project

There is a Sacher Torte recipe on page 186 of 'Foods of the World: The Cooking of Vienna's Empire', Time-Life Books, New York, 1968. I cooked this cake a few times and liked it. Yes, this recipe asks that the chocolate icing be cooked. The recipe says to cook to the "soft ball" stage, and my notes say that this is too hard and, instead, should cook to "harden" and then cool only to spreading consistency.

I have a relatively big and complete collection of Farberware, now called 'Classic', pots and pans; for 'reserve' I have several still in the original boxes unopened in each of a few sizes. Seems to me, often the best pot has a stainless steel interior, and, given that, Farberware does the rest quite well. I even use the frying pan: It was good the last time I sauteed, in two batches, 6 pounds of 10% fat ground beef with quite a lot of OO and then drained and loosely froze the result. Recently have been able to buy cooking spoons apparently just stamped from a sheet of stainless steel. So, the spoons are 100% stainless steel with no seams, wood, plastic, etc. There are enough ridges, etc., in the shape to make the handles strong enough. I have two lengths for the handles, one normal and the other longer. They are terrific -- I prefer them to the cooking spoons I've had for decades with the spoon part attached to the handle with rivets and plastic attached to the handle with rivets. The new ones look less 'homey' but are really more functional, really darned near indestructible unless start using them to clean bricks, crack concrete, etc.! I'm a big fan of many of the Pyrex products. Favorites include the 1 1/2 quart and 2 quart covered casserole dishes. Dinner tonight was 1 C of the loosely frozen ground beef, 1 C of relatively spicy tomato sauce, 1 can of ravioli, in a 1 1/2 quart dish, covered, heated for 30 minutes at 50% power in microwave, and topped with quite a lot of Pecorino Romano. Other favorites include the 2 C measures, the older 4 C measure that was taller (instead of the newer one that I believe is too short), and the 300 ml custard dishes, recently made heavier. The 300 ml dishes are good for Chinese dipping sauces, lemon juice and coleslaw when I pig out on fried scallops and hush puppies, the 2 T each of minced ginger, minced garlic, minced scallion, and crushed red pepper flakes for a stir-fry I do, etc. The Pecorino Romano was grated with a simple -- nearly simplest possible -- stainless steel grater. Yes, with such a grater it's possible to get some 'fresh meat' in with the grated cheese, but that little grater has big advantages in simplicity and ease of cleaning and handling. My 170,000 BTU/hour propane cooker cost all of about $35. It's nearly indestructible and works great. The cooker works especially well with an inexpensive stamped sheet steel Chinese wok, 14" in diameter. That wok is nearly indestructible, has great surface, is easy to 'clean', and is great over a big propane fire. Once at a department store in DC got the sales person to let me see their collection of glassware catalogues, and they had one from West Virginia Glass with some classic stemware including some gorgeous tall ones for Champagne. I called the company and they shipped me a collection of five dozen for average price a little under $2 a glass. They remain terrific -- no Chambertin, Meursault, Champagne, Barolo, Chianti, or Asti Spumanti deserved better! My mother got a lot of stemware from Fostoria in West Virginia; they are prettier but a little less functional and, really, too delicate -- once I broke a stem just by picking up the glass. One of the programs on Jackie Kennedy has her saying that when she went shopping for stemware for the White House, she found what she wanted in West Virginia. Hmm? Wal-Mart carries some Rubbermaid ice cube trays. I got a stack; so far the first four kept in the freezer have lasted and worked perfectly -- the cubes come out very nicely. The trays have yet to start to crack or tear. I put the ice cubes in a simple covered plastic storage container, of course, also in the freezer; so, I have a ready supply of loose ice cubes that don't freeze together or sublime. About the cheapest is for free, and some years ago we started keeping some of the microwave safe trays from some TV dinners. The dinners weren't very good, but the trays have lasted for decades as good microwave proof tools! One use is to put some pork shoulder BBQ in one of the 300 ml Pyrex dishes, set on one of the trays, top with another tray, and heat in the microwave. Hardware stores sell sheets of abrasive intended for smoothing drywall. The sheets are black with a very open mesh and some really tough abrasive. I have some, cut into quarters, I keep in the kitchen for cleaning stuck food! Yes, Virginia, they can scratch some surfaces! One of the most functional 'kitchen tools' is a wet-dry 'shop' vacuum cleaner. Mine is the real thing, 3.5 HP motor, large diameter hose, on four wheels, etc., I got years ago from Sears for about $105. It's great for spills on the kitchen floor! Occasionally, dump the insides onto the compost heap in the woods out back. For the filter, a flexible cylinder of pleated paper, when it develops a full 'beard', put it on a horizontal stick and rinse off the beard with a spray on the end of a garden hose. While I got some extra filters, really, with reasonable care, can make one filter last for through many rinsings for years. Over the years I went through enough paper towels to destroy a large forest, so I found an alternative: Recently Sam's Club has been selling packages of a few dozen rectangular white cotton terry towels of an appropriate weight for a bit less than $12 a package. So, on my kitchen 'island', I have a big stack, about 18" high, with each towel flat, not folded. So, when I need a towel, I just take the next one from the top of the stack. I use the towels to dry hands, dry pots and pans, wipe up spills, etc. For cleaning, a pass in the washing machine with cold water, chlorine bleach, and liquid detergent, a pass with hot water and liquid detergent, then the dryer, then stacking gives me a new supply. Curiously somehow even soy sauce washes out nicely. White plastic cutting board -- big enough to get the work done, small enough for easy washing, drying, handling, storing. I got tired of seeing all that beautiful maple crack!

How'd I know? Easy enough: Waffles are one of the foundations of 'comfort food' that men really like, even without the food, better with it. A related point is the common claim that one of the standard goals of adult life is to reproduce the happy memories of childhood, and waffles may be associated with some of those, some special celebratory breakfast where everyone was happy, the children were the center of attention, etc. But, off the comfort and back to the food, in the article there is a mention of "... I want the sour tang given off by exhausted yeast" Can you explain "exhausted"? My guess would be that the little microbes would just keep growing as long as they had food, water, and temperature. They don't do this? Why not? For more detail, the source of the "sour tang" is just the ethyl alcohol given off by the yeast or something else?

Waffles, you guys think you want waffles? Not a chance. It's fully transparent what you want: You want to wake up in a sleigh bed, with your head on six goose down pillows and under a dozen hand woven wool blankets in a rustic bedroom in a ski house heated with a large fireplace downstairs with snow falling outside in the Alps and from the kitchen smells of bacon, caramel apples, and, yes, waffles being cooked and then brought to you on a tray in bed by a Fraulein with long blond hair in a decorative apron with a full figure expanding around and above the apron saying "Guten Morgen! Wie geht's?" Now that's what you want for "waffles".

