mamster

Sammy, I stand by all my provocative comments. The point slkinsey and I (he better than I) are trying to make is that it doesn't make sense to bring the same amount of skepticism to every claim. Wine is not magnetic. There is no reason a magnetic cuff should affect wine. It's not impossible, but a reasonable person should ask for real scientific evidence that it works before dropping $50 or $20 on it. If you don't see how this is different from Lobel's trumpeting their new pork or Fat Guy recommending a brand of wineglasses, then I guess we're stuck. But maybe part of the confusion is that it would seem like evaluating the wine clip is the same as evaluating the pork: if you use it and like it, great. But it's harder to evaluate the wine clip than the pork or the wineglasses, even (especially) if you're experienced with wine. The placebo effect is a very real thing, and there are scads of products out there that rely on it. Most of them are drugs or other treatments for disease: magnetic bracelets, herbal medicines, stereo equipment enhancers, and so on. Now, it would be an exaggeration to say that none of these things work. Maybe some of them do. But in the absence of scientific evaluation, it is impossible to say whether they do or not--or, for that matter, whether they are dangerous. People who use such products are not stupid--they're ordinary. But they're being preyed upon by charlatans (often the charlatans have convinced themselves that the product works, which makes them better salespeople). In the case of the wine clip, it's obviously not dangerous, and the worst that could happen is you're out $50 and your wine doesn't taste any better or worse than it did before. Big deal, you might say, and I agree. But thewineclip is another in a long line of hucksters who don't want to know whether their product really works. It's an immoral tradition. I say give 'em hell.

I forgot to add that I want this for lunch too, with pretty much any wine.

"The meat is less briny tasting than other members of the re-formed chicken-patty universe" is the best compliment ever.

engberson, thanks for bringing that up. THANKS A LOT. Seriously, I have gotten a lot better at making curry paste, and the ingredients are getting ever easier to find in major metro areas. Certain curries benefit more from homemade than others. I still think the Mae Ploy red curry paste is an excellent product, as good as I've made at home. For the massaman curry we offer in the article, definitely make your own--I haven't been very satisfied with the commercial massaman pastes, and pim's recipe is superb.

Drugs, especially, but any product making novel scientific claims.

I'm one of those people who went right over to Amazon and bought the glasses. My existing wine glasses were from IKEA. They were too small and they didn't feel nice in my hand. When I bought the Spiegelau glasses I did so under the impression that they would enable me to drink wine out of them and look nice. It was easy to judge that they succeeded, and if they hadn't, I would have returned them (they are a pain in the ass to clean, though). I'm certainly skeptical of the idea that Riedel glasses and their competitors are perfectly tuned to specific types of wine, but that's not why I bought the Spiegelaus--I just needed some nicer stemware. In the case of the wine clip, there is a good chance that the product does absolutely nothing. Say you went to Amazon and they had a deal that said: for $50, we'll either send you some stemware or a box of powdered glass. Probably it's the stemware, but who knows? We're not willing to invest in a test to make sure you're getting the stemware. Hey, that's worth $50, right? It'll probably enhance your wine drinking experience.

Yeah, you can't get more admirable than donating snake oil proceeds to charity. twc, in case you are still reading, people who believe they have developed a working treatment are delighted by the prospect of scientific trials of the product, because it's an opportunity to prove to the world that the product works. It's just like taking an exam: students who know their stuff don't fear the exam, because they can strut their stuff. The Wine Clip is patent medicine. It's N-rays. Anyone remember coloring the edge of their CDs with a green marker? Supposedly it made them sound better. Many people convinced themselves this was true. It wasn't, and nobody does it any more. So, again, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the wine clip really works. There is exactly one way to prove to the world that it does: a double-blind scientific test like the one slkinsey described. And there is exactly one reason not to submit the wine clip to such a test: because you know in your heart that it will fail. Folks, don't be chumps. Don't buy an untested product for $50, $20, or $5, no matter who gets the profits. You're just encouraging people like twc to flood the market with more pseudoscientific crap.

It's pim's relative's recipe, so she'll have to answer that. I can report that I've made it a couple of times now, once with potatoes, and it's great either way.

