paulraphael

Oh, good god. It's also a symbol of economic privilege. Which interpretation makes more sense in this context?

Ok, maybe you could quote the passage in question. At first I was wondering if we'd read the same book; now I'm wondering if we live on the same planet.

I doubt it. In the new book the vegetarian rant is part of a chapter in which he revisits old ideas. Mostly to modify or retract. But he says the vegetarian issue still raises his ire.

I think you're just mischaracterizing his position. Bourdain attacks ideologies that present themselves as morally superior, but which don't acknowledge the enormous degree of privilege (mostly economic) that makes them possible. He may invite misunderstanding, to a degree, by using the blanket term "vegetarians" ... when what he really means is vegetarians who bring their ideas stubbornly and self-righteously into contexts that are inappropriate. Yes, there are many vegetarian cultures in the world, and many in which meat is optional. There are others where meat (or fish, or dairy, or whatever) is a matter of survival ... and to refuse it based on ideas you brought with you from the Land of Opportunity or the hippy commune, is just plain arrogant. I'm pretty sure Bourdain has travelled enough to not be constrained by simplistic ethnocentric ideas. And I seriously doubt he cares a bit if you abstain from Burgers while in Northern California. This would have been a well thought out argument. But this isn’t the argument TB makes in the book. No where near it. In all actuality I can’t imagine how anyone could possibly extrapolate this relatively well thought out, though poorly presented, position from what is actually printed in the book. Though it is a bit unclear exactly how vegetarianism comes from a position of priviledge, given that meat is truly the food of the weathly. "I don't care what you do in your home, but the idea of a vegetarian traveler in comfortable shoes waving away hospitality—the distillation of a lifetime of training and experience—of, say, a Vietnamese pho vendor (or an Italian mother-in-law, for that matter) fills me with sputtering indignation." "I guess I understand if your desire for a clean conscience and cleaner colon overrules any natural lust for bacon. But taking your belief system on the road—or to other people's houses—makes me angry. I feel too lucky—now more than ever—too accutely aware what an incredible, unexpected privilege it is to travel this world and enjoy the kindness of strangers to ever, ever be able to understand how one could do anything other than say yes, yes, yes."

I'm not sure if it's because of goals. But I think vegetarian cultures like the Hindus have many centuries of experience on their side. They've figured out the delicousness part and have encoded it into a deep tradition. And a living tradition ... it continues to be passed down to new generations of home cooks year after year. Vegetarians in this country more often inherit ideas from short-lived trends, from cook book authors who are forever in search of a new hook, or from opportunistic packaged food manufacturers (veggie bacon! Tofurkey!)

I think you're just mischaracterizing his position. Bourdain attacks ideologies that present themselves as morally superior, but which don't acknowledge the enormous degree of privilege (mostly economic) that makes them possible. He may invite misunderstanding, to a degree, by using the blanket term "vegetarians" ... when what he really means is vegetarians who bring their ideas stubbornly and self-righteously into contexts that are inappropriate. Yes, there are many vegetarian cultures in the world, and many in which meat is optional. There are others where meat (or fish, or dairy, or whatever) is a matter of survival ... and to refuse it based on ideas you brought with you from the Land of Opportunity or the hippy commune, is just plain arrogant. I'm pretty sure Bourdain has travelled enough to not be constrained by simplistic ethnocentric ideas. And I seriously doubt he cares a bit if you abstain from Burgers while in Northern California.

No, it's entirely reasonable, since many of the opinions are revisions of ones expressed in his most popular writings. I would assume that anyone bent toward dismissals of Bourdain will not have followed his every interview and essay and tv appearance. If your ideas about Bourdain come from Kitchen Confidential and The Nasty Bits (as mine have), you'll find different ideas here. Which isn't to suggest you'll like them, just that you don't yet know what they are. Straw man argument. Criticize Bourdain all you want. Just don't criticize a book you haven't read.

Half-sheet pans plastic mis containers in a few sizes side towels spoons!

