Jeffrey Steingarten

Ruth, I love my Raytek non-contact thermometer. You said "even stocks." But as I've discovered, you can use it to measure the temperature of most sauces and other liquids, even frying oil. I do think you were shortsighted in not mortgaging the house and buying one with a range going up to at least 1000 dg. F. And the models with a circle of lasers to pinpoint the area you're measuring. Aren't you amazed and a little put off when you scan the temperature of various things in your refrigerator and discover that nothing is below 40 dg. F.? Jeffrey

Dear Sebastian, Interesting question, but I believe it needs clarificaiton. What is the RACC? I can't find the acronym anywhere. And on the face of, the idea seems internally inconsistent. How can 95% of consumers eat twice the "customary" average? I do have a new and revolutionary theory about why Americans eat more and more and more: The cheaper food gets, the more we eat. Why should eating violate the free market rules that apply nearly everywhere else? All I need to test this is to plot yearly caloric consumption against the retail price of 1000 calories of food that year. Or something like that. Jeffrey

Carolyn: P.S. About San Diego: If you think I'm saying that people who move somewhere for the weather are shallow or chronically ill, you're right. About L.A.: I sounded too negative. I love eating in L.A. Although there's disagreement on the subject, I've had two of my best meals in America at Spago, Beverly Hills. L.A. has probably the best Chinese food in the U.S., the best Korean food, and at times the best Japanese food, though with the moving of Ginza Sushiko to NYC, I believe we've gained the advantage, though I don't believe I could duplicate here the meal I had a year ago at the counter of Mori Sushi with two favorite customers, Mary Sue Milliken and her husband Josh. (It's in a neighborhood without a name, kind of a suburb of Santa Monica.) And I wish we had a restaurant like Campanile, and several others in L.A. And I'm eager to see what haute casual is all about. JLS

Dear Carolyn, I'm stumped as well. L.A. is not a perfect exemplar--it seems to go in cycles, with the past eight years having been relatively dull, though not bereft; now some people believe that L.A. is on an upswing, the capital of haute casual. I'll believe it when I eat it--that is, is it all about sweaters or T-shirts? When chef Diot from several fine restaurants in France and then a good run in NYC opened Tapenade in San Diego, I had high hopes. and I've certainly had fine bistro meals there; but the last time I visited and asked for the hanger steak, it was off the menu becuase, he told me, everybody returned it as too bloody and too beefy tasting. George at Georges on the Cove hired an excellent young chef, Trey, who uses Chino vegetables (not common in this city) and is capable of innovative cooking; I've heard recently that George and Trey can't understand why a mediocre steakhouse downtown does so much better business than they. On the other hand, Bradley Ogden's (largely by remote control) Artera, located in a pretty uninviting hotel on a mid-county highway exchange, is often excellent and popular. Most other hotel restaurants, some quite lavish (e.g. Torrey Pines Lodge, or whatever it's called, and Rancho Bernardo) have tedious food. Otherwise, chain restaurants and bad restaurants do the best. It may be something as vague and inexplicable as the idea that people in San Diego county have very little food consciousness and very little willingness to spend lots of money on restaurant meals. There are not many farmers and at the markets, people buy largely on price. The great peach grower Art Lange had a hard time selling his somewhat expensive fruit at Pacific Beach, next to a stand of cheaper, unripe specimens. Yes, there are people like the Mungers and other leaders in the AIWF chapter, but a place needs many more of them to support fine restaurants. Plus, you probably need an active nightlife. Downtown San Diego is often either empty or filled with college kids barfing the streets. (My wife and I are nearly always twice the age of the next oldest customers when we go to the movies.) And you need a certain density, which San Diego still lacks despite the recent building of tall condos on the edges of downtown--and which L.A. is gaining in an odd way, often limited to certain neighborhoods. Here's another thought: People who move to San Diego and tourists who visit the city do so, I think, for the weather, for the beaches, for water sports and golf, and for tourist attractions like the zoo (way overrated), Sea World, etc. Are these the sort of people who care about food, think about it half the way, and like spending their money on good food? Certainly not. Jeffrey

