David A. Goldfarb

Thanks for the advice. I've ordered some samples. Ideas are brewing.

Just to update this thread, I recently was shopping around for a 1 pint Thermo Whip, and the best price I found (about $100 shipped) was at-- http://www.restockit.com/Whipped-Cream-Dispensers-.html It arrived today, about 5-6 days after placing the order, and looks to be a very solid piece of kitchenware. I forgot to order cartridges at the same time, so I'll pick some up tomorrow at Zabar's and start experimenting. It comes with a pamphlet of recipes and hints, which looks like it was written for the 1 l Gourmet Whip, but the recipes are easily divisible, and one should take note that the recommendation in the recipe book to keep the Gourmet Whip warm in a bain marie do not apply to the the Thermo Whip.

Thanks for the silvertips tip. That sounds very interesting. I know I'm very fortunate to have good tea a subway ride away, but you've made me curious.

Food photography with an edge in the latest issue of the online Fraction Magazine-- http://www.fractionmag.com/group5/ There is a curator's statement by Melanie McWhorter at the end of the show. Without saying too much about this before people have a chance to look at it, I like the way the project is curated. She finds an interesting thread in a fairly diverse group of photographs by a diverse group of photographers.

Yes, I think it's purple kohlrabi. Kohlrabi is usually green/white, but I've seen purple ones recently at the Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan.

Buying tea in a tea shop like McNulty's on Bleecker St. in the West Village is such a pleasurable experience that I've never felt inclined to purchase tea over the internet. I'm sure I'm missing out on some excellent tea, and I would definitely buy tea over the internet if I had no other options, but I love being able to go into the shop, see the tea in the large glass apothecary jars and take in the aromas as I decide what to purchase. I usually get the Heavily Smoked Lapsang Souchong (there is also a lightly smoked version), the Golden Darjeeling, and one or two others. Right now I also have the Flowery White Pekoe. I like the elderly Chinese man who stamps the bag with one of the rubber stamps they have for each kind of tea they sell and then scoops the tea into the bag on the scale. With so many businesses shutting down in lower Manhattan due to high real estate prices it would be such a travesty if a century-old institution like McNulty's were to be turned into another Gap or Starbucks or a chain pharmacy that it feels like a duty to shop there whenever possible, though my wife and I don't drink enough tea to do that more than once or twice a year, and then I might stop in occasionally to buy tea as a gift for a friend who likes tea. They do have a website at http://mcnultys.com where you can download a catalogue, but no e-commerce portal on the website.

I finished the article, and it is curious that he has such a history of eating issues. It makes his most recent career seem like some sort of grand overcompensation or maybe self-testing.

The New York Times magazine is publishing a big chunk of food critic, Frank Bruni's memoir of food due out in about a month or so. There is a preview, including the full text of the Sunday Magazine piece here-- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine...&pagewanted=all I haven't finished reading it, but there is an audio slide show that he narrates, if you're curious about what he sounds like. I was particularly struck by the way that he is one of those people who is completely recognizable from his baby pictures.

By separating meat and the liquid, I think you would get a less intense flavor, but more solid texture, if you don't want the meat to fall apart, as for a roast that you want to be able to slice.

I usually store the meat in the liquid, and the flavors seem to intensify. That's what I'd do with short ribs. The only times I don't, I suppose, is if it's something like a pot roast that I want to be able to slice cold before reheating.

Not often, true. But that Ruhlman & Polcyn recipe is an example. ← They have another recipe for sopressata that looks a lot more like sopressata than their recipe for peperone.

