Fat Guy

If science can confirm that this works, it is surely one of the great innovations of the era.

If you like to get your ice off a big block with an ice pick, the zipper bag trick works pretty well, though the oddly curved and pointed pieces it produces can be difficult to manage -- a square container (like the disposable ones from Glad and Zip-Loc) makes more easily manipulated blocks that will sit tight on a towel while you chip away at them. If you like cubes, you can buy bagged ice, but there's something about buying ice that upsets me. It also sometimes smells bad.

Hey, if you want to suffer, you can also fashion a knife out of a rock. The point is, once you've spent half an hour crushing 20 limes (aka 40 lime halves) with your bare hands and extracting the amount of juice you would have gotten from a dozen limes squeezed in five minutes with a proper lever-model juicer, you'll be ready to drive all the way back to Atlanta to get the right piece of equipment.

The lever design is like a hundred times better than the one where you press the fruit down on a bump. For no particular reason, I like the enameled ones the best. I don't actually own one, but I like the way they look -- especially the Amco ones where the lemon squeezer is bright yellow -- and I figure the enamel must be a good non-reactive surface.

Another thing that really comes in handy is a tray that can carry a bunch of glasses. This saves innumerable trips from the prep area to where the people are. If you do decide to bring martini glasses with you, I'd suggest contacting one of the local Libbey distributors in Atlanta so you can get them by the dozen in their original packaging. The original shipping cartons should be usable for transporting the glasses conveniently and safely. Whereas, if you get them at a retail store, chances are they will be out of carton.

Okay, let's assume for the sake of argument that equipment is not important. Let's assume that three hours of driving around Atlanta in search of some exotic bitters that are useful in making one cocktail is time well spent. Let's assume that you can just roll into any Target and acquire all your cocktail-making equipment in five minutes. Humor me anyway. Let's make an equipment list: - Lemon/lime juicer (being discussed on the other topic) - Lemon/lime zester - A blender that can actually crush ice - Two Boston cocktail shakers - Strainer - Measuring cups (jiggers) in various sizes - Proper 5 oz. martini glasses - Rocks glasses - Ice pick or ice crusher - Extra ice cube trays - Muddler - Swizzle sticks - Straws - Standard kitchen equipment: paring knife, small cutting board, spoons, bowls

Another thing I'm really good at, in addition to being served, is armchair quarterbacking. I'd be happy to second guess and otherwise offer unsolicited advice about any and all dishes.

Alex, I'll PM you with my flight and cell phone info.

This sounds like such a great time, I'm going to fly out for it. The first AA flight of the day from LGA gets into DTW at 9:09am. That's cutting it a little close for the bake shop, but if there's anyone who would be willing to pick me up the flight has a 90% on time rate, I won't be checking any bags and if we get lucky we might even squeak in to Z's by 10am or shortly thereafter. I could also use a ride back to the airport after dinner -- it doesn't matter how late; I'm going to check in to the airport Doubletree and take the first flight out Sunday morning. I'm happy to help on any cooking team. I'm also happy to sit on my fat ass, do nothing and be served. See you all there. Kris, save me a dance.

As someone who is not a cocktail expert but who is very experienced with off-site culinary projects, I would strongly suggest focusing on equipment first. You should be able to get basic spirits, mixers and fresh fruit wherever you're going. The only ingredients you should have to bring with you are the exotic ones that have to be searched for, and really your life will be fine without those. It's supposed to be a vacation. What you really need to be sure you have is the right equipment. You should have the right number of the right kind of glasses so that everybody can be served cocktails at once and you can break a glass or two and still be okay. You should have a cocktail shaker large enough to make everybody a drink at once, or if you are going to make different drinks you should have more than one shaker. You need all the necessary measures, lemon/lime juicer, etc., or making cocktails will become a real chore. Do you need a blender? When traveling, equipment is so important that you may want to consider starting with an equipment list and then working from there to see what drinks you can produce comfortably.

The Cuisinart Mini Prep is one of the great $30 items in the universe. I believe the capacity is listed at 21 ounces, but its best performance zone, in my experience, runs from about 4 ounces up to about 16 ounces. KitchenAid also makes a mini unit, which I like much less than the Cuisinart. I think the KitchenAid may in theory be a superior piece of machinery. It's got a true 24-ounce (3-cup) capacity and it's extremely sturdy seeming (the Cuisinart seems lighter weight, although I haven't actually checked manufacturers' specs on weight so I could be wrong). But for me, the Cuisinart always seems to wind up being the right size for my needs (a cup of mayonnaise or other dressing that needs to be emulsified being the most common), it takes up very little shelf space, and it has worked flawlessly for about 10 years now (not that I use it all that often). If I ever needed to do 3 cups of food prep, I wouldn't use a mini processor -- I'd work with the full-size one anyway.

