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I grew up in Memphis, and there the BBQ pork was just coarsely chopped and not pulled. Chopped is fine. And, yes, with a good rub and some good sauce just after chopping, oven roasting can be plenty good. For the oven roasting, just give it a lot of time at a low temperature and stop when the internal temperature is about 180 F. The oven temperature might be, say, 225 F. Then, might need about 16 hours to reach 180 F. So, yes, start with just fresh pork 'picnic' shoulder, that is, the front leg, from just above the wrist to just below the shoulder joint. The lower part will still have the skin on -- just leave it on. Yes, serve on lightly toasted large white bread bun with cole slaw and some especially hot table sauce customers can add in drops. A good side dish is some BBQ beans that do contain some chunks of BBQ pork. I do NOT have a good recipe for the beans! With the sandwich and beans, cold beer goes great! Traditional dessert is chocolate ice box pie -- basically a pie shell with some variety of chocolate pudding topped with a layer of whipped cream. Then all that is missing is a 1957 Pontiac Bonneville and, in the right front seat, a sweet young thing with a long blond ponytail tied up with a red ribbon, a circle pen, and a poodle skirt, but I digress!

Recently had some results I like with <i>homemade</i> pizza. <br><br> I use 24 ounces (weight) of dough to make a pizza 12" in diameter, use no <i>pizza stone,</i> do <i>pre-bake</i> the dough just on a cookie sheet and without toppings (four minutes), add toppings, bake directly on the oven rack (five minutes). I use a home electric oven with a temperature of about 625 F. <br><br> I use only simple toppings and very much like the results. <br><br> There is no end of ways to cook pizza. There are ultra thin, ultra thick, ultra crispy, ultra <i>bready,</i> etc. And much more variety is possible in the toppings. <br><br> Here I describe what I do. <br><br> These notes are a description of the steps I settled on after a sequence of over 20 trials during a few weeks earlier this year. Here are some positive points: <blockquote> <SL> <LI> For the dough, I just buy that frozen, as <i>doughballs,</i> and let the company that makes these worry about flour varieties, yeast varieties, moisture levels, gluten development, dough hooks, etc. <LI> For the oven, I just use a standard home electric oven with no effort at a pizza stone. <LI> At the start of wanting a pizza, there are only three main ingredients, dough, sauce, and cheese; and all three can be kept frozen indefinitely. So, I can stock up on these three and then forget about the short lifetimes of fresh ingredients. <LI> Once the dough has thawed and risen, the rest goes very quickly. It's all super easy with just simple usual kitchen equipment. <LI> The resulting pizza may not be just exactly like what I had at some small restaurant in Italy with some gorgeous girl in a pastel floral print chiffon dress outlined with satin ribbons, but it's good. </SL> </blockquote> <b>Dough Source</b> <br><br> At Sam's Club I get <blockquote> Cafe Doughballs <br> Item #80005 <br><br> Golanian Bakeries <br> 1405 South Main Street <br> Fountain Inn, SC 29644 <br><br> High gluten wheat flour (ascorbic acid. enzymes, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), water, 2% or less of soybean oil, yeast, sugar, dough conditioner (vegetable gum, soy flour, monoglycerides, L-Cysteine, enzymes (amylase)), salt </blockquote> So, I get 20 balls, each in a plastic bag (not closed), frozen, 24 ounces per ball, 30 pounds net weight for the box. <br><br> Price for the box is about $15.24. So, each ball is about 75 cents. <br><br> This box appears to be intended as a commercial product, not a consumer product. Gee, why can't consumers also have some of the advantages of good frozen pizza doughballs for 75 cents each? <br><br> <b>Thaw and Rise</b> <br><br> To use one of these doughballs, need to thaw the dough, let it rise, etc. <br><br> A nice feature of these doughballs is the plastic bag they come in. So, for all thawing, rising, handling until actually forming the pizza shape, just leave the dough in the plastic bag. This way, during the rising, don't need to coat the surface with flour or oil, and the dough surface doesn't dry from exposure to air. <br><br> To thaw the dough and let it rise, I tried several obvious techniques. Except for trying to thaw quickly using the power of a microwave oven, all the techniques worked with no significant difference in the final results. <br><br> For all the techniques, first I close the open end of the plastic bag with a twist tie; I place the tie near the open end of the bag. Now the bag is closed to outside air but there is room inside the bag for expansion as the dough rises. <br><br> Here are three techniques that work: <blockquote> <SL> <LI> <b>One to Several Days.</b> One technique is to place the dough ball in, say, an empty vegetable bin of refrigerator. In 24 hours, the dough should be ready for making a pizza. If don't want to make a pizza, then gently drop the bag on counter top a few times to let some of the carbon dioxide gas escape, that is, partially to <i>deflate</i> the dough, place back in vegetable bin, and look again in 24 hours. A few times, I repeated these steps for a few days and then made a pizza. So, yes, just in a vegetable bin, the dough will thaw and rise. This fact is convenient; with my meager knowledge of bread making, I was surprised. <LI> <b>Twenty-four Hours.</b> Another technique is to place the bag and frozen dough on, say, the flat floor inside a microwave oven with the door shut and the power off. The oven provides a way to protect the dough from any small rodents! No, I don't have any rodents, but, then, I live in the country and don't want any rodents! After 24 hours in the microwave oven at room temperature, I have nicely thawed and risen dough ready to make a pizza. Likely an equivalent technique would be to place the dough in its plastic bag in a bowl of, say, at least two quarts, and, to protect against rodents, place a dinner plate over the bowl. <LI> <b>Four Hours.</b> For fast thawing, can place the bag and dough in a one gallon freezer bag, carefully close the freezer bag to be water tight, place in a dishpan of 100 F water, and let thaw and rise nicely. If keep the water at about 100 F, then should have nicely thawed and risen dough in about four hours. Since the part floating above the water level will tend to thaw significantly more slowly, occasionally rotate the dough in the freezer bag 180 degrees about a horizontal axis to put the top part of the dough on the bottom. </SL> </blockquote> So, whether I let the dough rise for days in the refrigerator, with deflating between each two days, for 24 hours at room temperature, or for four hours in 100 F water, the final results for the pizza as baked and eaten seem to be the same. <br><br> Here is a technique that does not work well: Using microwave to defrost, even for just five minutes at 10% power, leaves spots about the size of a quarter that have been overheated, essentially <i>cooked,</i> where the yeast has been killed, and that will not rise. <br><br> <b>Oven</b> <br><br> The oven I use is a standard home electric oven. I preheat the oven at its highest temperature setting, 550 F, for about an hour. Thermometers inside the oven show the actual temperature to be above the 600 F maximum indicated temperature of the thermometers. Generally my oven temperature is about 75 degrees higher than the oven temperature setting shows; from that fact and extrapolating on the dials of the thermometers in the oven, I estimate the temperature at about 625 F. <br><br> <b>Shape Dough</b> <br><br> When the dough in its plastic bag is puffy, can make a pizza. The amount of puffiness can vary a lot, but the resulting pizza is essentially the same. <br><br> I make no effort to <i>punch down</i> the dough. I just dump the dough onto a bread board with a coating of flour. <br><br> To get the dough out of the plastic bag, I remove the twist tie from the bag, hold my left hand open with palm up, place the bottom of the plastic bag on my left palm, use my right hand to peel the open end of the bag inside out and down over the dough and my left hand, turn over my left hand to place the dough on the flour, and with my right hand grab the inside out end of the bag and lift with some gentle jerking motions to turn the plastic bag fully inside out and let all the dough peel away from the plastic and fall out of the bag in one piece. Works great. <br><br> Then I dust the top of the dough with more flour and roll it to a circle of about 14" in diameter. To help keep the dough from sticking during the next step, I'm sure to have a good coating of flour on the bread board and, hence, also on the bottom surface of the dough. <br><br> <b>First Baking</b> <br><br> I pick up the dough and place it on a clean stainless steel cookie sheet and shape the dough to a circle about 12" in diameter. For the cookie sheet I use, the diameter of the largest circle that will fit on the flat portion of the cookie sheet is just 12". Now the cookie sheet and dough go into the oven for a carefully measured 4 minutes. Need to get the cookie sheet into the oven right away; if delay, then the dough can stick to the cookie sheet. But, if dough surface is nicely floured and place the cookie sheet into the oven right away, then the dough does not stick. <br><br> In four minutes the dough will be lightly browned, puffed enormously, and be loose on the cookie sheet. The puffed dough can look like some Hollywood version of a <i>flying saucer</i> with a convex top and bottom, symmetrical about a horizontal plane, and still in contact with the cookie sheet only on a small circle in the center. <br><br> So, I remove the cookie sheet and dough, now a <i>pre-baked</i> crust, and place on a cutting board. If the crust surface has loose flour, then I quickly dust it off. <br><br> At this point, need to be sure to remember to thoroughly clean the cookie sheet. Some of the loose flour may burn, but it tends to come off easily enough. But if use pot holders that have some oil on them, then, with the high oven temperature, even a thin film of oil on the cookie sheet from a pot holder can burn on the cookie sheet and form a dark brown varnish that is really difficult to remove. <br><br> <b>Toppings</b> <br><br> I use the back (convex) side of a 300 ml Pyrex custard dish to punch down the largest of the crust bubbles. I press down enough to form a small rim that will keep the sauce and cheese from running off the pizza during the next period in the oven. Also, can use sharp tip of a knife to cut a slit in some of the larger bubbles. To avoid forming the large bubbles, I tried pricking the dough just before placing it into the oven 100 times with a dinner fork (with four tines, 400 holes) and decided that this step is not worthwhile. So, just live with the bubbles; they don't have to have any noticeable effect on the final pizza as served. <br><br> I add 2/3 C of thick homemade pizza sauce (recipe below) and 4 ounces (weight) of shredded Mozzarella cheese (e.g., Stella whole milk Mozzarella from Sam's Club). <br><br> Note: Can keep the cheese without mold growth by repackaging the cheese in freezer bags, e.g., 1 quart each, and freezing. Can get the frozen cheese loose in a bag by hitting the bag gently a few times with the flat surface of a cutting board. Then, can place the loose cheese on pizza while the cheese is still frozen. <br><br> Just for convenience, I apply the pizza sauce still cold from the refrigerator. If the sauce were frozen, then before applying the sauce I'd thaw it and warm it to somewhere between refrigerator and room temperature. <br><br> Can get a somewhat more interesting appearance for the final pizza as served if the cheese, when melted, does not fully cover the red sauce but forms an irregular pattern. <br><br> <b>Second Baking</b> <br><br> Next, I slide the topped crust from the cutting board directly onto the oven rack -- "Look, Ma: No cookie sheet, no pizza pan, no pizza stone." I bake for an accurately timed five minutes. With the pizza directly on the rack of my electric oven with the heating element on the bottom of the oven, the bottom surface of the pizza has plenty of opportunity to get brown and crisp. Due to the first period in the oven, the dough is plenty stiff enough not to sag through the relatively wide gaps between the wires of my oven rack. <br><br> If leave the pizza in the oven too long, then the dough can form a large bubble or two, and the topping on such a bubble can rise enough to get hotter than desired and start to burn. <br><br> Generally, then, in another oven, would have to be careful about the times of each of these two periods in the oven. At a temperature as high as 625 F, the baking goes <b>very</b> quickly. So, in a different oven, until I had some solid data, I would have to check the first period in the oven, say, each 20 seconds starting at three minutes and the second period, each 20 seconds starting at four minutes. <br><br> To remove the pizza from the oven, with one hand I hold the cutting board nearly as an extension of the oven rack and, with other hand, place one finger on the crust edge and pinch with a dinner fork below and pull to slide the pizza to the cutting board. <br><br> I cut the pizza into four pieces and slide the whole thing to a dinner plate. <br><br> <b>Results</b> <br><br> The resulting pizza crust is yeasty, <i>bready,</i> crusty, chewy! The surfaces are nicely crisp; the interior is thick and nicely chewy; and the aroma is nice. May be the best pizza I ever had. <br><br> With a 24 ounce (weight) doughball used for a pizza only 12" in diameter, get a relatively thick pizza crust. So, the crust is the glory of this pizza, not the toppings. <br><br> While the flavor and texture of this dough are terrific, nearly all the glory is lost unless eat within minutes just out of the oven. Also, having the dough thicker likely holds in and enhances the glory of the bread and yeast flavors. It's genuinely terrific stuff -- if eat right out of the oven. <br><br> <b>Sauce</b> <br><br> Here is my first usable effort at homemade thick pizza sauce: <blockquote> 1/3 C virgin olive oil <br> 11 ounces minced yellow globe onion <br> 1/2 C minced garlic <br> 2 T dried oregano leaves <br> 2 T dried basil leaves <br> 6 T dried parsley leaves <br> 3 bay leaves <br> 48 ounces Contradina tomato paste (8 cans at 6 ounces per can) <br> 2 C water <br> 50 twists of black pepper </blockquote> In a 3 quart Farberware pot, I cook the onion in the oil until the onion is softened. Add garlic and cook gently. Add herbs and pepper. Mix. Add tomato paste and water. Mix. Add to double boiler top. Heat over simmering water to 160 F or so. Refrigerate uncovered until chilled and then cover. Or, measure out 2/3 C portions and freeze each. <br><br> I tried a similar recipe but with caramelized onions and then tasted onions continually for 24 hours after eating the pizza. The caramelized onions were <b>strong!</b> So, if use caramelized onions, be careful about the proportions and balance of flavors. <br><br>

ChefCrash, <br><br> Nice work and documentation. <br><br> I have a conjecture that would say that you should have let the meat cool in the bag with the liquid, that, as the meat cooled, it would absorb a significant amount of this liquid and, when sliced and eaten, be more juicy.

