project

Supposedly a key point about corn is that, as soon as it is picked, the sugar starts converting to starch which means that too soon the corn is no longer "sweet". In view of this point, my father's recipe for sweet corn went: Set table.Melt butter.Boil large volume of salted water.Seat family.Take a grocery bag and an assistant to corn field not far from kitchen door.Working quickly, pick corn and place in bag held by assistant.Then, running quickly back to the kitchen, remove the husks while running and dunk corn in boiling water as soon as reach the kitchen.When corn is tender, drain, serve, and eat with butter and salt.My experience is that 'field corn' can be quite good if picked as soon as the ears are just mature enough and if the corn field is within 100 yards of the kitchen door.

Pan, <br><br> For your questions, I grew up in Memphis but have spent the last 20 years between New York City and Albany. <br><br> FG says that chefs he knows say that the food at Starwich is good, and I am prepared to believe them. <br><br> You asked about my interests in food: I have eaten food from many ingredients, combinations, and techniques from France, Germany, Italy, China, etc. and new to me, and intend to continue doing so. I'm not against things that are new. <br><br> We have been touching on sprouts: I like bean sprouts -- have eaten a lot of them. But sprouts can be more than just a food; they can also contribute to an 'image': E.g., you noted: -- "have been humble foods since hippie days." So, given too much in sprouts, tofu, all-natural this, whole-grain that, organic everything else, with some vegetarianism thrown in, and I sense not just issues of nutrition, microbiology, or food chemistry but style, fashion, fads, and a pseudo religion and want to get out of there before people start smoking funny stuff and the place gets raided! <br><br> For my comments in this thread on Starwich, I don't think that we're talking about food or cooking, either old or new, but 'image' making in strategic 'marketing'. One of the old efforts in such 'marketing' was to 'target' young urban professionals (YUPPIES) with two professional jobs, no children, lots of disposable income, eager to feel part of the set of the 'right' people, politically liberal, socially conscious, environmentally sensitive, worried about the whales, spotted owls, bad ozone, good ozone, and bad carbon dioxide (but not ungulate flatulence), owners of one Volvo, one Saab, two 10-speed bikes, lots of hiking gear, and the complete Joan Baez, and great fans of Chablis and Brie -- together. My concern with such a combination is not the individual characteristics but the insult of the presumptive manipulativeness of the combination. That image actually got me to eat less Brie! With that marketing 'target', the marketing guys were rubbing their hand with glee and drooling but, I believe, totally fooling themselves. I sense that the Starwich people have fallen into such a trap of marketing nonsense. <br><br> Still, I believe that a Subway for the Starbuck's set is a good business idea and can be successful. I would advise the Starwich people to concentrate on the food and to set aside 'marketing' ideas of manipulating people with images and vicarious experiences. Again, I will concede that their 'image' making may be getting them some publicity, which is one of the best cases of advertising per dollar. They can make some menu adjustments later if necessary.

I like BBQ -- grew up in Memphis. <br><br> Chef G. Kunz and others have argued that quite generally in cooking, it is good to emphasize salt, pepper, acid, and sugar. For more, they mention browning, smoke, and texture. So, no wonder BBQ is good! <br><br> For your questions, just as you have asked them, I would be surprised if the answers to very many of them are known at all. <br><br> For a subject as complicated as cooking, getting really thorough understanding is difficult. Then, since cooking is also heavily practical, the lack of precision and the contradictions you mention are nearly inevitable. <br><br> For an easy way to 'resolve' the imprecision and contradictions, given some procedure with a lot of rigid rules from some expert, a procedure that results in good BBQ, just observe that the procedure is sufficient for the results and keep to oneself that the rules may not really be necessary for the same results or even good results. <br><br> Some of your questions suggest that you have a 'methodology' in mind: Identify the basic facts and, from them, construct new procedures for good, even best, BBQ results. We could say that you are attempting a case of 'reductionism' which had some spectacular successes in parts of physical science, engineering, and medical science. E.g., physics likes to derive desired results directly from 'first principles'. <br><br> However, cooking is so complicated that using only reductionism and derivations from first principles is not promising. Then it is fortunate that people did well without reductionism for millennia; it is not the only approach! <br><br> For 'best' and 'optimum', taken literally, in complicated subjects these are often tricky goals. Typically we can get some good results for reasonable effort; for more, it's expensive; for still more, it's much more expensive, and we get only a little more. We can encounter the 'law of diminishing returns' so that the last tiny bit of improvement for the best or the optimum costs more than all the rest of the effort. There is a famous profound question here called P versus NP -- for the first correct solution Clay Mathematics Institute will award a prize of $1 million. <br><br> In a situation where the work to be done is clear enough and the only consideration left is the cost, then finding how to do the work for least cost or nearly so can be valuable in practice. But, in many practical situations, there are many criteria that have to be balanced. E.g., consider getting a car with the smallest elapsed time in 1/4 mile acceleration: As we get a car with elapsed time under 10 seconds, we have something that is so specialized and so modified just for 1/4 mile acceleration that it is no longer useful for daily transportation! <br><br> Sure, in a competition, achieving the best is crucial. But, for a subject as complicated as cooking, or even just fresh picnic pork shoulder BBQ at Memphis in May, understanding what constitutes the 'best' in the minds of the judges will take some effort! <br><br> As you likely know, there are books on smoking and curing meats. These may be of some help. <br><br> Right away I think of three views of your questions about BBQ: <OL> <LI> Take a fresh picnic pork shoulder, coat the cut surfaces with dry rub, place on rack in pan in oven at 225 F until meat internal temperature is about 195 F. <br><br> Then remove from oven, let cool to internal temperature of 160 F, separate putting meat in a 3 quart bowl and discarding fat, skin, and bone, coarsely chop meat, pour over favorite purchased smoky BBQ sauce, pile on especially large toasted white bread bun, sprinkle on hot sauce, pile on creamy coleslaw, add top of sandwich, and eat, with BBQ beans, potato chips, and beer. <br><br> Dessert: Chocolate ice box pie. <LI> Do what you have done: Get all information, equipment, advice, experience, wood, charcoal, ingredients possible for some years. <br><br> Then remove cooked meat from pit, let cool to internal temperature of 160 F, separate putting meat in a 3 quart bowl and discarding fat, skin, and bone, coarsely chop meat, pour over favorite BBQ sauce, pile on especially large toasted white bread bun, sprinkle on hot sauce, pile on creamy coleslaw, add top of sandwich, and eat, with BBQ beans, potato chips, and beer. <br><br> Dessert: Chocolate ice box pie. <LI> From laboratory supply houses, get sensors, transducers, computer interfaces, and computer software, get a biochemistry laboratory with spectrometry and chromatography, get good with experimental design, analysis of variance, and response surfaces, get good with the applied mathematics of optimization, stochastic processes, and stochastic optimal control, especially Pareto optimality in multi-objective situations, design, run, and analyze experiments. <br><br> Then remove cooked meat from pit, let cool to internal temperature of 160 F, separate putting meat in a 3 quart bowl and discarding fat, skin, and bone, coarsely chop meat, pour over favorite BBQ sauce, pile on especially large toasted white bread bun, sprinkle on hot sauce, pile on creamy coleslaw, add top of sandwich, and eat, with BBQ beans, potato chips, and beer. <br><br> Dessert: Chocolate ice box pie. </OL> The results from the first view are really good, from the second view, better, the third view, tough to wait that long! <br><br> In any case, the results are much improved by sharing with a pretty young thing with a pony tail, circle pin, and poodle skirt! <br><br> If the goal is to win the picnic pork shoulder competition for the 2006 Memphis in May, then I would suggest starting with understanding what the judges are looking for. Then, work to give them what they are looking for. This 'strategy' can be much more effective than just trying to cook the best BBQ and then hoping that the judges believe we have! <br><br> My guess would be: The judges have a list of a dozen or so criteria. To win, have to do well on all the criteria. The main way to lose is to do poorly on one or more of the criteria. Actually getting (genuinely) optimum results on some one criterion is likely not necessary or even very helpful. <br><br> The historical 'methodology' that gave us a lot of terrific food was fairly simple and pragmatic, with a lot of trial and error, a lot of superstition until we got some science, insight based on a lot of experience, and incremental improvements based on what did work so far. So, optimality was not one of the goals or results. <br><br> It is true that careful experimental trials are one of the most powerful approaches; also good, if only to guess what to try next, is just the insight of someone with a lot of experience. <br><br> Then, one of the early steps in some associated 'scientific' work would be to take all that experience and observation and identify, formulate, and describe what is fundamental -- e.g., guessing that those alpha particles were bumping into hard dense nuclei at the centers of atoms. For BBQ, we believe that some of the fundamentals are fat melting, collagen melting, avoiding overheating the proteins, etc. <br><br> For more, might look for university programs in meat processing, get familiar with the literature they find important, meet the people, and understand what is known. If you then know enough for your goals, terrific. Else for more, decide what questions to address next, selecting questions you would like to have answered, you have a good chance of answering, and, if you need funds, funding sources would like to see answered.