Bloomsbury (the publisher, and actually soon to be my publisher) had a media lunch for Don't Try This at Home today, so I was able to take home a copy of the galleys. I've only had time to read a few of the stories -- just what I could scan in the amount of time it took the M1 bus to get from Alto to my apartment -- but man, just wait until you read the one about the guy with the paralyzed hand. We're also trying to arrange a special surprise for eG Forums members -- more on that once I meet with Dave the Cook and Maggie the Cat.

Comparing retail prices is meaningless -- the retail price of an appliance is a theoretical construct that exists for a variety of reasons, with none of those reasons being that it's the actual price. "Street price" is the measure that matters. Nor is the $169 Costco deal a special or temporary sale. It's the standard price Costco charges for that unit and it has remained the same since last year. There are also a variety of vendors that always have it for around that price, albeit with a slightly different product name and not as well equipped. I also think it's not particularly useful to compare old models of one brand to new models of the other. Although the rate of change with food processors doesn't rival that of microprocessors, there has been a lot of recent evolution. So it's somewhat like comparing a new computer to a two-year-old computer. The extra work bowl in a different size is definitely a selling point of the KitchenAid. Whether it translates into a value computation equal to having a whole additional food processor depends on what you use these things for. If you don't use the small unit at all, it's irrelevant. If you use it all the time -- like you're making baby food a couple of times a day -- you'll want a dedicated mini unit anyway. Similarly, the Cuisinart's superior treatment of dough only matters if you make dough in your food processor. Most people who make a lot of dough are likely to have a KitchenAid stand mixer or something along those lines anyway. Although, the Cuisinart is so good at making dough that the last two times I made any I didn't even bother to set up the KitchenAid.

(Just click that Upgrade button at the top left of your screen, Jamie. You'll feel so much better about yourself.)

Smithy, your husband is most likely attracted to the sweetness of the stuff, which is a pretty pervasive preference among American salad eaters -- you'll notice that most every salad dressing sold in the US has a ton of high fructose corn syrup in it. Two things I can suggest to get around that: 1) add some sweet ingredients to the actual salad, such as dried cranberries -- this provides really nice contrast with a more acidic/bitter dressing and at the same time is less masking to the tastes of the vegetables in the salad; 2) find other sweeteners for your dressing -- the combination of honey and mustard is particularly effective and enhances all sorts of greens (so the dressing would be oil, red wine vinegar, honey, Dijon mustard, salt and pepper).

Yeah, but by the middle of the day there wasn't any good merchandise left. All the good shirts and such were gone. It was possible for a determined person to spend the money, but it was easier and produced better karma to leave it over for the BABBP's charity beneficiaries.

Jamie, I don't know that the vendors were compensated by portion. I think they may have just been paid a fee to come up, and had their materials costs covered. I think the money taken in at the registers went first to cover those costs, and then to charity. So I don't know that any vendors lost any money; if anything the charities did. However, I know that a whole lot of people left on Sunday with a whole lot of unused money on their cards. I think my mother abandoned $93. So a lot of it probably evened out.

I think "white balsamic" works better in salad dressings than "red balsamic" because "white balsamic" is more like normal wine vineger (albeit sweeter) and less like real balsamic vinegar. If you experiment a bit with different vinegars, I think you will find that regular wine vinegar is pretty much the best vinegar for salad dressings, and that as you get into sweeter, heavier vinegars the dressing starts to mask rather than enhance the flavor of your salad.

I re-tasted the Southside products today -- for a total of four tastings this weekend -- and I became more impressed with them each time. Meanwhile, I've always thought Salt Lick served pretty tasty barbecue, but I've never been blown away by their stuff (neither here nor on location in Texas). When I interrogated people about why they liked Salt Lick's brisket better than Southside's, it came down to moistness and tenderness every time. To me, neither of those attributes is as important as flavor, and that's what the Southside brisket had a lot of, especially concentrated around its edges. In addition, I don't think softness is the be-all-end-all of brisket. I actually prefer a brisket with structure to one that practically disintegrates when you eat it. With respect to the sausage, folks seemed inclined to like Salt Lick's sausage because it had more of a smoky flavor. This just isn't as important to me as the flavors of the spice and meat. As one of the pit guys at Southside explained to me, they don't make smoked sausage -- they make barbecue sausage. Yes, it picks up some smoke, but it's more like smoke-grilled than smoked. Texas barbecue, in general, is cooked at higher temperatures than the barbecue in the Carolinas, Memphis, etc. As for the beans, the soupiness seems to parallel that of Brunswick stew -- it's not a texture that naturally appeals to me as a northerner, because my palate and preferences are attuned to thicker, richer sauces and soups. But once I put that bias aside I liked them very much.

