russ parsons

it might be a good idea to give it a test with a limited amount of vinegar first. i had a friend who bought something similar years ago only to find that the adhesive that sealed the spigot to the jar was not impermiable to vinegar. or at least that's what he suspects since he was greeted at breakfast by a floor covered in vinegar with a popped spigot in the center.

sun tea jar will work (does work; is working) just fine. as for wine, i prefer to use fruity but well-made reds. i see no point in putting anything good in there (unless there's dregs at the end of a bottle). i have not had much luck with white wines, because they oxidize so badly. maybe someone else has a secret.

i use a sun tea jar and it works great. in fact, i have two of them. one of them filled with vinegar that has already turned, the other with wine that is still in the process. as far as the acetone smell, i've had problems with that, too, so i asked a friend who is a very good winemaker and he said that was a result of too-high temperatures producing way too many acetobacters (as i remember it). he suggested cutting the vinegar with water and letting it stand for a a couple of days. worked like a charm. (by the way, you'll almost always want to cut wine vinegars with water at some point in the process ... alcohol converts to acidity almost on par, so a 13% alcohol wine will become a 13% acid vinegar. most vinegars are in the 5-7 range ... i find i like it at what i estimate is about 7-9. in practice, i just add water until it tastes right.)

i salted anchovies a couple of years ago when i found a bunch at the farmers market for something like $1 for 2 pounds. i fressed about how to do it until i read a description in patience gray of a scene where she watched an old man filleting them into an old oil can. after that, i figured, i can't go wrong. the procedure i used is pretty simple. i filleted the anchovies (you can do this with your thumbnail) and layered them with salt on a cookie sheet for overnight. i drained off the liquid and arranged them in a sealable glass jar with fresh salt and a bay leaf. i have no idea whether the bay leaf made any difference, but it looked pretty. and the anchovies were very good, though i have to admit they were not quite as plump and sweet as the very best sicilian salted anchovies i now have in my refrigerator (believe i got them from esperya).

i disagree with those who say tripe should be cooked briefly. i really like it cooked for several hours, particularly when you do it in a tomato sauce. you really develop those "third flavor" overtones that way. two good ingredients become a great dish.

that is one of my pet peeves. to me, too many stories are written about what "those people" do (never that explicitly of course) rather than "here's what we did in my family." there are a couple of reasons why that happens. first is the traditional journalistic news model that you send a reporter out to write a story and that reporter can report on anything accurately and well. to an extent this is true, but i do think it's rare that a reporter can capture all the nuance that someone from inside the culture might. which brings us to the second reason, and the much stickier one: it's really hard to find people who can write well about food and it's doubly hard when you start restricting yourself only to people from within the culture. when i was editing, that was a constant frustration. i had some notable successes but i also had a lot of flops (hopefully none of them made the paper in that state). it's a matter of how you choose to allocate resources, both money and energy. you can send out a reporter you know you can count on to get 90% of the story with a really easy edit. or you can take a chance on someone you don't know, work a week on a piece that gives you an extra 5% and then stay awake at night waiting for calls from other people in that culture telling you what an idiot you were for hiring someone who plainly didn't know what they were talking about. i have a hard time finding fault with editors who choose to go the other way.

anyone interested in chinese food in the sgv ought to check out carl chu's invaluable book "finding chinese food in los angeles" if i was smart enough to figure out how to include an amazon link i would ... it's there.

amen. without presuming to address the specific question of jonathan gold, this thread touches on something that has long bothered me about people writing about other people's food. i'm not sure where it comes from--the french with their passion for intellectual organization? escoffier specifically? perhaps an innate human desire to render things in black and white? -- but one of the central fallacies of "ethnic" cuisine reporting is the urge to say "here is what they do." "Here is how they make this." gradually, as we become more familiar with an area, well, by gosh, we discover that things break down. There is no Italy, there is tuscany, sicily, piedmont, et al. there is no france, but a series of french subsets. no matter how often this happens or how predictable it may be, this is always treated as something of a revelation. spend enough time with a cuisine, of course, and you find that those subsets each have their own subsets, increasing geometrically until you arrive at the truth that we all know from our own experience--everyone does things differently. we can make some generalizations about how a dish is prepared, but in the end, your mom didn't prepare the same dish the same way as her mom, or her neighbor. the more we learn about the cooking of another country, the less we are able to make intellectual distinctions of rightness or wrongness (to say nothing of "authenticity"). in the end, probably the only thing we're left with as writers is to approach a plate with an awareness of the culinary culture it comes from but also with an open mind.

