David A. Goldfarb

We seem to get a lot of products like ground flaxseed and dried fruits that come in supposedly resealable plastic bags, but often the part that is supposed to tear off doesn't tear properly, and even if it does, the zip seal rarely works, and then if you just want to close it with a clip, there's a bump from the zipper that prevents it from folding neatly. Then there are oils and vinegars that come with some kind of flow restrictor on the bottle that doesn't really restrict it enough for any practical use, so you still have to put your thumb over the top of the bottle to shake it onto something lightly.

Another reason to tie birds for roasting is to keep the stuffing or aromatics in. It also makes it easy to keep the wings tucked in, so they don't burn. I also do it for chickens to be poached, tying a long end of the string to the handle of the pot, so it will be easy to remove. I've always done it without a trussing needle, starting from the legs in the middle of a long piece of twine, crossing over and then around, and it holds everything together. I've refined that technique over the years, so it works pretty reliably. I'll make a video when I'm back in New York. I also tie roasts of various sorts, particularly if they've been boned, so they cook evenly, and I've gotten better at making a running butcher's knot for things like pancetta or rolled roasts of various sorts.

Decent bread of many types from a variety of bakeries. Butcher shops for sure, particularly shops where dry aging and cutting whole sides to order were just the norm before the era of boxed beef. Produce that tastes like something. Yes, now we can get anything year round, but it's as if three or four months worth of flavor have been spread thinly across twelve months. We have these things in New York if one doesn't mind traveling a bit around the city, paying a little extra for what is now a "luxury" product, and waiting for Greenmarket days, but they're not ubiquitous like they used to be, and in many places they don't exist at all.

Today I discovered the easiest way to crank out panini for a crowd lacking a panini grill is with two reversible grill/griddles, and for the occasional panini maker like myself, they don't take up much space, and a couple of cast iron griddles are cheap. My father passed away last week, and we had the funeral yesterday, after which our cousins sent over trays of cold cuts, cheese, some great rye bread, cole slaw, pickles, potato salad, pastry and such. We had more leftovers than we knew what to do with, but relatives were congregating at my mother's house today around lunchtime, and I knew my father had two of these griddles, slightly different sizes, but close enough. My father had been in the hospital for about a year, and my mother doesn't cook much, so I had to take them out to the garden and clean them up a bit first and reseason them. Each griddle could hold four large panini. I only had the heat on the bottom grill, so the cheese would have enough time to melt, and so I could keep them going at a reasonable pace while I prepped more sandwiches. The second grill was used as the press on top of the sandwiches. As they came up, I cut them in threes, so everyone could try a few different types (roast beef with horseradish, mustard and cheese; pastrami with cheese and mustard; turkey with cheese and tomatoes; salami with balsamic vinegar, cheese and olives; turkey with cheese and tomatoes; roast beef with cheese and tomatoes--can you tell I was trying to get rid of a lot of cheese?). This fed eight adults and three kids a hot lunch with leftovers in no time.

Yes, the recommendation from the shop was first to fill it with boiling water and to pour boiling water over it, letting it sit for about a half hour, and to do this three times. Then to season they recommended to brew three pots of strong tea of the type to be dedicated to that pot using enough tea that the leaves would fill the pot, each time letting the pot sit until cool, and generally not cleaning the pot with a brush or with soap either during seasoning or afterward. I've done that using the Imperial Gold China Oolong from McNulty's in Manhattan, and I've made a few pots of the same tea in it since, and I've been very pleased with it.

I'm in Vegas, not for the happiest of reasons--it's my father's funeral tomorrow, but today also happens to be my wife's and my tenth anniversary, and we know my father would have wanted us to celebrate and tell him about the restaurant afterward, so we made a reservation a couple of days ago after arriving in town, mentioning that we'd be interested in trying a riserva steak. Alas, there were none available this evening, so I guess if one wants to be sure, it would be a good idea to make the request further in advance and confirm availability by phone, but we still had a great meal. We started with a dry-aged beef carpaccio lightly seared on the outside, but still raw throughout over arugula with a Barolo reduction and shaved parmesan. A little oversalted, but once you got through that, the Barolo reduction was quite nice and the beef had a surprising sweet flavor. Next were angelhair pasta with a white truffle egg yolk sauce, like a carbonara, but without ham, with additional freshly shaved white truffle at the table. This was also a bit oversalted, but the truffle was quite delightful, the $50 price tag for a half-order a bit of a surprise. We also got a half order of the beef cheek ravioli with a nice sweet and thick aged balsamic (though not a tradizionale), grated parmesan, and what seemed to be another egg based sauce. A good combination of sauces and flavors, but I thought the beef cheek filling could have had a more interesting texture had it been less finely ground. We had two glasses of a 2004 St. Emilion bordeaux, I forget exactly which, mostly cabernet franc and a small proportion of merlot, which was pleasantly earthy. The main course was a 10-week aged porterhouse for two, medium rare, with Maldon salt. Of a variety of sauces we chose a porcini bearnaise, and we ordered a side of sauteed mixed wild mushrooms and cippolini onions. I thought the bearnaise was a bit overcooked, and would have liked a stronger porcini flavor, but the mushrooms and cippolini were good, and the steak was perfect. 10 weeks is not 8 months, but I could still tell the difference between this and a 4-6 week aged prime steak. The fat seemed to have something like a cured texture, and the fillet side had good density and concentrated flavor. I recently had a steak at another excellent steak house that I ordered medium rare and thought it was cooked at too high a temperature--just right in the middle but too great a proportion of well-done to rare. This was just right for my taste--a thin layer of char, a layer of medium rare, and a rare center. Sliced tableside by the waiter with a dull knife. He managed to do a neat enough job, but one wonders about steakhouses that want to make a show of tableside carving and don't give the waiters sharp knives and the training to use them in an impressive and flawless way. I saw a similar performance at Strip House--knife too short, didn't make a mess, but not much of a show for what should be a show. This is the sort of thing those cranky guys at Luger do effortlessly. Dessert was a chocolate cream tart with a very thin crust and an elderberry sauce--very nicely done, and they can also make a decent, very aromatic espresso.