"This burger tastes better" is simply not a claim that has to be held to the same standard as "this product improves the taste of your wine through magnetism." However, say restaurants all over town were serving clones of the DB burger, and DB said, "My version is the original and still the best; it tastes better because I'm the only one using real black truffles." At that point we'd be demanding: is this true? Can we verify that DB's burger contains truffles and the competing burgers don't? Can we do a blind taste test and see if people really prefer the DB burger to the clones? Many ineffective products are sold on the basis of the placebo effect. If I were selling the wine clip and believed it worked, I would want to make sure that my customers knew they were getting a working product, not a placebo. To that end, I would fund a scientific study. Take it out of the advertising budget, because it would carry more weight with many potential customers than a thousand testimonials. Fund the study and make sure it is peer-reviewed and published in a reputable journal (Food Chemistry comes to mind, or I'm sure there are enological journals that would be appropriate). If the product works, you should have no fear of a scientific test.

Craig, you captured one of my biggest fears as a food writer, which is that people will ask me to order wine, assuming I must be an expert. The way I should have answered, back when I was a student, was: "Food writer mamster has no recommendations, but undergraduate mamster suggests Franzia."

I would be delighted to take part in that taste test. However, you're misunderstanding the nature of the claims. Daniel Boulud is saying: I made this burger; here's what I put in it; try it and you'll like it. There are no novel scientific claims being made here, just claims like "you will enjoy a burger with short ribs and truffles." I might like this burger or not, for a host of reasons (maybe I'm impressed with DB and his ingredients and therefore predisposed to like the burger, or maybe it really is better), but in the end there will be no disputing the fact that I ordered and received a hamburger and am now less hungry than when I started. In the case of the wine clip, we're talking about a product that costs more than the DB Burger that may very well have no effect whatsoever. It's a product making grand and novel claims. It's proper to be skeptical about such a product, much more skeptical than one should be about a new burger. It would be wrong to say, "The wine clip definitely doesn't work," without a double-blind scientific trial. It would also be wrong to say that it does.

You're not even a little embarrassed to be saying this? "A scientific conclusion could not be determined" sounds like a nice way of saying "the control group came out the same as the treatment group" which is a nice way of saying "the product doesn't work." If this isn't what you're saying here, can you be more specific? Or do you mean that a double-blind study concluded that the wine clip works but they couldn't figure out how? If so, where was it published?

I heard Tom D had a conflict and had to cancel. His new book is called Tom's Big Dinners. Bruce Schneier has a new book on security tradeoffs (Beyond Fear--it's good) and I wager he'll be talking about that. I was on a panel with Chris Prosperi once and he's fun--get him talking about how to spot a restaurant critic.

The Dalai Lama isn't a vegetarian!

Hey, nightscotsman, at the lab where I used to work, we had a huge jar of vanillin. Nobody used it. Nobody knew why we had it. It had probably been there for decades. I would have asked to take it home, but I had no way of proving it wasn't contaminated. Anyway, if I had taken it home, I could have made you-know-what. Homemade vanilla extract sounds fairly economical. Well, the two-bean version does, at least.

Sundstrom's new place will be called Lark and it will be in the old Kokeb building on 12th. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/food/142903_...3_dining08.html

You can get a bitter flavor from too much real vanilla extract, too, but it's probably easier to do with the imitation because imitation has a higher concentration of vanillin. schneich, I'll put the question to you that I have to others: in what recipes have you tried imitation vanilla, and have you done a side-by-side taste test? Your post did bring one point home for me: vanilla extract is, like imitation vanilla, a cheap substitute for the best product, which is whole vanilla beans. Those of you who swear by real vanilla extract because you feel strongly about choosing the best--why aren't you using exclusively vanilla beans? They're quite easy to use and aren't bulked up with alcohol and water like vanilla extract.

I haven't, GG, but I will now.

Okay, I did it. I tried the sandwich. I printed the $1 off coupon. I figured it couldn't be as bad as people on this thread said. Boy was I wrong. The "baguette" was, let's say, "finish-underbaked". It was pure white--worse than Wonder Bread and much worse than the regular BK hamburger bun. And lost in the discussion of the sodium content of the sandwich is the fact that it is way too salty. And I love salt. I don't think the Santa Fe Chicken has an unhealthy level of sodium, but it sure has an untasty level. The vegetables are mushy and a bizarre gray color, apparently to simulate being charred on a grill or in a saute pan. The "salsa" is sweet and boring. The chicken is also mushy and flavorless. The whole sandwich kind of compresses into a doughy lump when you bite it. Bad move, Bayless.