Dear Wolfert, I had spent a half-hour writing a very nice answer to your question. And then, as has happened three times during this Q & A, Windows announced that it had to shut down Internet Explorer. And there was no way to recover more than a paragraph of it. I'll try again tomorrow or the next day. Very demoralizing. Yours, Jeffrey

Dear Miguel, If you think that I'm about to fall into your trap, you're mad. Not only I have not investigated the options for frying eggs, but I have a sneaky feeling that even if I had, you would still know much more than I ever will about frying an egg. Therefore, I feel that you have an obligation to write about 3000 words for us on the frying of an egg. Please! Expectantly, Jeffrey

Hi Garys14, I used to love the original Patsy's, though some people found it greasy. But my most recent two tries were disappointing. In Manhattan, the best crust I've had in the past year was at.....John's on Bleeker Street! The topping was, of course, not terrific. I've tried Grimaldi's again several times but the lines were too long. If it were guaranteed to be Pepi's in New Haven, no line would be too long. But my last Grimaldi's had a somewhat fluffy crust. And Pepi's wasn't a guaranteed Pepi's last time I was there. OUr pizzas were good but slightly on the average side. On that trip we decided that a place called Paul's in West Haven was the best we'd eaten in the past two years. Paul has only one arm and except for his energetic wife, not enough business to hire addiitonal help. But the pizza was nearly perfect! I hear that Paul's has retired within the past 12 months. Yes, I'm a bit disillusioned with NYC pizza. And I never had illusions about the pizza outside NYC, except for the New Haven version. I hear that that place in Phoenix is very good, but I've never scheduled my travel properly. Yours, Jeffrey

Hey, I challenge that! I can't imagine who said that I don't consider Katz's the best. Yes, it is the best. Jonathan Gold opines, I believe, that Langers's in L.A. is best. I've quite a bit of it--Niman Ranch's version, at least one of their versions, is quite similar and quite delicious. You might call it spiced and pickled beef. The smoke taste is often absent because they don't smoke it; they (Niman's at least) use liquid smoke, though not really offensively. I love Nimans--though only that made from the thick, fatty, double end of the brisket , which you must specify when you order it; and then you must steam it for a long, long time. They don't understand the proper texture. But even then, the result is not quite pastrami. When Ed Levine and I had a pastrami tasting on TV, Katz's won. When I participated in Ed's tasting in preparation for his NYTimes article, Katz's did win. When I was part of a Slow Food tasting, all the wrong brands won. I am not one to make religious slurs--actually, I am but not here. And anyway, Andre Soltner could not be fooled by gentile pastrami. But a chief member of the taste panel didn't like pastrami, and several others had similar character problems. I kept my Slow Food membership, even though they didn't even know what kind of bread on which to serve the pastrami. It was like being half surrounded by a group of Diane Keatons.

Hi Bill, Just to keep things straight: I should have said, something more like, "Tell the truth, but remember that there are at least two ways of deviating from it. One is making things up and the other is changing reality so that an accurate report reads better." That's pretty clumsy, but the other is ambiguous. Who said, " Facts are the enemy of truth"? (Somebody who quotes this all the time told me is was from Cervantes, from Don Quixote. I tried to look it up, failed, and challenged him. He then admitted it may have come from "Man of La Mancha"! I have postponed further research. Jeffrey P.S. For Neapolitan pizza, nothing can replace a wood-fired oven. For a New York City (or New Haven) Neopolitan-American pizza (more dough and chewier from higher gluten flour) you need the even higher temperature of a coal oven--widespread in these two cities but still uncertain in origin.

