Fat Guy

Certainly if seasoning is defined as that stuff you get on cast-iron cookware, the aluminum depicted above is not seasoned. Nor have I ever seen any aluminum cookware that looks that way. If there's some other definition of seasoning specific to aluminum cookware, like "filling in the holes" or "forming a protective layer," I suppose that could mean something, but I don't know. I'm certainly reluctant to believe anything I read on cookware manufacturers' and retailers' websites. By the way I found another online reference to seasoning aluminum cookware, this time from Globe Equipment:

I still don't feel we have an answer on the seasoning issue, but if it's true that seasoning creates a protective layer then the chemistry of aluminum is less relevant to the cookware's performance vis-a-vis surface interactions.

That's an important bit of universal cooking advice that a lot of people don't seem to have down: many foods will release themselves, or become much easier to release, if you just give them time.

Today I bought some Pretzel Crisps, which are flat crackers that taste and look sort of like pretzels. They are, incidentally, the "World’s First Spreadable Pretzel Cracker." But what really caught my eye was that, on the packaging, above the product name, it says "DELI STYLE." Now, I have been to quite a few delis. I've been to many real delicatessens rooted in the major deli traditions (Jewish, Swiss-Austrian-German, Italian, etc.), as well as just about every variant of bodega, mini-mart and fruit stand that is incorrectly referred to as a deli. But never once have I seen anything like Pretzel Crisps on offer. Pretzels, of any kind, are simply not a deli staple, in any kind of deli I know of. There's so much crazy stuff like this written on packaging. Please do share your favorite examples.

Just out of curiosity I checked the Lincoln Smallwares website. In general, I've found that cookware manufacturers' recommendations make little sense, even for their own cookware. So I have no idea if this is useful information: There were also some care guidelines: Incidentally, the page I've quoted from begins with a fantastically amusing (to me at least) statement of the obvious:

That's a red potato?

What I was told is that "most" of the cookware has been with the restaurant since 1999. I'm sure the collection has been augmented and some pieces have been replaced. There's no dating system on the individual pieces so it's hard to tell with any given piece, though they're all so worn down that I was only able even to find brand names dimly etched on a couple of pieces out of dozens I looked at. Presumably those were newer pieces, but beyond that indicator I just don't have enough experience with this sort of cookware to look at an individual piece of it and intuit its age. There wasn't any pomegranate juice being worked with, however the berry sauce for the souffles was cooked in aluminum and sat on the stove reducing for two or three hours and was then kept warm in that vessel for the entire service -- another five hours. I'm not sure how acidic that sauce is, but in general they seemed to be using aluminum (or in some cases cast iron) for just about everything other than presentation/service pieces. There were a couple of clad stainless pieces around but they didn't seem to be deployed in any particular pattern -- they were just grabbed randomly on account of being the next piece in the stack, I think. When a pan gets dirty, you throw it in a bin on the floor. Eventually, a guy comes around and takes the bin away. A few minutes later he comes back with clean frypans and puts them on a shelf.

I followed that topic and my memory is that I only saw a few posts mentioning oven fries, without this sort of detailed analysis. But maybe I missed something. If so, can you point to some specific posts?

Another issue for some might be that on current-generation induction burners aluminum is a no go.

I've gone ahead and started an aluminum-cookware topic.

That may introduce another variable: Magnalite is cast aluminum, as opposed to the typical restaurant product which seems to be formed from sheets of aluminum. I doubt it makes a difference but I guess it could. Does anybody know?

They were delicious and rustic, however when I got pulled off the meatball task to attend to something else a guy from the regular prep crew took over and made about a hundred visually perfect round meatballs in a just few minutes. I should add, the meatballs are an item from Beacon's new menu. The restaurant turns 10 this year, and Waldy has decided to reinvent the menu to some extent. As he explained it to me, he asked himself what kind of menu he'd want if he opened a restaurant today. For the past 10 years, Beacon has been operating on the premise of a "chef-driven steakhouse." This has always been a little boring for Waldy, who is a far more serious chef than is needed for a chef-driven steakhouse (the same goes for every member of the Beacon kitchen brigade). So the new menu, while it still offers some steaks and chops, is focused on the "open-fire cooking" concept, which is Beacon's (and Waldy's) big strength and serves as a much more atypical selling proposition, especially for the neighborhood. As JAZ mentioned above, we were in recently and tasted several of the new menu items. And I'm sure I'll work my way through the rest of the new items over the next few months, as we go to Beacon pretty often. The new menu is also different structurally. It's on one large piece of heavy paper, like a brasserie menu. The prices are the same all day and all night. There is no item over $30, unless you count the steak for two, which is $29 times two. There's a short list of lower-priced wines, and cocktails, on the menu itself (a full list is available separately). You can see the menu here.

