col klink

I hear ya Mark, smoking a rack of ribs for 3 to 6 hours is a very relaxing ritual and the best part is eating the ribs afterward. There something very Zen-like in getting the fire real low without going out, very fulfilling. If I need a quicker fix though, I go out for sushi!

I used to live in Austin and now whenever I go back, Kreuz's market in Lockhart is one of the two restaurants I absolutely HAVE to go to. Their pork chops are great, but it's possible to get ones that are dry (maybe they should brine 'em first). They also have good brisket but what you must order is the prime rib. Smoked for a long time and served rare and juicy. If you only go out once for bbq, go to Kreuz's. Salt Lick is fun and good, but I agree with NewYorkTexan, it is a little overrated. Their plus is being able to bring beer/wine/booze to the restaurant. They dramatically improved their place when they added air conditioning. Their mustard based sauce is different than anything else in Texas (at least Central Texas) and make sure to ask for the habenero version too. Don't worry, it's not that hot. By all means, try the peach cobbler but order it a la mode 'cus it's rather thick. There is a bbq chain that's more fun than the Salt Lick and that's Rudy's. There's a couple of 'em around town. Rudy's is also a gas station but they do have great bbq and big beer troughs. They have decent brisket, good ribs, great pork loin and great turkey. Make sure to ask for plenty of white bread, creamed corn and premium unleaded. This is another bbq joint that doesn't offer plates, but they do have utensils. My other must visit restuarant in Austin is the Tex-Mex style Chuy's (another one listed by NewYorkTexan). The location on the South shore of the river is the Chuy's where the underage Bush daughters were caught trying to order drinks. I always get the chicken tacos and everything's really fresh. I highly recommend getting one of the mixed margaritas, very tasty.

damn! That's a good idea. I do a lot of 'que when I visit my folks cottage in Upper Michigan and we barely have enough room for food in the our two refrigerators let alone more room for lots of extra brining chickens. That'll help a lot.

I think I posted this elsewhere, but I keep a lot of meats bought on sale (mostly pork and chicken) in my freezer and when the need arises, I smoke 'em. I keep leftover stock in there and lots of carcusses (carci?) for future stocks. I recently pulled out my smoked duck from Thanksgiving and it made a fantastic stock (my best really) for a risotto. What else? peas, ice cream sandwiches and leftover soups which later become lunches.

I've found that whole chickens needs to brine at least over night, but pieces need only a couple of hours. The longest I've let a chicken brine and still eat it was six day and it was still fine. But I wouldn't let it go for more than 4 days. A more scientific discussion is here Wherein Fat Guy says: But what I've found is it really depends on the meat. A big turkey I like to have brined for at two days up to four or five. Whereas thin pieces of meat like pork back ribs only need an hour and anything more than a day they become too salty. Heron, you also asked about what containers to brine in. In a pinch (and I don't recommend this except for hour or less brines) I've used a stainless steel pot but I'd hate it if the pot became pitted. For most things I have a whole mess of Tupperware and its relatives. For back ribs I use a wide and long one (I'm bringing it to the potluck). For turkeys and other such large or ungainly meats like goat legs/shanks nothing works better than a plastic food-grade 5 gallon bucket. I picked mine up at a local home-brew shop but another great place is Pacific Food Imports on sixth, directly east of Safeco Field. They have a lot of used olive brine buckets for free, both the 5 gallon variety and smaller ones as well, but most of them don't have lids. A friend of mine has also used garbage bags and placed them in a large stock pot. And at some point, we've all used ziplock bags as well. Oh yeah, always refrigerate your brining meat so keep that in mind before you put your turkey in the 5 gal. bucket and realize you don't have the room in the frige. One Thanksgiving I was lucky though and it was cold enough outside to leave it in the backyard. So far nobody's died and that was a year and a half ago.

What's your brine recipe? Here's mine: 1 gal water 1 cup kosher salt 1 cup brown sugar (it makes the 'que smell better on the grill 1 cup vinegar 1 cup lemon and/or lime juice 1 bottle of Crystal Extra Hot sauce healthy dash of cayenne powder I'm thinking of trying out adding a cheap bourbon for my next chicken brine. When I pound out the breasts, I haven't tried brining them but I do like to do a half bread - half parmesian cheese breading before frying (thanks to batgrrrl). Then make a pan reduction sauce with lemon and dry vermouth or white wine. Then I add a very healthy portion of butter to make it creamy.