Dear Pan, If you had not corrected me in such a courteous way, I would have answered, "Whatever!" Instead, I'll simply thank you. Jeffrey

I've sent out 575 copies of the lobster souffle recipes. If you guys didn't receive your copies, please send in another request to lobstersouffle@earthlink.net. We weren't prepared for this level of popularity. It's gotten in the way of my answering more e-Gullet questions. I had toyed with posting the recipes in one of my answers here, but that would probably be considered improper or something.

P.S. I forgot to mention: The main reason I'm toying with north Indian vegetarianism is that I lost ten pounds for the first time since they took Fen/Phen off the market--and without first getting sick. And ithis continued for a few days back home in Manhattan, until I started eating regular food.

Another knotty question. We can't eat healthy because we don't know what healthy is. In 1995, Walter Willett at Harvard wrote an article in Science (a peer-review journal) entitled "What Should We Eat?" He reviewed the literature up to that point. He identified only three foods, as I remember it, that had been reliably linked to chronic disease: trans-fatty acids, unfermented dairy products, and beef--perhaps the red part more than the fat. And that was it. Since then, the Harvard group has taken up the glycemic index and stressed whole grains versus white sugar (and potatoes). They've not found that saturated fat is related to any cancer; the red part of beef may be linked to prostate cancer. There's a way out here, but you have to start early: I've found a peer-reviewed paper showing that your chances of getting a serious case of prostate cancer is lowered if you masterbated a lot in your twenties. They've also found with research in their Nurses' study that eating roughage, e.g. salad, does not lessen your risk of colon cancer. And, of course, that if you reduce your intake of saturated fat but eat the same number of calories, it's much better to increase your intake of vegetable fat than to increase carbohydrates. But that was before they got excited about the glycemic index. (I was on some panel at the Harvard School of Public health in January 2003, shortly after their work on the glycemic index was published. I bemoaned the stress on whole grains. I pointed out that very few traditional cultures eat brown rice, whole wheat pasta, etc. They were unmoved.) Since then, on a trip to India, my wife and I stayed with two art-history professors who have never tasted animal flesh in their lives. Or eggs. Their protein comes mainly from pulses, grams, beans, lentils, etc. I'll write about this in Vogue. But the result was that I found myself completely satisfied. Although I've ridiculed vegetarians all my professional life, and still do, my recent eating pattern has been largely North Indian vegetarian, with meat mainly in restaurants--oh, plus I also roasted two lambs and a kid in San Diego. It's not a religious thing, for me at least. Nor is it an obsession. And American vegetarian food, with the dreaded crudite at the top of the pyramid, doesn't do the trick. I think it's the combination of stomach-filling lentils and hot spices that satisfy the tongue. Maybe it's all go away. Maybe I'm under the sway of a sinister Hindu trance. But if the answer to healthy eating is a largely vegetarian diet with whole grains (but not the awful whole wheat American bread), plus mouthwatering forays into steak, game birds, and fish , when you feel like it and when the quality is really high--this would not bother me at all. At least at present. The pastrami and barbecue must be made with the highest artistry. Confusing, huh?

Hi Ben, What a challenging question. There are two senses in which "the best" applies. One is in defining the characteristics of the absolute best peach, fried chicken, salami, etc. I don't think I've changed much in this area. It sounds odd when I say that, but I don't think it's a sign of inflexibility. I asked Ducasse why he was serving steak that had been dry aged for only three weeks, and he told me that it was a tradeoff between juiciness and flavor. This is true. And so I started tasting grass-fed short-aged beef with new appreciation--but not in an ultimate sense. As for the best methods, I'm sure I've changed my favorite methods quite a lot. Do you think I should issue a volume of errata on my entire life? Jeffrey

