JAZ

Now that I've had this book for a few months and have looked through it several times, I find it even more disappointing than I did at first. I find their categorizations for ingredients really confusing -- I mean, allspice is "sweet" but ginger is "sour"? Huh? I'm most disappointed in the regional/national listings -- they're inconsistent and often wrong. Are these supposed to be lists of ingredients, or iconic dishes? They list both, in no particular order, with no indication of what is what. For instance, here's the listing for "Cajun": cayenne celery chiles crayfish gumbo jambalaya onions peppers rice seafood tomatoes Aside from the fact that gumbo and jambalaya are dishes, not ingredients, tomatoes are not a typical Cajun ingredient (Creole, yes -- although the authors don't list tomatoes under the Creole section). And chiles aren't particularly common in Cajun food either, unless you count dried ground ones -- oh, yeah, that'd be cayenne. Most frustrating is that they don't talk about flavor and ingredient combinations -- just individual ingredients, which is next to useless if you're really trying to understand regional cooking. Listing celery, onions and "peppers" (I assume they mean bell peppers) teaches me nothing, but an explanation of "trinity" would have given me some useful knowledge. Why didn't they just leave the entries on regional or national cuisines out if they couldn't take the time to get them right?

I agree with Oliver. If the goal is to be have a sandwich ready without any or much effort in the morning, I can think of better ways than trying to freeze assembled sandwiches. You can make up tuna, chicken or egg salad, fill those little disposable Gladware containers with enough for one sandwich, and then just grab a container and a couple of slices of bread. Or use the deli counter trick of portioning out meat and cheese in single-sandwich amounts, and then all you have to do is put whatever condiments you want on your bread and add the pre-portioned ingredients.

Personally, I've never been a fan of hot dips on vegetables, but I might be alone in that. I used to make a radish-dill dip that was easy, good, and very pretty. People could never figure out what was in it.

Have you looked at the various Sumeet grinders? I've used the multi-grind before -- I'm not sure if it's big enough for your needs, but it's great.

I've had the same thing happen with potatoes in stew -- not always, but enough times that I now cook them separately before adding them to the stew. It seemed to me to have some correlation with how thick the cooking liquid was, but that could have just been my imagination.

Chris, this is how the enchiladas are served in the recipe -- just folded with some toppings on top. I think Bayless called for lettuce tossed with vinegar in addition to the onion and cheese. I'll give it a try when I get some more chiles for sauce.

I made "no bake" chicken enchiladas for the first time, and I'm a fan. I never realized how much the texture of the tortillas was diminished by baking in sauce. I used a recipe for sauce from Rick Bayless, but his method for the enchiladas seemed very strange to me. He called for dipping the tortillas in the sauce first, then frying them in oil. That seemed messy and a little dangerous, so I went with the usual oil then sauce ritual. One thing I did find useful from his instructions, though, was to use a small slotted spatula to transfer the tortillas from oil to sauce to plate, rather than tongs. It seemed like however careful I was with tongs, I always seemed to tear about one out of three tortillas. This is much easier and effective. Once I assembled the enchiladas, I did put them into a warm oven for a few minutes while I finished a few details for the rest of the dinner. Didn't seem to harm the enchiladas, but then I'm no expert.

It's strange how adamantly Ruhlman insists that this type of observation is misguided. From his blog before the book came out, in response to a review by Robert Sietsema: And today, in response to the NYT review: There's absolutely nothing wrong with focusing on French tradition and cooking, but why does he have to insist that it's "universal"? He's like a linguist who studies Romance languages and then says that language is the same everywhere, ignoring Mandarin, Japanese, Russian, Hebrew and virtually all of Africa's traditional dialects. That is, food might behave the same in one country as it does in another (whatever that means), but cooks don't cook the same in every culture. The techniques he discusses are not universal -- no more than the Indian techniques of toasting spices and cooking in a tandoori are universal, or the Mexican technique of cooking tortillas on a comal is universal. For whatever reason, he can't admit that, though, and it's unfortunate.

And let's not forget that one could describe Michael Pollan as "just" a professor of journalism, if one were so inclined.