I would not really be intending a "different"restaurant: <br><br> Maybe we can agree that the Starwich goal is close to a Subway for Starbuck's customers where the main point is just better sandwiches and salads. Next we can likely agree that the main path to "better" is higher quality ingredients such as heirloom tomatoes. All that I would applaud, and I would not be intending anything "different". <br><br> For the sandwiches I listed, e.g., pulled pork, can set those aside as from someone with poor skills at cooking. [i'm trying to improve my skills; I come to eG to get cooking instruction to improve those skills, not to get 'literature'!] The sandwiches I listed might well not be successful for a sandwich shop and certainly are not nearly the only thing that would be successful or that I would like. My "hostility" should be easy enough to explain; I will try:<br><br> With these ingredients and some of the others along with the emphasis on confit, compote, and aioli, my 'manipulation' alarms are sounding loud and clear. I sense that the Starwich people are assuming that I seek to be a person of 'style and fashion', from watching Emeril and Mario and/or having eaten recently at some 'trendy' high end restaurants, have heard about these ingredients and techniques, believe that having lunch with these will let me achieve the 'style and fashion' I seek and, likely also, meet other such people. That is, I sense that the real purpose of these ingredients and techniques is not food at all but just 'style and fashion'. <br><br> There is a big world of style and fashion out there, I'm told, especially on 7th Avenue in New York City. Also, there is a lot on these subjects in the New York Times. New York City is big on style and fashion. It is in the nature of the world that by a wide margin the people most heavily interested in style and fashion are women. However, I'm a man. <br><br> For a little more, I'm a little like the guy in the first movie 'The Parent Trap' who said about some Italian dish: "You know I hate that glop.". Net, the reason he hated it was that he sensed that he was being asked to be emotional in an effeminate way instead of rational in a masculine way. The battle between the emotional and the rational is not nearly new. These are solid old American male attitudes. Look at the classic movies about the American West: The men wear practical blue jeans (originally made for the California gold miners) made from canvas (originally designed to make tough sails on British ships) and brass rivets; the women wear long full flowing decorated dresses made from soft broad cloth. Swap costumes and get howls of laughter from any audience! <br><br> So, broadly, like many men, I like functionality and utility; like some men, for myself, I hate 'style and fashion' and find any presumption that I would like them to be insulting and offensive! <br><br> To be really clear, many men will look at Starwich and call it "chick food". <br><br> But, I do like good food -- nearly everyone does! I concede that some 'compote' might taste good; some aioli has promise of tasting great. If the real goal is just food that tastes good, okay. But if the real goal is just 'style and fashion', then I would feel like a manipulated fool paying more or even eating there at all. <br><br> The 'face value' idea that the Starwich frisee, etc. was selected just because it tastes good is naively simplistic. Instead, it is nearly universal that companies selling to 'consumers' will go to extreme lengths to create a special 'image' in the minds of their customers. I am 100% confident that the entrepreneurs and investors behind Starwich thought long and hard about 'image'. This matter of image is both very important and also very tricky stuff. <br><br> For why such images can be powerful, we can mention three facts: <UL> <LI> First, for some curious reason, humans can value a vicarious experience nearly as much as a real one. This one point is the main support for essentially all of Hollywood, fiction in 'literature', and most of the rest of the media. <LI> Second, people are highly motivated to belong to desirable groups. <LI> Third, things that are new and 'in fashion' are especially important to women. </UL> So, pick something desirable -- e.g., being rich, smart, powerful, secure, strong, thin, young, romantically attractive, on the 'A-list' -- and then sell something that will let the customer get a vicarious experience of that desirable something. In particular, pick a desirable group and then let the customer get a vicarious experience of belonging to that group. So, the group can be people who go to trendy high end restaurants, and then sell that vicarious experience, along with a sandwich, for $9. 'Chick food'! But, then, maybe a good place to pick up chicks, right? <br><br> If I believed that the $9 was just for the sandwich, then I would be even more gullible, literal minded, naive, and manipulatable than I was in my early years! <br><br> If you are convinced that the frisee is in there just because it helps to make a really good sandwich, then I have this bridge not far from one of the Starwich shops you would really be interested in! <br><br> To be still more clear, I'm convinced that, even if the frisee is good, that's not why it was selected by Starwich! Heck, they might even try to sell raw fish, if they thought that it would have the right image! <br><br> Picking images is difficult and risky. The methods I have seen used are mostly just intuitive and not promising. <br><br> My guess is that Starwich has not identified a good 'image', that they have assumed too much about their customers and will be turning off too many people. <br><br> Still, I believe that, with some minor changes, they can be successful as a Subway for the Starbuck's set.

Pan: You wrote: Thanks, but it was not "well" enough! It could have used afew more revisions! <br><br> You compared with Chinese food. I agree that I might often prefer a Chinese place. I omitted saying so because I was trying to be 'fair' and stay within the target 'space' of sandwich shops and because Chinese food is so different and can be such severe competition! <br><br> Shalmanese: You wrote: I've spent a small fortune in some of the best whitetablecloth restaurants in Washington, DC and in and near New York City, from three Mobil stars to five. I drool over many of the classic French dishes, especially with wines from a little south of Macon up to a little south of Dijon. <br><br> I, too, believe that Starwich can be successful, but I believe that the key will be just better quality as in heirloom tomatoes. For pomegranate and caramelized onion compote, I would predict that they would be permanently off the menu within 24 months. <br><br> FG: <br><br> Good thinking; good writing. Gee, you could have been a good lawyer -- ever consider that? <br><br> We're not far apart. <br><br> In your point 1., sure, I agree although would have some question about the last part: Maybe I do not clearly understand what their "contemplatedaudience" is, beyond just relatively affluent people who want a good sandwich, quickly, for lunch. Maybe the short description is the Starbuck's customers. I did say: <br><br> "... Starwich may be able to get many people to pay more for a better sandwich or salad." <br><br> and believe that this would be a very wide target audience. <br><br> I gave my main concern as: <br><br> "(2) modifies the approach of Subway by bringing in influences from current themes in high end white tablecloth restaurants." <br><br> I sense that what Starwich is doing is more specific than just your <br><br> "All those generations of culinary education that European chefs have undergone ....". <br><br> and fear that some of what Starwich is doing -- e.g., raw seafood, three sprouts -- may turn off too many people. I will concede that these things will be getting them a lot of publicity now and could easily be changed later. <br><br> For your point 2., especially with "2. Starwich is not so much inventing as it is improving.", yes, it appears that in some respects they are -- e.g., they are starting with sandwiches and adding heirloom tomatoes. However, it appears that in some other significant respects they are using what I called the big new thing (clean sheet of paper) approach, which is more risky -- e.g., the stuffed chairs, raw tuna, and relatively high dollars per ounce of the food served. <br><br> For your <br><br> "The premise of using top-quality ingredients is not a complex or radical one." <br><br> I agree fully and did mention in at least three places that I would appreciate high quality ingredients. <br><br> For <br><br> "While there are some creative sandwiches on the short list of available predetermined sandwiches, those are most certainly not the emphasis." <br><br> That would be good news: From the eG discussions and the Starwich Web site, I got the impression that the main emphasis was the "creative sandwiches". Starwich may want to adjust their Web site. <br><br> For your 3., e.g., "They are excellent.", while I would not want to eat any raw seafood and would not rush to get frisee, endive, pomegranate, juniper, or three sprouts, I was careful not to claim that all of the food tasted bad! Good work with pork, apple, and ginger might be "terrific"; good work with pomegranate and juniper might be, too. 'Heirloom' tomatoes, maybe picked by hand, handled like eggs -- they should be terrific. <br><br> But, to me, emphasis on frisee, endive, pomegranate, juniper, sprouts, compote, confit -- even if they do taste good -- seems more a matter of cultural and social class food fad and style than just what would taste good, e.g., from "All those generations of culinary education that European chefs have undergone ....". I sense I'm being patronized and manipulated, being expected to fall for the Starwich people making some simple and somewhat insulting presumptions. I'm all for food that tastes good; I don't want to join some fad social group to get it. <br><br> But, there's no joke: As in E. Fromm (extra credit for knowing the source), one of the stronger human motivations is "membership in a group". If people can spend their lunch feeling that they have membership in a group they like -- if only from the compote, frisee, and stuffed chairs -- just by paying more for a sandwich, maybe they will! Since I believe that such group membership is stronger for women than men, I do get the impression that Starwich is intended to be a bit effeminate. <br><br> Broadly, in locations with a lot of affluent people, is it possible to be successful by serving better food than Subway? I would think definitely yes and that the Starwich entrepreneurs, with their track records, should be able to do so. <br><br> The venture capital people strongly emphasize "defensible" advantages. These are tough to get in a chain of hundreds of sandwich shops. Partly the venture people are correct: Such an advantage can be valuable, e.g., the early Xerox patents on photocopying. Partly the venture people are wrong: Make a McDonald's hamburger? Easy enough. Beat McDonald's? Tough. Many have tried. <br><br> When advantages are valuable but not defended, then they can get copied. <br><br> Another lesson is 'market segmentation': Subway has been successful. Apparently now some new competitors want to 'segment' the Subway 'market'. But, the 'segmentation' means seem to me to be weak. <br><br> Perhaps over the next year or two we will see: <UL> <LI> Starwich getting rid of the stuffed chairs, frisee, and endive (AHN-deeve?) and including sliced roast beef ('au jus'?), Texas BBQ beef brisket, Tennessee pulled pork, oriental pork, ratatouille sauce and related sandwich ingredients, 'see and point' ordering, Caesar salad, freshly baked hero rolls, still warm from the oven, more ounces of sandwich per dollar, some soups, and some desserts. <LI> Subway including aioli and more sauces and sliced to order roast beef, turkey, and pork loin, braised chunks of pork shoulder, boneless braised beef short ribs, and more yeast flavor in their freshly baked breads. </UL> Maybe the 'elevator pitch' of the Starwich team went: "We are Subway for the Starbuck's customers -- are doing to Subway what Starbuck's did to everyone else serving coffee. Subway, Starbuck's, and the Starwich team are all proven. Since only a small fraction of the Subway customers are Starbuck's customers, Subway can't respond without losing far too many of their current customers. Besides, we can sell good coffee, too. It's a slam dunk." <br><br> I'm impressed until they drift into the stuff about raw tuna on frisee on sofas! Again, the emphasis on good food from good combinations of high quality common ingredients I like; borrowing heavily from fads in high end white tablecloth restaurants I believe is not, actually, a path to good food and will fail. For the sofas, maybe soon we will see those nearly new on eBay! <br><br> Gee, wouldn't be the first time I missed the main point. Maybe "Do you come here often? Look, my endive is bigger than your endive. Have you tried the frisee with aioli -- it's irresistibly sensual. Just a minute while I use the WiMax here to short 100 cars of pork bellies. Done. I see the sofa is available -- want to join me? My Ferrari's outside; like to take a spin out to Greenwich this afternoon? We can be back in time for dinner at ADNY." <br><br> A really good eGCI installment on aioli could be better than all the rest of this! Jack Lang, you have good olive oil and fresh garlic, basil, and cilantro over there you could experiment with? For the pork bellies, well, we start with a stochastic process expressed as a sum of a martingale and a process adapted to the history ....