Dear Fifi, Yes, I still cook for Sky King, perhaps more than ever, when I'm in San Diego and last week when my wife cleverly smuggled Sky King into Manhattan. The minimum meal here in New York City was ten or fifteen chunks of Jewish rye fried in oil over high heat; the heat is then set to low and five eggs broken over the bread and scrambled with it. I fed him no dry dog food on his visit to New York, but I certainly do so for convenience in San Diego. On the other hand, I possess several means in San Diego for cooking large amounts of animal flesh; my article in the February Vogue will tell you how I roasted a pretty large pig, plus lambs and a kid. Sky King eats very well when I'm in San Diego and in a cooking mood. No, I haven't done further veterinarian research. I certainly intend to. I wonder if a Golden Retriever's ideal diet is really much different from that of a pig. My book editor would like me to look further into the matter. I had considered calling my second book, The Man Who Cooked For His Dog, and Other, etc., etc. I still wish I had. With best wishes, Jeffrey

Hi Rodney, As I know from sad experience, one fantasizes the oddest meals when one has been deprived of favorite foods for several days in a row. The most recent such sad experience was in 1974. Otherwise, I get to eat more or less what I want, at least if I apply myself to it. But no amount of application and elbow grease would get me the one feast I especially regret never having been invited to. This would be my last supper. A few years from now, I might even apply to join the guys on death row just to be able to have it. And if this seems extreme, I can assure that with the banquet I'm thinking of in prospect, I would certainly forgo any legal appeals from a death sentence, if I should do something to deserve one. The meal was just one part of the marriage celebration in Florence, in 1661, of Marguérite-Louise, daughter of the Duke of Orléans, to one of the Medici kids. Though the entire party lasted for weeks, I'm thinking of the merenda (ordinarily an afternoon snack) given by Cardinal Carlo de Medici, a lover of hunting, beautiful books, and all the pleasures of the table. First came 35 cold dishes, among which were hams cooked in wine and decorated with carved, gilded bay leaves; a Genoese pie filled with cooked and uncooked egg-yolks and candied sweetmeats, and decorated with pistachios; roasted capons and young chickens, laid out with sweetbreads, small stewed birds, and slices of salted pig’s cheeks boiled and fried golden. There were flat omelets spread with capers, pitted olives, marzipan paste, fennel seeds, pistachios, sugar, and cinnamon, all arranged in little piles, three layers each, and decorated with egg fritters; and sheets of pastry interleaved with slices of lean ham, hash of roast capon, roasted sweetbreads, grapes, candied citron, pistachios, and marzipan—all sliced crosswise to reveal a striking mosaic. The death row caterers must not omit the jellied dishes such as guinea fowl split and decorated with pine nuts in the shape of flowers and covered with colored aspics; and pigeons roasted and then stewed in muscatel wine and lemon juice in the Catalan manner, with powdered spiced biscuits and pounded candied citron to thicken the sauce, and served cold. The garnish would be ten little rose-shaped tarts filled with five different sweet preserves—red and white quince, bitter cherry, green grape, and plum, all covered with marzipan paste (in the shape of the oak tree from the bride’s coat of arms) iced with sugar and flecked with gold. For dessert, the Cardinal offered fresh Tuscan cheeses; Pisa biscuits steeped in wine, arranged on a giant, iced platter, and covered with orange segments, split green almonds, tender sweet fennel, and diced, candied citron; Siena peach sweetmeats, sugar paste lilies, and a platter of Genoa sugar plums; marzipan eggs filled with favors for the ladies; small sugar baskets holding pistachio nougat also flecked with gold leaf; a plate of butter in the shape of a lion with a raised paw, another heraldic device of the bride’s family; ices of every description; and fruits half frozen in snow preserved from the winter months or served in cups carved out of ice with garlands of myrtle and flowers, or lodged in pyramids of ice. This was just a part of the first of seven services at Cardinal Medici’s afternoon snack on June 10, 1661. It sure makes a fine starting point. It might even be sufficient for my last supper, or almost. I should mention that as I missed the original event, I have had to take most of the details from Elizabeth David’s Harvest of the Cold Months. I believe she attended. The scourge of tobacco had been discovered in the New World at least a century before the Cardinal’s merienda. I imagine that the Old World was completely in love with tobacco by then, and that at least the men would have enjoyed a good smoke. I am surprised that the Cardinal's menu included no chocolate, which had been discovered, unknowingly, by Columbus on his fourth and last voyage, near the island of Guanaja, off Honduras, in the early 1500's. I believe that Cardinal Richelieu's brother, in France, drank chocolate for his headaches at least 40 years before the Medici wedding. I would have lots of chocolate at my last and final supper. Waiting on death row must be a real headache. Jeffrey

