cdh

And here I was thinking it was about ethics. I'm a pragmatist. If there is no victim, and no harm, it doesn't matter how many ethical angels can dance on the head of a pin. The overuse and misuse of the term plagiarize in this discussion just underscores my contention that it doesn't belong or fit in the kitchen.

Interesting Guardian article above. In thinking about the situation a bit more, I'm coming to the position that the furore being stirred up about the Australian event is unwise, unfair and out of proportion to any harm done to anybody. Australia is, after all, on the other side of the world, and the opportunities for most residents there ever to try the interesting cookery going on in Spain, Chicago, the London suburbs, or the Lower East Side of Manhattan are pretty limited. Importing those techniques and executing those dishes is a service to that side of the world, and to gastronomy in general since the dishes do indeed spur interest in avant garde gastronomy. I think everybody reading this will agree that advancing interesting gastronomy is a good thing. What possible harm could possibly have been done to anybody? Has Alinea, or WD-50 lost a significant number of customers due to this occurrence? Has anybody's reputation been damaged? Have any brand names lost any goodwill in their marketplace? The harm being nominally evoked here is that "plagiarism" has been committed. In a kitchen, this is a nebulous victimless transgression that has been imported from academia into gastronomy. Academia is a different situation entirely, as its whole reason for existence is to produce novel thoughts that further explore the thoughts of earlier academics. In academia, plagiarism demolishes that goal by recirculating an old thought rather than creating new ones. Gastronomy is not about the constant progression from one dish to the next, but rather towards finding what dishes please the dining public at the moment. The applicability of the meme of plagiarism to cooking is, I think, suspect. Cooking has always been more consciously about replicating the successful dishes of others than requiring or striving for novelty in all things. Just look at the Ruhlman book's exploration of the Certified Master Chef test, which in large part appears to be a test of one's ability to memorize and reproduce Escoffier's recipes. If that is not an institutional endorsement of exact replication in gastronomy, then I don't know what is. The harm really being evoked here, it seems to me, is lese majeste... a wound to the dignity of the chefs whose dishes have been replicated. That sort of harm is not one that the law, or our society anymore, views as compensable most of the time. This is essentially a case of bad manners... maybe.

Wow... bummer that the SK is out of commission... I've been 3 or 4 times over the past few years and it was always fabulous. I hope Shola's next venture turns out as successfully as this little experiment. It always did seem a little odd having the undivided attention of somebody that talented lavished over just 8 people.

I don't think the show is still in production...

I just saw a giant Shiner billboard along the highway in Delaware, so it is encroaching on Philly...

It was, indeed, a fine beer to start out the tour with. And the tour itself was great as well. I particularly enjoyed the chance to try Flying Fish's Puckerfish on cask at the Grey Lodge. A beer with an interesting backstory... once upon a time there was a cask of DFH's belgian dubbel that went out into the world. A long time later somebody discovered it and sent it back to the brewery unopened, but with a few years of aging on it. It had turned from a dubbel into a oud bruin, so they blended it out to level off the sourness, and Puckerfish was born. Yummy, though lacking in the real sour complexity of some of the belgian aged sours... no wood involved in the aging of this one. Anyway, all of the stops on the tour were great... Good job Rich! Edited to correctly identify the brewer of Puckerfish.

Just try marketing your Dark Caffeinated Fizzy Beverage In The Style of Coca-Cola and see how long it takes for the cease & desist nastygrams to start arriving. Same principle at work with Arpege eggs... particularly with regard to world famous brands like Arpege (and Coke), which have even higher levels of trademark protection than ordinary marks.

Fascinating thread... but now I feel the urge to throw another legal wrench into the moral mechanics that are being put together here. We appear to be forming a consensus that when a dish is duplicated from the repertoire of another, that credit should be given to the originator. One example above is the Arpege egg. Arpege, however, is a trademark of Alain Passard (or his employers if he does not fully own the restaurant.) L'Arpege could easily stop anybody from selling counterfeit Arpege eggs. Lots of other restaurants could do the same for their eponymous dishes. They might even have incentive to do so if the copies are (in their eyes) inferior in quality to the originals. And they have a strong argument... the value of their brand is diminished in the eyes of their market by others putting out pale shadows of the original greatness, yet still attaching the original name. We appear to be approaching a system that effectively gives the creator of a dish a right to veto another's choice to replicate it by using a combination of two principles. 1. You're a scumbag if you don't attribute your sources, and 2. If you attribute your shoddy work to the originator, they can stop you from doing so in order to protect their brand image in the market. Complicated, no? I'd love to hear reactions to this musing.

Cocktails are props. The romantic is in the person drinking it. So long as it doesn't taste so bad as to make you lose your cool, any cocktail can look like a sexy seduction potion in the right hands.

For a really good asian cuisine that you'll not find many other places, try the Burmese at Rangoon, which is on 9th Street, a little north of Arch St. Very distinctive and delicious food that Philadelphia is lucky to have.

Is it used as an active verb as in "We're really happy with our new lobster salad recipe, and we're menuing it in the spring." ??? Or is it moreused as a gerund like "All of our menuing takes into account the new food costs that our supplier gave us." ???

What sort of context? I've heard "menuing" in computer programming circles to talk about GUI design... but I don't know without context what it is supposed to mean in a restaurant publication.

