David A. Goldfarb

I shoot everything with manual settings, but if you want to start out and have good results immediately I'd recommend learning to shoot using aperture priority auto exposure, where you set the aperture on the lens and the camera sets the shutter speed. The aperture not only controls the amount of light that strikes the sensor, but controls the depth of field or how much of the subject will be in focus, which is an important aesthetic choice to make in food photography. I also recommend using manual focus, because food photography is generally close-up photography, and it is very difficult for the camera to know where to focus in that situation. Autofocus will always get something in focus, but it can't read your mind. In general, I'd avoid using a flash on the camera. This almost always produces very flat looking light, at least until you can figure out how to combine camera flash with available light, which is a large subject for another day. So if you are using aperture priority and not using flash and shooting indoors, you're going to be getting exposure times that are longer than you can handhold, so I'd recommend using a tripod. I'll handhold a quick snapshot in a restaurant, usually by using a high ISO setting, so that I can get a faster shutter speed, but higher ISO settings usually result in lower image quality. For every food shot I do at home I use a tripod. Shoot raw, because you can fix a lot of mistakes made in the field without losing much image quality that way. It is often difficult to judge color balance, for instance, from the LCD screen, but if you are looking at a large image on a calibrated monitor, you can see things you might otherwise miss, and the camera's "auto white balance" feature is not entirely reliable. Learn to read the histogram to be sure your exposure settings are right. One of the main weaknesses of digital photography, as opposed to film, particularly for food photography, is the ability to retain detail in the highlights. A histogram displays the distribution of tonal values in the image. The shadows are at the left side of the curve and the highlights are at the right. Generally, you want to adjust the exposure so that you don't clip the highlights (which is to say, you don't want to overexpose), so the shadow end can be almost touching the left hand limit of the graph, but there should be plenty of space at the highlight end if possible, so you have room to adjust the curve afterward, if need be, particularly if you are using available light. If you are using artificial lighting, then you should be able to get it right in the camera without requiring much post-processing, but lighting is another subject for another day. If you want to learn about lighting, I highly recommend Hunter, Fuqua, and Biver's book, Light: Science and Magic.

Once I was borrowing a friend's vacation home out on Long Island, and I was warned that the kitchen might not be adequately appointed, so I brought a large Sitram skillet, a few knives, and a cutting board, figuring I could manage with that, if there was nothing else. Much to my surprise the "inadequate" kitchen had a 6-burner Viking range, but it turned out that that had been installed by the previous owners, and the current owners didn't actually cook much, but there were a few All-Clad pots and pans. I wanted to broil some fluke and was sauteeing something else in the pan I'd brought with me, so the most suitable thing in the cabinet was a sturdy looking All-Clad broiler. Cold fish in the pan, under the broiler, and it twisted like a pretzel under the heat, which is what I'd expect of even a heavy baking sheet under those conditions, but not a broiling pan with high sides. Fortunately it returned to its former shape as it cooled, and the fish was just fine.

Hah! I think that's one of the few Kitchenaid gizmos that I haven't bought. The pasta extrusion disks, however, would be a complete waste of money, were it not for the two clips that come with the set for keeping the bowl attached (on bowl lift models) when kneading heavy doughs. I don't know what consistency the dough has to have to work with those disks, but I have never gotten them to work, and once, when guests were watching, the dough started circulating back through the attachment shaft and coming out of the disk with a stripe of grey-black grease along one side. I just tossed the batch and went to the cupboard for some commercial pasta.

Unless you pay for private trash removal by the bag. We don't, and we don't have a trash compactor, but I've known people who have in areas where there is no city trash pickup.

Maybe I'd freeze a sandwich to be served hot, like a chicken parmesan or a panini, but count me among those who find the thought of eating a defrosted sandwich unappealing. My parents freeze bread, and it's okay heated up, but I don't freeze bread. If I have leftover bread, it goes into a paper bag to dry out thoroughly, and I make bread crumbs. I usually make fresh bread, but if I'm caught short, I've got plenty of places nearby to buy fresh bread.

The maid of course.

I'm thinking of replacing our old rice cooker and looking at new ones, and I'm very dubious of the value of a rice cooker with more settings than "on" and "warm." Commercial rice cookers don't seem to have more than that, and somehow, thousands of Asian restaurants are getting by. And for the price of All-Clad, one could buy Sitram and have a much better product, if one wanted stainless.

