MarketStEl

Thanks for the merger, and I did check the hot dog roundup. Guess I'm going to have to order myself some Usinger's in the mail. Another item for my "once I get steady work or edit enough resumes to clear taxes" list. Some comments after a full review: --Dietz & Watson and Boar's Head seem to be going head-to-head in more places as they fight for the upper end of the deli meat market. D&W products are available in 45 of the 50 states and Puerto Rico, and I believe Boar's Head has a national presence now too. I'm surprised, Jason, that there were no Dietz & Watson hot dogs at your local supermarket. Then again, I can find Boar's Head deli products at a number of locations here in Dietz & Watson's home town, including Old Nelson Food Co. three blocks from me, but Boar's Head franks are harder to come by. --I actually have had D&W's natural casing hot dogs--both regular and "New York Style". They are even better than their skinless Eagles Franks. But I don't know how they'd stack up against the best of the best on this thread. --ShopRite's store brand, Black Bear, seems to get good marks from people who have tried it. Any further comments on Black Bear? --confidential to mrbigjas: You do know that A.A. is no longer run by Haltemans, right? And that their lease is not being renewed? --It looks like nitrate-free, uncured hot dogs don't do too well in the taste department, based on a combination of Jason's panel's evaluation and my own of the Fair Food Farmstand product.

Thanks, Chef. I don't take it personally at all. Sous vide is in reality a simple basic technique, however, it is the subtleties that make it great, such as spicing the dish and finishing it. The only thing making it difficult right now is the relative hassle and expense of the equipment. ← A Ronco® Seal-a-Meal and a Crock-Pot cost how much?

Is that bifstek con queso de Whiz a la plancha con, or bifstek con queso de Whiz a la plancha sin? edited to add: Non-Philadelphians, see .sig.

As you requested... About three days after I took that picture, I decanted the liquid from that bottle and got 3/4 of a quart of clear golden stock. I then strained what remained through cheesecloth four times. After the fourth straining, I let the remaining solids settle to the bottom, then decanted again. The results of the first decanting are in the plastic bottle. The results of the second are in the mayonnaise jar. The first decanting tastes less of vegetables than the second does, but both need a little salt to bring out more turkey flavor. So I guess I did it right this time, huh? Even though I'm still not sure what the solids were--I don't think I left that much stuffing clinging to the bird's bones.

I see from the comments that there is some debate over whether the "buns" are actually English muffins or something else. Apparently, the commenters have never encountered Wolferman's "signature" English muffins, which are that thick. You could cut these one-third of the way down and have a sizable bottom to hollow out for nestling your ground beef. However, the process as described in the "A Hamburger Today" article strikes me as making more sense than the one described in Slashfood, for at least one reason: If the raw burger meat is nestled in the bun, and the juices flow into the bun, then the bun must either be on the bottom for the first part of the cooking or it must absorb only those juices that emanate from the top of the patty, which can't be a lot.

Didja see my post two up from this one (#36)? Maybe we can get a campaign going: the Campaign for Real Fat!

A suggestion: Make the URL in your .sig a live link, like the one to my blog in mine.

Quoting from that link: He's writing for people who are ready to consume raw potatoes?? What's next, raw eggplant? And yes, I know there's a thread somewhere here about people who are happy to eat raw potato, but it's still hardly mainstream... ← I'm hoping that by "raw" he also means baked, the one cooked state in which no other substances are added in the cooking. Anyway, the fellow who put together this list, Dr. Joseph Mercola, is something of a diet heretic in one important respect: He says you shouldn't worry so much about your consumption of saturated fat. If you click on the link above, you will see that he recommends you use tropical plant oils, especially coconut, for cooking. If we follow that logic, we should go back to cooking our French fries in lard. OTOH, his argument, which is based on his contention that the "lipid hypothesis" -- the theory that the amount of saturated fat and cholesterol you consume directly contributes to the amount of cholesterol in your bloodstream -- is all wrong, permits me to eat all the cheese I want. You all may recall a better-known doctor whose diet was also based on an argument that the lipid hypothesis is all wrong. Fellow named Atkins, if memory serves me right.

How about a Reading Terminal Market? --Sandy, friend of the general manager

I have yet to encounter macaroni and cheese with waaaay too much cheese. Should you run across such a dish, I would appreciate photographic evidence of its existence.

