MarketStEl

I've already indicated my interest in the steak over on the thread that probably sparked this one. I'd also be interested in the chicken. So: The distance from here to a Philly-specific version of Cook's Illustrated is...?

Actually, I need to modify my statement a bit. I have noticed lately that some brands of "whole grain white" bread -- that new variety that's made from a strain of wheat that produces a flour with the color and taste of white bread flour without stripping away the husk -- list their nutrition information for a 2-slice serving. The reason they do this is because this ups the dietary fiber stat to a figure they can promote. Whole wheat bread is higher in fiber than the other varieties (including those multigrain ones), and this new white bread is as high in fiber as whole wheat. Per slice, these breads have twice as much fiber as other varieties, and if you eat two slices, you're getting 4g of fiber--more than you'd get eating a bowl of oatmeal.

Bring it. I'm in. Say where and when.

Might it be that Holly and Vadouvan are both right? Yes, a new establishment should be cut some slack as they work the kinks out. But no, if a diner feels that his experience was something worse than "working the kinks out," he should feel free to vent on this board and not have to clean up his or her opinions. However: I often find that when responding in anger with words that will linger on well after time has healed the wounds, it is best to count to 100--very slowly--and take several deep breaths before committing one's feelings to paper. (For purposes of this argument, these boards are a form of "paper" in that they share the former's ability to preserve something for a good long time.) One should exercise care when speaking publicly, but if one does not, the antidote for the speech is more speech.

Remember, Lindsay, this is Ikea. Actually, the "caviar" is lumpfish veneer over particle board. Love your life's philosophy and attitude, BTW.

Thanks for explaining why Kobe beef is what it is, even though that wasn't your goal. I note in the paper you linked that the degrees of abundance listed by the authors are not official USDA terms; all they recognize is "abundant" marbling -- and if I understand the translation table correctly, the threshold for "abundant" isn't even halfway up the Japanese marbling scale and is hardly what I'd call abundant if the top three places on the Japanese scale are any guide. I assume that this unfortunate state of affairs can be traced to the 1950 folding of the old USDA Choice grade into what was then a stricter standard for USDA Prime. (Done, I presume, at the behest of the meatpackers.) I notice that the top Japanese quality grade for marbling -- 5 -- encompasses the top five degrees on a scale of 1 (devoid) to 12 (well over 50% fat marbling and maybe as high as 75%). In the US, beef with a marbling level of 5 on this scale (a Japanese quality grade of 3) is eligible for a Prime grade. From the pictures, it looks like level 5 has around 25% fat marbling. That's a HUGE quality range, and it pretty much renders the designation USDA Prime meaningless as a reliable standard of high quality. No wonder the restaurateurs speak of low, medium and high Prime. The USDA Select grade has more integrity: You're sure to get a cut of meat with almost no fat, and thus almost no flavor. If this paper is any guide, it would be worthwhile to shell out the bucks for Peter Luger or Lobel's just to test your hypothesis, for you're not guaranteed the highest quality possible (or close to it) otherwise. (I'll wager that the "prime" steaks Omaha Steaks offers are at the bottom of the scale, if indeed they're USDA Prime; I don't recall Omaha Steaks stating specifically that their steaks are graded such.) However, if you're following my standard of value, the brisket is probably the better buy. But as far as beef steaks are concerned, the link you provided convinced me that I'm not at all likely to find "bargains" in this category. Stop & Shop strip steak is an obvious rare exception.

Was the boy who founded Pulp named Durian?

I don't know about you, but I find that a package of ramen noodles cooked according to instructions yields about the same volume of ramen noodle soup as a can of condensed soup does once you add back the can of water. In both cases, it's enough to fill two decent sized soup mugs or bowls. One of the funnier serving sizes to me has to do with prepackaged sliced bread: one slice. Other than toasted in the morning, who consumes only one slice of bread at a time?

