Fat Guy

I'm not sure what menu you're looking at but when I was at the restaurant I remember thinking "There isn't a single seafood entree $25 or under." And there were a couple of $30+ entrees, as I recall. I don't think Thai food necessarily has to be cheap food; I just think any restaurant charging those prices needs to provide some value or a level of culinary artistry that makes practical considerations (like portion size) irrelevant. Kittichai is very good but doesn't transcend the need to consider portion size. They charge nearly $30 for a small piece of Bear in mind that entrees at Kittichai don't even include rice. That adds $3 if you want it.

Wood floors are more susceptible to water damage than tile floors, though not more susceptible than laminate, but water damage is more than just spilling stuff. You can spill stuff on a wood floor. You just have to wipe it up. As long as you don't have a situation where water is getting under the floor, it's not a problem. Lots and lots of people have wood kitchen and even bathroom floors and have no trouble with them.

Saying kosher chicken is brined is shorthand. The actual process is soak-salt-rinse and there's some intricacy to the exact timing. The net effect seems to be about the same as a short brining cycle.

I went to a pretty cool event the other night. Emeril has just released, in association with Allen Bros., a line of high-end mail-order steaks. The launch event was to be held at the new offices of Martha Stewart Omnimedia, Emeril was to be there, and steak was to be had by all. Antisocial misanthrope though I am, how could I resist the invitation? After a cocktail hour during which we heard a few words from Emeril and his partners and I ate most of the planet's remaining supply of shrimp, our group of press and others was ushered up to the roof of the Martha Stewart Ominmedia operation. The roof has 360-degree views of the Hudson River, New Jersey and Manhattan. They had set up grills and a tent for Emeril, and he gave a cooking demonstration along with some steak-cooking tips (let it rest after cooking, etc.). He gave out a few tastes on the roof: We then went back downstairs and got to try samples of New York strip, ribeye, and filet mignon (not-so-mignon actually), all with appropriate sides. The whole time Emeril was around and you could go talk to him. He was friendly and sociable, just as I imagined he'd be from seeing him on TV, though more reserved and humble in person. (Incidentally, I did not take these photos. They were provided to me after the event by the Allen Bros. publicists, Bullfrog & Baum.) At the end of the event I got to take home three steaks: a New York strip, aribeye, and a filet mignon. A couple of days later I took them to my friend's house in New Jersey (I wonder if we were visible from Martha Stewart's roof?) and grilled them over charcoal, treating them and letting them rest as per Emeril's instructions. Emeril's Red Marble steaks are very good -- better than anything you're likely to get in a supermarket anywhere. But they are not without their flaws. First, they are shipped frozen. Despite advances in freezing technology, I just don't think top-quality steaks can survive freezing without some impact. I think, for example, the steaks we tried at the event (which I'm guessing were not frozen) had better texture than the samples we grilled later (which were frozen and cryovaced, the way they're sold online). Second, the steaks are not necessarily Prime. According to the Red Marble website: "Emeril’s Red Marble Steaks is a mix of grades: choice, high choice and occasionally prime." I don't absolutely insist on Prime for a steakhouse steak. The Prime grading criteria are to my mind questionable. But Prime is a good starting point if you're looking for great steak. Third, the steaks don't seem to be dry aged. The website is silent on the issue, only mentioning 4-6 weeks of aging without saying more. In general, if you dry age you say so. And the steaks don't really have the mineral taste and firm tenderness of dry-aged. If you compare the value proposition to what DeBragga & Spitler offer, the Emeril steaks are a little less expensive. For example 4 x 12oz. New York strips from Emeril are $89.95. From DeBragga.com you pay $98.95 for 4 x 12oz. New York strips if you get the closest comparable (non-Prime -- prime costs almost double) product. I haven't compared shipping costs. But assuming the total bill for 4 x 12oz. New York strips from DeBragga is 10% higher than from Emeril, a lot of folks will feel that's worth it given that the DeBragga steaks are dry aged and shipped refrigerated not frozen.