You get better results with deep frying. And if you're in a commercial environment where there's always a deep-fat fryer running anyway, there's no great reason (other than perhaps dietary) to consider oven fries. But what you can get with oven fries (as we call them in our household) is pretty good results in a home kitchen without 1- heating up a deep fryer or pot of oil, 2- wasting or being stuck with a gallon of vegetable oil, 3- making a huge mess, 4- having vaporized grease collect on all your light fixtures, and 5- needing to worry a whole lot about safety if you have children or incompetent adults around.

I assume we're all in agreement that the aluminum-Alzheimer's link is bogus, and for those who think it's a concern I think that could be addressed separately, so moving on . . . On the Sitram/All-Clad topic I mentioned that many if not most professional restaurant kitchens use aluminum cookware. Not anodized aluminum. Not Teflon-coated aluminum. Just aluminum, like this Lincoln Wearever stuff: The major advantages of this kind of cookware are: 1. It's cheap. A Lincoln Wearever 10" fry pan is $23.70 at BigTray and, as its use in so many excellent restaurants demonstrates, is all you actually need to cook at a high professional level. 2. It's durable. The cookware depicted above, in use last night at Beacon restaurant in New York City, has been with the restaurant since it opened in 1999, under heavy commercial use on very powerful ranges and in a wood-burning oven. 3. It's lightweight. Although aluminum cookware tends to have thick walls, it's still very light compared to most other cookware. 4. Aluminum is a very good conductor of heat and has generally good properties for cooking. It's not copper, but it's quite usable. 5. The surface releases pretty easily. More on that later. Now for open questions, which may also be disadvantages: 1. Does it need to be seasoned? The cooks I spoke to last night, and other people I've spoken to, have said that unfinished aluminum needs seasoning, just like cast iron. Is this true? 2. I hear again and again that aluminum is sensitive to acidic food and both wrecks and gets wrecked by anything acidic that you cook in it. Is this really true? I've witnessed one challenge to the hypothesis: last night, as seen in that first photo above, we cooked meatballs in tomato sauce for an hour in a 600+ degree wood burning oven with no noticeable interaction between the saute pan and the sauce. I've also challenged a similar hypothesis many times with cast iron, and have never seen a problematic interaction between seasoned cast iron and tomato sauce, which by all accounts is quite acidic. 3. How best to clean it? This is one area where I've never done well with aluminum. I don't use much unfinished aluminum (I have a lot of anodized, which plays by different rules) but I have a big stockpot and several half-sheet pans. The stockpot, if you scrub it with a metal scrubber, turns the washing water gray. The sheet pans are easily scratched, not that it matters all that much. What's the deal here?

I make these all the time and have never even considered most of these issues, so this discussion may lead to some interesting results. My normal procedure, however, is as follows: Preheat oven to 400. Slice russet potatoes into "steak fry" size (approx 1/4" x 1/2") skin-on pieces (though not every piece will have skin). Pour some medium-quality extra-virgin olive oil in the middle of a half-sheet pan and spread it around with fingertips or a wadded up piece of paper towel. Spray can be used but the oil in commercial sprays is typically inferior in flavor. The Misto device is effective but probably unnecessary. Lay the wedges out on the half-sheet pan and brush the tops with olive oil, using either oily fingers, a brush or same paper towel. Cook about 30 minutes with convection off. After about the first 20 minutes, pull the sheet pan out and, using a spatula or tongs, turn each piece over. I use a fish turner and a spoon. Tongs work quicker but can rip the potatoes. Then, about 10 minutes later, when a little exterior color is starting to show, turn convection on. They'll generally be done 10-20 minutes later depending on the oven and the size of the cuts. Transfer to a metal bowl, sprinkle with salt, toss.

I don't know enough to disagree with this, even though I think I do disagree. I'll have to do a little more research and, more importantly, pick up a cheap aluminum pan and play with it, after which I'll start a topic on cooking with aluminum cookware.

At least I'd have had family meal. As it was, we were too busy to take a break.

P.S. Here's the printed menu, after being crumpled in my pocket overnight.

