Nick

In a wood-fired pizza oven a relatively small fire is kept burning in the back of the oven and keeps the bricks (mass) up to temp. In a bread baking oven the mass is brought up to temp with a good fire which is then allowed to go out, and the damper is closed to retain heat in the oven. In a pizza oven it (the damper) is only partially closed to allow gases from the small fire to escape. In a pizza oven the door opening is always open and needs a fire to keep things up to temp. In a bread baking oven, the opening is closed up after the oven is loaded. In either case, the bread or pizza is cooked by the heat radiating from the masonry. Though in the case of ovens where pizza and other food is cooked some heat from the fire in the back of the oven may have some effect on flavor. In a well-tended oven though, smoke would not be a part of the flavor as the oven is hot enough that the fire is burning cleanly. I'd get Pat Manley who's been building ovens for many years to chime in here, but he's in Guatamala right now with his crew building clean burning stoves for the Mayans. I just make the dampers.

A few years ago I was working on new designs for very small waterpower wheels and had a free subscription to Modern Plastics, a monthly industry trade mag. One month featured a long article on advances being made in food packaging - particularly for meat. It was fascinating and a bit scary. For instance, one company had come up with a way to keep ground meat (hamburger) "fresh" for up to six weeks. I just did a search at Modern Plastic's website and couldn't find the article, but did come up with this which gives an idea of the "advances" being made that will make long distance prep and shelf life possible.

The Professional Chef from the CIA. Joy of Cooking - Both the new edition and my mother's old copy from 1962 - now held together with duct tape. Two three ring notebooks with recipes typed out on card stock by my mother with a manual typewriter - with handwritten notes and comments.

A little keilbasa small-diced, briefly sauted in evoo, and tossed in with the eggs adds flavor. As far as liquids; my mother used to put in some milk, Susie adds a little water, and I don't use either.

It seems to me that if point and counterpoint were to occur in food we would need two chefs to provide this. As Jonathon said in his original post, "....it has a lovely series of exchanges between the two principal instruments, each sometimes stepping forward, the sweetness of the violin and the austerity of the oboe combining to produce something more than either can individually." Two chefs working in harmony could, I think, do this.

No. I'm saying that you might not need all that power. An you need to be careful -- about make-up air, and bragging about your equipment. People might get the wrong idea. It's something to think about when Jason's stove top, if all burners were at full tilt at once, is equal to 38 horsepower. That's some power and doesn't even include the oven(s) - or the blower for the exhaust fan. It got me to thinking about a friend from up the road that's in Guatemala building cooking stoves for Mayan Indians as I write this. Want some ventilation problems? Here's an excerpt from Pat's website. "Our mission is to replace alot of what are known as 3 stone fires, with hand built masonry cookstoves. The 3 stone has a fire in the middle of 3 stones set as a triangle, with a metal plate (often the lid from a 55 gallon drum) laid over the top to cook on. These 3 stone fires are commonly located within a dwelling, providing heat as well. "The problem with this method of cooking and heating is that there is no way of properly venting the wood smoke. These wood fires are the sole source of cooking and warmth for thousands of Mayan families. Unfortunately, it is also the source of chronic respiratory illnesses. In the extreme, because it is traditionally the woman's job to tend the fire and do the cooking, women are exposed to more woodsmoke, often damaging their eyes which all to often leads to blindness by age 40! Growing up Maya in Guatemala is difficult enough, without the additional disadvantage of smoke damaged lungs and the numerous illnesses resulting from breathing large quantities of wood smoke daily. "One of the first dwellings that we went into, to see about building them a cookstove, still had their 3 stone fire burning. The air inside was kind of blue, and within a minute my eyes started to water, and within a few minutes they were burning. I could only stay inside about 3 minutes, but I could taste the smoke for hours". Quite a contrast. (I make the dampers for the commercial wood-fired ovens Pat builds in this country.)