newspapers use star ratings for one reason: readers love them (obviously not e-gullet readers, but the vast majority). whether you're talking about restaurants, robert parker's wine scores or the seating arrangement at spago, most people are nuts about classifications (and other people are nuts because of them).

yeah, what he said. i think in general four-star restaurants are a category of restaurants, not necessarily a grade of restaurant. we've talked about the variety of critics the NYT has used over the last couple of years, but can anyone give an example of a four-star restaurant that didn't fit that very specific mold? quiet, serious, distinguished, exalted? i'm just asking because i don't know.

maybe i missed it, but it seems everyone is arguing as if every restaurant wanted to win 4 stars. i thought implicit in the review was an acknowledgement that babbo chose to be a three-star restaurant and was happy with that and god bless'em.

i did a piece 10 years ago on testing the different fat levels in homemade ice cream (all made without egg yolks). i came up with 18% fat (2 cups cream, 1 each of half and half and milk). more fat that that gave you an unpleasant mouth-coating texture. less and it just wasn't quite as good. i also tested different sugar concentrations and came up with about 14% (between 1/2 cup and 2/3 cup per quart of liquid). of course, other ingredients will affect that: chocolate, sweet fruit, etc. this was just for plain "fior di latte" style. it really is interesting trying to balance all of the flavors and textures, and a good way to spend a couple of summer afternoons.

As is mine since klink has the great good sense to use my recipe. mine is 2/3 cup per gallon. it is, of course, infinitely superior.

i think if you review his reviews, bart mainly focused on local mom-and-pop places, not fine dining. and his reviews were more about the colorful owners than about the intricacies of cuisine. and you know what? people really do like those kinds of stories. just don't call them reviews (and, of course, don't hit them up for free meals afterward).

my impression is that it wasn't for his review meals. he paid for those (after all, the paper reimbursed him). i think whoever said it was a power thing was right. i think bart just wanted to be recognized as a vip. i'm afraid this is not uncommon among people who want to be restaurant critics. hopefully, most of them get weeded out early.

sugar does not counter salt. sweet is not the opposite of salty, it's just different. try it without the sugar sometime.

yeah, what she said, but especially that bit about the sugar. when i read the initial post (admittedly, i'm late to the party), what immediately occurred to me was that someone had oversugared the brine. with poultry, i use no sugar at all because the taste and the texture always reminds me of sliced luncheon meat. with pork, i am not so dogmatic. but less is definitely more.

well, i've known bart ripp for more than 30 years. he and i were sportswriters together at the albuquerque journal, my first job. he followed me as restaurant critic at the albuquerque tribune. he is a wonderful writer and i learned a lot from working with him. that said, there is no excusing what he did. if the accusations are true (and i don't think anyone who has worked with him would seriously doubt them), he should have been let go long ago. but i would also point out that prior to being hired as the restaurant critic at the tribune, bart's only acquaintance with fine dining was at las vegas buffets when he was covering boxing matches. he was hired for the job because he is a colorful writer, not because he knew anything about food. i mean anything ... at all. despite our friendship, i was shocked when i found out he had been named restaurant critic. to me, the fact that he was, and that he was able to hold onto the job (and even change papers) for so long speaks to the utter disregard most newspaper administrations have for food and restaurants. anyone who spent 5 minutes with bart would know that he's a wonderful and charming guy, but that he doesn't know radicchio from a radiator. without excusing what he did, i think there is more blame other places than the note allows.

