Fat Guy

I think a pH meter will be a last resort. Or, I may give up before getting to that point. In any event, I don't understand how all these people are doing it without any equipment of that nature.

The ricotta-like failures we had today (I hesitate to call the product ricotta, since it wasn't made from whey -- then again I guess neither is most ricotta in stores) had the benefit of inspiring a very good baked-ziti casserole for dinner. I may put some on pizza tomorrow. Still, I'd rather figure out how to make mozzarella. It seems like something that plenty of people are pulling off without a hitch. So what's wrong with me? (Don't answer, please.)

Both brands were labeled just "pasteurized," not ultra. I used 1.5 teaspoons of citric acid dissolved in 1 cup of filtered water.

Started a topic here.

As much as I'd love this topic to consist of me teaching all of you how to do this, the sad truth is that it has to be the other way around. The science fair is coming up at my son PJ's school (he is in first grade) and we figured we'd try making mozzarella. The plan is to document the making of the cheese, do a display board about the science stuff involved, and bring in samples of our cheese for folks to try. We have two weeks to get it together. We are not off to an auspicious start. I found this video on YouTube and it made the process look so easy: Trouble is, our curds and whey wouldn't separate enough to produce mozzarella. The curds came together and could be removed from the whey, but they wouldn't release enough of their liquid to allow for kneading into mozzarella. We tried twice with milk from the local supermarket, the Farmland brand, and then thought maybe the milk was at fault -- perhaps it was heat treated at too high a temperature. So we got Tuscan milk from another local supermarket and had exactly the same problem. For dissolving the tap water, I used tap water filtered through the Brita so there shouldn't be a chlorine problem. What are other possible issues?

Failure. I need to do some serious troubleshooting. I'll start a separate topic on this once I get the kitchen cleaned up, which could be next month.

The tablets appear to be pre-scored into quarters, so I'm hoping it will be easy to use a quarter for a gallon of milk. I think we're going to do a trial run tomorrow morning so we'll see what happens.

I'm in possession of more citric acid than I'll ever use. I only needed a few teaspoons but the brutal economics of Kalustyan's has my kitchen looking like basically like a meth lab. Anyway, I've been thinking about what else I can use the citric acid for. I have a few ideas, and there are a couple of past topics, but I was wondering if anyone has experimented with using citric acid in cocktail making.

Got it at Kalustyan's. $5.99 for a pack of 10 tablets, each tablet claims to be able to coagulate 50 liters of milk.

On the one hand it's brilliant. On the other hand it doesn't evidence much knowledge of what the extreme-foodie set would find boast-worthy. It's too easy to come up with long menu-item descriptions that sound ridiculous, but that trend subsided a while back. The guy who gets eaten by a photo-blogging bear should at a bare minimum own a copy of Modernist Cuisine and a full set of Gray Kunz Spoons. Extra credit for Nenox knives.

Mozzarella for a science-fair project. I guess I should start a topic on that and collect some wisdom, but at the moment my priority is sourcing some rennet.

This parody music video, pretty much targeted at the likes of many of us, has been getting a lot of play: Very well done. Also picked up and elaborated upon by NPR.

I need to do a big cheesemaking project. Like, making cheese with 28 kids. Any thoughts on where to get a bunch of rennet cheap in NYC?

I just passed the one-year anniversary of my Berta and it is definitely growing on me. One year just isn't that much time in the life of a range, though, so I have only limited input to offer here. The one thing I'd suggest you check is the capacity of the oven. I feel like my oven loses a whole lot of space to the insulation and surroundings, which doesn't much matter for me because I have a 36" range so the oven is still plenty adequate. But if I were to scale everything down and have the same inefficiency of oven-space allocation, that would be tight.

This is a question that gets debated a lot and depends first and foremost on the definition of barbecue. Narrowly defined, no, New York does not, though plenty of people would argue that some narrow definitions of barbecue exclude Texas barbecue because it's not "low and slow" and there are people in Eastern/Central North Carolina who argue that whole hog is barbecue and everything else is just grilling. If you look at broader definitions, pastrami is probably barbecue as is Peking duck. Neither of those is really indigenous to New York City but pastrami at least is close. Also, Dinosaur is a New York-based operation that has pretty much developed its own style. You're in no danger of needing to kill yourself, but if you remove the variable of price from the equation you'll find plenty of people who will argue that on a good day Hill Country is on par. At least, in my experience, it's the most impressive facsimile of the Central Texas butcher style that I've seen anywhere outside of Lockhart.