The answer to "1)" would involve an interesting social commentary on the times we live in. From my perspective it would seem that many people can no longer judge the excellent from the good or the mediocre from the poor. So, not being able to discern one cut of meat from another, or whether a piece of fish is in good shape or not, they will settle for the mediocre of the supermarket - where all is "good". And so, people not having any knowledge or judgement of their own will opt for the "safeness and convenience" of the supermarket. So far as "4)", in my business I am not involved in food but I can closely relate to being, "a brilliant and obsessive perfectionist in his craft, [that] is not optimistic that he will find someone to take over the shop when he retires." It's a sad fact of the times that this is so. Like the people you describe, when I am gone, there will be also gone what I have tried to keep alive from those who came before me and managed to teach me a little something - as well as all that I've been able to learn on my own. People will look at my tools and wonder how they were used. It's just the way things are now. There's probably not much that can be done about it - for those of us who care. On a lighter note - I was in a local (good) supermarket last fall and was in the produce section looking at the various (also good) offerings. I noticed an older couple, perhaps in their late sixties, he with white hair and ponytail, and she with grey hair and bra-less (California hippies?) They were checking out the green beans. He picked one up, bent it between his fingers, and it snapped. He looked at her, she nodded her assent, and they put some in a bag to buy. I learned something about checking out green beans that day.

Jersey? You mean that place where after you pull out of NYC on an Amtrak you ride through miles of chemical wasteland and drainage ditches filled with greenish/brown goop? The place that used to be called the Garden State because of all the truck farms that fed NYC?

Maybe I haven't read enough of his posts. I haven't gotten the idea that he's a"smug bastard."

ugh. he gets smugger by the post. Tommy, he's right. Heat "travels", or flows, by all three. Taking the piece of meat in question, when you take it out of the oven a number of things are going to happen. For one, the meat is going to be hotter toward the outside of it than the inside of it. It will also be hotter than the air that's surrounding it once it's outside of the oven. So, by conduction, the heat inside the meat will travel to the meat that's even further inside and cooler. The meat that's closer to the outside will lose temperature as it flows to the cooler air surrounding the meat. By covering the meat with foil, less will be lost to the surrounding air and more will be driven toward the cooler (but still hot) meat in the middle. But, say you don't put foil around it when it comes out of the oven. (I'll leave aside thin film boundaries for now.) The meat is hot and is Radiating its heat to the surrounding air which is cooler. At the same time, the heat from the meat is setting up air currents by means of Convection and the air is moving from the bottom part of the meat and then, because heat in air rises, travels up to the top and beyond - where it then loses its heat to the cooler surrounding air and falls to repeat the cycle. Foil restricts both the radiation and, if left a little lose, the convective currents. Now, I have to get out of here and cook some chili. Heat transfer is easy compared to flavor transfer.

We've got anywhere from a foot to foot and a half of snow on the ground and got another couple of inches today. This is actually quite good as Maine has experienced a drought and low water tables for the past two years.

Would you be more comfortable if it were said that heat "migrates"? Really, heat does flow from hotter to cooler. How should we describe it? I've been working with heat for thirty or so years and have usually refered to its transmigration as travels, moves, or flows. Now, that I'm thinking about it, I mostly say that it flows. (As evidenced by my unconscious use of it in my second sentence.) Edit: Maybe you could get a carry over of 15 degress if you were cooking a whole pig and covered it after it came off the fire.

Poland Spring is not naturally carbonated; it's CO2 added. Also, at least some years ago, the flavored waters also contained corn syrup. I tried a few sips and poured the rest down the drain. Maybe they've changed and no longer add the corn syrup. I'll have to check out a bottle tomorrow. Things have probably changed (in many ways) since they were bought out by Nestle. I couldn't get the link to work, so tracked down this one to the same company. Maine Goodies

Try marinating the tuna in Tamari (soy) and grated ginger for a few hours before cooking on the grill. Before cooking the other side, throw some cherry chips (I use sawdust) on the charcoal and spray it with water to keep in from flaming (or soak the chips). Then cook the second side with the cover down to smoke and cook at the same time. If she doesn't like it this way, give up - again. I also like raw tuna (particularly the napes) dipped in the same thing as the marinade of Tamari and ginger.