I'd say slicing makes a big difference for a braised brisket that isn't cooked so long that it's falling apart. A brisket that's perfectly good sliced against the grain can be tough and stringy sliced with the grain. I had an aunt who sliced with the grain to get longer slices, and they took a lot longer to chew than shorter slices against the grain. In our family we did horseradish with brisket. Fresh grated with vinegar is best, if you like it strong. Horseradish grated with beets, or red horseradish from a jar, has a bit more complex flavor and isn't quite as rough on the nasal passages. I posted our family recipe on my sister's "Family of Food" blog a while back. My posts are generally under "Son of Food"-- http://familyoffood.blogspot.com/2008/01/j...-soul-food.html

Ruhlman and Polcyn give a recipe for an artisanal peperone in their book, _Charcuterie_, which they claim has an ancient history. Sopressata comes in at least two styles, one sweet, which has more of a detectable wine flavor as well as a tart flavor from fermentation and whole or slightly crushed black pepper; and one spicy, which is often described as "Calabrese," where the hot pepper tends to be the dominant flavor. On pizza, if it's good, it's good.

That's a bit like "cheese food"--as if they need to remind you that it's food and not, say, plastic.

I love reading about the elaborate presentation of some of the dishes in _The Epicurean_. Stanley Punch--"Arrange the punch inside of a goblet beside which is a heron made of gum paste (No. 3624) surrounded by grasses" (illustration included). It's just not the same without the heron.

For the traditional European sauces I like the classics like Escoffier and Ranhofer's _Epicurean_. You can download _The Epicurean_ in two PDF files from this great collection of historic American cookbooks-- http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbo...oks/book_47.cfm Here's the main entry page for the site-- http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/index.html

Do you really think it's possible to spread a dough on a hot stone with your bare hands? ← Sounds a bit iffy to me, but if people are trying it, I suppose the approach would be to stretch a very soft dough with one's hands and then transfer it to the stone and push it around a bit without touching the stone. I suppose I've done something not unlike this, minus the stretching and pushing around, when transferring a too-wet ciabatta dough from a peel to a preheated stone and watching it spread out more than I had intended.

With very wet doughs I've been using water instead of flour on my hands to make handling easier. This may not work at the stage when you're trying to spread a pizza dough on a board or get a topped pizza from a peel to a stone, but when handling wet bread dough it works well, and I suppose it might work if you were moving a wet dough like this directly from a bowl to a hot stone and spreading it on the stone. I picked this up watching a sushi chef wetting his hands from a stream of water in a nearby sink when handling sticky rice. It works nicely for matzo balls, meatballs, cookie dough and other sticky things, I find, and it doesn't add flour to a dough you want to keep wet.

My pizza stone came with a metal rack for picking it up when hot, or I suppose for serving pizza on the stone at the table, though I don't think it would do a very good job of protecting the table from the high heat of the stone. The stone lives in my oven most of the time, but this rack seemed thoroughly impractical, so I threw it away after not using it for several years.

Reconsidering the fondue idea, these are small planes aren't they? Are they steady enough for handling liquids easily?

How about something like a chocolate dip with strawberries--something like an ambient temperature fondue?

I usually don't even notice or think about the comps that other diners are getting. While I can understand the impulse to pay attention to such things as a matter of research, to figure out whether one might want to develop a relationship with a particular restaurant, someone who gets so upset that they walk out upon noticing that someone else is getting something better than what they have has deeper problems to worry about.

Heh. Now if I'm cooking somewhere else, I bring knives and usually a cutting board, and sometimes a large skillet or other cooking vessel, if I think I'll need it.

I've used Bourdain's recipe from the _Les Halles_ cookbook, substituting blackberries for cherries and Black Haus blackberry schnapps for kirsch, and it worked out well. If you don't have the book, here's a copy on the net-- http://www.culinate.com/books/collections/...kbook/Clafoutis Last time I made them, I did some in a 10" fluted ceramic tart dish and had extra batter, so I did some more in 4.5" metal tart shells with removable bottoms for about 5 min less cooking time, and they all came out nicely. I think one bottle of blackberry schnapps should be enough for the next thirty years.

In college I used to work in the kitchen sometimes, where we always prepared meals for about 50-60 people, and when I went home on break everything in our home kitchen seemed so small. The pan we always thought of as "the big pan," was suddenly more like a medium sized pan, and trying to scale back, I still usually prepared enough food for at least twelve people when we were only four.