We finally made it to Tarry Lodge this afternoon. The mission was pizza. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the pizza at Otto. Despite Otto's limitations -- the pizzas are cooked using a combination of griddle and broiler -- I think the pies are quite good. But Otto does operate with limitations, whereas Tarry Lodge has a legitimate wood-fired pizza oven (according to Liz Johnson, it's a Mugnaini oven burning oak, cherry and beech). We had: Margherita Quattro formaggi Goat cheese, pistachios and truffle honey Guanciale with black truffle and egg I think it's possible to discuss and debate which is better: Motorino, Keste, Co., or Tarry Lodge. Maybe there are some other contenders -- I personally don't think Lucali cuts it, and I haven't tried anything else on par. I can't say based on one visit to most of these places that Tarry Lodge is the best, but I certainly enjoyed these pies a lot. They use the 000 flour, they bake in a proper wood-fired oven, the crust is pillowy and blistery, the toppings are absolutely first rate. It's as fine an example of modified-American Neapolitan pizza that I've had. I don't know what they're using for tomatoes on the Margherita, or if they're taking advantage of tomato season here in the Northeast, but the tomato flavor was emphatic and the mozzarella was a gooey, salty delight. The guanciale is sliced thin and applied conservatively, the black truffles have good flavor (they are necessarily preserved, but preserved well), and the egg makes a great contribution once you burst it and spread it around. There's no good way to eat this pie, but whatever you can do to get all components into your mouth at once is worth doing. The four cheese was as good an example as I've had. And the goat cheese with pistachios and truffle honey was an unexpected surprise: I ordered it because there were enough non-meat-eaters in the group to rule against a second pie with meat, but it turned out to be a candidate for my favorite pie. The honey is a background note, so it's not at all a dessert-type pizza. It's just enough to enhance the goat cheese and crumbled pistachios. We couldn't resist exploring the menu further. There was no way we were going to get into real entrees/secondi, but we tried a few pastas: That's tagliatelle Bolognese (bottom), orecchiette with fennel sausage and rapini (back left), and garganelli with mushrooms (back right). There was no consensus about which was best (likewise with the pizzas) but all agreed (to the extent they tasted) that all were outstanding (likewise with the pizzas). The Bolognese sauce is made from a combination of veal and pancetta such that the luscious but otherwise mildly flavored veal is given a jolt of salty porky goodness by the pancetta, the fennel sausage has enough fennel in it to make you sit up and take notice and is applied in liberal quantity, and the mushrooms with the garganelli have the flavors you'd expect at an all-mushroom restaurant in Oregon. And we tried some vegetables: Those are beets (the solo photo), snow peas, rapini, and cauliflower with capers. These portions, as well as all the portions we saw today, are more generous than at the Manhattan restaurants. Also some desserts: Lemon-almond cheesecake with vanilla gelato. Warm chocolate cake with bitter orange and pitachio gelato. Grapefruit sorbet. Apple crostata with cinnamon gelato. The desserts were very good but not as impressive as the savory food, though the apple crostata had the potential to be a masterpiece had it not been overcooked. We also had two salads and a couple of people had a glass of wine or coffee. The total for all that food was $240 pre-tip, which is pretty good considering that 7 of us rolled out of there feeling profoundly stuffed. Port Chester and nearby areas (if you walk a few feet up the street you cross the Connecticut border) are lucky to have this place. If you're a city person, it's not worth a special trip if you're normal. It's worth a special trip if you make a study of the best pizza. It's also worth making the effort to visit if you're going somewhere on a route that takes you near it. A couple of knocks against the place: First, the women working the door were proud graduates of the Batali-Bastianich academy of crappy reception. They didn't have quite the attitude of their urban counterparts, but they did their best. I'm so sorry we arrived 10 minutes late for a 2:15 reservation at a restaurant that serves straight through the afternoon and didn't have another party booked at that table until 5. Please, it's Westchester on a summer Sunday. There's traffic. The only way to avoid the risk of congestion is to leave home at 4am. Otherwise it's a crapshoot. Second, the food is very salty. No individual dish is oversalted. But every savory item was salted right up to the maximum legal limit. This brings out flavor in the dishes, it's true, but a lot could be accomplished with less. The issue is that, when you eat a lot of food that's this heavily salted, you (or at least my companions and I) feel crummy after the meal and remain bloated late into the night. I write this in a swollen state. A similar comment could be made about use of olive oil in and on some dishes.

Is this observation supported by menu language? I haven't done a full study, but I pulled up the Corky's menu and it doesn't use that nomenclature. Then again Corky's may not be authoritative. In any event: http://www.corkysmemphis.com/dinein-menu.pdf

The salted butter issue is an interesting one. I know that pastry professionals are nearly unanimous on calling for unsalted. And I understand the theory. But in practice I've found that salted butter tastes better than butter plus salt, especially when you're talking about supermarket butter, perhaps because of the preservative effect of the salt. And while there's some loss of precision when you use pre-salted butter due to varying salt levels in commercial butter (although you could do a careful computation based on the nutrition-facts label), I've found that everything tends to work out fine when you use salted butter. I have never actually seen a real-world example of someone saying a recipe came out badly for using salted butter.

I don't do a lot of baking -- the division of labor in our house is generally I cook/she bakes -- but when I do vanilla and salt are my secret weapons. In chocolate-chip cookies, for example, if you use a ton of extra vanilla and a little extra salt, most people are like, "Wow, these cookies are so great." The fancier vanilla extracts are more concentrated than supermarket-level stuff, but still I'll generally double those. I've never been able to compute the strength of my homemade vanilla extract, but I use a lot of that too.

