mamster

tighe and I settled this discussion by trading shots of bourbon at the klink BBBQ. I can't remember what the hell we decided. Seriously, here's the scoop: I was wrong. The cipollinis that look like pearl onions and come in a jar are indeed grape hyacinth bulbs and are not in the onion family (I think they're in the asparagus family). I've never actually eaten these, just heard that they exist. The flattened onions you get at Whole Foods are expensive onions. Tighe assures me that these were the real deal. Now I want to try some.

This is great--I get to take credit for my tart, which was aped from a Seattle restaurant, and Charlie Trotter's tart!

I absolutely love the chicken sandwiches at Island Burgers & Shakes on 9th avenue in Manhattan. I can't hope to replicate them at home since (a) I don't have a grill, and (b) I don't have six billion ingredients on hand at all time. Their burgers are okay if you can convince them not to incinerate them, but the chicken is great every time--awesome grill flavor, high quality toppings, good choice of bread. I'm not sure what their secret is besides grill control (they get just this side of burnt and then pull so you get awesome char without charcoal). Maybe they brine.

A couple of observations. First, instant yeast usually already contains ascorbic acid--check the ingredients on yours (I know Fleischmann's and SAF do). More vitamin C will just speed up fermentation more, which is not necessarily what you want. Are you measuring by weight or volume? Your dough looks a little too wet for baguettes; I'd try incorporating a little less water. There's no need to mist every ten minutes or so. The steam is only doing its duty in the first five minutes or so. Using the steam pan is good; after the intial steaming, mist the oven at the 0:30, 1:00, and 1:30 mark, and then stop. And thanks for the tip on spraying the knife with cooking spray; I use cooking spray often, but not for that--silly me!

Wow, this is like a sneak preview of next week's column, which is about recipes. Since other people always enter my recipes into the eGRA, I have no real right to complain, so carry on.

My baby's got sauce! Tighe, you probably felt this coming, but cipollini are, botanically speaking, onions. I say the more onions the merrier, though.

I should add that I pieced that little diatribe together from the McGee piece and from various journals I have access to online. I didn't come across any study that concluded that aluminum cookware is a source of significant dietary aluminum and would have told you if I had, but that doesn't mean that such a study doesn't exist. In other words: I could be wrong, so proceed with caution. nightscotsman, if you think there's a higher calling than building giant exploding robots, you are not from my world.

I have little to add to what jackal said, but I do have a question that I hope won't take this thread too off-course. Coincidentally, I made baguettes last night (the Ganachaud-inspired poolish baguette recipe from Bread Baker's Apprentice), and they came out great, but I totally don't know how to slash. I ended up using the old reliable serrated knife, which is not that reliable, but I have a lame and (contrary to anything I may have said previously) suck at using it. Any tips? How fast should I be slashing?

elyse-- The best ways to reduce your intake of aluminum are (1) don't use aluminum-containing antacids or baking powder, and (2) don't eat fruits or vegetables. Fruits and vegetables grown in soil absorb aluminum from the soil--it's one of the earth's most abundant metals. Garlic, potatoes, carrots, and green beans have especially high levels of aluminum, relatively speaking. Tea leaves are extremely high in aluminum, although few people actually ingest much tea. People who want to minimize aluminum in their diet must avoid these foods and any other foods that absorb significant minerals from soil as they grow, including most grains. Seafood also contains relatively high levels of aluminum. For people who don't take daily antacids and who use non-aluminum baking powder, this is by far the largest source of aluminum in the diet, on the order of 10mg per day. You may believe that any aluminum intake is harmful--that's possible. Aluminum is not an essential nutrient, it's certainly poisonous in large quantities, and it may still be related to Alzheimers. But nobody has ever demonstrated that the amount of aluminum released into food by using aluminum cookware even approaches the amount that most people get in fruits and vegetables, unless they are doing some pretty bizarre things with their cookware. This is especially true for cake pans. The typical cake is low in acid (even a lemon cake is much less acidic than, say, tomato sauce) and does not cook at a very high temperature. The amount of aluminum that will enter a cake baked in an aluminum cake pan is barely measurable. It's almost certainly less than the amount of aluminum in a single pea. Why do I care? I care because aluminum pans are the best pans I've ever used for making cakes, brownies, and a variety of other foods. You said you listen to us on food. Well, listen to this: the cakes I've made in my all-aluminum Magic Line pans are by far the best I've ever made. They brown evenly and predictably. Oh, and when I use the aluminum pans, I use parchment paper, which would further inhibit the transfer of aluminum from the pan to the food. For my saucepans I use stainless-lined aluminum, because stainless is much less reactive than aluminum and unlikely to impart an off flavor or a toxic heavy metal to my food. I haven't tried the All-Clad cake pans, which I believe are similarly stainless-lined aluminum. I'm sure they perform very well. But the price is not worth an unmeasurable decrease in dietary aluminum. Now, elyse: you've given us a medical warning. Would you please do me a favor and bring the information I've just presented to one of your medical friends and get a response? Because I would honestly like to know if they have new information that suggests that I'm wrong about aluminum from baking pans and that we recently learned that it accounts for even, say, a quarter as much aluminum as I get from eating beans and garlic, shrimp and potatoes. Is everyone familiar with PubMed? It's a free interface to citations and abstracts from a wide variety of scientific journals. If you search PubMed for "aluminum cookware" and "aluminum pans" you'll find abstracts to several studies done in the last ten years or so, finding again and again that aluminum cookware does not contribute significantly to dietary aluminum. Here are a couple of typical extracts: "A study was carried out of the leaching of aluminium from aluminium cooking vessels and packages. Very small or undetectable levels of aluminium leached from packaging materials into foodstuffs." "The daily intake of aluminium even if all the foods were prepared and stored in aluminium containers would be approximately 6 mg/day, a very low value compared with the Provisional Tolerable Weekly Intake of 7 mg/kg body weight (equivalent to 60 mg/day for an adult man) established by the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives." If anyone finds an citation on this topic and would like to read the full article, I might have access to it through my university; please ask me. Oh, and Steve K, thanks for the great info on tart pans.

