IndyRob

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/8335439/KFC-abandons-finger-lickin-good-slogan-in-a-bid-to-boost-its-image.html When they came for the Colonel, I was silent - because I was not a Colonel. When they eliminated the Kentucky, I was silent - I was not a Kentuckian. When they eliminated the Fried, I was again silent - probably 'cause, well, I myself, was probably fried. When they eliminated the Chicken, thus becoming merely KFC, I was silent - perhaps because I was a chicken. But now "Finger Lickin' Good?" is gone? Oh, God forbid that KFC should be food-centric.

I think Kat Tanaka Okopnik has the answer that is relevant today. In my area we have no KK stores anymore. They're sold in gas station convenience stores. Our local Mom & Pop shop blows them away. Plus, our local supermarkets have stepped up their in-house donut game significantly.

My wife bought an Accusharp. I was a little skeptical at first, but it works fine and fits in well with my 'good enough' nature. I will probably buy more sharpeners and knives over my lifetime than many, but won't spend more overall. It gives me a good enough edge that I can get a satisfyingly clean slashes in my baguettes with a chef's knife - which I find to be a tougher test than tomatoes or meat.

Coca Cola is definitely different from the 1880's version. Although it has changed subtely. Wikipedia has a purported orgininal formulation. An 'open source' project called Open Cola was created but has apparently not faired well. One of the key steps in Open Cola seemed to be emulsifying the citrus oils - which seemed to require a modified power tool. But the marketing perspective is more fascinating to me. Remember New Coke? It came out on top in blind taste tests against both the current Coke and Pepsi, but was a huge bomb commercially. This is an important lesson. When you call something by a known name you create an expectation. When it varies from that, it's always a failure.

I, like many people, don't watch TV in real time much. I just let the DVR collect the shows I want to watch and I watch them as I please - fast forwarding through commercials. That's why I think product placement will become the norm. I liked the challenge. I can relate to cooking in a Target store far more than I can to some Farm in Napa Valley. The only thing I didn't really like was the lighting. Target is definitely NOT a great dining atmosphere. But it's entertainment. It's a game. It's not bocuse d'or.

While I was watching this episode, I imagined that I'd find this very post. But I enjoyed this challenge very much. IIRC, Hubert Keller won a Top Chef: Masters challenge cooking in a dormroom bathtub. At the time, he probably would've killed for an entire Target store to work with. A good measure of a cook is to limit them to what's in a house at a given time. An entire Target store should produce some good stuff. I was a bit disappointed by what they came up with as a whole. But it was a fair test. Regarding the product placement/Target commercial, I'd say get used to it. Thanks to my DVR, I watch Top Chef prectically sans commercials. And of course in Indy we have a traditional automobile race that Target (and formerly K Mart) is a big part of. Target will sponsor a couple of cars but will pay for much of it by their 'associate sponsors' (Energizer Batteries for instance) But interestingly, no one really played up any of the products. And in fact, it could be argued that one of those products sent someone home. [EDIT]And henceforth muppets should narrate all quickfires.

A few years ago we gutted and completely remodeled our kitchen. It got us a lot more cabinet space, but that was soon filled up and we wound up with crowded unmanageamle cabinets again. But recently I realized there was a simple solution to much of this. More shelves. Usually, cabinets come with two or three shelves. And as we were finsihing the kitchen by installing the shelves, we tended to space them equadistantly and figured out what went where later. Just adding one or two shelves and optimizing their spacing based on what was stored on each shelf made a huge difference. It has eliminated a lot of stacking of bowls and whatnot. Once I get around to the cabinet with all the sheet pans, cookie sheets, pizza pans, etc., we may have as many as 15 shelves in one base cabinet.

I've just gotten off a 'cheese rollup' kick. At Taco Bell this is a tortilla that, for 79 cents, they put some cheese on a tortilla and roll up in a wrap and nuke briefly. It's pretty unremarkable except the tortilla gets nicely steamed. So I had been doing this with with a variety of fillings. For example, put a tortilla on a piece of wax paper, spread with some chili, sprinkle some cheese on top and roll up jelly roll style and tightly roll in the wax paper. Microwave for 25-40 seconds. In the rare case I get a tear, it's usually buried inside. Not exactly Haute Tex-Mex, but a good way to get from hungry to burrito in 3 minutes. Pan fry in butter for a different character. For just the tortilla you could try putting it between two pieces of wax paper (perhaps with some weight on top - may a silicone pot cover) and microwave for 5-10 seconds. Or just look for fresher tortillas. The ones I buy (from GFS for those in the midwest) are quite fresh and flexible.

I'm putting my money on this. Salt in a solution tends to want to equalize. We are instructed to use plenty of water to cook the pasta. If we were to salt the pasta and cook in plain water, salt would be drawn out into the water. So when we salt the water, the opposite is happening - which is what we want.

Well, in a sense it's not that sort of show. But I agree with you. But I've been thinking about all the footage they haven't used and hope that someone may come along and re-cut it and put a clever narrative over it. Maybe Bourdain and Ripert watching preparations and arguing about whether the dish is going to work or not. Or maybe Fabio and Stefan ("I'm a tellinGah you NOW, my friend, thees eez goinGah to be sheet!").

