Fat Guy

It's definitely of interest, primarily because it doesn't include Sushi Yasuda. One wonders what the story is behind that seemingly impossible-to-justify decision. Might be worth discussing some other points on another topic.

For most purposes you are going to want to brown the pork bones. It will make for a somewhat richer, deeper, more "roasty" tasting stock.

Hey I didn't say I store the meat and sauce together. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. It depends on what I'm trying to accomplish. One thing you will find is that defatting is a real pain if you store the meat and sauce (what I would call the "braising liquid") together. Also, separating out the braising liquid allows you to run it through various processes in order to make an even better sauce: you can strain it, you can reduce it, you can season it, you can combine it with other stuff. There are, however, some braised dishes I prefer to store in their liquid, especially those using small chunks or thin slices of meat: goulash, Irish stew, brisket that has been sliced. I think when you get into the smaller and thinner pieces, which have a lot of surface area relative to their weight, the sauce acts compellingly on them. As Julia Child wrote, "It will only be the better for a sojourn with its flavor elements."

Please do continue to "bore" us with the details. There is virtually no limit to the number of stockmaking photos or the depth of analysis we can engage in here. It's a beautiful thing that this eGullet Culinary Institute course, which was presented in July of 2003, is still "live" a year and a half later. This is what is so right about online culinary instruction. Keep those photos coming. In terms of pork stock, the secret weapon is the foot, which has an excellent ratio of meat to bones to cartilage to skin and doesn't have very much fat. I believe it was in the Zuni Cafe book that I learned this. Shanks are also a good utility stockmaking cut. But I would ultimately go by price and appearance. You need to be sure you have plenty of bone . . . and plenty of meat. I know it sounds like non-advice, but that's pretty much all there is to it. One caveat: do not use any smoked or cured pork products when making pork stock. You'll wind up with an overpowering smoke and/or salt flavor if you do. So if the hocks you saw were smoked, as they often are, that's a no-go. Remember that fat does not contribute to stock and will be removed later in the process, so don't pay for a lot of fat when you buy your pork bones and meat -- this suggestion might influence your selection as between two equally priced cuts, one of which has more fat. In terms of aromatics, for pork stock, I would support Snowangel's no-carrots suggestion, because pork is naturally "sweet." For beef and chicken stocks, I think they generally are improved by use of carrots as an aromatic, though that is certainly not a hard-and-fast rule.

If you don't have any parchment handy, you can use a side of bacon.

Tightly covered is a must. Assuming any tightly covered vessel, though, where's the moisture going to go? I guess a little bit of it will populate the vessel itself, but that doesn't seem likely to be significant.

I must agree emphatically with Paula's approach to reheating braised meats. I would add that for a very large item like a whole brisket or a pot roast you will need more like 2 hours of reheating at 275 to get it up to standard -- at least in my oven you will. I also like to pull off the cover and flick the dial up to 325 for the last 10 minutes of reheating, which improves (to me) the appearance of the dish for service. In terms of the problem being addressed in this topic, I must be operating with the protection of the braising gods because I've never had it. I've never given much thought to the possibility of a braised dish drying out under refrigeration, so long as it's in a sealed container: the pot it was cooked in (with the lid on), a Pyrex casserole with lid, a Zip-Loc bag, or a disposable Glad container. In restaurant kitchens, if you wander into the walk-in refrigerator, you'll often see braised meats being kept in plastic tubs that are the heavy-duty large-scale commercial equivalents of Tupperware. Or, if it's a whole brisket or something too big for most dishes, I just wrap it in Saran Wrap. In all instances, it seems to stay moist enough for me. Where's the moisture going to go anyway?

Most folks fall into either the love 'em or hate 'em camp. The whole "slider" genre is pretty far removed from the normal range of hamburgers. The whole idea is they are "steam griddled," and have onions incorporated into the very thin patties. They are sui generis. But White Castles do provide a habit-forming jolt of fat, sugar and salt.

You totally had me going there... what happened? Is this like a figure of speech... like when I tell people, "I'm bad," which I do, because I am. ← The fries at White Manna are bad, as in not good. It's an unfortunate weakness in the establishment's offerings. The burgers are the best examples of the genre; the fries are as bad or worse than White Castle's fries.

