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eatingwitheddie

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  1. I hate the s---. It's simply too smelly/funky for my taste. I find it hard to be in the same room. Truthfully I sometimes use the Red Beancurd as part of a spare rib marinade. No cooking hints here. Ed
  2. LIGHT VS. DARK SOY This is an extremely complicated subject for a variety of reasons. First there are so many different kinds and brands of soy. Not only light and dark, but thick, sweet, Phillipine, Chinese, Japanese, Thai etc. Then there are different brewing methods using differing ingredients. Basically light soy is saltier and thinner while dark has a molasses flavor component and the ability to color dark sauces while using a small amount of soy. Typically in my cooking, and that of many professional chefs, dark and light soy are mixed. If you want your fired rice to have that dark Americanized look, use more dark soy. If you want a light brown sauce use a lighter color soy, or a smaller quantity of a dark soy. When I'm braising spare ribs with soy, sugar and vinegar, I want a black look with that molasses overtone so I use a dark soy. Specifically I prefer light Japanese soy - I usually use Kikkoman - and mix it with Chinese dark - usually Amoy Golden Label from HK. Typically for a stir fry I use a 3:1 proportion, light to dark. When it's available, the Kikkoman which is imported from Japan, is better than our domestically brewed Kikkoman.
  3. CALMEX ABALONE This brand has a reputation as the best, and it is one of the few canned foods that I think is quite good. It is often the only brand available. I have never done a formal tasting of it vs. the competition. It just needs to be sliced and served. But frankly, when was the last time you wanted to eat canned shrimp or mussels? I usually want my seafood fresh. These days live and fresh frozen abalone are available. The frozen Australian abalone (Australia has absolutely awesome fish/shellfish) is a very good product. Most Chinese, however, when wanting to eat this delicacy prefer the sinfully expensive dried abalone. Like some mushrooms, drying somehow intensifies and improves it. A single portion is in the $100-200 range.
  4. This is one of HK's most famous and expensive classic restaurants - abalone and similar items are specialties. Unfortunately I've never had the pleasure Ed
  5. TESTING A RESTAURANT - WHAT DO I LOOK FOR? The first and prime thing that I want from a restaurant is delicious food: I want fresh, clean, beautifully tailored flavors and textures. If I get that I can put up with almost anything. Presentation, and the order in which dishes are served, especially at a banquet, are particularly important. Yinging and yanging the items so that you get a nicely blanced progression of tastes, colors, and smells is what's critical. When I go to a (new) Chinese restaurant before I order I typically: 1) Walk around the dining room and see what others are eating. 2) Check out the fish tanks (if they have them) - see what they have and how they're taking care of them. 3) Read the menu and ask if there are any ancillary menus - chef's specialties, set dinners, and in particular banquet menus. Very often the banquet menus are a good clue to what the restaurant itself thinks is special - and frequently these items are available a la carte. 4) Check out the local veg and fish markets and see what's fresh and then ask the restaurant if they're serving those items. 5) If these menus are in Chinese only, I am often aggressive about trying to get a waiter who is willing to translate for me. There are dishes that are good tests of a chef's skill. One of the best is sauteed sliced fish. Fish filet is resillient and hard to pull apart when it's raw. When cooked, however, it falls apart very easily. It is very difficult to toss and sauce fish filet in a wok without it breaking into smaller pieces. This is a classical test. But don't forget, there may be 10 different stir fry chefs in a kitchen, and only one of them has cooked your dish and it probably wasn't the head chef. He might be great (or terrible), but don't forget about the other 9 chefs whose cooking you haven't tried. This helps account for the variability of a particular restaurant. On a Chinese hot saute line it is frequently known which chef cooks which particular dish best. In restaurants where they really care, they may assign a particular chef to cook a particular dish because they know how well he executes it. Additionally, one might look to see the volume of sauce vs. the volume of the food. Sometimes we want just enough sauce to coat the food and still have it be quite flavorful, whereas with other dishes we might want a large amount of gravy or a completely dry dish. Our industry is all about the details. Chances are good that if there are a lot of beautifully thought out and maintained details, the restaurant will be a good one. Though obviously the small and perhaps funky places can be terrific. It just takes one really good cook!
