Chris Hennes

That's the beauty of overnight shipping . What I find most distressing about the food in Oklahoma is the near-impossibility of finding good steak: I thought it would be a mecca! How wrong I was... the nice thing about things like lobster, oysters and mussels is that they are shipped live, so it's a bit easier to guarantee freshness.

Benvenutis Restaurante (non-chain, 105 W Main St., Norman, OK) I don't know why we hadn't tried Benvenutis before: my thought had always been that it didn't look that promising on the outside, and I kept putting it off. It turns out that was something of a mistake: so far, this is the best Italian I've found in Oklahoma. It's a little higher-end than the other places I have tried, and a fair bit of their menu isn't really Italian, but the few things I've tried there have been pretty good. The beef carpaccio tasted excessively of the mayonnaise-based sauce they heavy-handedly applied, and it had nearly a full salad's worth of lettuce on top, so I wouldn't recommend it. The mussels were quite good, however, if a little sweet considering the fact that their house bread is also sweet: I would have thought either a neutral bread or a saltier broth would have worked better. The lasagna was so-so, but the lobster "ravioli" was very good, and my wife said the pizza was OK. The wine list was reasonably extensive, and reasonably priced, with many bottles under $50, and quite a few available either by the glass or as a flight. The atmosphere is relaxed and elegant (for Norman), the service was unobtrusive, and the prices are good all things considered. I find it inexplicable that the University frequently takes guests out to Legend's when they are looking for something "nice," with Benvenutis under a mile from campus and head-and-shoulders better on every dimension.

A sheet of high-quality paper towel folded a couple times and placed over the sharp edges has worked well for me in the past.

I can't let you do that, Dave. You can't just give up on this. The world demands an answer! Making your own seems kinda pointless, you would just be developing a fancy brine recipe. But if there were some way to make Coke work... now that...that would be something. The trouble with trying to neutralize the acid is that the reaction produces salts, and not necessarily of the NaCl variety. What kind(s) of acid are in Coke?

In the judicial world, a judge is is expected to recuse himself from a case to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. I'm not sure it matters that a hard-core cocktailian thinks that Robert Hess is ethical: we're trying to ferret out what a "hypothetical moderately well-informed reader" would think. And, for example, when I read Hess's book and he has a recipe for the "Bloomsbury," he doesn't say "I recommend Tanqueray 10," he says "I created this drink as part of a promotion for Tanqueray 10, and so that is the recommended gin to use." He's only got one paragraph in there, and 1/4 of it is this disclosure!

OK, let's just do the dilution calculation straight up, no percentages (using the "concentration" of H+ calculated in the first step above, and again ignoring any buffering, etc.): C1*V1 = C2*V2 --- (0.003162)*2.5 = C2*6.0 -- C2 = 0.001318 -- -log10(0.001318) = 2.9 I'm only giving you two significant digits here, and since it's a log scale the difference between a 60% dilution and a 140% dilution simply isn't that large. They both give approximately pH = 2.9. But it's not the same number if you carry a few more digits around.

pH is a relatively complicated animal: first off, it's a logarithmic scale, and second off, you potentially have to deal with buffering, etc. However, in this case you are starting with a relatively strong acid and you are not diluting it very much. If we just do a back-of-the-envelope calculation and assume that we only have to deal with the hydrogen ion concentration, then: 2.5 = -log10(A) --> A=0.003162 Diluting that concentration by 60% gives: A=0.003162*.4=0.001265 And then converting that "concentration" back to pH gives -log10(0.001265) = 2.9 So, not unexpectedly, for that very small amount of dilution, you still have a fairly acidic solution (pH=2.9). Of course we've made some approximations here, but I think this is close. Now the question is, what is three days in a pH=3 solution going to do to the texture of your belly?

Interesting that you've got both The French Laundry and Per Se on there. French Laundry I buy, but how do you justify Per Se?

In that case, I have trouble imagining that any of us would write a review of a bar as though we were purely analyzing the contents of the cocktails, and I think it would be disingenuous (i.e. unethical) to omit the fact that we were sitting at the bar chatting up the bartender the whole time. Or to omit the fact that we helped develop a new drink by tasting several varieties, or that we were provided with samples of a half dozen vodkas, etc. It's not so much that these things are "comps" per se as that they are things that a reader would be legitimately concerned might bias a review.

This is all semantics without the ethics discussion on the other topic. What matters in the end is going to be, whatever we choose to call them, is it unethical not to disclose them when you post comments on your experience? Maybe we can work backwards from that, then, to define "comp" as something the bartender has given you for free that you would feel ethically obliged to disclose in a review. What, of the above list of might-be-comps, would any of you personally feel obliged to disclose in a review of the bar?

Chris, I think you're thinking about it backwards: if you claim to be following this Code of Ethics, and you post about Joe Agave without disclosing a relationship, you are implicitly stating that no relationship exists: there is no requirement to explicitly state it. The rest of this discussion only pertains to the enforcement of the code. Which in your example is being taken care of by the blog's readers, who will soon decide that the blogger is full of crap and will cease to be readers.

I nearly always stop the smoker manually, though the digital unit I've got has a separate timer from the oven, which has come in handy on occasion. The last puck starts to slowly smolder if you let it get pushed on, but what I do is just leave it there for the next smoking session. Then, when I start a new session, I pull out the bisquette right behind it (so the one on the burner doesn't get pushed off before it burns).

Nope, I just keep the puck hopper full all the time (well, as I think of it—I add a stack of pucks every few hours for very long smokes).

