scott123

I just looked it up in the phone book, I was off on the name, it's: Time For A Bagel 680 Speedwell Ave. Morris Plains 973-984-5885 For those of you familiar with Morris Plains, it 2 or 3 doors down from Arthurs/Collins Pub and it's right across the street from the train station. There's only a couple of parking spaces in the front. If those are full, there's plenty of parking in the back, as well as a back entrance. Just take the turn next to Arthurs and the parking lot will be on your left. The bagels, at 60 cents a piece aren't cheap. On Wednesday they sell a dozen for somewhere around 4.50, which is a pretty good deal. And one last thing. Watch what bagels they give you, some can get a little light/dark/misshapen - don't be afraid to be assertive and request a different one.

A large portion of the fat on my 235 lb frame has got to be from the mozzeralla cheese on the thousands of slices I've consumed all over the tri-state area :) While living in NYC, I worshiped at the altar of John's in the village, here out in New Jersey, I'm a huge fan of Suvios in Morristown. Pete's in Morristown is fairly formidable as well. 20 years ago I remember getting slices that were three times larger than I've ever seen at a place in Hoboken on a street off Washington. You needed a third hand to manipulate these slices. Anyone familiar with that place? Here's my best pizza tip. If a place has great pizza, it'll never be empty. Same thing for Chinese Food. If you see a lot of empty tables and the place isn't brand new, turn around and walk out.

As a new member combing through old threads, this one piqued my interest so I thought I'd give my input, even if it is a month after the fact. Having lived in New York for 10 years and making many a nocturnal visit to H&H at 3 am to get freshly baked bagels, it was very difficult for me to find something comparable here in New Jersey. After an exhaustive search for quite a few years I was overjoyed to find something of a similar caliber. It could be a bit of a distance for most of the Essex and Bergen County members in this forum but Time Out for a Bagel in Morris Plains is, imo, the best bagel West of the Hudson. Although they open at 5 am, they're there making bagels hours before that. Getting there at 5:05 won't necessarily guarantee you a fresh from the oven bagel (the holy grail of bageldom :) ) but it will improve your odds. Every hour after that and your odds go down dramatically until 12 when not only won't you get a hot bagel, the selection will be miniscule. By 2 the bagels are almost always gone. It's cafeteria style. They have a few tables where people are usually eating/reading the paper. On weekend mornings the tables are jammed full and the line is out the door. The service is horrible - no one speaks English and they rush you when ordering, but the bagels are unbelievable. If you do go, no matter what you do, don't get the blueberry bagel - it uses imitation blueberry (more like grape) flavoring.

For me, a several day open bottle of wine is undrinkable. But... I agree that 5 minutes of cooking (reducing) has a very similar effect. Opening a bottle accelerates oxidation and cooking it accelerates that oxidation even further.

Slkinsey, thanks for you thoughts on soapstones. I am definitely intrigued enough to be buying one in the near future. Although I am fascinated to hear about thermal mass issues discussed in the NY Pizza Survey thread, I tried reading through it and couldn't make it past the first few pages. Currently low carbing, I am perfectly comfortable talking about pizza peels, but seeing pictures of pizza, really good pizza, that's too much to bear. I will eventually look into that. Thanks.

Jackal, that aga peel is very aesthetically pleasing indeed. I have emailed the company inquiring about dimensions.

I know what you mean. I have a "wholesale" supplier near me that's equally mislabeled. Thanks, that abestkitchen link is the best prices/best collection of peels I've seen in one place.

That's an interesting point. I wasn't aware of this phenomenon. Could you go into a little more detail? Thanks, I do.

I was a vegetarian for 10 years and for a large part of that I practically lived on Ethiopian food. During that time and since, I've been pondering and researching ways of replicating it at home. There are many mediocre Ethiopian recipes out there. I have tens of Berbere recipes and not one am I happy with. Berbere is a lot like garam masala - everyone has a slightly different recipe and the majority of recipes you find can be heavy handed with the cloves(imo). Can I take a moment and vent about all the crummy recipes on SOAR (now some other name) that get copied all over the globe? I'm sure you've seen the yemiser wat recipe floating around. None of the countless Ethiopian restaurants I've ever been to has put frozen peas in their yemiser wat. My favorite dish, made by my favorite restaurant is yemiser alecha (I think some restaurants refer to it as kik alecha). If you've had veggie platters, it's the yellow looking stuff :) Since I haven't been able to find a recipe, I've been trying to develop something myself. On the menu, it was described as a mild lentil dish with butter, ginger and garlic. From looking at it, I could tell there were also onions and anaheim peppers. Red Lentils Onions anaheim peppers Ginger Garlic Butter Salt I've made this a few times and it's been excrutiatingly close to the real thing. After reading this thread and thinking about butter, it's probably herbed/spiced butter (nit'ir qibe). I'll give that a shot. The best barometer for any cookbook/collection of recipes you find is the injera recipe. As the previous post noted, soda water is a no-no. And recipes not using teff are a bad sign as well. Good luck.

I would avoid using the pull top can for any in-can cooking method. During cooking the inside of the can reaches a higher pressure than the force needed to pull the cover off. I highly doubt the covered wouldn't explode.

I have tried cooking with those - the brands available to me in that size are just not up to snuff. Not that I spend that much more on my dry Spanish white, but I'm much happier with the results.

