schaem

It's on Catherine Street, just south of East Broadway. Their pork/cabbbage buns are good when they have them fresh, but the real stars are the turnover looking things containing garlic chives, eggs and noodle bits. The scallion pancakes seem popular, as well.

Yeah, and some of those I-talian fellas make decent sandwiches.

Right. I may be willing to accept that Montreal bagels are better, but since bagels are generally considered breakfast food, and since I'm hungry now, and since i live in Brooklyn...I guess I'll just have to suffer the inferior (but quite dense, chewy, and tasty) product at the Brooklyn Bread Co. (And thank the gods I'm no longer waking up in Minnesota).

Trillium, would you be willing to elaborate on the complete brining (or salting) technique you used? Do you start with raw eggs, etc?

So, is the importation of standards of perfection by the creatively bereft also intellectual theft?

And i think you confuse writing recipes or menu ideas with the hardest work a chef does. Execution, training, managing, acquisition of products. These are the hardest things a chef does.

Exactly. How can Ceasar salad be called a "generic" dish. It has a name fer chrissake! It comes down to the old artist vesus artisan view of chefs. I guess if a chef is an artist, then copying his unique creations would be akin to copying a painting or a novel. If the chef is an artisan (which seems more likely considering they crank out numerous copies of their "works" every night) then the arguement doesn't hold. Recipes and ideas are more akin to "tricks of the trade", students (cooks) are influenced by their masters (chefs) and masters are influenced by their peers. Daniel Boulud adapting a dish from Paul Bocuse is a perfect example of two [confident] peers riffing off of each other. It is often said that the common trait of all great chefs is generosity. One can be gererous with ideas as well as with food.

Well I guess i could hang it where we hang the duck prosciutto.

As a sous chef in a NY kitchen I find myself learning a lot about Mexican food from the other cooks as they make family meal. With the summer being slow, I feel like we could get even more complicated, and none of the guys seem to know how to make cecina from scratch. Anyone have a recipe, or recipes? Maybe we could even start a back-of-the-house Mexican food thread.

I believe Grimes' first review was of Roy's. He announced his presence with "If clowns had a cuisine, this would be it."

A successful chef needs to be a teacher and manager. Despite what some may think, not one single chef has cooked every component of any meal in the history of fine dining. They have cooks. Some of these cooks are exceptional and will be chefs themselves someday, some are capable, and some are hopeless (bodies we call them). A chef must insure that his vision is being realized through these cooks, or in some cases, despite them. This requires teaching and demands good management.

I rarely use roux, but I would try adding the roux to the sauce, not sauce to the roux. And do it little by little, as if you were mounting with butter. You can mount a lot of butter in a little sauce (gelatin not a factor) so you should be able to with roux (which must be even more stable than butter).

My favorite aspect of these ads is how difficult they make mundane kitchen tasks seem, "Tired of that frustrating old peeler...", while they show someone lacerating their forearms in attempt to free an Idaho from its skin. A peeler! "Tired of that impossible to understand knife..." In the "not Pasta-Pro" ad (the off-white one), the beleagured home-economist drops half the (over-cooked) pasta down the garbage disposal. Cut to: hungry family at table. Scowling Husband throws hands in the air with James Finlayson-esque exasperation at wife's continuing ineptitude. A classic.

Well, I tend to be from the "use the parts to make the sauce" school. Brown the bones, saute the liver and heart, shallots, thyme, peppercorns, a little wine, a little stock....

You might find it useful to put a weight (piece of foil & another pan) on top of the bird for the initial sear. This keeps the skin flat and even for crisping. Then take off the weight, add some butter and a sprig of thyme. With skin still down use a spoon to take the now foaming butter and baste the legs only, for a couple of minutes. Then proceed with Mr. Seeber' instructions. The legs should be cooked more than the breasts and a couple of minutes of basting with hot butter should be sufficient.

I'd be interested to read what the "dead wine skeptics" have to say about non-clarets that supposedly last a long time, ie Madiera or Gruener Veltliner (I'm highly skeptical about that claim). I, sadly, don't have the budget to be "subjected" to enough old Bordeaux to have made up my own mind (just a few sips of '57 Margaux once) so I enjoy reading the debate.

Yes. Amaros. Thank you. Trillium, I noticed on another thread you said you were going to make an Amaro, could you give us some details please? Perhaps an Amaro thread is in order as I plan to begin "investigating" the ones we have at work.

I agree, but is Italian Vermouth usually served room temp, neat?

Sheesh at $350 a head, you'd think you would all get Beluga.

I'm curious about the Vermout-based aperitfs. At work we just got some Italian single-producer (artisanal?) vermouths that are really interesting, but I haven't had much exposure to them.

I usually have a glass of champagne before dinner. What do others enjoy?

Klc, If memory serves, the Zuni Cafe has a novel approach to stock making. Unfortunately, my memory can't serve up what that approach is. Can you help? My post is based on my method, and my method was taught to me by chef, who, in turn, learned it from his chef, and so on. A lot of my food knowledge is like that (as is yours, I'm sure). That's one of the reasons I hang out on this board (and read thousands of cookbooks and magazines). I (we) so often don't have time to experiment with other approaches, and so much of our knowledge is handed-down (it really is a medieval profession) that what we assume is the "right" way is really only one way. A germaine example is pho. A Vietnamese cook told a friend of mine that the oxtails were added to violently boiling water, and boiled hard for hours. This goes against all the rules, but pho is one of the worlds great foods, so who knows from rules? Speaking of medieval, I want someone to start a "Cook's Guild". Where have all the guilds gone?

They say "old birds make good soup". Don't violently boil the stock. Do skim. Refrigerate to remove fat, then reduce. Start with raw bones (rinse them). Take off all the raw meat. To get a nice flavor poach the meat in the reduced stock and season after removing; this way the meat won't be overcooked but the flavor will still be transfered to the stock. By seasoning afterwards, you don't salt the stock. If just making stock, or soup, use old fowl. Otherwise use the bones from whatever chicken you want to eat.

I'm not sure what you mean by butter sauce, but any attempt to reheat an emulsified sauce will result in breakage (seperation). Your nice creamy sauce will just seem greasy when you reheat it. If you keep the sauce seperate from the rest of the dish, you can reheat it in a pot and try using a hand-blender to temporarily re-emulsify. It will still break, but may hold together long enough to fool people.

I would love to see a tasting menu in Basque!