cdh

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.

No first hand knowledge, but tales of kobe beef production sound similar or even more lavish. e.g http://www.askthemeatman.com/kobe_beef.htm

Wow! Impressive demo. Thanks for taking us through this process. Something else to add to my list...

I don't know about cheap, but Martini & Rossi sweet vermouth always tastes like cardboard to me. I've noticed no particular distinguishing aftertaste in cheap vermouths.

You was had. $10 for angostura? Extortionate! $33 for pernod is also quite high. Those prices are about 50% higher than you should be paying. If you're in the DC area, take a drive out into Maryland's countryside on the way north... the land of cheap booze.

Does that mean I can come over to your kitchen and help myself, so long as I let anybody come over to my kitchen and take some of anything I made with stuff I got from you? What a fun thought experiment.

There is a lovely dish that a Burmese restaurant in Philadelphia serves-- a tea leaf salad. The leaves appear to be big whole leaves like you find in good Tung Ting oolongs and other teas where the leaves come balled up in little clumps rather than as little pieces. They're clearly soaked in water for a while to reconstitute them, and they're dressed with fish sauce and peanuts and little dried shrimp and other such things. A very strongly flavored and salty dish, but quite nice.

I recall an interesting story I was told a while back that indicates this sort of things happens in French as well. Apparently there are cultural differences that sprung into linguistic differences on the use of the word for fish. Some of older more maritime stock who emigrated away from France refer to fish on the plate and in the market as pesche, while speakers of modern French think that is wrong and refer to it is poisson, which appears to imply a processed-ness that raw pesche does not imply. Or so I was told by somebody claiming old French "swamp yankee" heritage... I speak no french at all.

You're going to love it! It is quite an experience. Bring a camera, take pictures, and report back!

Not a word that bothers me, so long as it means what it implies. Going to the bother to find a good single source of something is a worthwhile activity. It is more than just calling up the Sysco guy and buying what he has on hand. It is more than just taking what comes by easily... it implies that time and effort went into finding the hermit's cave (or out of the way warehouse in a sketchy part of town), or into finding the local farmer who would grow just the variety of wild rutabaga you wanted to put on the menu. "Sourcing" implies doing some work to find stuff, rather than calling the one stop shop and taking what's handy. It implies that you know what you want, and worked to find it.

Glad the machine and grinder are working out for you. With the Carezza things to keep in mind are: Only crank the filter handle over to the little arrow on the front of the machine, even if it could go further. When it stops sealing at that point, it is time to go shopping for a new portafilter gasket, and the extra play past the mark will let you get by for a while, but you may be wedging coffee grounds up into the dispersal screen. . Also, stock up on some citric acid powder (from a homebrew shop) and run a mild citric acid solution through the machine every few months to keep hard water scale from building up on the innards. If you've got scale, you'll know as the apparent pressure the machine produces will visibly drop, shots will take longer to pull and crema will stop forming. Have fun with that machine... mine's about 5 years old now and still going strong.

I think that spices get sold in inconvenient containers and in too large quantities. I miss having readily available bulk herbs and spices like I got used to in Texas at Central Market. If I needed two tablespoons of dried marjorum, I could go and get exactly that, and it cost maybe 75 cents. Freshness is so important in spices that it seems a waste to buy a big jar of something that is only going to get worse with time.

I have had many a fine Sazerac made with bourbon no aversion here. ← I just had to comment on the gumbopages bold!!!! exhortation to never use bourbon... Glad I'm not alone.

I've been doing Sazaracs and their close kin a bunch recently... maybe it is just that I love that black licorice flavor in everything... but as to the how? I take a glass and put in a teaspoonful of sugar into it. Onto the sugar goes 2 shakes of peychaud's and a few drops of pastis. There is enough liquid in with the sugar that the whole mass will slowly flow and stick to the walls of the glass if you tilt it and turn it around with enough patience. Once the entire inside of the glass has an even coating of sugar, in go 3 ice cubes and 2 oz of bourbon. I sometimes like a little fizz on top as well. No citrus gets anywhere near my Sazerac. While Sazaracs are a fine drink when made with rye, I don't understand the aversion to bourbon in the mix. I think it complements the anise's sweetness quite well.