I am not that much of wine drinker but use it constantly in recipes. The recipes that I make with wine rarely use more than about 1/2 a cup, leaving me with 3/4 of a bottle of wine left over. In order to have this available for future cooking, I take the rest of the bottle and reduce it by half and then freeze it in ice cube trays. Is there anything wrong with this? Will the flavor of the wine in the final dish suffer?

I had heard somewhere about a Turkish neighborhood near Hoboken, anyone?

Jason, Udoms doesn't carry fresh galangal?

And just to get down to the nitty gritty :) I did a search for udom and found this. Here is an address, phone number, and the day when fresh produce is delivered: Terri Lee Foods, Inc. Chinese, Thai and Oriental Groceries 225 Maywood Avenue Maywood, NJ 07607 201-843-7919 Udom Corp. Thai and Indonesian Grocery 288 B Main Street Hackensack, NJ 07601 201-621-0065 Udom in Hackensack has a larger selection of Thai dry goods than does Terri Lee, and Terri Lee has a larger selection of fresh produce. The best days to go to either store for fresh produce are market days, when they bring the fresh produce in directly from China Town in NYC. Udom's market day is Saturday starting at 11 a.m.; Terri Lee's market days are Thursday and Saturday starting at noon.

fink, would you happen to know the name of that Thai market?

I get the feeling you can do it without busting the locking mechanism, you just need to fool the oven into thinking it's locked when it's not. Maybe a piece of metal the right size.

800 degrees is the realm of pizzeria ovens. For the best pizza, that's exactly where you want to be. As far as cleaning cycle pizza, I don't know how to do it but the locking mechanism can be jimmied. The guy in this forum did it: http://forums.about.com/n/mb/message.asp?w...6308.3&search=y I PMed him a while back with questions. It's possible that I don't understand how to get PMs in that forum, but I yet to hear from him.

Busboy, what didn't you like about the metal peel?

I agree 100%. I haven't tried it yet, but it was recommended that I use the oven cleaning cycle to make pizza. I'm not sure what impact a cleaning cycle every two weeks will have on my oven but I am open to trying it once. I'm curious do you make pizza on your soapstone? Have you made pizza on regular baking stones? If not, do you know anyone who has that could compare the results? Although I opted for fire brick at the time, I am by no means ruling out the acquisition of a soapstone slab in the future. If it makes a better pizza, I'm getting one.

I did a substantial amount of research/pricing on soapstone and was almost ready to buy one until the question of porosity hit me. Since I couldn't find anyone that used a soapstone for bread/pizza to ask, I ended up going with another solution (fire brick). Although soapstone transfers a substantial amount of heat to the bottom crust, does it wick away moisture as quickly as the ceramic stones do? From the research I had done, my impression was that the stone did not seem porous enough, and too much steam would be trapped between the crust and baking surface. Since you bake with a soapstone, I'm curious about your thoughts on this. Mdt, although I'm extremely happy with the end results, my journey to a solution included some teeth grinding. I'll tell you my present solution and the one I'd choose if doing it all over again. Present Solution (More thermal mass but also more complicated to configure) Two 12" x 12" x 2" Fire brick tiles, purchased from a stone supplier for $6 a piece For another $10 the supplier did three cuts on the second tile so I was able to form a rectangle 15 x 18. Because the tiles were so heavy (60ish lbs.), I ended up buying kiln posts from a local ceramic supplier for another $5 to support my oven shelf. If I were to do it again "Half" Fire Bricks - 1 1/4" thick, very cheap (less than $8 to cover an oven shelf) and easy to find. Thin enough to not require any support but yet thick enough so that the brick shouldn't slide when delivering pizzas/breads. 1 1/4" thick fire bricks will give you more thermal mass than any retail baking stone out there, won't have a tendency to chip like quarry tiles and will cost you about $100 less than soapstone. Look in your yellow pages under "stone." Brick suppliers generally don't carry fire brick.

Now that I have the baking stone solution of my dreams for my home oven, I am now almost ready to make some pizza. In another forum, a member recommended a metal peel as being much easier for delivering dough to the oven. Does anyone here have experience using a metal and a wooden peel? Any preferences? Also, can the edge of a wooden peel be 'sharpened' by sanding? Are there kinds of woods that I should look for/avoid?

Hello... Being new to the site, I just took a moment and read through this entire thread - there are some great ideas here. Jaymes, I know the subtopic of your 30 year old book goes back quite a few posts, but I was curious about something. Does this masterpiece of yours exist in digital form? Knowing that 30 years ago Bill Gates was just a pimpley faced teenager, the odds are slim, but I thought I'd ask anyway.

Thanks! Thats a fantastic thread!!!

Thanks, those are some great leads. Han Ah Rhuem? I'm not familiar with that. Is that the name of a store? Korean grocers tend to have Thai ingredients (like fresh galangal) that my local Chinese grocers do not. Would you, by chance, happen to know if there are any good Korean grocers west of Little Ferry? The farther I can get away from the congestion of the GWB, the better. Also, could you recommend a good Middle Eastern grocer in Patterson? Glenn, if memory serves me correctly, Jersey City/Newark can be pretty tricky parking wise. That being said, the possibility of finding a good Moroccan or Afghani grocer west of the Hudson are probably pretty slim. Any specific places that you like?