A natural spring that runs cold and clear, and has good water beats what I have now. I had such a spring years ago on a different piece of land. It was just so beautiful to drink from it on a sweaty, hot summer day. And it the winter, it ran over and would melt the show in it's run-off. It was about the best water I ever had. But, good water is so hard to come by these days that I'm happy with what I have. It's why I stay where I am.

I drink water from my well. It is a drilled well, but only 55' deep. In the Spring the water usually runs out over the top of the well casing. It's a beautiful sight to see your water so plentiful that it rises a foot and a half above ground level and runs over. It's also good water and in addition to an electric pump I have a hand pump, by which means I can, with a few strokes, get fresh, cold water right from the ground. There's nothing that matches it for refreshment on a hot summer day.

I don't know if this can be answered. There is something in all of us that will find something that is disgusting, that is another's sublime treat. It may begin with the olafactory for much of it and sight for the rest of it. Before one can actually get to tasting something, one must move through the sight and smell of the thing if it seems to be verging on disgusting in either way. I think to move beyond that it usually involves a trusted friend who says, "This is great! Try some." Or something similar - and describes the particular taste and pleasure to be found in eating such a thing. Without that help how many of us would have ever ventured to try that otherwise "disgusting" piece of whatever?

My first thought, since you brought up New England and that's what I'm most familiar with, is that what is found in "American" restaurants is rarely to never as good as what you might experience in the homes of very good "American" cooks. And so, American cooking in restaurants has never made much of an impression on me. Most of what I've found, in my rare excursions to American restaurants, I could cook better myself or know someone else who can. On the other hand, especially when outside my region, I like sampling the local American offerings of wherever I'm passing through. For instance, I remember having a really good meal in St. Augustine (FL) at a restaurant I found by pulling into a gas station and asking for a good place to eat. Excellent southern seafood and hush puppies. But here again, I imagine that the good local home cooking was probably even better. This is wandering dangerously off-topic, but since reading your post Robert (and being an American), my thoughts wander to the differences between truly good cuisine that is cooked in the local home vs. what is found in the local restaurants. Perhaps the restaurants can give us an example of the local cooking, but, in most cases, the jewels will be found in the homes of people we'll never meet. Well, Robert, I've probably wandered so far from your original intent for this thread that it's okay not to post it.

I ran into the same thing with green beans lately. I don't know who came up with this fad and why people are cooking(?) them this way, but heavily boiled canned green beans (other end of spectrum) would be no worse.

Jin, before I posted my above, I did a google search on "cryovac plastic" and came up with quite a bit of stuff (a lot from manufacturers) and couldn't find any reference to using with heat. It all seemed to be about storage - and it is great for that. So, it reinforced my feeling that food should not be heated in it. I know there are miracle plastics out there, but I have my doubts about using any of them around heat. While I've never made a terrine, I sort of shudder at the thought of lining the mold with plastic wrap as called for in many recipes.

What JAZ said.

As far as I know cryovac plastics are only used for storage that is not heat related - that is it's not the same as those bags that one drops in boiling water.

If you have time, could you tell us more about that? Or, is there a link to something you've already written about it? Thanks, Nick

I agree with herblau. Maine now has some of the strictest anti-smoking laws in the nation. It's been banned in just about everyplace except bars (and from what I hear that may be banned as well.) My own view (along with herblau's) is that if you don't want, can't handle, the smoke - don't go there. Don't work there. You have a choice. I personally don't like and won't go to a place where tobacco smoke fills the air so much that it's unpleasant. That's my choice and it should be the same for everyone else - smoker or non-smoker. While we're on this, the Bush administration is now rolling back the clean air laws that we finally got on the books twenty and thirty years ago. It seems an interesting contradiction. Laws mandating "clean air" in places where you have a choice of going or not going. Dirty air for all outside of those places. Hail to the Chief.

Hey, what about braised snipes?