Two comments: <br><br> First, on FG's piece, it's good 'literature' in the usual sense of 'communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion'. We get involved in a story. <br><br> But, literature puts no food on my table or in my belly. As instructional material that would help me with food, literature can't give me much. So, really, mostly I can't use such literature. <br><br> One of FG's recent pieces described a really good sandwich and mentioned the rye bread. Good. What would be terrific -- for me much better than any literature about food -- would be some really good instructional material, say, on eGCI, that would show me how to make such bread. An alternative, also better than any literature, would be just reviews of existing commercial sources of such bread. <br><br> Second, I wish the Starwich entrepreneurs and their investors well, but I suspect that their efforts illustrate an important point: In a geographic analogy, when we go for new territory, we have no maps, no guides to what is good, and it is really easy to wander in various unproductive directions. In contrast, when we stay with the 'tried and true', we don't have to know all the reasons it works and, instead, just observe that it does, which can be much easier. In some fields, we have some good approaches to doing new things that will be successful with high reliability. Alas, mostly the restaurant business is not such a field. <br><br> Still, people do have to eat! And, the point that the restaurant industry is large is correct and important. The financial success of Starbuck's is impressive. So, it's tempting to press ahead. <br><br> My reading is that Starwich is mostly (1) a Starbuck's for sandwiches and salads instead of coffee and (2) modifies the approach of Subway by bringing in influences from current themes in high end white tablecloth restaurants. <br><br> My reactions: For (1), I would agree -- as Starbuck's got many people to pay more for a better cup of coffee, Starwich may be able to get many people to pay more for a better sandwich or salad. <br><br> For (2), I sense a fundamental and serious mistake -- food from current themes in high end white tablecloth restaurants is not really what it at first glance can seem to be. To explain: For a high end restaurant, people go heavily for the total 'experience', a kind of theater. Such restaurants commonly make heavy use of unusual and expensive ingredients, and these attributes are part of the experience, the 'show'. Bluntly, though, just on paper plates as carry-out -- that is, just the food itself separated from the table setting, decor, service, atmosphere, and the rest of the experience -- the unusual and expensive ingredients do not promise to be better. Sure, I would rather have a good chicken than a poor one, but I would rather have nearly any (cooked) chicken than a piece of raw tuna. <br><br> E.g., I have never eaten endive or pomegranate and am not sure what they are; for juniper, well, we had a juniper bush climbing the chimney once, and I understand that it is important in gin, but I've nearly never tasted gin and have never eaten juniper. I like shallots, but I would not know what a shallot confit mousse was. I have no idea what frisee is. I have made caramelized onions at times but do not know what a caramelized onion compote would be. For an aioli, I have seen some on Emeril and Mario but have never eaten or made one. Port Salut I've enjoyed with Chambertin; without Chambertin, on a sandwich I'd prefer Swiss. I ate soft shell crabs once; I much prefer chicken. From having anything to do with a place that served three sprout salad, I'd fear that the guys at the office would question my good sense and manhood. Some really contemptuous jokes should be too easy. <br><br> To be more clear, if I were trying to court some pretty sweet darling adorable precious young thing I hoped would be a fantastic mother of my children and if it were clear that some high end restaurant would impress her, then I would take her even if they served lobster carpaccio and soft shell crabs on confit of frisee, endive, pomegranate, and juniper compote. I'd order a porterhouse steak. But, I wouldn't be caught dead bringing confit compote glop back to the office for lunch. <br><br> Simply put, (A) some high end restaurant total experience is one thing; (B) a good sandwich for lunch is something else; and it is a misunderstanding of (A) to think that the food from there, separated from the rest of the experience, is intrinsically better and would improve (B). <br><br> Better sandwiches should be possible. For some examples, I would think of corned beef or pastrami from one of the best New York City delis, BBQ from Memphis (Knoxville does well, too), classic Philadelphia steak and cheese, thinly sliced roast beef, or a grilled brat with sauerkraut. Heck, I find Subway's Chicken Teriyaki to be good. <br><br> For a better salad, a good start tough to beat is just to make the best possible Caesar salad. After that, good options are really high quality ingredients in a chef's salad or an Italian antipasto. <br><br> Much more should be possible, but for more I'd advise the Starwich people to set aside themes and deliberately strange ingredients from high end white tablecloth places and, instead, just concentrate on good combinations of high quality common ingredients. I'm not necessarily against truffle oil, although I doubt I've ever had it. Pork loin with ginger and apple flavors might be terrific. <br><br> From the Starwich pictures, the portions appear to be small, about the same as a 6" sub at Subway but for 50% more than the price of a 12" at Subway. So, Starwich would need $18 to provide as much to eat as Subway does for $6. <br><br> I would advise the Starwich entrepreneurs on two general lessons in how to do good new things reliably: <br><br> First, for the big new thing (clean sheet of paper) approach, drawing on various sources, observations, inspirations, experiences, expertise, etc., get some bright ideas. The Starwich people have done a lot of this; good. Next, understand that even the best looking such ideas are nearly never any good. Sorry 'bout that. So, filtering and possibly some additional development are needed. This filtering step is badly neglected and doing it well is where the major opportunity is. One way to get the filtering done is to have a major culture working hard at it for something over 1000 years -- e.g., cooking in China. Another way is to have wealthy people paying bright people to work hard for centuries -- e.g., cooking in France. Other ways to do the filtering can involve lots of well designed double blind experimental trials, etc. In some fields, especially some parts of technology, it can be much easier: We can use 'engineering' fundamentals to show with high reliability that the bright ideas will work as intended. If the intention clearly offers a strong reason for the target customers to buy, then we are well on our way. Alas, engineering is not nearly as powerful as we could wish so that, net, only a few projects in only a few fields can use this technique, and the restaurant business is not one of the fields that can. Net, the big new thing approach is tough for the restaurant business. <br><br> Second, for the little new thing (incremental) approach, start with something that is known to be good. We may not fully understand just why it's good, and that is a major advantage over the big new thing approach. Have some bright ideas much as before. From these ideas, make some little (incremental) changes in what is known and then test, refine, and repeat. The advantage is that we are never very far from something known to be good. The disadvantage is that it can take many steps to reach something that is both really new and much better. <br><br> For Starwich, their ideas for atmosphere, environment, experience, 'happening', and, possibly, in-group generation, based on stuffed furniture is plenty novel but a bit of a strain and an awkward juxtaposition for a sandwich and salad shop and will be difficult to evaluate. Gee, guys, to someone who mostly just wants a good fast lunch, various contrived 'social' assumptions can be insulting from being presumptive and, possibly, transparently manipulative. <br><br> Cooking is not a field of hopeless shots in the dark; instead, there are some techniques known to be promising. One of the best is the recommended emphasis on sweet, sour, salt, and pepper. We can add some of smoke, browning, onions, garlic, ginger, mushrooms, wine, soy sauce. Especially for desserts, we can emphasize butter, cream, fruits, nuts, vanilla, chocolate, coffee. So, we get some reasons why a Caesar salad, a Memphis BBQ sandwich, and chocolate ice box pie are so good. <br><br> As it is so far, I believe I'd just prefer Subway to Starwich, except when I was in Manhattan with some pretty sweet darling adorable precious young thing and we needed a fast lunch before an afternoon violin concert!

There is a lot of information on cooking pork butts and pork shoulder on eG with a lot of links to good information elsewhere. <br><br> One start can be <br> <br> http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=28704&hl= <br> <br> and that thread has a link to the relevant thread <br> <br> http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?act=ST...12&hl=butt&st=0 <br> <br> with links to discussions of BBQ elsewhere. <br><br> TImes, temperatures, chemical reactions, references to H. McGee, etc. are all included. <br><br> There is some related material from Cook's Illustrated at <br> <br> http://www.cooksillustrated.com/article.as...id=792&bdc=9504 <br> <br> It is also possible to braise chunks of pork shoulder; from M. Batali can see: <br> <br> http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/cooking/re...6_19165,00.html <br> <br> For a short answer, take a whole piece of pork butt or pork picnic shoulder, place in oven at 225 F, and cook to internal temperature 185-205 F. <br><br> Slowly cooked pork with a lot of emphasis on vinegar, sugar, salt, pepper, garlic, and browning -- tough to go wrong.<br>

Onion Soup Les Halles has been posted on RecipeGullet. ← :sad:The "onions", those are yellow globe onions, right? So,they are not white onions, Bermuda onions,Vidalia onions? Yellow globe onionsare the same as Spanish onions?<br><br>Uh, I hate to ask. But, I do it for myself, and I'd do it for you:For the onions, next time you make a batch, could you,pretty please, weigh the raw onions? Ounces, pounds, grams,kilograms -- any of these would be fine.<br><br>Still more, just in case, could you report theinside diameter of the, assuming circular,pot used to caramelize theseonions, e.g., so that we can have an estimate ofthe number of ounces of onions per square inchof pot surface you are using?<br><br>Uh, to reallygo over the top, after you have caramelized the onions,could you -- this is really over the top -- weigh theresult again? Yes, once I cook a batch, caramelize to thefinal weight, and see the color, then likely from then onI, too, will remember the color and just cook to the color,but, the first time, trying to reproduce what you did,the caramelized weight should help.That weight, it is for the onions drained?<br><br>For one more, I hate to say this, but some decades agowhen I first thought of making onion soup, I read thatthe real key to it is the stock, in particular, beef stock,and then got all involved in lots of long discussions ofbeef stock making back to Escoffier, where to get thebones, etc. It was all so involving, I never made thesoup -- never even got the bones. But, the stock remainsfor me a big question.<br><br>So, do you have some thoughts on what stock makes goodonion soup?

For a "helicopter" view of Hunt's Point, NY, USA, can see: So, which building has the Bronx Chops?

If you got up in a helicopter, you could get a photo of a lot of warehouse buildings all in the same place, ← A "helicopter"? Okay:

I investigated woks a few years ago and on Friday, July 19th, 2002 from The Wok Shop in San Francisco bought a 14" hand hammered "Pow wok", from China, steamer ring, lid (with handle), and a standard stirring tool. Of these items, what I have actually heavily used is the wok; so far I have used the other items rarely or not at all. The construction of the wok is just stamped sheet steel -- not cast iron, not stainless steel, and not Teflon coated. I fully agree that stamped sheet steel is the only candidate wok material. There is a handle, also of steel. The handle looks like they took a piece of steel tubing that might otherwise be used for exhaust pipe for a small car, cut off a piece about one foot long, hammered one end to be flat, and pounded the other end into a forming tool to roll the cut edge inward to make a smooth end. Then they attached the flattened part to the outside of the wok with three rivets. The quality of the rivets is terribly low, but so far they have held. I've been quite happy with the wok. By now, it is very well 'seasoned'. The 'seasoning' operation was easy enough: Just use the wok, let oil get black on the surface, and then don't remove the blackened oil. At times I did clean the inside with a stainless steel scrubber (a ball of tangled shreds of stainless steel with lots of sharp edges), detergent, and a sponge. So, the inside surface is now a great cooking surface. For the outside, it's hopeless: Enough food spills over the edge and gets on the outside that the outside is a bit sticky. I just let the heat worry about the outside. The 14" diameter was about the largest that would fit in my kitchen sink. The 'hammering' puts some shallow dents in the surface and are said to help hold food on the slopes and not just all slide to the bottom center. I am not sure that the hammering is very important; it has not been for what I have done with the wok. I use this wok for nearly all my 'saute' work. For a spoon, I have never used the Chinese one and have used a long handled one piece stainless steel cooking spoon instead. In using the wok, I have an insulated glove in my left hand to hold the wok handle and hold the spoon in my right hand. My last use was during the Blizzard of '05 here in New York: I made 7 quarts of chicken soup. Used two roasting chickens, total weight 15 pounds, 4 pounds of onion, carrot, celery (2:1:1) for the stock, and another 2 pounds of onion, carrot, celery plus 1/2 pound of mushrooms for the soup, all browned in the wok -- yup, during the blizzard! So, that was 18.5 pounds of food to brown. We're talking huge clouds of rising steam, smoke, grease! I would never attempt to use the wok indoors; it's an 'outdoor puppy' only. I use it over a 170,000 BTU/hour propane burner. The burner is fully effective but very simple and inexpensive: It is from King Kooker, a company in Louisiana, and was intended for cooking large pots of seafood on beaches. There is just a simple cast iron burner, a brass and steel jet for mixing the propane and air, a frame of welded iron rods, and a hose with a pressure regulator to a propane source. I got Model No. 88 PKP, but they have revised their products since then. It's been outdoors since I got it maybe five years ago. Eventually rain and freezing weather ruined the pressure regulator, so I used some stock brass fittings, some Teflon tape, some stainless steel hose clamps, and some epoxy to eliminate the regulator. So, right, I'm using the thing without a regulator; to adjust the propane flow, I just use the valve on the propane tank. I don't recommend this, but I'm getting by with it. The wok is not super stable on the King Kooker; a wok ring might help, especially if you cut notches each 120 degrees so that the notches could fit over the three rods of the burner. The wok has just one handle, and I agree that a small handle on the other side could be helpful. Now to learn how to cook as well as in my local inexpensive Chinese restaurants!

Nathan, MANY thanks for the information. What you have provided is NOT "more" than I ever wanted to know about water baths but just a good start on what I have wanted to know and have looked for more than once on Google and not found. I especially thank you for the food safety details and references. Actually, I suspect that many laboratories do not 'buy' equipment such as constant temperature baths and, instead, would be embarrassed at the suggestion that they could not just more easily build their own. Indeed, mostly I went looking for just the relevant parts, starting with thermocouples, electric relays, and electric stirring motors. When I worked a summer in a biophysics laboratory, we had 'home brew' constant temperature baths. For the heating element, we just put a standard incandescent light bulb in the water. Of course, we had the electrical part out of the water. So, the bulb was 'upside down'. So, if want 100 W of heat, then just use a 100 W bulb. Too much heat? Fine: Change to a 60 W bulb. Of course, no such set up would ever pass anything like standard electrical inspections, but that has long been common in scientific laboratories! I don't recall a bulb ever breaking while under water, but if it did then I guess we would have just depended on the circuit breaker! Working late and then walking through the lab was errie: The lab was dark but occasionally one of the light bulbs lit. When I was a child I had some good laboratory equipment including a ring stand and some clamps; wonder whatever happened to that stuff! Should have taken it with me when I went off to college! It may be that getting 0.01 C temperature stability is not so easy: When I was at the US National Institute for Standards and Technology, we were doing accurate laser wavelength measurement and for our interferometer tried to keep 0.01 C stability. Our laboratory guy was very concerned about how difficult such accuracy is to achieve and basically just wanted to keep the laboratory shut with no one inside and with nothing going in or out. I would settle just for some sources of thermocouples, thermometers, electric power relays, and stirring motors. For the tank, hoses, lids, etc., sure, just use stainless steel pots and epoxy, silicone, Teflon tape, hose clamps, etc. For a pot, once in a weak moment I bought a really cheap stainless steel stock pot. It is useless as a stock pot and is so cheap that the holes for the rivets for the handles actually leak, but seal up the holes with some silicone and the thing would make a fine container for a constant temperature bath. Also the lid is so thin that it would be easy to cut to customize. When I overheat and ruin a Farberware pot (I have a big supply, many still new, of the old ones of stainless steel with a thick hunk of aluminum glued to the outside of the bottom, and like them a lot), I keep the old pot as a source of stainless steel scrap! One of my pet peeves is that people selling things still have not really accepted the importance of the Internet and, thus, mostly do not seek actually to describe their products in enough detail to permit actual project design and engineering and, then, purchase and usage. Instead, the vendors seem to assume that the Internet is mostly just a calling card or first-cut brochure and that the customers either already know all about the products or will work face to face with a technical sales representative, try a bunch of products, etc. There is another problem: A surprisingly small fraction of people in business actually know how to write meaningful descriptions of their products. These days, for a 'control', we are tempted just to connect to a general purpose PC adapter card with a digital to analog converter and some standard device driver software and write a little PC software for the control logic. Have you made some progress in this direction? Likely one of the great fun things we are now able to do in a home shop or kitchen is to use the currently available means of connecting sensors and actuators ('transducers') to a PC and writing some simple software! E.g., put the frozen chuck roast in the oven with a sliced onion and a can of cream of mushroom soup and head off to work. When within about a hour of leaving the office, connect to the home computer and have it turn on the oven to start cooking the roast. Better, still, would be a home computer with wheels, arms, stereo digital cameras, WiMax to a DSL modem and at the office use data gloves to remove the chuck roast from the refrigerator, unwrap it, put it in the pot, brown on the top of the stove, slice the onions, pour in the red wine and beef stock, put on the lid, set it in the oven, open the Chambertin to breath, and set out the cheese to get it up to room temperature. Instead of such progress we get, what, a new patch of a Web browser with some old outrageous security problems fixed but possibly some new ones ready to get us to have to swap again a year from now. Of course, in the future, if we were short on onions, then we could use the data gloves to move to our second car at home and drive to the store, get an onion, drive back, and then finish the roast. For this, virtual reality at 60 MPH down the Saw Mill River Parkway, would want a really good WiMax connection! My ISP dropped the connection again? Oops.

