paulraphael

Sam, I agree on general principle, but have to say that my friends who are classical musicians would (and do) cringe at the notion that Benjamin Britten has some innate musical or cultural superiority over, say, Radiohead. It strikes me a bit like the belief that haute cuisine is somehow superior to regional cuisine, when in my experience there are inspiring and disappointing examples of each. I tend to agree with Alex Ross, music critic at the New Yorker on the general issue. And on Radiohead.

It might not melt, but it CAN catch on fire. Which might even be scarrier. I walked into the kitchen once to see the entire toaster (one that was plastic on the outside) engulfed in flames started by poptart icing. The whole fireball had to be picked up by the power cord and hurled into the sink. I'm definitely going to try the pop tarts. Gfron said his main goal was to improve the filling, but I'm more excited about the pastry. The original tastes a bit like particle board. This version has a butter crust.

A couple of months ago I served lamb seasoned with lapsang souchong. I made a rub with the tea leaves (ground to powder), salt, black pepper, butter, and a bit of red wine and red wine vinegar. The rub went on the full lamb racks about 2 hours before roasting. The flavor picked up from the rub was subtle ... enough to taste on bites of the outer part of the meat, but not the middle. I also used lapsang in the sauce. The sauce was lamb coulis (jus made by multiple emersions / slow reductions of veal stock and lamb bones and trimmings). The tea was steeped in right at the end, for four minutes, with the sauce held below a simmer. I'm a whore for lapsang souchong and have been looking for ways to cook with it. My dessert experiments haven't gone so well ... this lamb is the first thing I've been happy with.

I think that's right. The trouble is that next month it could be from some completely different maker.

I'm stumped then. Wild guess: the creme fraiche was a bit low on butterfat, and this reduced its stability. I'm not convinced either but it's all I got

I'm guessing it's overwhipped. If that's the case, stirring in a bit of unwhipped creme fraiche might fix it (i'll bet you already tried this).

Here are some links to informal videos that show excellent cutting technique: Hung from Top Chef (includes tip chopping, forward push cutting, and using usu-zukuri on a raw hanger steak)A chef while making lunch and worshiping his expensive knife. He does a lot of classical cuts (julienne, etc.) but with more efficient techniques than the classical ones.Another chef's full suite of cutting demos. Pay attention to how lightly he holds the knife, and also to the chive cutting technique, which is vastly better than what typically gets taught in cooking school. And a book that's coming out soon ... no idea how it will be. For the basic classical techniques, this book is pretty good. The attached DVD is great for things like butchering chickens, although for a lot of other skills the author's technique is oddly lacking.

I'd strongly recommend seeking out instruction from someone who has Japanese training. I learned all the traditional Euro cutting methods (like the ones in the EGCI course and in Chad's book) and practiced them for years. Now I almost never cut like that. Japanese and Hybrid techniques let me cut faster, more precisely, with less damage to the food, and with better edge retention for the knife. Unfortunately there's a dearth of good instructional information. Most of it gets taught from cook to cook. There's a book coming out this summer (announced on Amazon), but I have no idea how good it will be or how relevent it will be to non-Japanese cooking. I'd love to see an updated to the EGCI taught by someone who's a master of the more refined techniques.

I've never heard of a knife snapping mid-potato, but there's been a lot of chatter lately about terrible quality control from Fujiwara. Someone in another forum complained about a new gyuto with a bent tip ... the temper of the metal was softe enough that he could bend it back with his fingers. This all seems to be new. Not too long ago everything I heard about Fujiwara was positive. Edited to add: I just took a closer look at the photo. I've never seen a knife snap like that (practically at its thickest point) under any circumstances. Truly amazing. Looks like someone cut your sword in two with theirs, in a low budget kung fu movie.

Some sites to check out: Tsuji, showing a lot of hira-zukuri technique, on usu-zukuri, and a site that will give you formal lessons for 10 bucks a month.Make sure your knife is very sharp! If you're going to make a habit of this, you should have at least a small set of waterstones, and spend as much time practicing with them as you do with your cutting. A long knife (9 to 12 inches) will make life easier, assuming you have room to use it. Sharpness, length, and technique are more important than having a real yanagi.

If that's true you might want to get your thyroid checked ... it could save you some money! I don't know how the Gila compares with stage races like the Tour de France and the Tour of California, but in those races riders eat 6000 to 9000 Calories a day ... about as much as three or four normal adults. If your local race is at all similar in daily mileage and elevation gain, then it's likely you're just not counting the food the racers eat while on the bike. Stage racers typically slurp down 50 or 60 grams of carbs every hour during a race, or whatever their stomachs can handle. This is still only a fraction of the calories that they're burning; the rest has to be made up at breakfast and dinner.