  6. LARD (PIG OIL) IN CHINESE COOKING Very often lard was the traditional oil used in fine Chinese stir frying. When freshly rendered it gives dishes a subtle and delectable taste. It is particularly called for in stir frys when the dish has a white color. When I first started in the business one of the restaurants I was affiliated with cooked with lard that they rendered fresh each day. It was always a secret, even from much of the staff - so many of their customers were Jewish or just wanted a helthy diet. But it made for particularly delicious food. As our knowledge of cholesterol has increased, polyunsaturated, flavorless vegetable oil has become the standard. Soy oil is typically used today, though any colorless and odor free oil with a high burning point will work well. I frequently cook with cottonseed, canola, or corn oil. Peanut oil can be delicious but it has a pronounced flavor, particularly so with the exported Asian brands such as 'Knife' or 'Lion & Globe' from HK (American oils like Planters tend to be bland - what's the point?). They are delicious but their strong flavor is more appropriate for spicy Szechuan dishes, whereas a delicate Cantonese sauce might benefit from a more neutral flavor. Sometimes oil is used for it's perfume. Japanese roasted sesame oil is the prime example. We never/rarely cook with it, but would use just a touch seconds before serving a dish so that it would smell good at the table. By the way, schmaltz, rendered chicken fat, is used by some of the most sophisticated Cantonese chefs. It adds a little 'je nais se qua', transforming a gentle dish into a savory one without the eater recognizing its presence.
  7. Most retaurants have just one or two really good wok chefs. You wnat them to mbe concentrating on YOUR dinner. If there lots of people best to have different banquets on different days.
  8. Bux I'm happy to go any place and talk about anything. If it ends up being inappropriate I'll just let you know. As far as restaurants go I haven't eaten in all of them, so my opinions will be limited to what I have experienced. Go for it! Ed
  9. Banquets are usually cooked for a 'table' - typically 10 persons, though any number from 8-12 persons is workable. The food is best when a chef cooks for just one or perhaps two tables. At Pings, for example, you could order a $350 table, but could easily spend much more - $1000/table or more. The food quality doesn't vary in relation to how much you spend once you pass about $40/50 person. What changes are the luxury and esoteric qualities of the items. For instance an individiual serving of whole braised dried abalone might cost as much as $100/person.
  10. Ann I'm intrigued that you have read about Chang Ta-Chien and his eating habits. Have you encountered some stories/information that would add to my body of knowledge? I'd be interested in hearing. Thanks, Ed
  11. Steve Thanks for the note - and yes I'd be happy to arrange a dinner with Ping or with someone else. There are many big fish in the sea. Ed
  12. Dear Ann I would be happy to share this wonton recipe with you. I thought I had a copy of it on my computer but I couldn't locate it. Sometime during the next week or two when I have some extra time I'll write it down and forward to you. If you don't get it, drop me a reminder Best Regards, Ed
  13. Ann - About my teacher: Lo, Huey Yen ("Uncle Lou") and the early days of the Szechuan restaurant business in the US I first heard about Uncle Lou as a teenager while reading a NY Times review of a new financial district restaurant called The Four Seas. My guess is that the year may have been '66 or '67. The jist of the piece was that this restaurant offered a type of special and authentic cooking that had rarely or never been available in NYC. The article inferred that influential persons went there to enjoy formal Chinese banquets, for which the chef was apparently famous. For me, that was the start of a different type of awareness regarding Chinese cuisine. I came to learn (some years later) that Uncle Lou did not stay at The Four Seas very long but had quickly moved on to a new Chinatown restaurant where he partnered with a former co-worker. The restaurant was named, Szechuan, and it was located in Chatham Square. To my mind this was the first Szechuan restaurant in North America. By 1968/'69, one of the partners, David Keh, had gone uptown and opened a second Szechuan restaurant on the SE corner of Broadway and 95th St. Uncle Lou stayed downtown for the moment and another important Szechuan chef, 'Shorty' Tang, became chef on 95th St. Within a year's time (1969/'70) Mr. Keh sold off the original Chinatown location to partner Robert Chow, and opened a third store called Szechuan East at 2nd Ave. and 80th St. Uncle Lou was its chef. It was during this period that I started setting up Chinese banquets as a serious hobby, and as a result, my relationships with various chefs and restaurateurs developed. My education with Uncle Lou began in earnest. I regularly