I'm not disagreeing that it produces a great tasting burger. But if you grind your own meat and then overwork it and compress it into a dense patty, you're still going to get a dense, tough burger. And that was the question here -- not about the taste.

There are several other changes I'd suggest before grinding your own beef. (It is very good, but time consuming -- and I don't think buying preground meat is the problem.) When you say you use "seasoned" meat, do you mean you form the patties then salt them? Or do you mix seasoning into the meat and then form the patties? In my experience and from what I've read, mixing and compressing the ground meat is a major cause of tough, dense burgers. Compressing the meat might also account for the swelling, although I'm not sure about that. When you form the burgers, try just taking a handful of meat and patting it loosely together into a patty, then salting both sides 15 minutes or so before cooking. And Chris's suggestion of an indentation in the middle of the burger will probably help keep them flatter as they cook.

I guess we have differing ideas of good writing. Because other writers have done worse doesn't mean that this is good. We're agreed on that point. It's odd that he didn't have a better editor. I wonder why that is. Incidentally, I'm curious about something I didn't mention before -- in the first sentence I quoted, he says that "6 tablespoons of cold water into a cup of flour will give you a workable pot sticker dough, or about 2 to 1 by weight." Doesn't 6 tablespoons of water weigh about 3 oz. and a cup of flour somewhere between 4.25 and 5? Maybe my math is off, but if that's the case then calling it a ratio of 2 to 1 is wrong. Considering that the book is called Ratio, it's a careless error.

I’m not "dissing" the book based on two sentences. Qwerty asked specifically why I said the writing wasn’t good. I went to the chapter on Amazon, which is what I’ve read, and picked two confusing sentences (out of several) with lots of errors. I’m not saying the book is worthless because of them; I’m saying that in my opinion it’s not an example of good writing. By the way, I think Ruhlman’s books about other people (Making of a Chef, etc.) are good -- much better than his books about cooking. Some writers are great at capturing the essence of a person or situation and not that great at explaining concepts. So I don’t think I have preconceived ideas about his writing. I was really hoping that the bad writing in Elements was a fluke and that Ratio would be better. Also, as I said, this doesn’t mean I think the book is worthless. It’s limited in scope, but limited can be a very good thing, if it’s done well. And as I said, pedestrian writing is not the worst fault in a cookbook. I think it’s great that he’s getting cooks to think about weights, and I think as far as ratios can take a cook, they’re a valuable thing to think about, especially for a beginning cook who may not have considered that aspect of cooking.

Not only is his writing oddly phrased and awkward, it also contains grammatical and punctuation errors. For instance, here's the second sentence in the "Doughs" chapter that's excerpted on Amazon here: "The simplest dough is flour and water, and will be relatively flavorless unless you do something to it, such as add fat, egg, yeast, salt, sugar, or if you wrap it around something tasty (ground pork) and fry it, as with a Chinese pot sticker (6 tablespoons of cold water into a cup of flour will give you a workable pot sticker dough, or about 2 to 1 by weight)." This appears a page or so later: "A bread that’s mixed with a lot of yeast and baked 4 hours later hasn’t had the time to develop flavors – so adding flavors to these doughs, herbs, aromatics, olives, nuts, even a coating of olive oil and coarse salt before baking, goes a long way in this case." I'm not saying that a cookbook has to be elegant and beautifully written (although that's a wonderful thing when it happens). But I don't expect to have to stop and read a sentence twice or three times to get its meaning. If that happens once in a book, I can overlook it. If it happens twice in three pages, I assume that it's going to keep happening, and that makes me reluctant to keep reading. That's what I mean when I say it's not good writing. I expect more from a published author.

I've never cooked any Thai food before, but last night I decided to try my hand at beef satay. It turned out well, I thought, but I've ended up with a lot of sauce left over, and I wonder if anyone can suggest the best way to keep it. The coconut milk in the sauce is what concerns me -- I'm not sure how long it will last in the fridge. Can I freeze the sauce?

From what I've read (admittedly only what's available on Amazon), the writing is as pedestrian as I've come to expect from Ruhlman, although it's certainly edited better than Elements was. At the time when I asked my question, I had no idea what the book was actually going to include -- I may have phrased it facetiously, but it was not a ridiculous question. It seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, that ratios are useful for baking and sauces (sausages too) but not the majority of cooking.