For one thing, bad cake is often made with vegetable oil rather than butter. Veg oil is not only inferior in flavor to start with, it's prone to rancidity. Various preservatives have flavors of their own, and there's no preservative that will prevent a product from having that "sitting around" flavor sooner or later. Not rotten, or even stale exactly, just not-so-fresh. Other problems with supermarket cakes include bad chocolate, too much sugar, and frosting gone wrong. Is artificiality a good enough reason not to use imitation vanilla? If so, why?

Oh, I'm not saying imitation vanilla is better. I'm saying it's as good for a fraction of the price. You can find 8 oz of imitation vanilla for $2, whereas the popular Nielsen-Massey Tahitian extract is about $25 for the same amount. And, if the Cook's lab testing is correct, the imitation vanilla has a higher concentration of vanillin. I'm going to bring up salt again because I think the arguments are similar. Some people (including some professional chefs) use expensive sea salt such as fleur de sel for everything. I have seen people recommend using fleur de sel for salting pasta water. Now, there is no way that fleur de sel tastes worse than industrially produced kosher salt. And for, say, sprinkling on steak before serving, fleur de sel has a clearly superior texture. But for any application where the salt is going to dissolve, fleur de sel isn't worth the price--any difference is going to be so minor that practically no one, including professional chefs, will be able to taste it. Now, I'm not yet convinced that the argument can be made as strongly for real vs imitation vanilla, but let's pretend for a moment that it can. If even those with trained palates can't taste the difference once the vanilla is baked into cookies or cake, is there any reason to use real vanilla at ten times the price? To support the struggling vanilla farmer? I will be delighted to do challah French toast as my next experiment. beans, sorry about the "hit me" thing; I was getting carried away.

Probably the PBS show you saw was the Cook's Illustrated show, America's Test Kitchen. I think the feeling against imitation vanilla comes down to two things. 1. Most "imitation" foods suck (tofu cheese, fake bacon bits, artificial sweeteners), and imitation vanilla says "imitation" right on the label. But imagine if kosher salt were required to say "imitation sea salt" on the label. Gourmets would shrink from it, horrified, right? If imitation vanilla really is just as good for a variety of applications, what's disappointing about that? 2. There are lots of lousy commercial products that taste terrible and contain imitation vanilla. They just don't necessarily taste terrible because of the imitation vanilla. Before someone brings it up, I realize that in other tastings, Cook's Illustrated picked Heinz red wine vinegar, Whole Foods balsamic vinegar, and Colavita olive oil over higher-end products. That doesn't prove they're wrong here. So again, if you're going to dis imitation vanilla, great. But let's hear specifically how you tried it and how it failed. What I'd really like to hear about is a common way vanilla is used in baking where the alleged superiority of real vanilla extract shines. I will try it, I will have both versions served to me in a blind tasting, and I will be happy to retract what I said if the real vanilla is a winner. Hit me. Irwin, I'm definitely planning to try the vanilla powder--the Nielsen-Massey brand can be ordered from King Arthur.

Have you done a side-by-side comparison? If so, what food or foods did you use as a test case? Sinclair, I find your balanced approach appealing.

On Friday I read the new issue of Cook's Illustrated. Again they did a tasting of vanilla extracts, and again imitation vanilla extract (aka vanillin) tied with real. In fact, an imitation brand came in second place, but the total spread between first and last place was quite small. The panel include CI editors and pastry chefs--I don't remember any specific names. They also said that for applications where the vanilla would be front and center, as in a custard, nothing compares with using whole vanilla beans. And they tried vanilla paste and powder and liked the powder best in cakes. So I bought a bottle of Imitation Vanilla Extract, some no-name brand, at $3 for 8 oz. I've seen it for less. I made my usual chocolate chip cookie dough (which contains 2 tsp vanilla extract to 11 oz flour), and made half with real vanilla, half with imitation. (In a previous "experiment", I've left out the vanilla, and this was a painfully obvious change.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, I couldn't tell the difference between the vanilla and vanillin cookies. Obviously, I should do more tests before making any rash conclusions, but I'll be awfully surprised if my results differ from CI's. Assuming I'm right, I see no reason to continue paying a premium for real vanilla (I will keep the beans on hand to use when appropriate, of course, and might try the powder). The best reason to use real vanilla extract, it seems, is fear of getting caught. So: fess up. Who's using imitation vanilla? Who wants to dispute CI's conclusion, citing actual comparisons?

And it would be hard to complain about having it with regular bacon.