Fat Guy

Some forensic investigation via Google reveals that when I purchased my pots Calphalon was using the name "saucier" for this piece. Later an almost identical pot was given the less Frenchy sounding name "chili pot." The same investigation reveals that my pots are probably 5, not 6 quarts. I've never actually measured, though. Maybe I will some day.

As I understand it, and again I'm not as involved behind the scenes as in the past, it works something like this: - The BABBP event organizers provide all the local support. They provide staff, infrastructure and ingredients. - Some vendors bring their equipment, others rent locally. - The vendors bring a small crew to handle cooking and some parts of assembly. The rest are from the events team. - Every vendor gets a budget for travel and such, based on distance, plus an attendance fee. - Every vendor agrees to serve X orders per day, however there is no bonus for serving any given number of people, or for selling more drinks or anything like that. It's a flat fee.

Yes, in commercial kitchens the rondeaus are often massive. I recently was asked to dump out the water in one, so I went to grab it and chef was like, "Woah, you need another guy to help!" I didn't think I needed another guy but I obeyed. I'm glad I did because full of boiling water that thing was too heavy even for two guys to carry safely. But the rondeaus available for home kitchens tend to run in the 6-quart range, so they're pretty manageable -- unless they happen to be made of case iron, in which case they're more difficult to manipulate.

I can't speak to the specifics of any given place, but when I used to be more involved in the event there were always people saying "Such and such a place can definitely handle that kind of scale." Then the organizers would reach out to the owners, who would say "Oh, no, we can't do that all the way in New York City. No way." There's a big difference between doing a big barbecue festival down South with thousands of attendees and doing one a thousand miles away from home base with tens of thousands of attendees. There were also always a fair share of people who couldn't come on account of conflicts. Like those sausage guys from Elgin, they were great, they could handle the scale, but there's some big event that they need to do closer to home that has started to fall on the BABBP weekend -- so they're out of the rotation even though they were one of the best participants ever.

The issue with a lot of the niche regional styles is that the BABBP organizers haven't been able to find purveyors with the experience with catering at a remote location on the required scale, who aren't otherwise booked at competitions that weekend, etc. I'm sure they'd be thrilled to have representatives of additional styles.

Thank you both for your support on this issue. So why in the world isn't this pot more popular? You don't need to be an advanced cook to utilize it. It shouldn't cost any more to make than any other pot. It's far more useful and versatile than a "saute pan" (in which it's virtually impossible to saute anything). I'm particularly puzzled by why the saute pan is so much more popular than the rondeau.

Executive Director of the eGullet Society, freelance writer, occasional teacher . . . But with a lot more money.

The Society is pleased to welcome Cooking With Julie as an eG Ethics code signatory. Cooking With Julie is a Napa Valley-based cooking school headed by chef Julie Logue-Riordan. Welcome!

If I run into George 25 years from now and he tries to get me to plant a garden, I'm going to slap him (and tell you you were right).

I freeze completely cooked meatballs all the time. Indeed, during the colder months of the year, it would be very unusual not to find between two and six plastic takeout containers of frozen meatballs in our freezer. My procedure is to freeze the meatballs together with their sauce. To reheat I do 10 minutes on defrost in the microwave -- this gets them from frozen solid to merely cold -- then transfer everything to a covered pot on the stovetop and do the actual heating over low-medium heat. The only thing I'd suggest is that there is some moisture loss in the freezing and reheating process, so make the sauce a little thinner and in a greater quantity than usual, so by the time it's all done you'll be at normal.

Not even close. When George starts lecturing poor people about their lifestyle choices, or nags us all to plant gardens, or makes any sort of unreasonable or unrealistic demand whatsoever, it will be another story. But for now he's telling an audience of chefs catering to well-to-do customers that they should support the artisanal ingredients they begged for in the first place.

There is no universe in which, to me, he sounds even remotely like Alice Waters.

I've seen this piece of cookware called by a few names. Rondeau seems to be what they call it in the culinary schools (see, e.g., the CIA's 7-Ply Clad Copper 6 Quart Rondeau). I've also seen it called a "soup pot," "short stock pot," and "sauce pot," as well as a Dutch oven or insert-nationality-here oven. What I'm talking about is an approximately 6-7 quart pot with two loop handles, which is maybe 4-5 inches tall and 10-11 inches across, though there are also larger and smaller ones, made of stainless steel or anodized aluminum or a clad material or something else, but not cast iron or enameled cast iron. With a lid. This is the most used pot in my kitchen, yet I hear very little talk about such pots. I actually have two of them, and on many days you'll find those are the two pots I'm using to prepare dinner. They go from the stovetop to the oven and back again and are very versatile. As the CIA says: It's also a useful pot for cooking smaller quantities of pasta, like ravioli, where you can get by with a gallon of water. It's great for cooking beans, soup, sauce, stew, steak . . . pretty much anything that can fit in it. You can fry, roast, braise, poach, whatever. Even when it comes to classic braising, I actually prefer my rondeaus to a Le Creuset, Staub or equivalent pot because mine have tempered glass lids. So I can check on the food without lifting the lid. Who will join me in giving credit to the rondeau for being a great piece of cooking equipment?

