JAZ

Also keep in mind that some foods will tend to stain the maple -- parsley, blood oranges, beets, carrots. A little diluted bleach will usually take care of it, but it might be a consideration.

It works, even for a larger chicken. The drawback is that it can create a lot of smoke and a big mess in your oven. But you can minimize both by putting a layer or two of sliced potatoes in the bottom of your roasting pan. They absorb the fat so it doesn't burn and smoke, and they keep the splattering down as well. And then you can eat the potatoes too, if you like that sort of thing. With butter under the skin, you probably don't need the brining for moisture, but it does season the meat all the way through, which I think is an advantage. If you do brine, don't salt the bird before roasting, but you probably figured that out.

It strikes me that we're all speaking of "food writing" as if it's a homogeneous category, when there are really many different species of food writing, all with different qualities. How can one compare On Food and Cooking with How to Cook a Wolf with Kitchen Confidential? It's like trying to talk about "non-fiction" as a cohesive genre -- what do you mean by that term? newspaper columns? personal memoir? "how-to" books? magazine articles? history books? It seems to me that "food writing" is almost as vague a category as "non-fiction," and trying to explain what makes "food writing" good, or trying to delineate necessary and sufficient conditions for successful food writing, is an exercise in futility. What makes a restaurant review good is different from what makes an essay good, which is different from what makes a cookbook well written. And that's not even scratching the surface of possibilities -- what about food science? or histories, or biographies? I find the Best Food Writing compilations amusing for that reason. Not that the writing in them isn't good; it's very good (and I'm not just saying that because Steven and John's writings appear there). But it's all very much the same type of writing - essays and articles. You'd never find a chapter from Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini in it, nor an excerpt from something like On Food and Cooking. Both are very well written, but they don't fit the profile of the book series, which really should be titled "Best Food Articles, Essays and Memoirs." And if those of us in the business (or those with a decided interest in it) succumb to conflating the various types of writing that comprise "food writing," the average person out there is even more confused. (I don't know about Steven and John, but here's my least favorite conversational exchange in the world: "So, Janet, what do you do?" "I write about food." "Oh, you review restaurants?" "Um, no. Actually I'm working on a book." "Oh, a cookbook?" End of dialog) If we recognize that food writing is not one cohesive category, then I think it's obvious that everyone here has expressed valid points about what constitutes "good food writing." But Steven's criteria are valid for one sub-category (restaurant and travel reviews), and John T's apply to another (essays and memoirs). And food science would require yet a third set of criteria. Expertise is crucial in some cases, extraneous in others. Personal experience is distracting in some cases, delightful in others. I'd bet that if we chose a topic at random and each of us here wrote about it, we'd all write something good, but there'd be nothing in common among our results except the general subject. And that's what's so wonderful about "food writing"; there's room for just about anything as long as it's well done.

does it also serve the purpose of tenderizing tougher cuts of meat? I thought it was papaya that contained the tenderizing enzyme. Does mango also tenderize?

The nice thing about braising with a cover is that you don't have to pay as much attention to the dish as it's cooking. I prefer to braise without a cover, or to start with a cover and remove it part of the way, through, because the liquids evaporate and become more concentrated. If you do it right, you don't need to reduce at all at the end, because the liquid reduces slowly throughout the cooking process.

That was always one of the major criticisms of Michael Bauer (at the Chronicle in San Francisco) -- that for years he was both editor of the food section and the primary reviewer. He isn't any longer, but the damage has been done. No one takes the Chron's food section seriously anymore, despite the fact that there are some decent writers on staff.

Aside from the texture question, it also depends on where you want the flavor to end up. If you cook the vegetables in the braising liquid for a long time, most of their flavor will end up in the liquid; if you cook them for only a short while, they will retain much more of their flavor. I've sometimes done both, adding half the vegetables at the beginning, discarding those and adding a new batch toward the end (or roasting them separately and adding them at the very end).