Fish and fish sauce are very different. Just don't reject the fish sauce on the basis of smell.

tsquare, I remember your Besalu recommendation. Laurie went there a couple years ago, but it didn't really enter my consciousness until Tony Bourdain mentioned that Hsiao-Ching took him there and couldn't stop gushing about it. Moral of the story: if you want to sell me pastry, be a celebrity.

Sure, if you have easy access to fish sauce. For a first-timer, a nice pork and scallion filling would be good, I think.

You're right, but you're only adding a little bit, right before you cook them. It's okay.

I'm working on a column about these! The Vietnamese word (without any accents, of which there are probably many) is banh xeo. They are so good, and easy to make at home, although there's a place not far from my house that'll make you a great one, with pork and shrimp, onions and bean sprouts, with nuoc cham for dipping, for like $6.

Tom-- How do you keep from falling into the trap of using the same descriptions over and over in your weekly reviews? It's a constant struggle for me (there's some sort of devil on my shoulder urging me, "Just write 'delectable!' "), and I only publish a review once or twice a month.

When I made those tarts, I prebaked the shells and then removed the rings and baked them on parchment on an old steel cookie sheet. But I (okay, more often Laurie) have made larger tarts using the regular tinned steel fluted tart pans without any trouble. On the other hand, I've never done a side-by-side test, and getting good color on your tart shells is important--they're far more often underbaked than overbaked. I don't understand how you get the tart out of the white porcelain ones. I guess you can serve from the tart pan, but that strikes me as less impressive than unmolding it.

We've eaten a lot of larb gai (with minced chicken) in Thailand, but it usually has a hand-minced quality and sometimes includes liver. When I make larb with chicken at home I grind the meat in the food processor and the texture is great.

snowangel, you scared me there for a minute into thinking that I had used the phrase "authentic phad thai," which would definitely be worth a flogging with a soaked rice noodle. Today I had lunch at a pretty good Thai place in Seattle that offers two different phad thais on the menu, one made with ketchup and one with tamarind paste. I'm not using the A-word, but I know which one I like. Hey, wait, we were talking about omelets.

Thai Omelet (Kai yat sai) This is a recipe that invites improvisation. I'm giving the minimal version I had for my midnight snack, but feel free to throw in anything that feels remotely Southeast Asian, including any combination of pork, shrimp (fresh or dried), shallot, garlic, and cilantro. 2 large eggs 1 tsp fish sauce 1 tsp lime juice, freshly squeezed 1/2 tsp white pepper, freshly ground 2 tsp peanut oil (see note) Whisk together the eggs, fish sauce, lime juice, and pepper. Heat the peanut oil over medium heat in a 10" nonstick skillet. Pour in the eggs, stir, and let cook until just shy of fully set. Do not overcook. Fold into thirds like a business letter and turn out onto a warm plate. Eat with nam pla prik (sliced Thai chiles in fish sauce) for dipping or spooning over. Note: Peanut oil is expensive, so if you're going to use it, choose one that has real peanut flavor. You can get unfiltered oil in health food stores, but it burns easily. The cold-filtered Asian brands are best, and the clear standout among these is Lion and Globe, from Hong Kong; I get it by the quart at Uwajimaya for $4.79. Keywords: Main Dish, Breakfast, Dinner, Thai, The Daily Gullet ( RG523 )

My guess is that they mean the seeds, and the photo is doctored or doesn't exactly represent the completed recipe. Unless they ask you to puree the vanilla pods at some point, there's nothing else in the vanilla bean that's going to dissolve.

I assumed so. That's definitely what the article linked to above is referring to.

This argument is usually made, first, by people who don't really understand how the peer review process and, second, by people who have a naive view of science as something done by unsung geniuses in their garages. I'd ask you to give a fairly recent example of a scientist who had to go outside peer-reviewed journals because of their conservatism but whose views later became orthodoxy, but I guess the lack of such an event wouldn't prove my point any more than yours. Perhaps the field I work in (biology) is less conservative than the scientific areas you're familiar with, macrosan, but it's honestly hard for me to imagine a field less conservative than biology. Revolutions in the field seem to happen every few months, spurred by papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Perhaps these revolutions aren't revolutionary enough for the average observer, but if you let me, I could go on and on listing radical new ideas by biologists that passed peer review even though the reviewers thought the conclusion was wrong, just because the experimental work was impeccable and the journal felt the discussion would be valuable. Some of those ideas have become orthodoxy; some haven't. Peer review is one of the reasons science works. I don't think science reporting should be peer-reviewed, only primary work, but the reason we have peer review for journals is the same reason we have editors at newspapers: because people are not always the best judges of their own work, and editors need some familiarity with the subject matter in order to make informed judgments about how to edit. Reputable scientists (oops, there's that word again) often find peer review annoying--wouldn't you?--but would balk at publishing a paper without it, not just because it's a seal of approval but because it improves their work. Most people who experience science only through the press would, I think, be very surprised (and also bored) after spending some time with working scientists. Of course, I'm speaking only for the university setting, and perhaps things are very different in the corporate world.

I got a call from the Portland Oregon Visitors Association asking if they could use this as their new slogan, and I told them it was fine. Hope you don't mind.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy.

Jinmyo, you first.