Chris Amirault

Cheap bun, killer pork, and a vinegar-based slaw using a combination of Jean Anderson and Milwaukee German ingredients:

New bottle tonight, so I'm making a Flatiron Slope: 2 1/2 oz rye (Rittenhouse) 3/4 oz Punt e Mes 1/4 oz Apry Dash Angostura

See, those last three, I'd never use buns for those. French toast demands good bread in particular. I'm really liking the tuna melt idea. Or perhaps an egg-bacon-and-cheese sandwich....

Without question, the bread product I toss out most frequently are hamburger and hot dog buns. Take this weekend: I have three burger buns leftover from a pulled pork dinner, and I have no good idea for using them. Let's face it: most buns aren't very high quality artisanal bread -- they're made for soaking up juices and tenderly falling apart in your mouth, after all. As such, they're not well suited for the same sorts of things that I'd use good bread for. If I had an idea or two in the next couple of hours, I'd be willing to give it a go; my four-year-old daughter is pretty tolerant of daddy's experiments. What do you think?

John, what's your take on the matter? Do you share the disdain for wine bloggers?

Whole Foods was selling butts for the first time I've ever seen -- and on sale to boot. Skin-on, bone-in beauts: I had to buy two. Prepared them as discussed here, with a few tweaks: While in Douglas AZ I scored some amazing chili powder (a mix of NM and Ancho, if I had to guess) that I used instead of the other chiles. I also added asafoetida on a lark, which is overwhelming when you smell it but melds into the background nicely as the pork cooks. I'm a bit more puck-conscious nowadays than I have been previously. So I loaded up the Bradley with the two butts and some tasso and got them all smoking with hickory pucks. As soon as the butts hit 140F, I pulled them out of the Bradley and let them finish in a 225F oven covered with loose foil. Took probably about another eight hours or so. Finishing in the oven had an unintended benefit: a cup or so of bright orange rendered lard. It's smoky, salty, and utterly delicious. Dinner tonight with some buns, the ever-popular mustard sauce, some beans, and a few quick cucumber pickles. Most of it is going into the freezer for later this summer.

I had a conversation with a cue chef about this very subject a few months back. He was amenable to doing as much local and sustainable as he can -- part of his marketing is green materials and he gets many of his vegetables from area farms. However, he needs to be able to procure meat products that are consistent in size and quality throughout the year, and as yet it's hard to get both in the volume he needs. For example, he smokes his own chickens, and finding exactly the right size for both preparation and service was very challenging.

Along Chris's line of thinking, I've been making the house ice tea using tinctures of spices (cinnamon, clove, allspice) if we want to go that way. A few drops into one glass and you've got the flavor independent of sweetness.

There's an additional problem: interobject variability. I juiced two limes, identical from the outside, yesterday: one gave a scant ounce and the other gave three. This is why god made little red tasting straws. And don't worry: plenty of OCD cocktail geeks around. Lean on me.

Given the variation of, say, Sidecar ratios, I'm not sure that palates agree on one true center. However, despite the fact that it is a metaphor at best, I think that the center is a useful concept.

Keep sharing. I'm overwhelmed by the many tinctures I have and get a headache thining about applications and combinations....

Calling ahead to reserve crusts?

Goaded two store owners into kvetching in the last week. I says, "Boy, that state liquor distribution system, pretty hard to understand." He says, "Tell me about it. You gotta year or two?" One new bit of information I didn't realize. Apparently the RI distributors merge, split, and switch companies all the time. So part of running a decent liquor store involves doing and following the dance, if you want to provide customers with a variety of product.

Had a nice variation on the Omar using orange juice instead of lemon with Heaven Hill BIB 100 proof, which I can get in 1 liter bottles for a song around here. Dropped a few drops of Fee's Old Fashioned bitters in there too.

Holy cow! That's quite a home bar, rivaling a lot of restaurant bars I've seen. What's the backlighting or under-counter lighting you're using?

We were visiting a house the other day that had a classic 1960s "rec room" setup in the basement: red shag carpeting, table shuffleboard, and... a bar. It's an ugly stained maple thing, but, damn, it's the real deal: extensive shelving, storage behind and underneath, even a little sink. (Sadly no Kold-Draft machine as far as I could tell.) I've been pondering organizational streategies for my messy liquor cabinet, but this got me going on the whole nine yards. What do you home-bar owners have currently? Let's see some photos and plans.

I volunteer for both inter-rater reliability training and validity measurement.

I think that's right. I visit the culinary program at Johnson & Wales now and then, and my gray hair, glasses, and general decrepitude always get me "Chef" comments throughout the building. I don't deserve the title and it makes me feel like a fraud, no matter how good my charcuterie turned out that weekend.

Knowing Richman, I trust that it was excellent when he had it. I also cannot trust that it will be so if I were to try it. I'm more convinced than I was when I wrote this piece that they're prefiring crusts now and then -- and there's nothing better to dampen one's desires than prefiring, I'm sure we'll all agree.

Wylie Dufresne looks amusingly troubled post-Skoal...

Yep. Works, but I prefer bourbon here.

What the hell are "condensed flavors"?

Fiddling with the Stingier Cocktail, and learning that 2 rye: 1/2 Branca Menta: 1/2 Licor 43 is a better balance. The Menta is sweeter than you think it'll be. That drink also requires a fat orange twist, flamed if you like, which works wonders with the Branca Menta. I decided to push that tonight with another brown spirit, Brugal añejo, that's raw and intense enough to battle through the Branca Menta. Might really shine with something even stronger (Inner Circle green?), but for now, it's sufficiently raw for its name: The Rough-and-Tumble 2 oz Brugal añejo 1/2 oz Branca Menta 1/2 oz Clément Creole Shrubb Stir, strain. Flamed orange rind over top; edge the rim; drop into glass.

She knows how to cook an egg in a fireplace, I'll give her that.

I don't know how a list can think, and it strikes me that Richman's description of what he did and didn't take into consideration is as blunt a declaration of subjectivity as you're going to get. But what list isn't subjective? We all know that authors rarely, if ever, write their titles. So is this argument merely about some GQ copy editor's decision to use an absolutely standard titling strategy for a "Top XX List"?