It may seem like overkill, but for $5-8 the Oxo silicone sink strainer is really a major improvement over other sink strainers I've had. It's easy to clean, and the stopper works. Has anyone improved on the simple wooden spoon? Another great simple thing is a $6 wok grate that I picked up in a Chinese market. It replaces the flat grate on an ordinary gas stovetop and is way more solid than those metal rings. I posted photos and a description of this a while back on my sister's "Family of Food" blog-- http://familyoffood.blogspot.com/2008/11/5...-tradition.html Incidentally, re: the rondeau thread, that's my rondeau there on the back burner.

Even before I moved to New York in 1991 I tended to walk pretty quickly. It's just my natural pace. Unless there's a particular reason to do something slowly, or I'm learning something new, or maybe I'm ahead of schedule or my wife is late getting home for dinner and I need to slow things down, I tend to be pretty quick and efficient in the kitchen, and if things don't require my immediate attention, I'm usually cleaning up.

For deep frying, I've been using a 9.5" Mauviel copper stainless-lined sauteuse evasée (Windsor pan/splayed saucepan). It is easy to find fry baskets that fit this shape perfectly. I was extremely lucky to be walking by the clearance section at Bed, Bath and Beyond one day when a clerk was putting two of these pans out for $19.97 each. I asked him if this price was a mistake (at the time, maybe eight years ago, this pan was around $350 in the US), and he assured me that this was the right price. They seemed perfectly fine except for a few scratches on the bottom, as if they had been used for a cooking demo or perhaps used once and returned, so I bought both, kept one for myself, and gave one to my father.

I don't recall exactly when it is, but there's been an annual poke competition on Moloka'i for a number of years, and some more unusual things show up there, like poke with opihi. You might search the website of the Moloka'i _Dispatch_ to see when the last one took place. Hunting is quite popular on Moloka'i, and it's fairly common to see a bunch of guys driving home from a hunt with a deer or a wild pig in the back of their truck, but I haven't seen it showing up in the few restaurants on the island.

Not exactly. Mauviel makes an 11x2.9" saute pan and an 11x4" rondeau. These are the professional tin lined versions, which seem more or less unchanged since the 19th century except for the designs of the long handles and the lids. In stainless lined, the saute pan is 11x3" and the rondeau is 11x4". Bourgeat makes an 11x3.15" saute pan and the rondeau is the same size with different handles. edit: SLKinsey's post slipped in ahead of mine. My understanding is that Falk makes the stainless lined copper sheet stock used by Mauviel and Bourgeat, but Mauviel is still making cookware in Villedieu, non, or maybe they are just making the tin lined pieces there? See video on this page-- http://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/80...iel&cm_src=hero

What makes these work is the Leidenfrost effect. Water on the skin turns to vapor, which for the moment at least, insulates the skin from the heat of the flame or burning coals, and it may also be at work I suppose when you've got an alcohol flame on your arm. This is also the reason that drops of water dance across a hot skillet without evaporating immediately.

Maybe not so exotic, but one of the nice and unusual things to do in Hawai'i is to visit the shrimp farms on the north shore of O'ahu for really fresh shrimp. We usually go to one called Romy's Shrimp Shack, but I know there's an older one that is often recommended. Also not so exotic, but not what tourists usually think of in Hawai'i is Leonard's hot malasadas.

Is that the one with the heavy cover that can be used as a roaster or paella pan? My father has one of those, and it's a great pot. He used to use the cover for making deep dish pizzas.

The avatar is a 9.5x9.5" stockpot. The photo of the brisket is in a 12.5x5" rondeau, but maybe the vertical crop and the high camera angle makes it look a bit distorted. More photos on this blog entry-- http://familyoffood.blogspot.com/2008/01/j...-soul-food.html Different crops, but they're all from the same camera angle. This is the pot in question (and no, I didn't pay that much for it)-- http://www.buycoppercookware.com/product_i...products_id=246

Maybe people like the familiarity of the long handle on a saute pan. I have 10" and 12" hammered copper saute pans similar in design to the rondeau, except not as deep, and with a single long handle, rather than two loop handles. I can toss the contents of the 10" usually with one hand or two and the 12" with two hands, but a single long handle on the 12.5" rondeau would be unmanageable, so I choose among them based on how big a pan I need and whether it needs to go into the oven. The 12" saute pan is good for braising a whole chicken or duck on the stovetop. One attraction of the even heat distribution of heavy copper for this is that stovetop braising is more like oven braising.

