balex
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Posts posted by balex
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Jay - Moens - definitely one of the greats. Top 3. Stunning place.
Matt - I would say Lidgates has gone the way of display food at ferociously high prices, with a certain loss of old school butchery. It's them Nottinghill Ladies wot done it.
Lidagtes still has some good stuff, but it has gone a long way down the "organic chicken breast marinated in thai spices" route.
For me a good butcher has to sell tripe, and veal bones.
Lidgates does neither.
218 Portobello Road, has a halal butcher that sells cow feet and tripe and mutton. And is maybe 1/3 of the price of lidgates. But the quality is not so high.
Tripe! where, where?(not the nasty soft bleached stuff!)
The place I am thinking of is on the east side of portobello road about a block south of Garcia, the spanish supermarket. It had two sorts of tripe, lamb and beef. This was pretty obviously not bleached.
Also, apparently they normally get a whole veal once a week, and will keep obscure bits of it for you if you want. Or so the guy said, but I haven't actually got my act together on this yet.
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Jay - Moens - definitely one of the greats. Top 3. Stunning place.
Matt - I would say Lidgates has gone the way of display food at ferociously high prices, with a certain loss of old school butchery. It's them Nottinghill Ladies wot done it.
Lidagtes still has some good stuff, but it has gone a long way down the "organic chicken breast marinated in thai spices" route.
For me a good butcher has to sell tripe, and veal bones.
Lidgates does neither.
218 Portobello Road, has a halal butcher that sells cow feet and tripe and mutton. And is maybe 1/3 of the price of lidgates. But the quality is not so high.
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I used to work there from time to time, and I liked "Le Petit Lyonnais" a lot, in Plainpalais.
Good unpretentious lyonnais food.
Quiet in the evening, and very busy at lunch.
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At Sant Eustachio they adulterate it with some dairy product to get the crema. I think they use a light cream.
I don't think the coffee is uniformly great in Italy: certainly north of Rome it is easy to find bad coffee. In Rome itself, there are loads of very cheap places that serve mediocre espresso. But it is very easy to find excellent coffee.
(edit: but there clearly is a lack of innovation: there are very few places where they really try to go that extra mile, by tweaking or finding a better source of beans.)
I was very surprised to hear that the coffee in America is better than that in Italy at the high end. Is this just a Seattle thing? I have never been to Seattle but I have been underwhelmed with the coffee in NY and SF and other points in between. It's very difficult also to find good coffee here in London: the major weakness is that the espressos have way more liquid in them, than they do in Italy.
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Fortedei, now I'm a bit confused. I thought senape was just the translation of the word mustard....
Senape is to mustard as parmigiano-reggiano is to grana. They are both cheese, closely related, both very good in their own way, but with a world of difference in taste.
Senape is most often translated as mustard. In fact, it comes from the white seeds of the mustard plant.
I don't think this is correct. Senape is an Italian word that refers to exactly the same things that the english word "mustard" does. If tou ask for senape in an Italian restaurant, or in an supermarket they will bring you something pretty similar to what you would get in England or France. Made from the same types of seed. Perhaps you meant to say that your prefer Italian mustard to French mustard or English mustard.
There are a variety of different but related plants called mustard: brassica nigra, brassica hirta, brassice juncea and brassica alba.
A few moments of googling found this useful website about
Unfortunately, you and I are not speaking of the same thing. The senape I was referring to is not found in Italian restaurants in Italy. It has nothing to do with the mustard one sees on a table, Italian, French, English or any other kind. I am referring to the senape you get in an apothecary. This is the same "essence" that Divina referred to as well as Steven C (who said the essence was still moto forte, thirty years after his nona bought it). I must have been going to Italian restaurants in Italy for the last thirty-five years with "senepeless" Italian friends, for I've never heard one of them ask for senape. What food does one order and then ask for senape? I'm curious.
Well, my children like to have mustard with steak sometimes. I have tried to talk them out of it, but without much success
Actually, I don't think we disagree. I stand corrected because I think that the Italian word senape does have a different denotation to the Enlglish word mustard since it also refers to the stuff you get in a chemist. (or apothecary for the more antique flavour). Though what would you translate that into English as?