By now the issue of Wal-Mart in Inglewood sounds like part of a very serious issue that promises to become increasingly important. My view is that so far discussions have been simplistic, even dangerously so. The issue does apply to food, of course, relevant to Wal-Mart, sources of food, how food is produced, etc. I can't solve the whole problem here, and my remarks are being written so quickly that they cannot be considered mature, but I will claim that the issue is serious and does need deeper discussion. Looking at much of the 20th Century, I concluded that flat out the worst danger to the health and welfare of people and to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness was nonsense economic ideas. I hope that in the 21st Century we do better, but so far I have seen only dangers and no progress toward solutions. As I learned in college and graduate school, one of the problems is the academic profession of 'economics'. I heard from some relatively well qualified professors of economics, and a summary view of their work was that, with astounding academic arrogance, it was not intended to directly address the current real US economy or any real economy and, instead, was a theoretical study within a closed self-perputating community mostly without real data or contact with experience of the theoretical properties of hypothesized simplistic mathematical models that may have some points of contact with some aspects of some real economies if we very much oversimplify. In particular, using the results of academic economics for policy for real economies is dangerous nonsense, much worse than common sense applied to real data on the real economy. For the sake of economic policy, having all the 'economists' placed end to end is essential. Thus, I believe that we are forced to return to common sense and real data. To illustrate one of the problems, I propose a simple 'thought experiment': Suppose someone invents a robot that can be manufactured in quantity for $300 each and that will do nearly any job a human can do, often better than a human could do. Now, what are the humans going to do? That is, first cut, almost immediately, essentially all the humans are out of work. We will be able to invent solutions, and, net, the robots should be a blessing, but until we have some solutions the robots would be a terrible curse, and so far we have not touched on solutions. This thought experiment is for something extreme and distant. Still, smaller versions of this problem are on the way now. Of course, we could claim that this thought experiment is not really new and is fundamentally the same as thought by Luddites that wanted to smash the machines early in the industrial revolution. In time, the industrial revolution was a blessing. Also the industrial revolution came forward slowly enough that not everyone was thrown out of work at the same time -- that is, societies and economies had time to adjust. Still, likely there were some terrible pains. So, first-cut, such increases in 'productivity' can be a blessing, but the pains can be awful unless the changes come slowly with some moderating influences. Two things can be mentioned for Wal-Mart: One of the reasons they can sell for less is their distribution system. Basically they are better organized from factory to retail store and, thus, save effort and money in inventory and handling. Here they are making some genuine productivity increases that would be as welcome even if they had employees highly knowledgeable in French wines and were well paid helping customers select. Another reason they can sell for less is that they pay their entry level people so poorly. But, how can they do that? Well, one way is to throw the local sole proprietor merchants out of business and then hire them as employees, but we have to suspect that really in most communities unfortunately the situation is such that there really is a ready pool of labor ready to work at Wal-Mart's wages. That is, in this case, the labor situation is already a sad story, and Wal-Mart is providing slightly better jobs for some people that are not doing well now. I'm not jumping to praise Wal-Mart: There really is something wrong, a loss, with a big ugly store. And there really is a big issue for a community such as Inglewood: The Wal-Mart site will require that Inglewood make changes in roads, bridges, traffic lights, fire, police, water, sewer, electric power, etc. Such changes could in principle cost the community more in total than savings from Wal-Mart's cheaper prices. In practice, a community should add the total costs and total benefits before deciding. Or, it may be that Inglewood had a long range community development plan, was executing it and investing in it, and now suddenly the plan gets tossed into the trash, new unplanned spending is required, and much of the old spending gets 'written off' or 'depreciated prematurely'. E.g., maybe from old traffic patterns the city installed $100,000 of traffic lights and with Wal-Mart the old $100,000 of lights are no longer needed but some new traffic lights for $300,000 will be needed -- that's, net, $400,000 in cost, not just $300,000. There can be considerable waste here, and the costs would need to be added before a decision. Essentially, as for traffic lights, also for people: It may be that one of the sole proprietor merchants driven out of business is a classic local butcher that is really good at selecting standing rib roasts, tying rolled pork loin roasts, making beautiful racks of lamb, stocking artesian made sausages, etc. So, this person has years of training invested. They get driven out of business, and their years of training get thrown away -- the merchant loses, and so does the town. So, the merchant's training goes the way of the $100,000 traffic lights. We are willing to discard unneeded traffic lights but not people. So, the costs of what we will do for this merchant need to be considered. Or, if we are too simplistic in our approach, then as a society we can (1) make some plans, (2) based on those plans make a huge investment in research, education, training, people, infrastructure, (3) for some sudden 1% savings throw out the old plans, throw away the old investments, make new plans, make new investments, and (4) repeat this over and over. Soon we get tired of throwing away huge investments for each case of 1% savings. Then we become unwilling to make plans or investments unless we can be guaranteed that there will be no changes until the investments have had a chance to pay off; in this case we become severely myopic, and that also brings some terrible costs. The issue, the problem, is not change versus no change: Instead, the issue, the problem, is planning for no change and then getting rapid change in contradiction to the assumptions of our planning. Broadly, if we change the assumptions only a little, then the best decisions can change enormously even though the savings are small. If large changes in decisions are costly, then these costs need to be considered; else, we are proceeding with wasteful nonsense. This stuff also happens in business: At one time, it was possible to install telephone equipment, pay for it with 20 year bonds, and have the equipment still in place and doing well 40 years later. Then a lot of bonds were sold, a lot of telecommunications equipment got installed, and, surprise, the value of the installed equipment fell by about 90% soon after installation. Much of an industry went bankrupt. The people that bought the bonds were expecting that the equipment would hold its value for decades and instead the value fell after just a few years. The situation has been so severe in the US free enterprise system that the US telecommunications industry is in such bad financial shape that it will have serious difficulty selling bonds to have US telecommunications keep up with Japan, South Korea, or Canada. Broadly, I would advise: In considering change, we need to add all the costs and all the benefits. Some of the costs may involve writing off to zero value a lot of physical assets and intellectual capital. If we do not consider all the costs, then we will suffer another effect: People will not invest where their investment is likely to get 'written off' far too soon; the result will be less beneficial change than we want or can have. E.g., fathers are already telling their children to avoid careers that may be subject to foreign competition and to go for careers that have geographical barriers to entry: E.g., it can be smarter to be a licensed electrician that has no competition more than 50 miles away than a Ph.D. in electrical engineering that can be employed by only a few large organizations that are in world-wide competition. In part the result will be a country where mostly people rush to careers with geographical barriers to entry and where, as a country, our competitiveness declines and what we have to pay for imports rises. It would be good to hear how some other countries handle some of these issues. E.g., it can look like farmers in Switzerland using quite old production techniques on some really horrible farm land actually manage to have a decently good living. Also, it may be that some of the Scandinavian countries, also with poor land, manage to have a standard of living generally competitive with and sometimes better than that of the US. In simple terms, when we are told that the way to prosperity and a higher standard of living is putting up big ugly buildings, we should have pause. In terms of food, if we are so 'productive', then we have to ask why Italy makes such good dry grating cheeses and why our grating cheese taste like sawdust? Sure: Before the US artesian cheese factories could become solidly established, refrigerated transport permitted a few companies to get nationwide market dominance in the cheese business; these companies didn't much know or care about anything better than sawdust; and their customers didn't much know, either. When we see such products, we should have pause.

Ben Hong: Yes, of course, your post of Mar 27 2004, 06:04 AM was most for cooking on kitchen stoves. My outdoor propane burner is a bit unusual. We seem to be taking different views of weights and volumes: In the US, one 'quart' is two pints, and one 'pint' is 16 fluid ounces or 2 cups. For something based largely on water, 1 pint weighs about 1 pound and one quart, about 2 pounds. One of my goals in this dish is to fill a 2 quart Pyrex glass casserole dish, and, thus, I would have about 4 pounds of food. I my area, New York State in the US, the local Chinese carry-out restaurants most commonly sell their dishes in 1 quart -- two pound -- portions. Thanks for the description of harmony in Chinese cooking and 'Wok Hei'. Some people can look at a list of ingredients and imagine accurately what the result will taste like; so far I cannot do this. Instead, I keep getting very different flavors just by changing proportions of a fixed list of ingredients. For me, an analogy would be how the three additive primary colors red, green, and blue can, just by changing proportions, combine to form, within the limits of the human color vision system, all the subtle colors and shades in nature, art galleries, etc. For "Project, you must keep on experimenting and eating", I'm trying. Big Bunny: Thanks for the suggestion. I hope eventually my results are good enough to deserve your suggestion of "cold beer"! I agree that cold beer usually goes well with Chinese food; for why, I don't have a clue. chengb02: Thanks for the suggestion of freezing green onions. While the texture may suffer, I can believe that the flavor mostly will not. As long as I am mincing the aromatics, the flavor should be enough. Samhill: Thanks for confirming the suggestions of oyster sauce. As part of trying to 'envision' flavors, I took most of my bottled Chinese sauces and for each took 1 T, dissolved in 1 C of water with 1 T of vinegar and 1 T of sugar, boiled, and tasted. I concluded that I can't envision what the effects would be. Or, I am sure that in Chinese carry-out I must have eaten oyster sauce at least dozens of times, but I cannot guess which dishes had it. So, as part of keeping the experiments simple and keeping down the number of changes between trials, so far I have not tried oyster sauce in this dish. Thanks for the suggestion of a cast iron wok. Yes, cast iron would hold heat much better than my wok of sheet steel. For "This leads me to believe your wok is not nearly hot enough. When I stir fry, the heat is such that liquid is reduced very quickly. No boiling.", it looks like I was not very clear: In the trials I described, I was using 2 C of sauce mixture -- soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, sherry, water, etc. I am not trying to reduce (evaporate, boil away) any significant fraction of this volume, just apply heat enough to cook, sterilize, and thicken with a corn starch slurry. For my wok being hot enough, I should be more clear: The manufacturer of my propane burner says that the thing can put out 170,000 BTUs per hour. It's easy to make the thing roar like a jet engine and send flames 2 feet high without the wok present or 6 inches over the top of the wok with the wok present. It can be scary. Before I put chicken pieces in, the wok is smoking strongly. I leave the chicken pieces in the oil just long enough for the surfaces to become white; then the whole wok contents get dumped into a colander set in a bowl. I'm using enough oil that the pieces cook very quickly and nearly uniformly. Then the oil goes back into the wok; heating the wok boils away any water left from the last batch of chicken; I get the oil smoking again, and do another batch. Once all the chicken has been in wok and is draining a colander, I put about 2 T of oil in the wok, add the aromatics, spread them around, and put the wok on the burner. In just a few seconds the aromatics are very fragrant and I dump in the nearly 3 C of sauce mixture. So, at that point I am essentially 'deglazing' the wok. I intend to try a more traditional 'stir-fry' technique with the chicken. Then I will use less oil, and water from the chicken may evaporate on contact with the wok. In my most recent trial, I did try the onion suggestion -- I included 2 T of minced shallots and believe that I like the effect. I increased the chicken breast meat to 8 pieces, about 41 ounces as frozen. Still, 16 ounces of green beans is a lot for the chicken; if the green beans are to be only incidental, then 8 ounces would be more appropriate. I did the brining more effectively: Put the 1 gallon Ziploc bag with the frozen chicken and brine, sealed, in a dishpan of room temperature tap water until the chicken was defrosted (about 2 hours) and then put the bag in a bowl and set in the refrigerator overnight. I concluded that this more effective brining did do more to help the chicken be juicy in the end dish. Since my top priority is to make some progress on the flavor for minimum effort otherwise, 'velveting' the chicken is still in the queue of things to try. My latest, and best, effort at the sauce has 1/2 C of each of Pearl River Bridge Dark Soy Sauce, distilled cider vinegar, and sugar and, then, French style chicken stock to make 3 C. I use about 1/3 C of this mixture to make a slurry with the corn starch. Since I have 3 C of sauce liquid, I have stayed with 1/4 C of corn starch, but 3 T might be a little better. During the cooking, the sauce smells a little like some BBQ sauces. With the leftovers in the refrigerator, opening the door quickly convinces one that there's Chinese food in there. But, the flavor still has a long way to go.

