David A. Goldfarb

Add a little stock or water, and it should loosen up.

Today's project along these lines was a Sauce à la Laguipierre--mushrooms and shallots simmered in white wine and veal stock; spiced with garlic, bay leaf, allspice, and pepper; combined with velouté and the abovementioned "mushroom essence;" thickened with egg yolks and cream; strained and finished with butter and lemon juice. I served it with grilled salmon and white asparagus. Traditionally it might be served with sole or in a dish like Tournados à la Laguipierre, served on toast with foie gras and a slice of truffle. It's kind of interesting that it is versatile enough to go with fish or beef, and easily with chicken or veal. Laguipierre was Napoleon's cook and a mentor to Carême. One of the things I like about making these sauces is that they make one realize what the mid-century modern convenience foods like canned mushroom soup were replacing. Of course anything made with good homemade stocks is going to be more subtle and complex than industrial soup from a can, but I could totally see this in my grandmothers' (plural--they all made it) tuna-noodle casserole.

I've bought celery from the Greenmarket here in New York, and it's been the same variety as the commercial celery, but it tends to be less uniformly straight and has more flavor. I often use the leafy tops in stock.

New York City. Ida Red for eating, and lately Northern Spy for baking.

For the kind of tomato sauce that cooks for a long time, I toss the pasta with a small amount of sauce and let it sit over low heat for a minute or so to absorb the flavor of the sauce, and then spoon more sauce over the pasta on the plate if needed, and that works well.

I have a Messermeister butane torch (I think the same torch is sold under a few different brand names), and I've noticed the off flavor and find it is reduced or eliminated by keeping the torch a bit farther away from the food. You just have to experiment a bit with the flame setting and the distance.

This is a good year for more classic and historic sauces, I think. There are so many of them, and I seem to have built up enough of a library of stocks in the freezer that I could actually make a good number of them without too much additional effort, replenishing stocks along the way. There's still always something, though. Today I found myself making "mushroom essence" (broth steeped with mushrooms and a little lemon juice), which appears with surprising frequency in The Epicurean, and Escoffier mentions "mushroom liquor" without exactly saying what it is (or at least not anywhere that appears in the index). How is it that we manage without mushroom essence today, when Ranhofer added it to all kinds of savory things? I figure there's a whole array of lost and forgotten flavors out there worth rediscovering.

In New York and other high value real estate locales where rent is a bigger expense than staff, I think we're already seeing more interesting restaurants moving out of high rent districts and exploring new geographic territory.

I just pile the stale bread off to the side of the breadbox, and when it's thoroughly dried out, I put it in the blender to make breadcrumbs and store it in a bag. This seems to produce enough breadcrumbs for what I need.

Really good Chinese peanut oil, piment d'Espelette, my first wild yeast sourdough starter. Not a flavor, but Japanese knife sharpening has definitely allowed me to create some new textures.

I've been living in Queens for about a year and a half, and haven't really explored all the Asian restaurants yet, but I recommend the Great Wall Market (77-00 Queens Blvd. near the PanAmerican Hotel) in Elmhurst, if you want to make a stop at an excellent Asian market.

That's a beautiful chocolate mousse cake. Two days ago my wife and I went to see It's Complicated, in which Meryl Streep's character owns a bakery (a little overlap from her previous film, there), and in one scene she takes her date, played by Steve Martin, to the bakery and offers to make him anything on the menu, or anything off the menu that she can make, and he asks for chocolate croissants, and it being a bakery where they probably have dough already folded in the fridge, and a sheeter to roll it out quickly, and a temperature controlled proofing cabinet, so the final rise doesn't have to take too long, and through the magic of editing, they're eating croissants before morning. Of course we're both in the mood for chocolate croissants after this, so I said I'd make some, since I had all the ingredients on hand, but I warned her that it was going to take longer than it did in the movie. It's been a few years since I last made croissants, and it's a little cool in the kitchen this time of year, so between all the long risings and foldings and chillings and rollings and chillings and risings, I started yesterday morning, and this morning she could wake up to the aroma of butter and chocolate wafting from the kitchen. I divided the dough in half after folding, so maybe next time I can do it a little more on the time scale of the movie, even without a mechanical sheeter. I'd forgotten what a good croissant is supposed to taste like. I really need to make them more often.

Is it just homogenization and industrial food? The other side of culinary globalization is the influx of Asian and Middle Eastern cuisines into Europe and hybrids like chicken tikka masala in the UK and currywurst in Berlin.

The pasta dish is indeed a winner as is the venerable LEO (lox, eggs, & onions, scrambled). Making my own bagels in New York City, I know, it seems crazy, but it's not that difficult, and I'm hedging my bets in case we find ourselves in a non-bagel city someday. I make my own corned beef, too. Haven't sorted out pickles yet.

Bagels 4 c Bread flour (King Arthur Sir Lancelot Flour is even better) 1 tbs barley malt syrup (Eden Organics makes it) 1.5 tsp salt 1.5 tsp yeast 1-1/4 c water Knead all ingredients in a mixer (about 6 minutes on 2 setting on my Kitchen Aid). Add a little more water to bring dough together if necessary. Make 12 balls of dough and allow to rest for about ten minutes. Poke a hole in each ball with your thumb, and stretch into bagel shape. Refrigerate overnight. Remove, return to room temperature and allow to rise until double in bulk, about 2-3 hours total. Preheat oven to 450F Put the bagels into boiling water for 15 sec on each side, beginning with the top side down. Brush with an egg wash and top with toppings if desired Bake for about 15-20 min.