You can probably gues what I have to say about poultry, smoke it! But I know you don't have a smoker so I provide something a little more useful. The best thing you can do to a chicken, any chicken, is brine it. I vividly remember the first time I tried brined chicken breasts, as it was the juiciest chicken I ever had. After you taste a brined chicken you can't go back and grilling becomes exciting again. I get amazing, juicy and tasty chickens every time. And I get the cheap 79 cents/lb chickens. I haven't roasted a brined chicken but I have roasted a brined turkey and it came out great. There are those who worry about the excess of salt ruins the drippings, but I didn't have any problems. As a matter of fact, it was the best gravy I ever had. True it was a little saltier than most gravies, but not by much. Also, rosemary goes very well with chicken, either placed under the skin or in the cavity.

Yup, somehow I was attacked by a feral sweet tooth and picked up this little item I haven't seem in years: Abba Zaba! I blame Dave Chappelle: "Abba-Zaba, you're my only friend" It was horrible! But I don't like taffy, it always feels like it's trying to pull out my fillings.

Thanks for the great link! I've been asked many times about brining by the folks who eat my bbq and I've never had an answer better than "because it tastes better that way."

I love going to Central Market, it has all of the quality of Whole Foods but less expensive and has more space. Plus you have to love a place that sells durian! They have a pretty good wine and beer selection and I always drool when walking past the meat counter: brisket, rib eyes, lamb, gorgeous pork, rabbit and game hens to name a few. I also like the fact that you can easily park there and it doesn't take to long to get to if 5 isn't a parking lot.

You'll have to forgive me, I'm not very familiar with kosher food preparation. How do you mean that brining was not considered because the meat was kosher? Is brining somehow not kosher? I smoke a lot of meats and I brine just about everything except for beef. I would hate to think that if there is a kosher dietary restriction among my guests that I'd be crossing the line.

Uwajimaya is the place for me, but I don't end up buying a lot of Asian ingredients precisely because I haven't had easy access to a good store. I only end up going to Uwajimaya when I go to PFI for lots of cheese, olives and bulk spices. Good to hear about City Greens. I used to go there for produce or Woodchuck Cider, but their organic veggies always looked a little depressing and they didn't have enough variety to warrant frequent visits. So it's good to hear they've gone Asian, I think they'll get better business that way. Also, they just haven't been the same since they stopped using their "beer vault."

I would say that Todai's sushi is a step above supermarket sushi. At Todai's you get much bigger pieces and I would say on average, a little better quality. And of course there's more variety. But they all did have the feeling of grocery store sushi, that is a lack of love, a soulless quality. It's funny that people complain of warm sushi, because at lest the rice should be warm and at most the meat should be cool. I was happy with the temperature, wasn't too cold, wasn't too warm. The pieces that sat longer than the others were cooler though as they were sitting on refrigerated serving apparati. Most of the store bought sushi says that you should let it sit on the counter for a half-hour so it can warm up. We went to the weekend lunch and they were serving lobster claws so those people complaining of a lack of lobster probably went during the week. By the way, I would stay away from anything that had been tempuraed, most of it sits in steam trays and get soggy. The tempura roll they have was cool in conception as they cut the roll up before they deep-fried it so there was more batter, but by the time you get to it, it's already soggy despite not being in a steam tray.