I hope that induction stoves catch on... they've been around for decades, but have never caught the fancy of enough people, it seems.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/dining/01ghana.html Any eG folks with experience with African cuisines like this?

Well, my whole concern was that there is a difference between being a place with some talented chefs and being a superpower. If superpower is a mistranslation, then I would not have even commented. I am quite happy living someplace that is not a culinary superpower. With one possible exception, nobody lines up years in advance for any table in Philadelphia, and no chef in Philadelphia has inspired waves of immitation across the world or gotten any significant press non-locally. Those are indicia of superpower status...

I think that superpower might be an overestimation, but it does sound like some nice places to eat are opening there. I'd not say that Israel is a superpower until a couple of homegrown chefs open destination restaurants that get chatter of the el Bulli type going here on eGullet. I gather that the raw ingredients in Israel can be great... it's a matter of finding the people with the talent in the kitchen, and with the PR folks.

Well, the spate of quote abuse does point to a deficiency in standard written English-- lack of an irony mark. When there is not enough context to allow a reader to infer a less than literal intention, how should a writer try to convey a less than literal intention? We've got ready access to a zillion typefaces and enough random little marks that we encode characters in 8 bits (256 possibilities) for each one. Using something that already has a meaning, like quotation marks, as an irony mark seems silly. Pick a new mark and stick with it. I nominate the ~ mark... it's wavery and visually implies not exactitude... and in math it actually means "similar to"... and it is already on everybody's keyboard and nobody ever uses it for anything substantive outside of math. So instead of a "raspberry coulis" it would be a ~raspberry coulis~ ... much prettier, I think.

Right, but you're defining that and serving it as SOUP with a splash (your words) of sherry. What's being suggested here (I think) is the flip side of that - sherry with some soup to call it a savory "cocktail". ← Well, detlefchef wants ideas for savory cocktails... I think the souped up booze model is about as close as we're going to get. A bloody mary is vodka + gazpacho. A bullshot is vodka + beef broth. The turtle soup and bisques are just extensions of that thought process... Just about all booze except certain scotches have a sweet edge to them. To get the savory in there, you need to put it in there with something that brings it along and can overpower the sweet edge of the underlying liquor. I think it is the ethanol itself that has the sweetness I'm thinking of, so it is always there. Running strongly savory salty soups through strainers to make them into smooth liquids and then mixing them with complementary booze is the only way to get a savory booze experience that I can think of.

No. It would be boozy soup in a cocktail glass. That sounds like a savory cocktail to me. With the snapper or shellfish bisque maybe a smoky Laphroaig type thing would work well too... Some sherry, some scotch, and some soup might make a damn fine boozy savory thing.

While I've been to neither, Vetri and Babbo have always sounded similar in conception and execution. How wrong am i?

How about snapper soup with a heavier than usual dose of sherry? That is certainly savory, and likely delicious. Don't know that I'd want to sip it from a conical glass... but it would be savory and boozy.

Do wish his caption folk had gotten the high ball and the old fashioned labelled correctly... his labels in the intro to the glassware indicated that an old fashioned was tall and a high ball was short... but then in the julep segment he gets the ID right... sloppy captioning.

Look at the way a table is set: Fork fork plate knife spoon I think that this table setting tells you something about the expectations of how you'll handle your utensils. Forks, being on the left, are expected to be handled in the left hand. Knives and spoons, being on the right are expected to be handled by the right hand. The setting would, logically, be based in the idea of convenience and not for the purposes of making the diner go through an elaborate ritual of juggling silverware. So, yes, you're expected to keep the fork in your left hand. Unless you're using it as a cutting implement, when you'd use it in your right hand with nothing in your left. Forks, for stabbing, poking and lifting are a left handed thing. Cutting is a dominant hand activity, so using a fork to cut necessitates switching... but otherwise I think the table setting indicates expectations.