i had the (mis)fortune of being seated next to jacques at an iacp booksigning. which meant that i was in the position of making conversation with the lines of people who were waiting to have him sign their books/aprons/whatever or just have a picture taken with him. not quite as humbling as being seated next to julia, but close. seriously, he is a great guy, one who is always revealing unexpected layers. i don't think i've ever seen a prouder grandpa than when claudine brought her baby by. he picked it up, abandoned the book stack and walked around for about a half hour showing everyone the baby. really a sweetheart.

i hate to disagree with blovie, but i do like plugra for my curd ... i think of curd as more of a lemon-buttery think than a lemony thang, er, thing. absolutely the best winter dessert after a big red wine-heavy meal (as long as we're hyperbolizing): spread a prebaked tart shell with a thin layer of lemon curd. if you want to make it pretty, take some long strands of lemon zest, cook them in grenadine, pat them dry and chop them very finely and then sprinkle over top. michel richard taught me how to do it even more easily--he strips the zest with one of those japanese mechanical apple peelers, cooks it in grenadine, then puts it in a blender with a lot of water and puree's it. the zest is chopped very, very finely so it can be drained in a chinois. brilliant.

in the spirit of unrestrained chauvinism this thread seems to be going in, i have to say that mine is the best. paraphrased from "french fry": 2 large eggs 2 large egg yolks 1/2 cup sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt Grated zest of 1 lemon 1/2 cup fresh lemon juice 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, chilled and cut into pieces beat eggs, egg yolks sugar and salt together in small saucepan until smooth and light colored. add lemon zest, juice and cold butter and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until butter melts, about 5 minutes. reduce heat to medium-low and continue cooking, stirring for about5 minutes, until the curd is smooth and thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. pour the curd through a fine strainer into a chilled bowl. cover tightly with plastic wrap, pressing it flat against the surface of the curd to prevent the formation of a skin. and refrigerate until chilled. (i do like the idea of beating it until it's chilled ... i'll have to try that). i did a quest for curd several years ago and came up with this via "excell" (plotting in a dozen recipes, trying them all, finding what i liked and didn't like and coming up with a couple of testing candidates ... ). i also tried it with different citrus. lime was very good. others were less good ... their flavors were less distinct in some cases (grapefruit and orange) or there were inherent problems (the fine berry color of blood oranges turns bruised purple when heated). the "trick" in this recipe is making sure the butter is very cold ... it moderates the heat in the cooking of the eggs so they don't coagulate.

speaking just for myself, i do each of my recipes twice and then they go through the test kitchen at the times before they are published. and occasionally someone will still come up with a problem. there are several trouble spots: first of all, cooking is not strictly a chemical operation ... there are variables in ingredients (cherries over ripe? under ripe?); definitions (high heat? mince? chop?) and judgement (how set is "set"? what does it mean when a tester comes out clean? how clean?). on top of this, there is a balance that must be maintained in recipe writing. they must be detailed enough that someone can reasonably replicate the dish, but not so detailed that they go on for thousands of words and scare people away. it is always instructive to teach cooking classes from time to time, just so you can see what other people make of your recipes. sometimes the dishes come out totally unrecognizable. hopefully, they still taste good. on another note, was anybody else curious about someone trying to cook a dish that they had never eaten before? this isn't critical, as i've done it myself (and with clafoutis, too, as a matter of fact ... when i started out i was utterly seduced by the picture in paul bocuse cooks at home ... disappointing recipe, as well). it seems a little to me like trying to play a song from reading a chord progression. do you think this is just an american thing?

bristol farms in la, $30 a pound for kings.

a bit of a drive away, but you might want to try The Farmhouse in the Russian River Valley in Sonoma (near forestville). i had dinner there last week and it was really, really great. steve lietzke is the chef and he's doing a really good job. we did a long tasting menu, but probably the highlight was a beef carpaccio topped with a small salad of crisp sweetbreads and fresh porcini. an unexpected combination that really worked. awesome wine list, too, and not exorbitant. definitely my second-favorite restaurant in the wine country and not all htat far behind the first.

they do seem to take a masochistic thrill in this. i've been at a table for 5 where almost every course each diner got a different dish, usually grouped around some sort of theme. i particularly remember one that was "battle lobster", where each dish showed off a different aspect of lobster flavor or texture. really a tour de force.