Fat Guy
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Posts posted by Fat Guy
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That is not the case as I understand it. Freezing can, on the one hand, cause ice crystals to form within the meat and therefore can affect the cellular structure in ways that increase tenderness slightly. But freezing will, on the other hand, result in loss of juices when the meat is thawed, so the cooked product is likely to be less juicy, and therefore drier, and therefore not as seemingly tender to the diner. This can be confirmed simply by cooking the same steak fresh and frozen. The fresh steak will be juicier. But more important than the pure issue of tenderness, which is probably something that could be measured by a machine, is the issue of overall structure and flavor. Beef that has never been frozen may have a certain "firmness" that frozen beef doesn't, but it's a desirable rather than an undesirable firmness. All these factors need to be evaluated in the context of what's good to eat, and I don't know of any serious chefs who thing the habitual freezing of beef is a good idea from that standpoint.
Here's an interesting piece on beef tenderness: http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/...ion/DJ0856.html -- you'll see that, overall, freezing is not a significant contributing factor to tenderness at all, but that to the extent it does contribute it mostly contributes negatively.
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Free BYO at Fairway is, at long last and very unfortunately, over. The license has come through, there is now a wine-and-beer list, and corkage is $10 -- still reasonable, but the end of an era. The wines on the list are priced as low as $15 for two of the Spanish selections. The one we tried tonight was drinkable, albeit served warm, in glasses they can't figure out how to keep clean, and never once poured for us -- the waiter just opened the bottle and left it on the table (service at Fairway's cafe remains just as awful as it was the day Mitchel London took the helm so many months ago; I'd have thought by now he'd have sorted it out but there hasn't been any noticeable progress at all, which at this point is a disgrace).
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Do you do much digital treatment at all?
Jin, if you'd like to see an example of what one of these images looks like before any postprocessing, I've set something up. Here's one of the temple images you saw in Part I, at 400x600 snapshot resolution with basic autolevels, as most of Ellen's images get presented on eGullet:
Now if you follow this link, which you'll only want to do if you're on a broadband connection, you'll see the original 6 megapixel jpeg out of the camera -- no modification at all, not even rotation. This is the image Ellen would work from in order to make a large print. Note if you view it in Explorer, the software will shrink it down to fit your screen. To see the whole thing at full resolution, hover your cursor over the image, and then click on the expand-image box that appears at the bottom right.
Also, another experiment, this would be just the part of the image above that, if cropped, would be roughly the resolution we're using here:
Finally, here's how that detail would look if we messed around with it in PhotoShop or PaintShop in order to make it look the way they'd want it to look in a glossy magazine:
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I didn't have contemporaneous awareness of any of the Gobi desert stuff (the events described in Part I), but once she returned to UB I started to get relatively frequent e-mail updates (from both Ellen and, to a lesser extent, from J) so I knew most of the Part II (and beyond) stuff close in time to when it was happening. In all cases, I chose denial as the best approach to processing the information. Conversely, Ellen and J were totally unaware of the blackout (her plane took off that afternoon, a very short time before it happened) until they got e-mail from me almost a week later.
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Okay but in Ellen's defense that's no perm. That's just her hair. She's an Ivory Girl.
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He's amazing, that Craig Camp -- he knows about French stuff too.
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Oops.
Well, now at least you can tell us the answer.
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Sometimes even eGullet diehards are speechless. I keep reading these "Horsemeat Confidential" posts, trying to think of something to say, and the best I've been able to come up with so far is the "Tartar sauce" joke from the other thread -- which at least Pan appreciated.
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I'd really like to get in touch with Ms. Gerst. At the very least we could give her a platform for a detailed statement of her views, not to mention a standing ovation.
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Maybe it's Tartar sauce.
(sorry, I couldn't resist, really, I couldn't help myself)
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I can't wait until we get the avatars database back, because you *know* what we're going to do with that hat photo.
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Gary Coleman?
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The manufacturers, wary of lawsuits, have made sure that the coffee isn't lap-scalding. Unfortunately, it results in a less-than-stellar cup.
I don't know if it has anything to do with lawsuits -- drip coffee makers have been underpowered since long before the McDonald's incident. And there are some dual element models that do achieve sufficient power to get the water into the desirable temperature range. But in the end you're still making coffee by dripping water through the grounds, which is a lame way of extracting their flavor. I agree that the press pot is the way to go, but some people just don't like press pot coffee -- and no matter what you do it will be cloudy compared to drip. A lot of the serious coffee people say the vacuum system (I forget the technical term for it) is the best way of brewing coffee without getting into high-pressure methods. One of those will probably be my next acquisition.
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Most of the top restaurants in the city are within 20 minutes of the theater district on foot. So the question I'd throw back is, assuming more than half the best restaurants in the city satisfy that requirement, and assuming there are a whole lot of candidates, what additional types of information (cuisine preferences, price range, current favorites, etc.) could we use to narrow the field?