Hmmm. I don't have a TV, which is probably why I've never heard it. I do work in a cookware store, and have sat through numerous product demos given by reps from the various cookware manufacturers, and not one of them ever mentioned that. None of the books I have that talk about non-stick cookware mention it either. One of them (The New Cook's Catalogue) specifically mentions cooking with "little or no" oil in them. It's not that I never use oil in my non-stick skillets, but I certainly don't use it all the time. In fact, I ruined one non-stick skillet I had by trying to shallow fry some tortilla chips in it -- the oil bonded to the inside of the skillet and formed a sticky crud that I couldn't remove (that was quite a while ago, and is part of the reason that I'm much more careful with my non-sticks and oil now). Looks like it's time for more research.

The osmosis caused by a salt rub is opposite that in brining. Rubbing salt on the outside of a piece of meat or fish does draw out the moisture, unlike brining. So brining doesn't take the place of curing.

Yeah, this was very counterintuitive for me too, until I read Shirley Corriher's explanation. The mistake you're making (and the one I made too) is in thinking that the concentration of salt is higher in the brine than in the meat. But that's not the case. The "free liquid" in meat (i.e., the water that's not bound by the proteins and held inside the cells) is actually very concentrated with dissolved substances, including salts. So the brine flows into the meat. However, the salt does also work in another way: it actually "denatures" some of the protein in meats, which increases the ability of the proteins to absorb water and also makes it slightly more tender. I'm sorry I'm not more specific here, but I lost my copy of Fine Cooking magazine where she describes that aspect. Her book only talks about the osmosis.

It's simply not true that you shouldn't heat up a nonstick pan without oil. I do it all the time. (That's what they're designed for.) Where did you hear this? The potential for trouble with non-stick coatings is actually much greater if you use oil than if you don't. Now, you may have problems if you heat up a non-stick pan on too high a heat, regardless of whether you use oil or not. Keep your flame to medium, and you should be fine. I don't care for the double sided non-stick grill/griddles myself, because to me it defeats the purpose of having a grill if you can't heat it up nice and hot (which you can't with non-stick). Non-stick griddles, though, are wonderful things for pancakes and grilled cheese sandwiches. If you have a choice, go for two pieces: a cast iron grill pan, and a non-stick griddle.

What do you mean by that? lay a fish filet on the cutting board and salt it. come back 10 minutes later and it will have sweated. obviously, dunking pork in a brine overnight will have a different end result but the salt will still have an effect on how the meat cooks. i'm not saying so with a negative connotation either. But surface salt and brine solutions produce two different results. Brining increases the moisture content of meat.

Can you discuss the differences in quality please. Is it the thinness of the crystal? Or just design? Thanks... Sommelier glasses are lead crystal and are hand blown. Vinum are lead crystal, machine made. Overture are glass, machine made.

The magazine Taste of Home was mentioned in one of the recent magazine threads here, and since the IACP quarterly newsletter had a short article on the magazine, I thought I'd share some of the information it provided. Taste of Home, as previously noted, rarely shows up on lists of circulation because it carries no ads. But, according to this article, it has the amazing circulation of 4.6 million (more than Bon, F&W and Gourmet combined). It actually ranks 8th in circulation for all consumer magazines, right below Family Circle and Good Housekeeping. The demographics are interesting: the average age of subscribers is 60; only 30.5 percent work full time (13 percent of subscribers are male, which apparently is pretty high for a cooking magazine). North Dakota leads the pack in number of subscribers, followed by Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa and Wisconsin, where the magazine is based. Recipes for the magazine are provided by an unpaid staff of "field editors" -- 1,000 home cooks from all 50 states and Canada (none from New York City). The in-house (paid) staff numbers seven, who also work on other publications. Taste of Home began publishing in 1993 as a spin-off of Country Magazine. It has subsequently spun off two other pubs -- Quick Cooking and Light & Tasty, (which have circulations of 3.2 million and 1.2 million, respectively). The company also sells Taste of Home products, sponsors a traveling cooking school, and this year held its first Cooking Expo (6,500 people pre-registered for the event). The parent company, Reiman Publications (with 12 publications total), was recently acquired by Reader's Digest Association for $760 million.

