Fat Guy
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The Times article is good, well-written, and interesting. But, though it is a personal narrative in form, never do you learn what the author is thinking, and there are very few interesting observations -- it's mostly just a solid piece of reporting done in the first person. There are of course fundamental structural differences between a highly edited and condensed narrative and a more informal long-form travelog like the one we've been treated to here, but despite my obvious prejudice I can't help but note just how much richer Ellen's account is than the Times account. They're just not in the same league in terms of entertainment value, information content, or style. The Times certainly would have been better served by an edited and condensed reprint of this. Then again, travel writing in general -- particularly in the US -- has mostly gone in the service-oriented, relatively depersonalized direction of the Times and the guidebooks. The golden age of travel writing is long over -- there is no commercial market right now for quirky personal narratives, by die-hard seasoned travelers who can both write and take photographs, with the frank, young, hip, explicit accounts focusing on people, culture, and observation rather than hotels and the other stuff you could just as easily get from a guidebook. Nor is it unusual for an eGullet feature to be superior to something in the New York Times. We are currently providing, for free and on a volunteer basis, many examples of fresh content that run circles around what the uninspired dead-tree old-school media are limping along with. And you'll see more of our features and writers getting picked up in print media -- keep an eye on some of the better food and travel magazines about eight months from now and you'll see what I mean. And then watch the bookstores maybe a year after that.
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except to chastise her for leaving out the part where we saw a UFO on our first night in Mongolia.
There's no fucking way we're waiting a month to hear this story. Do tell.
And thanks for posting; we hope to see a lot more of you. Consider yourself re-urged.
(e-mail me a photo and I'll post it for you)
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That was probably just because the server didn't know how to do it.
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I did notice that there are no banana or peach desserts on Zilla's list. Those strike me as priorities for a Southern-oriented dessert menu.
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Welcome, scopra. This guy has extensively documented the process of converting his Weber bullet into a cold smoker. I'm sure doing it on a larger scale wouldn't be too terribly different.
Jhlurie, I was with a group that insisted on getting table service, so there was no opportunity to customize the order in any meaningful way (I've found that with waiter service, all special requests are pretty much ignored). So what I got was just the random selection. But three people had pastrami and all of it was laced with more fat than the photos I'm seeing here.
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So we now have at least three stories on where Katz's gets its pastrami: there's the official story that one of the owners told the New York Times after the other owner had already told a different story, there's the place in Albany where the owner told me they make the pastrami for Katz's, and now we have a new Northwest theory. Very interesting. Incidentally, I was at Katz's today and for what it's worth the pastrami was, visually, a lot fattier than the Fowke pastrami.
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The accidental pastry chef. I love it. I hope you're keeping careful notes -- this is something you should write about someday for a magazine, in order to let people know how the restaurant biz really works. And of course, as ridiculous as this employment selection technique is, in the end the restaurant is probably getting a more enthusiastic, conscientious, and useful pastry chef than it would have gotten by hiring an actual pastry graduate from one of the cooking schools.
Have you heard about the incredible coconut layer cake they serve at the Peninsula Grill in Charleston? I've been wondering why there aren't more knockoffs of that, because it's a lot more interesting than coconut cream pie (which is after all something any idiot can make pretty well at home with minimal labor). Here's a picture of it. I believe the restaurant is currently going through the charade of keeping the recipe a secret, because the cake is being sold by mail, but I'm also pretty sure the recipe appeared in some of the cooking magazines or newspaper food sections before the cake became a mail order product. In any event, it shouldn't be hard to reverse-engineer something like it.
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Okay here's what we do for our first avant-garde "Farm to Table" eGullet dinner: we load a bunch of people into the Fatmobile and we drive out to Achatz's place with the goal of arriving when it's closed, at like 3:00am. We bring with us several live chickens from the live-poultry market in the Bronx. That way the avant-garde experience can begin in the van. Each passenger will take charge of a chicken, name it, and bond with it during the long drive. Achatz will cover the whole dining room with a big plastic tarp and he'll bring out a stove and a bunch of chairs. We'll all sit around in a circle and he'll kill and butcher the chickens and proceed to make us a 12-course meal, which we'll eat with our hands, where every course including dessert is chicken. If the chickens lay some eggs on the way out, he can use those too. Does Monday work for everybody?