This is a teaser rather than a report, as the pictures will make clear. The report will come once these have been eaten, quite likely once I get Vince and Aaron over here for a tasting. My 27-year-old platform bed is falling apart, so last Saturday, I headed down to Ikea, where one of their bed frames was on sale. I left with the bed frame, a splatter guard, a small box of snack crackers, two bottles of Swedish sparkling juices and some cheese. Ikea stores in the US function as small Swedish trade fairs now, thanks to the presence of a food section just past the checkouts. (You have to either go back through the checkouts to pay for your purchases or pay for them at the bistro next to the food display.) The food section has a variety of Swedish products, with lingonberries featured prominently. Among them are cheeses from Sweden, both non-native (there is a mild Swiss--not Jarlsberg, which IIRC is Danish anyway) and indigenous, like these two: "Grandfather's Style Snapcheese," says the English translation on the back. After looking at the Falbygdens web site and finding nothing useful in the English-language version, then translating "Brännvin" separately, I think that that last word should be "schnapps cheese," for this semi-soft cow's milk cheese is injected with aquavit -- or what would probably be called "schnapps" in the US. According to the igourmet.com Encyclopedia of Cheese, Herrgårdsost is the second-most-popular variety of cheese in Sweden, a semi-soft cheese that comes in large wheels with tiny holes and is similar to Gouda in character. According to recipetips.com's Glossary of Kitchen and Food Terms, Herrgårdsost has a soft supple texture, lots of tiny holes and "a nutty, tangy flavor, very similar to cheddar, that intensifies with age." So what's this cheese like -- Gouda or Cheddar? Tune in again tomorrow for the next installment of As the Wheel Turns. I also picked up one non-cheese item, mainly for the humor value. Some of you will get it: At only $2.79 for the jar, this can't be all that fancy a delicacy. I just hope that "Mamma Mia" doesn't start playing when I open the box. It looks as if Ikea has a one-price policy for the cheeses they sell. All of them were $6.99 a pound.

Pardon me for quoting one of the legends of off-price retailing in response to this post, but Sy Syms' words seem oddly appropriate here: "An educated consumer is our best customer." This may indeed be a chicken-or-egg question. If people around here aren't aware that better quality ingredients are available, then the answer is to make folks aware of what's out there. I'd still like to suggest, though, that the concentration of fabulous wealth that can sustain stores that supply such products -- assuming that they have similar price differentials to the beef we've been discussing -- isn't as great here as it is in Manhattan. For all our lawyers and doctors, this city is at heart still blue-collar in so many respects (not least among them being the relatively low percentage of residents possessing baccalaureate or higher degrees). We may have gotten turned on to the pleasures of good food, but we're not rich enough (or motivated enough?) to demand the super-premium stuff on a consistent basis. That DiBruno Bros. successfully turned itself from a bargain hunter's cheese emporium in the Italian Market to a respected purveyor of fine cheeses from around the world, and then built on that to expand into better-than-average meats, fish and charcuterie off Rittenhouse Square, however, does shoot a big hole in this argument. Maybe you might want to consider approaching one of the Reading Terminal Market vendors about carrying better grades of meat. Speaking of better grades of meat: I recall Vadouvan remarking that there are three levels of USDA Prime. Yet I can't figure out from looking at the materials pertaining to grading on usda.gov what the distinguishing features of each level are, or even that they officially exist in the eyes of the USDA. (There's stuff about "yield grades" within each classification, but I don't think that's what Vadouvan had in mind.) Is there any guide out there that explains what the distinguishing features are? A couple of other items, one related to my visit to usda.gov and the other related to this discussion: --The renaming of the third grade in the USDA hierarchy is a triumph of marketing. However, it probably would never have happened if it were not for the nutritionists' campaign against fat. It did allow beef producers to sell the leaner stuff to consumers who would not have otherwise considered it, and I note that USDA Select (formerly USDA Good) has taken the place of USDA Choice in a good portion of supermarket meat cases. --I still find the more interesting search to be for the bargain -- the relatively inexpensive product that delivers superior results or performance. Sometimes, such a product does not exist. But when it does, you latch on to it.