A relevent study in these hard times ... Abstract Considering the similarity of its ingredients, canned dog food could be a suitable and inexpensive substitute for pâté or processed blended meat products such as Spam or liverwurst. However, the social stigma associated with the human consumption of pet food makes an unbiased comparison challenging. To prevent bias, Newman's Own dog food was prepared with a food processor to have the texture and appearance of a liver mousse. In a double-blind test, subjects were presented with five unlabeled blended meat products, one of which was the prepared dog food. After ranking the samples on the basis of taste, subjects were challenged to identify which of the five was dog food. Although 72% of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the five samples in terms of taste (Newell and MacFarlane multiple comparison, P<0.05), subjects were not better than random at correctly identifying the dog food.

Any updates on remmedies for the pine nut affliction? My girlfriend has been gagging on all food for the last four days. She says it tastes like something died in the back of her throat. Diagnosis by google pointed to every kind of horrible chronic gastric disturbance, until I noticed that none of those conditions produced a foul taste specifically when you eat. A bit more snooping around pointed to pine nuts ... which she'd eaten the day before. We're all relieved that she's not dying, but a cure would be nice. She read that acids like vinegar can help, so she ate a salad with tons of vinnaigrette. It helped, but only for the duration of the salad.

I was under the impression that food costs for pastry are lower than for the rest of the restaurant. With the notable exception of good chocolate, the main ingredients are cheap. With most dishes there are advantages like being able to do most of the heavy lifting well in advance, and only minor assembly and plating at service.

I've often wondered about deep-frying maki -- not to salvage it; just because it sounds good. And I assumed it would be seen as some kind of sacriledge, but apparently not. I can imagine it coated in a light tempura batter, and fried just long enough to crisp it on the outside and warm it slightly or cook it rare in the middle.

I think the best thing you could buy from japaneseknifesharpening.com is their sharpening video and a couple of stones. "catch me a fish and i'll eat for a day ..." etc..

Do you have a video camera? I think a cheerful instructional episode on maki casserole would make an amazing pilot for food channel.

I just grind the meat once, but I like to add the salt (1% by weight or a bit less) to the meat before grinding. the grinder mixes it up nicely. Just be sure to wash the grinder immediately afterwards. Salt is corrosive to carbon steel and aluminum and other metals used in most grinders.

Yup. The one time I was sure I had food poisoning, the symptoms matched staph intoxication. Knocked me off my feet for two days. Another issue is that the temperature required to reliably kill bacteria would mean overcooking many types of fish. I'm not so interested in tuna or salmon that's cooked through to 160+ degrees. And yet another set of issues is non-microbial spoilage. These include oxidation of fats (rancidity), and enzyme breakdown, with byproducts like trimethylamine and ammonia (all of which makes fish stink). Cooking tends to make the off-flavors and odors of these processes worse, not better. All these issues are much more pressing with cold water fish than warm water fish. edited to add: the biggest health hazard with old sushi is probably the rice. The fish will likely spoil quickly and get too nasty to eat before any serious pathogens have a chance to take over. But that starchy rice is basically a petry dish, and it spends its entire cooked existence at danger zone temperatures.

Chikalicious has been a big success in NYC. I'd take a close look at what they do. p*ong did something similar (in addition to being a full service restaurant). It failed, but I suspect this had to do with execution, not the idea itself. Some other spots to look at are WD-50 and Taylor in NYC, and Providence in LA.

I've infused vanilla successfully into melted butter, just by splitting beans, tossing into the butter, and holding over low heat for 5 to 10 minutes. The flavor is excellent, even when it's the second use of the beans. Chocolate is probably a good enough emuslfier that you wouldn't have to worry about breaking the butter. If think breaking will be an issue, you could infuse the vanilla into a beurre monte ... it would just take a bit of effort to keep the temp below 180 or so, to keep it from breaking.

I don't assume that, because we have no way of knowing who actually makes it for them. What seems fishy is that a brand like Setaro gets burried ... and this is a pasta I only know about because a lot of (real) Italian chefs like it. I don't know anyone who's been swayed by Setaro's marketing, because I don't know anyone who's seen any.

Doing a few different shapes from each maker, and doing more than one trial of each should also be a minimum if the results are to have much weight. It's a lot of work ... testing anything with scientific riggor is hard. The most basic elements of experiment design usually demand much more attention than these magazines ever commit. slkinsey hints at some issues when he mentions different pastas requiring different amounts of cooking. A typical, oversimplified experiment design would call for cooking everything identically, to level the playing field. This obviously gives useless results. But the alternatives make it harder to design the test: exactly how and how much do you cook each pasta? How do you decide? There's a simple control that I'd like to see implemented in all taste tests like this: some samples should be doubled. in other words, if you're being asked to taste ten different bowls of spaghetti, some of those bowls might contain the identical product (but it's a blind test, so you wouldn't know). If if you give different judgements of two tastes of the same pasta, then the weight of your judgements is diminished (a statistician can even determine how much).

Really impressive, especially the Cecil and Lily cake. Looks like hand lettering done with a wide-nibbed pen. How do you pull that off?

I really don't know how much of the backlash (when it's substantive at all) is aimed Waters' actual policies or at caricatures of them. Does she have any core mission statements or manifestos that can be linked to?