went to Chinatown to pick up unusual ingredients which Uncle Lou would prepare for me, often for a banquet that I had arranged. Uncle Lou never explicity showed me how to cook a particular item. Instead he let me observe, like a master and a student. I learned by watching, tasting and eventually trying to put my knowledge into action. Since I was primarily a customer not a staff member, I was able to patronize his restaurant and eat his cooking quite frequently. While Uncle Lou specialized in banquet cooking, he had a background in classical Szechuan dishes. I'm not certain, but I believe Uncle Lou grew up in Chungking (Szechuan's capitol). Working backwards, it seems to me that he must have been born around 1920 or perhaps a couple of years before. In any event, by the late 1940's he had become an extremely skilled and well known chef. When the Communists took over China in 1949, he ended up working for the preminent Chinese painter of that era, Chang Ta-Chien. As was the case with so many of the moneyed upper class, they fled China. Many went to Taiwan with Chiang Kai Shek, but Chang Ta-Chien fled to Hong Kong and then India for a short period, finally settling in Sao Paolo, Brazil where he lived for about 15 years. He built a home there that apparently was elaborately decorated and landscaped in traditional Chinese style, and he brought Uncle Lou with him. By this time Uncle Lou was quite a famous chef. Wealthy Chinese who traveled around the world would make a pilgrimage to Brazil to visit the great artist and, perhaps just as importantly, to taste the cooking of his renowned chef. The significance of this is that Uncle Lou was not primarily a restaurant chef. He specialized in cooking dinner for 8 or 10 persons. When he came to NYC from Brazil he was not particularly skilled at running a commercial kitchen. You wanted this guy to cook your dinner, and frankly that was all. When he cooked well, the food could be astounding. What dishes do I remember most 30 years later? Well, first of all, most classical Chinese banquets start off with a cold appetizer platter. Chinese 'cold cut chefs' learned the art of vegetable carving, often slicing and arranging food to look like a Dragon and Phoenix or a Panda. This is painstaking work that would take years to learn and hours if not days to execute. Each dish would have hundreds if not thousands of pieces. Uncle Lou bucked this tradition. He almost always served hot appetizers - a quirky thing to do for a classically trained chef, but he did it with great style, humor and deliciousness. I recollect one meal where he made shrimp toast that were decorated to look like goldfish, while on the other side of the same plate he had pieces of fried fish that looked like shrimp. I fell in love with his 'Chrysanthemum' hot appetizers: chicken gizzards that were braised, scored and fried crispy to resemble flowers. Since no one had ever prepared a chicken gizzard that I enjoyed, these were a revelation. Subsequently, whenever Uncle Lou cooked, I invariably begged him to prepare chicken gizzards, and unfortunately, have never had one since that I craved eating. Smoked Duck is one of the great pleasures of the Szechuan kitchen and Uncle Lou turned out a classic and masterful version. If you left it up to him, however, he would prefer to make a variation: Smoked Chicken. Speaking of chicken, one on my favorite things he made was the eponymous Ta-Chien Chicken. Properly made, this dish is composed of chunks of chicken still on the bone that is red cooked with dried shitake mushrooms, winter bamboo shoots and scortched dried red chiles. It is virtually impossible to find this preparation today, though thousands of restauarants have a dish called Ta-Chien Chicken on their menus it is virtually never the 'real' thing. Luckily I do dine on this dish regularly: I prepare it myself. In my own cooking I also prepare the classic Szechuan item, Wontons with Red Oil. I serve Uncle Lou's version which is topped with three distinct sauces, one layered over the other. The main sauce is a peanut butter emulsion. Delicious! Carp with Szechuan Hot Bean Sauce, Snow White Chicken (shredded white chicken with cleaned beansprouts in a pure white sauce) and dry sauteed dishes are all items I remember cooking with Uncle Lou. He knew the 'old' ways of doing things and I often think of the day when I saw him make a flour and water dough and proceed to 'work' it underneath running cold water. It seemed that he was washing the dough away, but in fact he was washing away the starch so that just the gluten would be left. He broke the remaining dough in pieces and then added some baking powder, fried the dough, and when done, removed the browned 'kofu' and then braised it. He had prepared homemade gluten. It felt like a little bit of a miracle. Someplace deep in the depths of my records I have my 'Uncle Lou notebooks' containing the menus of banquets I enjoyed. Perhaps I can locate them and find some more dishes to describe at some other time.
