btbyrd

Red, white, and blue tacos with barbacoa and grilled chicken. With roasted poblanos, picked jalapeños, and cotija.

Wings, a wedge, and some quick pickles made in my chamber vacuum machine.

Haha... teppanyaki was our standard Valentine's day thing bur during COVID that wasn't an option, so I used my little Blackstone inside to somewhat replicate the experience. I got the onion volcano down.

They're 6oz vintage-y coupes made of thicc glass. They're not really my style, but guests seem to like them and they're relatively inexpensive. Of course, they're apparently unavailable now.

Mine is a 17" and the 20" isn't much bigger storage-wise and has a usefully bigger cooking surface. I only cook for 2-4 most of the time, so it's not really a big deal. But since I'm already having to store a 17", storing a bit more wouldn't be that much of a change and would provide a benefit. They're both good at a campsite, provided that your car is nearby.

Thank you! I'm also a piker of the "fake it till you make it" variety, but I think I've been doing alright so far. That like and comment from Wylie are really an artifact of his being homies with my chef owner, but it's pretty cool nevertheless (especially given my love of technical/modernist cooking and ingredients). A few years ago, Grant Achatz liked and responded to one of my Insta posts, so now I've gotten likes from chef heroes in NYC and Chicago. It makes me long for the time before Instagram was populated by spambots. But I digress.

Also: Beverage photography is hard, y’all. All the food I’ve ever photographed has been real and reasonably easy to shoot, but ask me to get 5 drinks together at the same time and get a couple different angles? That’s maybe the hardest thing I’ve done from a food photography perspective. The ice is constantly dying… the drinks are constantly dying. In unison. As an extrapolation of something Marco once said, five minutes is an eternity. Not quite as bad as cooking fish, but close.

I created and run a cocktail program for a small Italian restaurant in my hometown. Mission Pizza Napoletana serves some of the best pizza in the world (and the other food is great too). Here are some photos of drinks from the initial menu. We have an ice program, a carbonation program, and a gigantic-freaking-twist program. Negroni on a big cube. Campari, Tanqueray, Punt e Mes. Our Boulivardier recipe is Elijah Craig, Campari, and Cocchi. MPN Spritz. Organic prosecco (from one of two producers), Aperol, and San Benedetto sparkling water. I force carbonate everything so that the bubble level is off the charts. Negroni, Italian Greyhound, Spritz, Black Manhatta, Paper Plane. A photo from my home bar that helped me get/create the job. And my favorite Paper Plane photo.

I have the smallest Blackstone they make and wish I'd gone slightly bigger, but I got mine for portability and storability so I guess I got what I wanted. Mine is small enough to run on a small green 1lb propane tank (its intended fuel source) but it functions much better when you use an adapter to connect it to a 20lb tank. Anyway, my primary use is for smash burgers. I can do four at a time and it's fine. These are made from cast iron and they're relatively thin so the heat isn't very even. But they're inexpensive and fun, so go bananas. One of my friends got one and did his weekly bulk meal prep on it. Cooked a bunch of peppers, onions, and chicken and whatever... minimal cleanup, a smart idea. It can also be a good breakfast thing, but the unevenness of the heat is something to consider with delicate items like eggs or heavy items with a lot of moisture like hash browns (which will brown unevenly if you just let them sit there). TLDR: Smash some burgers, make some breakfast, do some brick wrapped chicken, and sear anything outside that you wouldn't want to sear inside.

Made some lobster tails with béarnaise for my dad’s birthday. Classic.

I seldom have time to cook these days, but when I do I keep coming back to steak tacos. Walmart wagyu strip loin with salsa verde, charred spring onions and jalapeño, boujie Truf green hot sauce (don’t judge me).

Squid, saffron short grain donabe rice, olive oil, yuzu kosho.

Jacques Pepin's show on PBS always made me want one. Of course, that show was brought to us in part by Cuisinart, so I guess the marketing worked.

Conway Electric.

My favorite Li Ziqi video isn't food related. Also check out Dianxi Xiaoge's channel.

The thing to do is start them out with a cup of dashi. I have been umami-bombing myself for like 15 years. It's not really all that mysterious and I think you're getting too in your head about it. I don't know how many people you're serving, but my initial thought would be to do 3-5 canapes each featuring a different classic umami-rich ingredient. Also have a shaker of MSG on the table and let guests taste it themselves by salting their finger or whatever. Parm, shiitake, miso, bonito flake, some crudo cured in kombu.... you know, whatever. But at that point you're basically just doing a mini-meal as hors d'oeuvres. That's how I'd want to do it, but I'm cheffy and pretentious. The easier route is just to start with dashi. Good dashi is simple and contains two classic sources of umami. It was by investigating the properties of dashi that umami was discovered in the first place. Start at the beginning. Free glutamic acid from kombu + isosinate from katsuobushi. Maybe serve two dashis, one classic and one with dried shiitake for an extra dose of guanylate. Or a whole dashi flight also featuring some crappy hon dashi or your own synthetic "dashi" constructed from MSG and magic powders. I don't know, it's your dinner. Go nuts.

The dinner itself should be the educational experience. Grafting it on beforehand with MSG scrambled eggs is weird.

These days I mostly get Nueske's applewood smoked bacon from an upscale grocer for $9.99/lb. I used to order it through the mail at twice the price (factoring in shipping) so I feel lucky. It's a fantastic all-around bacon... good for eating, good as a seasoning, tasty fat. Not quite artisanal, but very good.

My old Thermapen MK3 started to drain batteries down like nobody's business and it made me distressed. Santa heard me bitching about it and brought me an orange Thermapen One. While there's certainly no need to upgrade from an older model to the One, it is noticeably nicer. And it uses AAA batteries. My first use was to cook tenderloin steaks for Christmas lunch/dinner, and no headlamps were needed even though it was dark outside. The extra speed is also appreciated even though home cooks don't need it. Working in a professional kitchen where you might need to probe a bunch of chickens or whatever, the faster read time is real nice.

Only 109? Amateurs.

I always just buy the red one.

Thanksgiving is fundamentally a harvest festival celebrating the Columbian exchange (broadly construed). Think about what cuisine would have been like in the New World at the time. What the settlers would have brought with them. Serve venison, game birds, trout, oysters, and clams. Do a succotash with the three sisters. Incorporate chili and chocolate. Look to indigenous cuisines, even Mexican cuisines, for inspiration. There are so many traditions and inspirations to draw upon, so many more flavors and techniques and preparations to draw upon than we as a culture seem to be willing to allow ourselves to imagine.

I seem to have misplaced my copy of The Fat Duck cookbook, but I recall that it had a recipe for the three nitro poached aperitif things that come out first. I have made the Campari ones before, and I'm pretty sure I "cooked" a recipe from the book. Does anyone happen to have the spec for that one?

Then came the f***ing onions.

Working the salad bar station. Red bell time was my moment of zen.