Fat Guy

Steve Jenkins, one of the partners in Fairway, writes in the recent book The Food Life (p. 154), that "All olives should be washed in cold water and gently bounced dry. They've been soaking in brine for months, for heaven's sake."

For the past couple of hours I've had a piece of Pecorino Romano and a piece of Parmigiano Reggiano out on my counter, and I've been tasting bits of each. I've probably done it 20 times, such that I don't think I can eat any more cheese this month. If you'd asked me yesterday, I'd have said these two types of cheese are comparable, but having tried them side-by-side I now feel they're completely different. I'm surprised by just how different. Aside from being hard in texture and salty, there are no other significant commonalities. Without scientific instruments it's hard to be sure, but to my palate the Pecorino Romano is much saltier. So much so that, standing next to it, the Parmigiano Reggiano doesn't taste like a salty cheese at all, even though I know it is. The Parmigiano Reggiano has a sweet, almost buttery taste punctuated by those amino-acid crystals and some Scotch/Bourbon notes. The Pecorino Romano is funky, barnyardy, pungent and significantly less subtle than the Parmigiano Reggiano. I think, eaten straight, it's pretty clear that the Parmigiano Reggiano is a superior cheese. Then again it costs double. And as a snack accompanying cocktails I think I prefer Pecorino Romano for its ability to punch through the flavors of spirits, olives and salted nuts. I have to do a side-by-side tasting on that issue too, though.

Vodka seems to be much more standardized, with every bottle in my cabinet being 80 proof.

I made a gimlet the other day and it had, to me, an unpleasantly strong alcohol burn. I looked on the bottle -- I had used Bombay Sapphire -- and it said it was 94 proof. Then I looked at a bottle of Gordon's gin, which is what I'd used the time before, and it was 80 proof. It seems there's a significant variation in alcohol content among brands. What's the deal with all this variation? And what's the best way to adjust proportions when you get a spirit with more or less alcohol than you were hoping for?

For me it depends on the olives, and especially on where I buy them, but what I've found is that a lot of places sell olives that are covered in undesirable slime and excess salt. So a lot of times I'll rinse the olives before serving. This tends to elicit good guest feedback, with comments that the olives taste especially "fresh" and "olivey." Pit bowls are an interesting psychological experiment. I've found that the best thing to do is, before guests arrive, eat three or four olives and put the pits in the pit bowl. People are much more likely to use the pit bowl if they don't have to be the first.

What's your procedure for serving olives? Do you just put them out in a bowl? Rinse them? Garnish them? What?

I imagine that breaking all this down by demographics will reveal a different picture. If you go to a Whole Foods, even though there are indeed a lot of prepared foods on offer, you're going to be hard-pressed to say that cooking is in decline. The typical Whole Foods is jam-packed full of middle-class people climbing all over one another to buy ingredients that need to be cooked. Likewise it's hard to walk through any Chinatown and conclude that people aren't cooking. Immigrant cooking is, I have to think, alive and well.

For example, Steve Jenkins, who is perhaps the preeminent cheese authority in the US, writes of Pecorino Romano in his Cheese Primer: and I just don't agree. I love the stuff. But Jenkins seems representative of most people I've spoken to about this. Then again, the posts here don't seem to confirm it.

Am I the only person who likes Pecorino Romano cheese? I particularly like to eat it straight, with olives and other salty stuff, as a snack with cocktails. But it seems everybody I run into doesn't like it. The big objection is that it's too salty. Will anybody join me in expressing love for Pecorino Romano as an eating cheese (as opposed to a grating cheese)?

The wound is now almost healed, but still visible if you look closely. In other news, today I was up on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx and went to Randazzo's, a place where they shuck clams and oysters at a workstation out on the sidewalk and serve them to you on crummy plastic trays. I noticed that the shucker used a technique not discussed here: He would insert the side of the blade near the hinge, then grab the shell and, with the exposed part of the blade facing down, whack the whole package two or three times on the edge of his stainless table. This severed the hinge and the rest seemed easy.

