paulraphael

Funny you should mention, I wandered into the Bowery WF just yesterday, and specifically checked the coffee section. I was pleased to see that they now have Grumpy and Intelligentsia and Stumptown. They had a small variety from everyone ... mostly blends that did't particularly excite me. Otherwise I would have grabbed some of the Grumpy. Been meaning to try it. Although it was indeed expensive. Have you tried Brooklyn Roasting Co.? I've been hearing good things and the prices are a couple of notches lower than the more famous west-coast guys.

David Schomer on roasting for espresso.

I use a britta in NYC for drinking water, especially for tea and coffee (not for cooking water though, generally). Mostly for chlorine. There's always at least a hint of chlorine flavor in our water here, and sometimes in the summer they crank it up to the point where it smells like a pool. Unpleasant straight, disgusting in coffee. After a pass through the filter I can no longer smell or taste it, and the water's great for coffee. Also a lot of buildings have nasty old pipes. Like the one I'm in now. I don't know why some buildings are so different from others. My last building was 100 years older than this one but the water was better. Here it tastes like some of calcium and iron and god knows what. The britta does a good job eliminating these flavors also. If I were afraid of anything truly dangerous in the water (heavy metals, organic contaminants, viruses etc..) I'd want a much more serious filter. But the britta's good for keeping things tasty.

The only thing I can think of (besides pure cynicism) is that to make the bottom thicker than the sides, and it's easier with an additional layer than with a layer of variable thickness. But it doesn't explain why you'd need more than 2 layers of aluminum. I have some old calphalon (from back when it was the Commercial Aluminum Cookware Co.). This stuff is pretty nice, even when it's been beaten nearly beyond recognition. I no longer love anodized aluminum, although find it serviceable enough to keep using. Newer calphalon looks purely like a consumer brand driven by marketing people. I'd only recommend it if it were available for cheap.

I use the ziploc freezer bags, with the standard closure (not with the separate plastic zip thing). I've found these to be 100% reliable if handled carefully. I've used them up to an hour at 85°C, and 48 hours at lower temperatures. These bags have a good track record (they're what Dave Arnold and Nils Sorensen recommend at CookingIssues). If you use them at higher temperatures, handle them gently; the plastic gets soft and the seal will be less strong. I use these bags routinely for cook-chill, and cook-freeze. The biggest caveat is not sous-vide specific: if you freeze liquids in these (I use them for stock) they often leak when you thaw them. So I never thaw bags full of frozen liquid in a water bath, without double-bagging. Usually I'll just put in a bowl and microwave. I often reuse these as sous-vide bags, but not for anything critical. The chicken thighs I buy for s-v come vacuum-packed ... i just slip the whole package into one my recycled ziplocs and evacuate the air. In this case the ziploc is just for backup. The commercial vacuum packaging is designed to be easy to open, and it can sometimes be too easy. It's not 100% reliable in the water bath.

I figured out the answer. Their prices have gone from high to stupid high. I don't think anything at all is wrong with the coffee ... they still sit near the top of almost all the coffee fanatic reviews, nationally.

Re: Australian coffee, Toby's Estate has moved into NYC and has been warmly received. My local shop now carries it in place of Stumptown. It seems to be in the same league but a bit more reasonably priced.

It's possible that what you're calling "light roast" and what people at Stumptown and Heart and Counter Culture call light roast are quite different. The term is obviously subjective and ambiguous; without side-by-side pictures it's hard to know what anyone's talking about. To get into the ballpark, I believe these guys are all roasting lighter than what was common in France and Italy (at least 20 or 30 years ago) and quite a bit lighter than what you see at Starbucks. I don't think any of them do a truly pale, very light roast for their standard offerings, especially for an espresso (which would be overly bright and acidic). Which also leads me to scratch my head when you talk about light roasts making coffee that tastes like dirt. Typically you'd expect the opposite; the lighter the roast, the higher the acidity. Too light = too bright. Unbalanced w/r/t tartness vs. sweetness. How long do you rest the coffee after roasting?

What do you mean? When we cook food to pasteurization—to make it safe—we base our times and temperatures on data. At least that's what I do. I don't have a lab to analyze my food.

The guy who used to be the fish butcher at Le Bernardin in NYC (and maybe still is) used to talk about this. He was one of these near superhuman kitchen workers, who needed to be replaced by two or three guys on his days off. He cut everything perfectly without any waste. He talked about the right degree of sharpness ... too dull and and the cuts were rough; too sharp, and when filleting certain kinds of fish the knife would sever the pin bones rather than sliding the flesh off of them (if I remember correctly). This does seem to be technique-specific. Japanese fish butchers use a deba, which is single-beveled and traditionally extremely sharp, except at the heel where it's given a back-bevel to withstand cleavering through bones. But in Japan the approach to butchering fish is completely different and so the concerns are different as well. I suspect Japanese-style butchering is a slower, more involved process than what they use at Le Bernardin.

