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Shalmanese

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Posts posted by Shalmanese

    Foodies: Are you a classicist? an elitist?

    in Food Traditions & Culture

    Posted

    I think I said it best in this thread. The correlation between price and quality of food is tenuous at best. At best, it is only one way. That is, good foods isn't neccesarily expensive but expensive foods are usually good.

    If you believe the sole determinant of the quality of a food is taste, then food snobbism has no justification. Dozens of foods which are now expensive were once cheap and those which were cheap are now expensive. To arbitrarily reject foods because they are cheap is to denounce the snobs of the past as hopelessly misguided. Similarly, the foods you reject today might one day be highly prized by food snobs cut from the same cloth.

    Foodies recongise this fact, that great food exists at every level and so does mediocre food. Being a foodie is to seperate the great from the mediocre, not the expensive from the cheap.

    And mizducky: I don't think at all that foodieism is a symtom of the idle leisure class. Go to nearly any culture in any socioeconomic bracket and you will find people who are passionate about their food and could be properly classified as foodies. French farmers, italian grandmothers, chinese peasants, mexican bakers. However, I think it's an absurd myth fostered by rose tinted tourist glasses that an entire culture could be like that. I'm willing to bet that if you landed in any one of those cultures, you would find quite a sizable proportion of the population as apathetic about food as the average american. Perhaps this is the reason why they aren't typically thought of as foodies, because of the mistaken notion that foodies in America are very much out of the ordinary in society while completely normal in idealised french countryside. But the French have latched onto McDonalds and Hypermarches just as much as the Americans and foodieism is still very much a minorty position, no matter where in the world you go.

    Cooking with Liquid Nitrogen

    in Cooking

    Posted

    Of course, the other thing you could do which has some great potential -- though no ideas jump out at me at the moment is "cooking with liquid oxygen".

    Well, I could certainly imagine being able to play around a bit with tableside cooking... if you could work out the liability issues with people getting burnt.

    Liquid nitrogen is indeed used tableside both at El Bulli and The Fat Duck.

    I know LN2 is used tableside. I was envisioning *cooking* tableside with LOX.

    New tiger tomato debuts in Britain

    in Kitchen Consumer

    Posted

    "Experts say the new tomato is so tasty is can be eaten in salads, as a snack on its own...."

    And what I want to know is, why shouldn't every tomato be like this? That is just what a tomato should be. No more, no less.

    Heh, when I was reading that, I was thinking... "But, thats how my tomatos ALREADY taste!".

    Cooking with Liquid Nitrogen

    in Cooking

    Posted

    Of course, the other thing you could do which has some great potential -- though no ideas jump out at me at the moment is "cooking with liquid oxygen".

    Well, I could certainly imagine being able to play around a bit with tableside cooking... if you could work out the liability issues with people getting burnt.

    Risotto--Cook-Off 21

    in Cooking

    Posted

    Grub - your instincts were right about grinding up whole threads - these will be of much better quality than the ground stuff.  The Iranian saffron is superior to the Spanish (although more pricey and harder to find as well).

    My grandmother taught me to add some sugar to a few threads in a mortar and use a pestle to grind them up; then to add a bit of boiling water to them - this releases the flavor.  She also warned me (and still does) not to over-do it with saffron, too much can be overpowering and too much for our systems to handle.  There was a thread about saffron not too long ago and many people complained they don't like it, so perhaps they were exposed to too-large doses.  If I accidentally add too much water, I simply let the excess cool and store it in the freezer in a zippy for future use.  You can even break off pieces as you need them.

    For risotto, you want to add a bit of stock to the threads instead of water, in a vessel separate from the rest of your stock, and add it to the rice when the rice is about 2/3 cooked; this way the flavor will be more pronounced in the final dish.

    I've heard that wine is the best soaking liquid for saffron. The alcohol releases a few more of the alcohol soluble flavours. Then again, it could just be bullshit.

    Carrots

    in Cooking

    Posted

    I don't usually cook carrots but I've fallen in love with Thomas Keller's carrot soup. Glaze 3 large carrots in 1 1/2 cups of carrot juice, 1 tbsp of butter and 1 tbsp of honey and a pinch of curry powder. Then, add 1 cup of carrot juice, 1 cup of heavy cream and puree. Delicious

    Risotto--Cook-Off 21

    in Cooking

    Posted

    For those of you who are daunted by the proscriptions that you MUST have an absolutely A+ quality, home-made stock (and, you really do), then you might want to experiment with Miso Based Risotto.

    For me, it's a wonderful alternative when I don't have frozen chicken stock on hand.

    Ordinary Food at Extraordinary Prices

    in Restaurant Life

    Posted

    Is there a way to do £100 bowl of baked beans? A US$200 hot dog?

    Sure.

    £100 Baked Beans: Heirloom beans, Kurobata pork smoked with organic applewood, Danish Smoked Salt... and truffles!

    $200 Hot Dog: 100% Wagyu Sausage, artisinal sourdough loaf, heirloom tomato relish... and truffles!

    €500 Beer: Organic, Artisinal hops, Hand threshed barley, Water from pure norwegian springs... and truffles!

    ¥100,000 Chocolate Truffle: Single Estate chocolate, organic, Madagascar, hand picked vanilla, Pesticide free, artisinal sugar... all enrobing a massive truffle.

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