Peter Luger and Katz's Deli opened in 1887 and 1888, respectively. Does that count as more than 10 years old?

Right. I'm saying heads-only for stock sounds like nonsensical advice. Lobster-head stock?

That advice sounds like nonsense to me, and where did you hear it anyway? I usually make lobster stock when I'm making a dish that uses lobster meat, as opposed to serving whole lobsters. What I do is remove the claws and tails from the live lobsters and boil them in salted water until the meat is just cooked rare (usually, you will want to boil the claws for approximately twice as long as the tails, which is why this method works better than cooking a lobster whole) unless it's for a cold dish like lobster salad, in which case I'll cook it just through. Meanwhile, I separate the bodies (if you pull up and down on the opening where the tail used to be attached, they come right apart) and set aside the roe from any females and then clean out whatever guts I can reach with my fingers. Then I put the bodies in a roasting pan in the oven for a good long time. After the tail and claw meat is cooked, I remove it from the shells and add those shells to the roasting pan with the bodies. Once everything is nicely roasted, I add it to a stockpot with fennel, leeks, carrots and celery, and also tomatoes if a deeper color is desired. Then I make lobster roe butter by mixing the roe into butter and I freeze it. As opposed to fish stock, I treat lobster stock like a meat stock and simmer it for several hours. I like to let it cool overnight in the refrigerator with all the shells and aromatics still in the stock, and then strain it the next day, after which I reduce it to a strong concentration. When it's time to cook with this stock, say for a soup, whip out the lobster roe butter and mix it in towards the end of cooking. It will reinforce the flavor and color of whatever you're making.

A full boil is the way to go for reduction. Once you have all the fat and free particles out of the stock (because you defatted and strained it so carefully), the main negative consequences of a rolling boil (homogenizing all that crap into the stock) have been eliminated. So crank it up and let it reduce. I've mentioned this before, but it's worth saying again: all these formulae are useful as starting points, but you have to taste your stock in order to make the final determinations. Right now, Marlene, since you don't have a reference point, all you should do is taste and observe. Later, when you've made several batches of stock, it will all come together. But do taste at every stage: before and after reduction, during the cooking process, etc., because that's how you learn what stock tastes like. Everything else, even the visual cues, can be misleading.

There are two other White Castles in Manhattan. There's one on 103rd Street and First Avenue, which is walking distance for a lot of Upper East Siders (like me), and there's a very busy one on 125th Street and Seventh Avenue (aka Adam Clayton Powell). There was also, until recently, one on Fifth Avenue directly across the street from the Empire State Building. That one has, however, closed. These days, however, when I get the craving, I usually go to Sassy's Sliders on 86th Street and Third Avenue. They are what White Castles would be if done with better ingredients and more care. Even better, if I'm in the vicinity, is White Manna in Hackensack, NJ, which offers the ultimate artisanal expression of the "slider" genre, made from fresh ground beef, piles of steamed onions pressed down into the patties and served on a Martin's potato roll with delicious cool slices of dill pickles and really bad fries.

One thing to bear in mind, Marlene, is that this gets a lot easier. Once you've got a feel for the way your stove, stockpot and procedures work together to make stock, you'll be able to do this as a non-labor-intensive, set-it-and-forget-it operation. It will be a few minutes of assembly, a little skimming, and then most of the rest of the time is yours save for a little manipulation here and there.

For the purposes of this class, we've been using the term "demi-glace" (literally half glace) to refer to a reduction of stock that is quite rich but not as rich as a glace. This is how the term is used in many American and other English-speaking kitchens. According to Escoffier's definitions, demi-glace is a specific combination of stock and sauce Espagnole, and that's probably the more technically correct definition for professional French cooking, but we're just talking about reducing stock here. Reduction can take awhile. It depends a lot on how much surface area your pots have compared to how much is in them. You can reduce a cup of stock in a 12" skillet in no time. Reducing the same cup of stock in a 1/2" test tube will take a lot longer. A big stockpot full of stock can take hours to come to the boil and reduce to a small percentage of its former self. Splitting it up among several pots will hasten things, of course.