Speaking for myself on the issue of bother, I find it annoying to have both salted and unsalted butter in stock because then I have to check labels instead of being able just to grab butter. It also doubles the inventory requirements if you keep both types around, not that butter takes a ton of space.

Most of the butter around here is also salted. I actually think it's better, because unless your butter is just a couple of days out of the cow the salt makes it taste fresher to me. (I also keep butter in the freezer to help avoid development of off flavors.) The only time I use sweet butter is if I get some from a farmer's market, and even then I usually add salt, although I don't really use that kind of butter in baking. On the issue of egg size, I find that unless a recipe uses a zillion eggs there's no reason to adjust for egg size -- and maybe not even then. However, after years of using jumbos, not long ago I switched to large eggs. At the market I use, and I imagine this is true a lot of places, the large eggs are the freshest (based on examination of the Julian date on the box) probably because they have the highest turnover. (Who are all these people using large eggs? I feel like everybody I know uses the bigger sizes.) I have to do some arithmetic to see how they compare in terms of price. Large eggs are always a lot cheaper per dozen but I'm not sure how they compare if you account for less volume. Then again if you don't adjust recipes for volume (I don't in baking, but if I'm making omelets I use, say, three larges for two jumbos) then that comparison is academic -- it's the per-egg cost that matters and large eggs are cheaper. If something is cheaper and better, I tend to go with it, which is why I'm a large-egg user these days.

Recently I cooked some beans this way at a friend's house and, as people usually do, he proclaimed it a miracle. It occurred to me then that I didn't have an explanation for why it works. And how could so many generations of bean makers be so wrong? Or have beans changed?

I quadruple the pepper. Double or triple the vanilla. Never sift. You?

I see it has been about half a decade since anyone has posted about Kittichai. Certainly, I had dismissed the place as too much of a scene. I imagine a lot of people have forgotten about Kittichai over the years, which must be why there was a big PR push at the end of last year. In an attempt to generate some renewed interest, Kittichai sent around gift certificates to media at holiday time at the end of 2009. I threw my gift certificate in a drawer. The contents of the drawer got dumped into a box. We moved across town. The contents of the box had been sitting on top of a dresser, with the gift certificate on top of the pile. My mother became unexpectedly available for babysitting duty, and we were looking for something to do tonight. "Hey, what about that gift certificate from Kittichai?" Ellen said. I dug it out and made a reservation. The restaurant remains quite beautiful, with its central pool full of floating candles with orchids suspended above. What has changed, at least based on my observation tonight, is the clientele: the restaurant was full of relatively normal people out for good food. I didn't see a lot of ridiculous outfits, big hair or mismatched couples. Granted it was on the early side but the dining room wasn't loud and the servers were earnest and capable. Prices are high and portions are small. I probably wouldn't recommend that you pay for a la carte dinner at Kittichai, unless money is no object. There are, however, some prix-fixe options and the prices at lunchtime are much gentler. All that being said, the food we tasted was absolutely delicious. This is contemporary Thai cooking at a high level of finesse, presented attractively on a variety of interesting serveware. The first thing to hit the table was an appetizer (called tapas on the menu) of chopped chicken, coconut and herbs on top of butter lettuce leaves, arranged so as to make three wraps. Up until we tasted it, we had no expectations. We woke up after the first bite: tremendous complexity of spice, sweetness, acid and salt. Then green papaya and mango salad, with a bracing dose of dried shrimp and a fair amount of heat (though I'd probably request most dishes spicier on a return visit). Chicken soup with coconut and galangal, aka tom kha kai, served in a contraption with a flame underneath and a parchment bowl for the soup, was unusually rich and creamy, with meaty chunks of chicken. At least for the price you get excellent ingredients. We had two fish entrees: Chilean sea bass glazed with what was basically a better version of Chinese-restaurant sweet-and-sour sauce; and Arctic char in a coconut broth. I know it's a blow to my foodie cred to say so, but I love Chilean sea bass, and this was one of the best uses of that fish I've seen. The Arctic char was a fine piece of fish but the star of that dish was the broth. We also tried three side dishes: sauteed gai lan with garlic and ginger; tofu and mushrooms over greens (I think they said morning glory, which I guess is water spinach); and Thai omelette with crabmeat and Sriracha sauce. Ellen and I disagreed about the omelette: she felt the crabmeat was unpleasantly denatured, whereas I enjoyed it. The tofu side stole the show: a vegetarian dish to impress a carnivore. On the last page of the menu is a Monday-only hot-pot offering. We'll definitely be back for that.

My flight is booked, so I'm coming. Still working on all the rest of the details.