I continue to see astounding differences between the Alinea effort and what the Sand Hill Road and Winter Street venture capital communities do. In my first post I did not indicate which I prefer; actually, my main point is that the Alinea case is the good example and one that Sand Hill-Winter should learn from. The thousand or so MBAs at Sand Hill-Winter have a lot to learn from Chef Achatz and Nick Kokonas! Good for Alinea! nick.kokonas: You wrote: "I am indeed the generalist that Project accuses me of being, but I have at times been a specialist." Oh, no! Clearly I didn't know enough really to "accuse" you of being a "generalist"! I just said "Mr. Kokonas seems to be the closest approximation to a 'generalist' ....", closest on the Alinea 'team', and how "close" left unspecified! My statement would still be true even if you were 99% as good a chef as Chef Achatz! The business plan and fund raising process you described in "1)" makes good sense. I remain surprised at how different your process was from the Sand Hill-Winter process. Good for Alinea! Directly for Alinea, my remarks on research were mostly just "Yet, Alinea seems fully eager to exploit research and, possibly, even contribute to it." "Exploit research"? I do believe that Chef Achatz and his staff are ready, willing, and able to draw from H. McGee's books and its references and just as easily could chat with chemists about pH, aerosols, aromatic esters and other flavor compounds, components of wines, contents of some 'secret sauce', chat with microbiologists about cooking without oxygen, chat with physiologists about senses of flavor and smell, and, from such chats, possibly draw from related research, recent or not. Here, then, is how Alinea might "exploit research". Possibly "contribute" to research? At some point, it may be that such discussions with scientists could result in some trials in the Alinea kitchens with surprising results -- uh, it was supposed to have nearly no taste, but it tastes great or it was supposed to taste great but is as flat as the floor and duller than the back of a Sabatier, why? -- that would stimulate further investigations in the scientists' laboratories and result in peer-reviewed papers of original research by the scientists with at least acknowledgement and possibly coauthorship for the relevant Alinea staff. Here, then, is how Alinea might "contribute to" research. Of course with such things there can also be points of intellectual property. My view is that, in 'information technology' the Sand Hill-Winter approach regards the contents of the shelves of the research libraries as distractions or at best worthless nonsense and any original research, even if already done and past peer-review, as more of the same. My guess is that this view is excused by the success of W. Gates, a college dropout. Really, the 'information technology' community is afraid of, intimidated by, contemptuous of, hung up on the 'risks' of, any contact with 'research', and this is a major mistake. Chatting with a scientist occasionally does not have to be a major business risk! Here Chef Achatz is or can be well ahead of 'information technology' easily. Good for Alinea! You wrote "3) I see no difference between any ongoing production venture and Alinea when it comes to creativity. Intel spends billions per year trying to be innovative and creative. They try to hire creative engineers. I think it is the same here." At times Intel has tried to be creative (I omit examples), but my view of Intel is that A. Grove has been single minded on just shipping faster processors with old architectural features for Microsoft's Windows and letting everything else slide and that almost entirely Intel's development expenditures have been aimed at building the next plant with smaller line widths and more gates per unit area and that otherwise their attempts at creativity and innovation have contributed surprisingly little. I gave my view on creativity in Sand Hill-Winter startups. Net, to me Alinea still seems especially, and commendably, 'creative' for US business, in particular, compared with Intel! For "I don't think that the VC's themselves always believe in these investment trends, and the good ones ignore them completely and keep an open mind." Well, that's what the "good ones" really should do. Actually, mostly I blame the limited partners! noambenami: For your "Ever hear of the term 'due diligence?' You have no idea how intensively most startups are studied when serious investors come in." Yes, I do have more than just an "idea"! For evaluating technical work in 'information technology', the editors of the relevant research journals and the research problem sponsors at the US DoD, DoE, NSF, and NIH do well; the Sand Hill-Winter people have yet to get started. Partly I blame myself: When I was a professor in an MBA program, I made some efforts to say how to evaluate information technology but didn't get enough across clearly enough! Likely the VCs do much better with biomedical where it is accepted that advanced technical material is relevant. For your "Anyone investing in Alinea would do so because of Trio. Similarly, most investors will invest in people with a successful track record. The lengths of business plans vary widely and wildly." I believe that lengths of plans should and likely do vary "widely and wildly", but 25-50 pages is a quite common recommendation from the Sand Hill-Winter people. This recommendation may be more to reduce the effort to handle the 1000 plans that they reject than to better understand the one plan they accept. Also, even for a plan to be accepted, the shorter the plan, the less there is to check! Whatever the reason, the assumption that an elevator pitch, etc. should be sufficient for a clear explanation, clear enough to separate from, say, perpetual motion, for a business intended to generate the VCs' desired ROI is close to absurd. "Or, a billion dollars is just sitting there; here in 25 words or less is how to get it; although we have described the opportunity meaningfully in 25 words or less, still no one else can see this and beat us to it". Sure. Right. And if you like that, then I've also got this great bridge in New York you'd really be interested in! Yes, the history of Chef Achatz at Trio, French Laundry, Charlie Trotter's, etc. was no doubt important for the investors, and clearly the Alinea investors were able to evaluate this history. In contrast, in 'information technology', the Sand Hill-Winter investors commonly have a more difficult time evaluating technical accomplishments. You wrote: "Any tech company that does not engage in continuous product improvement quickly finds itself out of business. Version two follows version one, and there is furious competition between companies on the basis of features. Much more so than at most restaurants." Thus, apparently we differ on 'creativity'. My view is that in 'information technology', especially in software, version n + 1 is not a very good example of 'creativity'. Much of version n + 1 is fixing bugs, adding functionality needed and originally envisioned but delayed, or responding to clear requests from customers. Really, it is as if all the creative parts were done before the first funding round and no further creative efforts are expected, attempted, or wanted. For "furious competition between companies on the basis of features", I doubt that Alinea will see their menus quickly copied elsewhere, and, similarly, for any genuinely advanced product in 'information technology', there is very little, commonly really no significant, competition for functionality, features, etc. If there is so much competition, then the original work was not very creative! So, for a genuinely advanced product, I do not see "furious competition between companies on the basis of features". For the Sand Hill-Winter investors, my view is that they want to see the 'creative' 'intellectual property' before writing the first check and will count any prospects of any future creativity as, with a dime, at best just enough to cover a ten cent cup of coffee and more likely a dangerous distraction. I do believe that Chef Achatz and his investors are intending and counting on continuing creativity quite far beyond what Sand Hill-Winter consider and that here that Alinea fully correct and that Sand Hill-Winter are making some big mistakes. Heck, I could even see some good Alinea customers coming once each two months or so eager to see what new creations they will find from Chef Achatz and team! Good for Alinea! Of course, the better Alinea does for such good customers, the more they will be creating a tough act to follow! For "Frankly, the R&D budget for most serious high tech startup represents a much higher fraction of expenditures than at Alinea." for "R", there is essentially none budgeted for Sand Hill-Winter "high tech" start-ups or, as I understand it, Alinea. For "D" for "high tech", yes, but the work is rarely very creative; at Alinea, the work is fully creative. So, I conclude that Alinea is more creative than Sand Hill-Winter are willing to entertain. Good for Alinea! For "High tech startups are often started by a partnership between technical specialists and management specialists. Look at a company like Google, that was started by a number of technical wizards, or Juniper Networks, or Amazon. All these companies depend on the expertise and vision of a very small core number of highly specialized people." For this, my claim basically was that Alinea has a greater role for specialists and a smaller role for generalists than Sand Hill-Winter say they want to see. Good for Alinea! You are correct in your "High tech startups are often started by a partnership between technical specialists and management specialists.", but Google is an exception! Apparently L. Page and S. Brin were graduate students at Stanford when A. Bechtolsheim invested the first $100 K and relatively soon got M. Moritz and J. Doerr involved. Quickly the investment rose to $25 M. E. Schmidt, to play the role of the 'generalist' or source of 'adult supervision' although he has an excellent specialized background, didn't come over from Novell until much later. Google is one of the high points of insight by Sand Hill, but as 'information technology' the original Page-Brin 'page ranking' ideas appear not to be very advanced. Basically Google is a telephone directory for those of the four billion internet protocol addresses used for HTTP on TCP/IP port 80; that Google could make so much from advertising, especially from their rather subtle approach, is amazing. So, even with Google, Sand Hill was not betting on anything very advanced. My view is that in being advanced the work of Chef Achatz is quite competitive which puts him up with one of the high points of Sand Hill. Good for Alinea! For Juniper, it appears that T. Li was the technical wizard; I do not recall the rest of the original team. At Amazon, apparently J. Bezos was the main person; I am not sure there was much more of a team. Google, Juniper, and Amazon aside, the Sand Hill-Winter people in what they say continue to put high emphasis on a team with generalists and at most secondary roles for the specialists, higher emphasis on the generalists than in the Alinea example. So, Alinea is ahead of at least what Sand Hill-Winter actually say. Good for Alinea! For "This is not the opinion of anyone who actually understands software. It is understood that creating and maintaining software is an incredibly expensive and tricky proposition. Consulting is, in fact, looked upon as a much safer business proposition due to the lack of development time and quick time to cash." What I said was: "For this growth, software is looked on with favor for its near zero per unit cost of production, e.g., just copy a CD; ...." So, I said that making a copy of a CD was easy; I did not claim that writing the original copy of some valuable software was easy. Could it be that I am one "who actually understands software"? Let's see: I have worked in software for years and done simple things, some of the most advanced scientific things, some of the most advanced military things, and some of the most advanced commercial things, hold a Ph.D. in engineering from one of the world's best research universities where my Ph.D. research was heavily in software, have taught the subject at the university level and, as a professor, developed and taught a graduate course in software, done successful research in software at one of the world's best laboratories of computer science, have a long string of peer-reviewed publications in software, have done serious work in systems management, systems administration, and systems planning. Gee, what does it actually take to be one "who actually understands software"? For "It is understood that creating and maintaining software is an incredibly expensive and tricky proposition." well, this is correct in general in practice but has not been my experience or that of the best people I have worked with! The secret is to understand software, and very few in software do! Actually, quite powerful understanding has long been available but is routinely ignored in practice. Far too commonly the software community rushes to get something that appears to work and later tries to patch the problems that appear in practice; this approach must create huge messes and does and explains what you have observed is common. For a small connection with Alinea, I would urge the staff to generate detailed internal confidential documentation, possibly with a video camera, hopefully also with weights, volumes, times, temperatures, viscosities, and remarks on color, aroma, and taste, of just what they tried and what the results were. For "Consulting is, in fact, looked upon as a much safer business proposition due to the lack of development time and quick time to cash." you will find that overwhelmingly the Sand Hill-Winter people regard consulting as a low margin business that is difficult to manage and not 'scalable' and want nothing to do with it! While I do believe that Alinea is a good investment, generally on consulting and 'services' business I agree with Sand Hill-Winter that a software business where producing copy n + 1 is essentially free has a great advantage. For "Such innovation incubators as you speak of have never proven themselves in the real world. Innovation is way to erratic and dependent on bright individuals to be put under such controlled conditions." You are correct that the 'incubators' were a big flop. That the "controlled conditions" were the cause is likely a good explanation. But, I did not use 'incubator', and the investors I spoke of did not regard their direction as an "incubator". Instead, these investors just believe that, with their "deep domain knowledge", long industry experience, and great insight, they see the opportunities better than the entrepreneurs. The analogy would be restaurant investors that really like good coconut cream pie (I do) and then pushing their chef to concentrate on making such a pie. Clearly these would not be Alinea investors; good for Alinea. I agree with your "Innovation is way to [too] erratic and dependent on bright individuals" and would say that it also implies that investors need to place more emphasis on the specific entrepreneurs and business plans. For Alinea, it would be easy for an investor to say "Ah, the restaurant business, that's a low margin sector. We pass." But, for Chef Achatz and Alinea, likely not! So, once again, the Alinea investors looked more deeply than Sand Hill-Winter! Good for Alinea! The Alinea investors stand to enjoy their deeper examination on each visit to the restaurant and the bank. For "Frankly, Alinea as a business is a nearly risk-free venture ...." for the reasons you gave and others, I agree. Alinea doesn't look like another Google (nearly nothing does), but it does look like a good investment, better than a lot that Sand Hill-Winter have pursued! Good for Alinea!

There are seven aspects of the Alinea business planning I find curious, surprising, astounding, even amazing. I compare with planning new businesses in 'information technology' with candidate investors the venture capital funds, heavily on Sand Hill Road in CA or Winter Street in MA. There appear to be some examples of some large conflicts in investment strategy. (1) Business Plan: Entrepreneurs starting businesses in 'information technology' and contacting candidate investors are commonly advised to have a business description that can be given in 30 seconds as an 'elevator pitch', an 'executive summary' of 3-5 pages, and a 'business plan' of about 25 pages, usually no more than 50 pages, and to place little emphasis on spreadsheet tables or detailed budget projections and to submit documents electronically and not to use color printing, expensive paper or binding, or anything else expensive. The Alinea business plan on hand made paper with detailed spreadsheet tables and food samples ranges from significantly to astoundingly different. It sounds like the Alinea plan did not stay under the 50 page limit and depended only a little or not at all on an 'executive summary' or an 'elevator pitch'. An amazing contrast. (2) Research: The US Federal Government heavily funds peer-reviewed research. The main agencies are the DoD, including DARPA, DoE, NSF, and NIH. Sand Hill Road and Winter Street take such research results in 'information technology' as something that with a dime will at best just cover a 10 cent cup of coffee and usually as just an unwanted distraction. At least the initial product development should be solidly done and in the hands of happy customers, and either using or doing 'research' should not be anywhere in sight as a relevant activity. Yet, Alinea seems fully eager to exploit research and, possibly, even contribute to it. An amazing contrast. (3) Creativity: In 'information technology', 'creativity' is supposed to be already in the product and, hopefully, protected with patents, and any suggestion for a role for creativity continuing in the future is regarded as an absurd reason for investment comparable to betting on visions seen in the clouds. Yet, with Alinea, clearly Chef Achatz and the senior staff will be expected to continue to be creative for a major fraction of their time far into the future, over the horizon. An amazing contrast. (4) 'Stage': In 'information technology', the investor general partners and limited partners mostly agree about the appropriate 'stage' for an investment. One of the most important criteria include existing paying customers. In particular, for 'due diligence', the investors are supposed mostly to take the attitude that they personally do not need to, and should not attempt to, understand, evaluate, or judge the product for themselves but just to use the opinions of paying customers. For Alinea, however, hard work spending funds from investors has been going on for months with no hope of any paying customers before 1Q05. Further, Alinea investors actually got literally to taste the product as they first looked at the business plan. Later they got to taste the product at an investor's dinner. An amazing contrast. (5) 'Team': In 'information technology', it is accepted that there should be a 'team' with a lot of emphasis on generalists and at most secondary emphasis on specialists. The generalists are supposed to have a track record of managing large -- hundreds of employees, hundreds of millions in annual revenue -- rapidly growing businesses that were sold with large gains -- hundreds of millions of dollars -- for the investors. Further, the project is not supposed to be very vulnerable to the loss of any one person. At Alinea, however, Mr. Kokonas seems to be the closest approximation to a 'generalist' and his work will soon be "97%" done. Chef Achatz is one of the world's most advanced specialists in his industry and is clearly a key person for Alinea. An amazing contrast. (6) 'Scalability': In 'information technology', it is accepted that the desired financial gains can be achieved only with a business that is 'scalable', that can grow quickly to a large size, say, annual revenues of $500 million. For this growth, software is looked on with favor for its near zero per unit cost of production, e.g., just copy a CD; and any business that depends heavily on people, e.g., a 'labor intensive' or 'service' business, is regarded as hopeless. At Alinea, however, providing an 'experience' to the customers is heavily a 'service' business and 'labor intensive' in the extreme. An amazing contrast. (7) Direction: A large and growing fraction of investors on Sand Hill Road and Winter Street have concluded that for business directions they should not listen to entrepreneurs but should identify, formulate, and plan such directions for themselves and, later, find entrepreneurs to execute the plans. At Alinea, however, clearly the both the direction and technical details have been at least very heavily, likely at least nearly entirely, from the experience, creativity, thinking, and work of Chef Achatz and done well before the business plan on hand made paper presented to the investors. An amazing contrast. More broadly, the Sand Hill Road and Winter Street firms commonly claim that they can be pleased to have even two investments in 10 do well but, for those two, need some significant gains, e.g., invest $5 million and get back $500 million in about five years. It is true that, if we go to the yacht clubs on the Great Lakes, then we see plenty of evidence of people that have done well in business and, if only from geography, the suspicion has to be strong that the successes had little or nothing to do with Sand Hill Road or Winter Street; thus, these streets clearly do not have the only good path to business success. Still, that Alinea can be so different on the seven points above and still be an attractive investment shows some large differences of opinion among some serious investors. So, are there some resolutions for some of these seemingly large conflicts in investment strategy?

