Fat Guy

Tino27 and his bread extravaganza (the only photo I've taken this weekend):

I thought it was a superb meal. I'd have been proud to bring any chef in the world into that room. I think anyone, no matter how jaded, would have been blown away not only by the quality of the finished product but also by the teamwork, the collaboration in devising dishes at the market, the seamless interplay of six teams of cooks in a kitchen with finite space and resources, and Tammy's organizational talent, not to mention all the off-menu stuff like Chris Hennes's charcuterie, Tino27's breads, Tammy's cocktail hour, and White Lotus and Dance's tea service. I also have to say I was really moved watching Mr. and Mrs. Chef Crash work together in the kitchen producing baklava, fattoush, and that semolina thing, in a carefully choreographed culinary dance like nothing I've ever seen before. Talk about two hearts beating as one. The only major disappointment of the evening was Torakris's refusal to make tempura. Someone will need to start a topic for planning next year's event, which by the way will coincide with the 10th anniversary of the eGullet community.

Paul, if you're referring to large hotel pans, no, I have no use for them in my home kitchen. I do however use several of the 1/9 size pans for storing everything from side towels (add those to the list) to doodads (corkscrews, thermometers, etc.). http://bigtray.com/abc-steam-table-pan-st1904-sku-abcst1904-c-19820.html Something I forgot to mention: Cambro containers. They are superior to all consumer-grade storage containers, especially the big ones that I use for flour, sugar, cornmeal, etc. http://bigtray.com/cambro-camsquare-food-storage-container-6sfscw-sku-cam6sfscw-c-13420.html Also: plastic bus tubs, in other words the plastic basins that bussers at restaurants use to collect dirty dishes. I use these not only to clear the table but also as bins for potatoes, onions and the like. http://bigtray.com/traex-bus-box-1527b-31-sku-trx1527b31-c-25290.html I guess the items mentioned above break down into realistic and unrealistic for most people. A commercial hood with Ansul system or a commercial deep fryer, probably not going to happen. But anybody can get a box of Crystal Wrap.

A lot of professional kitchens could use a chef too. Dishers = ice cream scoops. Sheet pans are so useful. It's amazing to me that they're not a standard kitchen-store item, yet a lot of home stores only have cookie sheets. I think the Microplane line and the Vita-Mix have now crossed over to the home.

For example, I think every home kitchen would benefit from having a big roll of commercial food film (what we home cooks call plastic wrap). The large-format commercial rolls make a mockery of the ones you get at the grocery store.

It's looking good for me to get out to Detroit tomorrow on a flight that arrives at 4:44pm. At the moment Chris Hennes says he can come out to the airport and get me, but if there's anybody going to be out by the airport heading to A2 at around that time we can save Chris the trip. Shoot me a PM or email if that's you...

An issue has come up and there's no way I'm going to be able to fly out on Thursday. I'm researching the rules for flying standby on Friday and hope to be able to make it out some time Friday. I'll follow up as soon as I know what's what.

Dress code at Grange?

I think the original proposition was that, sure, it's nice to have multiples of some things, but there are a few items where when you have more than one it changes what you can do in the kitchen. Since we're talking about utensils I guess I can't give two ovens as an example, but I will say that having two ovens, even if it's just for a week in a vacation rental, really can change your approach to menu planning and cooking.

There's a review in this weekend's New York Times Book Review of a book called FOUR FISH: The Future of the Last Wild Food, by Paul Greenberg. The reviewer is Sam Sifton, the Times restaurant critic. Among other things, he calls out the Monterey card:

I see that direction and am wondering what happens if instead of spraying you just put a little oil on the sheet pan/parchment and wipe it around with a piece of paper towel, and leave the tops un-oiled until they come in contact with the oiled surface of the pan/parchment after flipping. Or, if the oiled tops are providing some sort of cooking benefit, why not just flip before the start of cooking, so both sides will be sure to have come in contact with oil?

What's the advantage of spraying over just wiping a thin film of oil on the sheet pan?

A couple of these things have made their way through my kitchen and, eventually, into the trash. I'm just not sure they have much utility. What are you all using them for?

Beyond just scallops, frozen seafood has improved dramatically in the past decade or so. You'd be surprised how much of what you get in even pretty good restaurants has been frozen.

Pizza: It's not so much a question of New York style. The overwhelming majority of pizza in New York City is baked in standard-issue metal pizza ovens. It's more an issue of Neapolitan or related brick/stone-oven styles. Those are quite hard to replicate if you don't have a specialized pizza oven. That it's possible to bake a deep-dish pizza in any old oven doesn't change that. Ice cream: Most homemade ice cream I've had has been defective in terms of texture, even when made with first-rate ingredients. Without professional equipment it's very hard to get it right. And while it's relatively easy to do better than supermarket brands just by using better ingredients, I've never had homemade ice cream that's competitive with the ice cream that comes out of a good restaurant kitchen or gelateria. The equipment difference is almost insurmountable.

Yes it's not all that hard to beat Pizza Hut at home. It's more complicated to compete with a wood-fired stone oven.