Fake Memphis style BBQ sandwiches: Chop and/or shred the pork, mix with BBQ sauce, warm in microwave, pile on lightly toasted big soft white bread bun, add salt and squirts of really hot sauce, top with coleslaw, pop open cold beer, turn on TV, enjoy.

Dr. Susan, <br><br> Welcome to eG! <br><br> Yup, can sympathize on problems cooking beef. <br><br> I would offer five pieces of advice: <br><br> (1) <b>Oven Temperature.</b> You very much do want to know the temperature inside your oven. Generally cannot trust the temperature indications on the dial on an oven temperature control. So, to know the real actual temperature, you need to measure the temperature, with a thermometer, inside the oven. Since a thermometer might fail, you should have and use more than one. If you use, say, three thermometers inside the oven and all three agree, then you know the temperature inside your oven. This is just what I do. <br><br> So, I would suggest that you buy some inexpensive oven thermometers, that is, thermometers intended to be placed inside the oven on an oven rack. In my oven, the thermometers are all inexpensive, not electronic, bought from a shrink wrapped card hanging on a hook in a gadget section of a grocery store. So far, all three of these thermometers always read the same. Once my oven is at a steady cooking temperature, usually the dial on my oven thermostat reads 75 F lower than the thermometers inside my oven. To keep these thermometers from falling through the slots in the oven rack, I have them resting on a folded sheet of aluminum foil. <br><br> (2) <b>Meat Internal Temperature.</b> Still more important than oven temperature, whenever cooking a 'roast' or other large piece of meat, you very much need to know the temperature inside the meat. This temperature is by far the most important single piece of information for getting good results in roasting. <br><br> A thermometer designed to measure temperature inside a piece of meat is commonly called a "meat thermometer". I have several and would suggest that you do also. <br><br> Likely my best meat thermometer I got some decades ago. It is from Taylor and is glass with a red liquid inside and a stainless steel scale attached to the outside. This thermometer can be left stuck in the meat while the meat cooks inside the oven. <br><br> To clean this thermometer, I let it stand and soak in a glass of soapy water. A day later, I clean with a soft brush, rinse, dry, wrap in a protective towel, secure the towel with a twist tie, and store in a gadget drawer. This thermometer has worked beautifully for decades, for chickens, turkeys, pork shoulders, eye of round roasts, beef rib roasts, etc. <br><br> Since this glass thermometer indicates new temperatures slowly, I also have some meat thermometers that indicate new temperatures quickly. These, however, cannot be left in a hot oven. <br><br> My standard such 'rapid reading' thermometer says 'ACU RITE' on the dial. There is a shaft about 5 inches long with diameter smaller than a pencil, larger than a lead in a pencil, and about the same as a soda straw. One end of the shaft is pointed, for inserting into meat. The other end has a dial and scale in a metal housing about the size and thickness of two 50 cent pieces stacked. <br><br> So, when I'm warming soup, I give it a stir to make the temperature uniform, use this thermometer to measure the temperature, and regard the soup as hot enough and safe enough at 170 F. <br><br> To clean this thermometer, I just clean the shaft. I try not to let the end with the dial get wet. <br><br> This thermometer was inexpensive, likely also bought from a shrink wrapped card, and is not electronic. <br><br> I also have another model which has a digital display but needs a small battery. <br><br> Typically a meat thermometer is easy to insert into the meat except possibly for the surface of the meat. So, to let the thermometer easily puncture the surface, cut a slit. To get an accurate reading of the temperature of the meat, usual advice is to avoid having the thermometer contact a bone. <br><br> For my fake version of Memphis pork BBQ, I cook fresh 'picnic' pork shoulder to an internal temperature of 180 F. <br><br> (3) <b>Beef Round Roast.</b> Beef round is not easy to work with. This meat is basically the main muscle that on a human would be the back of the thigh. This is likely the largest and one of the hardest working muscles on a cow. So, this muscle is high in collagen and low in fat. More fat could help make the meat tender and juicy. For the collagen, have to 'melt' that or it will leave the meat tough. The standard way to melt collagen is to cook slowly. Once such a piece of meat is cooked, slicing thinly across the grain can help make the result much more tender. <br><br> With beef round, I've had some successes but some failures. The failures were close to what you reported -- hard, dry, brittle and not tender, juicy, or 'succulent'. The failures were all from trying to make beef stew from chunks of beef bottom round roast, a topic I would leave for the second semester of Beef 101. <br><br> The easiest way I was successful with beef round was to buy eye of round roast, the whole thing. Some old notes from a typical trial have eye of round roast raw weight 6.28 pounds, roasted in shallow open roasting pan in a Brown-n-Bag (brand name of a plastic bag intended for oven roasting) at 325 F for 2 hours and 23 minutes to internal temperature of 168 F, final weight 63.5 ounces, loss 26.9%. My notes say that I liked the doneness from the 168 F internal temperature. When the roast cooled, I sliced it thinly for roast beef sandwiches. They were good sandwiches; the meat was plenty tender, moist, and flavorful. I stacked the thin slices of meat on rye bread, added some brown mustard, wrapped, and carried to work for lunch. <br><br> Corned eye of round is sometimes available in grocery stores; I've had good results with that also. <br><br> For roasting a whole beef bottom round roast, there is a Julia and Jacques TV episode where Julia made beef stew of chuck roast and Jacques roasted a whole beef bottom round roast. <br><br> Good ways to handle top round include Sauerbraten and Swiss Steak. Some special steps in preparation are needed, but the results can be terrific. <br><br> (4) <b>Beef Rib Roast.</b> For rib roast, here are some notes from a successful effort: We bought a rib roast with three ribs, including the "first rib", with the rib bones attached (not cut away), and raw weight 8.11 pounds. We placed the roast in a shallow stainless steel roasting pan covered with aluminum foil; the orientation of the roast was fat side up; we placed the glass meat thermometer in essentially the center of the meat; we roasted (uncovered, no water added) at 325 F; after 3 hours 45 minutes, meat internal temperature was 150 F; after 4 hours 15 minutes, 161 F; after 4 hours 39 minutes, 171 F; we kept the roast in a warm oven with meat internal temperature between 165 F and 171 F for another 1 hour 20 minutes before carving and then carved and served. It was good. <br><br> (5) <b>Chuck Pot Roast.</b> If I had to cook a beef dish for a beef lover right away, terrific and nearly fool proof, then I would do a pot roast with a round bone chuck roast. Such a pot roast was the first roast I ever tried to cook, and my track record is, no matter what I did, the results were good! <br><br> So, put the roast in a roasting pot, add water-based liquid to a depth of about half that of the meat, cover the pot, place in an oven at about 325 F, declare the roasting done when the bone is loose, the meat is nearly falling apart, the meat internal temperature is, I'm guessing, 180 F, the kitchen and the whole house smell good, and everyone in the house has to be forcibly constrained not to open the oven and dig in! <br><br> For my first effort, for the liquid, I used a can of Campbell's Condensed Mushroom Soup, straight from the can, no water added. I just put the soup on top of the roast, likely with some salt and pepper, covered, roasted, and ate. It was good. <br><br> During the roasting, juices from the meat form some terrific gravy. Since this liquid will include a lot of melted fat, may want to pour liquid into a container and spoon off the excess fat. <br><br> Standard additional advice includes: (1) At the beginning, in the roasting pot, brown the meat in oil. Then the "browned bits" can help the flavor of the final gravy. (2) Some people dust the roast with flour before browning. This flour can also brown and can serve to thicken the gravy. Here, however, it is easy to get TOO MUCH flour which can cause problems for the dish. So, I suggest avoiding this flour. If at the end, want a 'sauce', then pour off the liquid, strain it, spoon off the fat, make a roux of flour and butter, and use the roux to thicken the liquid. (3) For the liquid included (say, to a depth half way up the side of the meat) at beginning of the roasting, can use beef stock and dry red wine. Might toss in some garlic, tomato paste, and herbs. For the herbs, the usual suspects are thyme, bay leaf, and parsley. Nearly any reasonable proportions will give a good result. (4) About half way through the roasting, can toss in some chunks of carrot and celery and some white boiler onions. Near the end of the roasting, toss in some chunks of potato. Then, will have some carrots, celery, onions, and potatoes to serve with the roast. Again, nearly any reasonable proportions will give a good result. So, put the roast on a serving platter, arrange the vegetables around, pour over some of the sauce, and pass the rest of the sauce in a bowl. <br><br> There is a lot of fat in chuck roast. During the cooking, a lot -- likely nearly all -- of the fat melts into the liquid. This melted fat is easy to separate. With such separation, the resulting meat as eaten can be reasonably low in fat. <br><br> Any meat left over used as beef hash can be too good for mortal morals!

Yes, about 35 years ago, when Time-Life first offered their <i>Foods of the World</i> series by subscription, I signed up. The <i>editions</i> kept coming, and I got a dozen or so. <br><br> In part the books are much like travelogues and intended to be, say, like <i>Life</i> magazine, for light entertainment while flipping through the pages, looking at the pictures, in a comfortable chair in a cozy room next to a fire, sipping on herbal tea or some such and getting a vicarious escapist fantasy experience (VEFE) of enjoying the foods of the world. To me, this travelogue aspect of the books seriously displaced important information, documentation, and instruction on the cooking itself. <br><br> Some of the people associated with the books had world-class backgrounds in cooking; the basic quality of the recipes is (for recipes in cooking, not for information in, say, mathematics, physical science, engineering, or medicine) quite high; there really is some good material in the books. Since it has been 35 years or so since the books were published, there are now alternative sources for most of the material. But, some of the material in the series may be unique or difficult to find elsewhere, and for this material the series could be important in a serious collection of books on cooking. <br><br> Many of the dishes in the books are complicated; to use the books for these dishes, really should already have good general cooking skills, e.g., in French cooking, and already be able to get good results quickly on complicated dishes from relatively sparse instructions. <br><br> I would recommend staying with the books that cover geography from Italy to the Arctic and from Gibraltar to the Urals and to place less emphasis on the books for other regions. <br><br> In the book on Russia, there is a curious recipe for Beef Stroganoff: Need some really good fresh mushrooms (difficult to find in 1970; easy to find now), a lot of nice yellow globe onions, some powdered mustard, a lot of sour cream, and some filet mignon cut like matchsticks. Right: No stock. It's definitely not a beef stew! Due mostly to the (rather extravagant) use of filet mignon, the actual cooking is really fast. It tastes good, looks good, is relatively easy to get right after just a few trials, is surprisingly good for how simple it is, and would make a spectacular show dish for doing the last steps in front of guests. <br><br> There is a Black Forest Cherry Cake (<i>Schartzwälder Kirsch Torte</i>) recipe that is difficult to make but good: The cake itself has lots of eggs and some powdered cocoa but very little flour, takes some special handling, but is unusual, unique or nearly so. Learn how to handle the cake, get a good source of cherries, learn how to make and handle the decorative chocolate curls, get some whipped cream that can hold up, use high quality <i>Kirschwasser,</i> do much of the work in a cold kitchen (in the winter, with the windows open!), and can have a winner. <br><br> There is a <i>Sacher Torte</i> recipe -- again, lots of eggs, lots of chocolate, and this time some apricot jam. It's good and does look a lot like what is currently shown on the Hotel Sacher Web site. <br><br> There are some Hungarian stews and desserts. <br><br> The book taught me how to make puffy cheese, orange, and chocolate souffles. <br><br> I believe that the chicken stock recipe is from P. Franey. <br><br> For the cooking of the US, those parts of the series can be absurd and laughable for people in the US! Maybe the books on the US would look good in Europe and Asia, in which case we might suspect that the books on the cooking of Europe and Asia could look absurd and laughable to people in those areas! <br><br> In particular, for the cooking of China, it seems to me the subject is so intricate, huge, different, and distant from Western cooking and culture that there was little hope, too little, that the Time-Life team could do anything very useful. <br><br> One important alternative source of information on cooking is eG: E.g., the lessons by W. K. Leung (hzrt8w) on Chinese cooking likely already have more and better photography of information, documentation, and instruction on cooking than all the photographs in all the books in that Time-Life series.

This thread is a good candidate for the best information, instruction, or documentation on Chinese cooking I have ever seen, and I have a large stack of famous books on Chinese cooking. Three loud cheers for digital images, the Internet, and eG! Cashews are widely available. The cashews you bought, were they, as you bought them in the bag, already salted or not, roasted or raw? If they were just raw whole unsalted shelled cashew nuts, then I will know what to look for. The 10 ounces, was that the weight of the bag or the weight of the nuts you actually used? Is there a reason you used breast meat instead of thigh meat?

Another approach to specifying the sauces is just to thoroughly describe the labels on the actual bottles used! This approach would be less generic and versatile but more precise!

