Fat Guy

I think, as artisan2 and others have intimated, that it's critical to maintain a realistic and non-patronizing perspective here. Yes, we've all seen people buying crap food with food stamps. No, the solution is not just telling them about basic nutrition and watching as the disadvantaged transform themselves into the gourmet's ideal of peasant cooks. We are also an organization with limited funds and an infrastructure that is better suited to some things than to others. We do not, for example, expect that we will ever run a soup kitchen or food distribution center, nor are we going to pursue programs to feed those affected by famine in the developing world. There are other organizations better suited to that, and we hope our members will support them, but we will not be moving into that space. Rather, what we are well equipped to do is focus on media and learning efforts, such as teaching volunteers to teach others, and partnering with other charitable organizations for in-person outreach opportunities. Getting back to artisan2's point, the research on what is nutritious and how to cook on a budget will not be terribly complex. There will be a lot of work involved, as there always is, in preparing course materials, but it's something we can do. Where we would really need to focus some effort, however, is on gathering feedback from the audience. We can't allow ourselves to be some out-of-touch ivory-tower organization that lectures poor people inappropriately and tells them to do things they'll never do. We will need case studies, real understanding and a grass roots approach. This means we move slowly, starting with the basics and experimenting along the way. It's a big, exciting project, but let's get comfortable with a long timeline.

The beauty of the online format for teaching teachers is that chapters aren't needed. We have one big global chapter, and it's easy to accumulate feedback and create regionally adapted materials quickly using our distance-learning technologies. We are also already blessed with a regionally distributed system of discussion forums with managers, hosts and members who live in those areas. So we have a very good infrastructure in place already -- it's mostly, I think, a question of adapting it to this purpose. I have a good feeling about all this -- I'm really glad to see so much enthusiasm. This is how the eGCI started in the first place -- a member put up a post, and next thing we knew we were up and running.

I'll let the eGCI team take the lead on organizing this effort -- and of course all who are interested in being on that team are welcome to join soon -- but my thinking on this has been that we would need to focus on course development before we could focus on outreach. In other words, first we create online classes that contain the information we want to teach. Then we create an online system of teaching our volunteers to carry that information forth into the world -- essentially a how-to-teach-the-class class, plus supporting printed materials (basic information, recipes, etc.) that can be distributed in person. We would probably want to have a certification process, whereby volunteers who wish to present courses on behalf of the eGullet Society have to demonstrate familiarity with the course materials and go through a basic review by the eGCI staff. That's the point at which I think it would make sense to start interfacing with organizations and sending people out to teach. And I don't think it ends there -- there is much more we can do. But we have to start with the basics. This is all in the very early stages. It's going to take some time to make all this happen, but with more human resources (not to mention more money) we can make it happen faster.

You're going to be happy with it. In terms of the question of scraps, for the advanced-amateur majority among our membership a broad range of bones and trimmings -- cooked, fresh, frozen -- will work very well. In some situations, however, you will want to start with only raw, fresh ingredients and do all the roasting and cooking to your specifications. For example in very advanced restaurant cooking at the high end, where the sauces are carefully calibrated and visual appearance and clarity of flavor are critical, you specifically don't want random additional complexity or inconsistent ranges of flavors. Not that any professional sauciers would need to use this eGCI class, but it's worth noting that "anything goes" is a good attitude for stockmaking at our level but not necessarily at all levels.

You are not hallucinating, chefzadi. The eGullet Society statement of purpose reads in relevant part: In addition, our statement of purpose specifies that our current and planned activities include: In the last semester of our eGullet Culinary Institute (eGCI), a team of eGullet Society members presented an amazing eGCI course called "Cooking with Disabilities." This three-part course, which we hope reached many people who benefited from it (and it even got some nice coverage in the Washington Post), inspired us to make a commitment to do more along those lines. What we have been discussing as our next step is creating additional classes about things like cooking on a budget and basic nutrition for the coming semester of the eGCI. We are going to have an announcement very shortly (next week) about the coming semester and how to get involved. After those courses go live, we should start a dialog about ways to get that information to groups of people who aren't necessarily going to read it online. Thanks for thinking along these lines. Next week, I hope everyone who is interested in getting involved in this project will contact the eGCI administrators and join in.

My understanding is that oxidation is mostly a factor that affects the color of raw meat, and the most pronounced effect is that it makes meat a brighter red (although it can also cause loss of color over time). The bulk of the color change to cooked meat comes, I believe, from denaturing caused by heat, not by oxidation. But I also think it's an oversimplification to speak of the "color of the meat changing" because what's going on is more an issue of different pigments being created and destroyed (and also added), and their interactions. Just as a related, simple example: lobsters are said to "turn red" when cooking. Actually, the lobster always had the red in it. The cooking simply destroys all the other pigments in a lobster's shell, leaving only the red. In raw meat, color is mostly decided by the ratio of myoglobin to oxymyoglobin to metmyoglobin. Cooked meat also has denatured metmyoglobin, which is as far as I know "the brown stuff." There are all sorts of things that can cause cooked meat to be pink: it can have to do with pH, or even nitrates -- remember, your braising liquid may contain water or vegetables with naturally occurring nitrates, or it may contain pH-affecting wine and such. Anyway, I'm no expert on this. Here are some sources: Everything you ever wanted to know about the -globins in meat, from two meat scientists Much information about the color of meat, from the USDA/FSIS

Fascinating, and worthy of its own thread.