Winston Churchill and collard greens: Among his other accomplishments and afflictions great and small, Churchill was known to be fond of his liquor; he regularly added whisky to his water When collard greens are cooked, many of their nutrients leach into the cooking water; the resulting liquid, called "pot likker", is usually sopped up with cornbread and often saved for later reuse Donald Fagen and a root beer float

I really don't have much quarrel with what you said in this post, but I would be careful about generalizing from this: because if you reverse the argument here, the statement is still plausible--some people might also discern differences where none exist, though that's much less likely. What is more likely is that if someone finds no difference in a blind tasting, there really is no difference or the difference is so small as to be trivial or undetectable. I'm sure you've heard about the activist group that has gone around staging blind comparisons of various bottled waters and the local municipal supply, and most of the time, people either can't discern a notable difference in taste or even prefer the taste of the municipal tap water. Now, we do know that waters do vary in taste depending on the dissolved minerals or other matter they contain. But most spring water not sold explicitly as mineral water (as, say, Gerolsteiner is) probably doesn't have that different a composition from filtered municipal water, and often enough, where municipal water tastes worse, the taste is imparted by the aged pipes through which it flows from treatment plant to your tap. And to make matters worse (particularly from the standpoint of the activist group), some bottled waters are bottled at least partly from municipal supplies! (I'm not including the ones that are bottled entirely from municipal supplies, for those are usually identified as such, like the company that bottled New York City tap water for sale outside the city, or the Chester Water Authority, which bottles its own product under the name "Octoraro Mist" but AFAIK does not sell it at retail but rather donates it to community groups to make a point.) In cases such as these, I often cast a gimlet eye at those who claim there are significant differences. However, we are discussing taste here, and you may be sensitive to tastes and flavors that I am not. As for the mags, both Cook's Illustrated and Consumer Reports share the same goal: to provide neutral, unbiased guidance about products based on replicable tests. Neither publication accepts advertising for that reason. I've heard audiophiles take issue with Consumer Reports' rankings of stereo equipment, and obviously, despite its influence, not everyone swears by its Annual Auto Issue. So why shouldn't someone who is passionate about food not necessarily share Cook's Illustrated's opinion on a matter that is ultimately highly individual, that of taste?

My beef (sorry, I really couldn't resist) is that some of those for whom it's apparently not worth it haven't tried it. Now, it may be that, for these people, there is a certain dollar amount after which no steak costing that much could possibly be worth it. But even if it's reasonable for such a dollar amount to exist for most people, it doesn't seem reasonable, as I see it, for it to be below what Lobel's charges. And that's because the amount of money that one would spend on a Lobel's steak is comparable that the amount of money that, I suspect, may people on this board occasionally spend going out to dinner. You may note that in my last post on this subject, I allowed that the only way I would be able to satisfactorily settle the issue to my own satisfaction would be to try one. Ultimately, you are correct in making this point. As the old Latin phrase goes, de gustibus non disputandum est, and what might be a justifiable price differential to you given the quality difference may not be worth it to me, and vice versa in some other area. (For instance, you may not consider Pennsylvania Noble so much better than other Cheddar-style cheeses to justify spending $20 per pound on it. I do.) However, even the taste test you cited ends up backing up my argument about the relationship between price and quality being non-linear. To repeat what Bob posted: The ranking I emphasized is conceptually identical to a "CR Best Buy" rating in Consumer Reports, which the Stop & Shop steak would doubtless have earned were it Consumers Union conducting this test. Thanks, Bob and dagordon, for answering my question about Omaha Steaks in the course of addressing other subjects. BTW, Vadouvan, "are you secure enough to spend less?" is a marketing slogan, true, but if there weren't some truth behind the assertion, off-price retail and outlet stores wouldn't exist. I may know the hidden flaw that caused me to be able to buy a pair of Italian dress shoes by a well-known designer for $80 instead of the $240 they would normally sell for, but most people who see them won't see it. I'd call that a form of "security," for the insecure probably wouldn't be caught dead in an off-price store looking for finds like this. But that's fashion, which isn't the same thing as food, I'll grant. Nonetheless, there are even restaurants where people flock because they are trendy or statusy, not because they serve outstanding food (although if they didn't serve good food they wouldn't survive, or at least I hope they wouldn't). I agree--I've done that myself on more than one occasion. And in that context, splitting a 36-ounce porterhouse for the same price is entirely justified, especially if the experience is equivalent or better to that of the $50 dinner out. (BTW, how do you go about splitting the steak?) And in others (see above), there may not be. That my larger point holds doesn't mean that spending much more is never worth it. Edited to add: It's just that in my case, I generally think the burden of proof lies with whoever's charging so much to demonstrate that it is indeed worth it. "I'm from Missouri, and you've got to show me." Now as for why you could get something that's worth spending so much more in New York City but not in Philly, which was the original subject of your post: I refer you to my prior comments about the relative pickiness of home cooks compared to professional chefs at high-end restaurants. Add to that the presence of a much greater concentration of fabulous wealth looking for stuff to buy in Manhattan compared to anywhere else in the country, including LA and Palm Beach. And I might even allow for that "not from here" sentiment someone alluded to uptopic, though I think that may not be as significant here as that someone thought.