You mean category 5 hurricane Rita? Actually, here in New York, the weather is nice; as I recall, you are in TX? In case you want to check if I am correct, I've provided plenty of references. You mentioned Amazon: It should be able to give you ISBN's. Again, the "controls" do not have to seem "rigid": No doubt you have made plenty of use of measures of weights and volumes, timers, thermometers. For means to estimate the amount of dough needed at the start of the evening service, for what I mentioned about probabilities, it might be possible to have just a little graph on a single sheet of paper; you have other methods more common in the restaurant industry; in either case, using the methods is no more "rigid" than using a thermometer. Yup, it does so appear! On "what people like", from <i>Pretty Woman</i> we heard that it is "sucking up"! I believe that you are closer to correct. Yup, you have described the vicarious escapist fantasy experience (VEFE) of gossip about celebrities! <br><br> On "what people like", your "in some sort of imagined 'in-crowd'" has some support: There is an E. Fromm book that explains that the main issue in life is getting a feeling of security in face of the realization that we are vulnerable to the hostile forces of nature and society. For this security, he says only four means have been discovered: (1) love of god, (2) love of spouse, (3) membership in a group, (4) suppression of the feelings with passion, etc. Your remarks about in-groups, gossip, etc. are likely mostly part of (3). It may be that we should put some of VEFE and, sometimes, food in (4). Fromm omitted what I would mention: (1) money in the bank, (2) knowledge able to overcome the hostile forces and put money in the bank, and (3) power that can yield money in the bank that can buy knowledge and its results as needed. <br><br> Some months ago, eG had a change in forum policy that reduced the chances of eG being used to arrange social gatherings. So, with your "4500" and "gossip" you are saying that eG is being used for <i>vicarious</i> "social gatherings"? Yup, as we heard in <i>Jurassic Park,</i> "Yes, they <b>do</b> form herds!". <br><br> I don't do gossip: I don't read tabloids, read movie celebrity magazines, or watch movie celebrity TV programs; I don't gossip on the telephone, at the grocery store, or over a back fence; on the Internet and eG, I don't either read or write gossip. Never have; never will. Some people really actually do not like gossip! <br><br> Again, I can enjoy VEFE: It's good for light entertainment, e.g., movies. <br><br> But I come to eG for information on food, trying to get documentation, instruction to let me be a better cook. That's one of the main stated purposes of eG, and it really is why I come. For any ulterior hidden unconscious motives -- nope! VEFE does not help me be a better cook. <br><br> Some people have enjoyed Part One and Part Two. I didn't, not even just as VEFE. <i>Formula fiction</i> is about an interesting person, with a serious problem, who makes admirable and successful efforts to solve the problem, and gets the girl. However, for Part One, the guy used a simple hand tool for a simple manual task, injured himself, and maybe put raw human blood in the raw oysters -- which would convert expensive seafood to dangerous medical waste. For Part Two, the guy did not use simple solid means to estimate the amount of dough needed, ran out, and caused a problem for one of the world's best restaurants. In both cases, not very "admirable" or "successful". <br><br> Maybe I'm supposed to like the story because these simple failings make it easier for me to see myself in just that situation. Nope: Like billions of other people, I've used hand tools without getting hurt. Millions of restaurant workers don't run out of supplies during <i>crunch time;</i> running out at ADNY is sickening; and, for me, I have studied, used, taught, and created solid techniques for how to handle uncertainty in real situations, including avoiding running out. <br><br> In formula fiction there should be admirable and successful efforts; here we have someone hurting themselves and hurting one of the world's best restaurants. To me, no fun reading about such things. I'm not getting any enjoyable VEFE from someone who fumbles the ball, drops the ball, trips on the ball, falls on the ball, loses the ball, ends up face down in the mud under people who recover the ball. Not me. <br><br> Your <blockquote> So again I am afraid that VEFE rules, project. </blockquote> does raise an interesting question: Why so much VEFE? What can we do with VEFE? What is it with VEFE? <br><br> Again, actually, it is not true that "VEFE rules". You didn't make it as a chef serving just VEFE. Instead, you had to serve real food. <br><br> For an answer to my questions, I would say: There are buyers and sellers. Since VEFE is cheap to provide, sellers love to have people buy it. The media, "Yes, they <b>do</b> form herds!", and they have nearly 100% consensus on providing just VEFE. But, I can't use VEFE; again, it doesn't help me learn how to cook food and puts no food on my table or in my belly, and these failings I very much <b>do NOTICE.</b> So, for a good movie, maybe I'll buy some VEFE. And, some good classical music. Otherwise, I'm not buying. My view is that at least 99% of the time people are buying VEFE from the media, these people are getting ripped off. <br><br> I've been surrounded, drenched, bombarded, attacked with people trying to sell me VEFE or, in school, even forcing me to take VEFE, but I've never tried to sell VEFE. But, maybe there's a chance! Once I was in a drug store waiting on something, saw a huge magazine rack, noticed what seemed to be a lot of magazines on <i>romance,</i> and wrote down the titles. It was a huge collection; I got maybe 50 titles. Looking, I noticed that the three most common words in the titles were <i>secret romantic confessions</i> but that there was no magazine with the title <i>Secret Romantic Confessions.</i> So, that's a start, right? To heck with a magazine teaching people how to cook. Instead, have a magazine for people who are having affairs or imagining that they are! I know, I'm doomed: I keep concentrating on material challenging between the ears when all the action is below the shoulders -- the heart, the gut, and lower still. <br><br> I very much did <b>not</b> like Part One and would very much have preferred some nice photographs on how to shuck oysters safely. I very much did not like Part Two and would very much have preferred some solid information on restaurant operations, information on how to be successful, not on how to fail, information certainly available from one of the world's best restaurants. To me, going to ADNY and leaving with lessons in failure is degenerate, dysfunctional, and disgusting. <br><br> I don't touch cigarettes or illegal drugs, and I take high quality beer, wine, and VEFE in only small quantities. <br><br> There is a curious point: There are nearly no titles with <i>vicarious escapist fantasy experience,</i> not on eG or in the media. Instead, nearly always there is a title that has face value of being <i>real, rational.</i> So, however much people like VEFE, at face value the content is nearly always something else. Basically, VEFE can't show its face in public. <br><br> It appears, then, that the media top brass want to convince themselves that people don't notice and don't mind and, really, are happy, happy. Well, I'm saying that I do notice, right away, do mind, very much, and am torqued, pi**ed, angry. <br><br> For ADNY, Alain Ducasse has done well building a reputation as one of the world's best chefs. Part Two, however, has in a fairly responsible position in his kitchen someone who injures himself with routine tasks with basic tools and who makes serious and nearly inexcusable mistakes in elementary parts of the work. What is amazing is how Ducasse got talked into cooperating in having his operations described in this way. That evening, a customer had the right to demand, <blockquote> Where's the !@#$%^ )(*&^%$ <b>spaghettini!</b> </blockquote> I'm confident that Ducasse doesn't get many such questions, in his whole career hasn't gotten many such questions. The <b>real</b> situation, not the escapist fantasy one, is crucial and includes -- he's good, it's crucial that he is, his career'd fall like a shot duck the first week he wasn't. The work of his kitchen might be a crown jewel of civilization; thus, to me the description in Part Two is just <b>sickening.</b>

Carrot Top, <br><br> I have not been questioning your qualifications at all. Congratulations working on the southern tip of Manhattan. The time I worked down there, the traffic was <b>terrible!</b> Right: In an analysis of hospital sizing, mostly the beds are given and fixed. The beds are not the source of the uncertainty. The uncertainty is from how many patients arrive each day for each medical specialty! Then these patients have to flow through the hospital. Even if have beds enough in total, may have shortages of capacity in individual departments -- burns, intensive care, general surgery operating rooms, etc. <br><br> At times, hospital sizing has been taken seriously; the work I and a colleague did was taken fully seriously in a serious situation. <br><br> A restaurant is similar in the sense that customers arrive instead of patients; food orders go to various stations instead of patients to various departments, etc. The hospital beds would correspond to, say, the restaurant tables. The challenges of the uncertainties are similar. <br><br> Monte Carlo simulation is simple enough: It is what happens in the old board game Monopoly when moves are determined by rolling a die. So, if have a suitable description of some uncertainty, then can use a computer to generate appropriate random numbers and, say, see how a hospital or restaurant would work during 10 years of operation. That is, in a few minutes on a computer, we can get data from 10 years of experience. If the data shows something is wrong too often, then we can make some changes and try again. It can be useful. <br><br> The methodology of Monte Carlo simulation for doing hospital planning and evaluating the chances of a hospital being too full to provide needed care should also be applicable to aspects of restaurant planning. That's a more complete description of the connection between hospital planning and restaurant planning. <br><br> For such Monte Carlo studies, there is a nice book by Maisel and Gnugnoli. Their book has an extended discussion of an application. As I recall, they did either a medical clinic or a social services office. In claiming that such methodology could help in planning restaurant operations, I am on solid ground. <br><br> For bringing in a Poisson process, that is technical. Apparently Shalmanese is familiar with the subject. At Goldman-Sachs, at one time I would have referred you to F. Black. However, there will no doubt be people there now who know what a Poisson process is; Goldman-Sachs may have hired some people from the Princeton ORFE program, and they will know! <br><br> A Poisson process has to do with <i>arrivals.</i> In a restaurant, there are arrivals of many kinds. At a McDonald's, all during open hours, there are arrivals of vehicles, mostly cars, with customers. There are arrivals at each deep fryer, burner, oven, station, refrigerator door, etc. There are arrivals of orders for mixed drinks, bottles of wine, and each item on the menu. <br><br> Roughly a stream of arrivals form a <i>Poisson process</i> provided [A] in each interval of time, the distribution of the number of arrivals in that interval does not depend on the time of the beginning of the interval and the number of arrivals in intervals of time that do not overlap are independent. So, a Poisson process has [A] <i>stationary</i> <i>independent</i> increments. Short. Simple. Nice. <br><br> Commonly in practice we can check just intuitively if [A] and are true. Just from these <i>qualitative</i> assumptions it is possible to say that there must exist a number, call it the <i>arrival rate,</i> so that, with this rate, for any interval of time, we can just write down the probability distribution of the number of arrivals in that interval. Moreover, the times between arrivals are all independent and have the same distribution, an exponential distribution. We can also write down the expected number of arrivals and the variance (Goldman Sachs calls this <i>volatility</i>) of the number of arrivals. For [A], it is possible to weaken that. <br><br> For more, given two independent Poisson processes, if we combine the arrivals, then we get another Poisson process. So, if at ADNY the arrivals of raviolis is Poisson and the arrivals of spaghettini is Poisson and if they are independent (could be some question here), then the arrivals of uses of the common dough is Poisson. So, right away we know a <b>lot</b> about the arrival process for dough and have a good start on being able to calculate the chances of needing, say, more than five pounds of dough for one shift. A careful calculation might consider a little more, but this is a good start. If I were at ADNY, were working for someone with a 14" Sabatier, were responsible for having enough dough for the shift, and had any doubts about five pounds being enough, then I'd do <b>some</b> such calculation to be more sure! If I had an excess of dough, then I'd use the calculation to show that, even with the five pounds, there was a 1% chance of running out and offer to raise that to 5% or 10%. And, I would not have to wait a few hundred days and collect data to estimate that 1%! Now we're getting somewhere! When I read Part Two, this is what I thought should have been done. <br><br> So, for any of the arrivals in a restaurant, could check [A] and , collect some data, estimate the arrival rate, and then have some quite finely detailed information on the full distribution. <br><br> E.g., maybe a restaurant has Meusault by the glass. Well, then, right away we can say that at least a decently good first-cut approximation to the distribution of the number of glasses they sell in one shift will be a Poisson distribution. If we can estimate the rate in that distribution, then we can quickly calculate the probability of selling more than 16 glasses of Meusault. Doing this and checking the Meusault stock, we might discover that the chance of having enough Meusault for the shift is only 80%. So that we don't disappoint 20% or so of our Meusault customers, either we should get some more Meusault before the shift or select a different white Burgundy to offer by the glass. It's simple enough and could be useful. <br><br> I saw plenty of weakenesses in the MBA programs. Still, the MBA programs are a major part of what is there. They are better than nothing, do have some good content, and commonly are taken quite seriously. For business education, as one of the best restaurant managers in the US once said to me about a certain red Burgundy wine, "You won't find better." Missing something that is in an MBA program and needed could be costly! Good, bad, or otherwise, the content of the MBA programs has been considered about as carefully as we can expect for such things in our society. These programs have long commonly taught material very close to what I have been discussing. Net, the material should be taken seriously. <br><br> A little more generally, in the US, the research universities are one of the most important sources of high quality information. We're rarely going to get better information from politicians, TV commentators, newspapers, magazines, movies, movie celebrities, motel professional training seminars, popular books <i>People with 77 Effective Habits,</i> software salesmen, government departments, management consulting firms, gurus, stock brokers, novelists, TV talk show hosts, mutual fund salesmen, etc.

