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Thought I'd do a little test and so I used your method (and, actually, I've been using it for a while since I read a very similar method in Cook's Illustrated). Anyway, here are pictures. First the setup, then the eggs at 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11 minutes. For my tastes, 12 minutes are a little long. I actually like to error on the side of moisture and so 9 minutes is perfect to me. btw, I'm very near sea level. You'll note that the alert was set to go off at 205 and that's when I took them out. If you can see it, it was already starting to boil at this point, just starting to rumble, but not in a full rolling boil. You can see the ice bath ready for them, too. I took each out and shocked them. Then I cut them in half, not wasting time peeling them, to show the yolks:

I find that the Food Network is a backup channel more for me than a primary channel nowadays. I'll go out of my way for Good Eats if I haven't seen it, although the nightly ones are up against Tough Crowd, which comes after Daily Show. I haven't watched Cook's Tour since it changed days. I thought it was just off the air. Iron Chef must be at a bad time for me now, too, because it's a show I'll choose above others, but I haven't seen it for a while. I've been f'd up ever since they switched the Pacific Time hours for shows. I don't think there are any primetime shows I go out of my way for right now. The only shows I make any effort to watch are either at odd hours or are part of the shows you can actually learn something from during the day, like Mario's show.

Adam, it seems that you might be putting a little too much emphasis on the evident fit between Western haute cuisine not having heat and Western haute cuisine emphasizing the natural flavors of the ingredients in simple preparations. What it doesn't explain is the love of strong flavors that exists in haute cuisine -- truffles, caviar, liver, balsamic and other reductions. Obviously, you can say, people love these for their own sake. They have intrinsic value. Any more than a jalapeno? It's rare to even get something fiery as an accent in the same way you would get other bold flavors. I think it's entirely historical/cultural: we haven't done so recently, and people aren't used to it. There's no reason, outside the historical/cultural context, not to have capsicum used in haute cuisine. It just hasn't been. As mongo says: The thing about history is that it isn't a thing, but more like a process. I think there's enough cultural interaction, enough experience with heat in our country, especially through Chinese, Mexican, and Thai food that's enjoyed by all classes, that people are ready for fiery haute cuisine -- at least in moderation and intelligently planned as part of a dish or meal. We just need chefs who make the effort to show what hot haute can be. I think there's been that effort in certain limited circumstances, some of which have already been mentioned, but I'd like to see the top tier restaurants using it more. I'd like to see places like Trotter's and The French Laundry and other New American five star restaurants making use of capsicum. Maybe Trotter's next book shouldn't be "Raw", but rather "Fire". It'd have a wider audience, I bet.

Capsicum, though, is much like salt in that in its refined form, it has no specific flavor but moreso imparts a sensory experience. It may even be more the case with capsicum than with salt. I'd say that sugar is similar but less so. I don't know what a refined bitter is off-hand, but I don't think I'd want to try it. I'm not sure about a refined sour, either. Capsicum also has the same effect as salt in that it excites the palate, creates salivation, and like I said before, improves the ol' factory senses where the majority of complex flavor is perceived. I just don't see any objective reasons for haute cuisine to avoid fiery seasoning. It's just the case that it doesn't for seemingly complex cultural/historical reasons. With the extent of familiarity with other cuisines that chefs have today, I would hope they would push the culinary envelope and make fiery seasoning part of that expansion. It's certainly the case that us diners are doing so.

Or, borrowing from the classic SNL/Phil Hartman commercial: colonblow.com. Oh wait, there is: http://colonblow.com/

Maybe you'd start pissing potato vodka.

Signed copy from Trotter. A gift from a friend when we ate there. Actually a decent book.

I don't think it matters much if it kills them or not, though I have heard that sufficient quantities kills them. At the very least, though, it keeps them busy. The mind can never distinguish and so evaluate one thing amongst others as well as it can one thing by itself. But I think there are some analogies that may be fruitful: * Music: I may not be able to as easily tell if the middle C string on a piano is perfectly in tune or not when a chord is played, but that shouldn't make me stop playing chords. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Likewise, a flute in an orchestra may be slightly out of tune, but that shouldn't make me think that a flute solo would be a better test of quality than a symphony. * Sports: An all-star team clearly has better individuals than just your average team. But that doesn't devalue teams. Teams as a whole have their own value in how they work together even though one individuals skills and talents may be minimized to some extent as he plays within the team structure. I really think there's a problem when we start exalting the ingredient rather than looking at the chef's creation, the dish, the meal, as a whole. I see FG as wanting to privilege ingredients (or maybe just pointing out the current trend of privileging ingredients). The chef takes a back seat to the ingredient, which is a huge mistake. It almost makes you think that the purveyor/buyer should be more important than the chef.

jariggs, I set out to debunk you, but in the end I can't really tell if the 15% is true or not. Found an interesting link about how much nutrition is available in a raw potato, though: http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/Jun20...50086.Bc.r.html FWIW, raw potato starch is not digestible by humans. That could be a good thing. So how many digestible calories does a raw potato have? Maybe it's a good snack item instead of the fried potato chips you could eat raw potato chips. Atkin's friendly potatoes the natural way.