Yesterday I went to Todai knowing full well that it wouldn't be the best of anything, but there'd be a lot of it. I was pleasantly surprised! We had planned on going to Kamon's for all-you-can-eat sushi but found out they closed a couple of years ago. Since I *needed* sushi, and lots of it, I recalled Todai's and away we went. We arrived at 11:30 to big lines. The place was packed and it took about 10 minutes to go through the line. Sometimes the chefs had a hard time keeping up with the voracious demand. Their sushi lineup was surprising: salmon skin (ok), albacore (esculent), seaweed (good), two types of clam (ok), salmon (good), maguro (good), squid (good), octopus (decent), red snapper (decent), flying fish roe (fun), spicey shrimp (blah), spicey tuna (ok) and a number of rolls, all of which were uninspiring but not off putting. One nice thing about Todai is if a member of your party is sushi averse, there's still plenty of decent food available to them at the hot bar. There is a matrix to figure out the buffet cost: m-f lunch: $12.95, weekend lunch: $14.95, m-f dinner: $21.95, weekend dinner: $22.95. I'm not sure what the difference is between lunch and dinner besides the price. Tea was $1.50 and a large sake was $6.50. There were times going through the line where some of the pieces were below my tolerence level, but if you go in with a grain of salt you can enjoy yourself. Often times you'll find that fish has a hard time staying on the rice, but that was part of the fun. I certainly had my fill of sushi.

All of those were great points, here's another on that I've read: Nigella Lawson (the sultry chef) mentions that she saves extra wine from parties, puts them in baggies and then freezes them so she can use the wine later to cook with. I thought that was a particularly good idea since you don't have to open up a new bottle just to cook with it. Granted I haven't used that trick since I whenever I open up a bottle, I plow right through it. Nevertheless, I still thought it was a pretty neat idea. Update on the freezer: I also have a duck carcass leftover from Thanksgiving that's waiting to be made into stock.

If you have a decently sized freezer, buying meat on sale is a great deal. Whenever whole fryer chickens fall below $1/lb, I buy a couple and throw 'em in freezer, pulling them out when I feel like it. Whole fryers are going to be cheaper than cut pieces and they're going to taste better. I smoke mine, but throwing a chicken in a dutch oven with wine and veggies makes a great, cheap meal. Afterwards make a stock from the bones and you're on the way to making a great soup with the aforementioned beans. Currently in my freezer: 2 racks of pork back ribs, 2 whole fryers, a pork rump roast, loads of pork country style ribs and lots of old bones waiting to become stock.

I prefer my bacon smoked, fatty and sliced thick. I fry it slowy and serve it just past limp so it's nice and crispy along the perimeter. I find that bacon served this way works great for blts, clubs and breakfast. Now if the bacon is going into a soup or a salad, I cook it more but that's just for texture's sake. I've tried the bacon that is more meat than fat once. I suppose that technically it's bacon, but since I prepared it like my normal bacon with the fat cooked the way I like it, the meat was tough and stringy and more like ham. I didn't much care for it so I used the rest in my "five pork salad" which was actually a navy bean soup with various cuts of pork.

Vinegar is also used to enhance flavors. I always make sure to use at least a little of both when I cook. Is it possible to award a Noble prize to folks that invented sea salt and vinegar potato chips?

I haven't drank any of the high carbonation ciders but one of the things I like about the Granny Smith is the low carbonation. But last October when I was watching my beloved Mariner's lose (yet again) to the Yankees and almost losing to the Indians, I was drinking a lot of the GS and sucking down about 1 or 2 Pepcid AC per pint. But I'm one of those guys that gets really stressed out over baseball in the post-season if my team has a chance.

It's mostly a texture thing, to have tiny little pieces of ice dance across your tongue. Sort of like an alcoholic Slurpee. I'm sure this isn't the traditional way to drink a cider, but it's pretty damn good.

I've had the pear cider and I didn't like it as much as the Granny Smith. It didn't taste bad per se, but the GS goes down ever so smoothly. When I drink it at home, I have a cycle of pulling one out and putting another in the freezer. Every once in a while I hit a zen state and every bottle I pull has the perfect amount of ice crystalization. My biggest gripe about the Woodchuck's pear is that it has 2% less alcohol than the Granny. Does the Granny ever give you really bad heartburn?