wesza: Thanks for the contribution! Gee, I didn't expect that Green Beans with Chicken is a recognized dish! Instead, I was just trying to combine some ingredients readily available to me, ingredients similar to what might be used in China, and to get good and interesting flavors similar to what a moderately good cook in a not very good US Chinese restaurant might get. For beans, I understand that some a yard long or longer are common in China but that except for length string beans in the US are similar. I cut the length to about two inches to make the food more convenient to eat. Or, it's a bit of a challenge to eat a bean four to six inches long gracefully, and when I try and a juicy bean goes "squirt" I can end up wearing some food! Let's see: For flavors, you are including egg white, some different soy sauce, a different source of hot pepper, some rich chicken broth, some different preparation steps, and, optionally, some Oyster Sauce. You are altering the proportions and are omitting the vinegar. Frying the beans: Wow! Wouldn't have thought of that! Although I am in a hurry to get a decent dish, another principle in trials is to make only fairly small changes at each step. So, I need to do another trial with some of the ideas here. Thanks for the details!

Ben Hong: Thanks again! To a novice like me trying to get something at least up to the level of an inexpensive Chinese carry-out, your advice sounds good. For "all seasonings should be used sparingly and harmoniously", the "sparingly" is easy; understanding "harmoniously" is challenging! Why a sauce made of oysters and sugar should be 'harmonious' with chicken and green beans escapes me. I know how to get stuff that tastes awful; how to get stuff that tastes good, from harmonious seasonings or otherwise, I'm still missing, really in the dark. Why lily buds, wood ears, Shitake mushrooms, eggs, and shredded pork with Hoisin sauce, scallions, and simple flour and water pancakes are 'harmonious' is one of the mysteries of the universe! For "the hot wok is oiled only with enough oil to prevent food from sticking", okay, that's easy enough. But at times I thought that I have seen Chinese cooks use a lot of oil, maybe 3/4 C, to cook chunks of meat and then drain the meat. For "liquids should be kept to an absolute minimum", that has been one of my biggest questions. This does seem to be the approach of the more authentic books on Chinese cooking, yet nearly all the Chinese restaurants I have been to in the US include a lot of sauce. The only real exception was the Northern Chinese restaurant, the Peking, opened in 1947 on the west side of Connecticut Avenue in DC just south of the Maryland line, but nearly everything they did was an exception. I ate there a few times a month for several years and yet don't have hardly a clue about what they did and only some rough guesses in a few cases: For one of the easiest ones, they took whole skinless boneless chicken breast, breaded it with some flavorful breading, fried it, cubed the result (the breading still stuck), and combined it with a cool salad of vegetables, sauce of mostly chicken broth, and served the whole in a bowl lined with large leaves of head lettuce. It was a nice contrast to nearly anything else in Chinese cooking. For another of the easiest ones, they did shrimp with a hot red sauce at one end of the plate and a mild white sauce at the other end of the plate with everything surrounded with either bean sprouts or spinach. There is something similar as 'Love Bird's Shrimp' or some such in Jason Lowe, Deh-Ta Hsiung, and Nina Simonds, 'The Food of China', ISBN 1-55285-227, Whitecap Books, Vancouver, 2001. For "above all, strive for that elusive, ephemeral essence called 'WOK HEI'", I don't have a clue about what that is and less of a clue about how to achieve it although I'm eager to learn. For "unless it's a meat based dish, such as scallion beef and ginger, the ratio of meat to veg. should be 1/4 by volume, such as chicken and green beans.", didn't know that and glad to learn. For the dish I'm working with, mostly I'm just interested in the meat. The green beans are in there just for some contrast. So, right: If have 16 ounces of green beans and enough meat that the green beans are just contrast, then might have three pounds of meat, and that's a large dish. It has occurred to me before to cut the green beans back to 8 ounces. The common US Chinese carry-out dish is one US quart, that is, about two pounds. When I did the dish here, I got about 1 1/2 quarts. Next trial, I intend to shoot for two quarts. I can do it in more than one pass through the wok, but if I am going to get out all the ingredients, do all the cutting and chopping, and clean up all the mess afterward, then I want to get a lot of food for the effort -- say, two quarts, four pounds. I can do four pounds in maybe only 10% more effort than two pounds. So, there are 'economies of scale'. I can do the dish where all the cooking except for the final assembly is a 'stir-fry' -- just work in small batches. For the meat for the last trial, I used four batches. Still, when I turn off the fire (outdoors) under the wok, I want to walk back into the house with a two quart glass casserole dish essentially full. My wok is not huge, has diameter only 14", but it is all steel, Chinese, with a round bottom. The wok is large enough to permit final assembly and adding corn starch for four pounds. Last, for "very high or extremely high sustained heat is a prerequisite (for speed)", uh, I, uh, did omit details of my heat source: It's claimed by the manufacturer to put out 170,000 BTUs per hour, and that may be more power than most of the restaurants. So far my eyebrows are still intact, but there is a risk!

