Jason Perlow

This is something we tried on eG.... 10 years ago. We even had an extended discussion on why it's nearly impossible to replicate the taste and the texture. Hint: MSG. Lots and lots of it. If you really want to make good Gyro... and not try to "replicate" the stuff that is made by Kronos or Grecian Delight in Chicago commercially, check out a post I did about Plaka Gyro in Tarpon Springs, FL a bunch of years back. Very interesting stuff, and tastes NOTHING like the standard Gyro shop item.

IMHO DeLorenzo's has the best pie in NJ. You mean HAD, if you mean the Trenton Hudson Street location. Closed last year. There's another location left in Robbinsville, I've been to it, but I wouldn't say it is as good as the original.

Last Sunday's Dinner. Mojo boneless grilled chicken thighs, with roasted red peppers, Rice and Beans, and roasted zucchini topped with parmigiano-reggiano and heirloom cherry tomatoes. A closeup of the zucchini dish. Yes the tomatoes are that color, they are naturally greenish-yellow when ripe.

Shrimp and Chicken Stir-Fry with Curry & Coconut Flavor / Eggplant and Zucchini. An improvised dish, we had a coconut tree harvested at our next door neighbors and we came into a windfall of coconut jelly/meat and coconut water. We processed up the coco meat/jelly/water and added it to a curry powder, and stir fried with the usual soy sauce. Was excellent. Here is how it was plated, with Thai Red Rice. Another Coconut Curry dish, this one a fried rice with BBQ chicken thigh meat and the leftover red rice.

Another Smoking/Grilling Saturday afternoon. Creative dish was the "Spicy Bacon-Wrapped Chicken and Pork Thunder Thigh Balls" which were made for the BBQPad Chicken Thigh Cook-Off. This was 2/3 of boneless skinless chicken thighs to 1/3 pork sausage, processed in the KitchenAid with garlic, habanero pepper, scallion, cilantro added along with a supermarket brand "Pork butt rub" seasoning. Wrapped in Bacon and then glazed with mixture of Dark Superior Soy, Pineapple Juice, Honey and a home-made fermented ghost pepper and fresh coconut water hot sauce. These were smoked for 1 hour at 225 degrees. Here's a cross-section of one of the meatballs, one that was not wrapped in bacon because it was made with leftover meat. You can see the herbs inside. Texture of these meatballs were fantastic. Tenderloin of Pork, smoked for 2':30" until internal temperature hit around 140. Same seasoning mixture as meatballs used for rub and same glaze. Cap of Filet Mignon, grilled at high temperature with Oak Wood chips added for smoke. Montreal Steak Rub. Cooked until internal temperature of 120, left to rest for about 30 minutes. We made steak hoagies with these with a horseradish sauce and topped it with heirloom cherry tomatoes from our hydroponic garden.

Cost, about $3000.

Interestingly enough in South Florida, we have LOTS of Colombian and Peruvian restaurants, particularly in Broward County, but again, we have enough indigenous Colombians and Peruvians to support them. Very vew legit Mexican restaurants, though. Cuban/Puerto Rican/Dominican cuisine is pretty much centered around the Miami area and not Broward. Lots of Venezuelan in certain towns, like Weston. But we have a major dual-cusine problem with Asian, and also we have entire cuisines that just do not exist, period (Ethiopian, etc) and a lack of specialization in sub-cuisines like Sichuan or Hunan or Shanghainese or Malaysian Chinese.. The only Asian cuisine that has not succumbed to the dual-cusine problem is Indian, but I suspect that is because there are enough Indians in this area to support actual Indian restaurants. And even with Indian we are limited to North Indian style food for the most part.

It's really, REALLY bitter. Would stir frying them or using some other technique make them taste any better?

Updates on the hydroponics garden. Things are growing well, but we are now at the point where we are towards the end of the current leaf lettuce lifecycle (after many trimmings, the leaves have gone bitter) and have started planting new ones. After tweaking the system for flow issues over the last few weeks, everything is nice and healthy, and we've been getting very good growth on the lettuces and herbs. We've had salads just about every day, with lettuces coming all from our garden. A close-up of one of the towers. We've added some base planters and a trellis behind the spa. We've planted snow peas, snap peas, zucchini and cucumbers in here, with the intention of them all climbing up the trellis and adding some nice vegetative backdrop to the spa area. Tomato/Pepper area is going completely gangbusters, after some tweaks to the system. We had a bit of die-off earlier due to some pump and circulation isuses but the plants have recovered well.