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Insert the word "American" between "stupid" and "publishing". Most of the rest of the world (where cooking is a pleasure not just a necessity) weigh the ingredients.
There's a publishing industry in the rest of the world?
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If you're going to stick with the drip method, you're going to operate within a series of limitations that, some would argue, prevent you from making excellent coffee no matter what. Drip coffee makers are intrinsically flawed in terms of the way they run a large amount of water through the same grounds -- I've actually heard some coffee geek types say that the best move with a drip is to stop the brewing half way through and only drink that part.
In any event, it sounds as though you're doing the right things on most major fronts. The areas where you might be able to eke out a bit of improvement are 1) you might prefer the results from a permanent gold filter; 2) you might benefit from roasting your own beans; and 3) you might do better with a better grinder. I'm not sure exactly what type of grinder you're saying you have, but I'd definitely recommend a Solis Maestro for your next one. Conical burr grinders are superior because of the evenness of their grind. There's no guesswork in terms of how fine you need to go, because the grind isn't based on time -- it's based on the way the burr is set, so you just set the dial to the correct grind for a particular method (or you go one or two steps finer or coarser, depending on your preference).
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Yikes. I hope it wasn't "chicken with 40 cloves of garlic."
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All my worst recipe experiences -- veritable muggings I tell you -- involve baked goods. The following things have been true of 90% of the baking recipes I've tried, and I attribute the success of the other 10% to happenstance:
- The prescribed oven temperature is wrong for my oven, even though my oven is properly calibrated.
- Likewise, even when proper temperature is determined such that correct results can be achieved, the recommended baking time is wrong.
- Quantities of flour are wrong, in no predictable pattern. (And of course the stupid publishing-industry-wide practice of measuring flour by volume makes this impossible to remedy.)
- Various essential measures and specifications are not specified: the size of eggs, the type of brown sugar, the strength of vanilla extract, the strength of chocolate . . .
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Jack, I hope you haven't left for Singapore yet, because there's a major piece on food in Singapore in today's New York Times:
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It's all a question of how much work you want to do. You can always get your stock clearer and closer to the ideal. Whether it's worth the effort is an open question. One of the great things about stock is that you can make really excellent stock with very little effort -- it should ideally be a set-it-and-forget-it proposition. That's why at some point most people are going to say it's good enough for a stock that's likely to be used only as an ingredient, at home, and will never be submitted for a culinary-school exam. Personally, I'd put it through the strainer once when it's all done reducing and call it quits.
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Overcoming fear of condiments with Mamster.
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I'd make traditional bruschetta, but with very thin strips of grilled steak under the tomato topping.
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"I'm Dr. vmilor, how is your porkpa today?" he asks.
"ctgm, mjc, gknl," she replies.
"Bless you!"
"skchai! tjaehnigen!" she replies, with increasing melkor.
"I better loosen your bloviatrix and check your wawairis," he says.
And with that, he tucks his anil torakris under his vogelap, and aliwaks away.
Mongolia. Seriously. The Sequel.
in Elsewhere in Asia/Pacific: Cooking & Baking
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Awilda, she has written about some:
Rogue River Lodges Food Diary
White Mountains AMC Lodges Food Journal
More of a joint effort, you'll find some writing by me, some writing by her, and a ton of her photos in our cross-country and cross-Canada trip diaries from last summer. Here's the master index
A little less rugged, Ellen's Whirlwind Vancouver Food Tour
A little closer to home, Ellen's reports on the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party
Here's a little information about last year's Nepal trip. Too late for you to go along on this year's trip, but maybe next time . . .
Also, if you'd like to see a ton of photos of Nepal, go over to Ellen's personal site www.byellen.com and check these two links:
Faces of Nepal
A Walk Through Nepal
I'm sorry none of her magazine travel writing is available online. There's some great stuff by Ellen about Africa, Alaska, Nepal, and various other far-off destinations in Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel magazine, but the online archive got ditched when Newsweek bought the magazine so the only way you can see that stuff is if you have the back issues. Likewise, Conde Nast's Concierge.com no longer maintains an archive of its "Off The Beaten Path" pieces, of which she wrote too many to list here.
As Ellen explained in the Rogue River pieces, it has only been as of this year that she has had a digital camera that can withstand the kinds of extremes that her trips involve and that possesses the battery, memory, and resolution capacities necessary to take enough images at a high enough quality level for potential magazine or newspaper use. While those older Nepal photos were taken as slides, and while we do have a slide scanner, there's just not the same level of convenience and immediacy when you have to deal with processing, selecting, and scanning slides. So, with her current equipment, maybe we'll be lucky enough to see a lot more stuff like this going forward.