Many thanks for the critique and ideas! JAZ: Thanks! I agree that thigh meat should be better. For a small point, a 10 pound bag of frozen skinless boneless chicken breast meat is convenient. For a larger point for me, I don't know how to work with thigh meat: When I take apart a chicken, either raw or poached, for the thigh and drumstick meat, all I get are irregular torn scraps. When I get Chinese carry-out with chicken, I get chunks of meat that came from I don't know where on a real chicken! I get the impression that some of the meat has been pounded. You are right about the corn starch ratio: For my 2 C of sauce, sounds like I should cut back to 1-2 T of corn starch. And, I should constrain my compulsion to have reproducible measurements for everything and, instead, at least for the corn starch, make a slurry and dribble in by teaspoons at the end only until I get an appropriate thickness. Thanks for suggesting the onion family. Sounds like I should include maybe 4 T of minced onion along with the 2 T of each of minced garlic, minced ginger, and red pepper flakes (chili sauce, etc.). Scallions are one of my favorites, but I resist buying them because they do not keep well. I like fresh chives, too, but see them only occasionally. I do have some nice shallots and yellow globe onions, and they should be a start. Jason: Thanks! The flavors I have are really uninteresting; with just my flavors, a Chinese carry-out would go out of business in a week! While I have included a sampling of the usual suspects, somewhere I'm missing a lot, in ingredients, technique, or both. For bottled sauces to try, have Sambal Oelek Ground Fresh Chili Paste Lee Kum Kee Black Bean Garlic Sauce Koon Chun Bean Sauce Lee Kum Kee Hoisin Sauce Hop Sing Lung Oyster Flavored Sauce Lee Kum Kee Premium Oyster Flavored Sauce Sounds like I need to try these -- one or two at a time. And thanks for suggesting the onion family. Singapore: Thanks for the suggestions! You also agree I should get some onion in there. Okay. It would be plenty easy for me to marinate the chicken in the sauce. I'll do that for the next trial. You are suggesting that I stir fry the green beans. I wondered about that. With my technique, I cook the aromatics, add the sauce, boil, add the green beans, and boil. So, I am 'poaching' the green beans but in the sauce. So, maybe the green beans are giving up some liquids with flavors that are hurting the flavor of my dish, and maybe stir frying the green beans causes these liquids to evaporate and/or cook on the wok surface and, thus, get better flavors. Also your sauce technique is different: You get the solids all stir-fried and hot together in the wok and then remove them all, make and thicken the sauce, and then add the solids back to the wok. I've seen this done by Chinese carry-out cooks. My concern has been that at times I got a 'broken' sauce where manipulations after the corn starch had thickened caused the corn starch to 'break' and leave the sauce thin again. My only solution was to add the corn starch slurry as the very last step, add it to the combination of hot solids and liquids. I got this suggestion here on eG, and so far it's worked. Still, I don't understand when corn starch thickened sauces break and when they don't. I have noticed that your technique can yield a more interesting final dish: Some of the solids remain uncoated and more distinct. E.g., in some dishes with chunks of meat heavily breaded and nicely fried to distinct nicely browned chunks with some nice vegetable chunks, say, broccoli florets, can put the sauce in the bottom of a casserole dish, put the chunks of meat in a mound in the center, and arrange the vegetables around the boundary. Then, the sauce is there but the chunks of meat and broccoli are not coated (hidden, masked, overwhelmed). Such nice things are some grade levels above my skills: I'm still in the grade trying to get the flavors up from the boring category. Thanks for the suggestion of Vietnamese chili paste. The Sambal Oelek Ground Fresh Chili Paste is from California but may be similar, may be by Vietnamese in CA. For "Lighten up on the sugar in the marinade. One teaspoon instead. And add 2 tsp salt." Thanks. Since I have brined the chicken and am using soy sauce, I'm reluctant to add more salt. But, for the sugar, having that in the marinade would tend to dry the meat. So, if I'm going to include sugar in the sauce, likely should delay that until the meat is out of the marinade. Thanks -- I would have missed that. "Welcome to the world of the Chinese Chop Suey Cook!" Yes, I'm a long way from being able to get flavors as good as in any successful Chinese carry-out. In my area of New York State, 70 miles north of Wall Street, there are more Chinese carry-outs than McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King places combined, and with my stack of books on Chinese cooking and dozens of trials I have only a few times done as well as they do. My improvised dumpling dipping sauce is passable, and otherwise the only candidate for a competitive trial was when I did Moo Shi Pork 20 years ago from: Joyce Chen, 'Joyce Chen Cook Book', J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1962. No kidding: I don't understand how to get good flavors in Chinese dishes. chengb02: Yes, you are correct on the corn starch. For my next trial, with 8 pieces of chicken instead of 6, for the sauce I may add water to make 3 C instead of just 2 C and then add corn starch slurry just as needed and then estimate the amount to use with a measurement the next time. Also, with so much water, maybe I should include some light chicken stock. I have some reduced and frozen I made in the French style with onions, carrots, celery, leeks, etc. I'm definitely a 'Western' person: I've frequently had decent successes with French cooking, and my Chinese efforts have rarely been better than poor. Thanks for the soy sauce suggestion: Just as a soy sauce, I do like the flavor of the soy sauce I used. I guess my surprise was that 1/3 C of that soy sauce in 2 C of sauce with 1 1/2 quarts of the final dish was too much soy sauce. Including 1 C of extra water or stock should help the situation. Else maybe I should cut back to 1/4 C and then keep cutting back 1 T at a time. Maybe what experienced Chinese cooks do with soy sauce is just add it by color -- once the sauce has enough color, stop. For "Finally, the savior of any Chinese dish is green onion and/or oyster sauce. If you are looking to add flavor, add one or the other or both!" Wow! I have thousands of pages of books on Chinese cooking, and you gave a big secret in two sentences! Sounds like I should get some green onions, even if they are quite perishable! jo-mel: Thanks for your praise! Careful planning? Yes. Good success? No! Yes, the frozen green beans are just a big compromise for the terrible sin of convenience! Thanks for the suggestion of velveting. I saw the discussions of velveting, in either oil or water, in: Barbara Tropp, 'The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking: Techniques and Recipes', ISBN 0-688-14611-2, William Morrow, New York, 2001. but I have never tried it, and the main reason is that I've been trying to get some decent flavors first and to minimize other labor on the way. Thanks for the confirmation that velveting works. For "Your ratio of sugar to vinegar is fine, if you looking for a sweet/sour dish? Were you?" Well, in part, yes. While I can like 100% 'savory' dishes with no sugar at all, here I was including some sugar, at least in the sense of the standard broad recommendation of having all of vinegar, sugar, salt, and pepper. Also I am beginning to suspect that ginger helps and works well with sugar. And I am suspecting that somehow some flavors that by themselves do not taste very good can, with sugar, be marvelous. While I wasn't looking for a sauce as sweet as candy, it is fair to say that I'm trying for sweet/sour in some sense. For "Too much dark soy, IMMHO." Yes, I have finally reluctantly concluded that. Again, my surprise, shock, was that 1/3 C of dark soy did so much and went so far. But, gee, if dark soy is so strong and needed in such small quantities, then it is just that much more of a bargain! But, one thing I have yet to understand is how a dumpling dipping sauce of 1/2 C Pearl River Bridge Light Soy Sauce, 5 T of Chinese Rice Vinegar, 1/4 C minced garlic, 2 t of dark sesame oil, and 2 t of Chinese style hot oil can taste so good with dumplings yet be way too strong and way too salty when used as the sauce for a stir-fry. More mysteries of the East! Thanks for the Hoisin sauce suggestion. I like Hoisin and can't ever understand how something with such simple ingredients could taste so good, so special, and so different from anything else. The people that mix up vats of Hoisin sauce understand much more about balancing flavors than I do, even understand more than I would guess is possible. Yes, Hoisin sauce might fix up this dish nicely. But, I've been regarding leaning on Hoisin sauce as cheating and been trying to avoid it. My best guess about Hoisin is that there is a lot of sugar in it and that somehow the sugar totally changes the effects of all the other ingredients and makes the total come out as something quite new and where even the sugar is not so obvious. For "On the red pepper -- I have a fondness for Chili Paste with Garlic. Always adds the zing I want." I thought I had a bottle but just checked and do not. I've seen it on the shelves but so far have neither bought nor used it. I guess one consideration is that in some goal of actually learning how to cook I've been trying to work by doing my own combinations of components that are 'elements', e.g., garlic alone, chili sauce alone, black beans alone, sugar alone, etc., and, thus, avoiding pre-mixed combinations. Ben Hong: Many thanks for the insight on what experienced Chinese cooks actually do! Thanks for the confirmation that such a cook would blanch the green beans in water! The nutritionists might scream about all the vitamins and minerals lost to the discarded blanching water, but my experience is that the blanching water commonly does not taste very good so that for a nicely flavored dish the blanching is important. You may notice that in my steps, I cooked the aromatics, added the sauce, boiled, added the green beans, boiled, etc. So, I did 'blanch' the green beans in 'water' but, also, did keep the 'blanching water' in the final dish! So, this blanching of the green beans in the sauce may have hurt the final flavor of the dish -- may have been the cause of much of the "uninteresting" flavor I'm concerned about. Maybe the standard practice for nearly all the vegetables -- carrots, celery, cabbage, green beans, bell peppers, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, wood ears, snow mushrooms, baby corn, broccoli -- is to blanch and otherwise the dish will taste like some combination of leaves, grass, a cow pasture, canned flavors, etc. -- all flavors I seem to have obtained in many of my trials! So, maybe the idea is mostly just to blanch away the flavors of these vegetables and let the other flavors, the aromatics, soy sauce, oyster sauce, black beans, etc. dominate the dish. I have not read this anywhere, but I've been guessing it, and you seem to be confirming it. On marinating the meat with soy sauce, etc. and enough corn starch to soak up the loose liquid, I've tried that and can see some advantages, but my efforts tend to cause the pieces of meat to stick together during the stir-fry. Maybe I used too much corn starch. One question I have about your procedure is that it sounds like the dish would be drier than is common in Chinese carry-outs in the US where it is accepted that the customers like a lot of sauce to help flavor the rice. E.g., for a dish of maybe 2 quarts, I'm thinking of 3 C of sauce. That's a lot of sauce, much more than the 1-2 T you mentioned. Richard Kilgore: Thanks for the reminder that I should use fresh vegetables! The advice here is unanimous and uncompromising -- I should be severely chastised and brutally flagellated with a limp wet soggy defrosted freezer burned green bean, all for sin of frozen convenience! For "You also may be using too much oil, but I may not be picturing your procedure correctly. About 1T of oil in a very hot wok should be fine to start." Well, just to cook the pieces of chicken, I went ahead and put a lot of oil in the wok, about 3/4 C. For the 6 chicken breasts, defrosted, brined, drained, cubed, and drained, I cooked them in four batches. For one batch, I got the oil hot, dumped in the chicken, stirred, and dumped the wok contents into a colander set in a bowl, and returned the oil in the bowl to the wok and then did the next batch. I tried the drain the chicken thoroughly. For the oil in the actual dish, I just put about 2 T of the oil in the wok, got the oil hot, and added the aromatics. When I quit coughing from the outrageously strong aroma of the aromatics, I dumped in the nearly 2 C of sauce and continued. So, with all this oil, I'm nearly deep frying the chunks of chicken. I was thinking that this technique was common. But, sure, I can return to doing more of an ordinary 'stir-fry' of the chicken pieces with just 1-2 T of oil and still doing this in four batches and draining the chicken. Thanks for the suggestion of peanut oil. Next time I buy cooking oil, I will likely spring for my first batch of peanut oil. I can believe that it could help the flavor. Your garlic technique is much more civilized than my 2 T of minced garlic, 2 T of minced ginger, and 2 T of crushed red pepper flakes, dumped into 2 T of hot oil, that caused me to stagger back coughing! Thanks to all for the critique and ideas!