It isn't so easy to know how much to say. Here I keep trying to give short answers and later say more. <br><br> Analyzing systems that operate under uncertainty is not taught well very often. There is some relevant software, but mostly it's not among the really big sellers! In some cases, new applications could be of value. In principle -- and I believe at times in practice -- there should be applications in parts of restaurant operations. <br><br> The math I did for SSBN survivability was decades ago -- when there was still a Soviet Union! I don't still have access to it, and it would be imprudent to spread it around freely anyway. <br><br> Continuous time discrete state space Markov processes are treated at various levels in the relevant literature. Cinlar has a good relatively elementary book. There is more in Dynkin's classic books. You would want to look for the Kolmogorov forward and backwards equations. For queuing applications, should keep in mind exploiting embedded Markov chains. When they start using Laplace transforms in tricky ways to get closed form solutions of distributions in tricky queues, feel free to turn the pages more quickly! When they start talking about non-regular Markov processes, Martin boundary theory, and monotone class arguments, look for a simpler book! <br><br> For <blockquote> ADNY can't order a poisson distribution of dough, ultimately, it has to condense down to a single estimate. </blockquote> Right. Again, mostly we cannot hope to have ADNY <b>never</b> run out of dough. Our goal, then, has to be more modest: For a relatively simple modest first cut goal, although possibly progress over just intuitive manual methods, would be [A] to get the distribution of dough needed and using that distribution, to select the "single" amount to make to have an acceptably low probability of running out. For simple approaches we basically need the distribution to calculate probabilities of running out as needed to select the "single" amount to make. Some caution is needed: <i>Distributions</i> really <b>are</b> important, and given a distribution we can calculate probabilities, but it does not follow that a necessary step in every application is to find a distribution! A second cut would be to balance the cost of running out versus the cost of dough wasted from having too much. A third cut would be to include what you mentioned, uses for leftover dough the next day. This use of the excess the next day clearly can help reduce waste but, still, for most inventory items, fundamentally does not change the need to find and use a distribution. Part of what is nice is how much Poisson process theory gives us from just some really meager assumptions, ones that are just <i>qualitative</i> and, thus, relatively easy to check in practice just intuitively! This topic is called the <i>axiomatic</i> foundation of Poisson processes and, for applications, is nice. Cinlar's book has a nice treatment (uh, I do have a change at one point in his proof). <br><br> You have remarked on data: That is a solid concern. The amount of data needed can vary enormously. E.g., the work I did on global nuclear war limited to sea (sit down for this one) had as input data just some numbers on one sheet of paper! For other seeming relatively simple problems, the amount of input data can be staggeringly large. You mentioned entering data on the weather, etc. One issue is, the analysis may not know what to do with, say, a snow storm! Sure, quite generally, the more data we have, know how to use, and do use, the better we will do. Still just because some data is available doesn't mean we have to use it if we don't know how. We are not obligated to type in just everything every minute 24 x 7 even if in principle it could help! <br><br> Another issue is the computing: Sometimes the computing is really simple. Other times, the computing is a total mess! Broadly one of the more important issues in current practical computing is what infrastructure makes applications easier to do? There has been a lot of progress; more is on the way; still more is needed. <br><br> On 1., it depends on what "it" means! Sure, if "it" is <i>supply chain management</i> (SCM), then there is a well deserved reputation for taking a team of 200 people three years just for the initial implementation at one company! Some of the people doing the implementation arrive at work in new Corvettes or Ferraris! Further, on-going usage can remain expensive. And the installation can be "brittle" meaning that small changes in the company's operations can cause big breakage, long delays, and high costs in the SCM system. But such examples are for some fairly comprehensive coverage of some fairly complex processes at large companies. Here the effort is nearly all in just getting, checking, transmitting, and storing the routine business operational data. E.g., need a list of items to order, candidate vendors for each item, possibly really complicated pricing based on volumes, other items, total ordered from the one vendor, etc., descriptions of people and their skills, processes and the machines, capacities, data base schema, screen forms, encryption and security, backup and recovery, etc., all before we consider a Poisson process or necessary conditions for optimality! However, if "it" is just a small focused application of the basic applied mathematics, then the effort can range from something reasonable down to just a few keystrokes on an engineering pocket calculator. <br><br> For what could be done at a high end restaurant such as ADNY likely would require some investigation. So far in the US, people who concentrate on high end topics in engineering such as stochastic optimal control are reluctant to spend time in a restaurant to "bridge to practice". So, for the high end topics, less is known about the potential for practice than we could wish. But, the effort for a real application doesn't have to be huge: I was doing a quite serious and valuable industrial application of stochastic optimal control before I went to graduate school. At one point I flew to Cornell to discuss something, at the end mentioned a second problem, got a 90 second explanation of stochastic optimal control theory, ran for my cab, and by the time my plane landed understood it all well enough to start writing software. Someone in the restaurant business might do something similar. <br><br> On 2., that is a common intuitive conclusion from classical filtering theory in electronic engineering, but, actually, it is not very general! There are many places where it is possible to do some quite clean powerful valuable analyzes in situations with really messy <i>noisy</i> data. One broad collection of examples is the work on <i>non-parametric (distribution-free)</i> statistical tests of about 60 years ago; this work has not been much used in classical engineering but is everyday stuff in parts of the social sciences. These non-parametric tests can at times do terrific things with meager data and meager assumptions in really messy situations. Actually, the Poisson process is something of an example: Some simple intuitive qualitative considerations can be enough to conclude that some arrivals really are a Poisson process. Then all that is left is the estimate of the arrival rate, and the obvious estimator really does have high quality and is the one to use. An estimate might take no more than 100 arrivals; might get something useful for only 20 arrivals. Then Poisson theory can say a lot. One of the nicer tools, with some terrific properties, is just cross tabulation. At times can get some terrific results with meager data in messy situations. Of course, one of the classical examples was checking the fairness of a roulette wheel. A roulette wheel is <i>noisy,</i> but it didn't take much data to show overwhelmingly that there was cheatin' going on! Again, people work with lots of uncertainty everyday; mathematics should be able to contribute to the work and to improve on simple manual techniques without insisting that all the <i>noise</i> be removed from the system first, and mathematics can do this. <br><br> For 3., how much needs to be done on inventory control varies. E.g., for beef stock, maybe they make 100 liters at a time, reduce it to <i>demi-glace,</i> freeze it in ice cube trays, pack it in humidity proof containers, and store it in the freezer. One batch may last them three months, and the shelf life is nearly forever. When it's half gone, make another batch. Their chances of running out are next to zero; the cost of the space in the freezer is low enough. Not much more to do! That's one extreme. <br><br> For "specials", sure, that often works, but at ADNY, likely won't get last night's leftover biscuits as dumplings with today's lunch chicken! Yes, I know: At 3 PM each day, each French restaurant in Manhattan is supposed to get a delivery of 50 quarts of hand grown, hand picked, hand selected picture perfect varietal raspberries at $50 a quart, serve three quarts or so and turn the rest into raspberry coulis and use it to make nice red lines on white sauces or to lubricate between the layers or chocolate cake! We're talking some <b>expensive</b> little red lines and lubrication! <br><br> There are other extremes: We could think of various cases of very expensive very perishable fresh seafood and produce. Here we would like to know about the trade-off between [A] expected cost of running out and expected cost of what gets thrown away or, perhaps, used for a less valuable purpose. Here there may be some significant complications from interactions: When both Maine lobster and Dover sole are on the menu, what is the Poisson process parameter for each? <br><br> On 4., what you say is partly true but not always! I never mentioned a "statistical model"! What I did with global nuclear war limited to sea was <i>statistical,</i> but one sheet of paper had plenty of data! Really, then, the idea of building a "statistical model" is a bit crude; sounds like something from a motel seminar in regression analysis for marketing studies! <br><br> Having only 30 data points is not impossible! With 30 points, can do non-parametric tests with probability of type I error any positive whole number multiple of 1/30. So, can get type I error as low as 100/30 = 3.33%, and that's not so bad. Just 30 points may well be enough for a usable estimate of the arrival rate of a Poisson process from which one could say a lot about the probability of running short. <br><br> At a restaurant with reservations, have a good start on when the customers arrive. Of course, they don't arrive exactly on time, but there should be plenty of data for a rather good description of the difference between the reservation time and the actual arrival time. Next, there is time to get them seated, get past any round(s) of drinks, and place orders. Now the orders arrive at the kitchen. Given the menu and for each dish how the kitchen does it, at 9 PM, for each worker, what is, say, the distribution of the length of the work queue? So, does anyone look really too busy? Anyone look really not busy enough? If so, then might move around some staff. Similarly for the major pieces of equipment. Does this particular menu promise, with probability too high for comfort, to cause a queue too long at some one piece of equipment? The quantities of data readily available should make it possible to answer such questions, and the answers might be useful. <br><br> For <blockquote> Think about airline bookings, the airlines essentially have the same problem, they need to book enough seats so as to fill a plane yet not so much that they overbook. They can run a billion statistical tests over it yet overbooking is still reasonably common. What makes you think a restaurant can do any better? </blockquote> Uh, you might find that at times some airlines deliberately did <i>overbooking!</i> Airline reservations and pricing have been addressed fairly seriously in what they call <i>yield management!</i> Nothing I have said here would be news to the experts in that work. Such work has also been done for hotel room reservations; some people in that field actually have heard of stochastic optimal control theory (trust me on this one!)! <br><br> It does appear that, again, you are wanting to see the applied mathematics and computing get a perfect solution -- no empty seats and no overbooking. Such perfection is usually asking too much, more than is possible even in principle. The most that can be asked is to do the best possible; that can be <b>much</b> better than the results from manual or simple methods yet still noticeably (perhaps frustratingly) short of perfection of having each seat filled and no overbooking. <br><br> Giving up right away is too pessimistic and not useful. Again, humans, using just simple manual methods, do this stuff everyday; there should be an opportunity to do a little better!

Of course we actually <b>are</b> <i>on topic:</i> I am accepting the claim made in the thread about Part One that the point of the book was to provide information about restaurant operations, so have been discussing restaurant operations. <br><br> The central problem in Part Two was running out of dough, and this is a good example of an important issue in restaurant operations -- having enough without having too much. E.g., it's a problem in <i>inventory control.</i> The relevant research on such questions in operations is called, appropriately enough, <i>operations research,</i> and what I have been describing are some of the most solid parts solidly in the middle of operations research. E.g., I did mention the Princeton ORFE group, and there the "OR" abbreviates just <i>operations research.</i> Will bet you dinner at ADNY that the ORFE group -- e.g., E. Cinlar -- would confirm that an important problem in operations research is inventory control, especially with uncertainty. [Disclosure: Uh, one of Cinlar's best students was one of my professors!] Want to take me up on this bet? You'll have to bring your checkbook. Be careful -- ADNY will set you back. <br><br> In particular, I mentioned Poisson processes: These are crucial and powerful in inventory control and, more generally, for estimating arrivals -- e.g., when the next order for Poisson, or dough, will reach the kitchen at ADNY. Cinlar has one of the nicest treatments of Poisson processes. As a professor, I taught operations research, including Poisson processes, in one of the better MBA programs; that these topics are crucial for operational planning in business is so solid that granite looks like pastry cream. Once, as an expert witness in a legal case, I applied the material to hospital operations, e.g., estimating when they would run out of beds -- close enough for you? If the books you mentioned on restaurant management did not make clear the importance of this material, then you have learned something important on eG, have made some professional progress, and are now ahead in the restaurant industry. You will learn nothing of higher quality about restaurant operations anywhere. An MBA will cost you; you just got for free some of the highest quality material there is in any MBA program. That this material is important for business planning, someday possibly including restaurant operations, is just rock solid -- totally beyond any question. We're talking crown jewels of civilization here -- it doesn't come any better than this, not in this solar system. E.g., it's fully respected at Princeton, and they are fully correct. <br><br> Supply chain management is also solidly within operations research. That in principle supply chain management applies to restaurant operations is as true as apple pie. In particular, the core of supply chain management is just inventory control. Further, part of the Manguistics software is just C-PLEX which is optimization, by R. Bixby at Rice University, and one of the best pieces of operations research software. <br><br> There isn't a lot on applications of operations research to the operation of restaurants, so my operations research examples, with lessons for restaurant operations, were from other fields. My mention of Monte Carlo simulation to evaluate plans in restaurant operations is one of the most appropriate suggestions for progress in planning in restaurant operations. Huge literature shows solidly that Monte Carlo simulation is one of the best tools in planning and sizing facilities operating under uncertainty, including for reducing chances of things going wrong; that this methodology would never be helpful in restaurant operations is absurd. Uh, you recall, commonly a restaurant kitchen has a queue of tickets that have arrived from the front of the house, a queue of dishes from the kitchen not yet carried to the tables, etc. Restaurant operations are awash in queues. Monte Carlo and Poisson processes are among the most important -- likely the two very most important -- tools in analysis of systems of queues. Uh, I kept it simple and omitted swindles, importance sampling, generation of random numbers! In your restaurant career, you just made some professional progress. <br><br> Want some real and solid progress on restaurant operations? Well, this is what some of the best of it looks like, and it is NOT in Escoffier! <br><br> What I said about economic productivity is important for the restaurant business: Broadly in the economy, more in automation is coming. One result will be that the comparative cost of traditional <i>bench work</i> by craftsmen, artisans, and artists will rise quickly. That is, even if we do get a factor of 10 increase in productivity, not all prices will remain in the same proportion; instead, some things will get comparatively cheap and some, comparatively expensive. E.g., the DVD player in my new computer just failed. It's within warranty; maybe I can get it replaced. But, I can buy a new one for $20. How far will $20 go at ADNY? A meal at a place like ADNY, a loaf of handmade French bread, a piece of handmade goat cheese will become comparatively more expensive. Ask a reference librarian what Google's 125,000 computers are doing to their careers. Fewer and fewer people will be able to pay for, or do, such bench work. The future is more and more in driving automation. Including in the restaurant business. Net, you just made some more professional progress. <br><br> We very much <b>are</b> <i>on topic,</i> and any conclusion otherwise would be naive and shortsighted. With the Internet, this really very much is a <i>Brave New World,</i> but meeting the challenges is what the stuff between our ears is for! <br><br> I'm still surprised that ADNY ran out of dough!

