JAZ

Years ago, my sister used to buy "Coronitas" -- Corona beer in smaller bottles -- 7 or 8 ounces, as I recall. I was never a fan of Corona, and at the time the idea struck me as a marketing gimmick. Now, however, I often find myself wanting just a small beer; 12 ounces is too much, and I either have to waste 4 or 5 ounces or find some way to cook with it. (Actually, come to think of it, my parents often used to split a beer before dinner. At the time, I thought it was cheap; now I think it's great. If I had someone to split a beer with, it would save a lot of beer.) So, two questions: do any decent breweries bottle beer in anything smaller than 12 ounces? And if not, why not?

While I agree that the Torpedo is worth trying, it wasn't life altering. It's not even the best of Sierra Nevada's beers (which I like); I thought their ESB (Early Spring Beer) was better balanced and more interesting. But it's good to have another option when I'm in the mood for lots of hops.

Until about three years ago, I lived my entire life in the Western US. Growing up, we ate macaroni and cheese fairly often, and always as a main course. My friends' mothers served it as a main course. When I went to college, the dining hall served macaroni and cheese as a main course (for lunch, not dinner -- but still as a main course). Imagine my surprise when I moved to Atlanta, where macaroni and cheese is treated as a side dish. On the one hand, I guess I can understand that -- it's a starch; there's no meat in it; you could look at it as a pasta version of cheesy mashed potatoes. On the other hand, it's impossible for me to forget my past. I still think of it as a main course. I suppose I'm more inclined to accept a stovetop version as a side dish, but once you put it into a gratin dish and bake it, I go back to my original view. Is this a geographical difference? Cultural? Is it only a Southern thing? Is there a difference between "main course" and "side dish" macaroni and cheese?

Just because some of us don't think the future "path" that Alice Waters endorses is viable, it doesn't follow that we think the one we've been following is correct. Those aren't the only two options.

Except that I know many chefs who don't like vegetables in their meat stocks. Parsley stems would be fine for an herb sauce and maybe a vegetable stock, but why should a chef who doesn't like the flavor use them in a dish where he or she thinks they don't belong? It would be like using the leftover beets scraps from a brunoise in carrot soup, just in order not to waste them. I think cutting down on waste is a great thing, but I don't think you can expect chefs to use any old leftovers in menu items. It's great if a restaurant can feed them to pigs or chickens, but let's face it: not many restaurants have that ability. Compost sounds like a reasonable alternative.

Cocktails with Cointreau or curacao and lemon juice often taste to me like they have orange juice -- for instance, the Journalist: 2 oz. gin .25 oz. Curacao .25 oz. lemon juice .5 oz. sweet vermouth .5 oz. dry vermouth Dash Angostura bitters The first time I tasted this, I thought "Wow, a Bronx cocktail that I actually like!" It's got something of the flavor profile of orange juice, but without the heavy mouthfeel and cloying quality of orange juice itself.

I make pureed vegetable soups from just about anything -- carrots, asparagus, broccoli, artichokes red peppers, corn -- using the same basic formula. Start out with a cup or so of onions, leeks or shallots, sliced. Saute them in butter or oil until soft. Add about a pound of your vegetable of choice, salt and half a cup of white wine or sherry. Cook until wine has mostly evaporated, then add three to four cups of chicken stock or water (depending on how concentrated you want it) and simmer until vegetables are very soft. Puree (in batches if necessary) and put through a strainer, then add half a cup of cream and adjust seasoning.

That would be my question, too. Did you develop them so your customers can buy them and take them home to heat up in the toaster? If not, I guess I'm missing the point.

I'm actually happy with my home kitchen now; my last kitchen, though, had the worst gas range ever. Not only was the broiler on the bottom, but there was no drawer to pull out, so to use it, I pretty much had to lie on the floor and try to place the food under the ring of flame without burning my arms. And the burners were crap -- no way to keep a low flame at all. Give me electric any day. Where I teach, the worst thing -- even worse than the expensive yet awful Wolf and Viking ranges -- are the Viking wall ovens, which are half an inch too narrow to accommodate a half-sheet pan. How stupid is that?

Experimenting for a class coming up, I made a West African chicken soup with tomatoes and pureed peanuts yesterday. I wasn't sure what to expect, but it was fabulous -- spicy and complex. The peanuts added more body than flavor, so that if you didn't know what was in it, well, you wouldn't know what was in it.

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?