Technology aside, a big change I've noticed has been the willingness of some companies to freeze high-quality dry-pack scallops. The wet/dry pack distinction seems to me to be the major point of quality differentiation in retail scallops. Costco, for example, is selling the dry ones frozen and they're pretty good. Add to that improvements in freezing technology, packaging, shipping, etc., and you can now get results with frozen that would have been unimaginable in the 1990s. Costco frozen scallops are not as good as fresh ones FedExed from Browne Trading in Maine but they're better than what a lot of retailers are selling fresh. I recently used some Costco frozen scallops in a pasta dish and thought they were nice. That was an application where you go direct from the frozen state into a hot skillet. I also popped one in my mouth raw and it didn't have any off flavors or anything like that. If anything the texture suffers a little from freezing. Ceviche lives in a gray area between raw and cooked because it's chemically "cooked" so I don't know how it would work with frozen. I do know that I've had some pretty good ceviche in places where scallops don't really live.

I think tuna sandwiches fall into the category of "things where personal preference overshadows all other considerations." As is the case with a lot of breakfast foods, people simple prefer the tuna sandwich they're used to. There are a couple of places in New York City, like Tom Colicchio's 'wichcraft, that make tuna sandwiches that are from a pure ingredients standpoint much better than what most people are likely to be able to produce at home. But it's not *my* tuna-salad sandwich. It's something else entirely.

The ice cream question is an interesting one, and I think parallels a few other products especially sweets. If you live in a place where your access is limited to supermarket brands, you can make better ice cream at home. I have not tasted homemade ice cream as good, however, as what they make at the better restaurants and gelateria-type places using the best ingredients (which are available to the home cook, but the same rule applies: you don't get Valrhona chocolate at the local mini-mart) and professional equipment (which most home cooks don't have).

I must agree. The production requirements in restaurants invariably ruin toast.

There are a lot of foods that are difficult if not impossible to make at home as well as the restaurant and commercial versions. Anything deep fried, anything baked in a bread or pizza oven, anything requiring the heat of a commercial broiler, ice cream, etc. It's possible for a devoted cook to do some of these things well at home with considerable jerry rigging or other inconvenience, but it's an uphill battle. A conversation with the restaurateur Drew Nieporent last night got me thinking about the flipside of that proposition, though: what are the things that are hard for restaurants to do as well as we can do them in the home kitchen? The example we were talking about was hamburgers. It's not easily feasible for a restaurant to hand grind and season a small batch of meat, form patties gently by hand to order, and cook them carefully in a cast-iron skillet. Even the most celebrated hamburger places either have their meat ground off premises or do it all in big batches before service. Without any particular skill, you can make a hamburger at home that's better than what you'll get at most any restaurant. What else?

Ever since I started the "Stupidest kitchen-gadget purchasing decision you've ever made" topic I've been thinking about the flipside: the super-inexpensive but highly effective kitchen gadgets I've come across over the years. For example, the Norpro 10" nylon spatula with holes. If you pay more than about $3 for one of these things you're getting ripped off. And it's an incredibly versatile, well-designed tool -- one of those rare items that seems impossible to improve upon. At first it looks a little small but its size is actually just right for maneuvering food around a skillet. The material it's made of is more heat-resistant than a lot of plastic kitchen tools; I've never had a problem using one even when cooking at quite high temperatures. I can't imagine maintaining a home kitchen without at least a couple of these in inventory.

From the standpoint of flavor that will satisfy a fairly discriminating customer, fried chicken overall tends to be the best fast-food option. Although KFC is not good, the fried chicken at Popeye's, Bojangles, Church's, and some of the smaller chains is surprisingly tasty.

I'll start: Permit me to introduce the "Automatic Knife Maintenance and Sharpener with Mountable Stand" sold by DealExtreme.com. I confess this is the biggest piece of junk I've ever purchased with my own money. Not a lot of money, but 100% wasted. In my defense, if there can be any defense for such idiocy, we've been in temporary dwellings -- moved out of one apartment, waiting to move into another -- for the past three months. And the only good kitchen gear I have with me is a Forschner chef's knife and a Sani-Tuff cutting board. Everything else, including all my knife-sharpening equipment, is in a 10'x20' storage room at a facility in the Bronx somewhere off the Major Deegan Expressway. When my knife started to get dull I didn't want to spend a lot to get it sharpened, so when this gadget popped up in a search result I figured, hey, maybe it will be okay as a temporary solution. Wrong. I can hardly do justice to how completely useless the "Automatic Knife Maintenance and Sharpener with Mountable Stand" is. It's inconceivable that it could ever sharpen anything. The stone is total junk. There's no good way to run a knife through it without cutting the counter (or your hand), not that you'd want to run a knife through it. Ultimately, I wound up taking my knife down to the French Culinary Institute where I got Dave Arnold to sharpen it -- a nice perk of being an adjunct there. It occurred to me, we must all have deep, dark secrets of moments of kitchen-gadget-purchasing weakness. I look forward to hearing your confessions.

Got some in Hackensack last week, $8.99 a pound. At the same time I bought a control sample of the farmed, at $8.79 a pound and poached both the same way. I thought the wild, which had a much deeper, beautiful color than the farmed, was at most slightly better tasting and perhaps not better at all.