Fat Guy

So, this is what I have been doing of late. It's not a particularly artisanal or gourmet way to make yogurt, but it yields a surprisingly likeable product that is convenient, cheap and versatile. I figured this out quite by accident. When I first started making yogurt I purchased a bunch of nonfat dry milk. I had read in several places that if you add dry milk to actual milk you can create a thicker yogurt. I never tested the theory because I was happy with the consistency of my yogurt anyway. Then I went into yogurt hibernation: a few months passed, during which I made no yogurt. Stonyfield Farm and Stew Leonard's served us well enough, and yogurt-making was just one more thing I didn't have time for. My coffee-roasting efforts went on hiatus during this time as well, because my coffee roaster's glass roasting chamber had broken (on account of being dropped). One day a few weeks ago, however, we ran out of yogurt and coffee on the same day. There wasn't even enough roasted coffee to make a cup, but we had about 25 pounds of green beans. And there wasn't enough yogurt for a portion, but there were maybe four tablespoons of it in the bottom of the last surviving container. Moreover, it was pouring out -- one of the heaviest New York rains I can remember. So I decided I would try some new strategies. First, I roasted some coffee in the oven on a half-sheet pan. It came out surprisingly well -- better, I think, than most of my efforts in the FreshRoast machine I had been using. And then I turned my attention to the yogurt. But just as we had no yogurt, we also had no milk . . . except, I realized, enough nonfat dry milk to make 10 quarts of milk. So I took four packets of dry milk and put them in a small stockpot with enough water to make a gallon. I heated it up to 205 degrees, and I noticed that, while it tasted pretty crappy at room temperature, when it hit the mid-100s it was indistinguishable from regular milk and perhaps even -- surprisingly -- a little fresher (cleaner, brighter, more dairy-ish) tasting than the milk I typically get at the supermarket. I then let it cool to 120 and poured it into four 32-ounce Glad plastic containers (the disposable ones that are cube-ish), added a tablespoon of yogurt to each and shut them tight. For a heat source, I took two Pyrex baking dishes and put the four Glad containers in them, and I filled the container with hot water from the faucet. I left the whole assemblage on the stovetop while I was making stock on a nearby burner, a process that kept things at around 110 degrees all day. At some point the temperature dropped a little bit so I refilled the hot water and that carried me through until evening. The yogurt had set, so I refrigerated it overnight. All in all, this process was similar to what I had tried in March and reported here, except it was more impressive in a blood-from-a-stone sort of way, and also one other thing . . . The next day, I was treated to the best batch of nonfat yogurt I'd ever produced. It had a terrific, tangy flavor and a consistency that was thicker than I'd ever achieved before with nonfat milk. And, without very much labor at all -- just the occasional moment of observation while I was doing other things in the kitchen anyway -- I was able to make four quarts of the stuff, which lasted a good long time.

Just as Mozart's music is brilliant whether you play it beautifully on your flute or I play it badly on a harmonica, Dover sole a la meuniere is a haute cuisine dish whether it's made from a freshly caught Dover sole or a crappy frozen one. To use an American example: Just like every other American restaurant and home outside California during most of the year, American haute cuisine restaurants for most of the 20th Century used frozen vegetables and frozen fish -- and the freezing technologies were damaging to those products, not like the fancy blast freezing they do to tuna for sushi these days. By today's standards, all but a few locally grown ingredients in season (as well as meat and poultry, which were better back then) were crap -- worse than what you'd get in an average suburban supermarket today. But that doesn't have any bearing on whether or not the food served at those restaurants was haute cuisine. It had bearing only on the question "Was it well executed haute cuisine, or badly executed haute cuisine?" Certainly from a classical standpoint, haute cuisine that sucks on the plate is still haute cuisine, and non-haute cuisine no matter how well prepared still isn't haute cuisine (unless it is fundamentally altered, such as by the addition of a foie gras, short rib and truffle stuffing in Daniel Boulud's "db burger"). The artistry, elegance and savoir faire of haute cuisine exist at a level above execution.

I haven't seen the current lunch menu yet, but I saw several draft lunch menus pre-opening. There were a few of the same dishes from the dinner menu plus several more casual, less expensive lunch-like items of the composed salad and upscale sandwich/panini variety. I remember thinking to myself that trying the short-rib sandwich needed to be a high priority in my life.