I was copied on the following letter from George Faison of DeBragga & Spitler to his restaurant clients. I felt it was compelling enough to reprint, so I asked and he said go ahead. So, here it is for your consideration and discussion:

"Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded." -Yogi Berra

While the overall improvement in New York-area barbecue makes local barbecue lovers less desperate, it also has probably increased overall local interest in and knowledge about barbecue. One may also be able to credit both the Big Apple Barbecue and Blue Smoke with helping to create the conditions and audience for that overall improvement. That has always been the vision of the Union Square Hospitality Group people, at least. That's a big part of why they take a huge financial risk each year in order to promote not only their own restaurant, and not only big-name pitmasters from all over, but also their local competition. I think that barbecue in New York in general has settled into sort of a middle period. When there was nothing good, anything remotely good was a source of much excitement in the community of leading-edge eaters. Now that the bar has been raised, it's hard to generate excitement. Hill Country was probably the last big opening to generate major excitement. You just didn't see that kind of enthusiasm when, say, Wildwood opened. So yes, overall excitement on the leading edge is palpably down. At the same time, with the exception of just a few people I can think of, I saw all the same old people at the Big Apple Barbecue this year. It's just that they were behaving differently. The bloggers and other online people did their jobs with the early iterations of the event. We took photographs, we made video, we wrote exhaustively. Now they have big-deal professional photographers and television crews all over the place. You can't go far without tripping over that Japanese TV crew. And what there was to write has mostly been written. Not to mention, now it's the Snapple Big Apple Barbecue Block Party, and there's the Every Day with Rachael Ray tent etc. It has scaled up in every way. I do think there's a bit of the "We were there at the beginning, we liked the old Stones better," sort of effect going on, as you see with any niche thing that goes mainstream. But in the end it's still a pretty great event if you attack it strategically.

It is essential that Dorothy Hamilton schedule a series of comparative tastings of Fourchu lobsters and lobsters from all the world's major lobster fisheries, and invite me to each of them to taste and Jimmy Lappalainen to cook them for me. I emailed Clearwater to find out the retail, and I'll report back. I assume the wholesale price will be set next year if they're imported in those quantities.

This assumes that less online discussion reflects lowered attendance, at least from within the relevant group (overall, of course, attendance goes up every year). That's one possibility but I'm not sure if there's evidence one way or the other. It could just as easily be that the same number of people from our subculture are attending, but they feel there's less to discuss. After all the event each year has become mostly repetitive of the previous year, with the addition of a few new vendors and other minor changes that only insiders really take note of. So there's less of a feeling of being at a new happening, and more of a feeling of making one more visit to an annual event. Speaking for myself, I feel like there are only so many photos I can take of Ed Mitchell, the archive is there, it's gratuitous to photograph and post photos of Ed, Ed's brothers, Ed's son, the pigs going on the pit, me with Ed, yet again. That his restaurant is now the Pit in Raleigh instead of Mitchell's in Wilson is not terribly relevant to the Big Apple Barbecue experience. Overall, these days I mostly go to enjoy, see some of what's new, say hello to the people I've met in previous iterations of the event, and generally act like "I was coming to this before it was cool."

Many thanks for the report. Your impressions square mostly with what I was hearing from seemingly reliable people on the street yesterday. The major point of differentiation with what I was hearing is that everybody I spoke to seemed to love Jim 'n Nick's sausage. I'll need to taste to see how I feel. Also I like Blue Smoke ribs a lot more than you do.d Given that the 11-12 hour seems to be the best opportunity to conquer the popular spots, I think I'll start immediately with Big Bob Gibson's today. Then I think I'll hit Martin's. Then Jim 'n Nick's. After that I'll do catch as catch can, because lines will become insufferable even in the FastPass area.