The best representative of Texas that came to the event was Southside Market from Elgin. But at least in some years the Big Apple Barbecue weekend competes with some big barbecue event in Texas so the Southside people stopped coming. Hill Country, the New York-based operation, is in my opinion the event's best representative of the Texas style. As for the question of quality, I think most of the operations that come up for the Big Apple Barbecue are accustomed to doing offsite cooking and events. They do as good a job in New York as at any other offsite engagement, I think. Depending on the establishment, you might actually do better at an event. For example, on any given day you won't likely find Mike Mills supervising the pits at any given Mike Mills restaurant, but you'll always find him at the Big Apple Barbecue. The context of the Big Apple Barbecue has changed over the past decade. New York City was a barbecue wasteland a decade ago, with just a handful of places even attempting to do anything good. Today, it is possible to live in New York City and not be barbecue-deprived. I'm going to Dinosaur for dinner tonight and anticipate that, as usual, I'll get meat on par with what I'd get at a good barbecue place in barbecue country, albeit at a higher cost, and most everything else (other food items, beer selection, etc.) will be superior.

The Big Apple Barbecue Block Party turns 10 this year -- not quite as old as us, but I remember covering the first one when our community was nascent. Anyway, this year's event is on June 9 and 10 (the latter is my birthday) and the FastPass is on sale now. The website is up at: http://www.bigapplebbq.org/index.php Click here for the terms under which this event has been posted

Same here. I think I filled mine three times since moving in here, and a few years ago we hit our one-year anniversary. Still, it must add some cost per load. I'm interested to know what that is.

Okay I just did my first load of dishes since returning home from our trip. I've figured out our CPL on the detergent side. Filling to the first line uses almost exactly 1 fluid ounce of detergent, maybe a little less but call it an ounce. We're buying Cascade Advanced Power Auto Dish Detergent at Costco where a 125 fluid ounce container costs $9.49. 9.49 / 125 = 0.07592, so call it 8 cents per load for the detergent. I'm not quite sure how to approach measuring the cost per load for rinse aid. I guess I'll have to wait until I start a new bottle, then see how many loads it lasts and divide.

I'm trying to figure this out for myself but I can't even figure out how much detergent I use per load in order to divide that into the total container size and price. But I'm going to try to figure it out. Maybe next time I run a load I'll measure. How about you all? What's your CPL and the underlying computation?

I think there has been a shift in the sector, where assignments that used to pay $2 a word are now paying 25 cents a word. It's possible to earn a good living at $2 a word. It's almost impossible at 25 cents.

Amanda Hesser's recent blog post on her Food52 site has been getting a lot of attention online lately. If you Google it, you get a ton of results. Her basic premise is that the profession of food writing is pretty much dead and that prospective food writers should do something else. "Except for a very small group of people (some of whom are clinging to jobs at magazines that pay more than the magazines' business models can actually afford), it’s nearly impossible to make a living as a food writer, and I think it’s only going to get worse."

I would need quite a few in me to find one edible. Maybe not even then. So, I think we have so far two categories of things that get mixed reactions: 1) items where the selling proposition is convenience, and 2) items that a lot of people think just taste bad.

I recently tried a SlimJim for the first time in forever and couldn't believe how bad it was.

Just looking at some prices online. Self-rising flour does not appear to cost appreciably more than regular. On Meijer's website it's US$2.99 for a 5-pound bag of Gold Medal all-purpose and $3.29 for Gold Medal self-rising. A 30-cent difference is not a big deal, though you can get flour much cheaper if you buy 50 pounds at a time. The price of those plastic packets seems radically higher per ounce than equivalent dish liquid, though if Andie says there's savings to be had on the rinse agent or whatever else comes in the packet then maybe there's something to look at there.