I can't really see that attitude has anything to do with it. It's not about how I relate to the food I'm served, or the attitude of the person serving it. It has to do with, as Holly said, whether or not the food is made to order and served to me at a table.

Although I happily use (and actually plan for) leftovers, I've never been a fan of trying to use everything in the fridge in one dish -- I find flavors get muddied and you end up with something that has no focus. In your example, although I'm sure the fritatta was great, I would have used the grilled mushrooms and onions on a salad, (alone or with leftover steak if there was some), and saved the onion/garlic jam for another dish -- maybe pureed with some roasted red pepper into a sauce for the pasta. Or as an appetizer, spread on some crostini and topped with slivers of the pecorino.

From a Tales of the Cocktail press release: From the list, in addition to RoyalSwagger, former eG Forums host Erik (eje) is one of this year's apprentices. Congratulations!

Now that (I guess) the book is out, I'm curious to take a look. Can anyone tell me what kinds of recipes are covered? It seems to me that "ratios" are important for sauces, baking and pastry primarily. And that's great, but does the book include any actual ratios or recipes for, like, dinner? I can't see that there's a ratio for pot roast, or chicken and dumplings, or roast pork. I'm not saying that the book isn't worthwhile if it doesn't have these, but I'm very interested to see what it does actually cover.

The Kapoosh looks just like the photo Andie linked to. Perhaps there was an early version with bamboo inserts, but when I bought one, it had the plastic rods, not bamboo. A friend of mine has one now and it also has the plastic. My problem with that style knife block was simply that it didn't hold very many knives. I think if you only had a few knives, and especially if you had cleavers and other large knives that don't fit into an ordinary block, it would be an okay choice.

I was just in Denver for the weekend for the IACP conference and had two great meals with Steven Shaw (Fat Guy) and Dave Scantland (Dave the Cook). One was at O's, which is described here; the other was at Rioja. We opted for the tasting menu at Rioja, and after a brief discussion of how many dishes we wanted, we went for the full tour. It turned out to be an amazing spread of food -- three "tastings" at a time from each of the sections of the menu (online here), plus wines. The standouts for me were the tuna tartare mixed with fennel and apple and served napoleon style on apple chips; the pork belly on garbanzo bean puree; the "candied lemon" gnocchi with Dungeness crab; and the lamb,which was done perfectly. If there was a drawback, it was personal -- there was a lot of goat cheese, not a favorite of mine. Overall, the dishes were nicely conceived and executed, and the wines were a good match. Great value too -- $75 including the wines. I'm glad we went there for our first dinner; if we'd gone after O's, Rioja surely would have paled in comparison. As it was, it was a delightful surprise; we honestly didn't know what to expect, and it was a great meal all the way through.

Rancho, that sounds similar to the sauce I've been using, but I've also seen sauces that start with frying the chiles in oil before rehydrating. Any reason why one method is better than another?

I first heard of Chef Kleinman when I read this article, which was reprinted in Best Food Writing 2008. Although I enjoyed the author's explanations of how Kleinman got his effects, what really struck me were the descriptions of some of the dishes (anytime a good food writer says something brought tears to his eyes, I take notice). So I didn't have low expectations at all. I don't have too much to add to Steven's description of the meal, except to say that I found the shrimp dish to be nearly on a par with the pork, and found the duck to be less satisfactory: the duck itself was fabulous, but the beans were not as good as they could have been. The two frozen dishes were extraordinary. Like Steven, I'd had liquid nitrogen ice creams before, but these were a big cut above any of the others. The texture of both the sorbet and the ice cream was unbelievable. The ice cream was rolled in cinnamon tortilla crumbs, and the contrast of the crunchy spicy bits around the smoothest ice cream in the world was perfect. It's what yogurt and granola can only dream of being.

Here's a link to the paper cited by the Wikipedia article. Seems to be a case where some oxidized nuts caused the reaction, while most were fine. and I know I've eaten lots of pine nuts -- plain and in things. Never had them go rancid, and never experienced that taste disorder.