Dave the Cook

Over the last nine months, Janet Zimmerman (JAZ around here) and I have taught a three-day course called Kitchen Basics. We cover a lot of ground for kitchen newbs: Equipment essentials How to put together a pantry (including fridge and freezer staples) A variety of cooking techniques explored through recipes: steaming, boiling, roasting, braising, shallow frying and sauteeing Scientific foundations (again, using hands-on recipes): emulsions, reductions, browning, the Maillard reaction, salt effects Cuts of meat and fish: where they some from and guidelines for knowing which techniques to apply to them A variety of prep techniques It's roughly four hours of seminar and eight of hands-on work. Everyone gets a reference packet (16 pages of basic information) and a set of recipes. It's been very well-received; all three sessions sold out and got excellent evaluations from the students. It's been so successful that we've been asked to teach an intermediate version of the class (hmm . . . this sort of presumes an expert version down the road, doesn't it?) As much work as it is to put together and fine-tune, a class for beginners is straightforward: if you're teaching someone who knows very little, almost any information is helpful. Intermediates are more challenging -- we don't know what they know (or don't know); we don't have a good idea of their skill level; we're not sure what interests them. So we're putting the questions to the best group of cooks we know: members of the Society. Where's the middle ground between the person who burns water and the person who makes their own olive oil powder? What should we cover? How should we cover it?

The prep chimp could be chopping a carton of cabbage or shelling a case of shrimps -- what's the difference? Squeezing a lime takes ten seconds. I don't much care about a $51 cocktail -- there are plenty of great drinks at a third the price or less, and I haven't made my way through those yet. But the grilled lime -- as Katie has made clear -- is the least of the expense.

$51 doesn't sound like a bad return at all.

Grill (or smoke) some cut limes and squeeze them? ETA: I've done this with tomatoes, and the juice is indeed smoky.

I'm really looking forward to this opening, which has been pushed back to the week of 14 April. A driving force behind Holeman and Finch (which is right across the driveway from Restaurant Eugene) is longtime Eugene employee Greg Best, one of the most talented and dedicated mixologists I know.

Two of my favorite things, ribs and wings. But I've never been to St. Maarten, so I don't know what the culinary influences are. Is it jerk, Creole, French, Dutch?

Richard (as you can see from the post in the Daily Gullet) puts a high price on craft, and I'm sure he's fine with Bayless copying the dish -- it's a sign of respect, after all. But it's one thing to say you're appropriating a dish; it's another thing to actually put it into service. Richard is like a guy I knew who got rich in the early 80's tech scene. He used to say "Ideas are easy. Making them work is the trick." I've seen Blais invent dishes on the spot with ingredients that just show up on the dock (at Element, he had a standing order with his fruit-and-vegetable guy to just bring the best stuff he could find; the crew would figure out a way to get it on the menu).

Do you know what lamb parts you might be getting?

Wouldn't Perlow be an example of an undiagnosed case of diabetes? Dude thinks he's healthy, starts feeling crummy, talks to a doctor who says "Surprise, your 400 pound self has diabetes!". How many people like that are walking around under the impression that everything is fine? ← Perlow has been diagnosed. ETA: Underdiagnosis might be asserted had Jason gone for a checkup and been told that he didn't have diabetes when in fact he did. A suspicion that a condition is underdiagnosed is just that -- a suspicion. If you prove that it exists, you remove the underdiagnosis. The Flegal study demonstrates that diabetes was underdiagnosed in the past, but it could only do that in light of historical statistics. The Flegal study also suggests that what people are calling an epidemic is in reality a correction in observation. The same proportion of people had diabetes in 2002 as they did 14 years earlier. All that changed was that in 2002 we knew about them, and in 1988 we didn't.

With all due respect, asserting that a condition is underdiagnosed is a logical impossibility. The only way to obtain facts to back up such a statement is to have, well, diagnosed the condition. In which case . . .

Fair enough. An increase in diagnoses isn't the same thing as increased incidence. This article discusses the issue:

I can't speak for Steven, of course, but I can point to several studies to support his contentions. See this 2007 article in the New York Times. It concerns, among other things, the results of a 1986 study of identical twins separated at birth -- the gold standard for genetic studies (the study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine): Another piece in the Times (this and the preceding column are both by Gina Kolata; article here) talks about Rockefeller University obesity researcher Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: One more from Kolata:

Not by accident that the Beijing Olympics start on 08/08/08 ! Very lucky number in Chinese. Going looking for that book now. J ← Here's a link that will get you the book, and send a few yuan the Society's way as well: The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

A short item in the AJC's Peach Buzz outlines the scope of Blais's next project, an "upscale burger joint" with the working name of "Flip": I know that Blais spent quite a bit of time developing the burger that's being served at Elevation. It will be interesting to see how he handles an entire menu of ground flesh. ETA: the whole (short) story is here. Scroll down to "Blais & burgers."

Click here for the Society file on Richard Blais.