Do you see the piece online? I'd love a link so as to be able to check it out.

The main Grand Livre volume has just come out in English -- they just got a pile of them in at Kitchen Arts & Letters about a week ago, and it's $250. I think it will start to appear elsewhere soon. There is an English version of the pastry volume planned as well -- I think it may alredy be done and working its way through the publishing process, which can take months or even years. It even says "Egalement disponible en version anglaise" on the Ducasse site. So, we wait. I regret that I haven't had the opportunity to push this topic forward as much as I wanted to. We'll get there, though.

Upthread some disparaging remarks were made about apples that have been stored through the winter. While really old apples are not necessarily a good thing, in all places that have a real winter there needs to be some mechanism of eating during that winter and that mechanism is not going to involve eating crops that are actually growing outdoors. Options include root cellar-type approaches (this would also cover storage of apples), canning, freezing, dehydrating, etc. Another option is growing crops indoors, in hothouses and the like. I suppose some would say that these applications of technology are preferable to importing produce from elsewhere.

Chef, do you think it is possible to have great Italian cuisine outside of Italy?

Nah.

Although most of the attention focused on the current issue of Edward Behr's The Art of Eating (2004, Number 68) is bound to be on Mitchell Davis's excellent article on shopping for food in New York City, I believe the most significant piece in the issue -- and perhaps the best piece to appear in AoE in quite some time -- is the wonderful profile of Odessa Piper of the Madison, Wisconsin restaurant L'Etoile, by Amy Trubek, the author of Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession. In this article, Trubek lays out the singular vision of Piper, a chef who cooks with an incredible array of local Wisconsin ingredients. To call Piper the Alice Waters of Wisconsin would be to trivialize what she is doing, because her challenge is of a different order of magnitude than that of cooking fresh, seasonal, local food in California. The article not only tells an impressive story of culinary inventiveness and fidelity, but also reflects carefully on the meaning of terroir. It commits few (not none, but few) sins of sentimentality and does not gloss over the key facts. I feel badly that I skipped over L'Etoile when I was in Madison, having been told "all they serve is apples and it's overpriced." These days, I have learned that when the right (as in wrong) kind of person says something like that, it's a rave review for me. I have said before that I support buying fresh, seasonal, local produce and do so myself plenty, but that there's a big difference between buying local and buying exclusively local. Most significant to me, from the perspective of this discussion, are the following statements in Trubek's piece: "The amount of fresh, regional produce used at L'Etoile does decline to 30 percent from January to March, but another 30 percent of preserved Wisconsin fruits and vegetables brings the total amount of Wisconsin produce to 60 percent even in the dead of winter." Also, "Piper's idealism and imagination have made her purchases of regional ingredients unusually large and consistent, but even for her Harmony Valley Farm's carrots tend to be showpieces on the plate, while for stock carrots from California will do."

The East Coast of the United States is a bit longer than the West Coast, but if you take New York City to Florida you have roughly the span of Seattle to Southern California. By the standard most West Coast people use to describe "local" produce, anything I can get from Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, etc., is equally "local" to me. So the Californians needn't pity the New Yorkers -- most anything that can grow in Southern California can grow just fine in Florida, and so on up through the latitudes. Nor is the superiority of West Coast produce something I'd take for granted: Indian River citrus, Vidalia onions, Georgia peaches (not to mention Ohio peaches, grown just 9 hours by car from New York City), tomatoes from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, apples from throughout the Northeast, and many other East Coast crops are world class and if you talk to the chefs who travel the world in search of the best they'll tell you some of these products are the best of their kind. However, I see no moral superiority in a New Yorker buying citrus from Florida as opposed to from California. The Florida citrus may taste better, but I don't see it as any more local to me than anyplace else. The world is a small place these days. Nonetheless, we have no cherries right now on either coast. I just finished the last of my five pounds of cherries. I may need to return to Costco tomorrow for another box.

I think the NAMP book is great, as is Ubaldi's meat book, but I would love to hear about actual butchering books. The one mentioned by FaustianBargain sounds good. Are you in the UK, then? That might also make a difference in terms of what is applicable to you.

Here in New York City, soda fountains have not disappeared entirely. There aren't many, but there are a few. Lexington Candy Shop on Manhattan's Upper East Side and Hinsch in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn come to mind. You can get a comprehensive lesson in all types of soda-fountain beverages by sitting at the counter in one of these places for half an hour.

This would be a solution for a fully submerged braise where the meat and liquid are kept together; however, in such instances the liquid itself is also a pretty good sealer, as is the lid to whatever vessel is being used.

I haven't been since something like 1997 -- I think I went the same year Bux did -- but it's the restaurant in France I'd most love to return to. There may be better and more consistent restaurants -- Michelin thinks there are more than a few -- but Roellinger's inventiveness and unpretentiousness put him at the top of my list.