Well, among other things, the fact that shrimp consumption continued to rise even after punitive tariffs were levied on the product from Southeast Asia. This suggests that demand is still strong, or that the Asian producers aren't dumping, or that the Americans don't know how to market their stuff--assuming that the tariffs have raised the price of the farmed product to where it matches that of the wild American variety (quite possibly unlikely).

This is one area where I don't quite get the flak. Sure, every organization is going to have its share of people who do not like their work or their working conditions, but there seems to be some deep-seated skepticism underlying WFM's critics on this issue--a sense that the top brass can't be serious about their approach to labor relations. This is not to say that companies never use a collaborative approach as window dressing for a top-down imposition of management's will or worse, but I do sense that WFM is not simply blowing smoke through its hat when it talks about its management style and values. Or is making mad profit prima facie evidence that they can't be serious about this stuff? I didn't quite follow you on this passage, although your last paragraph sort of straightened things out. I take it you're saying you disagree with WFM's "absolutely no preservatives" policy? That's all right--and I hate to sound like a marketing consultant here--but if WFM is to remain at all true to its roots and not simply throw in the towel and morph into a larger version of Dean & DeLuca or DiBruno's or (insert name of favorite fancy food emporium in your locality here, if such a creature exists), it must continue to adhere to some basic tenets of the "whole foods" movement and philosophy. I'm sure that their willingness to sell conventionally grown produce that has been treated with pesticides is considered corruption enough by some. Then why, in season, do I see a fairly high number of "Pennsylvania Grown," "New Jersey Grown," "Delaware Grown" and "Maryland Grown" signs in their produce section of the South Street store, and have ever since the day it opened in 1999? How much autonomy does WFM give its regional produce buyers? (WFM stores in the Greater Philadelphia and Washington/Baltimore markets became part of the family through the company's acquisition of Fresh Fields, a Maryland-based natural grocer that began operations in the early 1980s. The chain's stores took the family name in 2000.) I assume you are referring to Safeway stores in California, not Safeway/Genuardi's stores in DC/Philly? Thank God for Lancaster County. I just hope the tourists don't completely pave it over. I think we've seen this sentiment expressed on both this thread and others dealing with WFM. But if you will pardon me for going into my "the fundamental division in the US is not red-state/blue-state, it's urban/rural" file, small towns like the one in Maine you mention above are probably the last places WFM will set up shop. Not enough people with major bucks to blow on fancy food. Pardon my bogeyman drift, but the reason Wal-Mart grew into America's largest retailer so quickly is because for most of the company's first two decades or so of existence, it focused exclusively on the small towns of the Heartland and Deep South, where discount department stores had not bothered to venture, figuring people in these modest communities would appreciate a store with a large selection of low-priced merchandise. They were right. And so is WFM for not opening stores in these same places; the business justification is the mirror image of Wal-Mart's. Let's face it--food porn rules. "I am Whole Foods of Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated."

I think we could consider Bleachboy's answer to the question the definitive one on the subject. To provide further confirmation, here are some web sites for other stores that feature "whole foods": Whole Foods Cooperative, Erie, Pa. Whole Foods Co-op, Duluth, Minn. Rainbow Whole Foods Co-operative Grocery, Jackson, Miss. Roanoke Natural Foods Co-op, Roanoke, Va. And there are other variations on this theme, including retailers of supplements, that popped up when I Asked Jeeves "What are whole foods?" A bunch of sites dealing with Whole Foods Market, of course, also popped up, including sites pertaining to the ongoing drive to unionize the famously anti-union company. But perhaps more pertinent to Mimi's original question was an article from Forbes that also showed up in the search. Leave it to the business writers to get to the crux of the matter: Food Porn* *Yes, the same title as that much-discussed Columbia Journalism Review article on food writing. BTW, I popped into the South Street Whole Foods just a little while ago after picking up a few items at the Super Fresh. I scoped out the produce section, which is the most eye-popping produce section in any Philadelphia supermarket I've yet encountered. The same goes for the prices. This time of year, you won't find any locally grown produce at WFM--it's all California or from abroad. Conventionally grown Spanish on-the-vine tomatoes were $3.29 a pound. Spanish onions, $1.79 a pound. And yes, they had Bibb (Boston) lettuce--organically grown, from California, at $2.39 a head. I think I'll continue my habit of buying most of my produce at the Reading Terminal Market, with occasional forays to the Italian Market for bargains.