K.C. taught me how to cut, so I think I can speak to this. He didn't keep chives in the fridge as a matter of course; it was a demonstration. The idea being that if they stay fresh for days, they'll definitely stay fresh for a few hours. Which allows you to cook more efficiently: instead of the European method of cutting your herbs at the last possible instant (during service when a million other things are going on), cut them first, when your knife is at its sharpest. There's no penalty if the knife is truly sharp.

I did this test with chives and the difference was evident after 45 minutes. The herbs you're cutting there (for whatever reason) just aren't that susceptible to enzymatic browning, so they're not showing much difference.

Your meat was pasteurized when the heat went off, so the danger is from anaerobic bacteria, like c. perfringes and c. botulinum. These love warm temperatures in a low-acid environment in a bag where there's no air. They produce toxins that are not destroyed by normal cooking temperatures. It's impossible to say how likely this was in your situation. I don't think there's any way to predict the presence of these organisms on raw meat, or any way to test for the toxins (without a chemistry or biology lab). My guess is that the probabliity is low. But the stakes are high. Like daveb, I'd be inclined to eat it but not to play Russian Roulette with guests.

So, based on location, price, and possibility of reservations, we ended up at Chez Michel ... a 9:30pm reservation the night before we had to get up at 4:45 to get to the airport. And worth it. Everyone in our group loved it. Didn't exactly fit the mould of the upstart / experimental new restaurant, but I gather from reviews that the chef has reinvented the place a few times since the 90s, and has hit on something that's part traditional Breton and part unique. We spent a lot of time with the chalkboard menu. Even the native French speaker in our group needed help deciphering a few of the dishes. We were surprised by how casual the place was, and how inexpensive. Reviews had me expecting higher prices (not our usual experience). The chef himself sauntered around the dining room, answering the waiter's questions and at one point spending about five minutes recommending wine. He was expansively friendly, spoke no English, and with his rustic / Serge-Gainsbourgian good looks seemed to have been delivered straight from Central Casting. I wish we'd had the time and budget to visit some more places, especially more contemporary ones, but this was a great meal and a restaurant I'd recommend to anyone. Day to day we found the bread and pastries to be relentlessly good, but the restaurant food to be only decent ... probably because it was too challenging to get away from places that thrived on tourist traffic. Fresh fruit was absolutely perfect everywhere, including corner shops and tarts at lower end patisseries. Vegetables are more of a challenge ... our friends in Paris have to travel and research to find veggies that taste anywhere near as good as they look. The fish we found at various markets and a Bon Marché was excellent and stupefyingly expensive. i ended up cooking dorade, rather than the more interesting looking varieties, partly because I couldn't identify the others, partly because I couldn't afford them. We had a loaf of bread from Poullin, the one they call their specialty, and it was completely unremarkable. But our friends' local baguettes from la Parisienne are as good as any I've had. We could have eaten baguettes and nothing else and been happy. We loved the 4 and 5 Euro bottles of wine. Coffee everywhere came out of automatic machines ... big espresso machines at cafes, little Nespresso abominations at people's houses. It was all uniformly good ... better than the average cup you find in NYC, worse than the best cups. We spent a few days in Rome afterwards. Espresso was better. Even the touristy gelato was pretty good (nut flavors especially). But food overall was really bad. The nicest restaurants had decent food (but not memorable). Everything else a disappointment. Nice statues though. Maybe this should have its own post. Thanks again everyone for the tips!

That Konosuke is quite similar to the Ikkanshi Tadatsuna gyuto I've been using for past 5 or 6 years. It's my favorite style of knife, since the thin edge geometry lets it cut efficiently even after losing its fresh-off-the-stones magic. When it gets dull, it still works better than a heavy chef's knife ... except for the kinds of things a heavy chef's knife does better in the first place, like cutting tough, woody, stemmy things, beheading fish and chickens, chopping chocolate, etc.