Did a stir-fry with chicken and string beans with a sauce of garlic, ginger, crushed red pepper, soy sauce, vinegar, dry sherry, and sugar. Flavor is not very interesting and seek critique of what I did and ideas for improvements. For the chicken started with 6 pieces of skinless boneless chicken breast meat (from three chickens) and defrosted and marinated by placing in a Ziploc bag with a brine of 1/4 C table salt and 1 quart water. For the beans, used a 16 ounce net weight package of Hanover Gold Line frozen green beans. Defrosted, cut longer beans in half, rinsed, and drained. For spice, used 2 T of each of minced garlic, minced ginger, and crushed red pepper flakes. For the sauce used 1/3 C Pearl River Bridge Dark Soy Sauce, 1/3 C Chinese Rice Vinegar, 1/3 C dry sherry, 1/3 C sugar, and water to make 2 C. For corn starch for the sauce, took 1/3 C of the sauce mixture and combined it with 1/4 C corn starch to make a slurry. For the chicken, when defrosted, after about 2 hours in the brine, drained, cubed, and drained. For the cooking, in a Chinese steel wok over a high propane flame, with about 3/4 C Canola oil, at high temperature, in four batches, quickly stir fried chicken pieces, not enough to brown the pieces. Drained cooked pieces. Leaving about 2 T of oil in the wok, added the garlic, ginger, and pepper, heated (aroma very strong), added sauce mixture, boiled, added green beans, boiled, added chicken pieces, boiled, added corn starch slurry, boiled, dumped into a 2 quart casserole dish. Got about 1 1/2 quarts of finished product. Ate with steamed white rice. The sugar and ginger together left a curious candy on the end of the cooking spoon used in the stir fry. Sauce was quite dark. Flavor was not too salty, but such a dark sauce seems like overkill. Sauce was quite thick, gave the solids a thick glossy coating, and left little liquid sauce. With the 16 ounces of beans, could use more meat, maybe 8 pieces of chicken instead of 6. Flavor edible but not interesting.

simdelish: Thanks for the extra details! For the amount of Brioche cubes in the bread pudding, we have three estimates: First, a 'pullman' pan is 16 x 4 x 4", can be used to make a two pound loaf of bread, and for the bread pudding you are using 1 to 1 1/2 loafs of Brioche made in such a pan. Second the cubes of Brioche fill up a 'hotel pan' of 2 x 12 x 20". Third, during the toasting, the cubes are 2-3 deep in a 'sheet' pan of 1 x 18 x 26" Sorry to be so dense, dull, and obtuse on the pans! I'm in the US and not a professional cook! Let's see: The volume of the pullman pan is 16 x 4 x 4 = 256 cubic inches, and a Brioche loaf made in such a pan will likely have volume larger than that of the pan. The volume of the hotel pan is 2 x 12 x 20 = 480 cubic inches. The volume of the sheet pan is 1 x 18 x 26 = 468 cubic inches. So, maybe the best estimate for the amount of Brioche cubes is the 480 cubic inches. Let's see what that volume would be in US quarts: 480 cubic inches = 480 / (12 * 12 * 12) cubic feet = 7.481 * 480 / (12 * 12 * 12) US gallons = 4 * 7.481 * 480 / (12 * 12 * 12) US quarts = 8.312 quarts or a little over two US gallons, a lot of Brioche cubes! But, then you also have four quarts of heavy cream plus about 1 cup of egg yolks (12 egg yolks). So, have about twice the volume of Brioche cubes as heavy cream and egg yolks. So, a person cooking at home might scale back to, say, 2 quarts of Brioche cubes, 1 quart of heavy cream, and 3 egg yolks. To compare proportions, the recipe from challah-baker has 3 C half and half, 3 eggs, and 5 C of day old challah which seems to be a little wetter. Rum, raisins, cinnamon, custard, warm caramel, cold creme anglaise -- the recipe sounds terrific. As soon as I find some Brioche, I'll likely make a batch! Thanks again!

simdelish: Many thanks for the bread pudding recipe! Sounds terrific! Some small questions: First, for "1 or 1 1/2 loaves (pullman style) day old or frozen Brioche", I have no idea how much Brioche that might be. So, the next time you cook this, could you weigh the Brioche you use and let us know the result in grams, ounces, or whatever? Second, I don't really know what "pullman style" is. Third, what is the shape, e.g., length, width, height, of a "hotel pan" and the material it is made of? Fourth, when you "toast 5-7 minutes", on a "sheet pan", could you describe the shape and material of the sheet pan? Fifth, for the "toast" operation itself, can you describe the form of the heat, e.g., some temperature in a oven, broiler, or whatever? Of these, the first and last are the ones that I guess would be most important for me to know.

Cosmology theme: S. Weinberg, E. Witten, P. Pebbles, and, to hedge bets, Jesus. Pebbles might just say "The equations don't say, and I won't speculate", but he might help keep Weinberg and Witten more honest! Mathematics theme: J. von Neumann (one of the founders of computing, one of the best mathematicians ever), R. Rockafellar (leader in methods of decision making over time under uncertainty, U. Washington), T. Magnanti (mathematical planning in engineering and Dean, MIT), U. Grenander (bridge from advanced and novel mathematical statistics to vision and intelligence, Brown U.) on the future of information technology. Classical music theme: J. Bach, W. Mozart, R. Strauss, and D. Shostakovich. Goal would be to have them improvise some music during the dinner starting with Shostakovich backwards to Bach. I would especially want to hear what Bach and Mozart do after hearing the work of Strauss and Shostakovich. History theme: F. Roosevelt, W. Churchill, J. Stalin, and A. Hitler. The dinner may, uh, 'break up' early! Similarly for major players in other major wars. If I had to pick just one, then I would toss out the history theme as too unpleasant and the cosmology theme as too much a long shot for anything new and interesting, regard the mathematics theme as the most practical and the music theme as the most fun and flip a coin to select from the last two!

Memphis 'Q? My information is wildly out of date! My connection with Memphis 'Q goes back 40 years! In 1961, I was frequently eating lunch at Beretta's near the campus of Memphis State University. Another place was on the SW corner of Poplar and Union just west of a railroad overpass. On fishing trips in TN, AK, and MS, ate 'Q at many small places. The 'Q was nearly always in the form of chopped 'Qed fresh picnic pork shoulder. Nearly never ate ribs in Memphis. Last time I was in Memphis was in 1974 (FedEx). In those days, Memphis was nearly covered with little 'Q places: Some had used school desks for dining room furniture. Since then have eaten very similar 'Q in Knoxpatch. Such 'Q is good food. Recently from my current location (70 miles north of Wall Street) I've done rough utilitarian approximations: Just get a shoulder, sprinkle on some rub, roast in a slow oven, let cool down a little, separate, chop, sauce, heat through, chill uncovered and then cover. To serve, microwave. It's okay, but the real thing has benefit of lots of practice, smoke flavor from a real pit, and lack of the two extra heatings. FG's recent Carolina wanderings showed how confused some people can be! Gee, I really like hush puppies: At one seafood house in MD used to pig out on hush puppies and fried scallops washed down with beer! But, hush puppies with 'Q? Ah, come on! With Memphis 'Q, the standard extras are 'Qed beans, maybe some potato salad, and dessert of chocolate ice box pie! Extra super-hot hot sauce and beer, of course, are 'standard'!

Bob Marley: My posts in on this thread were mostly to make a point close to your objection about "THE PALATES OF A FEW, VERY SUBJECTIVE CRITICS WITH QUESTIONABLE TASTE". So, my original point was: "Here is another and more direct, useful, reasonable, and valuable goal: Given a bottle of Chateau Effete Rotchild 1949, and given all these grapes, how do I harvest, make wine, and blend and age the wines to get something that tastes very much the same?" And we don't have to use "the palates of a few", either. Or, one possible goal of the work would be just to mix up some wines like ones we already know we like! For "I don't think that even the founders are suggesting that you can reproduce an existing wine". Right. To "reproduce an existing wine" was my guess at one possible goal for the future.

