Chris Amirault

The watery stuff that's inside of a whole coconut is called coconut water. The other stuff is created by grating, soaking, and squeezing out the liquid from the meat. That liquid then separates into the cream and the milk. When you buy a can of "milk," you're getting a combination of cream and milk that, over time, will separate. However, like dairy cream, coconut cream consists of both fat and other stuff. To fry curry paste, you want the oil to separate from that stuff, called "cracking the coconut." (That can obviously also refer to breaking the shell.) It's a very important step -- see this book for example -- that's often left out of Westernized cookbooks. If you make it yourself (click for a topic about doing so), the cream separates very quickly and easily, and it's much oilier and thicker than the stuff at the top of the can.

Actually, no! That's precisely what one doesn't want to do: you're boiling the paste in the cream until the cream separates. Instead, you want to separate out the oil and fry the paste in that.

Well, as David Thompson explains in Thai Food (the relevant parts of which I just reread for a class I taught yesterday), when you cook using coconut cream you first need to crack the cream into its two constituent parts: the solids and the oil. Most people don't do that step, and as a result they boil instead of fry their curry pastes. There are a few different ways to do it: long simmering and then separating off or frying over high heat and then, when it cracks, adding the paste. I've never been particularly satisfied with either: simmering takes too long and the frying spatters hot cream all over the place. Gotta be a better way!

I'm wiped. Yep, I took photos during prep, which I'll show in a bit. But that six hours -- from pickup to drop-off -- went by in a blur. The additional three hours of dishwashing and cleaning was also exhausting. By their accounts, the students had a great time. Me? I'm loaded with criticisms of what I did and how I did it. More a bit later when the caffeine kicks in.

Speaking of glucose, I found the powdered version, along with malt powder and lotus root starch at a local Japanese/Korean grocer. I've also seen other stuff at other Asian stores around town.

It's a tough sell round these parts. At the restaurant where I work, we were hoping to have Sunday suppers communally but, for the reasons noted above, I think, the communal part never really took off.

More details, please, on all things! And what do you mean by "move away from the sealer bar"?

It's not always homogenized, but it often is. Check the can: if there are stabilizers in there, well, that's what they're there for. And even when it's not, sometimes the can has been shaken up and it takes a long time to separate out. How do you do it, Jenni?

Nothing from parents, nothing from grandparents. I love 'em all to death, but... zero. So what do you make of the fact that so many Society members had lousy-cook forebears?

The title says it all: how do you crack the cream -- that is, get the solids and oil to separate -- using the homogenized coconut milk in cans? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes I'm splattered with white napalm before it cracks and I give up. Your techniques?

I remember David Chang acting incredulous in a NYT interview when the reporter asked what he cooked on his day off. The answer involved the F word, I believe.

Fresh rice noodles. The effort-to-perceivable-quality for homemade is way too high, and the success rate way too low. Update later. Meanwhile: you?

Me as well. Ditto leftover fat, which finds its way into lots of SV bags.

To Soba's point about the Time/Life series, remember that the hardcover books have a relatively small number of recipies, and those are, iirc, simplified. The real cookbooks were the spiral-bound recipe books, which are pretty hard to find.

Sounds just fine to me!

Thanks again, everyone. Following advice here, I did all the non-interesting shopping already and plan to do some prep shortly, probably including cleaning the shrimp since, increasingly, I think we have enough to do and I have no clue about the skill level of the folks coming. I'm also going to get all the stations set up and get the ingredients and tools out that I think we'll need. I have a ton of those cut very large, so I'll get those out. Yes, well, I stole it from you guys, more or less! That's really smart. I think I'm going to go through today and add those by hand.... Note to self: get name tags at office. Note to self: get first aid kit at Target. Excellent idea. Note to self: get more hand soap at Target.

What Charles said -- but, to be clear, there are many I've talked to who believe firmly in attitude above all, even if you don't, and we're discussing the concept as a whole. Hell, the NYT did a whole piece on this subject recently.

Say more about this cacao-nib-infused mezcal.

Completely agree with Kohai and no insult was implied to either you or the drinkers of Tokyo. I'm working on an article about Tender Bar that will talk about this very point.

You'd love Tokyo!

I have yet to get my notes together on the meal schwa in toto, but I can comment on this attitude thing now. schwa's attitude is hard to pin down. Everyone kinda barrels around the dining room in a mood that ranges from scruffily affable to dismissive and annoyed. Trying to chat with people about the food, for example, was a real crap-shoot, perhaps because the guys had to get back into the kitchen to get out another course. Whatever the reason, it was disconcerting to be able to talk in detail about how one dish was prepared and then be literally ignored when we asked a similar question next course. (Having said that, perhaps the server didn't hear us over the Rage Against the Machine that was turned up to 11.) It's as if the place read Danny Meyer's Setting the Table and decided to do the exact opposite of everything he says. Me, I'd go back again, but that's because the intensity and quality of the food offsets the issues with service and ambiance -- for me. I shrugged it off when I got sauce spilled on me and the server didn't seem to notice or care; we kinda laughed along when, just as we were snagging an initial bite of another course, two guys swooped in to take away our plates and drop them on another table. Seems to me that that sort of "attitude" is only going to work in a community in which such lack of basic hospitality will be read as the wacked genius of a brilliant chef whose food Must Be Eaten, and not simply as aggressive rudeness, punk rock or otherwise. Here in Providence, for example, schwa wouldn't last a year. So one question is, can your place tap into or build two clienteles: those who want the attitude because you're the It Chef and they want to bask in your Pierre Marco White 'tude, and those who put up with your PMW 'tude because your food is light years beyond anything they can get there? Another question is, given how easy it is to provide casual American service -- most US restaurants get away with murder, after all -- why wouldn't you want to cultivate a third clientele, those who can enjoy a relatively relaxed yet hospitable environment while giving you money to eat your food? I mean, why not ease up on the 'tude and have a more successful business? What do you lose by not spilling sauce on your customers?

I've had consistently fresh, well-prepared, and tasty burgers and fries at the relatively few In-n-Outs I've been to over the years. Like any chain, I'm sure that there are stinkers, and it sounds like the LV place was a stinker. And, really, if you waited 25 minutes for food at an In-n-Out, something is wrong.

Yeah, those little packets are crazy expensive compared to the bulk.

Yep: four little packets of Saco per box at the local megagrocer.

Try Famous Grouse.