Max Robbin

well, all i know is what i learned from bruce cost. and, yet again, forgive for the tone. There are two basic kinds of chinese soy. Soy superior sauce is thick soy with molasis, often called dark soy, used when braising meat in the "red" style. Superior soy sauce is a lighter, saltier and thinner sauce which is more often used in dips and stir fries. Tasting soy superior on it's own is awfull. It's transformed in a recipe. The japanese also have a light soy (called usukechi - Bon can correct my on my romanization), and a dark: the standard kikkoman variety. There are also soy's with combined flavourings. Mushrooms in chinese and south east asian cuisine is common (i've never tried it, just seen it in books. In japan there's ponzu which you can bottled, as well as umeboshi flavored etc. Okay there's more but i'm going to lunch. sorry if i'm telling everyone something they already know.

I'm not sure where i heard it but someone told me what steak is supposed to feel like when done at different levels. Place you're hand face up, fingers out but not tense. press the center with you're other forfinger. that's rare. an inch towards your little finger is medium rare. the ball just below your thumb is medium. Or something like that. When i actually remeber which is which it works wonderfully. Does anyone know this, and can correct me about which places on your hand are what?

My mom had a little paring knife (like 4 inches!) confiscated on her way back from france. The woman from de Gaulle customs promised it would be sent back. It wasn't. Eventually they gave us a big check and i bought a slicer instead. But we imagine the customs officials in france have a very extensive cutlery collection. ;)

thank you for that image. Now, can we get back to the blenders?

same tricks as with brown sugar. place in bag with wet towel, microwave for ten seconds with a piece of apple, etc. But mainly i just scrape it with a spoon or cut off a chunk with a knife. I don't find it so trying.

I find that using the traditional palm suger as opposed to white or brown suger makes a flavor difference. Tastes rounder and more authentic. Can be purchased all over chinatown.

I doubt jean-george (he's sort of a one name person now, like cher) dislikes dill. He uses it extensively in his cookbooks: i specifically remember dill stuffed shrimp with baked lemons. I was off dill forever but i just had some cold cucumber soup which remineded me it can be quite nice. cilantro seems to be another of these controversial herbs. I like it it small quanities (though went through maybe a five year period of severe aversion), but i know people will refuse to eat at the best restaurent in town (this is in ohio) just because they can't bring themselves to say, "no cilantro please." I actually hate eggs. The smell of a fried egg makes me nausious. I won't eat anything with more than fifty percent egg (like a custard) but i love baked goods. i'm wierd i know. chinese black vineger is nasty but essential in sweet and sour dishes.

I go to a thai restaurant with friends and the first words out of my mouth is "who wants to share some squid yum?" Nobody's interested. Now i feel vindicated. Yum is >the< foodie pick of thai cuisine. I find thai angel on grand and...laffayette and center?... to be somewhat inconsistant but when they're on, they're wonderful. Great squid yum, of the still warm extra chilli variety and very good beef and green papaya salad. Beware the chicken curry though, go for beef. My introduction to yum was thai restaurant (used to be a pongsri) on baxter and bayard. They've fallen off of late but had great yum and choisam back in the day (fyi i'm 24).

i have a picture of him with a blender, but that's for another thread. There's that blender thing again!

I like tha men's room at Eleven Madison Park. Very old world. I really do feel like i'm peeing in the middle of either a stiechand photograph or henry james novel. The original prints on the walls don't hurt either. By far the coolest bathroom i've ever been to was a pensione in... ####, somewhere in tuscany, maybe...which was covered with tile, floor ceiling walls toilets urinals sinks. blue and green as i recall, very marine. I saw Zagat's now has a catagory fo this. what do they say about it?

Bux: I actually think the texture of yama is great in an ume-shiso maki. It's the okra-like sliminess that i can't get used to. All my japanes friends have a major nostalgia trip when the see it on the menu at Tomoe.

Fat-Guy: I've found that periodic stock making (and i too often reduce it to glace for space reasons) is a wonderful shortcut to the depth of flavor found in restaurant food. And i also find myself cooking things i would not otherwise, especially when using the stock as a base liquid for cooking grains or legumes. I also find that a few quality ingedients can really make a difference in my cooking. I use sel-de-giere (sp), fresh herbs in abundance, and top notchh olive oil. These three simple luxuries really do seem to make a difference in everday cooking. Does anyone else have a similar experience with an ingredient and technique? perhaps this is a topic for another thread and catagory, but steven, where do you get your bones?

I like almost overything that goes on sushi but i do have some less then obvious favorites. Engawa is actually the flesh under the dorsal fin of a whitefish (forgive the dialectic tone, i get a little strident about sushi), and i've had it both raw and grilled and served like eal. I'm also a huge fan of shelfish especiall aoyagi, aoyagi adducter muscles (served batera style, generally somewhat sweeter), mirugai (I actually bought and served a whole one once, man was that a production!), torgai (a giant cockle i haven't seen anywhere outside of japan - do you guys get it in australia or england?), those metalic hiroshima kumomoto oysters. otherwise i'm basically a fatty tuna related fish fan: albacore, hamachi, chutorro, ohtoro, etc., etc. kazuo, rare in the u.s., is interesting but not my favorite. i'm a tobiko, masago fan. ikura kaiware is actually a traditional salad (suminomo i guess). The idea of having it on sushi is cool. I'd like to try that. I like to end the meal, if i have room, with an ume-shiso maki, with or without cucumber. The piquency and saltiness seems to clear the palate and settle my tummy. Sushi was the first food i actually liked enough to desire to eat it even when not hungry. My introduction to gastronomy. I was 4 i think. It changed my life. I still think it's one of the few perfect foods in the world.

well aside from some of you louts i'm the most arrogant chef i know (note use of "chef", not 'cook'), but i've never truelly replicated a dish i've had at a four star restaurant. I've been inspired buy them, used small elements of them and so on... You know it just occured to me that perhaps i've never really tried to exactly duplicate anything... but this is besides the point. Of course you can order two pounds of morel's from earthly delight, but when's the last time you you cooked for twenty people? You can order a whole lamb i'm sure, or a peck of brandywines or whatever. But if you're just cooking for one or two, or even four, this is impractical. Resteraunts do benefit from an economy of size when it comes to ingredients. also consider how restaurant's plate food. If you're serving four or five courses (my parties are generally not much more than that), and if you intend to plate each course with the detail and elegence of gramercy tavern, you won't have any time to eat, no matter how well planned and "do-ahead" the menu. I was actually leafing through tom collichio's "think like a chef" today, a book that is exactly on topic. Chef tom seems pretty confident in the general public's ability to make poached fois gras (is that a toucheren..or something like that?), and frankly i tend to agree with him. we can call up the same company and get the same quality of liver he uses, no problem. It's a simple technique, i'm thinking i ought to do it for the holidays. But that's a far cry from the mushroom tarts (paves, whatever) he offers in the previous chapter. Which a much more sensitive and precise technique and ingedients that may not be readily available. What i would like is for an actuall real live proffesional cook to comment on this thread. I'm sure you guys know some; why not e-mail them the page? I'd be really curious to get the proffesional oppinion. by the way, you can all come over for dinner but only two at a time. I have only three chairs.

Ignoring part of your question: Woo Lae Oak in Soho (Wooster? Green?) is a much more stylish and posh version of Korean BBQ which i found wonderfully fresh and satisfying, with great variety. Also excellent is the Kimchee Pork Stew. This is not, however, the most traditional of places, and they're not open at 4 a.m.