Well, I just checked out all my food science books, and the only one who addressed this question (that I could find) was Robert Wolke in What Einstein Told His Cook. And he says that I was wrong. (Damn, I hate that.) In talking about the reason you don't place the thermometer near the bone, he says "Bone is a lesser conductor of heat than meat is. For one thing, bone is porous, and the air cells are heat insulators. Also, bones are relatively dry, and much of the heat transfer through a roast is due to the water in the meat. So when most of the meat has reached a certain temperature, it's likely that the regions surrounding the bones will still be relatively cool." So that blows my theory. But it did start me thinking (or maybe it was the martini). If "much of the heat transfer" is due to the water in the meat, then pork tenderloin, being relatively dry itself, would probably not continue to increase in temp once you took it out of the oven. Does that seem reasonable? You didn't brine this one, correct? So that would mean there was a lot less moisture in the meat than if you had. When I roasted my chicken, I did a quick soak in brine before roasting. Plus, the chickens I get have a fair amount of fat on them, which keeps the meat even more moist. So maybe my chicken temp rose because of the fat and water in the meat, whereas your pork temp didn't because there wasn't as much moisture. I'll email a question to Wolke at his web site; maybe we'll get an answer. Edit: pretty big chicken -- maybe 5 lbs. My oven temp was about 475; I took the chicken out when my thermometer (in the thigh) read 160 and it rose to about 168.

I always thought that much of the carryover was caused by heat from bones (which, I believe, get hotter than the meat itself). So it stands to reason that you wouldn't get nearly as much from boneless cuts. But 15 degrees still seems like a lot to expect. I roasted a whole chicken last week (big sucker, too) and the temp rose by about 8 degrees. And of course I have no idea where I got the idea about the bones. I thought it was Cookwise, but I couldn't find it in there.

I used up some leftover proseco in a peach sorbet once. It was pretty good -- sort of a frozen Bellini. It still had a little fizz, though.

I don't think you're oversimplifying because you're "respecting someone else's taste." I was merely stating that I could understand Dave's reluctance to cook a high quality ingredient in a way that he believes ruins it. I do think the refusal to even recognize that his reluctance might be understandable is oversimplifying. You'll notice, if you read what I wrote, that I never actually said what I'd do, or gave him advice as to what he should do. I said I understand the desire to accommodate one's guests' tastes. I also said that I understand the other side. Period. My example was merely something to think about, which is precisely what I said at the end of my post. It wasn't a rhetorical game; nor was it a straw man. But please accept my apologies, since it seems to have upset you so.

Sorry, Liz; I'm not generally that snide. And I know how the urge to use a metaphor can overtake a writer and wipe out whatever knowledge of grammar or vocabulary one possesses. I shouldn't have pounced on it. Nice article.

I think you're oversimplifying the problem. Yes, of course you want to accommodate the tastes of the people you're cooking for. But mistreating a high quality and expensive ingredient is a difficult thing to do, and I think Dave has a valid point of view. Let's up the ante a little. If you'd bought, say, a couple of Wagu rib eye steaks, and your guest asked to you bread hers and fry it, then top it with cream of mushroom soup and simmer it for 45 minutes or so, could you honestly say you'd do that? If not, why not? Just something to think about.

Ahhh, Pernod... Speaking of unfortunate drinking experiences, one of my worst involved that yellow liquid. It was ten years before I could face the stuff again.

I love my Waring, which Cook's also rated high (the price was their main concern -- at $100 or so, it's a lot more than the Oster they gave top honors to). Tall narrow jar, one-piece design (no gaskets to lose, no jar bottom to fall off), two speeds, purees anything quickly and completely. My only complaint -- and it's extremely minor -- is that the jar sits on the base a bit precariously. And it looks cool.

Quick Pickles by Chris Schlesinger, John Willoughby and Dan George. I pulled out this book from the shelf to look up a recipe and it struck me again what a beautiful little book it is. Photos include ingredients as well as the finished pickles. Nice looking and easy to follow layout as well. (Good recipes too.)

I posted a couple a while back: cocktails And one that was more a discovery than an invention is mandarin vodka with a splash of Lillet Blond, stirred and served up in a cocktail glass with an orange twist. It's good with Absolut Mandarin; sublime with Hangar One Mandarin Blossom. Now I'm mostly working on non-alcoholic cocktail recipes.

Too bad the author doesn't know the meaning of the phrase "to pull a punch."