I'd be more adventurous if there was a longer list of fish that were available, fresh, sustainable, and affordable. The last one has been a bigger influence lately. My fishmonger has fish ranging from around $7 / lb to over $30 / lb. Anything approaching the high end is going to be more of a special occasion purchase for me. My list lately has included trout, black bass, sea bream/dorade, and occasionally arctic char. For a while I was buying tillapia, but the quality was inconsistent.

A ceramic steel will chip a knife every bit as easily as a metal one. The questions are how thin is knife's edge geometry, and how brittle is its metal. Global knives aren't particularly thin or brittle, so chipping isn't much of an issue. Ceramic steels work a bit differently than metal ones; they're abrasive and actually grind the blade slightly. They're coarse compared with fine stones, so you want to avoid them if you polish your blades with anything higher than 2000 grit or so. People complain about sharpening difficulties not because the steel is hard (it's fairly soft by Japanese standards) but because it's gummy and doesn't let go of a bur. If you don't get rid of the bur, you end up with a wire edge ... the knife can still be extremely sharp, but the edge will be fragile and short-lived. It's likely that most cooks use knives with wire edges and don't even know it. I personally find it very difficult to get the last remains of the wire off of my chef's knife, and it's made out of much friendlier steel than the globals. To put it in perspective, Dave Martell of Japanese Knife Sharpening said he's given up on sharpening globals on stones; he uses a belt sander just like he uses on German knives. I assume this means he hasn't found a workable solution to the wire edge issue with global's metallurgy.

But restaurants can make excellent tea and coffee, and many do. Are we talking about areas where restaurants often slack off, or where they suffer some fundamental disadvantage compared with a home kitchen?

I think these points are the crux of it. A restaurant's limitations come from the nature of the a la carte workflow. The home kitchen's limitations have more to do with facilities, number of hands available, and the impracticality of making certain preparations on a small scale. Home cooks get dismayed by haute cuisine recipes that involve half a dozen components on a plate, each one requiring many sub-components. Cooking like this for a dinner party is martyrdom, but at a restaurant with dozens cooks, each of whom preps for several hours, the result is an efficient workflow that allows last minute assembly of extremely complex plates.

True that. The only homemade ice creams I've had that rivaled the best at restaurants were made at home by pastry chefs (or home cooks who have trained under them). Yes, at the high end. And I've been to some lower end places that have a kid cranking out tortillas to order. I'm no tortilla connoisseur, but these places made better ones than I ever have.

Agreed. The term "additive" is essentially meaningless, and "chemical" is completely meaningless, at least with regard to food. All food is 100% chemicals, just like our bodies. I think this kind of effort just preys on consumers' uninformed fears. The trend among many of the best chefs lately has gone, I'm happy to say, in the opposite direction: they are embracing ingredients and techniques once known only to industry. Their goals, however, rather than being about cheapness or infinite shelf life, are centered on quality of flavor and texture.

I'd suggest using zest from the lime and not just the juice. That's where you'll get more of the distinctive lime flavor.

All good advice. A few more thoughts: -check your freezer temperature, both for when you chill the canister and for when you harden the ice cream after spinning. The colder the better. Below 0°F is ideal. If you can get the canister this cold, you should be able to spin the ice cream in well under 15 minutes, depending on the quantity you're making. This will help keep the ice crystals small. -check the temperature of the ice cream when you're done spinning it (the drawing temperature). This should be around 23°F. -try your luck with a simpler flavor, like vanilla. Make sure you can get this right before venturing into fruit. Fruit flavors throw unpredictable amounts of added water and sugar into the mix, both of which can mess with your results from batch to batch. If you want to get serious, you can measure the brix of the mix ... basically the percentage of disolved solids. This will help you compensate for variances in your fruit. -try some stabilizing ingredients, like commercial ice cream stabilizer, or gelatin, or a mix of gelatin and corn starch or gelatin and xanthan. These help improve (and adjust) texture and prevent ice crystals from forming during spinning or storage.

Exactly. Anyone using a paring knife in place of a chef's knife, either because they feel safer or more efficient, should think about getting some chef knife skills. The wee knife is both many times less efficient and many times more likely to bloody your prep!