I can't imagine buying pancake batter in a spray can, but the concept isn't uninteresting. I've been experimenting a bit with pancake batter in a Thermo-Whip and haven't quite gotten the right consistency, but it's almost there. The batter needs to be thinner than pancake batter so that it whips and sprays smoothly, but thicker than crepe batter to have enough structure to hold up to the extra whipping of the whipper. Preserved in the Thermo-Whip under nitrous oxide, it should last in the fridge nicely, and my thought is that it should make a lighter pancake.

Nova lox is brined and smoked. Gravlax is salt/sugar cured with dill and sometimes other spices under weight and not smoked.

You mean they sell it in bottles?

I think this is very much the case, and if one is cooking all the time, then a lot of things get made along the way that may not have been the original object, like poaching a chicken to strengthen a batch of chicken stock and having a poached chicken to use in chicken salad or soup or ravioli or pot pie or whatever. The other day I was making a batch of clarified butter and thinking about what I might do with the otherwise discarded milk solids, so I made up a batch of pancake batter to throw them into, and when the jet lagged wife and son woke up, I made pancakes. Food begets food.

There were a couple of semesters in college when baking bread was a weekly thing, and I could usually make enough to last for the better part of the week. Since then, I've gone through periods of baking much of my own bread off and on, and for the last couple of years it's been mostly on. I've definitely found that I bake more since acquiring a stand mixer, so that is a big factor, and I'm fairly sure that the Kitchen Aid has paid for itself by now in terms of making things at home for less money than it would cost to buy them. I tend to work from home a lot, so waiting for bread to rise and bake works well with my schedule and doesn't require a great deal of labor time, even compared to walking a few blocks to the bakery and back.

Have you seen those individually washed and shrink-wrapped potatoes sold for baking in the microwave for about a dollar a piece? I'm not sure if you have to pierce them with a fork, or if they do that as well.

I used to visit a friend at his country home in the south of Poland, and they had an old brick stove and at the time no running water. I gather they've since dug a well, maybe in the 1990s. If I recall the story correctly, the house was originally purchased before WWII, burned down within a year or two, and was rebuilt, so I don't know if the stove dates from that period or if it survived the fire and was in fact much older. The stove had an oven, holes for pots or frying pans, spaces in the back for pots on low heat, and a big well for a large stockpot that was used mainly to heat water for bathing and I suppose washing clothes and such, and the heat from the oven warmed the whole cottage. Everything in the stove was heated by the same fire essentially, but one could move the fuel around, say, to get more heat on the front burners or to regulate the temperature of the oven. In Escoffier and in nineteenth-century cookbooks there are often instructions to place a pot half off the fire or to prop a pot up with a wedge so the scum will collect on one side and will be easier to skim. And to think how obsessive we can be with our oven thermometers, Thermapens, infrared thermometers, PID controllers and modern ovens, ranges, and sous vide circulators. Managing the heat in a large wood-fired stove is really an art! I would think that the slow braise and stockpot are ways of capturing the heat from other more heat-intensive operations, so they were ways of using heat more efficiently. Soups and stews could be kept on the back burner rather than refrigerated. This seemed to be a common practice in Poland when I was there for an extended period in the late 1980s, even among the vast majority of people who had gas or electric stoves.

The main thing is one part sugar to three parts kosher salt, and then everything else is a flavoring. For traditional gravlax, that would be coarsely ground pepper (about 1/4 or 1/2 as much as the sugar) and fresh dill (a few sprigs to cover the inside surfaces of the fillets). Lately I've been trying other things. The last one I did the main spice was black fennel seeds with coarsely ground black pepper and juniper berries. The traditional method is to cover two fillets with the rub and set on a plate with the two sides face in with the dill in the middle and another plate on top weighted down, spooning the juice over it and flipping it after a day of curing, and it's done in about two days. What I've done recently is to vacuum seal the fillets with the rub in a bag and just flip the bag without any additional weight, and the pressure of the vacuum seems sufficient. I've also done a single fillet this way, and it's worked fine, but the curing time is shorter. After curing wipe off the cure with a damp cloth or paper towel, or you can even rinse it lightly, and slice like lox with a thin sharp flexible knife like a long boning knife. There are salmon knives for large pieces, but I don't own one, and I'm not usually curing such large fish.

I've tried it with individually quick frozen Alaskan wild sockeye salmon from Trader Joe's, and it worked pretty well. You just need to find two similarly sized portions. The fish comes very neatly filleted, so there isn't any waste, and it's about $7-8/lb.

Gravlax is another great thing to make yourself. I remember when I started doing it several years ago, it seemed like a complicated thing, but now I realize it's five minute's work, ten if I have to fillet the salmon, and then two days of waiting, and it's this excellent thing to have around at maybe 1/3 the price of what it would cost in prepared form.