Fat Guy

This has been a big focus area for the avant-garde/molecular people, as well as for the food corporations. I've seen several variants of transglutaminase pasta made from shrimp and other proteins, along with ravioli and dumplings that use thinly sliced fruits and vegetables as skins. And in the health-food section of the grocery store where I shop, they have all sorts of wheat-free pastas made from all sorts of stuff.

The latter strikes me as the most comprehensive explanation. There may be specific reasons why specific critics were retired, but overall it seems to be a cost-cutting thing. And the cost-cutting measures are further justified by access to so many alternative sources of information. Interest in fancy-restaurant dining may be on the decline, but interest in dining overall is surely on the rise. And plenty of the less fancy places (as well as the fancy ones that still open every season) are reviewable. It's just that the audience for that particular niche has evaporated. There's also the larger issue of the underlying importance, relevance or lack thereof of restaurant reviews. When Steve Cuozzo stopped writing proper reviews, he did it not because he lost his budget (he's still writing a column, and still has a lot of decisionmaking power as executive editor of the Post) but because he said traditional reviewing was no longer a meaningful activity. Restaurants are ever-changing, anonymity isn't possible, reviews are boring, etc. I think short-term something like this is great for the reviewer at the top of the pyramid -- in this case the New York Times reviewer. The professional print reviewing power is becoming increasingly consolidated in one person. New York Magazine is a distant second but seems to have a stable critic position. If the trend continues over time, however, it will spell the end of those positions too. Unless the surviving outlets push farther away from a food focus and make the reviews more about entertainment and the personality of the critic. The Times list also doesn't mention some less recent changes, such as the elimination of New York restaurant reviews at Gourmet.

We could really use a recap of every name that has been mentioned thus far.

That there's more information available now seems simply to be a fact. The internet makes it so. More information, greater diversity of opinion, less concentration of opinion in a few voices. There may be a question regarding the quality of information, but quantity isn't really up for dispute. However, on the narrower issue of professional newspaper and magazine restaurant criticism, we are clearly seeing a decline.

Danyelle Freeman out at the News. This recap from the Times chronicles the steady thinning of the ranks of NY restaurant reviewers: http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/200...er-critic-gone/

The large Costco jars are one of many options. In the regular supermarket, one can get both smaller jars and the packs within packs mentioned earlier. Yesterday I got as close as I've been able to get yet to a controlled experiment. I was at Fairway and noticed that over on the rack where they have some of the garlic (there are also a number of packaged garlic products out of frame, and more still upstairs) that they had both Christopher Ranch peeled cloves (the black bags hanging on the right) and Christopher Ranch labeled whole heads in a bag (on the left a little higher up, they just had that one little bag left). So at least I knew these products were from the same grower. I ate a thin slice of each raw, then did it again. I think the fresh had both more strength and some subtle aromatics not present in the pre-peeled. Also, the pre-peeled was slightly less firm. I then sauteed some broccoli with both types, each put through a garlic press. Again, the pre-peeled had, I think, a little less potency. Nothing on the order of half, but maybe 20% less potency. There was no qualitative flavor or aroma difference in the cooked product, as far as I could tell. Indeed, at one point I lost track of which bowl had which sample, and it took some doing to sort that out.

If you did, though, the storytelling value would be enormous. How urban are these pigeons? Do they have access to worrisome toxins? I'd probably not be inclined to eat a New York City pigeon, but would have no trouble eating a Burlington, Vermont, pigeon. Once.

This summer, the few times I've braised I've done it overnight. The temperature is lower outside and nobody is in the kitchen. That strategy works for combating the heat issue. However, it's still not all that easy to interest people in eating braised meat in this kind of weather.

I was just at the beach contemplating something related. What I was thinking was that the food Americans grill during the summer tends to be quite heavy: steaks, burgers, sausages, etc. Which is not to mention the stuff we smoke. Furthermore, central air conditioning is the norm in much of the country, as it was in the beach house we were visiting. Yet, there was zero interest in, and zero willingness to accept, the idea of me braising a brisket for one night's dinner.

I don't think it would be so hard to devise some experiments that, combined with blind tasting, would give useful results. What I think is intriguing is that we have strong opinions being expressed by people who haven't even tried the product in question, and by people who have tried it maybe a couple of times under non-controlled circumstances. That leads me to think that the most powerful thing about fresh garlic could easily be the idea of fresh garlic. I will at some point try to set up a real test.

According to Mark Bittman's article in the New York Times, which I cited earlier, the answer is no: That's the case, at least, with the Christopher Ranch product.

If it's more convenient and doesn't result in a loss of quality then it's easy to see how a rational person could contemplate using pre-peeled garlic. If it results in a loss of quality then that's another story. But so far nothing has been established. The only semi-objective analysis seems to be something done by Cook's Illustrated but I haven't read it.

