Fat Guy

I think it's becoming standard in the foodie subculture to be anti-pepperoni. But really, if you're operating a business in the US, selling to Americans, saying on the menu that you're serving "pizza salame piccante" and using a high-quality, artisanal product doesn't change the fact that you're selling a pepperoni pizza. I happen to enjoy pepperoni on pizza, on Italian subs and as an hors d'oeuvre. Some pepperoni is pretty tasty, and most isn't great -- just like salume of any kind, just like hamburgers, just like lots of things. But when it's good it's good.

Missed your post.

The Society is pleased to welcome MacGyver's Kitchen as an eG Ethics code signatory. As the blog's description states: "You know I like to work with powertools, but I can cook, too. Don't worry, there's no superglue in that." Welcome!

Finally heard back from the "deli style" people: What-ever.

I think the big advantage of the no-knead doughs, with their long fermentation times, is that they taste better. Plus all the stuff Sam said.

The wetness of the no-knead dough presents two sets of challenges: first, it's difficult to stretch into a pie shape without ripping it; second, it's prone to stick to the peel, which makes it hard to slide onto the stone. One thing that helps is to work with a lot more flour than you at first assume you'd need. Lots of flour on your hands, on the peel, etc. This helps.

This is what I was referring to when I asked if covering promotes sogginess.

Were anybody other than Jim Lahey to make this recommendation, I'd say it's insane. With his name behind it, I'd put it in the category of "worth trying once." It doesn't seem like a good idea, but maybe it works. A friend and I did recently use his dough recipe and it came out incredibly well. On a grill, though, and with the pizzas assembled on a peel and slid onto the stone (actually an inverted bottom of a ceramic planter). The wet dough is not exactly easy to work with, so I get the idea of building the pizza on the stone, though it does seem a little odd.

I haven't heard anybody in the restaurant business suggest that OpenTable allowed a restaurant to hire one less person. If it allowed for one less employee, it would certainly pay for itself.

My two cents: while current induction technology requires magnetic utensils, this is not an inherent limit of induction technology. In 20 years the available induction cookers will quite possibly be compatible with any electrically conductive metal (this would include copper and aluminum), not just ferromagnetic ones. There may also be a new technology to replace induction -- who knows? So certainly Sam is abundantly right that it doesn't make sense to invest now in the possibility of induction in 20 years. Take whatever money this advice saves you and take advantage of the bargains in the stock market right now. In 20 years you'll have more than enough to replace your cookware.

For those who don't flip, I have a question: how do you avoid making the bread soggy? In other words, if you griddle one side of the bread, flip it, add the egg and cover to finish, doesn't it get all steamy in there?

I like to think that, for some of those people, the explanation has to be that nobody has told them how easy it is to get special treatment: just go back to the restaurant a few times, be nice, be interested, and in most well-run restaurants you'll be getting all that same stuff too. There are exceptions, but that's the standard procedure. So, not knowing that it's nothing personal, standard procedure, easy for any repeat customer to get, they make other assumptions, they take it personally, they hatch conspiracy theories, etc., when in reality it's just the way restaurants work.

He gives the logistics explanation in support of one incident of special treatment, but on the larger point he notes: That, to me, is exactly the attitude a restaurant needs to have. But even then, there are customers who can't live with other customers getting better treatment. Me, when I see other customers getting better treatment than I'm getting, I may see it as a positive thing. If I go to a restaurant for the first time, and I have an excellent experience, but I see regulars getting lots of comps and special items over and above the excellent baseline, it makes me want to become a regular too. I've really got to wonder about people who, when they're getting a great meal, can allow that to be ruined by the fact that other people -- generally people who've earned it through repeat business -- are getting a better one.

I keep meaning to test the Junior's outpost in Grand Central Station against the original.

Right, I think of Texas toast as soft sandwich bread that's cut to a double thickness. It's something you see on supermarket shelves, though not necessarily in the Northeast. Secondarily, many restaurants use it to refer to griddled buttered bread. This is something I really need to get around to experimenting with. Without having done any side-by-side comparisons under controlled circumstances, I've long had the general, anecdotal, unsupported feeling that buttering the bread works better for, for example, grilled cheese sandwiches than buttering the pan does. I have no idea why that would be the case. If it does work better for grilled cheese, it probably works better for egg in a basket, I guess.

