restaurants, sit-down chains, nice restaurants, other types of food service establishments, in the home, etc. Then if we had the number and nature of the verified cases from each segment we could draw some conclusions about risk. I mean, just as an example, if people cook 60% of their meals at home but 30% of foodborne illnesses come from the home, the home kitchen is relatively safe; if people eat 30% of their meals at home and get 60% of foodborne illnesses from the home, that's a different story.

The New York Times piece I cited above says:

The latest New York Times report on this indicates that the produce in question probably came from California. It does seem beyond doubt at this point that food handling by Taco Bell was not the culprit, given that this happened across not only multiple warehouses but also two different distribution centers.

That's how I do it, and I've never experienced a problem with deglazing in cast iron. I'm not all that familiar with electric ovens like yours, but I would think the heating coils for the bake settings would be below the cavity, and that the coils on top would be for broiling. Are you sure those top coils engage when you're not broiling?

I'm not a huge consumer of disposable foil pans, but my mother roasts poultry in them all the time and burning has never been a problem. Not that I really understand the theory behind it, but just based on observation it seems to me that things take a little longer in foil than in heavier roasting pans.

When you go from a heavy roasting vessel to an aluminum pan, that's also likely to affect your roasting performance a little. I might slightly raise the oven temperature in that situation, or allow a little more time. Unfortunately, the first time you do pretty much anything in an oven you have too many variables to make a perfect prediction. If you're a real stickler, your best bet is to do a practice run; temperature probes are also helpful. If you have some flexibility on timing and you're not a total perfectionist, then just preheat the oven for a good long time and start the birds the same as with the old recipe; if you judge that they're coming along slowly then raise the temperature a 25-50 degrees F at the half-hour mark, and build in some flexibility in your dinner start time.

There's no way to answer the question without knowledge of your specific oven and utensils. In my oven, if I roast something in one of my 10.5" cast-iron skillets, it takes exactly the same amount of time as if I roast two of that something in two of my 10.5" cast-iron skillets. Not one second different as far as I can tell. You have to pack my oven full of quite a lot of stuff before it has any noticeable impact on timing. Ditto for pretty much any restaurant oven -- one portion or four, they don't care. Another thing that makes a difference is pre-heating. If you get your oven walls good and full of energy by pre-heating for a solid half hour or more, it will perform more like a restaurant oven.

I wonder if there are statistics available regarding the relative safety of food from 1- fast-food/quick-service type places, 2- nice sit-down restaurants and 3- home kitchens. It seems to me that, obviously, fast food is the least nutritious and delicious, but that if all you care about is safety (as in, bacterial contamination and such) you'd probably just want to eat all your meals at places like McDonald's. After all, at such places most everything comes in the door frozen and is cooked to ridiculously high temperatures. There are probably also a lot of preservatives and preservative processes brought into play at every stage of the production and distribution process. Meanwhile, you go to a nice restaurant and there are hands touching everything, raw oysters, steak tartare, fish cooked to medium rare, etc. And home kitchens? Forget about it. Most home kitchens would fail every kind of sanitation inspection: foods defrosted at room temperature, slow cooling and holding at danger zone temperatures, cross-contamination of all kinds . . . .

I don't think apple self-sufficiency would be a stretch or even a yawn for New York. We're the second largest producer in the country. New York produces 25 million bushels of apples a year.