Non-haute cuisine dishes can be extremely complex, and haute cuisine dishes can be minimalist compositions. It's entirely possible -- and not all that uncommon -- to make haute cuisine dishes from cheap, crummy ingredients.

Haute (aka haut) means high but it also means elegant, and in the culinary sense I would say it means artful, which also happens to be what Merriam-Webster says. I believe the descriptor haute cuisine is quite useful and describes actual levels of cuisine that really exist in many of the best culinary cultures, not just French but also Chinese and others. Were this a legal issue, we'd probably want to develop a multi-pronged test to determine whether or not something is haute cuisine. It might be interesting to speculate about what some of those factors would be. I'd especially be interested in distinguishing the form (the fancy china and the waiters in the penguin suits alluded to by Pan) from the substance (the actual elegance, artistry and as Ducasse would say savoir faire of the cuisine).

Some restaurants are reviewed within two or three months, and some are not. Per Se (where the gulf between the meal the regular Joes get and the meal Bourdain and Ruhlman get is as wide as Keller is tall) was given in excess of four months (seven months if you count from the first opening) and ADNY still has not been reviewed even though a new chef has been in place since May. Fairness requires that each restaurant be taken on its own terms, and that the relevant and knowable factors receive consideration.

The coffee from this first roast was excellent. There's a substantial difference between the flavor of the same coffee beans roasted to approximately the same darkness in the i-Roast versus the FreshRoast. The i-Roast roasts slowly and with gradually increasing heat, and the coffee is more complex and mellow for it. It doesn't have as much of the brassy, acidic aspect of the beans that come out of the FreshRoast. I may actually roast several more batches on preset 2 before I branch out. More to come.

Thanks for pointing to that "Diner's Journal" piece by Asimov, Sammy. I either missed it when it came out or, worse, forgot it! Although I haven't plotted a graph of when restaurants have opened and been reviewed, I don't think it would be particularly relevant anyway. Every restaurant is different and deserves to be taken on its own terms and in its context. Some places get up to speed very quickly on the service front; others take longer. Some have kitchens that start slowly, whereas others are impressive out of the gate. No successful restaurant, however, is as good in its first few months as it is going to be after a year, so there is an element of timing that is relevant to the choice of when to launch a review. I think, in particular, when a critic thinks the food at a restaurant is terrific (and I think there can be no serious question that the review in question implies plenty of three-star food) but also thinks that the overall dining experience is not up to snuff, that's the time to say "they need a little more time." And while no chef should be allowed to rest on his laurels, I do think some benefit of the doubt is appropriate when dealing with a chef who has a track record. You can't wait forever, of course, because eventually you have to recognize when a temporary condition is becoming a chronic one, but we're not talking about months and months here -- we're talking about approximately two months (I think October 7 was the opening date maybe?).

Kunz wasn't at Cafe Gray the night I dined there, and we ordered regular three-course meals from the regular menu. I'm sure we were in the computer as VIPs, but since the service we received wasn't particularly good I doubt we benefited terrifically from special status (although we did receive some extra desserts). But in evaluating Cafe Gray by the standards of a two-month-old restaurant at this scale and level of ambition, I would hardly call the service anything but "about what I'd expect, maybe a little worse." The food, on the other hand, is superb, resting somewhere between three and four star food on an aggregate basis (we already know a couple of things on the menu are, historically, "four-star dishes," and there are several other items at that level as well). What Frank Bruni should have done in that situation -- and it seems he felt the same way about the food as I do -- is write a "Diner's Journal" piece saying "fabulous food, service needs work" and then do the review in a couple of months, at which point if the service kinks aren't worked out it's entirely reasonable to dock the place a star (the clear baseline for Cafe Gray being three stars). But to run a review when the restaurant has been open for lunch for like a week and still isn't serving hot food at breakfast -- and to run that review, apparently, based on visits that never even included lunch -- is premature. New York Times reviews aren't dynamic. The star rating Cafe Gray received this week will be an albatross for, most likely, a minimum of a year. I'm sorry to say that, at most every restaurant in the world above the level of a McDonald's, there is "a direct correlation to the dining experience that depends on knowing [the chef] personally or of him knowing that you are a member of the restaurant profession . . . ." That being said, I think RobinsonCuisine overstates the case when he declares categorically that "those whom he has taken a personal interest in come away with glowing reports while those who are 'regular Joes' leave disappointed and its a huge gulf between the known and unknown." I have not seen a body of evidence to support such a damning claim.