Ducasse does a wonderful veloute-type sauce made from Boston lettuce. I'm sure a little of that with some crumbled up bacon and tomato concasse would be nice. I'll try to find the recipe. When I saw this thread I thought it was about a restaurant. We have a place here in NYC called BLT Steak, and another on the way called BLT Fish, named for the chef, Laurent Tourondel, as in Bistro Laurent Touondel. I thought this was an announcement that he was going to open BLT Soup.

I keep losing count, but that's a lot more than 20 reasons. No fair.

I think we have a winner!

Forget $350 sports tickets. What about $10,000 diamonds that nobody without a microscope can tell from $100 pieces of cubic zirconia and that lose half their value after being worn for one day? The sobering part of these reactions is that this "how could you spend so much on food when there are people starving in Africa" lunacy represents the neo-Puritanical thinking of most people when it comes to cuisine. Luckily, there are enough people out there who don't think this way to support a few four-star restaurants. Think how many more such restaurants there would be if, as in France, it was as respectable in the US to spend as much on dinner as on completely worthless things like diamonds, which by the way are mined by slaves etc.

I guess the most remarkable group of restaurants to me is tried, true, around a decade or more old, yet largely unheralded. Of course, it's not my thread and folks are free to list what they want to list, but my personal list wouldn't include Peter Luger or Union Square Cafe, because they get their fair share of press (or more), wouldn't include Blue Hill or Balthazar (too new, plus plenty of press), and wouldn't include well-documented standards like Katz's, Lombardi's, Papaya King, et al., because residents and tourists alike have tons of opportunities to learn about these places and frequent them in droves. So far I think Gotham and Picholine are the two examples that are going at the top of my personal list (I think the list should go in order of excellence, since that's what makes the lack of recognition so confounding). And it's not just a question of number of hits if you run the places through the New York Times search engine. It's about the context in which these places are mentioned, the frequency with which they are written about as restaurants not just in passing mentions of chefs or dishes or recipes, and the buzz on the street and online.

The closest I've come to a situation where I was able to compare samples of the same cheese at different ages was with some 1, 2 and 3 year Parmigiano Reggiano specimens from, I was told, the same producer (from those red cows, supposedly). Of course, you can never do a perfect comparison because the milk itself is either different in the case of a simultaneous tasting or, if it's the same milk, you have to taste the cheese at 1 year intervals. The most noticeable thing was loss of moisture. The 1 year specimen was very cheese-like and waxy, whereas the older specimens were progressively more crumbly. Loss of moisture, on its own, leads to concentration of flavor in all sorts of food products, and as far as I can tell it's no different in cheese. I think one would probably call this concentration of flavor "sharpness" in the context of hard cheeses. Of course texture also changes as the cheese becomes more crumbly and brittle with loss of moisture. What else is going on in there? Well, there seems to be some molecular development or breakdown, because in addition to the expected concentration and drying, there were new flavors in the older cheeses. Not just stronger versions of the old flavors (some of which, like the grass and butter flavors, went away), but bona fide new flavors. There were almost wine- and Scotch-like aromatics involved, as well as a certain sweetness.

To the average semi-upper middle class international tourist, food is neither art nor art-like. The whole notion of all of us being members of a "culinary arts society" probably seems risible to most folks, especially those who've never experienced culinary artistry and even many of those who have but upon whom it has been lost. (Part of our mission here is to help as many people as possible see things differently, by increasing culinary awareness.) I think it's helpful to bear that in mind when thinking about how the audience is likely to react to this story.

I think, when it comes to the back-breaking labor required in the commercial baking business as well as many other food businesses, it doesn't really matter what kind of immigrant you are but it does help to be a poor, hungry, ambitious immigrant. It's no surprise to me that the Jewish food businesses of old are now often run by Latin or Asian immigrants. You go to Katz's deli and half the guys behind the counter speak Spanish. The guy who runs Absolute Bagels is, I think, Thai. Speaking for myself as a downwardly mobile white lazy bastard, there's not a chance in hell I'd ever work those hours schlepping sacks of flour and slicing meat to order for annoying and unappreciative customers at a profit of one cent per bagel. And you can be sure the kids of those Latin and Asian dudes who are now serving Jewish foods are at Stuyvesant High School right now and will be going to Cornell on scholarships and will own my slothful middle class Jewish ass by 2030. My grandkids will probably be prep cooks in China.

Have you tasted the 8 or the 12? Tell all.