Congratulations on getting science into the kitchens of the world! Some questions about stews -- times, temperatures, acids, ethyl alcohol, brine: Take some cubes, roughly 1 1/2 inches on an edge, say, 6 pounds, of relatively tough lean meat, e.g., beef bottom round roast, for flavor, lightly brown (Maillard and all that), cover with a water based liquid, heat on stove top to X degrees F, cover, place in an oven at X degrees F for Y hours. Then chill uncovered. Remove layer of fat on top. Remove meat and keep moist. Make a gravy of the liquid. Combine meat chunks with other ingredients, say, brown glazed 'boiler' onions, chunks of carrots and potatoes, sauteed mushrooms, pour over gravy, heat to, say, X degrees F again until vegetables are nearly cooked, chill uncovered. To serve, warm a portion in microwave. Q. 1. My first-cut understanding is that cooking temperature X needs to be high enough to kill bacteria and to melt collagen but low enough not to ruin the proteins and that cooking time Y needs to be long enough to let the collagen melt at temperature X. Is this roughly correct? Or, the danger is that temperature too high too long will ruin the proteins and cause the meat cubes to be brittle, dark, hard, dry (seen this often enough)? Would what works for cubes of beef bottom round promise to work well for tough lean meat from game, four legs or two? Q. 2. Is there a real danger of the initial browning step, if too hot too long, ruining the proteins throughout the meat cubes? Q. 3. In my last trial, used cooking temperature X = 180 F and cooking time Y = 24 hours. What would be the pros/cons of different values? Q. 4. In my last trial of 6 pounds of meat, included in the water based liquid 1 cup of distilled white vinegar. What effect might the vinegar have and why? Is the effect just lowering pH or a reaction of the acetic acid? What might be the pros/cons of different amounts of vinegar or other acids? Q. 5. If the water based liquid is to include some wine, beer, or other source of ethyl alcohol, should the alcohol liquid be boiled first to evaporate the alcohol? Q. 6. Is brining the cubes, say, for 24 hours, before the browning harmful, useless, helpful, essential? Q. 7. My fake Memphis BBQ is to take a fresh 'picnic' pork shoulder, about 10 pounds, place on a rack with cut side up, set rack in a roasting pan, cover the cut side with a dry rub, say, Emeril's Essence, insert a meat thermometer, place in a 225 F oven until thermometer reads 185 F, about 16 hours, discard skin and bone, coarsely chop the rest. For one sandwich, take a large white bread bun, lightly toast cut surfaces, top with 4 ounces of the meat, top with warm commercial BBQ sauce, top with drops of hot sauce, top with coleslaw. Somehow the pork easily essentially always comes out 'succulent' -- soft, flexible, juicy, nearly butter soft -- with little danger of being brittle, dark, hard, dry. Why is it so much easier to get succulent results from pork shoulder than from beef bottom round? MANY thanks.

Didn't realize that there was a place in the Hudson Valley trying to serve BBQ. One reason may be that a 'Q place should be easy notice anywhere for a few miles downwind, and I haven't yet so noticed a place. So, it may be that the Hudson Valley governments just do not understand the unique attractions of such contributions to the local atmosphere and environment and, thus, keep down what a 'Q place can do with smoke.

I come here occasionally and for two reasons -- first, to remind myself of how much I should appreciate Escoffier and, second, to remind you not to try cooking anything else new. Or, supposedly once violinist J. Heifetz commented on modern music by saying: "I play it occasionally and for two reasons -- first, to remind myself of how much I should appreciate Beethoven and, second, to discourage them from writing any more." How about: "Did you learn that from Betty Crocker?" or "Gee, after eating this evening, we concluded that in the 8th grade you took Home Ec?" or "Now that the meal is over, there is good news and bad news: The bad news is that we ate it; the good news is that we are still alive." or "Be aware that seafood from the vastly deep can be from too deep -- the detritus on the bottom." or "If you keep working hard and making progress, then in a few more years you might qualify for admission to a cooking school." or "Bet there are some cooking schools in the South Pacific that would love to have you there on any day when they are teaching their traditional techniques of cannibalism." or "In all of culinary history, your cooking fills a much needed gap." or "Yes, it is clear that the town's restaurant inspectors do look for rat droppings on the floors but do not actually taste the food." or "Until this evening, we hadn't suspected that archeology could have found a cookbook written by Neanderthals." or "Congratulations: We can believe that in all of culinary history occasionally such food has been cooked before but that certainly you are the first to serve it in a restaurant." or "The several dishes we had this evening contained much that was new and good; the new, however, was not good and the good, not new." or "We have concluded that you are clearly a chef of unique talents and soon will be successful in burning water." or "Yes, we ate it -- that was the good news." or "Yes, this evening we have had a clear illustration that a major current theme in the culinary arts is a return to the simplest preparation of all natural ingredients and that this theme likely goes back at least to the Neanderthals." or "We did conclude that the soup this evening was unique, but we are not sure if it was what we were supposed to eat or what someone else already did." or "Your efforts really can be appreciated by the right audience; we might suggest, hogs?" or "Foods consist heavily of plants, animals, and fungi that were once alive: Some of what we had still was, and the rest we doubt ever was." or "This evening we were reminded that no one is perfect and that mistakes are inevitable." or "If your chef's career doesn't work out, you might try leather tanning?"

Let's start with the goal as a point on the horizon; a first step for a cheap start to this goal is mentioned at the end. Broadly, this proposal is OUTSIDE of the TV "great wasteland". First, take all the people that majored in fine arts, literature, English, 'belle lettre', drama, theater, etc. and set them aside. Take all the people that have traditional backgrounds as TV producers, directors, or writers and set them aside. Also set aside the food stylists, art directors, fashion coordinators, musicians, screen play writers, gag writers, etc. Set aside the young open faced likable doofus and the small slim young woman as 'hosts'. Second, take the broad assumption that the viewers are idiots, the people working on the program are so much more qualified in just anything and everything than the viewers, the viewers are drooling irrational easily manipulated bags of emotions with a lot of free time to waste and free cash to spend, the people on the program will have to simplify the material for the child-like viewers, and, did I mention, the viewers are idiots, and set that aside. Third, set aside the idea that the purpose of the program is to provide a vicarious experience of (1) belonging to a fun alive exciting group, (2) getting praise, acceptance, approval, and respect from feeding the crew at the firehouse, (3) exploring the highways and byways of a less corrupted and more genuine, accepting, and less competitive rural America, (4) having the rare, cherished, and coveted privilege of sitting in as an awed silent observer on an erudite seminar in a esteemed group of culinary masters, (5) cheering at a highly competitive intense culinary sporting event with an announcer voicing sports commentary cliches ("He will win if he POSSIBLY can!"), (6) rebuilding kinship ties with a traditional large old-country family, (7) passing down cherished traditions through the generations, (8) sampling the magnificent all-natural in-season bounty of our unspoiled rural roots, and (9) feeling effortlessly competent and, thus, more secure by overcoming the anxiety from realizations that we are vulnerable to the hostile forces of nature and society. Etc. In particular, set aside the "great wasteland". Instead, adopt as the purpose of the program providing some information about food preparation people can and likely will frequently actually use in effective ways. Week by week have the viewers notice that they actually use the information and want more. In particular, do not leave the viewers just entertained, not significantly helped, and, basically, having wasted time. Okay, what viewers and what information? For the viewers, take some of those people set aside, anoint them as the research staff, and have them hit the library, Census Bureau, Nielsen's, etc., and identify and describe in well prepared written form about the largest collection of viewers possible that could like some good information about cooking. Remember: Everyone needs to eat! Make clear to this research staff: Your unsubstantiated insight and intuition are fine as long as none of them are visible in your report. Your report content is to be all numerical and thoroughly documented with references to primary sources. Slipped in as appendices, supplements, etc. will likely find outlines of dramas fathoming the depths of the human soul with passion, pathos, and poignancy, outlines of the great American novel, poems ranging in length from one word to thousands, short stories about personal experiences and suffering of wide variety, drafts of grant proposals for projects to fight social injustice and foster social change, save the whales, save the environment ("Oh, what have we done to our planet? Can the damage EVER be repaired?"), save the world, etc. -- set those aside. Next, for the collection of viewers, have the research staff do some sampling and see how the people in the collection are eating. Concentrate on flavor, cost, time, and nutrition. Now, find some people that are good cooks, professional or amateur, and anoint each of them as a Member of your Technical Board of Advisors. Give the Members of this Board your research reports on your collection of people and what they are eating and have the Members suggest where the people could do better on flavor, cost, time, and nutrition. Based on these suggestions, design your programs to provide the corresponding information. For each program, start by outlining what you are going to show them, then show them, then review what you showed them. Also make clear what meals the dishes are suitable for -- breakfast, lunch, dinner, school lunches for children, picnics for family, dinners for guests, hurried dinners, holiday dinners, etc. Do place suitable emphasis on generally useful techniques. Of course, provide very precise measurements of weights, volumes, times, temperatures and descriptions of color, viscosity, density, transparency, gloss, etc. Such precision is needed by the audience so that they can reduce uncertainty as they are trying to learn and more likely achieve the desired results. Yes, a practiced cook may be able to get good results seemingly without such precision, but such a cook may be working fairly precisely anyway. For example, a cook may be able to tell when oil is hot enough by the appearance of the surface, but such an appearance is nearly impossible to communicate to others; the effective way to communicate oil temperature is with degrees F or C; then, indeed, the person learning might also learn to tell by appearance. Point out where the precision is crucial and where it is optional. Also describe the basic 'ideas' or principles behind the dish. For each program, get a sample of your collection of viewers, have them watch the program, have them do the cooking, and then have the members of your Board evaluate the results. Revise the program until the results are consistently good. Distribute the programs on TV and DVD. If the programs catch on, then you might make some money. But some funding would be needed to do the project. The programs would be 'entertaining' only in the sense that a viewer could realize that they were actually learning some useful information and could enjoy that. But, without the learning, I would either not watch at all or resent wasting the time from watching. I do wonder about the potential of programs that are just more of the "great wasteland" and, really, only waste the time of the viewers. My view is that the TV industry is a self-perputating self-reinforcing clique of essentially 'belle lettre' entertainment people that are just convinced to the center of the cells at the center of their bone marrow that just some better, more clever, more 'original' 'story telling' ideas similar to 'belle lettre' back to Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the ancient Greeks are the best that there ever could be. They have just one Procrustean bed and force everything to it -- "BAM!". The whole concept of information safety and efficacy is just not part of the 'belle lettre' tradition. So, with TV, rarely do people learn anything they can actually USE beneficially. If the world could really be and actually was full of total fools with plenty of time and money, then 'belle lettre' might have a role. However, in nearly any field where people are actually making a living, they have to be much more serious, especially about information safety and efficacy, than the 'belle lettre' people are willing to be. The 'belle lettre' community, as in the recent US National Endowment for the Arts report 'Reading at Risk', is smugly and conceitedly convinced that they are the unique experts in all of 'reading' and 'writing' when in fact they rarely read or write anything with any significant information safety or efficacy. That is reason for the "great wasteland" and also its vulnerability and an opportunity. For a cheap start, do the research part quickly yourself. For the Members of the Board, promise them recognition. For the testing, just use friends and family. Document with a digital still camera. Publish just as HTML with text and JPGs on the Internet, e.g., maybe first on eG. Then go look for funding for more. Again, everyone needs to eat. Also, the information via books and TV for showing people how to cook has been almost entirely from the Procrustean bed of the 'belle lettre' community and, thus, nearly useless for any practical purpose; thus, the average level of cooking expertise is abysmally low and there is a huge opportunity to help people do better.