So, having moved to a new part of the country, in order to help us find new restaurants, my wife and I have been using Google Maps/Google Local as a basic restaurant search engine when we are looking for specific cuisines as well as well-rated restaurants. Since acquiring ZAGAT, Google has "normalized" their ratings system in a similar fashion to ZAGAT, it has a point scale that is identical. However, the ZAGAT Survey reviews that appear on Google are compiled by ZAGAT using their known amalgamated methods of combining diner surveys and professional reviewers (as they have always been) whereas the Google restaurant reviews are 100 percent user-contributed. So while in a search both types of reviews may appear right next to each other, a ZAGAT "27" and a Google "27" are very different. The problem with the Google ratings system is that the ratings are assigned based on a mob-mentality type of approach. There have been many criticisms of ZAGAT's system and the way it is weighted and what kinds of flaws it has -- historically, we've had some very big threads on this site and my co-founder, Steven Shaw, has written extensively about this. But I have always felt that ZAGAT had at least enough sensibility and representative sampling imposed on it to make it a good initial point of reference and has a good level of base information to inform the diner about overall restaurant quality, whereas Google's system seems to make no sense whatsover and can empower a single reviewer, in some cases, to artifically inflate or knock down the rating of a restaurant, particularly if there aren't enough ratings submitted on a restaurant to give it a good representative sampling. I will give you one particular example. This week, my wife and I went to visit two Thai restaurants in South Florida, both located within one mile of each other. The first is Pad Thai in Tamarac which has a 24 rating, and the second is Tobu Thai & Sushi in Coral Springs which until last night had a 27. Today it is a 25. I'll explain why in a moment. The Google ratings system is composed of three data points, Food, Service, and Decor. Each of these data points is rated from 0 to 3. The overall restaurant rating is computed from an algorithm that essentially takes the total amount of user ratings in each of these areas and averages them. So if you have a restaurant that only has a few reviews, but they are all exceptional (a 3 in each datapoint) you can easily crank the overall rating up to 27 or higher. And in ZAGAT parlance, a 27 is an exceptional, destination worthy restaurant at very high culinary standards. So you can see how easy it would be to confuse a ZAGAT 27 with a Google 27. Comparably, a local Sushi or Thai restaurant would never end up being a ZAGAT 27, it would be considerably lower unless they were exceptional examples of the genre. For example, Jasmine Thai & Sushi in nearby Coconut Creek, is a ZAGAT 22. Which is a solid review for a local Thai/Sushi joint under the ZAGAT system. Conversely, a few bad reviews (zeroes across the board) among only a few total reviews will also deflate a restaurant's rating. I saw this happen in the case of Pad Thai, which I thought was a very solid, local and authentic Thai restaurant. Probably would also be a 22 or 23 on ZAGAT. One user had given the restaurant zeroes across the board, and I've captured this review for posterity just to illustrate how ludicrous it is that a single user have this much influence. I flagged this and informed Google, but to offset this we gave this restaurant a deservedly good review. So far it has not moved the needle on the overall rating. I'm hoping they can remove this, because this is a totally unfair way to evaluate a place, especially if you haven't even eaten there. The other restaurant we went to, Tobu Thai, was a total disappointment in every regard. You can read Rachel's review on the page I linked above. As a result of that review, it was knocked down from a 27 to a 25 overnight. First, I think it is confusing for Google and ZAGAT to have identical numerical ratings, and they should consider giving Google a different way to identify those reviews. Second, it's obvious that mob mentality in either direction or a low representative sample is not helpful in determining the qualitative aspects of a restaurant. My opinion is that Google needs "Super Reviewers" or people who have the experience to make informed judgements to supplant the regular reviews, sort of the way Amazon has trusted product reviewers who have a history of reviewing books and items for sale, so prospective diners can make better decisions regardless of what numerical rating the algorithm has given, or so the algorithm can make appropriate judgements/weightings. Not only should a single reviewer's feedback be flagged as helpful or informative. etc (and I think the reviewer should get negative imput as well if there's a clear misjudgement or lack of expertise, something Google does not do now -- you can only rate a review as "Helpful" or "Not Helpful") but it should also go on their record to allow Google to build a history of confidence, or conversely, indications of bad advice for that particular reviewer. Good reviewers should get gold stars, or plusses, or whatever, just like resellers do on eBay. Bad or seriously uninformed reviewers should get bad marks. I'd appreciate anyone's thoughts on this.

This is certainly not a new problem, but ever since I have moved to South Florida I have been dealing with this more and more. And this is not a problem unique to Florida, I've encountered this in such places as New Jersey and parts of the NY Metro Area that can easily support restaurants dedicated to specific Asian cusines and have less risk in keeping restaurants open due to foot traffic and a somewhat stonger local economy. What I'm talking about of course is when an Asian restaurant opens, be it Chinese, Thai, or something else, and then for whatever reasons, feels it has offer another cusine in addition to what it's main mission was originally supposed to be. In South Florida, you see Thai restaurants combined with Sushi, Vietnamese combined with Chinese, Chinese combined with Sushi, or inversely a Japanese/Sushi restaurant offering Thai stuff. In New Jersey I frequently saw Korean restaurants combined with Sushi. Or Sushi restaurants opened by Chinese families. But this may be due to the Korean and Chinese affinity for Japanese food and sushi in general, and usually resulted in a very different style than sushi restaurants opened by ethnic Japanese. I frequently ate at these sort of places, and the quality and value in some cases was very high for what they were offering, but it was not real Japanese-style sushi. Regardless of where the bias of what cuisine is weighted against another on a menu offering, this frequently results in both cuisines being offered as less than the sum of their parts, Is this problem unique to the economic situation we are dealing with, in which Asian restaurants are unwilling to take risks in specialization, or is also because certain demographic areas in the US don't have enough native Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean (or what have you) to patronize restaurants dedicated to their cusines? BTW, this problem doesn't appear unique to Asian restaurants, I've seen this happen with other cuisines as well, but it just seems that Asian is the main offender at the moment. I am curious what else people have seen in other parts of the country, and whether or not anyone feels this trend will reverse itself anytime soon.