Canned puree may indeed be that. The Tuttorosso puree I have in my pantry has an almost identical ingredients list: "Tomato concentrate (water, tomato paste), citric acid." Note the absence of salt. Okay, next challenge: Find a commercial tomato puree that is not reconstituted from paste.

I've got a couple of large cans of Tuttorosso tomato puree in my pantry right now, along with a couple of cans of Tuttorosso crushed tomatoes with basil. Tomato puree is a thick liquid, much thicker than tomato sauce. Unlike tomato sauce, though, it usually contains no added salt. And unlike crushed tomatoes, which are otherwise similar to tomato puree in thickness, puree contains no solid tomato pulp. Most of the major tomato processors make puree as part of their product line. However, it does not come in smaller cans the way most other tomato products do. I have yet to see a can of tomato puree less than 22 ounces net weight. Look on the lower shelves of the canned tomato section of your local supermarket, where the big cans usually reside.

If you look over on the Pennsylvania board, you will probably find a post or two from me that notes that my two "neighborhood" supermarkets are a Super Fresh (A&P family, like Food Emporium) and a Whole Foods, which are located across the street from each other. I've never been disappointed with anything I've bought from Whole Foods, but I do the overwhelming bulk of my shopping at the Super Fresh (and at an Acme about a mile further south), and I can tell you why in one word: Price. The funny thing is, when it comes to regular prices on products both stores carry, WFM is not all that out of line with the competition. However, the regular supermarket runs much better specials on these products. That also applies for natural and organic products--the Super Fresh is running a very good special on Del Monte's new line of organic canned tomatoes this week; I've never seen Muir Glen priced that low at Whole Foods. Yes, it has. That is very evident at the aforementioned Super Fresh, which increased the number of natural food products it carries and grouped most of them together in one section of the store. The Whole Foods on South Street does carry Boston lettuce regularly. That the store near you does not may have something to do with its produce suppliers and where they get their products. WFM does prefer to carry produce grown as close to the store's location as possible whenever possible, which is why you will find lots of Pennsylvania and Maryland grown produce on South Street. (Take a look at the labels in the WFM next door to you and see what states dominate where such information is provided.) This probably should not be an issue with lettuce, as most of the lettuce Americans eat is grown in California. But there are local growers of Romaine, for instance, and Boston lettuce is often grown hydroponically; there is a large hydroponic grower of Boston lettuce in Chester County, IIRC, and it may supply WFM stores in this region.

On further reflection, Sara had said upthread that she thought it was possible to educate and entertain at the same time. Alton Brown does exactly that on Good Eats. You'd think the Food Network brass would have taken notice. But if I go any further down this road, this would become yet another Food Network-bashing thread, and we have plenty of these already. A note for the Philadelphians on this board: WYBE-TV (Channel 35), the alternative public TV station, makes a point of doing two things: --Serving metropolitan Philadelphia's underserved audiences, which is why the station's schedule is chock-full of programming aimed at a United Nations of ethnic groups and other marginalized folk, and --counterprogramming WHYY, providing local public TV viewers with something different to watch at any given time. WYBE runs cooking shows on weekdays, when 'HYY is busy educating the tykes, for the latter reason. Similarly, when Channel 12 (Channel 64 in Seaford, Delaware; the station is co-licensed to Wilmington and thus Delaware's only VHF TV station) is teaching us to cook on Saturdays, 'YBE runs multicultural programming.

I certainly don't have a pipeline to the Whole Foods Markets PR department, but we all have access to the company's Web site... which really isn't all that helpful when it comes to answering the question, "Just what exactly do you mean by 'whole foods'?" But it is clear enough on this: They do not carry any products containing artificial ingredients. The Quality Standards section of their Web site has a link to a list of ingredients WFM deems unacceptable. That list explains why you will find Tropicana orange juice (no additives) and Philadelphia Brand cream cheese (carageenan, a stabilizer and thickener, is a natural product derived from seaweed), but not Hellman's mayonnaise (contains calcium disodium EDTA, a banned ingredient, as a preservative), at Whole Foods stores. So if by "whole", the company means "unadulterated" -- that is, containing only natural ingredients with nothing artificial -- then you have the answer to your question. Many well-known brands--I've given two above--meet this standard, but others do not. Some other examples: • Most commercial brands of canned tomatoes would meet WFM's standards. Del Monte canned tomatoes, for instance, contain only calcium chloride (a natural salt) and high fructose corn syrup (a substance some people have trouble with, but not an artificial ingredient) and thus could be sold in WFM stores. • WFM stores could stock Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce, but not Heinz, which contains sodium benzoate as a preservative and polysorbate 80. L&P uses no artificial ingredients. I think this sheds some light on the subject.