Don't think it's that bad! <br><br> There is an example in cars: One of the real nonsense problems in the US automobile culture was fuel flow and ignition timing. These were done with poor accuracy, especially with cold engines, and the result was wasted fuel, dirty air, worn dirty engines, too much in maintenance, etc. Then about 20 years ago we got computers controlling fuel flow, ignition timing, etc. It was terrific progress on wasted fuel, etc. But, that use of a computer to control fuel and ignition didn't ruin the creative or enjoyable aspects of using a car! <br><br> Sure, in some science fiction scenario, computers will be so advanced and powerful that humans will be left just holding on to the power plug as the last means of control over the computers! But that's a very long way in the future! <br><br> There is quite a bit of computer control now. E.g., the Internet we are using to connect with eG basically depends on computer control, say, in the packet routing algorithms. The Internet is being tough on the old <i>circuit switched</i> telephone network, but without the Internet eG would have to be, say, just an old <i>bulletin board</i> system, and those were so clumsy to use they just were not effective enough to catch on. <br><br> The role of a computer I was outlining in restaurant operations would say how much dough to have on hand, etc., at the start of the evening service. This computer role would not much reduce "'real' creative opportunities". E.g., what to do with the dough, what sauces on the spaghetti, what to have in the sauces, what wines to pair with the dish, etc. would still be from the existing creative means of ADNY. <br><br> Your "total control" sounds regimented. Do you feel regimented driving a car that has a computer controlling fuel flow and ignition timing? The Ford Model T had ignition timing and fuel flow <i>choke</i> controls for the driver; do you feel that handing these over to a computer was a loss? Do you use computer spell checking? How about Google; last I heard, they had 125,000 computers. You know, essentially all of eG is on Google! There gets to be some question why the data should also be on eG's servers! <br><br> ADNY is using a lot of control systems now: With all their terrific equipment, they will have some terrific refrigeration, and that will have a control system for temperature, humidity, and frost removal. Similarly for their heating, ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC) system. In much of the electronic equipment they have, there is a <i>power supply</i> that converts standard wall alternating current to direct current. This thing has to be a control system because its main job is to keep the direct current at a specific voltage whatever the load -- and the load varies quickly from no load to full load and back frequently. The new fancy low temperature cooking, possibly being used by ADNY, needs a control system to keep the temperature quite precise. Certainly the ADNY bread ovens have control systems for the temperature and maybe the humidity. The standard wall alternating current is delivered with a control system. Similarly for the pressure of the natural gas used in the stove tops (assuming ADNY has gas burners -- I would guess that they do). <br><br> Sure, there should be the "serendipitous" in cooking, with as much "beauty and surprise" as you want! Or, if "beauty and surprise" are the goals, then so be it! Gee, a car with computer controlled fuel and ignition might get used for driving in Upstate New York to look at the Fall leaves; there is no conflict here! At a restaurant with a lot of creative activity, a good system based on stochastic optimal control for making better restaurant operation decisions under uncertainty should notice that the quantities of ingredients -- from all those creative efforts -- were highly variable and then, roughly, have higher <i>stock levels</i> to reduce the chances of running out. So, the chefs deglaze with red wine, reduce, add some red current jelly (at some restaurants, maybe not ADNY!), toss in butter, etc., all in variable amounts, and with a good system it seems that somehow there is always plenty of red wine, red current jelly, butter available but not a gross excess! <br><br> For <blockquote> But of course one would have to have actually cooked for a while to realize that, maybe. And not be scared to color outside the lines while doing of it. </blockquote> you're preaching to the choir here! Anyone proposing stochastic optimal control for restaurant operations is definitely not "scared to color outside the lines"! <br><br> But, you do touch on what likely is a serious point about high end restaurant cooking: Gee, in my cooking, once I get a dish the way I like it, usually after what I regard as <b>far</b> too much in time, money, and effort, on a computer I type in what I did. Then when I do backup for that computer, I "get happy, happy"! My main goal is not to create the dish but to eat it! <br><br> So, sure, a restaurant could do something similar: Once the chefs have had a good <i>creative period</i> and gotten a good dish, they can record it, teach it to the relevant staff, and have it available to put on the menu whenever that seems appropriate. <br><br> But, maybe some restaurant chefs actually do <b>not</b> want to do this and, instead, want always, <b>always,</b> to be <i>creative</i> for every dish served -- never write down what they did, every serving like a jazz improvisation, and no two servings ever just alike! Okay, if that's what they want! And, in that case, stochastic optimal control should do well having on hand all the novel ingredients they might want to use! <br><br> But, should mention, that in such an application, at some point will have to ask the restaurant owner: <blockquote> About that sushi quality tuna: It's on the list. We're keeping it on hand. It's been used for some creative dishes, but the last use was seven months ago. It doesn't keep very well; the kitty cats have been enjoying it! Uh, could you mention a number, what you regard as the <i>cost,</i> in US dollars, for an instance when a chef suddenly asks for this tuna and it is not on hand? If this cost is $500,000, then there will be plenty of tuna on hand; if this cost is $0.50, there will be much less tuna on hand at least until the chefs start to use it again. If you want to try some different numbers, then for each we can give you reasonably good estimates for what it will cost for supplies for the next three months. The estimates will be especially good for what you would be looking at here, the comparative cost. It's your judgment. </blockquote> Fairly generally, that's about how cost and creativity balance out. The issue really isn't regimentation or staying within the lines, but there are some costs. <br><br> I have a view on this; might as well type it in since there is no chance I can type too fast for Jason's servers! Can take a family of four where both parents work 80 hours a week at $10 per hour. So, they gross $80,000 a year, and, for a family of four, and commuting to possibly four jobs, we are sure that they can spend it! Now, if we can use computers to get productivity up by a factor of 10, then one parent can stay home with the kids, the other parent can cut back to 40 hours a week, they can gross $200,000 a year, and again we can be sure that they can spend it! Heck, they may even go to ADNY once a year! If we can use computers to get productivity up by another factor of 10, then they can gross $2 million a year, have high end private schools for the kids, an 8000 square foot house, nicely furnished, a vacation home in the country, and a 40 foot boat for fun on the water. If we can use computers to get productivity up by another factor of 10, then they can have a nice yacht, a 20,000 square foot house, a really nice place in the country, Ivy League educations for the kids and after a few years retire and pursue creative activities in cooking, music, painting, etc. If we can use computers to get productivity up by another factor of 10, then they can join with others in launching, say, a telescope with seven mirrors, each mirror 100 yards in diameter, the mirrors separated by 10 miles, to one of the Lagrangian points where it can have a stable home and quietly calmly look into the clouds on distant planets, etc.! <br><br> So, we are up to four factors of 10, a factor of 10,000. This means that a person can accomplish in 12 minutes what takes a 2000 hour working year now; we're talking a <b>lot</b> of increase in economic productivity! Okay, set aside that telescope and consider just three factors of ten: That means a person can accomplish in two hours what takes a 2000 hour working year now; we're still talking a <b>lot</b> of increase in economic productivity! And, you <b>do</b> want Ivy League educations for the kids, right? <br><br> So, how are we going to accomplish in two hours what takes 2000 hours now? About the only way we have in mind is just to automate everything in sight. So, we will want people managing computers managing computers, ..., managing computers doing the work. Some of what these computers will be doing is stochastic optimal control. What the humans will be doing is creative activities in cooking, music, painting, etc. But, to get there, we have a long way to go.

Carrot Top, Shalmanese, <br><br> No, it's not that way! What you are objecting to, I didn't say or mean! <br><br> The main theme in your comments is that there is a lot of what I called <i>uncertainty</i> in restaurant operations. Right. Of <b>course</b> there is. And, I addressed this issue, although briefly. Gee, guess what I wrote wasn't long enough! <br><br> Here is where it appears you are getting off the track: It appears that you are assuming that I would want to be able to say to a restaurant owner: <blockquote> Four times last week you ran out of important supplies during the shift and had to tell customers bad news. That cost you. And, 29 times last week you had to throw away supplies that were too old to use -- i.e., past their <i>shelf lives.</i> That cost you, too. That was a lot of cost -- waste. Via some planning software, we can eliminate all that waste. </blockquote> So, you seem to be assuming that I would need to be able to say the above or nothing at all. <br><br> <b>No!</b> <br><br> Clearly I could not deliver on the claim of "eliminate all that waste". I would not make such a claim. And I would not need to. <br><br> You want to assume that, then, there is nothing to be done. <b>No!</b> There is still plenty to be done, plenty of savings to be obtained! <br><br> Basically you are assuming that the only progress for such a restaurant would be to plan with exact calculations and, then, in practice execute that plan exactly or nearly so. Sure, that might work for some school feeding 2000 captive obedient students each day! Since the uncertainty does not permit executing a prior fixed plan exactly, you want to conclude that nothing can be done. Uh, this is a common mistake. Some very serious people in some very serious situations have made this mistake. Still, it's a mistake, possibly a very serious one. <br><br> For a simple way to see that there is a mistake here, we need only notice -- as both of you have been emphasizing -- that restaurants around the world, using just intuitive manual methods, work in situations of enormous uncertainty everyday. Easy conclusion: Working with uncertainty really is possible. <br><br> Then you are in effect jumping to conclude that these intuitive manual methods are the best that can be done working with uncertainty. Think about it: Do you really want to draw this conclusion? <br><br> Of course you don't! <br><br> But, what to do, how to work with uncertainty better than intuitive manual methods? Not many people have gotten into such things. <br><br> Well, via the largesse of the US DoD, your tax dollars have paid for long wide deep streams of research on this question. You see, the US DoD realizes that there is a lot of uncertainty in <i>national security.</i> In particular, the DoD believes about the mostly deeply in "sh*t happens", "the fog of war", and "no war plan ever survives the first contact with the enemy", and much more on uncertainty. In particular, at times the US DoD has been big on how to handle uncertainty in various <i>operational</i> contexts plenty general enough to cover, say, restaurant operations. <br><br> Here is an example: During the Cold War, a claim was that the the Soviet forces would not be able to find the US nuclear powered ballistic missile firing (SSBN) submarines as they were operating at sea. Well, clearly this claim cannot be literally true: In principle it would have been possible to get a big net and drag really quickly! I won't go into more (I could, but then I'd have to ...). But, it was clear enough that for the Soviets to find all of the US SSBN's at once would be somewhere between impractical and impossible. And they would definitely want to know just where each and every one of those SSBN's was, very, <b>very definitely,</b> before attacking even one of them with a nuclear weapon! <br><br> But, there was a concern about another <i>scenario</i> -- a good George C. Scott impression would go well here, along with some good Peter Sellers in a wheel chair! See, if there really were nuclear war with the Soviets and if they really did find a US SSBN, then easy enough to get people to agree that can scratch one SSBN. That is, in nuclear war, the only real safety of an SSBN is not to be located! If they cannot all be found at once, maybe they could be found slowly one at a time and then destroyed as they are found? Further, maybe somehow the world could get into a situation of global nuclear war but limited just to sea? Then the SSBN's could be picked off slowly one at a time. If so, then how long might they last? At times, this was regarded as a "controversial" scenario! But, suddenly the US Navy very much wanted an answer. Yup, they did. Your tax dollars hard at work keep you safe! At the time, I was working in such things supporting my wife and myself through graduate school. The Navy wanted their answer in two weeks. No one much saw what to do. I had some ideas and got to work. "Two weeks?". Hmm .... That was about right because just after that deadline my wife had already scheduled a short vacation for us, one she very much wanted, at Shenandoah. So, two weeks it had to be! <br><br> Now, it wasn't just the submarines I needed to consider; it was full nuclear war, but limited to sea. So, I had to consider missile firing submarines, attack submarines, surface ships, airplanes, etc., on both sides, with everything on each side potentially shooting at everything on the other side. That's a <b>lot</b> of shooting! No way would it be possible to calculate exactly when each shot was fired or its result or even when each SSBN got shot at! Uncertainty! And, I had two weeks! <br><br> How to do that? Well, I was not the first to consider looking for little tiny submarines in great big oceans! In WWII, a guy named Koopmans (I don't recall his first name) wrote a study called OEG-56 where he said that, give me the area of the ocean, the speed of the target submarine, the speed of the search submarine (surface ship, airplane, etc.), and the distance at which the searcher can detect the target and then I'll tell you the probability distribution of the time until the next detection! Moreover, that distribution will be in the family called <i>exponential.</i> Well, Koopmans was not asking for much information, and that fit well because no one had much information! Or at least what Koopmans was asking for was about all I had time to work with! Then, make a few mild assumptions, use some work of A. Kolmogorov (right, a Soviet mathematician -- I'm not making this up!), tap lightly, and what falls out is a continuous time discrete state space multidimensional <i>pure death</i> (that's what to call it!) Markov (right, a Russian) process subordinated to a Poisson process (can sometimes get these in French restaurants). As Kolmogorov knew, the probability distribution for the number of US SSBN's can be found directly from an exact calculation in terms of a <i>matrix exponential.</i> However, in this problem, the matrix would have been absurdly large. So, do what S. Ulam did -- to Monte Carlo we go! A few days of writing software, and I was done! The Navy got their results, and my wife got her vacation, both on time. My work was later sold; I could tell you who bought it, but then I'd have to .... <br><br> But, what I found was the probability distribution, not the exact situation. So, it was all working with probability distributions, not exact results. <br><br> Net, it really is possible to do a lot with uncertainty. <br><br> But, as both you have emphasized, all during the evening service at a restaurant, the staff is reacting at the last minute to suddenly revealed uncertainty. What would be the best way to do that? Again, the work is heavily based on working with probability distributions. As, I mentioned, a lot is known. It's called "stochastic optimal control" or "Markov decision processes". A short but okay description of the field is, how to make the best decisions over time under uncertainty. Yes, there is some at Amazon! Consider E. Dynkin (at Cornell, student of Kolmogorov), D. Bertsekas (at MIT), S. Shreve (at Carnegie-Mellon, Bertsekas student), R. Rockafellar (University of Washington), W. Fleming (Brown University). And consider the ORFE group at Princeton. Uh, won't find any VEFE in those sources (oh, poor VEFE, poor, poor misunderstood emotionally abused passionate poignant poetic VEFE!). Curiously likely some of ADNY's customers from Wall Street understand at least some of stochastic optimal control, if only because the Black-Scholes option pricing model is a very simple special case. Uh, they have not always known as much as they should have; the Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) disaster was a result of not really understanding. But, at LTCM some economists were involved, and how to believe that an economist could understand such things! <br><br> In principle stochastic optimal control would definitely be the gold standard for how to run a restaurant! Uh, those books on restaurant management, they covered that, right? <br><br> But, I didn't leap to say to apply stochastic optimal control! What I suggested was mostly quite simple! Actually, I did include a role for Monte Carlo as in the evaluation of the survivability of the US SSBN fleet! Such Monte Carlo is not always too difficult to do: I did if for global nuclear war at sea in two weeks! <br><br> Also I didn't recommend applying <i>supply chain management</i> (SCM), <i>supply chain optimization,</i> or the advanced onerous but coveted <i>multi-echelon supply chain optimization!</i> This last has to be essentially a very narrow special case of stochastic optimal control. Supply chain management software, e.g., from SAP, Manguistics, Oracle, might be okay for GM or Boeing and might actually in principle be able to cover restaurant operations, but I did not recommend just calling up your local SAP office! <br><br> Monte Carlo is not so bizarre: It's been a standard part of spreadsheet software for at least a decade. <br><br> I do remain surprised that ADNY would run out of dough!