The New York Post has a short piece about Mr. Pickell's release on $800,000 bail, including his comments on the food he had in jail over the weekend.

Of course. Just off the top of my head, I recall taking him to task for insufficient explanation of why he liked the steak at V. I also happened to agree with that assessment.

Perhaps the ideal gastronomy is the one that questions.

Just got two of the Exopats. I'll do some side-by-sides with Silpats next time we bake cookies around here, but visual examination indicates they're extremely similar.

I'm surprised Frank Bruni fired so quickly with this review. The restaurant only opened in October and just opened for lunch about a week ago. He seemed to have few objections to the food, thinking much of it brilliant. His primary complaints seemed to be about service, and indeed the service needs work. In such a situation, the best move is to wait another month or two and see if service improves. Now a restaurant that is so clearly in the three-star genre is going to be saddled with the same two-star rating as Sripraphai for a year or more. It hardly seems right. He's also just wrong about the crumble. It's a delightful dessert combining the silky lusciousness of chocolate with the crunch of oatmeal and the tartness of cranberry. The pastry department at Cafe Gray is one of the best in New York -- Chris Broberg, the unnamed (by Frank Bruni) pastry chef, probably receives more marriage proposals from customers (women and men) than any other guy in New York -- and he's okay looking but he's no Jude Law; it's all about the desserts. And you know, I have no problem if Frank Bruni doesn't like a dessert and can explain himself, but all he says is "the chocolate, cranberry and oatmeal crumble is to be avoided." Maybe a Craig Claiborne or a Mimi Sheraton has the stature and credibility to dismiss a dish in the pages of the New York Times without explanation, but Frank Bruni needs to work up to that for, at this rate, about fifty more years.

I think a jus lie is still a thickened sauce, just one thickened with a slurry rather than with a roux. If I remember correctly from reading Peterson on sauces, Escoffier's demi-glace was a shortcut replacement for coulis (made through successive re-moistenings rather than through reduction; coulis is preferable, flavor-wise, to a straight reduction, but is a pain to make). I don't know if the term demi-glace was in use at the time and Escoffier coopted it, or if Escoffier actually invented the term. Either way, the thing is, while it is certainly not correct from the perspective of Escoffier's vocabulary, the glace --> demi-glace progression as an expression of degree of reduction is one that appeals to common sense and linguistic sense, is easy for cooks to understand and reflects the primary base components for much of contemporary saucemaking, which generally rejects liaisons and thickeners. Just looking around for some real-world usage, I came back to the CulinArte site. They actually have two products that are relevant to the definition, both called Demi-Glace de Veau. One, however, is labeled "Classique" and the other "Elite." The descriptions given are:

We'd really need to bring in an authority at the level of a James Peterson to get to the bottom of this, but what I've been observing and deducing is that the classical Escoffier demi-glace method is no longer in wide use in contemporary haute-cuisine restaurants (almost all of which have been heavily influenced by nouvelle cuisine), at least not in the English-speaking world and I think probably not in France either. These days one is much more likely to see a demi-glace made by straight reduction, and indeed one is unlikely to see roux used in anything at the top level of kitchens. To my palate -- and I think this is predictable if you consider roux as both a shortcut and an emblem of an era when people wanted sauces that could hold a spoon upright -- a demi-glace made by straight reduction simply tastes better and is better than a roux-thickened one. Of course when you make a demi-glace by straight reduction you have to reduce it more than one thickened with roux to get anywhere near the same consistency (which you'll never really get, and that's okay). As for the 4:1 recommendation, I have a lot of trouble buying it -- I have to think that's a dilution ratio calculated to produce not only an extremely rich stock but also increased sales volume of the demi-glace product. If these products are reduced and made the way I've seen them done in top New York restaurant kitchens, I'd see it as more like 10:1 for turning technically correct straight-reduction demi-glace into an average-weight stock, and something up near 20:1 for real glace or what a lot of people call demi-glace in restaurants even though the designation is incorrect. I'm sure a real chef-instructor type could shed a lot more light on the situation, though.