Well, maybe that explains why my partner has started watching the Food Network and I've stopped watching it (Good Eats, Iron Chef/Iron Chef America and any show where the host visits Kansas City aside). He may still be a consummate professional, but a little bit of Emeril goes a loooooonnng, loooooooonnnnnng way. (That Crest toothpaste commercial is about enough.) Good luck, Sara, and we'll be hanging on your every word.

Neat variation on the patty melt you've got there, IrishCream.

I can't imagine that the issues the Guardian article raised surrounding the large-scale growing of oranges do not apply to the growing of grapefruit. As regular yellow grapefruit juice is much more tart than OJ, it has never been as popular, and the introduction of "Ruby Red" grapefruit juice, which is much sweeter, has not really changed things that much. I usually drink a glass of OJ or OJ blend (orange-tangerine or orange-pineapple) each morning. (I cut cranberry juice with seltzer as an alternative to soda for drinking the rest of the day.) Some of the distinctions among those 13 varieties of packaged juice are real and noticeable. Original has no pulp, "Homestyle" has some pulp, and "Grovestand" has lots of pulp. "Light" has reduced sugar content. The calcium+D juice has these nutrients added, presumably to appeal to people who either do not or cannot consume milk and dairy products; it has a cloudier appearance and notably chalky taste. Then there's "Immunity Defense" with added vitamin E and "Double C+E" with added vitamin E and twice the vitamin C of the regular variety. That's seven of the 13. If they count the blends, there are orange-pineapple, orange-tangerine and orange-strawberry-banana, making three more; all of these now have added calcium and vitamin D. Now we are at ten. I don't know what besides marketing distinguishes number 11, "Healthy Kids," from the others. What are the other two and their distinguishing features? Tropicana's main selling point is that its top-of-the-line juices are not reconstituted from concentrate. I suspect that otherwise, they too have all the pesticide, etc., problems associated with the reconstituted juices.

Just to make things clear (thanks, John), I have been referring to all-beef hot dogs throughout. I have eaten beef-and-pork and turkey dogs in the past, and I do not reject them on principle, but I generally prefer all-beef.

...shouldn't they be the best you can get? Maybe this belongs over in General Food Topics, and I wouldn't mind if the moderators moved it, but since I'm dealing right now with locally available product in Philadelphia, this is where I'll kick off this discussion. I know a lot of people in these parts swear by Dietz and Watson franks. And to be fair, they're okay. But they don't quite do it for me the way good old Oscar Mayer franks, which you can get anywhere, do. (Something about the way they're seasoned, though I think that seasoning involves some chemical flavoring; there's a pronounced taste of something besides beef in OM franks.) I tried the nitrate-free hot dogs sold at the Fair Food Farmstand a while back, and found them a bit on the bland side. I am generally impressed by the quality and taste of Hatfield meats (their scrapple excluded), but I haven't put their franks to the test yet. Nor have I tried any of the store brands--which is somewhat unusual for me, a big store-brand believer. But I've finally found a local hot dog that beats the nationally advertised brand: Dietz and Watson Eagles Franks. These are bigger than their regular dogs (six to the pound instead of eight), and they are more flavorful, too--more of a beefy taste, and a better mix of seasonings. (I didn't read the ingredients list on the last package I bought, but I would not be surprised to see "oleoresin paprika" among them--they sure tasted like they had a little paprika thrown in.) Anyone else tried these yet? (Unfortunately, they're not available year-round; they only come out around football season.) If so, do you feel me? Or am I off base? Is there something better out there I should know about? (And don't tell me "Vienna Beef." This ain't Chicago.)

(emphasis added) Notice I didn't say anything about that. I don't recall anyone else doing so in this discussion, either.

Pasta sauce is one of those items in the former category for me--I've never bought pasta sauce in a jar. However: I have yet to make it from fresh tomatoes. (Shrimp Creole, on the other hand, I have.) Hmmmm...mayo. I know there are recipes in Joy of Cooking for mayonnaise and blender mayonnaise. I have an immersion blender. Maybe I should give it a workout on this condiment sometime. (I use it to make a really tasty blue cheese dip.)