Dear Bill, You posed this question in such a gentlemanly way! But your questioning whether I would actually set my oven on the cleaning cycle to bake a pizza makes me wonder about your true commitment to pizza. I hope I'm wrong. Of course I would monkey with my oven. No big whoop! After all, I did great damage to my BBQ grill and would gladly do it again, though not quite so stupidly. And just before we sold our San Diego house to move temporarily into a rented version, I finally figured out how to defeat the interlock on the door that prevents one from opening it at the height of the cleaning cycle. Truth, literal truth--that's a very important question to me and very complicated In general, I would claim that everything I write is true, usually down to the smaller detaills. Maybe that's because my imagination is not rich enough to make things up. When I've tried, on one or two occasions, the results have sounded false and hollow. I've been on two panels, years apart, with my friend Ruth Reichl when this question has bee asked: Do you feel the need always to tell the truth? Ruth's answer is, no. People don't read her to get the truth (even though she is, after all, writing about people and events), but to get a good story, and in any event, she's mainly interested in writing a good story, not a true story. I was shocked. My view was precisely the opposite. I always tell the truth. I even try to be careful when telling a story not to monkey with the chronology, always tempting when your reporting one experiences that may have occured over the course of a month or a year. People always ask my wife or my assistant Elizabeth, did you really make ten thousand pigeon pies, etc., etc., and they always answer, sure, of course, what did you think. I suppose that people raise the question because they wonder how a grown man could possibly be so dumb.... It's also about this: The world is so weird, so surreal so much of the time that there's no need to make things up. And if you're a writer and find that a story you're telling is turning out boring, either tell a different story or tell this one in a different way. But before I get even higher on my high horse, let me tell you about the difficulties and ironies in my position. I remember spending an hour or two in the market in Meknes in Tunisia. I was with a group, and everybody in the know had prepared me for an active and interesting market. It was one of the only markets I've been to around the Mediterranean that I would describe as tedious and tiresome. Even the stuffed flatbreads I was hungrily looking forward to didn't seem to exist. The butchers in their stalls decorated with bloody calves heads were using an amazingly huge, oddly shaped, and threatening kind of cleaver, and I should have bought one or two of them, but I wasn't smart enough to think of it soon enough. Anyway, I had time left in the market and nothing very interesting, and so I wandered off into dark, narrow, and untravelled alleys off the market. Maybe I would discover something interesting, but more likely something really revolting, such as a ten food pile of bloody calf intestines, or even better, maybe I'd be kidnapped and held for ransom. That would be an article! So, I immediately stopped myself. Here I was, committed to writing only the truth, but trying to make the truth much more interesting than it had wanted to be that morning. In theory, the test is simple. Would I being doing this particular thing if I weren't writing about it? The answer is often yes--after all, I did have a somewhat secret life as a food explorer before I did it for a living. But would I make ten versions of coq au vin with real old live Brooklyn rooster or settle for five? That's a different question. That's for the purpose of meticulous recipe development and testing, which I owe to my readers not necessarily to myself. Until I come up with a succinct test, I'll leave it at this: Tell the truth, but remember that there are at least two ways of deviating from it. One is making things up and the other is making things better. Jeffrey