Well, I'd say the heads weren't alive by the time they made it into the press. In general it seemed that the chefs preferred live dismemberment. For one thing, I was told (as I have been told a few times in the past -- the one thing I knew going in) tails and claws reach optimum doneness in different amounts of time. So you might ideally want to boil a tail for three minutes and the claws for six. And for another thing, when you separate out the parts you can use the heads and some other parts (which wouldn't normally get eaten by a fine-dining restaurant customer) for saucemaking, stockmaking, etc.

It's all Greek to me. I've actually been in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island but probably couldn't point to any of them on a map, save for New Brunswick, New Jersey, since my sister lives near there.

What I was told is that there are some specific currents coming down from the Arctic Ocean that create a certain microclimate in the waters around Fourchu.

Yes, the El Verano Taqueria product was superb. I had the combo (a pork soft taco and a chicken soft taco, with two salsas) and an ear of corn slathered with mayo, cheese and cayenne. I'm not sure I've had better taco fillings and sauces in New York City, though I have had better wrappers. I wasn't nearly as ambitious an eater this year as I've been in the past. I didn't really even have a game plan today. Does anybody have an opinion, especially with respect to some of the newcomers, on which places are worth fighting for? I had the 17th Street product, which is always great. The beans deserve special mention. Blue Smoke and Hill Country are the two New York places I visited, and as I've felt in past years I think they compete very effectively against the out-of-town places. Also had Ed Mitchell's chopped whole hog barbecue sandwich, which has always been my favorite thing at the whole event. (I should note that, between the free punches on the press pass, the hospitality areas behind some of the pits, the free Snapple samples, and various stuff people handed off to me, I paid for nothing today except two MetroCard swipes.)

I don't have authoritative answers, but I'm under the impression that 1-no restaurant in the US is currently serving them, 2-if Dorothy succeeds in getting them imported they will be available through the normal distribution channels to restaurants in Non-New-York cities like Chicago where the restaurant industry can support purchases of that sort of premium product, and 3- they are available retail from a Canadian company called Clearwater Seafoods via overnight courier -- you have to very specifically request Fourchu lobsters and it costs like a hundred bucks to ship a few of them, but you can get them that way if you so desire.