Hot water, by the time it comes from the boiler through the pipes to the tap is likely to bring more things with it than cold water, as I've always understood it, and that's why it's usually recommended to start with cold water for anything in the kitchen, unless you have a hot water heater at the tap.

Vacpacked roasted chestnuts sound like an ingredient to use in something else, like a chestnut soup, if you don't have access to fresh roasted chestnuts. I wouldn't eat such a thing straight up. Try buying some fresh ones and roasting them yourself to see what they should taste like. Just cut a slit or a cross on top of each one so they'll be easy to peel, put them in the oven at around 425F until they open up and the shells peel back. The kitchen will fill with the great smell of roasted chestnuts. Take one out and peel it to test that it's cooked through (careful, hot!). If some of them don't open up, they are probably moldy. You'll usually have a few moldy ones in any given batch.

I think McGee's article showed that it was possible to soften dry pasta and cook it to an acceptable temperature with less water than traditionally recommended, and that smaller amount of water would contain more starch and could be added back to sauces, but McGee did not demonstrate that the pasta would have the most desirable texture by cooking in a small amount of water, at least not if you like your pasta al dente. Unlike some other things, I think you want pasta to cook unevenly, so it softens on the outside and retains a thin firm core and has a gradation from soft to hard. The way to do that is to cook it quickly in a large amount of boiling water, removing it from the water before the center gets too soft. Cook it in too little water as McGee tested in his article, or too cold water, and it will cook to the same boring mushy texture all the way through.

Congrats! I particularly like "The Fourth Guy."

I'd think about mild vinegars like sherry vinegar and good Japanese brown rice vinegar.

Temperature below 50F this morning, and an improvised cassoulet of sorts is in the oven using white beans, slab bacon, Italianish pork sausages from the Greenmarket, some leftover brisket with a very intense reduced braising liquid, onions, and diced portobellos. Since it's cooking in the oven with moist heat, I suppose it's something like braising--definitely fall weather cooking.

Often I like just a good vinegar and sea salt, maybe some freshly ground black pepper, and nothing else.

Here's my new yixing pot, about 300ml. The owner of the shop explained that they generally came in four basic colors, and this color is fired at a higher temperature than some of the other clays. The text, she said, is the Heart Sutra. The inside perforated where the spout attaches. Here is the maker's stamp on the inside of the lid, also showing the airhole in the lid. And this is the maker's stamp on the bottom of the pot. The shop had a selection of around 40 or 50 yixing pots and tea sets with matching cups on display in various designs, colors, and sizes as well as other Chinese teaware. They don't have a full website yet, but you can find their contact information at http://www.daolondon.co.uk/

A new batch of Heavily Smoked Lapsang Souchong from McNulty's. They also offer a lightly smoked version.

I'd think the main nutritional element of stock would be protein from gelatin.

I believe the standard date code for eggs is a number from 1-365, corresponding to the days of the year, indicating the date the eggs were packed. I'm not sure what the time between laying and packing is.

I've done it with all red onions, and they come out fine, usually on the sweet side, but I'm really pleased with the half red/half yellow mix I used this time around. I think the key thing is that they're fresh local onions.

If I'm buying from a supermarket, I get large eggs, because recipes usually call for large, but if I'm in the Greenmarket, a dozen eggs can vary somewhat from not quite large to jumbo, and the smaller ones are usually sold separately. I'll accept the variation to get farm fresh eggs. If I have both on hand, then I'll usually use the standardized ones for baking and the fresh ones for scrambled eggs, omelets, and such.

After all this discussion I sliced up the three pounds of red and white onions I had from the Greenmarket a few days ago and made a batch. It took about two hours and yielded about a cup and a half.

Here's Tom Colicchio's version-- http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2007/12/cook-the-book-onion-confit-recipe.html

I do it on the stovetop, and 5 lbs. of onions will take a while on medium to medium-low heat--maybe an hour or two--but not all day. I'm usually trying to get an even caramelized consistency with much of the water cooked out, rather than burned at the edges and soft in the middle, which is what happens if it's done too quickly (not that that isn't okay for some purposes as well).

I'm sure that for Keller's specific use, sweated onions that haven't caramelized are perfect, but when I make onion confit, I want it brown and caramelized more like in the last group of photos, somewhere between the eighth and the ninth image. If you get onion confit with a terrine, for example, at Bar Boulud, it looks like the onions in the first photo with the Camembert, but a finer mince and more meticulously presented. Is Keller wrong? Is Boulud wrong? No, they just have different ways of doing things.

Not a mistake at all. This technique is called "remouillage" and is a way of increasing the yield from a given quantity of bones. You still may want to reduce the total volume to whatever strength you desire, or based on how much freezer space you have.

Indeed, any intuition I have about centigrade temperatures comes from darkroom work, so as long as it's around 20C, I know it's about 68F, and I know that 0C is freezing, and 100C is boiling, but move away from those reference points, and I have to start thinking about it.