Though, I think we do disagree since the stuff you are talking about would normally be referred to as "essenza di senape" rather than "senape".
I just don't like arguments of the type: "The wine they make in country X is not really wine at all: it is just fermented grape juice. The only real wine is that made in zone Y of country Z". It confuses a normative-aesthetic judgment (perfectly valid) with a completely bogus linguistic judgement,
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Fortedei, now I'm a bit confused. I thought senape was just the translation of the word mustard....
Senape is to mustard as parmigiano-reggiano is to grana. They are both cheese, closely related, both very good in their own way, but with a world of difference in taste.
Senape is most often translated as mustard. In fact, it comes from the white seeds of the mustard plant.
I don't think this is correct. Senape is an Italian word that refers to exactly the same things that the english word "mustard" does. If tou ask for senape in an Italian restaurant, or in an supermarket they will bring you something pretty similar to what you would get in England or France. Made from the same types of seed. Perhaps you meant to say that your prefer Italian mustard to French mustard or English mustard.
There are a variety of different but related plants called mustard: brassica nigra, brassica hirta, brassice juncea and brassica alba.
A few moments of googling found this useful website about
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(These are not my views: I am just presenting an argument I have encountered(
The third reason to decant wines has been the same reason that you "decant" sugar or salt or mustard: to put it in a more attractive serving container. Allegedly it used to be considered "middle class" not to decant champagne. I think I recall Lord Beaumont being cited as the source of this opinion. The idea is that everyhting you serve on the table should be out of its original container and in one of your own containers.
I think this attitude died out in its purest form during the last century, but you still encounter its traces from time to time.
I
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Arrived 6:30, sat down at 7. Fabulous meal. Terrine to start: really one of the nicest I have had for ages.
Just the right mixture of textures and flavours, not too fatty while still being really moist.
Slow cooked pork (Middlewhite) with sauerkraut and sausage. The meat was so delicious, tender but still iwth a bite to it and great flavour.
Milk pudding with pears and prunes.
Everything was delicious. The pub was very crowded though.
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Where in London apart from borough market and the high end deptartment stores
can I buy good/reasonably priced porcini?
So it is a little late for the autumn ones, you may have to wait for spring.
M and C on Turnham green terrace and
Michanicou Brothers
2 Clarendon Road
London, W11 3AA
Telephone: 020 7727 5191
Fax: 020 7243 5119
in Holland Park (round the corner from Lidgates) both have them normally in season.
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Lies, damn lies and staitistics. Yes, you are right to be sceptical about these analyses.
These are estimates of consumption not sales, so one would hope that they have adjusted for this obvious fact.
I think you are spot on about the patterns of consumption. It's the half bottle of wine ten times a week rather than fifteen tequila slammers on Friday night. The French don't have quite the same taboo against drunkenness as the Italians, but it is still frowned upon.
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Interesting question.
I don't think bleudauvergne's argument that it is being stored is a good one, unless the amount of wine stored in cellars is going up year on year, which is unlikely.
Here you can find the official French statistics : 14.0 litres per year of which 61% is wine.
So it's a bit less than the figures mentioned below. The difference between perception and reality is striking. Certainly comparing UK to France in terms of alcohol.
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Notting hill farmers market on this morning (Saturday morning).
They have a beef stall that is very good for unusual cuts, and they always have short ribs. But NOT sliced thinly across the bone in the korean style. In the French style.
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Lunch today. I was very impressed. In general I have been very underwhelmed by restaurants of this type, so I was surprised to enjoy this meal so much.
A wafer of filo pstary with some truffled cream
A deep fried ball of salt cod in a jerusalem artichoke veloute
starters
lasagne of rabbit in a thyme veloute'. Not a veloute really, but very tasty foamy sauce and a very smooth puree of cepes. Lots of small chanterelles and I think other mushrooms (oops, there go my foodie credentials) Nice textures -- the filling of the lasagne was a quite firm forcemeat so the textural experience was very unlike a true lasgne -- the filling was firmer than the pasta. Flavours were fab. This was really nice to eat.
the mulllet en papillote mentioned upstream. My daughter loved this.
mains
Roast hare. Interesting presentation: saddle meat was cut off the backbone and coiled up against the fanned ribs (hard to explain). Bed of sauteed mushrooms, slightly sticky sauce. A couple of leafs of spinach wilted in. Tender, flavourful meat, maybe slightly underdone to my taste. Again succesful.
pudding was not quite so nice: caramelised pear, some crisp tuiley type things with chestnut puree and something else in. A bit too elaborate and the pear got lost.