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Do restaurants still do flaming desserts or am I just missing out because I live in Austin?
I believe open flames in the dining room are against the fire codes in New York City. Maybe candles and little sterno things are allowed, but I don't think flaming desserts are. As far as I know, nobody here is doing flaming desserts anymore, whereas there are still plenty of old-school "fancy" restaurants elsewhere in North America that do crepes suzettes, cherries jubilee, bananas foster, et al. I had some in Canada two summers ago, at one of the hotel restaurants.
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Combinations of flaming desserts should be attempted only by flaming dessert sommeliers.
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Are you as impresssed with the guy who slices your entire banana without ever touching it with his hands or peeling it - then he opens it up for you on your plate with his white gloved hands and voila! sliced banana. So its really the waiter that you are interested in - not so much the dessert.
I personally prefer waitresses to waiters or desserts, but that does sound pretty cool.
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Flames are good. I'm in favor of flames. Flames are right up there with exploding and collapsing things. But I think I'm pretty much desensitized to the old gimmick of just lighting some liqueur on fire in order to create flames. I would need much more serious flames to be impressed at this point.
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Those who know me well know I'm all about inclusive.
Sheer abundance and variety can constitute showmanship in and of themselves, as with the dessert carts and Viennese tables of old -- not to mention at Ducasse. There's a showmanship aspect to minimalism, even. And I actually think Steve Herrell's ice-cream mix-ins concept (he did create that, right?) is a brilliant example of dessert showmanship. But I think it's hard to top stuff that explodes, collapses, etc. -- destruction sells.
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Chefette I'm telling you there were a number of really hardcore, hard-to-impress, jaded food-media types there -- even some Brits -- and everybody who saw this was totally awestruck. It's pretty much all anybody talked about for the rest of the night. I know it's so gimmicky as to sound borderline nauseating when I describe it, but it was a really effective piece of dessert showmanship. I'm going to e-mail Broberg for some more details on the dessert (I think he said it was Guittard with high cocoa butter content) so that when Klc shows up and starts asking questions I can appear not to be a complete idiot.
So what about you all? What's the most impressive dessert you ever did see?
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Ducasse was doing something with molten chocolate poured over cooler chocolate at ADNY early on, and my memories of it are likewise fuzzy. It had some sort of geeky Ducasse-speak name like "CHOCOLATE, bitter and sweet, for your enjoyment." As I recall the bowl came out with various chocolate things in it and the hot liquid was poured over in order to do some last-minute melting. But it wasn't nearly as dramatic as this thing with its collapsing-planetoid effect.
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A dessert I had last night at the Mark Hotel here in New York City reminded me of what a sucker I am for showmanship in pastry. I don't think I've ever enjoyed a dessert service as much, and was hoping maybe we could all share our tales of wildly elaborate and impressive desserts.
The very clever New York pastry chef Chris Broberg, who was long at Lespinasse (during both the Gray Kunz and Christian Delouvrier eras) and later at Petrossian (working with Philippe Conticini), has been at the Mark for about a year now and has really whipped the pastry program into shape (there's definitely something of a dream-team coming together in the Mark's F&B department, which I'll post about on the NY board at some point). I'd been meaning to stop in for the longest time, and finally a promotional dinner for Mandarin Oriental hotels (the Mark is a Mandarin Oriental property) presented an easy (and free) opportunity.
The dessert that Broberg did for this dinner was a chocolate dome. It looked like a pretty normal chocolate dome: a half-sphere of chocolate with a semi-hard, shiny chocolate coating and a nice gold-leaf decoration in the middle. It was surrounded by pieces of candied fruit and such.
This was, at first, a little disappointing. I thought for sure Broberg wouldn't mail it in like this. Then again, an Upper East Side hotel with a rather low-key restaurant -- maybe he's just collecting a nice paycheck and living the good life. Or maybe for a banquet he just isn't going to do the good stuff. But when the waiters put down the dessert they said, don't eat it; the chef will be out to "explain the dessert." At this point things took a turn for the better.