Here's a brisket (flat end) of about five pounds with space for vegetables in said rondeau--

I have a 12.5" tin lined heavy copper rondeau that holds around 10 quarts, and I agree that it's a very handy thing. I can braise a whole pork shoulder in it with the cover on, make a double batch of braised shortribs and freeze half of them, or use it to saute four or five pounds of onions for onion confit (or maybe more, but that's how much I usually do). It's also a handy shape for boiling bagels before baking. Actually the dish I did this weekend with the pork shoulder started with a two hour stovetop braise like a Philippine style adobo, and then a slow roast all day with the cover off as for pulled pork, then I shredded the whole pork shoulder, cooled it in an ice bath, reheated in the morning to reduce the sauce further, cooled again, than reheated again and served it at dinner. It's one of those things that's better on the third day, so I figured I would make it in advance and start eating it on the third reheating. The rondeau was perfect from stovetop to oven to fridge to table.

Good point about starting the hams in the cold weather. That's probably true. My drying space isn't particularly well sealed--it's just an ordinary kitchen cabinet that contains other things, so it gets opened at least once a day. I haven't had mold problems, but I suppose that may just depend on what kinds of mold may be in the general environment. An advantage of your cooler setup is that it's easy to clean, so that could help on the mold front. I'd think you would want a little more air circulation than you would get in a cooler that's opened once a day. I'd probably vent it a bit, maybe by leaving the cover loose.

I've been to Tom Colicchio's 'wichcraft sandwich place down by NYU any number of times, and I like it. The food is decent and modestly priced. The place is spotless (out of curiosity, I checked the health department website for various places I like to eat once, and it gets unusually high marks regularly). Conveniently for an area with a lot of students, you can sit there with a coffee and read or do some work for as long as you like, and there's no pressure to move along. As to why the trend for these kinds of places, I suppose it's a combination of the economy and the general drive to diversify one's business to include things other than luxury dining, whether it be lower priced restaurants, prepared and frozen foods, or chains like the Wolfgang Puck's places you see in US airports.

We don't eat at the kitchen table, but it seems to become a repository for accumulated mail, and there is this glass pineapple-shaped dish that someone gave us, which we use for keys, pencils, and things we put in our pockets when we leave the apartment. There's some instant coffee, which my wife uses when I don't get up early enough to make the coffee. We had friends for dinner yesterday, so we straightened it up and moved a glass dish that usually holds fresh fruit from the dining area to the kitchen table, and I think I like it there, so it will probably stay. The dining table, where we do eat, has two water glasses on it at the moment.

Had friends over tonight, including Romy Dorotan and Amy Besa, authors of an excellent book of Filipino cuisine and culture called Memories of Philippine Kitchens. They ran a restaurant called Cendrillon in SoHo for 13-1/2 years, closed it recently, and will soon be opening a new restaurant in Brooklyn called "Purple Yam." Too much to think about in the kitchen to photograph, but the menu was-- Cheeses and charcuterie--Mountain gorgonzola, La Tur, homemade bresaola with arugula, olive oil, and shaved Piave cheese, and a homemade provencale-ish saucisson sec. Appetizer--Grilled local black sea bass kebabs with black oil cured olives, fresh oregano, fennel seed, and small heirloom tomatoes Prosecco Bioldo Chilled avocado soup with avocado sorbet and a garnish of toasted cumin seeds Main course--Pulled pork adobo--North Carolina-Filipino fusion style Marqués de Murrieta Reserva, Rioja - 2004 (this was quite good, incidentally) Achara (shredded pickled green papaya) from Romy and Amy's book Chilled white bean salad with roasted peppers Romy brought a rhubarb cake with meringue on top that Amy learned to make when she was a student in Germany in the 1970s. Another guest brought a Muscat Leccia - 2007, which is good, since I didn't have a dessert wine on hand. Amy approved of my interpretation of their achara recipe, and she and Romy both went back for seconds on the pulled pork, so I'd call it a success.

Thanks for the report. I'm impressed to see a duck press in actual use, and to learn that it can be used for things other than duck.

While it's good to get the temperature down to the 60s, it's not necessarily fatal if you can't do it. I've made pancetta, saucisson sec, and bresaola in a coolish cabinet, but I kept a thermometer/hygrometer in there, and temperatures often were in the 70s. When humidity was particularly low, I would spray the meat with water once every day or two, particularly during the first week of drying, so the outside wouldn't form an impermeable skin that could cause the inside from drying properly. So far, this has worked for me. Here are some photos-- I was encouraged to read Harold McGee's recent article in the _New York Times_ about small scale dry-cured ham producers in the South who have tradtionally hung meat at ambient temperatures, sometimes going into the 90s. After all, they did this sort of thing before there was air conditioning-- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/dining/03curi.html I've been thinking of making dry curing a seasonal spring/autumn project, when ambient temperature and humidity are best in New York, but these country hams hang for a year or more, so the temperature variations contribute to the flavor of the product.