This week I started doing some tastings of products that might be inclusion-worthy. The first thing I tried were some supermarket vegetable gyoza, which I boiled and let cool to simulate a morning in the lunchbox. He took one bite and spit it out. I then took one bite and wanted to spit it out. The product was just not good. Today I think I might make a frittata and see how a slice of that is received.

As I've established elsewhere, I like people from New Jersey. More importantly, however, I'm pretty much agnostic on the issue of who's eating at a restaurant so long as it doesn't much affect the food. I also don't hold a lousy cocktail program against a restaurant because, if I did, I wouldn't be able to eat out very many places.

I haven't been to BHWS in years, but BHSB today doesn't seem even vaguely related to the BHWS I gave up on way back when, except perhaps on the service front -- I had great service at BHWS probably on account of the Gramercy Tavern-trained Franco running FOH there. But BHSB just has a lot more people on the floor and provides much more extensive service than BHWS.

It may be that BHSB is inconsistent. Since I've been once I can't possibly judge that. Even three or four visits can only give a statistically questionable answer to the question of consistency, unless every visit is bad. What I do have confidence saying is that BHSB is capable of delivering a meal experience on par with what the world's best restaurants deliver. To me that's an important consideration, regardless of whether the restaurant delivers a meal experience that good day-in, day-out. And then there's the question of the definition of a world-class meal. Poor utilization of ingredients is a problem, sure. I don't, however, give any credence to the argument that repetition of great ingredients is some sort of flaw, especially not in the context of a restaurant with BHSB's orientation. It's a form-over-substance objection, a holdover from the era when cuisine was much more regimented. I've heard it countless times over the years, and I've been with chefs who deliberately chose a worse dish for a tasting menu because "we already used corn." No. If corn is the best ingredient you have, use it often and well. Try to change up the preparations, etc., but don't run from your best ingredients just because of some outdated notion of menu design.

I guess that's not the greatest marketing move. Because we had reserved online, a few days before we went for dinner we received a somewhat precious email listing what would be in season for August. The actual meal featured just some of those ingredients, and some that weren't listed. I didn't really care, but some people apparently do.

I think when you get a big list of California- and Mexico-grown ingredients from a produce wholesaler, there's no good excuse for repeating ingredients. You're free to construct a meal from anything available in the commercial distribution system, so you should emphasize diverse ideas. But if you create a restaurant where the whole proffer involves growing locally and working with the seasons, then it's not only an aesthetic but also a point of principle to use tomatoes, asparagus, squash, whatever, for all they're worth when they're in season.

I was referring to the three tomato dishes I listed as canapes, as well as some gripes from up-topic.