A few months ago our son's nursery school's PTA called upon me to solicit donations for the annual fundraising auction. Helpfully, the auction committee keeps a book of who has given in past years. Flipping through, I noticed that Beacon had donated before, so I figured that would be an easy one. I emailed Waldy Malouf asking if he'd donate dinner again and his reply was basically, "If you cook it." We agreed that the auction item would be dinner for four at the kitchen counter, prepared with the assistance of guest non-chef me. Despite my involvement, this item turned out to fetch a hefty sum at the auction. The dinner went down last night, although my day started much earlier. Those who have been to Beacon or read about it here know that the restaurant has an attractive open kitchen displaying a wood-fired oven, a grill and a rotisserie. Off to the left, through swinging doors, is a much larger kitchen where you'll find the pastry department, garde manger, dishwasher and a few other things. But the real guts of the operation are downstairs. The downstairs area of Beacon is about the size of the entire visible restaurant plus the upstairs kitchen. It's more like a small Mexican village than a kitchen: there's a baker, a butcher . . . for all I know there's a post office down there too. It goes on and on and if somebody sends you down there to fetch something you wind up lost and asking for directions in what you remember from before you dropped Spanish in high school. I eventually found Sergio Lopez, Beacon's chef de cuisine, conducting a meeting in one of the walk-in refrigerators. That's not a euphemism. The cooks like to have meetings in the refrigerators because they're nice and cool. My prep tasks started with grinding lamb for lamb meatballs. We only needed eight meatballs for the dinner for four at the kitchen counter, however I was tasked with grinding the meat for about 150 of them. The task involves feeding chunks of meat (Elysian Fields lamb chuck) alternating with onions, garlic and herbs (parsley and, thanks to a Greenmarket delivery that day, orange mint) through the Hobart mixer's grinder attachment, which is similar to a home KitchenAid mixer with the grinder attachment affixed except much larger, more powerful and more effective. I hadn't pulled a shift in a restaurant kitchen since working on my last book, so I had suppressed the memory of how arduous the repetitive prep tasks can be. In the case of grinding the meat, it looks easy, and I guess it is easy, but feeding each of those chunks through the grinder takes half an hour or so, with the chef wandering by every few minutes to note something you're doing wrong. After the first 10 minutes, my arms, neck and shoulders were feeling it. I'm not proud to say that by the end of 20 minutes I was considering throwing the remaining chuck in the trash and claiming I'd ground it all. In half an hour I was a broken man, and just wanted to go home, but I endured for the sake of the auction -- for the children. We then added Greek yogurt, salt, pepper, cumin, eggs and bread crumbs to the mix. My next job was to make the meatballs. For whatever reason, Beacon has settled on 1.9 ounces as the ideal size for a meatball. Sergio brought out a scale and covered it in plastic. He pinched a wad of meat, rolled it in his hands and put it on the scale. Yep, 1.9 ounces. "Now do the rest . . ." and he was off. I pinched a wad of meat, rolled it and put it on the scale. 3.1 ounces. I removed some of the meat. 2.6 ounces. More. 2.1 ounces. A little more. 1.7 ounces. Added a little back. 2 ounces. When you do it this way, it takes a while to convert that much meat into meatballs. I got a little better at it, but not once did I nail 1.9 ounces on the first try, as Sergio had. It reminded me of my father's strategy as a scout leader: my father was by all accounts better at starting fires by rubbing twigs than anybody in the world. That this was pretty much the only outdoorsy thing he knew how to do was not relevant. Immediately upon meeting a new group, he'd do a fire-starting demonstration. Nobody messed with him after that. Some of my embarrassing meatballs: We took the meatballs upstairs and browned them by shallow frying them in oil. This is a much more effective browning method than just cooking them in a skillet the way I and most home cooks do. The meatballs brown up beautifully and stay totally moist. We removed the meatballs, dumped the oil, deglazed, added the meatballs back to the saute pan, topped off with tomato juice and placed the whole thing in the wood-burning oven for an hour. We were mostly done with the prep for one course of the evening's 12-course menu. Luckily we weren't responsible for every single course. But we still had a long checklist of to-do items. Next we had to make the crispy poached eggs, which involved poaching eggs, cooling them and breading them. The crispy poached eggs were to be served atop flakes of smoked sable (aka black cod), so while they were poaching I flaked the sable. Sergio poached the first group of eggs. A couple of the eggs got damaged in poaching. Then a couple of others got damaged during the breading process. So in the end I was sent back to the stove to poach some extra eggs so that, in the end, we'd be sure to have five really good ones (four for the guests and one extra for us to taste). After about an hour in the oven the tomato juice had reduced into a nice sauce. That was pretty much the end of prep for that dish, though later some garnish would be grabbed from the restaurant's regular stations. Sergio had started braising rabbit that morning, before I got involved, and it was nearly done. We (and by we I mean Sergio) sauteed some morels for the pizza course. While that was going on I noticed I was standing right next to a rack holding a sheet pan of Neuske's bacon and a sheet pan of spiced pralines. I snacked so heavily on these items I was concerned that by the end of dinner service the restaurant was bound to run out of bacon and pralines. But supplies held out, despite a busy evening. I pulled the meat off the rabbit, following Sergio's instruction to pull it in fairly large chunks. At this point we got an extra set of hands in the person of Joel, the number three guy in the Beacon kitchen hierarchy after Waldy and Sergio. Joel and I made the short-rib agnolotti. The short-rib filling was enhanced with tangerine sage, raisins and Parmesan. There were a bunch of other prep tasks but it would be too boring to read about them all. At 7pm the guests arrived and, while waiting up front in the lounge area, were served a cocktail and a piece of foie gras terrine dipped in caramel and run through the cotton candy machine. At this point we fired two things in the wood-burning oven: a pizza with favas, morels, asparagus and red onion as the first course at the table, and the rabbit stew for later. As the guests were eating the pizza (which was actually their second course at the table, because first they received a crudite course of fennel that came off the garde manger station independent of our prep effort), we deep fried the breaded poached eggs, warmed (off the heat) the sable in a little garlic-infused olive oil, plated them up and topped with quince paste. You'll notice in some of these photos that there's an odd-man-out dish, which is because one of the guests was pregnant. So for this course, for example, her egg had to be cooked through more than the others. (There were additional restrictions, such as no pork or shellfish, which influenced the menu.) Those things that look like scallops are chunks of swordfish for the next course, roasted in the wood-burning oven. The swordfish was plated up with artichoke puree. Then thin slices of salmon seared on one side, with shisito peppers and citrus (I segmented all the citrus, by the way), except for the pregnant guest's salmon (front) seared on both sides so as to be cooked through. For most of the courses, we'd make five portions and whichever one came out the worst we'd sneak it off to the side and eat it with plastic spoons. There were also other items sampled, from the regular menu. So here's my salmon course with a side of ravioli. Next, the short-rib agnolotti, garnished with chiffonade of tangerine sage. Then buttermilk fried quail. These were half portions of a dish from Beacon's regular menu, though we garnished with fried parsley which is not how the dish normally comes. Waldy served the rabbit stew over couscous at the table. The lamb meatballs were served over creamy polenta and garnished with corn shoots. For the final savory course, Kobe beef, presented on a brick of Himalayan salt, cooked on hot stones at the table by Sergio. For the palate cleanser/pre-dessert, celery sorbet with Sergio's mother's recipe "coconut eggs," which are basically Cuban macaroons. Finally, chocolate souffles.