I haven't seen many examples of literature about butter and steak that's anywhere near comparable to the literature about wine. There's certainly some depth possible with those products, but at orders of magnitude less than with wine. The technical writing about chocolate is a little more beverage-like, and there are a handful of people out there who can talk about chocolate the way wine people talk about wine, but the total number of chocolate variants in the world is probably somewhere near the diversity of wine offerings in one small district of France.

I think when you look at food v. drink you've got a breadth v. depth issue. Food in an incredibly broad category, and it's many times broader today than at any time in the past. Drink is more a question of a few specific products (e.g., wine, beer) with astonishing depth. So when people study critical tasting of wine they learn a whole language to describe that one product, and subtle distinctions among samples are all-important. Food is much less focused. And from a critical perspective, even if you managed to develop a whole vocabulary for evaluation of, say, cucumbers, nobody would be interested in reading that sort of analysis. "The cucumbers were really crisp" is about all anybody has patience for.

For what it's worth, earlier tonight I put some discs of peeled ginger through my Oxo garlic press. It took a little elbow grease, but what came out was a lot of ginger juice plus non-fibrous pulp. The rest of the crud stayed in the press. Just tried the spoon again and failed. I guess my ginger is old and hard, but it seems like all the ginger I've ever bought has the same character. I don't know.

I've just gone and tried to peel ginger with a spoon. It's not even remotely feasible with the ginger and spoon I have here. The skin is too tough. Seriously, there are people posting here who can just grab a spoon and peel ginger with it? What am I doing wrong?

Doh! Microplane. Of course! But scraping with a spoon? Does that really work?

Due to its odd shape and tough skin, I find ginger difficult to use efficiently. I wind up wasting a large percentage of the ginger when I remove the skin. The alternative is to spend forever working on it. I also find it a pain to chop. How can I be more efficient?

I've been trying for some time to determine whether the case against the garlic press is real or imagined. Some of what I have observed: The hard-to-clean objection is not valid. The Oxo garlic press is quite easy to clean. Using a garlic press on unpeeled cloves greatly reduces yield, in my experience, and seems to impart some off flavors. After testing many times, I don't think I can tell the difference between pressed garlic and garlic chopped with a knife until it reaches nearly a puree consistency. Of course, pressed garlic is not the same as sliced or roughly chopped garlic. I haven't noticed any off flavors due to use of a garlic press. Has anybody else, or is it just something we've read?

You don't need to use any vegetables to make a great stock. You can just use meat and bones. The aromatic vegetables/mirepoix impart their flavors to the stock but are not necessary. Some chefs actually prefer a pure stock with no added flavors. That being said, that diet sounds weird. I'd be interested to learn what diagnosis indicates a diet like that.

I found the opposite: that the blade works better when curved up.

We had some discussion of this story when it broke in 2007. I also wrote an op-ed about it, which is cited in the discussion: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=100467

A high-quality ricotta can be nice.

I disagree that Jean Georges and Le Bernardin are microns behind Per Se. I see Per Se as being in a different category altogether. Were there a fifth star in the New York Times system, Per Se would have it. Jean Georges and Le Bernardin would not. That being said, Jean Georges and Le Bernardin serve superb food. Per Se is better but not twice as good. As with all these luxury purchases, what you get at the margin is an improvement that tends to be small relative to its cost. $500 bottles of wine are not 500% better than $100 bottles of wine, if such things can be quantified. So whether Per Se is worth double the cost is something that really depends on the perspective of the decisionmaker. If price is no object, and if the only desire is to have the best meal experience, there's no question in my mind that Per Se is the way to go. If value, party size, diversity of experiences, et al., are considerations, then that of course changes things.

I've done a few things in this regard. They all fall into two categories: 1. Tasting ingredients. For example, one time I was at a farmer's market and noticed that at one particular stand they had every herb I'd ever heard of -- and then some. And the farmer was cooperative, so he allowed me to buy a very small amount of each. I then went back to my hotel room and tasted every herb repeatedly. This radically improved my ability to taste a dish and identify the herbs in it, even though I still get it wrong all the time (just as with wine tasting, where even after years of practice you get fooled in blind tastings all the time). You can do the same thing with spices, with condiments like fish sauce and soy sauce, etc. Just having a good grip on ingredients is a big step forward. Most people don't actually know what, say, thyme tastes like. 2. Tasting archetypal dishes. It's helpful to go to a restaurant where you know they're going to prepare the textbook version of a classic dish, so you establish a benchmark. Even though classical cooking is not directly important to most people these days, a lot of what we eat is still derived from the classics. So being familiar with how a correct Bordelaise or Mornay sauce should taste can be helpful. It's kind of like seeing all the old movies, so you can better grasp the influences on today's movies. (This is something that's harder to do if you live in the boonies, needless to say.) At some point, it's not worth going overboard, because even if you're writing about food as a career, tasting food is a much more impressionistic endeavor than, say, professional wine tasting.