Lovely wine, excellent service. I liked it a lot. I'll be back.
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No one else replied so I will.
The folks around here are pretty skeptical of doo-dads that mess with wine (ref: Classic Wine Threads post - look for Wine Clip, and a recent discussion of some sake drinking Japanese gent who liked to electrocute his wine). I think for $50, you could pick up a couple not-too-fancy, but servicable decanters that would accomplish the same result of oxygenating the wine. Or just open the bottle and let it breathe a while. Or buy a turkey baster cause that's what it sounds like.
I am one of those sceptics, but the difference with these gadgets is that they obviously do/might work.
Double decanting is a good work around. So decant into a decanter. Pour it all into a jug, and then back into the decanter. Or if you don't have a decanter, pour it into a jug, rinse out the bottle to ge rid of any gunge and pour it back into the clean bottle. This is good if you drink more bottles than you have decanters, and makes sure you don't get mixed up.
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Great thread. Of course, we could talk about ragù indefinitely. Marco Guarnaschelli Gotti in his excellent Grande Enciclopedia Illustrata della Gastronomia lists seven different ones: abbruzzese, barese, bolognese, napoletano, potentino, romagnolo and sardo.
It seems to me a little inane to quibble over the primogeniture of a term derived from the French...
To get back to the hard facts, as Adam so aptly did with his well illustrated post, I believe that a great ragù alla bolognese (wasn't this the original topic?) ought to be made with a rather fatty cut of beef and pork (something like coppa).
Then, both the vegetables and later the meat should be let caramelize (without burning it!) My grandma used to say that to have good ragù the meat had "to suffer", in other words to cook and cook, sticking a little on the bottom, being rescued patiently with careful additions of stock or water.
Finally, there should be a law prohibiting the use of the term ragù for any meat sauce that has been cooked for less than 4 hours. While of course everybody's free to eat whatever hits his fancy, ragù alla bolognese must die over tagliatelle.
I apologise for three posts in a row, but this is an important topic..
I always thought that browning onions for these sauces was considered very wrong. I am sure I recall being told by some cook I respected, that if the onions brown at all, you have to throw them all out and start again. Long slow cooking so they are very soft and sweet and tender, but not caramelised. I will put on my asbestos underpants now, because I am sure people will disagree rabidly.
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Just as a sideline, let me mention a, to me, new and certainly different type of ragù I tasted a couple of days ago in Madrid, at Boccondivino, Ignazio Deias' distinguished Sardinian restaurant (one of the best places in Spain for Italian food, and that's saying something because the level of Italian food has improved spectacularly here.) This was a 'ragù sardo' based on crumbled, hearty sausage meat, much fennel and, of course, tomatoes. Ignazio serves it, not with pasta, but on top of a rich risotto made with Sardinian saffron. Outstanding dish for a luncheon in chilly Madrid...
This is another thing. You make it with fennel seeds, garlic and chilli, fried together, and then crumbled italian sausages (skinned that are browned) and then pelati. Very good, and much quicker than ragu (oops, I meant bolognese sauce).
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When you guys will se a proper conserva, you will understand what she meant by scurissimo... I did not use even a concentrate for mine, as I had 2.5kg of pure San Marzano home made passata that I wanted to use.
I do agree that the colour in old and modern ragú should be darker then mine, but the one in Adam post looks brown, or exactly the colour of Genevose, which is made with 2kg of Onions and little tomatoes paste (concentrate).
Ragu is made with 1/2-1 onion and 400g of tomato paste or 2.5 kg of passata. Even starting with a passata, you have to reduced, and then add more water, then reduced again, etc.... mine was cooked for 7 hours....
I will do one with Conserva and show you the differences after Christmas.