Dear Vikram, I agree with almost everything you've said. Of course, it doesn't matter whether I do or not because I am less of an authority on India, if there is an India, than anyone you could name. And I share your doubts about certain peripatetic food writers' methods. I spent three weeks in India and my wife spent four. We had been there before, for several months. But that was long ago. We might have travelled south, where we've never been, but my wife, who as a museum curator in San Diego, has charge of the finest collection of Indian miniatures in the US (they call them South Asian paintings because some are largish, miniature is insulting, and Mughal art is not Indian)--but the Indians still call them Indian miniatures) . This is the Binney collection, and Caron is first to bring it out to the public. Her tutor and helper is Professor B. Goswamy, professor emeritus at Panjab University, and one of the two or three or one greatest experts on the subject. He and his wife live in a nice house in Chandigarh, are very serious Hindus, and have a good young woman cook. They are vegetarian, and that's why my article will be about. We spent six days with them in Chandigarh, and four or five days on the way to , at, and driving home from the Kullu festival, where we ate awful stuff in the hotel and basic stuff in large group at the festival with a group of priests and officiators. (Goswamy is revered all over India and in on every museum board.) Each meal at the festival containing four or five courses of pulses, plus rice, sweet rice, and once bread. We spent two days in Ahmedabad to visit the Calico museum (Goswamy calls it one of the four greatest unknown museums of the world), where we had one vegetarian meal with Geera Sarabhai and ate little else. And in Delhi, which is not an awful city, of course, it was half restaurants in and out of hotels, and half at people's houses, hospitable people of means. One dinner was co-offered by the daughter of the last Nawab of Rampur, who brought several real Mughal dishes, truly delicious and very softly spiced. The one outstanding hotel meal was at the Mughal restaurant (not the Bukhara) at the Sheraton Maurya in Delhi. Well, there's a start. Jeffrey

I didn't know that our show reached Menton! Thanks for your question. I believe my answer to Jason Perlow's post entitled "No More Roundups? should answer yours. If not, please let me know. His thread does however degenerate into scatological references. That's Jason for you. Jeffrey

Hey, Jason, I hadn't noticed your use of "ill-fated." The show lasted for about 2 1/2 years, though not all of them in Manhattan. How long was it supposed to last? I'd say that fate was kind, but not for long enough. Yours, Jeffrey

Dear Mary Kay, Thank God you read the rest of the book! The Chinos are wonderful people, but sometimes careless towards strangers, as we all sometimes are. They love chefs who can appreciate what they're doing, but I assume that either you or your friend was also extremely charming. Or did you mention my book? They're very loyal. I spent Thanksgiving with them, and besides cooking twelve or fifteen wonderful vegetables dishes to go with the turkey and goose (they'll eat only vegetables they've picked that morning, so we got to take home the leftovers) , Hideo's wife Sherry's son by an earlier marriage, a young doctor, brought flu shots for us all. I just ate nearly a whole jar of Kay's boysenberry jam. Yours, Jeffrey

Hey Russ, How're you doing? That suit is not cashmere, it's honest wool, though quite soft at that. And it's a pinstripe, not a chalkstripe. I so wish I could afford those dreamy handmade British suits again. Why should a food writer be paid less than a lawyer? Maybe it's because we can't help doing it, and they can. I like lawyers and generally admire the system. It's investment bankers who I feel have somehow captured a key node in the economic system--it's as though they've somehow constructed a toll both on the San Diego Freeway or the Internet--and for doing what really amounts to absolutely nothing, they can exact exorbitant tolls and beautifully cut, hand-sewn British suits. Jeffrey