I went to Blue Hill at Stone Barns last night with a bit of a chip on my shoulder. I should say, I've never been a partisan of the original Blue Hill or of Dan Barber's cooking. I've never felt he delivered as a chef -- what many have called subtle I've experienced as bland -- although I've wanted him to succeed on account of his obvious brilliance as a writer and thinker (not that I agree with everything he says). So I've pretty much ignored the Blue Hill phenomenon for the past, I don't know, seven or eight years. And in my mind I've dismissed any and all Blue Hill advocacy as a mass version of one of those inexplicable lapses in taste that even the most educated gourmets can display on occasion (I feel similarly, though less strongly, about Eleven Madison Park). When Stone Barns opened, it wasn't even a priority for me to visit. So I was pleasantly surprised last night to have one of the best meal experiences of my life. So incredible was the meal -- not just the food but the whole package -- that literally overnight I've adopted the opinion that Blue Hill at Stone Barns is substantially better than anybody I know has argued. Now maybe I'll change my mind if I go back ten times and see chinks in the armor. But all I have to go on is what I lived through last night, and based on that I think Blue Hill at Stone Barns is one of the two best restaurants in New York. The other one being Per Se. The way I see it, Per Se (and Alain Ducasse at the Essex House before it) brought urban Michelin three-star dining to New York. I'm not talking about the grade-inflated scale Michelin uses in the US guides. I'm talking about real French three-star dining like I experienced in the late 1990s when France was still the best place to eat in the world, the difference between Alain Ducasse at the Essex House and Per Se being that Ducasse photocopied Parisian three-star dining while Keller made it American. Blue Hill at Stone Barns, for its part, seems to me the New York area's first serious attempt to do real Michelin three-star dining in a country setting, with an American accent. It is, in some senses, our French Laundry. We arrived about an hour early, picked up a map at the visitor's center, and wandered around the property. That it was one of the few meteorologically hospitable days of this summer didn't hurt, but under any circumstances the Stone Barns operation would be breathtaking. It seemed that every living being -- human and animal -- on the farm had been programmed to be enthusiastically hospitable. Staff smiled and waved hello. Sheep came over to visit. Certainly, no restaurant in America can rival the Blue Hill at Stone Barns setting. And there are only a few in Europe that can. When we transitioned to the restaurant, two things happened. My friend, who is one of the few people I know who is less subtle than I am when it comes to this sort of thing, took the lead, marched right up to the podium and announced to the host and hostess, "We have two problems." First, we were a party of six and two of our six had fallen victim to a transit delay, so two of us were to be an hour late. There's a range of predictable reactions to that sort of news, but "Oh good!" isn't one I think of. The host seemed genuinely excited that this delay would allow the four of us time to have a glass of wine on the patio. Second, my wife's shoe had broken. It wasn't a question of a heel snapping off -- these were relatively sturdy sandal-type shoes but moments before we entered the restaurant the entire band that secured the foot to the shoe had come completely unattached for no apparent reason. "I'll get some glue," the host said. My friend joked to me that, if it's a really good restaurant, someone on staff will actually repair the shoe, not just bring glue. A few minutes after we were seated on the patio, the host appeared with a tube of Gorilla Glue, took Ellen's shoe, and went off to the side of the patio to start working on it while we sipped a Gruner-Veltliner from Pichler that happened to be the best Gruner-Veltliner I've ever had. The shoe was repaired, the rest of our party arrived and we went inside to our table. The whole episode -- the unhurried aperitif on the patio, the above-and-beyond service ethic, the preprandial stroll around the grounds -- took me back to the best of French countryside dining. Whether it was because my friend was ordering a thousand dollars worth of wine, or because anybody at the restaurant knew or cared I was there, or just on account of a genuine fondness for shoe repair, we got what was surely the VIP progression of canapes. There must have been eight waves of canapes. It was such an avalanche that there was no hope of documenting every one, and later on when we received printed menus those menus included only the eight official courses of the meal not the eight unofficial ones preceding the bread service (which by the way is fantastic, both bread and spreads -- the butter and ricotta hailing from the original Barber family Blue Hill Farm near Great Barrington, MA). But a few standouts were the raw, squared-off tomato slices served salted and standing erect on one of those pins-and-needles crudite-holder contraptions; a tomato-water gazpacho; and the "tomato burgers," which were miniature hamburger-shaped sandwiches filled with tomato confit or something confit-like. This introduces two issues. First, I can't think of a restaurant I've visited, anywhere, offering better ingredients than what Blue Hill at Stone Barns serves. The products are a cut above and the raw-vegetable opening courses really serve to establish that. Second, there's the issue of repetition of ingredients. Somehow repetition of ingredients in a tasting menu is something that gourmets look down upon, unless the menu is specifically a theme menu built around a single ingredient. And I do think sometimes repetition of ingredients can reflect sloppy thinking in the kitchen, especially when the offending item is something like a generic, non-seasonal starch. But at Blue Hill at Stone Barns it seems like much more of a calculated choice: there is unapologetic repetition of whatever happen to be the best ingredients available. To me this is a good thing. I'd rather just have whatever is best than be hemmed in by a form-over-substance objection to repetition. Eventually we were served a meal. The first recorded course was veal marrow bones with American sturgeon caviar, served family style to a family where, blessedly, a third of the members were grossed out by the idea of marrow bones so I got at least a triple allotment. I see from a quick look up-topic that several of the dishes we had, or close relatives, have already been photographed and described. So I won't dwell forever. But the marrow with caviar might have been the best taste of the evening. This was followed by bluefish, tomato, pig's ear vinaigrette and paddlefish roe. Then a summer salad of fruits and vegetables, followed by slices of brook trout topped with little pieces of pig snout. Then celtuse, a stem-heavy vegetable I'd never heard of, with an almond dressing. I should have asked for the dressing recipe, though it may just have been "put almonds and water in a really powerful blender." The egg dish that came next was one of the better egg dishes I've had. Needless to say the poached egg itself was great, and it was served in a wide bowl with a deconstructed ratatouille. Then turkey (Broad Breasted White) with sunflowers and red chanterelles. This dish simultaneously included the best and worst ingredients of the night. The red chanterelles were some of the best mushrooms I've ever had, and the sunflowers were just bad. Our captain proudly explained that Dan Barber has been trying for years to find a palatable way to use sunflowers. I think it's probably time to give up, or fall back on sunflower seeds. Finally, lamb neck with eggplant and currants. I'll echo Bryan above: "easily the best neck preparation I've had." Desserts were exactly in line with the style of the rest of the food. First, blueberries with yogurt. Then grilled peaches with vanilla, honey and sweet-corn ice cream. Then a disarmingly simple petit fours selection consisting of berries, little wedges of stone fruits, and whiskey-infused chocolates. We stumbled out of there around 11:15pm, on a 6pm reservation. Blue Hill at Stone Barns is a triumph in so many ways. I haven't even touched on the agricultural aspects of the operation, and I've gone on too long already so I won't. But to me the biggest triumph is that Dan Barber has found the suit of clothes that fits him as a chef. He slipped it on and became the chef he was meant to be. In the process, he gave us a restaurant like no other.