  14. Mark- with regard to my father: It took a while for my dad (and mom) to come around and it was a gradual process. My first job in the industry was at this restaurant called Uncle Tai's in NYC. It was the 2nd Hunan style restaurant in North America. That was January 1973, almost 30 years ago!. I was a captain/maitre'd threre, but I had spent the 4-5 months prior to opening helping to set up the restaurant as the owner's assistant. Less than a month after opening we were reviewed by the Times, Ray Sokolov was the critic, and we received their highest 4-star rating. Virtually overnight we were the hottest restaurant in the industry and stayed that way for a long time. This helped validate my career path. Some years later, after I had been self supporting for a long while, and the subject of many media articles, someone asked my dad that question. His answer was that he felt 'relieved'. There's nothing like going into the Chinese restaurant business after paying all those years of private school tuition!
  15. THE QUALITY OF CHINESE FOOD IN NYC: 2002 VS. THE 1970'S Over the 35 years that I have been compulsively tracking the American Chinese restaurant scene there have been many changes. The late 60's and early 70's brought about a Chinese cooking authenticity revolution in this country that was exciting and extraordinary. Chinese regional ethnic cuisines from Szechuan, Hunan, Shanghai, Fukien, Hakka, Yunnan, Beijing and other areas could all be found here in one variation/adaptation or another. Since so many dishes are prepared a la minute in a wok, the quality of a dish was/is often a function of the skill of the particular stir fry chef cooking it. In a small restaurant, let's say a family run business, where there were only 2 or 3 wok stoves and a chef at each, it would be easy to control quality: have 3 really good chefs and all your food would be good. If you had 2 good ones and 1 pretty good one, your food would be a reflection of that: 2/3's good and 1/3 so so. That's why small family run Asian restaurants can be so good. If just a couple of people can cook well, then the kitchen is set up for success. I am always on the lookout for these sorts of places, and throughout my life they have consistently been around for discovering - and sometimes they're found in the most unexpected places. We recently had great fresh squid in a little family run Chinese restaurant in Alassio, Italy on the Italian Riviera, and again wonderful cooking at a small but highly rated family run restaurant in Victoria, BC. In the late 70's and the 80's the American Chinese restaurant industry expanded so that there was suddenly a take-out joint on every block, but unfortunately as a result, the number of good cooks available was spread thinner. Young stir-fry studs, stir-fry cooks who could work two woks at once and be highly productive, after cooking for just a couple of years, would leave their jobs and open small places of their own. It became very difficult to find kitchen staff members with the many years of experience required to cook really first rate food. For instance in 1973, when we opend Uncle Tai's resturant in NYC, we had about 15 chefs in the kitchen. Our number 5 chef had 20 years expericience, and our top stir fry cooks had all previously been head chefs. A decade later a number 3 cook might only have a couple of years of experience. The industry was spread thin and the result of this dilution was a lack of sophistication and quality. Many of the local take-outs ended up with almost exactly the same menus. Worse yet, they used the same B-minus/C-plus recipes. The traditions passed on from master to student were not the best ones, and unless you were learning to cook in Hong Kong or Taipei, it might have been difficult to find a master to learn from. During these same years in mainland China, fine cooking and luxury goods were distinctly out of favor and anti-revolutionary so many of the finest culinary traditions died or were at best clandestinely practiced. This had great effect. Nevertheless when we entered the nineties and immigration laws changed, we suddenly had an influx of Chinese, and many members of this newly arriving community were more sophisticated and closer to the source when it came to culinary traditions. This signaled a new authenticity revolution: but rather than being oriented towards bringing good quality Chinese cooking to the American community, the new authenticity was geared to the greatly expanded 'overseas' community. Simply put this meant the most exciting new Chinese restaurants were geared toweards the Chinese community not the American one. There were repercussions. In NYC. for example. the foodies who in the past may have flocked to high end midtown eateries such as the Shun Lee Restaurants were now more excited about other Asian ethnic cuisines: Japanese, Thai, Korean, Vietnamese. In order to find cutting edge Chinese places one now had to venture into the city's expanding Asian enclaves: Flushing, 8th Ave in Brooklyn, and Manhattan