balex: "What I meant about sensory similarity was more about things like 'masking' where the presence of one chemical reduces the sensory importance of another. TCA is an example. Now if we are not measuring the presence of both of these chemicals we are completely screwed. Even if both of these are in our low dimensional subspace, this still induces non-linearities. In particular since I think exact matching is not feasible, we want to find the point in the convex hull of the mixers that is closest to the target. IF we have some wierd function that measures sesnory distance, then the sets of points equidistant from the target wine will not be hyperspheres -- indeed might not even form convex stes -- in which case the whole problem ceases to be convex and you have multiple local optima and probably need to use some stochastic optimisation to find the best solution , and that's assuming we have good model of the distance function. And the number of chemicals in a mature wine is probabky really large. TCA can be detected by humans at concentrations of a few parts per trillion. So in principle we could be talking about a billion to a trillion different chemicals." If we are to try to blend some 300 Chardonnay wines to duplicate Montrachet, then we should start with good Chardonnay wines. Wines with strong off flavors will not be very useful. So, even if we match on only 100 chemicals or so, we would have to analyze for more, e.g., for TCA from bad corks or wherever it can come from. For TCA, we would likely not be 'matching' on it but just 'rejecting' blending wines based on it. If we have 300 blending wines and want to match Montrachet on some 100 chemicals, then mathematically either the Montrachet is in the convex hull of the 300 wines or it is not. If it is in the convex hull, then at least mathematically we can match exactly -- as usual, modulo no chemical reactions. Moreover, as noted, we will need at most 101 wines to do the matching. In practice, such matching would be as close as we can expect from finite precision computer arithmetic and quantitative chemistry, and these are quite precise. In any normed linear space, the norm generates a metric, and in that metric the collection of all points within a given distance of a given point is convex. So, if flavor corresponds to some such metric, then 'spheres' will be convex. Yes, flavor sensations are tricky to understand. I cut back on the amount of heavy cream and suddenly discovered that the prior amount of salt was too much! But we do not really need some version of 'convexity' to approximate flavors. Something like continuity in the usual topology is enough. In this case, at least in principle, and considering only the chemicals we are matching on, however close we want to be in flavor, there will be some Euclidean distance on the space of vectors of chemical concentrations such that any mixture of the chemicals as close as the distance in chemical concentrations to our coveted Montrachet will also be as close as we have specified to that Montrachet on flavor. E.g., take 100 gallons of our desired Montrachet and put in one tiny drop of distilled water or really good Chardonnay and try to tell the difference! Here we do not have to assume that the set of all chemical vectors as close as we desire on flavor will be convex. In principle this lack of convexity could complicate finding a least cost blend within a given closeness on flavor. I doubt that this situation would be very important in practice because there we would likely just be going for a really close match on the chemical concentrations and not trying to exploit flavor 'masking'. Perhaps we would, then, be leaving ourselves open to someone with a really good nose stirring up some swill from dried cattle blood, ground wood bark, vanilla, and plums and bettering our efforts at matching Chambertin -- well, maybe someone's imitation of Chambertin! Without convexity, for finding least cost approximate matching, we would be into nonlinear optimization. First cut, we would look for the Kuhn Tucker necessary conditions. Ah, in convex combinations, all the constraints are linear so that there is no problem with constraint qualifications! The meaning of 'stochastic optimization' is ambiguous: One meaning is solving a problem that evolves with some unpredictability over time. So, an example would be saying how to call plays in football. A key here is the possibility for 'recourse' where we don't have to call the play for second down until we see the results from the play on first down; moreover, the play we call on first down should be in light of this. This whole subject is fairly well understood mathematically and there is called 'stochastic optimal control'. The now famous but relatively simple example is the Black Scholes option pricing model. Another meaning is that we have an optimization problem to solve, a 'deterministic' problem, that is, one without uncertainties, and we make some use of a random number generator to guide our search. In such things, usually we scatter a lot of points, like sowing seeds, and then try to make improvements locally from each of those. We have essentially been assuming that our blending problem was deterministic. Alas, to use this technique for wine blending (for the case of least cost approximate matching on chemical concentrations to come within some specified closeness on flavor), we would have to have some quite impressive details on human taste sensations or 'put humans in the loop' to do a lot of tasting -- wonder if we could recruit the panel members on eG, after we warned them on just how much tasting there would be? Yes, if in our blending wines we have to pay attention to parts per trillion and if those wines could contain just anything, then in principle we would have to analyze all chemicals that could conceivably be present in parts per trillion, would likely have to analyze billions, maybe many more than trillions, of chemicals, and would need a comparable number of blending wines for an exact match. This situation strikes me as too pessimistic. Gee, we can take a grape, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay, etc., load up some oak barrels, head for Italy, California, Chili, Australia, etc., select ground, plant, grow, prune, grow, harvest, crush, ferment, rack, filter, age and do these things well and come up with excellent wine, even wine comparable with the originals in Bordeaux or the Cote d'Or. Here we have 'matched' on only a few things -- the grape, the yeast, the barrels, etc. -- maybe dozens, not millions. For the whole issue of blending to match a given excellent wine: Easy? No. Possible? I suspect so.

balex: "First there is the assumption that it is only a few (100) chemicals that are important. Secondly what we are intersted in is not chemical similarity but sensory similarity -- and it is not clear that unscaled Euclidean distance to the target wine is the right metric. Thirdly there is the issue of chemical stability that you touch on." Of course we have to guess that more than 100 chemicals are important. So, if we just started with 100 bottles of pure chemicals, then blending would likely be hopeless. But if we are seeking Montrachet 2001, have 300 Chardonnay wines all made to imitate Montrachet, and match on 100 chemicals, then we are likely matching fairly well on more than just the 100 chemicals we are considering. First-cut for what you mentioned with convex combinations and what I outlined in linear optimization, we are not really using a Euclidean metric; instead we are matching on the 100 chemicals essentially exactly. But a Euclidean metric could have a role: If the linear optimization problem with the 300 blending wines and the 100 chemicals was infeasible, then we could look for an approximate solution. The usual way to proceed would be to solve the convex quadratic problem of minimizing the sum of squared errors. Here, then, as you suggested we would be 'scaling' so that we would essentially be willing to accept being 1 microgram off on some tannin as equivalent to being 1 microgram off on some ester. Instead of minimizing the sum of squared errors, just minimizing the absolute value of the worst error is also attractive and in some ways easier. But we are implicitly exploiting some more things: First, we hope that as the number of chemicals we would match on grows toward infinity and past the actual number of chemicals in any bottle of wine, we really would get a match, essentially an exact match. So what we are doing with 100 chemicals is one correct step on an asymptotic process that in the limit will match exactly. Or, if 100 is not large enough for good accuracy, then try 200; eventually we will have to win (modulo the issues of chemical reactions, etc.). Second, we hope that whatever 'topology' is important for 'continuity' in the sense of the taste of one wine being close to that of another is the same as the 'usual' topology from the Euclidean metric. Then, any asymptotic process that converges in some one metric will converge in the topology and also in all metrics that generate that topology. We can hope that, given some complex system where we take measurements on several related variables, approximate exactly on all these variables, and continue as the number of variables grows to infinity, in the limit we will represent the system exactly. So, to test this, let's roll back to something simple: For numbers x between 0 and 3, consider the function f(x) = 1 for 1 <= x <= 2 and f(x) = 0 otherwise. Not a complicated function! For some positive integer n, pick distinct points u(i), i = 1, 2, ..., n, between 0 and 3 and set v(i) = f(u(i)). Now we have pairs of numbers (u(i), v(i)). We can write down a polynomial of degree n - 1 that will pass through all n points exactly. Now, as we increase n and pick the points u(i) to be dense between 0 and 3, do we get a sequence of polynomials that converges to f(x) exactly for all x? No! Instead we get polynomials that oscillate wildly near 1 and 2. Ah, hopes dashed again! So, we are hoping that nothing analogous holds in wine blending. One hope is that in practical terms there are only finitely many relevant chemicals, but this alone is less comfort than we could want. But in many areas we hope nothing holds analogous to the oscillatory polynomial disaster: We can write out what we want in an ideal girlfriend -- height, weight, age, hair color, eye color, education, talents, interests, accomplishments -- and not fear that getting what we do specify increases the chances of getting something really bad where we did not specify -- voice of Boris Karloff, smile of Bela Lugosi, mating behavior of a Black Widow spider, etc. Hmm .... Interesting: Where does specifying what we do want increase the chances of getting something especially bad where we did not specify? Or, we can squeeze the toothpaste tube as hard as we want in as many places as we want and we will still not succeed in making the tube smaller; instead we will only cause the tube to bulge out more in some place we didn't squeeze. If we ask our ideal girlfriend to play the Bach 'Chaconne', the Paganini 'Caprices', and the the Bruch 'Scottish Fantasy', then she may have had less time for cooking, sewing, hair, nails, and hostess skills! Or, as we know, at times there are trade-offs! So, if we want to blend Chardonnay wines from California, Chili, Australia, Italy, and even around Macon to match Montrachet, does matching one long list of chemicals increase the chances of something really bad on some chemical we ignored? Does the terroir and microclimate of Montrachet make that wine something really different in the way a step function is not a polynomial so that any attempt to match on some chemicals will just cause a really bad mismatch on some other chemicals? My guess is no, but it would be good to have some solid support for such a guess. Ah, we get all the esters and tannins just right, and at the triumphant victory tasting all anyone can taste is hydrogen sulfide! Naw: Since the only linear combinations we are doing are convex combinations, the hydrogen sulfide concentration in the blend can never be higher than in any one of the blending wines! The idea of measuring 100 variables from a complex system and asking if these are the 'right' 100 variables, how should we 'scale' these 100 variables, etc. are quite broadly important. These questions are not simple to pose well, but some progress is needed. Here's one: We take 299 Chardonnay wines and one additional wine, measure the concentration of each of our 100 chemicals in each of the 300 wines, and ask for a non-trivial test with rate of false positives of 1% "is the additional wine a Chardonnay?". We take 299 rocks from a valley and one additional rock, get data on each of several variables for each rock and ask if the additional rock was from the valley? Similarly for many cases of looking for anomalies.