But the cost of invention has never been so obscenely huge either. It takes a lot more resources to invent a strain of wheat that emits its own pesticide than it does to cross a Braeburn with a Granny Smith. I don't want to get too far into the specifics of this particular patent dispute. None of us know the legal particulars well enough. I'm not in favor of patents on things that were developed naturally or culturally or broadly. My understanding is that US and EU laws don't allow patents on these things. If 3rd world countries are allowing patents on them, it's a mistake, imo. But, I think there's little evidence that this particular issue is a problem. It wasn't even Monsanto that filed for the patent, it was just part of purchasing another company. Plus, apparently their patent is moot in the EU since they've pulled out of the cereal market there. And no one has been harmed by this patent. Has anyone been sued? Has anyone been stopped from selling bread? Finally, isn't this just a specific strain of a cereal that is better for texture than others? They could also go back to using the grain that was used for hundreds or thousands of years, right? Isn't that what most of you who would like to see GM products disappear are after anyway. They could go back to heirloom grains.

For capsicum heat, I nominate "fiery" as the best word. so would you say that sichuan cuisine could never be haute? I don't know enough about Sichuan cuisine to even begin to answer that. Are there high and low versions of Sichuan cuisine? Are all Sichuan dishes spicy? I'd need a lot of information I don't have. My hypothesis -- which I'd like to test -- is that a lot of capsicum makes it hard to distinguish between levels of quality in ingredients. If so, high heat would be antithetical to the haute nouvelle cuisine philosophy that is currently in play in most of the better Western restaurant kitchens. I think most ingredients vary in more than just flavor for quality, so it might be difficult. In fact, with meats I bet texture is often a bigger factor in our minds as to what is good versus bad. But I think we can assume, pretty safely, the idea that capsicum increasingly masks these flavor differences the more of it you use. I'm sure there's a threshold at which this is relatively unimportant which varies from person to person. But again, I think *any* use of seasoning or mixing of flavors does this. The bigger questions, then, would be: 1) At what point is this detrimental? 2) Is tasting the relative quality of one ingredient more important than the new flavor created by the combination of ingredients and seasoning, in other words, are the sum of the parts by themselves greater than the whole? Again, I think there's a real tendency to take this idea and do a reductio resulting in the notion that we should be eating sashimi everything. Frankly, I find sashimi about the most boring thing in the world. Yeah, good quality fish. Great. Now, chef, make me go wow with a combination of flavors that is greater as a whole than the sum of the parts. btw, one interesting effect of fiery things is that they open the sinuses. This has the effect of increasing one's sense of smell. And since smell has more variation than taste stricly from the tongue, in using fiery seasoning you may be opening the person to aromas and a much more full sense of taste.

I'd need a bigger freezer, or someone to split an order with....But it's a start.

I just realized I can answer this question an easier way: However, I do have a few on order that should be here any day (plus several of my food lit books are on another shelf because I'm actually reading them right now): Chez Panisse Fruit Martha Stewart's Hors d'ouerves Diana Kennedy's From My Mexican Kitchen The Quick Recipe Aquavit

Anyone know a place to purchase game meats in Portland?

I'm assuming this is a rhetorical thought experiement meant to suggest that capsicum blinds us to differences in quality.... How would that be different than saucing an ingredient? Or combining several ingredients? Or using seasoning other than light amounts of salt? Your thought experiment seems to falter in that any combination of flavors would then obstruct the ability to tell each ingredient's relative merit to an un-combined portion of the same ingredient. Right? I mean, if I have a pea in my mouth I can easily tell it's relative quality from the next pea I put in my mouth. Maybe better if I drink some water and clear my palate. But if I have a pea and carrot in my mouth, the flavor of each obstructs a pure experience of the other and thus, by your reasoning, each diminishes the other. Taking your reasoning to its logical end, we should be eating sashimi everything -- vegetables, meats, fruits, etc.

But does it hold within regional differences at all? Of course when you move from region to region, essentially jumping from one food culture to another, it's not going to hold. It'd be like comparing wealthy people in the SW to poor people in the midwest United States.