Chinatown became the areas where all the action was. And this was echoed all over North America.The quest for exciting Chinese cooking would bring you to a surburban Asian mall outside of Toronto, or to Monterey Park in LA. So to answer the question, when was the food better, one must know about this history. In 1975 you could go into a number of midtown restaurants and find world class Chinese cooking. Now you need to go to a small family run place, or perhaps a large HK style glossy restaurant, but one where there is a head chef who can cook really well. You must remember one critical thing: Chinese restaurants can be setup to do two types of cooking: regular a la carte dishes and banquets. Very often the chef who can organize and operate a large restaurant feeding hundreds or thousands of customers in a day, has a totally different set of skills from the chef who can cook a wonderful banquet for a table of 10. Plus there is lot of skill involved in simply getting that head chef to put out the really good stuff for you. For example if I want a terrific meal in NYC I might head for Pings. But, only if I order in advance, and insist that Ping cooks it himself. He is a wonderful chef. When I go there to eat off the a la carte menu the quality varies greatly, and I cope with that by ordering items that I know they do well most of the time or that don't require such great skill and /or concentration. The same holds true at Shun Lee. The food off the regular menu is usually quite good, though it can be somewhat Americanized. But if you put out an effort (and some big bucks) and arrange a banquet with Michael Tong the owner, they can really blow you away. It's been my experience that chefs of all persuasions are most likely to strut their stuff when they realize their client truly appreciates their craft/art. As to which of the restaurants you listed has the best Salt Baked Squid, I don't know, we would have to progressively try each restaurant. Even then it would depend on 1) the quality of the squid they were starting with 2) and which chef cooked it. In fact if you were to sample each restaurant's version I don't think you could really make a good judgement until you had done this same exercise 3 or 4 times. And even then it might be different a few months later after a couple of stir fry chefs had moved around. By the way, the correct (Chinese) name of this dish is: Pepper (as in hot pepper) & Salt Squid. I find the use of the word 'baked' to be silly. It is obviously (and always in my experience) fried!
  16. Steven In the late 60's as an 18 year old I decided I wanted to have a James Beard/ Craig Claiborne like career. When I told my dad that after 15 years of serious academic private school education and a year of college that I wanted to 'drop-out' and study cooking in Switzerland he acted like I was crazy and like he wanted to break a chair over my head. At the time, a rather famous Chinese cooking teacher, Grace Zia Chu, was living and teaching in NYC. I started studying with her. She was a great teacher, but not a great cook - she had been an ambassador's wife and always had professional help. In those days, I frequently ate at The Shun Lee Dynasty which was rated 4 stars and was one of the top restaurants in town. Their cooking was terrific, heads and tales better than Grace's, and I decided that I needed a different sort of education. So as a hobby I started setting up Chinese banquets. Often I would have more than one per week, and when I found a particularly good chef I would return to him often, hoping that he would delve deep into his repetoire showcasing his skill and art. I came across one chef in particular who was especially skilled and became his student/protege. It turns out that Uncle Lou, my teacher, was one of the greatest Chinese chefs of the 20th century, though I didn't realize it at the time. He was a family chef, not a restaurant chef. Uncle Lou had spent many years cooking for the preminent 20th century Chinese artist, Chang Ta-Chien. (have you ever ordered Ta-Chien Chicken in a Szechuan restaurant? - Uncle Lou invented it). I was exposed to a level of cuisine that most top professional chefs weren't able to produce, and the standards and flavors that I encountered gave me an incomparable education. Soon afte that I went to work with a restaurateur named David Keh. A high liver, David was very important in the history of the Chinese restaurant industry in this country. He opened what is arguably the the first Szechuan restaurant in North America in the late 60's and in 1973, as his assitant, we opened a Hunan style restaurant called Uncle Tai's at 1059 Third Ave, NYC. It got a 4 star rating and I found myself as its host/maitre'd. From that date on, for a period of 10 years, I was associated with a series of top NYC Chinese restaurants including Shun Lee Palace, Shun Lee West, Pig Heaven and Auntie Yuan. I have been cooking seriously, virtually everyday since then (for fun), and chasing great food: Chinese as well as many other kinds.