Yes, of course. I should have noticed, as I know the difference. Still, an interesting breakdown. ← No, it's in there: "free acidity as citric acid, 3.5 g (per 100 ml)." For reference, over here it says "(l)emon juice and lime juice are rich sources of citric acid, containing 1.44 and 1.38 g/oz, respectively." Converting the JFS numbers to g/oz gives us 1.03 g/oz of citric acid for a Meyer. ETA: if my arithmetic is correct (grams per ounce is a dumb way to measure), oranges have about 0.22 g/oz of citric acid. (Check my math: it's roughly 750 mg/100 ml.)

Right. This leads me to think that the fuss is about not about acid so much as it's about sugar. The USDA measures the pH of lime juice at 2.00 to 2.35; lemon juice at 2.00 to 2.60; and the JFS says Meyers average 2.65. Even given the logarithmic nature of the pH scale, the average Meyer is only a bit less acidic than a standard lemon (much closer to lemon than it is to orange, which ranges around pH 4); what seems to make the difference is sugar content, since standard lemons and limes contain very little, and oranges by comparison have about twice as much sugar as Meyer lemons. Thyme scent aside (I've never noticed this, but now I'm going to be on my guard), it seems to me that anyone used to making recipe adjustments from Old Overholt to Rittenhouse BIB or Tanqueray to Plymouth shouldn't find Meyer lemons all that perplexing.

What temperature are you serving the starter at? If it's at room temperature or warmer, you might be able to use methylcellulose to give it some structure. Cooler than that, gelatin might help. Neither would affect flavor or flavor intensity.

The blender as we know it today -- a tall jar with a bottom-mounted blade -- didn't exist until 1937. The price was an extravagant $29.75, at a time when a basic Chevrolet cost less than $700, meaning that the Waring Blendor (as it was orginally called) would run you roughly 900 of today's dollars. It didn't become popular until after World War II -- Waring didn't sell a million units total until 1954. All of that to say that through the war, the likely machine would have been a variation on the Hamilton-Beach Single Spindle Drinkmaster (something like this, though the original was hand-held) -- as Andy suggests, a milkshake mixer. Read more in the Daily Gullet article The Birth of the Blender (by Margaret McArthur and, erm, myself).

I remember deep-fried strips of chicken breast being served as bar food in the late 70s and early 80s. Whatever their marketing prowess (or maybe it IS their marketing prowess), McDonald's doesn't innovate so much as capitalize on trends that are already sufficiently underway as to prove marketability. Though I don't know the specifics, I recall McNuggets as a savvy product that made an institution out of a grass-roots food phenomenon.

Me too, and I'm not finding this discussion illuminating -- not that members aren't trying to help! It finally occurred to me to go back to Wondrich's Killer Cocktails, with the thought that Mr. Wondrich is often generous in his explanations, and that perhaps I'd missed something. Sure enough, on page 10, he pontificates: While, absent other descriptors, I object to the word "funky" in this context (surely we can find a precise word or group of words to describe the aroma and taste of really dark rums), I find this categorization much more useful than light/gold/dark. It tells me that Inner Circle 115 is more of the pirate-style, and Flor de Cana 7, while dark, is an aged Cuban, though it verges on the modern style. I do wonder if, a couple of hundred years ago, rummers hadn't recognized the distinctive styles and called them different things -- like Bob, Steve and Marlon -- rather than lumping them all into the single category of rum, we wouldn't be better off.

I've only tasted Aviation at Tales of the Cocktail, but I don't recall black pepper in the profile. Before passing judgment, it seems fair to try Ryan Magerian's recipe for an Aviation-based Aviation, I think. I posted this after Tales: Discussion of the recipe ensued. You can find it here.

I think you've got the essence of it here. Within reason, it doesn't matter what temperature the oven is; the liquid in the pot simply can't rise above 212 F -- that's physics. So as a recipe writer, you do the responsible thing and make sure the oven temperature is sufficient to keep the liquid boiling. I suspect the oven is preferred (it's why I prefer it, anyway) because it's a more stable environment. 300 F is also sufficient to bring the liquid to a boil in case the cook hasn't brought things to a proper simmer prior to ovenage, and accounts for heat loss when you open the oven door to put the dish in. On the other hand, I've done stovetop braises for 3-4 hours without problems. It's just a matter of paying attention in case the seal of the lid isn't perfect (none of them are). After all, you've got the same boiling point in play. I do think that 212 F is a bit higher than optimum for a braise. 180 F is what I shoot for: high enough for collagen conversion and safety, and as low as possible to mitigate protein contraction. What I usually do is bring the oven to 325 F, get the dish in the oven, give it 15 minutes, then reset the oven to 200 F.

I've done it that way, too!

It does help a bit. But where do I categorize Flor de Cana white (aged four years)? Or Inner Circle (take your pick of proofs: 80, 90, 115, 151), which is dark-colored and deeply flavored, but doesn't indicate age? The recommendations for Mount Gay, Appleton Gold and Mathusalem Classico are welcome; I'll seek them out. How are they best employed?