So, <UL> <LI> Ran out of raviolis. <LI> In the effort to make more raviolis, a mistake with a machine wasted some dough. <LI> Ran out of dough. <LI> Ran out of spaghettini. <LI> Since was out of dough, couldn't make more spaghettini. <LI> Making more dough would take too much time. <LI> Found an alternative. </UL> Okay. Actually, in a draft of a comment to Part One, I wrote but did not post: <blockquote> <b>Capacity Planning.</b> How many loaves of French bread should the restaurant order? The bread doesn't keep well at all. So, ordering too much bread results in waste. But ordering too little bread can result in running out during the day and disppoint customers and hurt revenue and earnings. French bread is just an example; there are many cases of how much to purchase or prepare, and then the cases can interact. Good answers here could help earnings. </blockquote> So, ADNY running out of dough was suprising to me only in that it could actually happen at ADNY! So, ADNY had a problem in "capacity planning" but with dough, spaghettini, and raviolis instead of French bread. I'm not surprised that a restaurant would have this problem; I am surprised that ADNY would. <br><br> But the problem was at least a little bigger than just simple capacity planning of how much of some one item, e.g., French bread, to order: So, for the evening service, need some <i>materials,</i> e.g., dough, spaghettini, and raviolis. Then some of the spaghettini and raviolis need to share the same supply of dough. I don't know just what is in the dough, but it likely at least has some flour, of some type, in it. Given dough, the spaghettini and raviolis can be made quickly, but making the dough takes time, apparently too much time to be done during the evening service. So, before the evening service, there must be some <i>planning</i> for the <i>requirements</i> for the dough. So, we have a case of what for some decades in some industries has been called <i>material requirements planning</i> (MRP). This particular MRP problem has only a few materials -- flour, dough, spaghettini, and raviolis; but it is easy enough to see that many manufacturing processes may have many more. Actually, ADNY must have many such MRP problems. Since many of the problems share flour, eggs, butter, salt, milk, etc., the problems are related and not all independent. If the problems were independent, then the whole could be decomposed into separate smaller problems, and that could ease the planning. But, at least to some extent, there is just one big ADNY MRP problem and not many small ones. Small or big, ADNY has some MRP problems. Of course they do. Easy enough to see that nearly any restaurant, factory, process plant, etc. has MRP problems. Some of the problems are complicated. <br><br> But, the flour flows into the dough, and the dough flows into the machines and into the spaghettini and raviolis. So there are some <i>flows.</i> Each single end to end flow looks like a <i>chain.</i> There is some jargon, then, to say that the planning is at least a <i>supply chain</i> problem. In each chain, there are: <UL> <LI> <b>Time Delays.</b> Time to make spaghettini and raviolis from dough appears to be nice and short, but time to make dough or to get a new supply of flour is relatively long. So, the quantities of spaghettini and raviolis may not have to be planned in advance, but the quantities of dough and flour do. <LI> <b>Shelf Life.</b> A sack of flour has a long shelf life. Likely the shelf life of dough is much shorter, and spaghettini and raviolis, each very short. So, mostly can stock up on flour; then the cost would be capital and storage space. These can be significant and have been the motivation behind <i>just in time</i> deliveries (which in general are risky), but capital and storage space (even at the price of New York City floor space!) for flour, etc. may not be very significant at ADNY. If stock up on dough, spaghettini, or raviolis, then can get too much and can have some waste, in labor, materials, etc. <LI> <b>Capacity Limits.</b> There are some limits on capacities, e.g., how fast the machine can make raviolis. <LI> <b>Uncertainties.</b> The operation is just awash in uncertainties. Handling these is likely the biggest challenge. One example of uncertainty was the mistake in using the machine to make raviolis, the mistake that, then, wasted dough and caused a dough shortage. Other uncertainties can be in staff illness, accidents, what the customers order, late vendor deliveries, the weather, etc. </UL> So, there are supply chain problems with uncertainties. <br><br> When things do go wrong, then sometimes there are some alternatives. Such decisions are sometimes called <i>recourse.</i> <br><br> So, there is a system that evolves over time with various costs, limitations, and uncertainties and that has some decisions with recourse. Hmm .... Some of the customers at ADNY will be familiar with such things in parts of finance. What to do is known fairly well in general terms and in many details. <br><br> Of course, for any good restaurant, and certainly for ADNY, the basic restaurant planning has already done good work on having the front of the house, back of the house, number of staff in each category, standard supplies, etc. all nicely balanced, i.e., given the size of the front of the house, plenty, but not always a gross excess, of everything else. Further, for the planning for each day, there are likely some easy approaches with good effectiveness. E.g., since ran out of dough, from now on each day have a little more. Also put on a list to remind the staff always to check the settings on the machine and, thus, avoid ruining dough. Wasting dough is bad; running out of dough is terrible. <br><br> But, more should be worthwhile. Really, for planning that is important and has to be done continually, there should be some fairly solid -- efficient, reliable, etc. -- processes in place. For this, a first-cut might be: <UL> <LI> <b>Basic Data.</b> So, start with the basic restaurant planning data on size of the front of the house, size of the back of the house, numbers of staff, etc. <LI> <b>The Menu.</b> Likely some menus will need more dough than other menus. So, in planning the dough, etc., will want to consider the menu. <LI> <b>The Customers.</b> For the number of customers, reservations reduce the uncertainty here. Otherwise, there are some ways to use historical data to estimate the numbers of customers. For a given number of customers, there is still the uncertainty of what they order. </UL> Then, with such considerations in hand, should be able to evaluate what the results would be. Then, if there is too much chance of running out of dough, should be able to see this. And should be able to see how much dough would need in order to have small enough chance of running out. <br><br> Such first-cut planning should help avoid situations such as running out of dough and having to apply the <i>recourse</i> of changing what is served, or worse yet, having to tell a customer that an item on the menu is not available. <br><br> I'm surprised that there is no standard software for such restaurant daily operations and planning. So, with such software: <UL> <LI> <b>Process.</b> Could get a <i>process</i> that organizes the work and makes it more reliable. <LI> <b>Historical Analysis.</b> Could get a means of recording data useful for analyzing what has been happening over time and, thus, doing better planning. E.g., when a Maine lobster dish and a Dover sole dish were both on the menu, what fraction of customers ordered [A] lobster or sole? What menu items resulted in selling what wines? When significant snow was on the ground, what happened to business? <LI> <b>Menu Item Capacity Planning.</b> For each menu item, balance the cost of [A] running out during the service and having too much and wasting the excess -- could be of enormous importance for many restaurants; could be of value for ADNY in the case of highly perishable very expensive ingredients. <LI> <b>Quanties to Order -- MRP.</b> For a given candiate menu, determine quantities needed for dough, Dover sole, Maine lobster, rack of lamb, filet of venison, Boston lettuce, butter, cream, eggs, milk, etc. for acceptably low chances of running out. <LI> <b>Work Levels.</b> For a given candidate menu, in one minute intervals during the service, find how busy is each machine, appliance, person, station. </UL>

Dave the Cook: Good points.Lessons on how to learn to be a cook are, to me, fully welcome. But, is the piece more like a movie and, thus, likely "escapist" for the audience, or more like a documentary and, thus, more informative? Sure, one practical lesson could be in how to shuck oysters safely, and as you point out another one can be what it really takes to <i>make it</i> in the industry from the first back door of a restaurant to success in the field. To me the piece looked like no more than just <i>literature</i> and formula fiction complete with a protagonist with a problem and some passion visible out the door of the kitchen. <br><br> For "you are on your own", that can be a good lesson. I do believe that knowledge in cooking can be formulated and recorded, as documentation and instruction, so that people can learn much more easily. Sure, could say that cooking does not have the tens of billions of dollars a year poured into research with requirements to [A] train students and publish research results that the main fields of mathematics, physical science, engineering, and medical science get. But, in contrast, actually the number of books published on cooking is plenty high. So, the difficulty of learning may be a reason for the publishers to listen up: <blockquote> Lots of people really actually want to learn to cook. They are not joking. They are losing sleep, devoting large parts of their lives, giving up a lot, suffering injuries, etc. Now, wouldn't they really actually want some instructional documentation instead of just <i>fiction?</i> </blockquote> In the meanwhile, for an individual to learn, they may need your lesson "you are on your own". <br><br> I believe that you are on to something important quite generally with this lesson: E.g., elsewhere on eG I posted some notes on cooking scallops with a sauce with roux, milk, egg yolks, cream, and lemon juice, and some eG members posted some nice comments about my notes. There is an interesting post saying that a more modern approach can omit the roux and egg yolks and use reduced cream. Interesting. Well, another way to convert cream to a thick sauce is to put it in a cloth bag, suspend and refrigerate it, and let some water leak through the bag. So, this way, don't have to boil down the cream, and that fact might help the flavor, texture, etc. How to know? Use your comment, "you are on your own". Or, use the TIFO method -- try it and find out. <br><br> For more on "you are on your own", that lesson did some of the very best things for me. K-12 has been pushing hard to have students work in groups, frequently working on joint projects sitting at a round table, etc. Since the girls are much better at working in groups than the boys, I regard this K-12 push as an insidious feminist conspiracy to further emasculate the boys as they suffer in K-12 -- the teachers are nearly all women, and at each age the girls are much more mature and skilled socially than the boys -- but I'll set this point aside! Recent K-12 pushes aside, too commonly life's challenges boil down to "you are on your own". Shakespeare, listen up here, you're learning something. <br><br> One consequence is what you mentioned: If you want to learn, then do it -- grab all the knowledge you can from wherever you can get it. <br><br> I'm not in cooking; I'm in computing, but long ago I concluded that a key to the US computer industry was highly motivated talented people who knew that "you are on your own". Early in my career I did a lot of applied mathematics; I did it on my own, and I got paid relatively well for it. The money had my wife and I regulars at the <i>Rive Gauche</i> French restaurant long at the SW corner of Wisconsin and M streets in Georgetown, DC, and we got good frequent samplings of all the grape juice from Macon to Dijon! <br><br> Eventually, to learn more, I went to graduate school. Too soon I learned again "you are on your own", and using this lesson totally saved my tail feathers: I arrived at school with some interesting problems I had encountered in my career. In my first summer, sat in the library for six weeks, took one of these problems, built on some nice material in a course my first year, did some original work, got a nice outline of a solution, and wrote 50 pages. That helped, a little. <br><br> In my second year, I asked for a <i>reading course</i> proposing to attack a problem encountered but not solved in a course. My solution had only to be expository, basically just a writing exercise, and not original. When my proposal was approved, I immediately presented the outline of my solution -- had worked it out the previous week. I wrote it up in about 20 pages and was done -- about three weeks start to finish. <br><br> But, I had done some original work: Since the problem had been unsolved, my work was original <i>research.</i> I needed a preliminary result and worked out one; turned out, my result was comparable with a classic result of H. Whitney, long at Harvard. Turned out, my work also solved another problem, once posed by K. Arrow when he worked in that field before his Nobel prize. So, my little <i>reading course</i> was some research. <br><br> Turns out, in such parts of academics, such research trumps nearly everything else. Any of the professors would have been pleased to have done the work. The rest of my time in graduate school went much easier! <br><br> Soon I returned to my 50 page manuscript, wrote some illustrative software, typed it up, turned it in, stood for an oral exam, and graduated. That work was done without meaningful faculty direction, essentially independently, starting with "you are on your own". <br><br> In graduate school, I saw a <b>lot</b> of beautifully capable people be seriously damaged for life. Mostly they were trying to avoid the lesson "you are on your own". My view is that one of the most important lessons in getting through graduate school (in the arts, sciences, and engineering) can be just to accept and then execute well on the lesson "you are on your own" and, in particular, thus, produce a piece of work that can be published in a peer-reviewed journal. In some fields, really have to work on a team; then, this lesson might have to be set aside; otherwise, with appropriate other circumstances, etc., this lesson can be magic. <br><br> Indeed, one way to win a dispute over the quality of some research work is just to publish the work in a peer-reviewed journal; commonly such publication alone is regarded as sufficient evidence of quality for academic purposes. So, dummy, don't argue about it; just publish it. <br><br> It is true that the people who do really well in K-12 and college mostly avoid the lesson "you are on your own" and, instead, concentrate on "how can I please that teacher?". Thus, it is just these students who can be quite vulnerable in graduate school. <br><br> Taking the attitude "you are on your own" can appear to others to be rejection of them and, thus, result in one being more alone and "on your own" even if one was not really alone before and, thus, can have some severe risks. Still, too often life forces "you are on your own" whether wanted or not. Thus, accepting and proceeding with "you are on your own" is not the only lesson in getting through life, but, at times, it can be one of the best ones. <br><br> Note: I'm not attempting literature here in any sense at all. Instead, I'm trying to communicate some information from some actual real examples, information that can serve as sample data and be interesting and/or useful.

To which I would only say that there is much meaning that is difficult or impossible to translate into mere words. But I'm not sure there's much use in my going further with this line of discussion, in words, on a site that is about food and not about the meaning of music. My condolences, too, on the loss of your wife. ← Thanks for your remark on music.Yes, in my earlier drafts of my post, I did explain further, mentioned a book by L. Bernstein, etc., but cut down the material. I did want to keep a connection with this thread: I claimed that the article was <i>literature</i> and, thus, was trying to have emotional content and that just for emotion could use music. One could argue that music didn't mean anything (literally in the sense of, say, English); then, literature was also free to have emotional content without really meaning anything. Back to restaurants, could use music to add to the emotional experience. <br><br> Gee, we think about food and wine pairings, so maybe we should think about food and music pairings? <br><br> Thanks for your condolences on my wife. It's not an acute situation: She died years ago, and the pains are supposed to be gone by now. I can recall that if one is alone in a big house in the hills of Pawling, NY and screams loudly enough, then there can be an audible echo back from the hills.