I first posted it in Pacific Northwest where I was encouraged to post it here as well. Here's the link: Tojo's post in PNW

It's great to hear from somebody else who's been to Tojo's. Addressing your points: First, Tojo's is pretty similar to the best sushi joints in Seattle. I'm not sure exactly what defines fusion sushi, however I do know what I get out here isn't anything close to Edomae style. My favorite place, Mashiko's (click here for my review), made a "hamburger" with a slice of ankima placed between a "bun" of a sliced scallop toped with flying fish roe. I can't imagine that's anywhere near the traditional style. So when I went up to Tojo's I was hoping for courses prepared differently and I've seen more creativity here in Seattle. I was more impressed in the presentation than in the food itself. But as I said in a previous post, he may save his exotic and more adventurous pieces for the locals. Second, it's good to know that Vancouver has such strict codes on seafood for its restaurants. That will put future visits to other places in the city in a different light. I guess we get pampered here in the states. I know we certainly do here in Seattle. That said though, I don't recall any particular raw piece to be sub-par, but it may be why there were few pieces that stood out too well. One of my personal dreams in sushi-dom is to get a piece so fresh, it's still twitching. The sweet shrimp I had at Shiro's here in Seattle was about the closest. It was kept live behind the counter, and less than 30 seconds of the head being ripped off, its tail was in front of me. The deep-fried head came about a minute or two later. It was utterly fantastic, but tail meat wasn't twitching (I can still dream though). Third, the soy and wasabi were the main ingredients that I tasted in the sauce. My palatte is still learning all of the intricate and delicate Japanese ingredients and hopefully one day I'll be able to recognize them all. Now that you mention the illegality of non-frozen fish, I wouldn't be surprised if Tojo added the sauce to mask something in the fish. Is it the norm to serve albacore with a sauce (similar to unagi which always seems to be served with a terriyaki-like sauce)? Forth, our bill came out to around $240 American for three of us, including tip. Sake was actually pretty cheap though we didn't drink that much (three large house sakes). I'm actually afraid to ask what people spend on sushi in New York and L.A. Previous to this, my largest splurge was $125 for two at Shiro's and it was nothing less than spectacular. I've had my most exotic, and thusly most exciting sushi meal at Mashiko's, but only spent around $90 for two. Fifth, it hard for me to write a scathing review about sushi simply because it's one of my "happy foods." It's one of those foods that no matter how poorly my day has gone, how upset I am, I can go eat sushi and the world is right again (or least for the duration of the meal). I'm still upset about the salmon nigiri I had with two left-over pieces to make a whole nigiri piece, and at the time I wrote the review, that made me upset about the rice. However I know better now about the rice. I've only been seriously eaten sushi for the last year and a half (though I had my first sushi 5 years ago, most of that time I lived in Texas) and as such, I still feel like a novice and like to be careful lest I am corrected by someone more in the know. It's been a week now since I was there and my opion of Tojo's is better since I've learned what rice is supposed to be like at the upper echelons of the sushi world. But I still would rate a couple of Seattle restaurants as a better experience regardless of price.

All right folks, I have led all of us astray. After talking to a real sushi expert (20 yrs experience, trips to Tokyo with top sushi chefs), I have been corrected. 1) One or two bites? One bite. No matter how big the piece is, take it all down in one fell swoop. 2) Fingers or chopsticks? My expert says there's a point in the meal where it's acceptable to switch from chopsticks to fingers and he still hasn't figured it out. But Shiro still says that fingers are acceptable. Point of note, when dipping into soy (don't mix the wasabi in), don't ever, ever leave rice in the soy dish. Major faux pas, the big chef's will have nothing but contempt and scorn for you. But it's not much of a problem here in the less traditional sushi restaurants. The third point about not mixing wasabi and soy is still valid. One more tip, good sushi chefs are sick and tired of making California rolls. If you are desperately in need one, sit at a table where you can order it in cognito, otherwise make do. I'm seen first hand where the chef rolls his eyes when they're ordered, every time dying a little more on the inside. Keep your sushi chef happy and s/he will go out of their way to please you.

All right folks, let it be forever known, that I, col klink, do hereby and knowingly rescind my "egregious error" comment about Tojo's "slipshod" rice. Last night I spoke with a guy who's been eating sushi for 20 years and has done Edomae style in Tokyo. When I told him about rice not being perfectly formed and my concern that it might not be appropriate for such an expenditure, his eyes lit up and he got very animated and excited. He was impressed that we were able to find a sushi restaurant that was so exact and demanding in its rice integrity. However he did agree that two pieces of salmon for one nigiri was not appropriate and I still stand by comments regarding that incident and my desire to see a little more exotica. But boy howdy, do I feel priveldged to see and try Edomae rice now that I know what the best rice is supposed to be.