One good thing about Trader Joe's is their satisfaction guarantee... if you get something you don't like, they'll refund your money. If I got smelly bean pieces, or decomposing pasta, or green tinted motor oil from them, they'd see both it and me again, with my hand out.

200? really? That makes a 33 degree drop, which might be more than I'd expect from a 3 inch free fall. I've found that I get seriously suboptimal results if the water is any hotter than the machine's set brew temp, e.g. if I flip the steam switch for 10 seconds and then unflip it, then brew, the crema fails to appear, and the coffee tastes off. That says to me that the machine is calibrated to the right temperatures as it is.

Your inquiry made me break out my thermometer this morning... from my Carezza a shot pulled into a warmed double-walled stainless cup clocked in at 167F. Plenty hot for me. Given that optimal brew temp is around 190F, the drop of 20 degrees seems right to me given the long transit through the air into the cup. If you like it hotter, you could pull a short shot, flip the steam switch and top it up with hotter water that shoots out the team wand when you open it up and turn on the pump.

upton is at www.uptontea.com... upton.com is something else. Upton catalogs are wonderfully informative and worth the read.

Where to start? I'd advise tasting broadly, and then narrowing in on what you find you like. Adagio Tea used to have a fabulous tea sampler of the month club where they sent along five samples of about an ounce each month, and the teas that got sent were really enlightening about how different teas can be. I don't think they do it any more, sadly, but they do sell sample assortments. Upton Tea does samples, but in my experience years ago, Adagio offered better value in the samples than Upton did. I'd advise not sticking with just one retailer, but to sample as broadly as you can. However, bricks and mortar tea shops may offer tastings, but I find that even though they know how their teas are supposed to be prepared, they don't have equipment to implement it themselves... hence I've been told to steep green teas at 180, and then offered a sample made with freshly boiled water because that is what the in-store water heating apparatus made. Suboptimal to say the least. Five years ago, Central Market did not have an impressive tea program... Whole Foods was much better... at least in Austin. Teapots and kettles are not absolutely required, but a thermometer and a strainer are. Use a mug to brew the tea in at the right temperature, then strain it into another after it is done steeping. Or use a tea ball. You might also get started exploring black teas with the imported British blends in tea bags, which are usually very hearty Assam blends that can be made with just boiled water and are often available in specialty markets in the US. Furthermore, I'd advise you ignore the directions when trying Darjeelings, as they often tell you to use just boiled water, and I find that to be too hot... I prefer Darjeelings done with 180-185ish water... Good luck and happy hunting.

Very hands on. Everybody in class gets to make each dish that is taught.

We appear to be falling into the linguistic trap common to talking about chocolate... when I said Belgian, above, i meant to say bars of eating chocolate as they are made in Belgium. I did not intend to say "Belgian Chocolates", of the Leonidas variety, which are fillings surrounded by a thin shell of chocolate. I wish it were possible to say Belgian chocolate without having to go through an explanation like that every time...

I'm also a fan of the dark without the sour. I think that corresponds to the Belgian style rather than the French style. Valrhona is always too sour and fruity for my tastes... tastes underroasted, maybe? In coffee roasting, bright acid-y flavors persist in lightly roasted coffees, and smooth out when the roast gets into the mid range. I'd bet that chocolate is similar. Chocolove's products are great... wish I knew which belgian chocolate house made the chocolate for them. An old favorite was their 66% bar with nibs, which they stopped producing due to quality control issues with their nibs (or so their reps at the fancy foods show told me). The ratio of cocoa butter to liquor in the Chocolove bars in the 60's is great. Their bars in the 70s get a little to crackly and the melt is a little less smooth than I prefer. My favorite bar in the 70s is the late lamented Swartenbroeckx 77% Noir, of which my stash is still holding out despite the fact it has been commercially unavailable for 5 years. This bar has a fabulous rich deep chocolate flavor with no sourness, and a smooth melt that conceys that flavor wonderfully well. Anybody have recommendations for further belgian style chocolate bars that are not insanely expensive and readily available in the US? The Trader Joes bars that come in threes are belgian and have the cocoa butter percentage right, but the cacao liquor in there is not interesting enough. IF they used more rich and deep chocolate, I'd be all about them... as it is, they're cheap and decent, but not exciting.

I find that meyer lemons have an herbal thing in addition to the floral thing going on... It is almost thyme-y. Particularly the zests.

The upscale sandwich market appears to have blossomed. How do you assess your competition from 'wichCraft and such... What do you think of the Pret a Manger entry into the NYC market? Does the Craft brand tie-in give them an undeserved leg up, or do you see them as fighting fair on an even playing field? How do you assess the rest of the upscale sandwich joints that are all over the place?

I've got a couple of pounds of El Rey nibs, which are delicious sprinkled on things that could use a little crunchy bitterness. They're great mashed into a spoonful of peanut butter.... Dunno if El Rey still sells nibs, but they used to... [edited to add: yes they do, but they're much more expensive than they used to be......]

I've not been to Phuket since the tsunami hit it... but I did have a very fine meal and an enjoyable cooking class at the Boathouse Hotel in Kata Beach.

Back when I was living in Austin in the late 90s, Celis was still open and brewing, so Shiner was second choice for cheap local beer. Shiner is not an interesting or engaging beer like some the Celis line-up were... but a fine thing with a burger by the pool any day. Pennsylvania has Yuengling, which is local, inexpensive and a damn fine beer in all of its incarnations. The Lord Chesterfield and Black and Tan are favorites.