Ethiopian. More esoteric Asian cuisines like Cambodian and Malaysian and Indonesian. Carribean Rotis. Dosas. Persian. Peruvian.

BTW... just posted an update to Rachel's Passover Roll recipe. Like Matzo Brei, this is something GOOD you can do with Matzot. http://offthebroiler.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/the-joy-of-pesadich-rolls/

That's not a particularly long list of ingredients for the spice and brine components. I've seen supermarket chickens and other poultry products that are much more complicated than that.

Nothing wrong with these chickens.

Weinoo: Love the ramem Last night was primarily leftovers from Passover, but Rachel made her awesome Matzo rolls which went great with the Pit Beef I smoked over the weekend, with a simple horseradish and mayo sauce and hydroponic lettuces from our garden. These were made with Whole Wheat Matzos, but you could use any kind, such as spelt or plain.

Looks very tasty! I'd like a couple sandwiches, please. Hmm, but perhaps not rare enough inside - Baltimore folks might raise an eyebrow or two. :-) They might like it a bit more charred on the outside too... [p.s. I like B'more's pit beef... ;-) ] Yeah, I wasn't trying for a Baltimore-type. Different animal entirely. This was smoked, at 225, as one might do a brisket, for 2 hours, as actual BBQ, over charcoal and oak, as opposed to high heat grilling, which is the Baltimore style. It's a 7lb peice of eye round, which I wanted to slice up for a whole mess of sandwiches and salads and stuff. Didn't do a horseradish sauce either, I just used a little bit of Pick A Peppa sauce as a condiment on the top. This was also a second test of my new CyberQ Wi-Fi pit controller, I wanted to do a larger peice of meat and see how it would do temperature stabilization. Yes, I know this sounds geeky and very sous-vide ish, and I've said ad-nauseum how much I think the technology is overused. In BBQ, you need all the temperature precision you can get, or you overcook. As it turned out, I was feeling under the weather today and it was like 90 degrees outside, so I had the computer do all the work and just monitored the meat temp and the smoker temp from the tablet in my air-conditioned bedroom. It kept it at 225 for the entire cooking period. I pulled the meat off at 140 degrees internal temp.

Very nice lamb.

So, I had a eye of round beef roast, and there was some Passover cooking to do. And we had uncooked wings leftover from the stock we made for Chicken Soup. Exhibit A, Eye of Round "Pit Beef" smoked on the BGE for about 2 hours. Cooked & Sliced Pit Beef Open Face Pit Beef Sandwich Pit Beef Sandwich Cross Section (yes, I know this looks pornographic) Potato Kugel, made with Rachel's "Ultimate" Recipe Beef, Kugel, Green Beans w/Garlic Lemon Pepper, Honey & Habanero Chile Wings

No, they are not the same. Get the OXO Good Grips peeler.

I also have to defer to the President on this issue. http://media.talkingpointsmemo.com/slideshow/obama-middle-east-trip/1-297523?ref=fpblg

To me this is not even a question of what flavor of matzoh. Or brand. Most matzos suck. It is, by definition, DESIGNED TO SUCK. It is a bread of AFFLICTION. That being said, for me to tolerate it, unaltered (such as transformed into Matzo Brei or into a kugel) I like mine crisped up in the toaster with some char on it. Because we're talking about white flour with no intrinsic flavor characteristics. So I like whole wheat and whole grain, because it handles toasting better.

Chabad-certified Schmurah. Because nothing screams exclusivity and Jewish wealth like the need to spend 21+ dollars a pound on shit that tastes like building material. http://www.chabad.org/holidays/passover/pesach_cdo/aid/265986/jewish/Order-Matzah-Online.htm

Had an excellent meal with some business colleagues on Monday at Yardbird in South Beach. This was a finalist for Best New Restaurant 2012 in the James Beard Awards. Kale Salad, which was the healthiest thing on the menu. Refreshingly good, I would never expect to eat kale this way. I think Yardbird is a restaurant that was desperately needed in Miami, considering that South Florida has never really had a fine dining establishment that could be classified as truly "Southern" in nature. More details at my blog at Off The Broiler

Is this the stuff that comes in a plain blue bag? I can get it at Fred's BBQ in Shillington PA I think it was in a plain brown bag that says "Carbon de Argentina" or something like that. Very heavy, very hard dense charcoal. Kind of a bitch to light, but it burns for a long time.