Assuming the things in question are comparable in the first place, who doesn't? ← An off-price men's wear retailer that used to do business in Old City ran print ads that ended with the slogan, "Are you secure enough to spend less?" To you and me, your question might be rhetorical, but trust me, there are people out there who don't get this notion. They are usually the sort of status-conscious types who "pay for the name". That assumption is an important one, though. I wouldn't claim that IKEA is equal to Thomas Moser or even Thomasville, though it might represent a better value than the latter even after factoring in the differences in workmanship and materials. (A product that uses less expensive materials or ingredients than a more costly one might still be a better value if [in the case of the furniture] it proves no less durable than the more expensive item or [in the case of a food product] produces results that are in the neighborhood of those obtained with the costlier item.) And to bring this back to the original subject, the difference in quality between Lobel's steaks and everything else might be great enough to justify the IMO eye-popping price differential. I'll never be able to answer that question to my own satisfaction without tasting one, though, and right now, I have other things I need to spend my money on. However, I am saving up for next Christmas; maybe I'll buy us a really special present.

There seems to be a lull here...the conveyor belt of foodbloggers appears to have stopped. Is it down for maintenance? Or is the queue really empty?

Suffice it to say I don't find bottled dressings vinegary either. I actually wish they had a bit more of a tang to them. Which is why I too make my own. If you use dried herbs as opposed to fresh, you can add those when you make the batch. Blue cheese dressing is the one exception to this rule. I've yet to figure out how to do a homemade one that is creamy like the bottled varieties. I suspect that egg yolks enter the picture somewhere.

Several of you have gently advised me that my previous statement about the relationship between price and quality is not entirely true, and indeed, within broad categories, you do "get what you pay for." Nonetheless, Bob said better than I did what I had in mind when I wrote what I wrote. I find the notion of spending lots of money for something that is not appreciably better than something that can be had for a reasonable price offensive. Similarly, the concept of "good value" does not necessarily mean something is not expensive; rather, it means that relative to what you're getting, the cost is modest. The meats I've purchased from Giunta's, for instance, fall in that category. I could spend much less on a Cook's or store brand ham at either of the supermarkets I shop regularly and get an okay product. But for the same price I would pay for a Dietz and Watson boneless ham at those same supermarkets, I got an all-natural, minimally processed ham that blew everything else out of the water, it was that good. That, IMO, is an excellent value. Consider how much more I could have paid for a Honeybaked, for instance, that wouldn't have tasted as good.

Now that someone's finally answered this one, I'll give you my scenic-route variant, which was why I gave both of Haile Selassie's names: Before he was crowned emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie was Ras (Prince) Tafari Followers of the Rastafarian religion worship Haile Selassie as a god (Jah Rastafari) Smoking marijuana is an important part of Rastafarian religious practice Salmon is also smoked, and when it is, it is sometimes known as lox "Lox"--Yiddish for "salmon"--is a cognate of the Swedish word for the fish, "lax" Gravlax ("buried salmon") is not smoked, but it is marinated--and to make it properly, it should be buried in sand My short version involved Marcus Samuelsson (Ethiopian by birth and ethnicity, Swedish by adoption and nationality) rather than Alaska.