Broberg and some of the line cooks appeared bearing pitchers of hot liquid chocolate, essentially the super-rich hot chocolate you'd get as a beverage at L'Aduree or Angelina's in Paris. A cook went over to the dessert of one of the women at our table and started pouring the chocolate onto the dome. He did this for about 10 seconds as a pool of chocolate started to surround the dome. Which I thought, hey, was a pretty cool touch.
But then, totally unexpected -- poof! -- the whole exterior of the dome started to disintegrate! And then, as the cook stopped pouring, the whole center part of the thing kind of collapsed into something that looked like the moon after being wrecked by a continent-sized asteroid. There were audible gasps, woahs, and holy-shits from most every person in the room. Inside the dome, it was revealed, was a whole other deal of crunchy nutty stuff and cocoa nibs all mixed in with the dome's fluffy chocolate interior and the gooey hot chocolate sauce.
Well, I'll be damned if that wasn't the most impressive dessert presentation I've ever seen. Not to mention at least three women (and one man) offered their bodies to Broberg after the meal (which is a lot even in a room full of media people).
I should add, this dessert was actually quite delicious on top of all that.
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NYC is probably the only place in the world outside of Mongolia where you could pull off wearing one of those hats.
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According to the story in the NY Post by Cynthia Killian:
Pastry chefs Chika Tillman and Donna Ryan met at Bid, Sotheby's now-closed restaurant, where they whipped up high-end confections."We'd like to provide that same level of dessert, but you don't have to pay $250 to get it," explains Don Tillman, Chika's husband and the 20-seat eatery's general manager.
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That's pretty much the list of what I'm planning to order the next time I go. Be sure to get the scallion pancake with the beef in it, not the plain one, though.
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Have you had any wines from New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, etc.? Do you think there's any hope that these regions can produce wines that are 1) excellent, 2) competitively priced, and 3) relatively consistent from vintage to vintage?
Also, what's the deal with China? Doesn't China have about a billion acres of land at just the right latitudes for growing wine? Are you secretly buying up land in China as we speak, with the intention of naming a whole series of wines for General Tso?
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In Wednesday's dining section, New York Times wine writer Frank Prial reports the following about California Syrah:
Given the praise lavished on these syrahs, the Dining section's tasting panel may be forgiven for having looked forward to this sampling of 23 bottles.At best, though, the collective attitude of the three regular panelists, Amanda Hesser, Eric Asimov and me, and our guest, Richard Luftig, the wine director of Washington Park restaurant in Greenwich Village, was one of restrained enthusiasm if not disappointment.
We found highly likable wines, yes, but too often we came across uninteresting ones of little character, with flavors cobbled from the winemaker's bag of tricks rather than from the syrah grape. During the tasting, I noted that the range of these syrahs was from A to D. I wasn't alone in thinking that these syrahs should have had more guts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/01/dining/01WINE.html
What sayeth you?
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This week's snack from Craig Camp is "a divine mouthful" . . .
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I wonder if the realm of private functions isn't the most likely podium for the culinary avant-garde. I remember Paul Liebrandt was doing some fairly radical private dinners at Papillon for awhile -- wasn't there a report of one with blindfolds and such? I'd almost be tempted to organize such an event for a group of willing eGulleters in New York: something so ahead-of-its-time and anti-establishment that it would make El Bulli look relatively conservative. Not to knock El Bulli: as a tribute to the restaurant, my real live bulldog could somehow participate in the dinner (no we can't eat him).
(Chefg, are you coming to New York anytime soon?)
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On any day when the weather is nice, go to Arthur Avenue, to either Randazzo's or Cosenza's. They're both high-volume well-priced seafood markets that have outdoor raw bars. This is how oysters are supposed to be eaten.
Converting chicken stock to soup
in Cooking
Posted
What's wrong is the assumption that there's any way to answer this question other than by tasting.
When dealing with natural products and long-extraction cooking, where there is so much variation, you simply can't rely on a mathematical formula. You have to rely on your taste buds.
Add some stock. Make the soup. Taste it. Add more, let it incorporate, and see where you are. If seasoning needs to be adjusted, adjust. If more mirepoix seems desirable, add it.
Eventually, as you repeat the stock- and soup-making processes in your home, in your stockpot, on your stove, with the chickens you typically buy, etc., you will develop a sense of what works for you. Until then, don't be tempted by the futile search for formulas. Taste, taste, and taste again until you've made something you love.