I think this is a lot of mountains out of mole hills. As noted suspiciously: Can you imagine the revolt that would ensue if Monsanto started suing bakers in India? Look at the flack the record companies are getting for suing kids who are swapping music files. It sounds like Greenpeace is way overstating the worries. It's like the claim above that RiceTec had patented basmati rice. As is later noted, no, they've just patented some strains that they've created. No big deal. These companies are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they don't invent things that are truly good for society and instead invent things like viagra or bitter blockers, they're attacked for doing something useless. If they invent something truly good like medicines to fight AIDS or foods that can grow in harsh climates, they're attacked for trying to make money from them (even though they generally practically give them away to 3rd world countries). You guys know that without a profit incentive there's not much invention at all, right?

Aren't raw potatoes potentially poisonous, especially as they age?

I imagine you'd be a lot better off roasting the bones nicely first. Less albumen/scum production, I think, and more flavor. Although, then you're getting a brown stock out of it. But I'm one who thinks there's no point in anything else.

If food reviews are more entertainment than journalism in the UK, what do people actually use to find a restaurant besides word of mouth and sites like this? Michelin? Zagat? What?

His "One Plate at a Time", though, has extra recipes that are referred to as "Contemporary". Essentially, he tries to get all nuevo on Mexican cooking, something he hasn't done in his other books. eg, he has a traditional turkey in mole poblano (though he calls it red mole). Then he follows that with a contemporary mole poblano which is served over cornish hens and uses pine nuts and apricots. I imagine it's much sweeter, maybe closer to a manchamanteles (sp? -- table-cloth stainer). I think Topolo serves dishes closer to this style than the traditional style, which you'll find more at Frontera. Actually, you can decide for yourself. Here's a link to the Topolo menu: http://fronterakitchens.com/restaurants/me...opolo_menu.html My experience is that the lower on the economic scale you go with food in Mexico, the more heat it has. Of course, there are regional differences, too, but some of the hottest things I've ever had were tacos outside of metro stationis in Mexico City. I think I avoided Montezuma's revenge in DF just because of how spicy some of the food was. But then you go to a nice restaurant and the food, even the salsas, are much more mild. And Mexico City restaurants outside of Palanco and Zona Rosa don't seem to be catering to tourists or foreigners much, if at all. I don't know what that perception says about haute being hot or not. It may suggest it's the case in Mexico as well. I wonder if this holds true in India or Thailand or China or Korea or Indonesia, etc. Is the local food of wealthy people universally less hot than that of the poor people? Is street food, eg, generally hotter than restaurant food? Is food at nice restaurants generally milder than the food at dives in these countries?

Never have. I've been meaning to make a new food trip up to Seattle sometime soon, though. Need to pay my taxes first, however. Yeah, not horrible. It would depend on how much upside there is to the restaurant. They can't have been making much money if they just suddenly closed, I wouldn't think. And they closed, a big negative. They're going to go a couple months with the idea that Cafe Azul is gone. They will have lost all their regulars. And if they reopen, everyone will know it's a different place. I assume they'll sell their name and recipes but how many chefs in Portland could live up to the old Cafe Azul. The dessert menu was about the only thing lacking, I thought. Still, I think there probably is some upside. 1) Both sisters were probably taking salaries when you really don't need both of them to run the business. 2) You could probably lower some of the prices of dishes and restructure the menu to have more small plates. 3) You could probably emphasize drinks more, even emphasizing a social bar area. 4) They never marketed much that I saw (or had good signage). 25 for $25 seemed about the only thing they ever did that I noticed. 5) They never did anything but dinner service (although, I'm not sure the location makes much sense for anything else). It'll be interesting to see if anyone buys it. There are several restaurants for sale in that area, I think, plus you have all those new lease areas under the condos being built. Will someone buy the restaurant just to convert that property? I wouldn't be surprised if they end up selling the restaurant for the cost of the equipment and furniture. Either that, or maybe they sell it to a lover of authentic Mexican (like me) who has a lot of extra money to throw around (not like me). If I would have known they were in trouble I would have gone and offered to work for free just to learn from Archibald. I'm really surprised they suddenly closed, too. I would have thought they would have gotten a rush of people who would want to eat there before they went out of business. Plus, selling something that at least currently has revenue might be more attractive. But I don't know how bad it was. I have a feeling we're in the darkest before the dawn for restaurants in Portland right now.

I'd say tilapia. It seems to be popping up everywhere all of a sudden out here. Even Safeway carries it regularly while all the Asian restaurants have it live. Goat could be one. Maybe duck, which isn't really eaten by the average person and so isn't that much more expensive than decent chicken by the pound.

I've always thought of a crockpot as one of the few cooking items I'd be willing to buy at Goodwill or a garage sale.

Thanks. That's very helpful. Yeah, I essentially want to have the pressure cooker around for when I need it and when I just don't feel like doing things the long way, but not if the quality is going to be meaningfully reduced. Doesn't sound like it is.