Ciao
But Adam did his with 'strattu, which is great but of course not Neapolitan but Sicilian. I don't know what the Neapolitan equivalent of this is, if it exists?
There should be a thread on strattu if there isn't already. I used to go to Palermo at least once a year just to buy this stuff, (and have a panino with milza of course).
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The point, such as it is, is to avoid bitter arguments.
perhaps so, but i would hope (hold) that any civilized diner would above arguing, and "discuss" issues in an open dialogue...
but that raises another observation. i've noticed that some cultures, which seem extremely passionate about food (boy, am i getting myself into trouble with that statement), like the italians, chinese, spanish and perhaps french, would put content of the conversation second to focusing/enjoying the communal experience. i contrast this (mainly) with the american culture, where even the greatest food could be ruined by an off-remark...
Italians also typically love to argue. That made me very comfortable in Italy, because most Jews also love to argue.
The point of discuzione (argument), though, is to have fun, not to make really serious accusations. I think there is a difference between good-humored argument and verbal confrontation.balex, what is "sconceing"?
I think these are special cases where people have to live for many years in a community and one wants to avoid getting on each others nerves. Religiosu communities often eat in silence which I suspect has the same purpose ...
Sconceing involves drinking a whole bowlful of alcohol. (A sconce).
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There are the old rules of acceptable conversation.
The following subjects are banned at table:
right]
Where? Not my experience in US, UK, or Italy, except for the sexual proclivities of those present-- sometimes.
It is a traditional rule in Engalnd, which is still practiced in clubs, colleges and probably officers' messes though I am guessing there. Violations are punished by sconceing.
The point, such as it is, is to avoid bitter arguments.
There are also prohitbitions about talking "shop".
Taken together these basically ban talking about a) anything interesting and b) anything you know a lot about. Insert emoticon of your choice here,
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I think there is no need to put a lot of vegetable falvour in the stock since it is easy to add it as desired.
If you want some onion or parsley flavours (I am holding off on using "notes" here) it is really easy to add them in. The key factors for me are
1) the maillard flavours -- white/brown stock
2) ratio of meat to bone.
The italian brodo is almost pure meat (bones are for dogs!), and the trad french stock is almost pure bone. What is interesting about the Ducasse approach is the way he has a number of variants -- the bouillon from a pot au feu, the fond, the jus and so on that lie at various points in the space of possible stocks.
Personally, I didn' have much success with the Ducasse jus, probably because I didn't add enough fat. I think it is the process of almost frying the glace in fat that gives that classic jus taste: it must sizzle to develop those flavours.
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I've made Emeril's Worcetershire sauce. It's definitely in the same neighborhood as L&P (and fifi's right about the aroma), but I found it to be all top heat and bottom sweet -- not quite balanced. It does, however, work perfectly in his recipe for barbecued shrimp.
The second time around, I made some modifications:
Oil for sauteeing
3 C chopped onion
2 jalapeno chiles, minced
2 poblano chiles, chopped
4 t minced garlic
2 2-ounce cans anchovies in oil, lightly drained and chopped
6 or 7 whole cloves
1-1/2 T Diamond Crystal kosher salt
1-1/2 t ground black pepper
1 large lemon, peeled (zest stripped off and reserved), cut in half crosswise
2 C dark corn syrup
1 C Steen's cane syrup
2 C malt vinegar
2 C cider vinegar
2 C water
2 C grated horseradish (about 1/2 pound fresh; well-drained if bottled)
No tamarind? For some reason I have always thought that worcestershire sauce had a lot of tamarind in it, (googling for the two names seems to confirm this)
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In any case, if the site is to be believed, the almond mixture, not the pastry, is what defines a Pithiviers. Hence calling something a Pithiviers* where a round pastry is filled with game or other meat instead of almonds is a metonymic substitution of the container for the thing contained -- or perhaps it's the other way round.
Synecdoche is the specific term for this sort of part-for-whole metonymy.
One of those words one has to use when the opportunity presents itself.
Sorry a bit OT.
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I drove past Harrods this morning and noticed that they have a Laduree tea shop. Laduree is famous for, among other things, having the second best macarons in Paris.
Anyone been? Is it open?
hahaha!!
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