DiBruno or Darigo? I think you mean Darigo's when it comes to fish? Or did you have Anastasi in mind? (Anastasi is the best-looking of the bunch, but I think Darigo's has the better rep.) As for your comments about the produce: With one exception (Scott & Judy at the north end), you're dead on target. As for the storefronts, Spice Corner, Canulli's House of Pork and the specialty sausage vendor whose name also begins with C are all very good IMO -- and, of course, there's Fante's, but that's housewares.

If their pork products are anything like their hams -- I'm still seriously bummed that production problems have caused them to disappear from the store -- the Van de Rose Iowa Duroc pork that Giunta's carries should prove highly satisfactory. I can still taste that ham I made around Labor Day even now; nothing our local packers produce--not even Lancaster County's best--even comes close. Question about Omaha Steaks, since they're very popular and I've enjoyed their strip steaks: How would they rank on a scale where Lobel's is 10, Whole Foods/Ochs at their best is 6, Esposito's retail is 5 and supermarket beef is 3 or below? And why are people so surprised that the companies that run both restaurant supply and retail operations offer lower quality product to the retail customers? For starters, most consumers aren't as demanding as most professional chefs at better restaurants are; for another thing, most restaurant diners would be pretty disappointed to shell out beaucoup bucks for a grand meal out at a top-notch restaurant only to be served something no better in quality than what they would serve at home themselves. Ippolito's seafood may be less consistently high quality than what Samuels & Son sells to restaurants, but even on off days it's probably better than what's on offer at Acme. Same goes for Esposito's vis-a-vis the supermarkets. BTW, I have a sirloin roast from Giunta's thawing in the fridge right now. Since my fridge seems to be keeping things right around 32F these days, it will be a few days before it's thawed enough for me to cook it. I'll report back once I have done so. Edited to avoid lumping in places like Giunta's and Fair Food Farmstand with places like Acme, Genuardi's and Shop Rite.

"eternal cucumbers" So what makes those beauties eternal?

I've purchased meats from Esposito's often, and seafood from Ippolito's once -- it's a bit off my usual path so I have to make a conscious effort to go there. I firmly believe that the relationship between price and quality is nonlinear, but if the steaks from Lobel's are so much better that they warrant the prices Lobel's charges, I'm afraid our friend is going to be disappointed with any Philadephia butcher. That said, I've found that Esposito's offers excellent value. I don't know how long they age their strip steaks, though. So far, I've had good experiences with the Van de Rose products carried at Giunta's Prime Shop at the Reading Terminal Market as well, but I haven't tried their steaks yet, so can't comment on those.

Reading Terminal Market regulars recently received news that Flay bested Delilah Winder in a surprise macaroni-and-cheese Throwdown on Winder's turf. So did the readers of The Philadelphia Inquirer, via Michael Klein's "Inqlings" gossip column. The ruse this time? FN was doing a show on the best dishes in America and wanted to feature her mac and cheese, which was anointed as best in the country by Oprah herself. The gory details.

Way advance heads-up: One of the companies that produces episodes of the History Channel series Modern Marvels is at work on an episode on cheese. I have no idea when this will air, though I suspect not until the 2007-08 season. As Modern Marvels is the History Channel's series devoted to scientific, engineering and technological achievements, I imagine we will be treated to all sorts of interesting cheesetech on this show. Edited to add: And they're casting a wide net. The ProfNet query that tipped me off to this project stated that the producers are even looking for information on aerosol cheese.

Miss Manners (Judith Martin, my preferred etiquette maven) ascribes the serving of the salad before the main course to restaurant practice: Doing so gave the patrons something to keep them occupied while the main dishes were being prepared. Most Americans have gone on to adopt the restaurant practice. In her instructions on giving formal dinner parties, the salad follows the main course.