As I understand it, botulism is primarily a concern if you infuse with raw product and store at room temperature. Bittman's recipe calls for cooking followed by refrigeration and recommends using within a month.

Just a reality check on the kind of cookware real restaurants use. I was working in the kitchen at Beacon here in New York City tonight. Beacon is a New York Times two-star restaurant, which means its probably in the 99th percentile of restaurants in America (albeit not in the top 1/10 of a percent, which is where you are if you have three or four stars). It's also an economically successful restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, where they can afford expensive kitchen equipment if they need it. And, needless to say, most any home cook would be thrilled to be able to produce food at this level. Beacon uses mostly Lincoln Wearever and Vollrath aluminum: A Lincoln Wearever 10" fry pan is $23.70 at BigTray and is all you actually need to cook at a high professional level. Of course there are various advantages to fancier cookware. They may be more pleasurable to use. They may be objectively better for certain tasks. But Lincoln Wearever is entirely sufficient for good cooking.

For most people, becoming a regular and reaping the benefits of becoming a regular is a passive, pretty much accidental process. Nonetheless the treatment they receive can influence their decisions about where to make repeat visits. As between two restaurants, equally good in most respects, the one that offers some value added is going to get more repeat business. But it doesn't have to be a passive, accidental process. It's possible to know up front which restaurants offer value added and which don't. For some people, this is desirable information. To others, it may seem impure, but my feeling is that when you're paying people to cook and serve food the impurity train has already left the station.

I think it's safe to say that Ko's popularity has declined such that: 1. While Ko used to book up in 10 seconds each day at 10am it now books up in 20 seconds. 2. Where availability due to cancellation used to be rare, it is now a little less rare.

Seasonal sounds like potentially the great discovery of this topic.

I've never even heard of Seasonal, so if it's good it's undervalued for me at least.