Yes, that's my experience as well. I think it's just something that people aren't educated about, and don't want to be educated about. The topic bores them. They want to have a Good Knife, but don't want to pay any attention to it. Use it on glass cutting board, throw it in the sink, the dishwasher, the drawer, and maybe five years from now say "huh, maybe I should get this thing sharpened." This is why I bring my knives when I go anywhere to cook, and why people who come to help cook in my kitchen they use my girlfriend's knives (she doesn't care) and not mine. Unless they care enough to let me teach them. Which has happened maybe twice ever. But in my pontifications about very sharp knives vs. sort-of sharp knives, I wasn't even thinking about the typical home knife drawer. Those knives don't even have edges on them. By sort-of sharp, I'm talking about those knives when they were brand new, or when freshly sharpened on a coarse stone or ceramic rod.

Seriously, Rotus, if you haven't had Stumptown or Intelligentsia, how do you know that no commercial roaster can roast as well as you? Considering that I'd never encountered well-roasted coffee anywhere in NYC before those two came to town, I can only assume it's not easy. The home-roasted coffee I've had was indeed better than Starbucks ... I'll leave it at that.

Rotus, do you think Stumptown and Intelligentsia coffee tastes like dirt? Or maybe you're using a different definition of light roast than they are.

Do Stumptown and Counterculture beans taste like dry dirt dust to you? Maybe your idea of light roast is lighter than what they're talking about.

as of when?

I have to agree with the glaring Aussie barista snob in the first post. As good coffee availability has improved, i've noticed my favorite roasters all use a light roast. I had a long conversation with a rep at Stumptown about this; she simply said that the darker the roast, the less the intrinsic quality of the bean comes through. Once you get to "Italian Roast," it hardly even matters what you started with. This is why dark roasts are favored by companies like Starbucks. I've noticed the same pattern at companies like Intelligentsia and Counter Culture (although I buy less of their coffee and haven't have talked to anyone there ... I can't say for sure they don't roast anything dark). Anyway, I'm sold. By far the most complex and flavorful coffees I've had are light roasts. Dark roasted beans taste to me much more one-dimensional.

These guys have been my favorite roaster for the last couple of years. They moved into New York and practically took the town from some of the local roasters (guys like Gorilla coffee, who excel at graphic design but don't seem to know much about roasting). Then this fall, I'm seeing that a lot of coffee shops that used to serve Stumptown or sell their whole beans have switched brands. I'm seeing replacements like Heart Coffee (unimpressed by my first try) and Toby's Estate (still deciding). When I've asked people behind the counter, I get cryptic answers. The suggestion is that Stumptown's quality has declined, but no one's coming out and saying it. Other possibilities, of course, are that they've become more expensive or harder to do business with, or that I'm only imagining a pattern. Any thoughts, from NYC or elsewhere?

We probably agree about that, although I don't like putting people in boxes like "normal cook." It seems more about priorities and temperament than anything normative. I actually like the working style and esthetic of the European knife and Cordon-Bleu techniques. The idea of a jack-of-all-trades tool (chef's knife) that always does your bidding and can be quickly and simply maintained (steeling) appeals to me tremendously. The question is if the appeal of Japanese-style cutting and sharpening techniques outweigh the costs—which I see as additional education and a more heightened need for attention. Different cooks are going to answer that differently, but I don't think it has to do with who's more "normal" or who's more professional. I think I'd mentioned in an earlier post that at a Michelin 3-star seafood restaurant where I staged, I saw all kinds of knives and all kinds of techniques. Everything from garden-variety Wusthoff to laser-thin gyutos with wa-handles. What I'm getting at, is that it's for the cook to decide. The benefits to sharp knives (in the Japanese sense) are real. So is the investment in new skills, and the added attention they require. No one can make the cost/benefit analysis for you.

Tell that to all the chefs in Japan. Here's how I like to show off with a sharp knife: all the cuts look great, all the herbs are fresh and vibrant, even though I cut them two hours ago, I finished prepping the food 20 minutes faster than I otherwise would have been able to, I don't have to stop and steel the blade to keep the edge useable, and even if I did this all day long I wouldn't get one of those knife calluses on my index finger.

Actually, I don't think many butcher shops use especially sharp knives. They get their cutting ability from a moderately sharp but very toothy edge. Most butchers use forschner or dexter kinds of knives, sharpened on a grinder by a sharpening service, and maintained on a steel. Commercial grinders use a coarse-grit that gives a toothy edge; this does a great job ripping through the sinewy, slippery texture of raw meat. A thinner edge with a mirror polish cuts even better, but the advantages are less significant with meat that's going to be cooked. Any time you see someone maintaining a knife with a butcher steel, you know it's not a very sharp edge. A thin, mirror-polished edge would get trashed by steeling. Thin edges need to be maintained on waterstones on on strops. What you're seeing in those butchering videos is the skill of person with the knife. They're slipping the blade perfectly through the joints of the chickens or between the muscle groups of the cow, so the knife has to do surprisingly little work.