I think we had a fair dose of market inspiration last year, but the structure of the Kansas City food-shopping scene was a little more demanding of advance planning. In A2, the market-inspiration approach is more the way to go, within a loose framework, I think.

I volunteer Kristin to make tempura from whatever vegetable looks good in the marketplace. I volunteer myself to supervise her, and to act as assistant expediter reporting to Tammy. I still have to book my plane ticket tonight but once I've secured that, and assuming I'm still alive in a month, I'll be in for everything all weekend except "Saturday Afternoon Session on Organic/Locavore/Personal Food choices."

Okay I am very close to being able to book something and join you all for the gathering. A couple of logistics questions: 1 - Is there anyone who might be able to provide me with rides from and to DTW? I'm looking at the following itinerary, which I have to book today if I want it: New York-La Guardia, NY (LGA) to Detroit-Wayne County, MI (DTW) on 05 Aug 2010 2:40pm LGA 4:44pm DTW Delta 2531 Detroit-Wayne County, MI (DTW) to New York-La Guardia, NY (LGA) on 08 Aug 2010 3:20pm DTW 5:18pm LGA Delta 2248 2 - Can we get a roll call of where everybody with a car is staying? Since I'll be car-less I'll want to stay where at least one person with a car is going to be, or very close by, or I may bunk with someone else but I'm exploring all options. By the way, is there a local food press in Ann Arbor? It would be awesome to get a paper to embed a writer with us the way the KC Star did with Steve Paul last year.

Kosher chickens can vary in quality just like regular chickens. So home brining should be totally effective.

Kosher chickens have been slaughtered and processed according to the kosher dietary laws, but the thing that makes them useful for barbecuing is that they're brined.

Yes, in a way it's more impressive for a pitmaster to turn out good chicken than a good pork shoulder. You need to have some skills to barbecue chicken; you have to be pretty ingenious at messing things up to ruin a pork shoulder.

I don't know that anybody has studied chicken variations carefully. And it doesn't as a rule track the regional style of the other meats. For example, most of the Lexington, North Carolina places I've been to have either chicken or turkey on offer but I've never seen it chopped fine and mixed with tomato-vinegar sauce. But there are two elements of chicken barbecuing that do see usually to reflect the regional style: 1. It's typically cooked in the same pit as the other meats (therefore same wood and temperatures), and 2. The sauce is generally the same (which especially matters when the regional style is sauce-intensive). But I do think there's a lot more flexibility with poultry. The same customers who will insist that the pork be a certain way (dry rub, wet mop, whole hog, etc.) only care that the pitmaster figure out a way to keep the chicken from drying out.

That's the argument the whole-hog Eastern North Carolina people use when they say all barbecue other than whole-hog barbecue is "just grilling."

I try not to overburden the forums with parenting-related topics -- it's always irritating to me when writers become parents and suddenly become unable to write about anything but the minutiae of child rearing -- but today I was reflecting on a pattern of behavior I've developed and I just had to share: I've become a scavenger. That is to say, several of my meal choices each week are dictated by what my son, PJ, leaves behind on his plate or in his school-lunch bag. Every time I pick him up from school I tear into his lunch bag to see what's left. After his meals at home or in a restaurant I often eat the rest of what's on his plate. And lately, I've started trying to rig the process. For example, today I reheated some barbecued chicken for him. I intentionally reheated more than he could possibly eat, knowing I'd get a leg in the bargain. Why didn't I just make myself a plate of chicken? If you have to ask...

In barbecue-connoisseur circles, barbecued chicken is frowned upon. Yet, if you visit most any barbecue joint in barbecue country -- even one purporting to serve the most authentic regional style -- you'll find chicken on offer. Sometimes, it's really good. For example at a recent dinner at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in New York City, everyone at the table remarked how great the chicken was. It held its own against the brisket and pork ribs. Ditto for the chicken Blue Smoke did a few years back at the Big Apple Barbecue. Given that barbecued chicken (and by that I mean slow-cooked with some smoke, not the rotisserie and grilled chickens that are so often mislabeled "BBQ") is omnipresent and can be excellent, I think it's time to give barbecued chicken some credit. First, by acknowledging that it's legitimate. Second, by perhaps talking about good and bad examples, what makes it good, etc. Or maybe you disagree and thing barbecued chicken is wack. We should hear that too.

We spent the day on the 4th at our friends' tennis club on Long Island. No I didn't play tennis. I had a couple of grilled frankfurters for lunch. In the afternoon, by the pool, the club had a Good Humor ice-cream cart roaming the pool area and you could take whatever you wanted. We ate a lot of ice cream. On the way home, driving through Queens, we pulled off in Jackson Heights and grabbed a gigantic, shareable order of bhel puri, two orders of Tibetan momos (one beef, one chicken), and a couple of kulfi pops (one mango, one pistachio with cardamom).