So I was walking down Broadway near Grand Street, stuffing my face with a lamb shish kebab from the Halal food cart near Spring Street, on the way to teach my food-blogging class at the International Culinary Center, when I ran into Dorothy Hamilton. Dorothy is the founder and head of the International Culinary Center, which is the entity that comprises the French Culinary Institute and Italian Culinary Academy. She's also my boss's boss's boss. And she thought it amusing and perhaps horrifying that I'd be eating outside food (as in food not prepared at the International Culinary Center) just half a block from the institution. I believe this caused her to take pity on me. Thinking I wasn't getting enough to eat, she instructed me to come to the fourth floor kitchen on Friday night at 10pm. For what? "A lobster tasting." Boss's boss's boss or complete stranger, it doesn't really matter: if somebody tells me to be at a lobster tasting, I'm there. I arrived at the fourth floor kitchen about half an hour early. Most of the other guests being chefs, they generally started arriving between one and two hours late. Luckily I'm in the staff category, so I was able to pretend that, no, I'm not some loser with nothing to do on Friday night but, rather, I'm an extremely helpful member of the team and I came early in order to help with setup. Not that anybody trusted me to do very much. Eventually I was clued in to what was going on. It turns out Dorothy Hamilton's ancestors are from a place in Nova Scotia called Fourchu, on Cape Breton Island. If you happen to live anywhere within the sphere of influence of Fourchu, you take it as a given that the world's best lobsters come from Fourchu. Not from Cape Breton Island in general. If you travel up or down the coast you get inferior lobsters, the local thinking goes. The ones from Fourchu, those are the ones you want. Dorothy has become a champion of sorts of Fourchu lobsters, and she appears to be on the brink of successfully brokering the importation of a whole bunch of them to New York each year, perhaps starting next year. The season is just a couple of months long, right around now, so these lobsters would be marketed as a premium seasonal delicacy with a terroir-type selling proposition: the Copper River Salmon of the lobster world. She has already led a trip where several of the better New York chefs accompanied her up to Fourchu to check out the situation up there. (The trip is chronicled in Departures magazine by Peter Kaminsky in the May-June 2009 issue.) On this evening, she invited a group of chefs to come to the fourth floor kitchen to play with about three dozen Fourchu lobsters. Also present were about a dozen of the best Maine lobsters available around town, for comparison. Along with the guest chefs and International Culinary Center chef-instructors were various non-chef guests, such as spouses of chefs, as well as hangers on and poseurs like me. So here we have the unpacking of the Fourchu lobsters: The guy there holding the lobster is a terrific chef named Ben Pollinger. At present, Ben is the chef at the restaurant Oceana, so he knows some things about seafood. When I first met him he was a cook at Tabla, the New Indian restaurant that is part of the Danny Meyer empire. I believe he has also worked at Union Square Cafe, at Le Louis XV and a bunch of other places. On the far right is Craig Koketsu. Craig is currently the chef at Quality Meats and Park Avenue Summer (which changes its name, menu and decor each season), which are owned by the Smith & Wollensky group. Craig was, back in the day, one of the hot young cooks working in the Lespinasse kitchen, under both Gray Kunz and Christian Delouvrier. At the end of the Delouvrier era at Lespinasse, Craig was chef de cuisine. I really thought, before I went into this evening, that I knew pretty much whatever was to be known about cooking lobster, and that there wasn't much to be known. I was quickly disabused of that notion. I can't believe how little I knew. I came to the realization quickly when Ben Pollinger said, like it was no big deal, "I'm going to crush the lobsters' heads in this thing to make a sauce . . ." He then proceeded to make quite a remarkable sauce, which seemed to be a relative of lobster Americaine but also seemed to be mostly improvised. In any event, after being sieved and adjusted and spooned over the lobster, it was excellent. Here we have Jimmy Lappalainen. Jimmy, who is Swedish, is currently the chef at Riingo, and was formerly at Aquavit. I don't want to play favorites, but of all the lobster preparations I tasted I thought Jimmy's was the most remarkable. I also realized yet again, watching Jimmy work, how ignorant I was about lobster cookery. Did you know it was possible just to cook a lobster in a skillet? I'm still reeling from what an effective cooking method this is. Jimmy cut the lobster up before cooking and first cooked the halved bodies over high heat (what we amateurs call super-high heat and chefs call medium heat) with some olive oil, lemon juice, shallots, white wine (actually I think he used Champagne), salt and whatever else was around. As the lobster cooked it rendered a bunch of stuff, which combined with the olive oil, lemon juice and other ingredients to make the most remarkable sauce. He took the bodies out first, which were just lightly glazed with the pan sauce. He then cooked the claws in that sauce. In the end, people stood around the skillet dipping bread into the remaining sauce it was so fantastic. I can't remember whose this was (possibly Mark Ladner from Del Posto?) but it was great: This is Dorothy Hamilton talking to Cesare Casella. Cesare is, in addition to being a big-deal Italian chef, one of the deans at the International Culinary Center. I actually share an office with him and Alan Richman, as evidenced by our shared phone: Please note that my name is listed first. And yes that's rosemary in Cesare's pocket. It's his fashion signature, always fresh herbs in his shirt pocket. Sam Gelman of Momofuku Ko and Ed McFarlane of Ed's Lobster Bar were also in the house. Sam and Ed (Sam is on the right) mostly boiled lobsters in order to facilitate the tasting comparison of the Fourchu and Maine lobsters. Note the use of a sheet pan as a stockpot lid. There were other chefs present, but there were so many working at once, and I was trying to pitch in here and there (unwanted, I'm sure), so I couldn't photograph or keep track of them all. I do remember Michael Romano roasting a lobster in the convection oven such that it rendered out an omelette-like thing in the pan. In a humorous moment, after we were all stuffed silly with lobster, one of the staff chefs came out with this: And also a potato gratin and a ton of other food. It was ridiculous, but a lot of it got eaten. You can also see in the background a massive banquet table set for the assembled guests, but really all the eating occurred standing around in the kitchen. So, perhaps you are asking, are Fourchu lobsters really all they're cracked up to be? I think the answer, based on this tasting, is yes. Compared to the Maine lobsters the Fourchu lobsters had far superior meat. This isn't just my opinion or my boss's boss's boss's opionion, but also the clear consensus of the chefs present. The Fourchu tail meat was both firm and tender, as opposed to the Maine meat which was firm and not nearly as tender. The Fourchu meat had a lot of nuance, and the Maine meat by comparison did not. It was like the difference between a cheaper and more expensive wine from the same vineyard: both Chardonnay, both with a lot of similar characteristics, but one with far more complexity and structure. The claw meat wasn't as noticeably different, but the tail meat was quite different. Apparently this is because the waters around Fourchu are the absolute coldest lobster-fishable waters around. As a result the Fourchu lobsters experience very slow growth and molt only once a year. The short, early summer season for lobster fishing in Fuorchu (where there are something like 50 residents, all involved in this industry) is right before they go into their molting cycle, so their shells are extremely hard and their flesh very well developed. It shows. But of course it will be necessary to conduct multiple repeat tastings to be sure. (Edited to fix geographic references.)