Had the review in Gourmet said, "The high points were as good as things get, but the low points made me wince," I might be inclined to agree that it reflected "real, rather than imagined, inconsistency at ADNY." But the review didn't say that or anything like it. Instead, the review portrayed the restaurant as a total failure and had nearly nothing positive to say about the food, which as you know is, when good, as good as food gets. I admire your faith in humanity, but a review like that is hard to explain without reference to an agenda, as is the overall media reaction.

Many thanks for posting that link, hillbill. It's a nice piece of "in their words" reporting by Nina Roberts. I do take issue, however, with the characterization of it as the demise of a New York institution. The institution is moving and, we hope, evolving. As one of the workers, Eddie Cruci, says:

First batch made on preset 2, which is the darker roast of the preset profiles. I'm being very geeky and using a scale to weigh the beans. I'll grind and brew some coffee tomorrow and report on flavor. Initial impressions of the machine: nicely made; fits together like a quality piece of equipment; very loud (which makes it hard to hear the "cracks"); nice mechanism for circulating the beans that reminds me of a movie-theater popcorn popper; in general seems a far superior piece of equipment to my FreshRoast.

You can. Stock is highly versatile in that you can reduce and expand it as needed. If what you have on hand is true restaurant-caliber demi-glace, you will want to dilute it by something in the neighborhood of 20:1. If it's a less rigorous demi-glace, it may be more like 10:1. But really, you'll have to judge for yourself by taste, because demi-glace (and stock in general) is a variable product. I'm also wondering what the recipe is. A sauce? A braise? A soup? Depending on specifics, I might handle this situation in different ways.

After a year of waiting (the product was promised for December 2003 but has been held up for prototype revisions) I have finally received a Hearthware i-Roast home coffee roasting unit from Sweet Maria's. The UPS guy brought it yesterday and I've been tied up with other obligations so it's still not unpacked, but I did break into the box in order to extract and read the instruction manual and accompanying literature. I'm looking forward to taking the i-Roast out for a spin. For those of you who haven't been following the i-Roast development effort, the i-Roast is intended to be the next generation of home coffee roasters. Its main claim to fame is that it has programmable roasting profiles, so that you can set a program that goes like, for example: stage 1, 350 F for 3 min.; stage 2, 460 F for 3 min.; stage 3, 470 F for 4 min. (That's the profile Sweet Maria's recommends for Brazil coffees for espresso). The unit also has a healthy capacity, said to be 130 to 150 grams of coffee beans, as opposed to the approximately 70 grams that my FreshRoast can handle without choking. The machine seems to have a lot of parts -- easily twice as many as my FreshRoast -- that need to be assembled and disassembled when you roast, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Stay tuned.

Thanks for getting to the bottom of that, Owen. I guess when something seems too good to be true, it often is.

I suppose with this list Time Out has succeeded at being talked about, if nothing else. Does anybody know if there's a link to this piece of content? I'd be interested to see any reasoning or justification given for the ratings, which standing alone seem quite untrustworthy.

I've had the bamboo chopping block in heavy use for more than a month now, and it doesn't seem to be rough on my knives at all. I don't know a lot about wood, but intuitively it seems that the end-grain design provides a sturdy yet forgiving surface. There appear to be several variants of bamboo cutting boards, and if you Google around you'll find that the overwhelming majority of the ones on offer in the West are not of the end-grain variety. Maybe those non-end-grain boards are the ones that are rough on knives. The only negative I've observed about this thing is that it's too highly absorbent of odors. I'm going to need to experiment with mineral oil and such.

Some Googling indicates that the technical term for this style of chopping block is "end grain bamboo" and that it is, by whatever method they measure such things, exactly 16% harder than maple. It is also, we are told, an environmentally friendly, renewable resource. Here in the US, they sell them at, among others, Sur La Table -- where it costs $65 (US). Ellen reports that she paid 45 CYR (China Yuan Renminbi) for the item, which apparently translates to $5.44.