Yet another fine question. Thanks for having me. Spain is the new Spain. Also, Ferran and his followers are perhaps the most innovative cooks around. That's all there is to say. Except: Ferran Adria has had three Michelin stars for, I wish I knew, seven years now. I ate there when he had two stars because Paula Wolfert told me to. the food was largely nouvelle Spanish, very good, but not revolutionary. And then he started transforming himself. Yes, maybe he's a genius, who come up with new tricks very year. Nobody did what he could do. But what about the other great Spanish chefs such as Arzac and Santamaria? They were doing what the great French chefs were doing--elevating the traditional, local idiom to haute cuisine. Nothing to sneeze at, especially given the wonderful Spanish products that the world food press had more or less ignored. Such as jamon iberico, and the best seafood this side of Hong Kong. My point, at least one of them, is: Ferran was cooking his revolutionary food at least four years before any American journalist wrote about it. (I couldn't have been dumber not to write about before that Amanda broke the news in the NY Times, the first US writer, I believe.) The American press is influential world-wide. But for most Europeans this was old news. But is it food? That what lots of people say about Ferran. I've eaten there four or five times by now, and the question still recurs. He's a genius; very few have followed him successfully; and he rejects what most of us would love to eat. I remember one day when he was showing me around La Boqueria in Barcelona, the great market on Las Ramblas, especially for seafood. All the fish sellers are women wearing fancy dresses and gold jewelry. I pointed out an enormous gamba, the size of a banana, and recalled a perfect seafood meal I had eaten at La Trainera in Madrid. Ferran said, "I don't care about the perfect gamba any more. I've eaten perfect gambas since I was young. Alberto (his younger brother and his pastry chef) went to a sushi bar in New York (the late Sushi Hatsu, I believe) with Jacques Torres and wept when he tasted the giant clam. That's not for me. I am interested in modern cooking. Are there any modern cooks in New York City?" I guess not. Of course, everything I say will have many exceptions. And there's innovation here and in France. But in both countries, I think--and maybe for commercial reasons--revolutionary innovation has taken a second place to perfecting what we've already accomplished. Like Bach. And that's what most of the Spanish chefs are doing--it's just that we're not so familiar with what they started with. I ate at a wonderful place in Girona, on the way to Las Rosas and El Bulli. Was it called El Cellar de San Roca? I especially remember the carpaccio of pig's foot. It was a revelation and I hadn't eaten anything like it before, but it was obviously not revolutionary, except to me, as I was not familiar with Spanish pig's foot preparation. Spain is the new France only because everybody's talking about it, and the French, some of the French but not my friends, are offended by the idea that so many food lovers are talking about and travelling to Spain. They'll get over it, and we'll all be the better for it.

Bill, I'm not ready to answer your question. Not that it's worth waiting for. But I have something else on my mind. This afternoon I was preparing a pretty long answer to a very important question, I believe it was from you. about whether I always tell the truth. I had nearly gotten to the final sentence when my Norton Anti-Virus told me I had to reboot, and that I better save my stuff. I ignored it. It won. And I lost the entire answer. Now I can't even find the question on the eGullet site. Did my answer somehow get sent out. If the question there, but I've gone blind. Can you help me?

Jason, I couldn't agree with you more. But I feel that TV is the best forum, and nobody who owns a TV camera wants to put us on. Our frankness was so much fun because it was on TV! And Metro could let us do that because they had almost no advertizing. The Internet contains endless dissing of various commercial products. But being able to say that Mott Apple Juice looks like pee-pee and tastes like a sugary IV in intensive care--then people understood. I hope. I learned lots. We'd ask the staff to buy a whole range of, say, apple juices. By the last six months of the show, we were up to 16 or 20 possibilities. And even then we'd get calls or e-mails after the show, telling us we had missed the most perfect apple juice made by some kosher bakery in Brooklyn. There was no way we could show all 16, and so we had to eliminate half before the show. To do this, we obviously had to list criteria as soon as wel got to the studio, and argue about it with each other. And get to the studio at least a half hour earlier. And we couldn't do the retasting of the best eight on camera because it might be so long and boring. So we switched all the tasting to before the show. The wonderful part of it was that Ed Levine and I, who have different tastes in food, almost never disagreed in the final tasting--and it was frightening close with apple juice. We wanted Windfall Farms to win, but of course we didn't know which it was. And then finally, at the end, both of tasted slight traces of skin and core in one of the two finalists, and that made it more complex and more rustic. So we agreed and asked which it was and....the winner was Windfall Farms. Have I mentioned that Mott's looked like pee-pee and tasted like sugar?