This makes sense, but it leads me in deeper to some of the thoughts that assailed me. In this case, only the first couple of paragraphs from the Food section appear to have been used. I agree with excluding the sections you mentioned, but a lot more relevant info was excluded. I understand that we don't need to be knitpicking individual articles at this point (there's the Discussion tab for that), but it would seem to me to make more sense to dump the whole article in and let it get edited down.

Wow, the amount of questions flooding my mind is daunting. I'll just pick one.... It looks like the content is published under the Creative Commons license which I think, generally speaking, means that Wikipedia content could be used. That might be a good way to seed articles. Should this be encouraged? Discouraged?

For what it's worth, buying KA flour from KA is no great bargain. I can get a 5-lb. bag of their A/P flour for $3.29 at Wegmans (down from $3.99 in recent months). Even when buying the 25-lb. bag online, you're still paying the equivalent of $4.10 for every five pounds of flour, and that excludes shipping. I'm buying high gluten flour in 25lb bags rom GFS for $8.99 which works out to about $1.80/5 pounds. I can get KA there as well for just a little more, but it's AP which I don't use much of. But I'm definitely eating far less meat nowadays. We used to have ribeyes 2-3 times a week. Now they're really only for semi-special occasions. And it sems that those cheap cuts aren't so cheap as people learn how to cook them.

Just watched Rick Moonen's video recreating the dish. No crust on the bottom, no pea salt, I don't think the herbs were fried. I'd never even thought to question these videos before.

I'm not sure if I would agree with this. Although I think 'comes cleanly off the bone' is a better rib experience, if I'm at a table, I wouldn't have any problem with 'falling off the bone'. It is certainly much better than still clinging to the bone. I went to a place in Illinois that Bon Appetit chose as their best ribs in America one year. The were the best I'd ever had, but I didn't really care for the much vaunted 'bark'. To me, it's blackened shoe leather. But under that was wonderfully pink, tender, flavorful porky goodness. So I think if you can get the job done without drying the outside for so long, it could be a good thing.

I was playing with this a few months ago and got the best results by wrapping a strip of bacon around the dog in a spiral fashion, securing the ends with toothpicks and throwing in the oven. I don't remember the time or temp, but you're really just cooking the bacon to the stage you want. The hot dog can stand some over cooking (as evidenced by grill charred dogs, and deep fried 'rippers' that people seem to like). One thing I found was that using a hot dog that's good by itself results in overkill when you add the strong bacon flavor/texture. The bland, whitish dogs used in Detroit under mounds of Greek Coney sauce would probably be good. From there it's just looking for the right flavors which led me close to condimentia.

Alas, my challenger for Arby's is nearly extinct. Rax is down to a single restaurant in a few midwestern states. And to add insult to injury two closed Rax Roast Beef stores I knew of were razed and replaced with Arbys. The Rax roast beef product is very similar to Arby's. But while still sliced paper thin like Arby's, it somehow retains it's juicyness. In the unlimited division, while I favor the French Dip, I feel as though there's still room for a better new idea. It may involve mushrooms, and gruyere and a baguette. A restaurant near me had a very good steak and cheese sandwich, but it's really a one-off preparation where the bread played a large role - perhaps more than the beef. Pastrami would be right up there, but I agree that it doesn't really fit the spirit of 'beef sandwich' any more than a salami sandwich. These kind of transcend the 'beef' label.

Bad rabbit. Bad, bad rabbit. I think in a previous thread I got freaked out about this and did some googling and found a similar statistic. While I don't intend to repeat this practice after that, I've often used room temp infused garlic oils after six months or more (although always heated to frying temps when used), I don't think it's a necessarily bad thing to put the problem into perspective. Given the fact that I'm still alive, and that I hear more about salmonella problems than botulism, I can't help but feeling that there might be a Douglas Baldwin-esque (in reference to his conviction that lower cooking temps can be proven safe) admonition lurking in the wings. I am making no claims, just acknowledging a data point that seems oddly out of place.

Hot cocoa mix is worth doing. You can customize your own mix. I once tried premixing dry ingredients for pizza dough. That turned out to be pretty pointless. Now I just make bigger batches and freeze some dough balls.

And here I was about to point out that Tom mentioned that he's never been south of Rome and that he needed to get down there. Well, it was a good hypothesis while it lasted.

I wasn't suprised. Mike knew his pasta was bad, but that was the only real problem. If Tre's risotto texture was all that was wrong, I would agree that it was a lesser sin. But there was the veg problem as well.

Aren't bananas a sort of miracle food even when slushified? The base offers several different directions to pursue.

We don't really use 'sussed', but as clever as it might have been, I agree that it would be blatant cheating if true. The fact that dim sum was not leaving the kitchen was a mystery to me. I've made 3 dozen potstickers for personal use and wouldn't really be intmidated by having to do 180 (well, maybe just a bit). But I could have done it, and as soon as service started I wouldn't have cared if I had a steamer or a pan on a stove. Potstickers would be flying out. It is the only Top Chef full service challenge ever that I thought I could have accomplished. I wouldn't have won, but I would've easily beat the chicken feet. If Dale just cooked for the judges, he should be eliminated..., um, post-episodus.

Many won't agree, but for me, Pickeled anything would send me scurrying. I sort of agree with the X, Y ways, in the sense that it sounds more like a demonstration than a meal/dish.

I'm skeptical - as salt (in any form) tends to dissolve upon being introduced to moisture.