balex: "Not at all. You are only allowed a convex combination of the wines that you are mixing and there is no guarantee that your fancy wine is going to be in the convex hull of your cheap blending wines. In any event, ctgm's point is valid: wines are not static linear combinations of chemicals but complex dynamical systems with interesting non-linearities in the ester reactions etc. Still an open problem, IMHO." Wow! Fantastic! Someone on eG understands convex combinations! Soon enough we will be into one of Caratheodory's results, Farkas lemma, and the Kuhn-Tucker conditions, constraint qualifications, etc. -- from each of which will need at least a bottle of wine to recover! Gee, why weren't Kuhn and Tucker in the movie on Nash? I've been wrong before, but here I'm still essentially correct! You claim that we cannot necessarily blend the esteemed coveted Rotchild from just any given 300 blending wines. Right. This is easy to see: Start with 300 bottles of water! Short of some religious experience, we can't do it! I didn't claim that we necessarily could do it! Instead, I first asked: "Now, can we blend the 300 wines to match the Chateau Effete Rotchild on the 100 chemicals?" Good question. The answer involves what you said: Is Rotchild a convex combination of the 300 wines? This is an important question. Turns out, the answer is not trivial. But, the answer is available -- we do have the means! Of course, the answer is, we write out a problem in linear optimization with 101 equality constraints and 300 non-negative variables and ask if the problem is 'feasible'. If we attack this with the simplex algorithm, then we either discover that we can't do the blending or find a way to do the blending using at most 101 of the blending wines. Then I continued: "If so, then how do we do this at least total cost?" So, here I did qualify the effort: Didn't try to find a least cost blending unless we already knew that some blending was possible. For "In any event, ctgm's point is valid: wines are not static linear combinations of chemicals but complex dynamical systems with interesting non-linearities in the ester reactions etc." I was unsure of just how to respond. It's been a long time since I read Wagner's books on wine making! It seemed that ctmg was assuming that we were considering blending as the wines were still changing rapidly. Ctmg didn't explicitly mention chemical reactions caused by the blending. My first reaction to ctmg would be that we are trying to blend 'wines' which should mean after the pressing and more important fermentation steps are done. So, we are considering blending once we do have some liquids that are reasonably stable over a time interval of a few weeks. My second reaction would be, if ctmg can tell us just how the chemical compositions vary over time, then in principal we could say when to blend at least to get a good result just after pouring and mixing -- assuming that the blending did not cause chemical reactions. Since wine aging has been studied, easy enough to guess that some changes could be predicted over time. My third reaction would be that blending gets to be a tough subject if we are considering blending to cause chemical reactions the results of which will over some time interval, short or long, give us the Rotchild we crave. Instead, as you noticed, I was just assuming that the little molecules would just swim around after blending as before and not change due to the blending itself. Or, I was assuming that mixing and aging are commutative operators! Of course wine making is awash in chemical reactions, and aging involves chemical reactions. But blending is not supposed to be as active as pouring vinegar over baking soda! Blending in wine making has been around for a long time. If the process of blending was wildly nonlinear (blending and aging not commutative), easy to believe that the intuitive techniques would just have become lost. Instead, likely a good first-cut approximation is that for reasonably stable 'wine', blending is 'linear' or close enough for the approximations being attempted. But, maybe I'm wrong: Maybe the extra tannins in one wine will affect the esters in another. I do agree that there are likely many open questions in blending wines to approximate the flavor of another wine.

I took my wife a few times in the 1980s. It was always good. We always got something decently good from the Cote d'Or and saved some for a cheese course, and the cheese was always good. The workers were so practiced that everything was done effortlessly and very quickly. The place did have a busy NYC quality. I was always surprised at how small the place was: Once we were standing there for just a few seconds waiting for our table, I glanced into the kitchen, and Soltner was bending over a lot of roast chickens he had just pulled out of an oven. Soltner always came to the table. We were always pleased to go.

Okay, let's see: Suppose we are given a bottle of Chateau Effete Rotchild and a list of 300 other roughly similar wines and asked to blend the 300 wines to be like the Chateau Effete Rotchild. Suppose we measure the concentration of 100 relevant chemicals in each of the 301 wines. Suppose we are given prices per bottle for each of the 300 wines we are to use for blending. Now, can we blend the 300 wines to match the Chateau Effete Rotchild on the 100 chemicals? If so, then how do we do this at least total cost? Hmm .... It turns out, this problem has been investigated for about 55 years. The problem is now very thoroughly understood. The results are in the form of powerful theorems, elegant proofs, refined algorithms, very high quality software, etc. Turns out, for this problem, the solution would be a piece of cake! One result: If we can do the blending at all, then we can do it at least cost for no more than 100 blending wines -- we won't need the other 200. How 'bout that!

Okay, at http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2004/0216/111_print.html is another story on Enologix and its founder Leo McCloskey. The Wired story is mostly better. Did wonder why the Forbes story did not mention UC Davis more. The Wired story explains: UC Davis doesn't like McCloskey! Apparently UC Davis has fallen into a conceptual trap: They wanted measures with reliability and validity of 'fundamental' flavor sensations. Okay. So, this is an approach to 'reductionism' but, really, a weak one since taking that 'flavor wheel' and saying how to blend to get something that tastes good is missing. Here is another and more direct, useful, reasonable, and valuable goal: Given a bottle of Chateau Effete Rotchild 1949, and given all these grapes, how do I harvest, make wine, and blend and age the wines to get something that tastes very much the same? Perfectly reasonable goal, and it's 'direct' in that we don't go through a lot of intermediate 'flavor wheel' analyses to say how. For how, for what chemicals to measure, here's a guess: Looking at many wines, can begin to guess the top, say, 100 most important chemicals. Then, match Chateau Effete Rotchild on those 100, and might be pretty close. If extend to the top 200 chemicals and match on those, and otherwise match on grape variety, soil chemistry, sugar content and pH at harvest, details of vinification, use of egg whites, oak barrels, aging, etc., will likely also match reasonably well on the rest of the 50,000 or whatever chemicals are there and come really close. Then you're close to Chateau Effete Rotchild as far as human tasters are concerned. Then for any human buying a bottle of wine to drink, buy the imitation and why pay more? The fundamental 'science' would not like this because this process did not identify 'fundamental' measures like velocity, acceleration, mass, energy, and momentum in physics. Instead, the process just matched on a lot of chemicals and process steps and hoped that the rest would just fall into place -- which it likely will. To heck with the 'physics envy' of the 'fundamental science': Instead, let's just make huge quantities of great wine and get rich! If want to match a Parker rating, proceed similarly. That is, get some of the wines Parker tastes, analyze those, and make some sense out of what combinations of the 100 top chemicals or so get what rating from Parker. The Parker ratings and 'Parkerizing' need not be very relevant: If you like Montrachet, Meursault, Chambertin, Hermitage, classic Barolo or Chianti, or even a Greek Muscat, get a bottle, analyze it, match it, and drink the match. This matching does not really permit making 'artificial' wine just from water, ethyl alcohol, and some chemicals: The matching on 100 chemicals or so promises to work only because the ingredients really are well made wines so that matching on the 100 chemicals promises to match on much more automatically. Sounds to me like UC Davis got lost in some objectivity that was nearly irrelevant. There really isn't anything less objective about matching some given Chateau Effete Rotchild. Just match it, bottle it, sell it, and let people buy it and drink it. Of course, this process takes Chateau Effete Rotchild as a given and does not explain just why it is 'good'; we can sincerely promise to worry about this each day on our walk to the bank! One curious point about the Forbes article is that they mention that Hahn Estates winery has 1000 acres and are shooting for 400,000 cases in 2004 and that Diamond Creek's wines sell for $400 a bottle. Hmm. Gee, if Leigon could get even $100 a bottle at the winery for 400,000 cases in one year, then that would be 400,000*12*100 = $480,000,000 which is really serious money for a 1000 acre farm anywhere in this solar system. Heck, $10 a bottle would be serious money. Sounds like wine prices will be coming down or we will be awash in wines. Yes, it's expensive to grow wine, but it's not a half million dollars an acre expensive!