I use peelers a lot, but find that things like corers and mellon ballers are just too dull to give a clean cut. If I core an apple or pear with one of those it will turn brown in just a few minutes. It will also leave a a mealy texture. A sharp knife leaves a glass-smooth finish that feels better in the mouth and that won't turn brown for hours.

Depends on what you do. If you're chopping, slicing, etc. with a paring knife, then you don't need one ... you'd be much better served by a chef's knife / gyuto. It will do all these tasks many times better and more efficiently. If you do things like hull strawberries, core pears, tourne anything, or do any of the cuts that require hand-holding the food (not counting Japanese usuba cuts), then a paring knife is borderline essential. You can do these things with a boning / utility / petty knife, but a paring knife makes the tasks much easier. I don't see much reason besides knife fetishism to spend big bucks on a paring knife. Mine cost $40. Some cooks I know who cut better than I do won't use anything besides the $5 Forschner.

Sure. For one thing, there are no magical ingredients used in store-bought ice cream that you can't use in your own. For another, home made ice cream doesn't need to last for weeks in the freezer, so you face fewer challenges when formulating it. Depends, depends. A very high end compressor machine will outdo anything. A cheap one may or may not be any good at all. Canister machines can be great or terrible, depending on the size of the canister and how cold you can get it.

I can't speak for the new formulation of nalgene bottles, but the older polycarbonate ones don't impart any taste. I'd put money on any blind taste test. Polycarbonate is one of a number of plastics that's been used for years for food storage and prep, all the way up to the highest levels of restaurants. I suspect added flavors come from water getting brackish, and maybe from slimy residue from bacteria clinging to the plastic. At least the wide mouths make them easy to clean. Like most people, I probably don't clean mine as often as I should. Most food grade plastics are much less reactive than aluminum (though I doubt you'd have trouble with metallic flavors in oil, unless the oil is particularly acidic. I wouldn't dismiss the importance of an easy to clean bottle, especially since you seem to like nice quality olive oils. Oil residue in any bottle will eventually go rancid and spoil the flavor of whatever new oil you pour in.

You might want to take a look at bladeforums (for knifemaking in general, or knifeforums or foodieforums for kitchen knife communities. The steel choice and heat treatment are important ... you can't do anything without good choices here. Steel used in a saw blade is likely to have huge carbides for abrasion resistance, which make it a poor choice for knives. People will talk your ear off about the pros and cons of different alloys.

I like the nalgene bottle idea better than the aluminum bottle idea, just because those aluminum bottles (originally designed for fuel) are practically impossible to clean. The opening is so small. You definitely won't get off flavors from a nalgene bottle. Nor will you get them from the small polypro bottles (for what it's worth, every restaurant kitchen I've seen, including high end ones, uses polypro squeeze bottles for oils and vinnaigrettes). None of these options should leak, although I try to remember to put my oil bottle in a zip-lock just to be on the safe side. I'd consider nalgene if you need a big volume, or a generic pp if you don't.

They probably have the most obvious choices, so I'm looking for something a little more esoteric (but useful). Already got them What to Drink with What You Eat. Any thoughts?

I read the book and liked it. I think the thrashings voiced here are for the most part innacurate. Calling him a windbag or asshole is one thing ... that's just opinion. But saying the book is just the same old crap leads me to think the critic didn't read it closely, if at all. The book is a collection of essays, some covering old ground, some not. The ones covering old ground in most cases offer a revision of his previous views. He mentions a lot of factors, including expanded experience and diminished crankiness, behind his newer feelings. He also respects that he now has a broad audience, while he wrote Kitchen Confidential under the assumption that it would interest only a handful of derelect insiders like himself. His criticisms of topics like vegetarianism and Alice Waters are nuanced. And I agree with them, for the most part. And if you haven't read the essays in question, you don't know what those opinions are. My biggest criticism is that quality of writing seems uneven. There's evidence of the old Tony, and some sections where he betters his old self, but others where the prose falls flat. Some essays, like the very interesting one on David Chang, would benefit from some serious editing.