It's not selling it that I see as a problem, its the use of it at the table. . . . ← That too is standard procedure at many places: the sauce on the table is the same sauce you can buy at the counter or by mail. Again and again, we are seeing Dinosaur held to unreasonable standards that do not even exist in barbecue country: - The same smokers used in plenty of "legitimate" barbecue places: not okay - The same level of variety of menu offerings seen all over barbecue country: not okay - Impersonal, chainlike decor that isn't nearly as impersonal or chainlike as what is common in barbecue country: not okay - The same procedure of providing and selling bottled sauces that is in play all over barbecue country: not okay It would be as if one were to say: - Pierre's French restaurant is inauthentic because it doesn't serve pizza, lasagna or even minestrone soup; - Pierre's French restaurant is a fraud because the waiters are from France and speak with French accents and no French restaurant has waiters from France with French accents; - Pierre's French restaurant couldn't possibly be a real French restaurant; after all, it is open on Thursdays; and - French food can never be good outside of France -- this is axiomatic. All my criticisms of Pierre's French restaurant are based solely on my opinions of the food.

Many of the top barbecue restaurants in the South sell factory-made prepackaged sauces. It is very much a part of the business these days. Must we really make another list to debunk yet another one of these romantic, nostalgic and wrong assertions about barbecue?

New Green Bo has the best soup dumplings I've had in the city. The wrappers are thin and delicate, the broth is rich and the fillings are of high quality. There's a significant step down from New Green Bo to the next best few soup-dumpling places in town. I also think the fried pork dumplings at New Green Bo are very special. They are stylistically different from the ones served at the five-for-a-dollar places: they're longer, bigger and have a firm filling that is sweet and separate from the crispy skin. I also like the five-for-a-dollar places, and wouldn't necessarily say that the dumplings at Dumpling House on Eldridge are better than at Fried Dumpling on Allen. The issue at both places is that you need to get them right out of the wok; otherwise they deteriorate rapidly. If you order fried dumplings at a regular restaurant, like New Green Bo or most anyplace, they cook your dumplings to order. At the five-for-a-dollar places they cook a hundred or so dumplings at a shot in a big wok and they sit around until they're all sold. Going at a high-volume time would seem the solution, but I think they slam them through the cooking process too hard during the lunch rush. I think the dumplings at these as well as a couple of other five-for-a-dollar places (like Tasty Dumpling on Mulberry next to Columbus Park) are all delicious and best-of-their-kind for hole-in-the-wall/street-food dumplings. In terms of the dim sum dumpling scene, I've never found a consistent winner over time among the big, high-volume places. Maybe Ping's has on occasion been bigger than the larger spots. Dim Sum Go Go is categorically different, although not a favorite. Ordering dim sum off a menu and having it made to order does have its advantages, but the style at Dim Sum Go Go is too precious for me. Both China 46 and Silver Pond in New Jersey are exemplary on the dumpling front.

JJ, when standing in the vestibule waiting to be seated, I was almost blinded by it. Eventually I had to go outside. Unfortunately, for 100 feet in every direction there were people smoking (cigarettes, not meat), so that strategy didn't work out very well.

New York has an "indigenous" style of barbecue, called pastrami. The whole notion of "indigenous" anything, however, is as nonsensical as the notion of "immigrants." Everybody is an immigrant -- whether they came on a boat or schlepped across the Bering Straits -- and no food is truly indigenous. Even under a forced "first figured out here" definition of indigenous, it would be a stretch to say barbecue is indigenous to anyplace but the first place where it was recorded. Everywhere else, it migrated. It migrated from North Carolina to South Carolina, or vice versa. And now it is in an early stage of migration to New York City, just as sushi was several decades ago. As for the objection to mixing styles, I don't see the validity of that either as a normative/descriptive or theoretical claim. Although barbecue is not easy, it is something that can be measured by science: you have meat, heat, smoke and various equations to get you to a finished product. If you go to Ed Mitchell's place, for example, you will see temperature probes and heat graphs all over the place -- this is how they intend to make franchises work without loss of quality.

Relevant to the multiple-meats point: the name of the place is actually "Mitchell's Ribs, Chicken & BBQ." The web site is www.mitchellsbbq.com. They smoke with Kingsford charcoal plus some wood. Not only Mitchell's but also many of the top barbecue places have mobile rigs that they use for parties, competitions and other events. These rigs can drive a couple of miles, or they can drive to Canada. The barbecue tastes the same in any event.

Emphasis on "frozen flat." The problems with reheating frozen food arise when you have a gigantic Borg-like cube of frozen stew. The Titanic could sink in the time it takes for heat to penetrate through to the center, and any method of accelerated warming will overcook the outside parts while the interior is still a block of ice. Whereas, if you freeze flat you have plenty of surface area and not much interior area, and you can reheat pretty quickly in a pot on the stovetop, or if you like to use the microwave you'll get much more even results. It all takes up the same number of cubic feet, so you're always better off freezing flat in a larger number of bags.