Chris Hennes

With no rice-cooker the time calculus is very different for me, obviously. The point about the packaging and shipping is a good one.

It doesn't matter, there's no way for any of us to generalize the value proposition of this stuff. It saves some amount of time no matter how you slice it: whether that is "worth it" is a completely individual evaluation. The only thing we can say is that the cost per serving increase by X, and the amount of time saved is Y.

Nah, if you can reduce the time-to-table from 45 minutes to 2 minutes for brown rice I think it's probably worth it. I could never consider serving brown rice with a stir-fry, I'd have to start it too early. But if it's just a matter of reheating, I could pop it in the microwave right before I fired up the wok.

Setting aside issues of cost, how is the quality of the rice? Basically as good as made fresh at home, or does it suffer for the freezing? Or is it better because they can use fresher rice or something?

Fat Guy just reminded me of the Charleston Chew: I think the last time I had one I was maybe ten years old. Do they still make them?

Well, any kind of filled cake is going get go a long way towards your desired messiness: just take your two layers of sponge and fill them with a pastry cream or custard. Or go crazy, go with four layers, do some custard/pastry cream and some whipped cream. Whipped cream as the frosting is nice too since it's soft and tends to go everywhere in the hands of children.

Over at Serious Eats, Kenji Lopez-Alt really outdid himself this time: "The Food Lab, Drinks Edition: Is Mexican Coke Better?" I suspect anyone reading this is at least superficially aware that Mexican Coke is made with sugar and that American Coke is made with HFCS: Kenji set up a daunting battery of tests to determine which tasters preferred. SPOILER ALERT: Anyone care to dispute his methods or results?

Also: how good are you at picking crabs? Your yield will vary quite a bit based on not just how large the crabs are, but on how good you are at getting every last morsel. I suck at picking crabs, I never get the yield the fishmonger says I should...

Oh, no... the chocolate is terrible, borderline inedible. But that soft caramel! Yes, please. Rolo are awful, practically designed to cause dental damage.

How did you forget Caramello?! That is the single best caramel-focused candy in mass-market existence.

I'd be inclined to go with completely colorless, clear gels, to specifically play with diner's perceptions. I'm very interested to know if it still tastes like a Caprese salad without the visual cues. And if you use gels instead of just liquids the olive oil should be easy to segregate.

Soba, hopefully you made it through the hurricane unscathed, we're looking forward to more cooking!

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Well, isn't this the case with pretty much any meat we cook? Using a precisely controlled water bath gives you more control. So, sure, poaching the chicken will give you the same result from a doneness perspective. However, if you bag it you can add aromatics, stock, liquid, fat or whatever in the bag. Also, as opposed to poaching, you don't lose any flavor to the surrounding liquid if the chicken is bagged. I was addressing Kouign Aman's point that for short cooking times, poaching and vacuum sealing can achieve similar results, provided you have precise control of your poaching temperature. You don't have to poach in water: I used to poach chicken breast in stock, etc. I prefer vacuum-sealing because water is much cheaper and easier to deal with when using a circulator, and you can use less aromatics, etc. However, even if you don't vacuum seal, I'd suggest that the very fact that you are poaching with precise temperature control makes that poaching action a Modernist cooking technique. Classical poaching with mediocre temperature control yields much poorer results for chicken breast.

With chicken breast the real key (IMO) is the temperature: presumably if you cooked the chicken without bagging it, but at exactly your preferred temperature, the result would be comparable.

I can hardly believe anyone actually cares: this is Bourdain's entire MO as an entertainer. What's the big deal?

Exactly: no matter what site you go to, or what newspaper/blog/Facebook page/Twitter feed you read, the world is littered with reviews that are not going to reflect your experience of the restaurant. Sometimes they are paid shills, sometimes they are "friends of the house" and sometimes they are just people whose tastes don't match yours. In my opinion you *must* seek out individual reviewers whose opinions are in line with your own and seek their advice. I find Yelp, Zagat, etc. totally worthless mainly because of the inherent disassociation of the review from the person behind it. I have no interest in the aggregated opinions of thousands: only the single opinion of someone whose tastes are in line with mine.

Though it might make sense to have a backup plan in case the price is exorbitant, or the space doesn't get finished...

Very nice, Bob. Do you have a sense of how many people can comfortable be seated in the dining area, and how much cooking area there is? In my experience we typically have around a dozen people cooking at any one time during the Saturday feast, and probably need seating for 30-40. What about price?

Right: Phillies games are fun, but I agree that they aren't a great fit for this event. Obviously those who really want to go will find a way to go on their own. Too much to eat in Philly to kill a whole afternoon at the ballpark.

Playing around with starch coatings can work wonders for fries of all kinds, especially if you are going to try to bake them instead of deep-fry. A few of the Modernist modified starches are supposed to work quite well: brand name is "Crisp Coat" or something like it, I think.

Or you could buy one of those plate racks for hyper-expensive dishware that prevents the plates from contacting one another, and that you can thus withdraw any plate you want at any time. One might describe this as an array of plates rather than a stack .

What it DOES describe, however, is the definition of FILO (and by extension FIFO). If you are adding and removing arbitrary numbers of plates in arbitrary order you are neither FIFO nor FILO. And the fact of the matter is that it DOES describe what happens in your kitchen: you have a plate on the bottom of the stack that is never being withdrawn. The reason it is never being withdrawn is that it was the first one in (put at the bottom of the stack by some plate factory packer or whoever). It was first in, it will be the last out.

You are mis-using the terminology: take all of your plates out of the cabinet and start placing them back in, one at a time. The first one you put in will be the bottom plate on the stack: it will be the last one you take out.