The best life will include all the butter Julia calls for.

Did three quarts of salad of Romaine lettuce, tossed with Caesar dressing as in http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=41922&st=32 with chunks of tomato, dipped in the dressing, scallion rings, pepperoni slices, imitation bacon bits, grocery store croutons, and grated fresh Pecorino Romano cheese. For dessert, took 2 pounds of fresh strawberries, washed, trimmed, sliced, added 1/2 C sugar, let sit to make juice, and ate with heavy whipping cream. REALLY liked it! Repeated the next night except fresh peeled, sliced peaches instead of the strawberries. Good but liked the strawberries better!

This summer have been pigging out on Caesar salad. Did post my dressing recipe at http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=41922&st=32 Note: FG, Jason, in these URLs, I do NOT understand the keywords after the '?'. So, what would be the URL of a specific post? My mixture is fairly traditional except I am using red wine vinegar instead of lemon juice (convenience) and adding dried flakes of parsley, basil, and oregano (for whatever they might add). Thyme would be more traditional, but my supply of dried thyme leaves is low. For the cheese I've been using (freshly, of course) grated (not the recently stylish shreds or thin slices) Pecorino Romano (yes, from Italy) but have gotten a piece of Parmigiano Reggiano (first in a few years) and intend to try it. I just sprinkle the cheese over the lettuce after tossing with the dressing and do not include the cheese in the dressing. In the salad I include some croutons from a bag from the grocery store. These do have quite a lot of flavor, but the flavor does not go really well with the Caesar salad, and the croutons are too crunchy for me. I've made better croutons, but the store bought ones are much more convenient. There is no joke that the flavors here stand up to be noticed. This isn't baby food; my complaint with the bottled versions of Caesar dressing in the grocery store was that they were baby food. In particular, for the anchovies, I suspect that one day when they were making 400 million gallons of their genuine authentic Caesar dressing, with the salad oil being pumped directly from a supertanker through a hose with inside diameter 18", they took one 2 ounce can of anchovies, quickly waved the can, unopened, in the air a few miles from the plant, and concluded from 'social scientists' doing focus groups with various species of rodents that they had sufficient anchovy flavor. With my dressing, just the empty salad bowl after eating the salad and in the kitchen waiting to be washed can be fragrant enough to change the whole kitchen to a 'bistro' experience! Following some old recommendations, I am including eggs boiled for only 10 seconds. The 10 seconds likely at most just helps cut down on any bacteria on the outside of the shell. So, bacteria inside an egg could still be dangerous. At http://www.aeb.org/safety/egg_handling_questions.html can see discussions of dangers from such uncooked eggs. So far I have not had any bad symptoms from using such raw eggs, but there is a danger. You will have to make your own decision. It's a serious decision; an infection could be serious. For the anchovies, I went shopping and about all I saw were cans with net weight of 2 ounces of flat anchovies packed in oil from Morocco. So, that's what I've been using. My old supply of anchovies had brand name Reese with a nice complex flavor. I bought a new supply with assorted brands (couldn't find Reese again), and the brand I like best so far is Crown Prince I got at Sam's Club. The difference: Some of the brands taste like little fish fillets that are trying not to offend people that don't like strong flavors; the brands I like have a strong complex (but not actually 'fishy') flavor. I do include the oil from the can in the dressing, and I do mince the anchovies. For the lettuce, I have been buying the bags of 6 heads of Romaine at Sam's Club. I rinse the leaves, tear them, spin them dry in my salad spinner, and, to get them crisp, let them chill uncovered for a few hours in the refrigerator. If after a few hours I have not yet used the leaves, then I put them sealed in a 1 gallon Ziploc freezer bag in the refrigerator. This bag seems to make and/or keep the pieces nicely crisp. I've been making a Caesar salad I can have for dinner -- just the salad for the whole dinner. So, I have been putting a lot into the salad including chunks of tomato, pepperoni, imitation bacon bits, scallion rings, etc. But, a traditional Caesar salad with lemon juice for the acid, homemade croutons, and no onion, bacon bits, or tomato can be terrific from being simpler but still striking.

Yesterday I brought home a three pound box of fresh strawberries and a quart of heavy whipping cream. I washed and sliced the strawberries, dumped over some sugar, and stirred. After a three quart ersatz Caesar salad -- homemade Caesar dressing, with wine vinegar instead of lemon juice, plus pepper, basil, oregano, and parsley and the salad with tomatoes, pepperoni, Pecorino Romano, imitation bacon bits, grocery store croutons, scallion rings -- I dumped half the strawberries with sugar into a bowl and poured over about as much of the whipping cream as reason would permit, plus some. Ate it all, then ate the other half. "I can't believe I ate the whole thing!" With the strawberries covering a round of shortcake -- basically just a biscuit, sliced horizontally, cut side up, topped with butter -- in a bowl and with the cream lightly whipped, it would be about as good as anyone could expect on this planet.

Although only part way through reading Janet A. Zimmerman, 'Science Of The Kitchen: Taste & Texture, Part Two', Jun 3 2004, 04:29 PM, eGCI. in the interest of humanity and human compassion and decency, I fervently RUSH to warn Ms. Zimmerman to implement defensive measures against the impending actions of infuriated vengeful Media Content Enforcement Police seeking retribution and retaliation! Of course, it is the high sworn duty of the Media Content Enforcement Police to keep all media content below the fifth grade and below the shoulders. Without special exceptions, content should be at the fourth grade or below; anything with arithmetic should be at the second grade or below. Content should connect with the heart, the gut, or a few inches below the belt. The principal techniques should be fear, anxiety ("Oh, we got Trouble ...."), scandal, perversion, passion, pathos, and poignancy. Graphs are to be included only as decorations. Chemical compounds and reactions are completely forbidden. Mathematical equations are to be regarded as Top Secret or higher and under the direct control of National Command Authority. The only exception is some of the content below the belt can be permitted to be at the level of the sixth grade. Under no circumstances is content to be permitted to rise above the shoulders. Anything between the ears is for the Media Content Enforcement Police the equivalent of terrorists with WMDs! With considerable irony, the Media Content Enforcement Police had been assuming that anything about food would appeal almost exclusively to the gut, perhaps occasionally to the heart or below the belt, but had no risk of rising above the shoulders. Now comes the incautious, indeed, courageous, Ms. Zimmerman openly discussing classes of chemical compounds and chemical reactions! In the central monitoring and control center of the Media Content Enforcement Police, the big threat board must be ablaze with red alerts from people around the world connecting, downloading, reading, activating neurons the Media Content Enforcement Police had long assumed to be safely permanently dead, achieving forbidden actual understanding and comprehension, letting just ordinary people get their hands on the control knobs of new and better things, threatening shockingly stimulative applications, and from both the understanding and the applications achieving intense forbidden pleasures from corresponding torrents of released endorphins! We should be expecting the Media Content Enforcement Police to use their most modern and advanced weapons -- yelling, screaming, battering rams, and flaming skin bags of hot oil! Coalitions should be forming as I type: Joining the Media Content Enforcement Police will likely be nearly all the well known media companies, owners of famous brand names of tasteless 'package goods', Associated Coalition of Franchised Fast Food, and more! Opposing and joining in the defense of Ms. Zimmerman, on the side of freedom, knowledge, and progress, chanting "Free at last!" should be vendors of peppers, mustard, garlic, ginger, horseradish, anchovies, orange rind, lemons, vinegar, salt, wine, mushrooms, and much more! Cooks of the world unite! Sharpen your knives; let your cutting boards be your shields; let your rolling pins be your clubs. After a long night of terrible struggle should come a bright new day of stimulated neurons, olfactory cells, taste buds, and more! Long live the Internet!