  17. Unfortunately I can't give you an authoritative answer to this question because I am not familiar, except in general terms, with the current crop of SF Chinese restaurants. Since this is a constantly evolving scene - you know how Chinese chefs purportedly move around - I can only comment of what I have experienced. In the early and mid 90's, The Hong Kong Flower Lounge, both the branch in Burlingame and the one on Geary were special. Unfortunately, they are gone now, though I've heard that whatever restaurant is occupying their former Geary Street space is quite good. But the fact is I just don't know about SF in 2002. Anyway I would be shocked if you couldn't find more interesting food in LA which at this point far surpasses SF in the size and variety of the Chinese restaurant community. Perhaps Jonathon Gold @ Gourmet would have a bunch of information about this. He's interested and it's his native turf. In NYC, the vast majority of dim sum is pretty good but rarely outstanding. And it matters which items you order in which restaurants. For instance, some favorites include: 1) Sweet & Tart, 20 Mott or Flushing - For my money the best Cantonese dumpling makers we have, but with limitations - I love that you order off a menu - not as much fun as carts but the upside is that everything is cooked to order and therefore the dumplings/skins are rarely overcooked. The shrimp and watercress dumplings here are as good as they get (they're served in soup w/wo noodles - more dumplings if you don't get noodles) as are the unusual and very juicy Cantonese version of fried dumplings. Also this stuff is available all the time, not just from 10-3, and that is a good thing. I often order a big glass of freshly squeezed orange or watermelon juice and some dim sum here. Dinner is ordered off an entirely different menu and usually is reasonably good. Try ordering sliced beef with fried bread and 1/2 a crispy chicken with crispy garlic (sometimes called 'golden sands'). 2) The Golden Unicorn, 18 East Bway - A good choice for good quality, service and consistancy over many years. Traditional carts. 3) King's Seafood Palace?, 6th Ave and 62nd St in Bklyn - I like this place a lot. It's in a converted industrial building 2 blocks off the main 8th Ave Bklyn chinatown drag. A large HK style Cantonese with low prices and a good creative kitchen. When we were here last month their Har Kow (shrimp dumplings) were fashioned to look like little bunny rabbits with eyes and ears - any dim sum chef who knows how and goes to the trouble of doing this, especially on such a large scale, has his act together. If you're looking for a fun off-beat place to go, try this. 4) New Green Bo on Doyers St. has a Shanghai kitchen and doesn't serve dim sum, but they do have kicking fried dumplings - my vote for best in the industry. You might find equally good ones, but when they take the time and care to cook them properly, and they usually do, you won't find better (anywhere). Their steamed veg dumplings are really good as well. Soup Dumplings are just good - not great. The fried dumplings here are a variation on the traditional crescent shape - a little bit straighter with skins on the thin side - and the dumplings are left almost open at their ends - this style is sometimes referred to as a Dragon's Eye Dumpling. This variation is associated with a particular city in central eastern China whose name I don't recall at the moment. If you want the really good s---, the best North American dim sum or dim sum that is as good as you can get anywhere, it is most likely found in Vancouver, where the cooking quality in the best places is virtually equal to that of Hong Kong's best. Last month we were wowed by some of the things we tried at both branches of Sun Sai Wah, which year after year is Vancouver's most highly rated Chinese restaurant. A large Hong Kong style Cantonese which features classic banquets as well as a la carte and daytime dim sum, Sun Sai Wah has unusual variety - a number on items that I haven't seen in Hong Kong let alone New York - and outstanding quality - GREAT really. Their signature Squab, an item I eat but don't usually go out of my way to order, could not have been better. The only problem was that I couldn't eat there more often, and with more friends, so that I could sample everything! Clean and attractive surroundings combined with really good hospitality made this an impressive restaurant indeed. Plus Vancouver has many, many other Chinese restaurants, both funky and upscale, which are worth checking out. I'm certain one could find lots more exciting Chinese cooking in this town. Can't wait to try! (not to mention the favorable exchange rates and Vancouver's great new-style Indian restaurant called Vij - WOW)
  18. The meat at Florence Meat Market is excellent. Just as excellent, and more difficult to find, is their old-timey traditional butchering: larding, barding, butterflying, boning, aging, and seaming are all on exhibit here. Apparently so is their marketing savvy: case in point.....their Newport Steak. Sometimes called a "triangle" or a short steak, this is a cut that is typically sold as a part of a larger cut, often under the all encompassing name 'boneless sirloin'. It is one particular muscle that has been removed - seamed out - and cut into small steaks. It is particularly good when it comes from a young prime steer and has some age on it. These are things that the folks at Florence understand, and have turned into a justifiably good and fairly priced mini trend. For my money, however, when I want a particularly good steak to cook at home, I go to Florence and pluck down two twenties and spring for a 2" thick, 3 lb. Porterhouse. I look for very marbled and aged meat, and have regularly enjoyed a Luger's quality product, courtesy of Benny and Maria (who is the person you usually deal with). My only regret is that my favorite 'poor man's cut', the little heralded beef blade chuck, also known as chicken steak or butter steak is not on their 'menu'.
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