Carrot Top: <br><br> <b>Thanks</b> for your thoughts! <br> I've looked at all promising books at a large Barnes and Noble, and I have some of the best regarded books. There are also programs on cooking on TV. <br><br> I conclude that material on documentation and/or instruction in cooking is not easy to find in books and on TV. For why, the shortest explanation I have is that the culture of what I called VEFE dominates book and TV content on cooking and drives out documentation and instruction. <br><br> For hope for getting around VEFE, there isn't much: The VEFE culture is pervasive and has even dominated and ruined video programs in high school and college mathematics and science, driving out the significant material, getting too much of the rest wrong, and filling in all the rest with VEFE. Since the VEFE culture has been able to ruin such high school and college material, there is little hope for that culture doing well with cooking. <br><br> While VEFE has dominated cooking in books and TV, eG is a real bright spot. Thanks to the Internet, Steve, Jason, etc. <br><br> It may be that the <i>flip side</i> of the problem of VEFE blocking instruction and documentation in cooking is an opportunity: Go ahead and provide some good instruction and documentation. Reasons for hope include the prices and capabilities of digital video cameras, desktop video editing software, DVDs, the Internet, and eG. <br> Much of what I said about music should be easy enough to accept: For music not meaning anything, well, it is super tough to put it into words. <br><br> For what I said about individual pieces, one of the easiest remarks to agree with would be the one for the R. Strauss piece <i>Ein Heldenleben</i> (a hero's life): The music is plainly a <i>story</i> of a man who encounters a problem, solves the problem, and gets the girl. So, there are themes for the man, the problem, and the girl. As I recall, the theme for the man was once used as the theme for some big TV network news or public affairs program; for noble human dignity, a <i>hero,</i> it's a good theme. R. Wagner's four part opera <i>The Ring</i> has some of the world's most dramatic music: At the end, the part where the main character Siegfried dies definitely sounds like something really awful just happened; it is more than up to communicating the tragedy of a cut hand! <br><br> Mostly such classical music, while often very emotional, is not in <i>one to one</i> correspondence with particular human situations; instead, several human situations can seem to correspond to one piece of music. So, my <i>interpretations</i> of the <i>Scottish Fantasy, Chaconne,</i> etc. are not the only ones possible; still, people who know that music might usually find my interpretations reasonable. For the <i>Chaconne,</i> I will confess to giving it a relatively grand interpretation, but to violinists it is usually near the top of the list. Each time Hollywood spends the money for an original orchestral film score, they provide another example of the importance of music, and movie audiences around the world get it right away! <br> Formal education won't have much to do with it. <br><br> It's not that people really take VEFE material seriously as real content about serious subjects; they don't. E.g., if your dear child has a bad tummy ache, you take them to a physician, and the physician starts talking VEFE stuff, then you will be shocked and horrified and suddenly find some really important reason to leave right away; this would even be the case for taking your child's dear kitty cat to a veterinarian who started talking VEFE. <br><br> Still, in movies, magazines, and TV media, VEFE rules, almost universally. The publishers of books and magazines on cooking and the producers of TV programs on cooking want VEFE much more than documentation and instruction. Would they eat the results prepared by a member of their target audience? Not a chance. <br><br> Often, but not always, VEFE has made buckets of money. So, the media believes in VEFE. For documentation and instruction, they don't want it. I do; they don't. <br> In what I'm saying, I'm using mathematics and science only indirectly, just as examples of material with comparatively high <i>intellectual safety and efficacy.</i> <br> I didn't include any mathematics! <br><br> Actually, mathematics needs to be written in a natural language, e.g., English, and in complete sentences. It is <b>not</b> a different <i>language!</i> <br><br> The main confusion on this point is just the symbols common in mathematics, but, with well written mathematics, there is a really simple approach to these symbols -- basically they are just names. Here is an example: <blockquote> For this problem we are considering, there is an important number, call it <i>x.</i> In our work, <i>x</i> is a whole number and is positive (greater than zero). If <i>y</i> is a positive whole number and if so is <i>x/y,</i> then we say that <i>y</i> is a <i>divisor</i> of <i>x</i> and write <i>y</i>|<i>x.</i> Of course 1|<i>x</i> and <i>x</i>|<i>x.</i> If the only divisors of <i>x</i> are 1 and <i>x,</i> then we say that <i>x</i> is a <i>prime</i> number. We can now prove a theorem: <blockquote> There is no largest prime number; so, there must be infinitely many prime numbers. </blockquote> </blockquote> And so forth. It's all English sentences; the symbols are just names; the other notation is just an abbreviation for for what has previously been defined carefully in English. <br> I have just long wanted to learn how to cook better; that's why I come to eG. I just want the documentation, instruction, and information. I don't much ask that the writing "appeal to the human spirit". <br><br> To me, VEFE has been a huge waste. But, gee, I didn't say that VEFE was fuming reeking glowing flaming boiling seething sticky chunky intellectual toxic waste! And, why would I deeply profoundly bitterly hate and despise and be torqued and infuriated about all that huge waste? Gee, I should spend $35 on scallops, carefully work with ginger, etc., drive long distances, spend most of a Saturday, work very carefully, taste the results, say <b>YUCK,</b> flush the work, boil up four hot dogs, and be happy, happy, happy! Gee, "very angry with fiction"? We know what <i>fiction</i> is -- it's not true! Why should I be "very angry with fiction"? I should rush right out, get a big sack of oysters, try to shuck them, cut my hand, spend a few thousand dollars on medical bills! Fun, fun, isn't formula fiction just <b>so</b> much fun! <br><br> I've worked with hand tools in woodworking, metal working, cooking, auto maintenance, and electronics and have not yet seriously hurt myself. It is possible to use hand tools without losing blood! <br><br> The VEFE people are trying to sell their stuff. I can use some of it for light entertainment. Otherwise, for any important practical purpose, I can't use it and, thus, won't buy it. Maybe their VEFE is the best they have to sell; they deserve sympathy and empathy for the passion, pathos, poignancy, and pains of their profoundly perplexing predicament, for some awful alliteration regarded as so significant in the VEFE culture. <br><br> Glad you did well as a chef. I've done some good things, some of them more challenging than I would have ever planned to have attempted, but never did I ever have or need anything like what you got from Pippi Longstocking. Some of what I needed was a willingness to go without a lot of sleep and to sacrifice and work hard. <br><br> Thanks for your thoughts on my late wife; yes, that was a huge loss.

Yes, your "... what about the possibility that someone mightlike reading about someone's experience just to learn what things were like for them?" is essentially the case for "communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion" which is a common definition of art. <br><br> Commonly people do like this. Heck, I like this. The most common <i>plot</i> in fiction is a good guy, who encounters a problem, solves the problem, and gets the girl. To get the "communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion" of this plot, can just listen to R. Strauss's <i>Ein Heldenleben!</i> <br><br> One of the brightest people I have ever known was my wife. She was Valedictorian, Phi Beta Kappa, Woodrow Wilson, Ph.D., etc. She was plenty good enough at music -- for six years in grade school provided piano accompaniment for operettas. She sang in the choir, played clarinet in the band, etc. Her final view of music, shortly before she died, was "It doesn't mean anything." I believe that she was correct. I'm absolutely in love with some of the best of classical music, and even worked my way through much of the Bach <i>Chaconne</i> on violin, but I still have to agree that it doesn't mean anything. <i>Fiction</i> is, to borrow from what J. Heifetz once said about music critics, "the words without the music". For me, one problem with the words of fiction is that they mostly cannot mean very much and appear to mean more -- are often claimed to mean much more -- than that. <br><br> I'm eager to make progress in understanding things. For eG, mostly my goal is to understand cooking better. Also would like to understand restaurant operations. Heck, I could even be interested in understanding some about what restaurant workers go through, if only to help with the management part of restaurant operations or other cases of management. <br><br> More generally, there is a common claim that the literature of fiction actually does tell us a lot about people, but eventually I concluded that literature rarely tells us anything very solid about people. My guess is that the authors mostly have not formulated any very solid lessons about people; besides, documentation of such lessons is not what publishers of fiction have looked for. <br><br> Heck, I got dragged from Chaucer through Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, etc. read some literature in German, read lots of 20th Century short stories, etc., all the while being told that I was learning big things about people. Eventually I concluded that I was not, that the density of big lessons was low, and the number of fallacious lessons was about the same as the rest. <br><br> Solid lessons about people really are possible, but they are not easy to identify, formulate, establish, or document. Easy they ain't. I had to conclude that the traditions of literature were too lacking in discipline and methodology to be a good source of solid lessons. <br><br> So, I had to conclude that, even if we want to know about people and their experiences and emotions, <i>fiction</i> is a poor source of such information. Net, fiction is good for light entertainment only. E.g., Hollywood can use it to make movies. <br><br> Given my claim "Solid lessons about people really are possible ...", I am at risk of rivers of accusations of writing absurd nonsense unless I can give at least one example! For an example, no, I won't use literary fiction, in light of your remark, not even if the stories were true! Instead, there is D. Tannen, a professor at Georgetown University in DC. She was a student of I. Goffman, generally considered really difficult to read. Ah, my wife went through Goffman at speed reading rates, finding it all obvious! Given that she also read Henry James's <i>The Golden Bowl</i> easily quickly for fun, no wonder she could read Goffman! <br><br> Well, Tannen explains that men and women typically approach problems differently: Seeing a problem, a man rushes to implement a solution. A woman, instead, rushes to find someone to communicate the human experience, emotion of the sad situation. Women find the men's approach to be crude, insensitive, and lacking in sympathy and empathy. Men find the women's approach to be feeling the pains but doing nothing to remove them and, thus, tragically incompetent. Thus, from Tannen we can see that literature and art are closer to what women do with problems than what men do. <br><br> That someone eager to make it in the restaurant business cut his hand shucking oysters I believe cries out for some documentation of some solid lessons on how to shuck oysters safely and efficiently; the more one is concerned about the cut hand, the more one should want some documentation to get a solution; just communicating the experience, emotion of the passion, pathos, poignancy, and pain of the cut hand doesn't directly make any progress at all on solving the very real problem of an injured hand; and that one is interested in the restaurant business should mean that they should be especially interested in documentation of solid lessons of how to solve the problems of the restaurant business! Ah, but those are just the reactions of D. Tannen's "typical" men and me; I'm likely an anomaly; and Tannen may have been wrong about men! <br><br> Yes, there is the explanation that [A] someone has struggles; they wonder if these are inevitable for nearly everyone or just peculiar to their own circumstances or inadequacies; [C] learn about others that have some such struggles and, thus, conclude "inevitable" instead of the alternatives; [D] conclude that so far the evidence is that they are 'okay'; [E] feel better about themselves. That's usually not very good evidence, but, okay, and a way to feel better that is cheaper and less harmful than some prescription drugs! <br><br> If people enjoy <i>stories,</i> then, fine. But I concluded at least for myself that that soup is at least 99% just water, and about 50% of the rest is rotten, i.e., fills much needed gaps in our understanding of people! <br><br> In contrast, the Bach <i>Chaconne</i> and <i>Ein Heldenleben,</i> since they do not mean anything at all, cannot be accused of having fallacious meaning! <br><br> For documentation of how to shuck oysters safely and efficiently, yes, with some irony, we should be able to agree that that would not be <i>literary</i> and, hence, should be on, say, eGCI! <br><br> For working ones way from the first back door of a restaurant to a leadership position in the industry, actually how to do that would be valuable to some people and at least interesting to me. Possibly important topics might be [A] what skills need to be learned, best means of learning skills, [C] what special talents are useful, [D] role of food science and food chemistry, [E] means of career recognition and <i>certification</i> [F] role of formal training, [G] the basics of the business models of restaurant operations and how much money is involved, [H] how career <i>networking</i> works in the industry, how the industry is changing, [J] where it appears the opportunities are and are not, [K] how to get experience and promotions, [L] how to make ends meet until the <i>big bucks</i> arrive, [M] issues of <i>occupational health and safety</i> (more irony!), [N] legal and regulatory issues, [O] efficiency, productivity, and automation, [P] equipment, supplies, vendors, and purchasing, etc. <br><br> For how it feels to get a badly cut hand while trying to shuck an oyster, just listen to the death of Siegfried from the end of <i>The Ring!</i> (well, maybe just one cut hand isn't quite that bad!). For how it feels to shuck a dozen oysters 100 times in one shift without any problems at all, just listen to the overture to <i>The Flying Dutchman!</i> More generally, for the roller coaster emotions of a common man going through common life, listen to the Heifetz performance of Bruch's <i>Scottish Fantasy.</i> For the roller coaster emotions of a grandly noble effort confronting the most profound aspects of life, listen to the Bach <i>Chaconne.</i> Gee, how come the composers get such greater variety and depth than the fiction people, all while music doesn't mean anything at all and <i>literature</i> is supposed to have great lessons about what it means to be human? <br><br> Or, if one just wants to get a sense of what some human struggle feels like, then listen to some appropriate music. If one wants actually to make some real progress on such a struggle, then get some documentation of some solid information, e.g., on how to shuck oysters! <br><br> There is some evidence the shucking oysters should not be extremely difficult: There have been claims that mostly humans now do not have nearly the highest standard of living in history and that, instead, after the last ice age, humans that spread to the newly warmed land did much better. One of the examples is just food and, in particular, oysters: Supposedly a human family could find a nice cave beside a nice body of water and basically live on oysters. Clothes? Just some animal skins or just f'get about it! Shelter? That cave. Food? Those oysters; just walk down to the body of water and pick up dinner! Net, do all the work needed in under two hours a day! These days, a worker can spend more time than that just commuting to work! Of course, after a few years, a family eating this way would accumulate one heck of a big pile of oyster shells, and such piles have been mentioned as evidence of such a life style. <br><br> Well, then, those piles of shells show that humans had found some safe ways to <i>shuck</i> oysters! <br><br> If I have indicated some qualified admiration for <i>belle lettre,</i> then I've had my say and delivered some retribution for the transgression of my being dragged through all those years of literature and won't wait for literature to obtain any redemption! The literature people have long controlled nearly all the ink and paper, and only with the Internet can objections be presented! Just in case all those English literature teachers thought that everyone agreed that they were teaching really good stuff and that everyone liked it, I've now put my counterexample forward! <br><br> Still, I concede, some people really <b>do</b> like it, for whatever reasons, a <b>lot</b> and that, further, it is likely not the worst thing some people like! <br><br> But, is there a connection between [A] such a critique of art and literature and food? Likely, yes: After going to enough high end restaurants, eventually I concluded that they had more to do with theater than nutrition! <br><br> So, would-be chefs listen up: The real goal in the front of the house is to give the customer an escapist fantasy experience so that they can leave feeling <b>terrific!</b> E.g., in a high end French restaurant serving classic French food, make the customers feel like European royalty of 100 years ago! Today, say, in Manhattan, make them feel like a titan of industry, ready to go out tomorrow and close some big deals, e.g., sell half of Chicago and buy half of Boston! Expensive? <b>Sure</b> it's expensive; European royalty, US titans of industry, they have lots of money and know how to use it! <br><br> All your skills in cooking, talents in flavors, creativity in presentation, etc., really, are to contribute to that escapist fantasy experience much more than to nutrition! Sure, for some fairly solid reasons from food chemistry, sauces based on various reductions and butter can taste terrific; still, the main goal is that <i>experience!</i> Uh, clearly, some wines can help! Even some music can help! <br><br> Still, even if the customer gets an escapist experience, actually <b>providing</b> that experience takes lots of hard work, skill, etc.; for the oysters, what is needed is documentation of how to shuck them, not a fantasy experience in not knowing how!