No kidding, this is a great thread. Likely fewer than 1% of the people that have made 'from scratch' pie crust have had such good advice. For the recommendation to cut the fat into the flour until you have "peas", here is a clarification: Yes, maybe the larger pieces of fat coated with flour will look like peas. But, such peas will likely constitute less than half the total weight of what you have in your bowl. The rest of what is in the bowl will vary from pieces of fat smaller than peas down to loose nearly pure flour. So, my concern about the advice of mixing until "peas" is that not nearly all of the bowl contents will consist of such peas so that a novice looking for a bowl of peas might just keep mixing, never get a bowl of peas, and over mix the dough. If a way could be found to have nearly all the bowl contents peas, then this would likely be A+ quality mixing! On the amount of water to add, you want the dough to be sticky enough to hold together. A dough that keeps cracking and breaking as you roll it out is too dry. For the amount of water to add, the recipe suggestions are good guidance but might be off by a little in a particular bowl due to variations in moisture of the flour. If you add too much water and get the dough a little too wet, then the dough will tend to stick to your pastry board and rolling pin. In this case, just keep dusting the exterior surface with more flour. In effect you will get slightly more total weight of pie crust with a slightly lower proportion of fat; that is, no big harm done. The recommendations for chilling the bowl, starting with a chilled mixture of flour, salt, and fat mixed possibly days before, chilling the dough just before rolling it out all likely can help. Such chilling might be more important in a hot kitchen or when using lard. But, with cold shortening, ice water, a cool kitchen, making the pie crust AWAY from the heat of the preheating oven, keeping heat of fingers away from the dough, and working quickly, 100 years of experience in my family (I believe that my father's mother was born in about 1871), good flaky pie crust that works well -- even directly with very wet fruit pies -- is fully reliably doable. Using butter no doubt can give a better flavor. I only tried butter a few times; since I do not have my trial notes readily available on my computer, I can't easily comment on what I did wrong. I may have used clarified butter, but that is only a guess. People on this thread that have made butter work are good sources of information. ludja mentioned a pastry blender. That is a relevant remark. The pastry blender I have consists of a (chrome plated or stainless steel) sheet metal U with a wooden handle joining the two top points. The bottom of the U consists of dull blades stamped from the sheet metal. Some pastry blenders have wires instead of blades. The idea of a pastry blender is to speed the 'cutting' of the fat into the flour. So, we are supposed to use the blades to mash the fat and let the loose flour coat the mashed pieces of fat. A pastry blender is faster than a knife and fork or two knives, but I fear that, especially for a novice, the results will be less good due to less precise control of the cutting, more 'mashing' instead of just cutting, and a risk of over mixing. Using two table knives is likely the slowest but, still, actually doesn't take very long; turn on the radio or TV or something, watch wildlife in the backyard, have your children do it, or some such. I believe that my father concluded that two knives gave the best results. Also my pastry blender is a pain to clean: The handle is wooden, and long ago soaking caused the wood to swell and connections to become loose. I need to take the thing to the workshop and apply some epoxy, etc. In contrast, table knives and forks are much easier to clean! My family's most common pie is apple. When Fall comes and there are terrific supplies of nicely tart cooking apples, a simple apple pie can be one of the best foods going. My family just assembled the apple slices directly on the raw dough to become the bottom crust and didn't take special efforts to waterproof the dough, prebake the crust, or precook the apples into a 'filling', steps that might actually result in a better pie. But the real glory of apple pie is the fresh tart apples, the sugar, the butter added with the apples, any nutmeg or cinnamon, and the flaky browned crust. The flavors are off the tops of the charts. Putting excellent vanilla ice cream on top of a slice should be illegal as overwhelming over stimulation of human sensibilities! For including raisins, a crumb top crust, etc., they might be still better. But mostly people that have had the basic real thing will just rush to make it and eat it and not delay for anything 'more'! My personal favorite is a cherry pie on those rare occasions when good fresh sour cherries are available. Where my father grew up, the backyard, and elsewhere in the area, had apple trees and cheery trees. Pros and cons of various special apple varieties were common conversation. There were plenty of wild raspberries in the hills and plenty of game. The stream beside the house was choked with terrific watercress. He did well financially: His father ran the general store, and his stepfather ran the feed and grain mill. In college during the Depression, he had an Auburn roadster, an Indian motorcycle, a bearskin coat and spent plenty of time bowling, playing cards, and dancing. He went on to office work but should have returned home and concentrated on local business and real estate and kept feasting on the local bounty!

One of the cooking topics that goes way back in my family is pie crust. My father grew up in the country in western New York state, a little south of Buffalo. There his mother, in a classic Victorian house with a root cellar and a wood burning stove, made a fruit pie a day for decades. Yes, one of the more important goals of the crust is that it be 'flaky'. Yes, it is generally true that lard makes a crust that is exceptionally flaky. Pie crust was one of the worst challenges my mother faced on getting married! While she did learn quite well, early on she was terrified. She never liked it. My father was the person that thought that good pie crust was easy. Basically, he was correct. Dad only used flour, shortening, salt, and water. While it is possible to make a good pie crust with butter for some or all of the shortening, the substitution is not trivial and all my trials yielded poor results. Nearly all of the detailed advice commonly given, my family didn't and doesn't do. The fat to flour ratio is not wildly critical. So, weighing the flour is not a big deal. Dad's mother, making a pie a day for decades, was so practiced that she didn't measure anything. Also, with practice, the whole effort can be blindingly fast. It is easy to spend much more time and effort getting out the pastry board, rolling pin, etc. and on the clean up afterward than on the work. So, for more efficiency, Dad's mother had a special cabinet in the kitchen just for making pies; mostly she didn't clean anything and, instead, just scraped off the pastry board and the rolling pin and closed the cabinet. The key to a flaky crust is a theoretical 'secret'. Essentially every traditional diligent highly dedicated bride will miss this secret and end up in tears! The 'secret' is that in the final pie crust, each individual flake was from a chunk of fat that was NOT well mixed with flour. So, the bride that mixes thoroughly is nearly guaranteed a uniform homogeneous isotropic crisp cracker drenched with tears. So, we want to LEAVE chunks of fat. To this end, there are three important considerations: (1) Don't mix very much. (2) Don't handle very much. (3) Keep the mixture cool so that the chunks of fat remain distinct and do not melt into the flour. In particular, for the shortening, have it still cool from the refrigerator. For the water, use ice water. For your hands, keep the heat of your hands AWAY from the mixture to the greatest extent possible. Under NO circumstances MIX the fat and flour with your hands. It is good to have a cool kitchen. Dad never bothered to chill the flour, but he didn't expect it to be hot, either. For the mixing, there is just absolutely positively NO role for any powered machine -- not a chance. The best tools for mixing the fat and flour are a dinner fork in one hand and a table knife in the other. Then with the flour in the bowl and the shortening in the middle, cross the knife and the fork and pull the knife in one direction and the fork in the other so that the knife CUTS a chunk of fat into two pieces and lets flour coat the cut surface. Two knives also work. The process is appropriately called 'cutting' the fat into the flour. Really, you are cutting the big chunk of fat into smaller chunks and coating each of the smaller chunks with flour. The person that said that the goal was to cut the two together until you had "peas" likely died laughing at all the problems this advice caused! Instead, basically for each cut, aim at a chunk of fat. When you can see no more chunks of fat that really are too big and should be cut, QUIT. So, for each cut, you have to watch. Until a machine can have good machine vision, forget about any machine being useful. Then use enough ice water to get the stuff in the bowl to stick together. In this work, think a little as you proceed to MINIMIZE the handling of the dough. Here is the right attitude: This is not 'haute cuisine' by the king of chefs and chef of kings. Instead, this is just PIE DOUGH that was part of what fueled the explosion of US population coast to coast across a continent in less than 100 years. That is, this is FOOD intended to be full of food energy, that is, calories. So, imagine that you are making this in a boarding house where you have 15 really hungry railroad workers due in, soaked with sweat and hungry as bears, and less patient, in less than an hour. You can use this pie dough for fruit pies, custard pies, savory pot pies, to wrap pieces of meat, as parts of other desserts, etc., but time you don't have. When you get the dough together, you will have a sticky blob in the bowl. Note: The sticky blob will not have uniform moisture level -- uniformity would mean too much handling. Now, to continue, you need a supply of just flour. You start by coating the pastry board with flour. From now on, there will be two distinct parts to the dough: (1) the inside and (2) the surface. The surface will always have been coated with flour and relatively dry and able to be pressed without sticking. The inside will still be moist and sticky. The next step is to go from the sticky mass in the bowl to two globs on the pastry board, each glob fairly smooth, one a little larger than the other, maybe 55-45. To take this step, think a little about how you will get nearly all sticky stuff from the surface of the bowl into the two globs. Note: It is permitted and can be useful to pick up the bowl and tilt it so that gravity can help the glob roll. To take the next step, sprinkle loose flour on the surface of the glob in the bowl. I roll the bowl to get help from gravity while using a spoon to separate the sticky dough from the surface of the bowl. When I get the glob mostly together, I roll it onto the pastry board. Then I use a spatula or knife to cut the glob into two globs. Now a lot of highly concerned very picky super expert modern advisors talk about wrapping the globs in plastic wrap, setting in the refrigerator, and letting 'rest'. Nonsense. Unnecessary nonsense. No one in my family ever did any such thing. Remember those railroad workers -- you don't have time for anything to 'rest'; if they don't eat your pie crust, then they might eat YOU. In particular, my grandmother didn't have time for such nonsense -- not even 10 seconds. She was a wife and mother in the country in 1910 and had PLENTY to do without ANY 'resting'. So, just keep going. Generally, the faster the better because time lets the dough get warmer and that and more mixing gets rid of the chunks of fat. The larger glob is for the bottom crust and is the one to roll out first. With practice, you can roll the dough into something close enough for the purpose QUICKLY. If you believe that your rolling pin work has failed and have to gather the dough back into a glob and start again, then you can still get a pie from this glob but will get a noticeably less flaky crust. If you have a tear in the dough, then use water as glue and maybe a stray piece of dough as a patch and do a repair. It does NOT have to look good. In all of this, you should touch the dough with your hands very little or not at all. Work quickly; minimize the handling of the dough. The result won't be 'puff pastry' but will be 'flaky' pie crust, and that's all you are after. Lard is more sensitive to temperature than shortening, but, handled quickly as described here, DOES definitely make a more flaky crust. If you have left over pie crust, then roll it out, dot with butter, sprinkle sugar and cinnamon, bake it, and serve it as a treat. It can be better than some pies!