I've found that an inverted glass only works well with soft, thin bread either from the supermarket bread shelf or crafted in that style (or brioche-type breads), not with most of the bread I eat, which tends to be fairly chewy sourdough, whole grain and bread of that sort, sliced thick. Bread like that, when you bear down on it with an inverted glass, you compress more than you cut. You've got to work on it with the tip of a knife, and that's harder to do if you've already buttered it.

The Society is pleased to welcome Do You Know The Muffin Man? as an eG Ethics code signatory. Do You Know The Muffin Man? is a blog by Toronto-based Eric Fung, "software developer on weekdays, aspiring pastry chef all other times." Welcome!

This morning I decided to make egg-in-a-basket (that's what we're calling it in our household, because I think overall it's the most legitimate name except to my ear "a" sounds better than "the") for our nearly-four-year-old son, PJ. As I was preparing to make it, a number of tips and tricks, gathered over the decades, for making egg-in-a-basket came back to me. 1. Egg-in-a-basket comes out much better if you use thickly sliced bread and a relatively small hole. This combination allows the egg to remain soft even though the bread griddles up really well. 2. For irregularly shaped bread, which tends to be better than sandwich bread, a round hole doesn't make sense. You want to cut an oval-ish hole that tracks the shape of the bread. 3. It's best to crack the egg into a small dish and pour from that, for accuracy. 4. The butter needs to be very soft otherwise spreading it on will rip up the bread. This is even more true with egg-in-a-basket than with, say, a grilled-cheese sandwich. Because the hole in the bread makes it much less stable.

Right, the little round cutout should be cooked in the pan alongside the mother ship. It's a nice little extra. Also, in our neck of the woods, we made the cutout with a small inverted drinking glass.

It's coming along nicely and looks much better today: It still hurts a lot, though. The gloves we had were cut-resistant but not puncture-resistant. Therefore I didn't use one. I used the countertop method. Ostensibly with that method if you slip the knife goes into the counter or the towel. Most of the time it does, but if you slip just the right way it goes into your hand.

I've never seen it not flipped. It's hard to imagine how that would work. Both sides of the bread need to come in contact with the pan in order to cook/toast/griddle properly.

A few thoughts: New York style breaks down into a few styles, the two major ones being the brick-oven thin-crust pie and the relatively doughy slice-shop pie baked in a stainless-steel deck oven and topped with a fair amount of cheese and often several other toppings. A third is the new style of pizzas getting a lot of press now, some of which attempt to be Neapolitan and some of which are their own thing. St. Louis style doesn't seem significant enough to include as a major category. Cheese underneath is not necessarily standard for Sicilian style. I only know of one place, in Brooklyn, that does it that way. The hundreds of other Sicilian pies I've seen, at least in New York City, have had cheese on top. Not sure what is meant by grandma style. Not sure there's such a thing as a New Haven style. Sally's and Pepe's, which are the paragons of New Haven pizza, actually serve pies that are fairly different from one another. Grilled pizza should be included, probably.

To read the full article, American Pie, click here. ← Just to elaborate on that, it's actually kind of difficult to follow the list narrative, so here's what I was able to extract as the Richman taxonomy of American pizza: 1. Neapolitan imitations 2. Chicago-style deep dish 3. Stuffed-pie variant of deep dish 4. Sicilian pan pizza 5. Thin, crispy, bar pizza 6. Grilled pizza 7. New-style American pie

That's totally the best. But also good is Morimoto's "tuna pizza" with bluefin tuna, anchovy aioli, and jalapenos on a flour tortilla. Probably the only way to make sense of the inquiry is to use a common-usage approach, in other words pizza is whatever large numbers of people in any given place call pizza. This approach is typically going to yield some weird definitions, but I guess it's a starting point.

I'm not sure if I make the grade. My stab wound is in the curve between the index finger and thumb. Does that count as the palm? In any event, it hurts like hell.