Moopheus

One could generalize to the miracle of bacterial fermentation. How many foods are made, or made better, by the action of some single-celled critter eating one chemical and pooping out a different chemical. Bread, cheese, miso, yogurt, etc. 'Course, sometimes this action produces deadly poison, so there you go.

Whoa! Good deal. Thanks, Weinoo. What is the brand? If you use them, please let us know how they are. ← I was just in there and they had Pastaso DOP for $2.79 and La Valle DOP in kilo cans for $2.49. Considering the non-DOP cans were still around $1.99, that's not much markup at all for the DOP cans. Now if it were possible to actually check out of Di Palo's in less than twenty minutes...

separately or together?

I think most brands that you're likely to find in a supermarket offer both types. I get filippo Berio in big cans for general cooking.

Remember also that it is not always necessary to use extra-virgin. It is better to use pure olive oil for sauteing, since it has a higher smoke point, and the high heat will destroy the subtler taste of virgin oil; it's a waste.

I suppose the weakening dollar is driving prices up too, like everything else. I just saw some jars of DOP tomatoes for I think $6 each here in Brooklyn. Even non-DOP Italian tomatoes are going for $2-3 a can around here.

I think you may have actually been looking for these guys, the online front for the Dairyland food company.

Drive the point of a large, sharp knife downwards through the center of the head, then pull the edge down and forward, essentially slicing the tiny brain in half more or less instantly. If you watch a few Iron Chef reruns, you'll eventually see this method demonstrated.

That depends. Ice cream basically begins to degrade from its fresh state as soon as the machine stops. And to me, the point of having the machine is to have it as fresh as possible, so I try not to make more than I'm going to use in a short time. Home freezers are much colder than ideal storage for ice cream, and they cycle widely, so a lot of what should be free water gets frozen, and the small ice crystals your machine has made get bigger. Stabilizers will slow this some, but at the cost of thickening of the texture of the ice cream. In custard-type ice creams (with eggs) this may be less noticeable than in plain (no eggs) ice cream, where even a slight thickening may be noticeable. Personally, I like the pure creamy texture of well-made plain ice cream, though I would never say no to a nice gelato!

If there is only a pint, why do you need to store it?

At the risk of veering slightly off topic, I had decided to sample all of the espressos available in the immediate vicinity of my office. None were very good, though a couple were not bad. Some were very bad--one of the worst was at Ferrara Cafe on Mulberry St. A 15-second shot out of a Cimbali superauto. Almost as bad a Starbuck's.

That almost exactly describes the espresso I had the other day at Dean & Deluca's. The doser was completely full, and the dosing and tamping were sloppy and cursory. But I guess we're just used to that sort of thing here in NY.

That's true, but it's also true with any kind of ingredient, and in a place where the customers are willing to pay top dollar to get the best ingredients and also for whatever amount of work is necessary to extract the best from it, you'd think it wouldn't be necessary to cut corners where a neighborhood cafe wouldn't.

Our apartment is like Ling's--small and without real dining area. We have an island with a flip-up counter. When we had a house in Mass., the room we used as the dining room (i.e., the room we ate in) was the original kitchen, and still had a beehive oven (this house was post-war, but post-Revolutionary War). The original dining room we used as a sitting room. The kitchen we used was an add-on from the 1840s.

In case Santa happens to be taking notes, a nice ice cream machine would be good. And I really need a newespresso maker. Actually, what I really need is a new kitchen to hold all the stuff I want.

Funny thing--the new Food Arts came today, and the first thing in it is an ad for Illy coffee featuring Thomas Keller, holding Francis!Francis! espresso machine. The ad quotes him as saying he "only serves Illy." Does not say "in pods."

Favorite chocolate bar? So many choices . . . how to decide?

That reminds of a time when I was in college, and a few friends and I went a nice Italian restaurant in Albany, nothing fancy but a place we liked. We had not much money in those days, and when the bill came, we literally just emptied our pockets onto the table. I think the amount we left for the tip came to about 8%. The waitress ran out of the restaurant as we were leaving, thinking she had done somthing terrible. We assured her that everything was fine--we had given her every penny we had. There was also a little pub in town where we were on good terms with one of the owners, and more than once after a night of eating and drinking, the check would come and it would be for about $3. The waiter got to keep what would amount to a 3500% tip. Sadly, that guy was forced out by his partner, and the beef stew was never as good after that.

Are they actually open now? I walked by the other night and there was a sign in the window saying they would open on the 14th, but possibly I misread.

You could just use a little corn syrup. What's happening is that as the sorbet sits in the freezer, the small ice crystals are melting and reforming as larger ice crystals, and more free water is freezing in the very low temperatures. To a certain extent it is inevitable in a home freezer because of the way they cycle. THe other thing to do is not make more than you're going to use in a day or so, and let the sorbet soften on the counter.

Was it also over budget? A really efficient team of engineers should be able to get at least a 20% cost overrun, maybe more, especially if it was cooked for a Dept. of Defense contract. Actually, in which case dinner might be even later if the ingedient procurement paperwork wasn't done correctly.

Maybe it wasn't clear, but I'm certainly not agreeing with them. It actually sounds pretty icky to me.

From the FAQ: TeeccinoWhile I've always been one to say that anybody who didn't think coffee was a drug wasn't using it correctly, there are several arguable points here. Most decaf has less caffeine than they say. It couldn't legally be called decaf otherwise. There's some evidence that coffee oils raise LDL slightly, but those oils are mostly filtered out of drip coffee. And so on.

Medaglia D'Oro is actually roasted in Florida. In fact, it's made in the same plant as Cafe Bustelo and Pilon. Though I have to say, I've used both Medaglia D'Oro and the Bustelo powder, and the D'Oro is much better for baking. The Bustelo is more bitter, the Medaglia D'oro has a better coffee flavor.

I almost forgot Shi Jin Shi at 18 Arhans.