Stainless is the safest if you're worried about other people mishandling your cookware. Anodized aluminum is also resilient. Cast iron, French steel, nonstick, copper and bare aluminum are all problematic if someone goes after the utensil. That being said, if you have only one roommate that person should be trainable on how not to abuse a cast-iron skillet, knife and cutting board. And if you get a cheap cast-iron skillet and some Forschner knives, it's not the end of the world if they sustain some abuse. There are a lot of things that can be accomplished without a purpose-built tool, however if you make a lot of salads in large portion sizes it's just masochistic not to have a salad spinner. This is a tool that pays for itself over and over again in convenience and time saved. The Oxo model with the "plunger" is a favorite of many people, and it's what I use. Restaurant supply stores are great, but also be sure to check out your local TJ Maxx, Marshall's, Tuesday Morning and related stores. The bargains in the housewares sections of these stores can be incredible. Also I don't know your personal situation but this sort of thing is what older relatives are perfect for. As someone who is rapidly becoming an older relative, I can tell you that if you were my nephew I could set you up with a lot of stuff: plates, flatware, a few pieces of cookware that are good but that I no longer use, a couple of sheet pans, a coffee maker, a rice cooker, etc. -- probably at least half the items you're looking for and some you aren't. So maybe you have a relative like that. The way you cook is important. If you don't use sheet pans, then obtaining sheet pans can be a fairly low priority. Eventually you'll probably want to have at least two aluminum half-sheet pans, a bunch of parchment paper, and two Silpats to fit the pans. This allows you to do everything from cookies to focaccia to large batches of roasted potatoes to parmesan tuilles. But I think it makes sense first to prioritize what you use already.

Squid is unkosher, unfortunately. The one thing PJ won't deal with is anything particularly spicy, so dan dan noodles wouldn't work at least not in their traditional form.

I'm surprised that I'm surprised. Now that I know the choice, it seems an obvious one. I'll be interested to read his work.

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I can't remember where one of our resident experts on everything noted this, but I think the arithmetic says that, all other things being equal, it takes the same time to come back to the boil because more water requires more energy to heat. The real difference, then, is that the temperature drops less in the first place. In any event, just this past weekend I experienced pasta cooked in too little water at a friend's house and it had everything wrong with it that could have been predicted.

Unfortunately, it's now standard for trading to be outlawed in schools.

Lots of good ideas. Please keep them coming. August we will be conducting tastings to see which things he likes. Some thoughts I had today on the subway: chunks of mozzarella and grape tomatoes, cold sesame noodles (I wonder how this would work with penne or something easier to eat than spaghetti-type noodles), yogurt with fruit, muffins, mini quiche, hard-cooked eggs (of course). Is there such a thing as a meatless version of larb?