Chefzadi, I'm so glad you got a copy and I hope you enjoy the rest of the book. Suzi, sorry I didn't see you at BookExpo. I did see a whole bunch of other eGullet Society members and eG Forums readers there, though. This was my first BookExpo and also my first signing of any kind. It's an atypical arrangement. In my case, I was signing galleys. While it's extremely difficult for me to get extra copies of the galleys for family and friends, somehow a hundred or so copies materialized for BookExpo. It's a nice deal if you're an attendee at BookExpo, because they give away the books for free. So a person would come up, I would give him or her (mostly her) a book and sign it, we would exchange pleasantries, and then the next person would come up. You only sign books for half an hour, and there are 20 authors signing books at the same time, with rope/ribbon things demarcating the lines for each author. I was terrified that I'd be sitting there with no line, especially since the head publicist and associate publisher were right there with me, but luckily there was a good line, so there was always someone at my booth and a bunch of people waiting. I didn't do nearly as well as the author next to me, though, who wrote some girly fiction thing with a pink cover.

Anybody else have anything on this? Is this the regular pass that anybody (who wants to drop a c-note) can buy or the one that you have to have an AMEX gold card for? I've been looking forward to tomorrow. Please don't tell me have to wait in line with the riff raff. ← The Bubba Fast Pass has nothing to do with the AmEx gold/platinum cardmember party that they held on Friday night. The Fast Pass was available to anybody. I was told by several of the higher-ups at Union Square Hospitality Group that all the Bubba Fast Passes were sold out in advance of the event. At the same time, I got different information from a number of people who were working the event, and there does indeed seem to be a whole booth set up for the sale of Bubba Fast Passes -- I'm not exactly sure why they'd have such a booth if they had sold out in advance. A few observations about the Bubba Fast Pass: 1) I told you so; anybody who didn't buy one should have listened when I told you to, 2) A single Bubba Fast Pass gets two people into the VIP area behind the pits, so you can share one with someone else, 3) A Bubba Fast Pass gets you and a guest into the VIP area even if there's no money on it (you can top it off or pay cash or, as happened today, just get stuff for free), 4) The difference between what happens on the public lines and what happens in the VIP area is amazing; it's two different events. On another subject, in terms of the way they make up the barbecue plates, you need to fight for your rights. These places are serving thousands of portions in just a few hours and they're relying on staff that don't necessarily work in barbecue restaurants. But you absolutely can ask for brisket from the deckle or extra cracklin's or pieces of pulled rib meat in your chopped pork. You just have to be insistent and a little patient. Brisket and sausage: I found that everybody I spoke to liked both the sausage and brisket from Salt Lick better than the sausage and brisket from Elgin. I felt exactly the opposite. So I don't know what's going on there. I must be losing it.

People who purchased the Bubba Fast Pass in advance were allowed onto the Fast Pass lines and were served all their food free of charge while the computer system was down. My mother had one, as did my brother-in-law, and they had no problem going through the Fast Pass line and getting all the food they wanted, quickly and efficiently. With a Bubba Fast Pass, it was possible to sample the food of all ten pitmasters in about two hours. At the end of the day, the passes seemed to be working, so we had to have $14 deducted from one of our cards for a bunch of desserts, but we're loaded for bear tomorrow with almost all our credit still remaining.

Barbecue is almost by definition pre-cooked. When you're dealing with something that cooks for so many hours, it's not practical to have it coming right off the pit for every order throughout the day. Especially when you get into the larger cuts of meat -- whole shoulders, whole hogs -- it's common for barbecue to be served lukewarm from meat that was cooked overnight and then maintained in various ways. When you go to Ed Mitchell's pits today, for example, sure you will see that his guys are out there with ten pits. But they have to cook 60 half-hogs (aka 30 hogs) this weekend. That means they've got to run the pits 'round the clock (aka 100% of each day), for service during just 25% (6 hours) of each day. If you go at noon today, you'll get meat from a hog that went on at 5pm yesterday and came off the pit at 3am today. Sometime prior to service, that hog will be brought up to temperature on a pit before it is pulled, chopped and seasoned. But it was pre-cooked in the sense that the time between 3am and noon is just as long as, say, the drive from Wilson, NC, to New York City. That being said, most of the pitmasters at the BABBP have always done their pre-cooking at the event. Some things are brought up from the place or origin, like the sausages, but I can't imagine it would be practical to set up a whole charcuterie operation on the street. I'm pretty sure last year only the guys from Salt Lick were using pre-pre-cooked stuff. Oh, and maybe the snoot people -- their thing requires some unusual processes -- but I'm not sure.

So, some thoughts for the future: - It would be great if somebody would volunteer to be the list maintainer. We would take that nycbbq@eGullet.org e-mail address and forward it to you, and also your job would be to update the list any time a new place opens or an old place closes. - There are things we can add to this list that would make it even better: links to relevant eG Forums discussions of each place, pitmaster CVs, expanded menu notes, specifics about cooking equipment . . . - There must be some folks who could volunteer to generate similar lists (or act as contributors to this list) for Northern New Jersey, Southern Connecticut and Long Island/Westchester/Rockland. Anybody? Shoot me a PM if you're up for it.

I don't know where you heard that, but as far as I know it's not true.