Low to the ground: it's the size of a mini-fridge, as you mentioned, but I'm always a bit annoyed at crouching down to do everything, and it makes things harder to see , I think.

I use mine a lot, and I'm still pretty happy with it. I haven't made any modifications to it, but I have one major one in the works right now: I hate how low it is. And it does indeed leak all over the patio. So I'm building some sorta table/cabinet for it to sit on. I haven't had any sort of puck problems, and they go on sale in Amazon.com's 4-for-3 sale all the time, so you can get them for a reasonable price there. I can see putting in a PID for fun, but I don't think it will have much practical benefit: smoking things is a lot less sensitive to the precise cooker temperature than sous vide is: just get a good meat thermometer and pull stuff out at the right temp.

Actually, to be honest, I didn't notice any great difference between using skin-on and skin-off bellies. At first I was disappointed to see that my hog had been skinned, but over the long haul it hasn't seemed to matter except with the hams. The bacon turned out great, and I don't think I made any adjustments to compensate.

Will the logo be trademarked or something along those lines, so that there is some legal recourse should it become necessary?

I am not the world's neatest cook. In particular, anything I wear when I am cooking is bound to get either tomato sauce, chocolate, or grease spatters on it. And yet, I still persist in not wearing an apron. Partially this is pure laziness, part of it is because I feel a bit silly in an apron, and part of it is because I have yet to actually destroy any of my clothing while cooking. If I'm going into a messy project I might wear jeans and an old T-shirt, etc. In fact, my wife theorizes that denim has killed the apron: jeans were practically designed for wiping your hands on and getting dirty. And with the convenience of an electric washing machine (as opposed to hand-scrubbing back in the good ol' days) and advanced detergents, aprons just don't strike me as that necessary for a home cook.

I'm concerned about the interaction of these two (or perhaps its the lack of interaction I'm concerned about). The "faithfulness to the historical record" seems primarily geared at the comments sections, but I think the statement should include something about the original post being held to the same standard. That is, for example, if a factual error is discovered, the article will not simply be edited as though nothing happened (which screws up the record if there are comments pointing out the error), but an "edited to add: this statement is incorrect and should read blah blah blah"-sort of statement will be used instead.

Holly, I agree with you completely, right up to the implication of your last sentence (ETA: in the post before this one): As I said, in my opinion, behaving ethically is a bare minimum requirement for achieving credibility. It is certainly not the only requirement. It seems that where you and I disagree is that in my mind, once the writer has stated that the meal was comped, I no longer perceive the review to be impartial, and I doubt anyone else does either. It doesn't seem to me that the writer is any longer "present[ing] that meal as representative of the restaurant."—now, he's just some schmuck who got a free meal and is writing about it. I mean, what is the writer going to say to recover from admitting the meal was comped? "Hey, this meal was given to me for free. But this review is 100% impartial, I SWEAR!!" I think that once you, the writer, say "I was comped," you are by definition no longer claiming to be impartial.

Credibility is, in my mind, a separate issue from ethics. Ethics is a bare minimum: then, you have to have a good palate, and good judgement, and a good experience base, etc. All of these things weigh into how much I value your review, but they do not matter one whit when it comes to whether or not you are behaving ethically. You told your readers that you were comped: they can decide for themselves whether that biases you or not. Edited to add quote.

If I'm reading a food writer's or blogger's work and they start out by saying "I'm best friends with this chef and the meal was comped" I'm not going to hold writing about it against them as a human being and I don't think it's unethical. I may not put any value in their comments, but they gave full disclosure and as a reader I'm capable of deciding on my own whether to value their words now or not. The critical thing is the disclosure: that allows the reader to decide on their own if they are going to value the review. I see absolutely nothing unethical about writing about a comped meal as long as you state up front that it was comped. I don't think you should then attempt to claim that it's an impartial review, either, but I view that as a separate issue.

I think many bloggers/writers/etc. implicitly follow this sort of code, but it's nice, and sometimes very helpful, to see it spelled out in such detail. The notion of a "badge" indicating that this is the policy your blog follows is interesting. It would provide a quick way to identify sites that decide to commit (if only in words) to this level of journalistic integrity.

As near as I can tell, from a storage perspective with already-roasted coffee we are concerned with three things: Preventing the evaporation/dissipation of flavor compounds Preventing the oxidation of essential oils Preventing the absorption of other flavors/odors For the first two, low-temperature storage is a no-brainer. Both processes (evaporation and oxidation) are temperature-dependent, and the lower the temperature the slower they occur. The third, preventing the absorption of off-flavors from other stuff in the freezer, is addressed by a) freezing whole beans rather than grounds (lower surface area on which to absorb anything, slowing down the absorption), b) storing in a tightly-sealed container, and c) store everything else in your freezer tightly-sealed as well. From a physics standpoint I don't see how freezing beans could on its own decrease the release of flavor as you brew (provided the coffee is allowed to come back to room temperature before brewing). With most foods our concern when freezing is cell damage, but a roasted coffee bean's cells are about as "damaged" as they are going to get, and we're not worried about its texture anyway, so that would not seem to be the case here. What physical mechanism does your friend say is occurring to cause the flavor release to decrease?

I'm impatient. And I really, really needed my kitchen sink back. So, went to the Home Depot last night and picked up a 3/4 hp Insinkerator "Compact." I actually wanted 1/2 hp because I don't use it very much, but I also wanted a quiet one, and 3/4 was the only option in the well-shielded baffled models. So far so good: I had never installed one before, but it only took about five minutes: pretty slick.