Lucy: Many thanks, again! You've got some of the best dough working instructions ever and by far the best I've seen for Chinese dumplings! So, we really do want to work the gluten so that we get an elastic dough. I was guessing that we did not! "1. Choose a low work surface to be able to get your weight involved." No problem -- there's plenty of 'weight'! "2. Even if it seems wicked hard, try to use as little water as you can get away with because once it's ready, it'll suddenly 'relax'." Okay, I'll watch for that. Some of the reading I have done, e.g., Rose Cheng and Michele Morris, 'Chinese Cookery', ISBN 0-89586-088-0, Berkley Publishing, New York, 1981. says that can have two levels of moisture in the dough. So, use a wetter dough for 'potstickers' and a drier dough for steamed or boiled dumplings. I have been intending to go for the drier dough, and your instructions seem to have this same goal. "3. You'll have to plan to knead vigorously for about 30 minutes. Last time I did it (but I'm really out of shape), my arm and hand were shaking for a full day afterward. So prepare for some serious muscle fatigue or get friends involved to knead on shifts." I need the exercise! And, I'm about 6' 3". "4. When it's ready it will suddenly become a whole lot easier to work. You'll be able to tell. It will be as if it is melting a little bit although temp has absolutely nothing to do with the process. It's the gluten which is finally breaking down and stretching out. You'll see it when it happens. It's almost impossible to overwork the dough when doing it by hand, so keep going until you observe this phenomenon." Again, I'll watch. "5. Divide the dough into parts about the size of baseballs when you're ready to make the skins and roll that into a snake. use your cleaver to slice the snake into managable bits to roll each one into a circle." Yes, that was my plan. From measuring sizes of various dumplings I have bought, I am guessing that the circles should be about 3 inches in diameter. Once I get a thickness I like, I will try to record the number of circles per pound of dough. Then, in the future, given a ball of dough, just weigh it, find how many circles it should make, roll the ball to a 'snake', and then space the cuts on the snake to get the right number of pieces with each piece quite accurately the right weight. For doing my own ground pork, I'm intending to leave that to after promotion out of the first grade in dumpling school! While still in the first grade, I intend to use just grocery store ground pork. Also, somewhere, in the first grade or second, I intend to spring for some fresh shrimp. I did wonder about just chopping the meat. I am willing to entertain that the resulting texture difference would be significant and possibly desirable. The many descriptions I have read about adding cool water to boiling water and then boiling again, three times, struck me as traditional efforts at timing and temperature control and not as a crucial part of quality when timing and temperature control are handled well otherwise. Good to get your confirmation.

Lucy: Many thanks! Your post is part of what makes eG terrific! I'm busy with non-cooking things. For dumplings, I bought another big supply of frozen ones from Sam's Club. But I do intend to get back to dumpling making! Your post will help! I believe I finally understand how to make the pleats, although my description with a lot of plane geometry will sound like neither I nor anyone could understand from that description! Ah, for me, such geometry is the easy way! At various times, I have bought various machines. So, I have several mixers, a blender, a big slicer, and more. But since that flurry of buying machines, I got more impressed with just chef's knife, cutting board, hands, and some simpler tools. So, so far I have avoided buying a food processor, spice grinder, or KitchenAid mixer or equivalent. So, I may be making the wrappers by working the dough by hand. Thanks for the information. I was wondering about cooking the cabbage, freezing raw or cooked, etc. I finally did find my family's old meat grinder. There is a picture of one like mine in some of the pictures of Fat Guy's wife on her tour of outer Mongolia! So, the meat grinder is cast aluminum with a screw to permit clamping the thing to a table. There is a long handle that forms a big crank. There are several blades. So, chunks are put into the hopper, the crank is turned, a coarse screw feeds the chunks to the blades, and ground results get forced out holes. So, in principle I could do my own ground pork! My little question generated some terrific responses from people with some serious expertise! Ed Schoenfeld's recipe promises some serious flavors. eG's terrific! Thanks for your post! Look forward to your pictures, etc.!

Carlovski: "Er, I'm not normally one to question a person's recipe, but anyone else feel that it sounded fine until we got to the 'serving suggestion'?" Where's the "question"? The canned ravioli? The intention is just a fast meal good as a combination of nutrition, preparation time, cost, and flavor, e.g., to improve on much of fast food. The intention is not something grand with a 20 year old Marcarini Barolo in a hotel next to Lake Como with another Daniela Bianchi! The canned ravioli is simple and plain. Just as ravioli, there not much wrong with it. The ground beef is also plain; is just beef and VOO. The tomato sauce is quite flavorful. So, the sauce provides enough flavor to spice up both the ravioli and the beef. Also, this thread is awash in getting some really special tomatoes, and I just poured in two cans from Sam's Club. So, I got something more convenient, maybe a little less expensive, and put in enough other flavorings to provide a lot of flavor for the sauce and the whole dish. If we were emphasizing fresh tomatoes, then, sure, would try to emphasize really fresh flavors. But in this thread, we are just backing down to convenient canned tomatoes. Also, still with the theme of convenience and saving on cost, I used just dried parsley, basil, oregano, and rosemary. I've had to conclude that the dried versions of these herbs are much, much more convenient than the fresh versions. The proportions I gave for a final dish are a little short on the ravioli -- so the dish comes out with comparatively a lot of ground beef and sauce. To get more of a ravioli dish, just cut the ground beef and tomato sauce back to 3/4 C. With two ounces of the Pecorino Romano on top, tough to go too badly wrong! For more "serving suggestions", maybe I'll boil some noodles, dump in ground beef and sauce, stir, heat, and top with the same cheese! Would that be better? Would some Italian sausage be better than the ground beef? But just for that ravioli dish, it's possible to do worse: Another dish I've been doing lately, also just for fast meals, is a chicken noodle casserole. Did one last Friday, and got six quarts. Have given a first cut version elsewhere on eG. The thing borrows from the chicken pot pie filling in: Jacques Pepin, 'Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques', ISBN 1-57912-165-9, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, New York, 2001. For one chicken of about 8 pounds, I have 1 quart of Chardonnay wine, plenty of garlic, parsley, thyme, onions, carrots, celery, mushrooms, white roux, milk, heavy cream, lemon juice. I include a stock made from chicken skin and bones, and more herbs and vegetables, from previous batch. There is a lot of reduction to concentrate flavors. For the last batch, I included 19 ounces of leeks. So, there is a lot of flavor from French chicken white sauce traditions. Net, to me, that ravioli dish is better on all of nutrition, preparation time, flavor, and cost. Once again I get shocked on how sometimes the Italian techniques do better than the French ones.

Good grief, eG comes through again! Great to learn so much more about tomatoes for sauces! My usual goals for tomato sauce are closer to FG's: I'm just trying to get something to eat! Although have cooked tomato sauces for decades, didn't for a few months and then a few days ago rushed to make a pot of sauce for a fast meal. Since was in a big hurry, didn't measure -- right, now that I don't have careful measurements, I got one of my best batches of sauce ever! One fast use of the sauce is to fix up some simple canned ravioli with some ground beef. For the ground beef, just did a new batch: Got about 7 pounds of 10% fat ground beef, fried to loose pieces in four batches, each batch with some virgin olive oil. Drained in a colander. Placed in two freezer bags, one gallon each. Chilled. Flexed. Froze. Will flex again and, thus, get loosely frozen cooked ground beef as a 'component'. Stuff keeps nearly forever: Last batch still worked and must have been over two years old! For the fast tomato sauce, essentially what I did was: 1 large yellow globe onion, weight of onion before peeling about 1 pound 1/3 C minced garlic 1/2 C dry parsley flakes 2 T dry oregano leaves 2 T dry basil leaves 1 T dry rosemary leaves black pepper salt 1/3 C virgin olive oil 2 cans of Hunt's Crushed Tomatoes in Thick Tomato Puree, net weight 28 ounces a can Quartered the onion (regard root end as south pole and made cuts through N-S axis) and peeled the quarters. For each quarter, made about 4 cuts parallel to N-S axis and then many cuts perpendicular to N-S axis to give rather finely cut pieces -- a lot of surface area. On eating, concluded that the onion variety and quantity along with the particular cutting and cooking were especially important to the results. In a 3 quart pot, added OO, heated, added onion, cooked with enough heat to evaporate loose water and, thus, 'saute' rather than just steam, cooked long enough to get some concentrated sugars from the onion, cooked short enough not to get any significant browning. Added garlic, stirred, cooked for maybe 20 seconds -- made sure not to brown the garlic (by the way, the garlic did have some small shoots with green interior parts, and did use the shoots and green parts, before reading eG saying that these parts can be bitter). Quickly added parsley, oregano, basil, rosemary, pepper, and salt, already measured, and tomatoes, cans already opened. Cooked to 180 F, chilled uncovered and then covered. For a meal, in a 1 1/2 quart Pyrex glass casserole dish, I add 1 C loose frozen sauteed ground beef 1 C tomato sauce 1 can Chef Boyardee canned Beef Ravioli in Tomato and Meat Sauce, net weight 15 ounces a can Add cover. Heat in microwave to about 180 F -- 50% power for 15 minutes, rotate, repeat. Top with about 2 ounces of freshly grated dry Italian cheese, e.g., Argitoni Pecorino Romano cheese from Italy That tomato sauce is one that can eat for supper and at bed time need a snack so can forget about the sauce and get to sleep! So, with these canned tomatoes, for this sauce, just open the cans and pour -- no draining, chopping, reductions, or tomato paste.