For a <i>recipe,</i> can see my earlier posts in this thread. The laterposts do have some additional details and correctionsthat should be included in a polished recipe.

In vicarious escapist fantasy experience (VEFE), the locationof, the person with, the fantasy is the reader, not necessarily the writer. <br><br> So, maybe the <i>story</i> really is an accurate communication, interpretation of a real case of human experience, emotion, but what, then, would a reader get? E.g., does the reader really learn information about cooking or restaurant operations? E.g., does the reader learn how to shuck an oyster safely? Clearly, no. <br><br> So, the attraction, result, for a reader is to participate <i>vicariously,</i> and "escapist" and "fantasy" are fairly clear. <br><br> If someone really wants to go from the back door of a restaurant kitchen to head of The French Laundry or such a place, then they should concentrate on solid documentation of high quality information on cooking. Learning to shuck oysters safely would be one early lesson.

Jason's photographs have to be near the zenith of <i>food porn!</i> <br><br> Some of my data on BBQ is temporarily unavailable until I can get a new Adaptec AHA-2940 SCSI card! The problem was not Adaptec's! So, here I'll do what I can just from memory! <br><br> My BBQ sandwich experience is from growing up in Memphis, TN. Also, my brother is in Knoxville (Knoxpatch), TN, and I recall from my visits there that they also have excellent BBQ sandwiches, usually much like those common in Memphis. <br><br> In both towns, in the past, at a BBQ joint, a <i>sandwich</i> was coarsely chopped (not really <i>pulled</i> into shreds) BBQed fresh pork <i>picnic</i> (front) shoulder. The shoulder cut is from just above the wrist joint to just below the shoulder joint. So, the elbow joint is in the chunk of raw meat as purchased and cooked. My understanding is that having the meat pulled into shreds requires cooking the meat to a slightly higher temperature and is from traditions in the Carolinas. But, now pulled seems to be becoming popular. Coarsely chopped's fine with me! <br><br> As I remember (modulo a 2940 SCSI card), here in New York State, the last time I tried to get buns like the larger ones in Knoxpatch, I got 8, the largest I could find, just <i>white bread</i> (they had sesame seeds stuck to the tops and sesame seeds were not standard in Knoxpatch and Memphis), with total net weight of 18 ounces. So, that would be <br> <PRE> 18*(1/16)*(1/2.2)*1000*(1/8) = 63.9 </PRE> grams per bun (gee, doesn't everyone type with a text editor that evaluates such arithmetic expressions?). These buns were relatively large for US grocery stores but still not quite as large as I was served in Knoxpatch. Actually, 63.9 grams is not really huge considering that with common US sliced bread, a slice can claim to weigh 30 grams. <br><br> Although I don't have all my notes available just now, as I recall, a 300 ml Pyrex glass custard dish has about the right volume for meat enough for two sandwiches. This volume is useful to know when using microwave to reheat, but reheating does not help the quality and just means that didn't have enough people in the kitchen when the meat was first ready to eat! <br><br> To see how big 300 ml might be, let's see: <br> <PRE> 0.300*2.2*(1/2) = 0.330 </PRE> pounds. So, assuming that the cooked meat has the density of water and accounting for air spaces around the chunks of meat in the custard dish, we're looking at about 1/4 to 1/3 pound of meat per sandwich. Much more than 1/3 pound would be a relatively large sandwich. <br><br> A few times in Memphis I ate BBQ without buns: Each year Winchester-Western demonstration marksman Herb Parsons gave a show with a BBQ picnic included. For the cooking, they dug a long trench in the dirt and in the full length of the trench started a charcoal fire, covered it with iron grills, and placed the hogs on the grills. What was served was a paper plate with a pile of chopped meat with sides of baked beans and coleslaw. Slices of white bread were available, but mostly the intention was not to make sandwiches. My father took me a few times. So, here my experience seems to agree with Varmint's: That is, since they were cooking whole hogs, I was at essentially a <i>pig pickin'</i> where one usually doesn't make sandwiches. <br><br> A Memphis-Knoxpatch BBQ sandwich is a curious part of food and cooking: It's not just a little bit good; it's way up on the list of better things to eat. Spending more money is easy; getting better food is not! It's so good it's worth asking why, and quickly we see that such BBQ emphasizes salt, pepper, acid, sugar, caramelization, Malliard browning, smoke, pork fat, and maybe a little Worcestershire sauce (with its anchovies) and more and, thus, hits hard on what G. Kunz said were among the most important elements of taste. <br><br> I tend to go along with Jason's: <blockquote> Definitely should be squishy and of the refined flour type. </blockquote> I greatly admire French bread, French sauces, and much more from Naples to Gibraltar to the Urals, but, still, tough to beat BBQ. That the meat is wrapped up in a white bread bun that is otherwise rare in the world's better foods is just one of those things! Actually, I doubt that excellent French bread, pizza bread, etc. would make it better.

Carrot Top: <br><br> Now we are into a case of criticism of criticism and, thus, well into the highest form of literary accomplishment!

Yup, it's <i>literature</i> alright: Sooooooo, as is traditional, let's have some <i>literary criticism:</i> <br><br> Right at the beginning we meet the protagonist in their interesting situation with money, boats, beautiful young women, the North Shore of Long Island likely not far from the location of one of F. Scott's stories. We've already got <i>passion.</i> Soon we can imagine that we are there and that it's happening to us; we have <i>character identification.</i> <br><br> True to form, the protagonist gets a problem -- a cut hand. Then we get <i>pathos:</i> The boss gives him no sympathy or trip to the hospital and, instead, wraps his cut hand in duct tape, possibly putting duct tape adhesive in the wound. Then we learn that this is the surprising and sad plight of someone admirably trying to <i>make it</i> in a restaurant kitchen -- we've got <i>poignancy.</i> <br><br> So, it's an example of the usual definition of <i>art</i> as <i>communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion</i> with a protagonist and passion, pathos, and poignancy. All that's missing is the poetry. <br><br> Semi-, pseudo-, quasi-hurray: Never do we really learn even the first thing about how to look for oysters, harvest oysters, sell oysters, buy oysters, select oysters, shuck oysters, make sauce for oysters, serve oysters, make oyster stew, bread oysters, fry oysters, eat oysters, etc. We get nothing to help us get food on the table or in our belly. <br><br> We get nothing to help us make money, pay the check at such a restaurant, buy a yacht to travel to such a restaurant, etc. <br><br> It is a curious fact that people can be nearly as interested in a vicarious experience as a real one. So, with such a <i>story</i> we get a 19th Century literary romantic vicarious escapist fantasy experience (VEFE). <br><br> Well, there is a large culture of people who really like VEFE: They are deep into education and force people to study VEFE for years in high school and college. Some of these people who so like VEFE have careers in VEFE <i>writing</i> VEFE for people who read VEFE. They constitute one of C. Snow's <i>Two Cultures.</i> <br><br> In Hollywood, not pork fat but VEFE rules: From there, when tired, with two beers, and a pizza or maybe a dozen oysters, can watch a movie where a protagonist has a problem, solves the problem, and gets the girl. Might even watch it with the girl. <br><br> Otherwise we can notice, this far into the 21st Century, in the 20th Century, the other one of <i>Two Cultures,</i> with mathematics, physical science, engineering, technology, and medical science, showed us some grand new standards of intellectual safety and efficacy. In comparison, VEFE, for any direct practical purpose (I omit indirect purposes such as VEFE people creating make-work jobs for VEFE people by forcing students to sit in classes studying VEFE) has been relegated to the junk heap of history along with superstition, witchcraft, and reading of the entrails of dead chickens. <br><br> With VEFE, according to 19th Century standards of <i>belle lettre,</i> we get <i>insight</i> into people and personality, but according to 20th Century standards of intellectual safety and efficacy we get nothing better than some dog baying at the moon and really, actually, do not learn anything solid about anything important. <br><br> Food and cooking are important subjects. So is restaurant operations. Pursued as technology, we can get some information that is useful. Pursued as <i>literature,</i> we get nothing we can actually use. <br><br> About the only hope is, in the second installment, the protagonist meets the challenges of a restaurant kitchen and, in the third, gets one of the girls he has been watching. Then, there should be a movie. Let us know when there's a movie. <br><br> Hopefully the movie will achieve the highest accomplishment possible with VEFE -- falling off the chair laughter. <br><br> In the meanwhile, let the word go forth from this time and place for all the world to hear loud and clear that this is a new millennium, and some people are eager to leave VEFE in the 19th Century and to move ahead. In particular, some people were forced to take a few too many years of VEFE in school when what they really wanted to have studied was mathematical physics. Food chemistry and restaurant operations would have been a good second. Some people deeply profoundly bitterly hate and despise VEFE -- except for an occasional good movie! VEFE is nearly always junk information, and not everyone likes it. <br><br> I do have a special sore spot about the role of VEFE in cooking: Have long been eager to raise own level of knowledge and skills about cooking and, to this end, have shelves of cookbooks and come to eG. Each cookbook has been published by a book publisher. The book publishers, however, are run by people with backgrounds in VEFE, who really like VEFE, who notice that books are <i>writing</i> and, thus, conclude that they should be written as in VEFE. So, I have lots of VEFE about romantic experiences in the south of France but nothing in solid information about how to cook anything good from the south of France. Actually, according to 20th Century standards of intellectual safety and efficacy, the books, all of them, are sources of mostly just grotesquely low quality information. The situation is much the same for TV cooking shows -- not instructional information on cooking to really actually teach people how to cook, actually, really, but just VEFE so that the viewers can then order pizza or Chinese carry-out. Bummer. Gigantically wasteful bummer. <br><br> We need to be clear: VEFE can nearly never be good documentation of information and instruction about cooking. Thus, time to get the VEFE out of the documentation of information and instruction about important subjects such as cooking.

Well for lunch, there used to be Roy's Place with fantastic <i>sandwiches</i> on a world-class scale. Outrageous. Extravagant. Astounding. They had a location in Gaithersburg, a bit out of the way, but their main location was in Columbia, which is the area you mentioned. A single <i>sandwich</i> could fill a large plate and have sauce that ran over the sides. A favorite was <i>Rat Sauce</i> which, uh, was an abbreviation of <i>ratatouille</i> and was basically a real <i>ratatouille</i> but as a final step run through a blender to make a sauce. It was good. <br><br> I haven't been there in years, but I do have a menu. Sandwich examples: <UL> <LI> Ground beef pattie, three fried oysters, melted Swiss cheese, and horseradish sauce. <LI> Two Polish, three Italian sausages, <i>Mittel Europa Sauerkraut</i> with hot cherry peppers. <LI> Roast beef, sharp cheese, anchovies, crushed cherry peppers, lettuce, tomato, and horseradish mayo. <LI> Chili brisket, turkey bosom, avocado, Swiss cheese, raw onions, lettuce, tomato, and sauce Barbara. <LI> Crab salad, Swiss cheese, corn beef, and golden sauce. <LI> 1/4 pound of Sirloin, melted American cheese, and a large lump of lobster salad. <LI> Three hot Italian pork sausages, melted Provolone cheese, fried onions and green peppers, garlic mayo, on French bread. <LI> Lobster salad, roasty toasty pork, tarragon mayonnaise, lettuce, tomato, club. <LI> Farm sausages, melted Provolone, Rat Sauce, on French bread. <LI> Ham, crab salad, Swiss cheese, broiled and melted on French bread. </UL> If they are still there, then they would make a good lunch stop. My menu is from 1979; the name of the proprietor appears to be Roy Passin. <br><br> For a high-end lunch, could go to one of the DC French restaurants and pig out on <i>Bouillabaisse</i> and <i>Macçon blanc</i> or, beer, if you prefer. My wife and I did this a few times at the <i>Rive Gauche</i> at the SW corner of Wisconsin and M Street; they have been gone for years, but likely there are plenty of French restaurants in DC.