Steve Plotnicki

It's the instant magic of eGullet. Ask a question and poof................ Joe's Stone Crab Mustard Sauce

I don't understand your question. Where did I say that wine costs more at the winery?

The thing about winery margins is that if you planted vines in say 1970, you based your investment on the cost of a bottle of wine during that time. Do you have any idea how many wineries planted vines when a bottle of wine was worth $6.99 a bottle and now 30 years later the same wine sells for $75 a bottle or more? Unless they have had to grub up their vines from phyloxera or some other reason and replant them, the margins they make are astronomical. As for the winery direct issue, it has nothing to do with wine, it has to do with things like Jack Daniels where the local distributors make most of their money. The amount of money the big distributors make from wine is marginal compared to what they make on hard liquor. But they are afraid that if they allow wine to be shipped into their states, then it will expand into hard liquor. And the larger wineries like Mondavi Phelp's don't want to rock that boat. That's because they make lots of plonk that the want tied to the sales of their good stuff.

Do I smell Ed Schoenfeld? Whether yes or no, I will head back there as soon as I can and pick up one of those porterhouses.

Gee this is getting sillier. Britcook insists that things not made by hand will not taste artisanal. I say that there is no harm to say they could, and to let people's taste buds make the ultimate determination. What I haven't heard him say is why that standard isn't good enough? If it's impossible, then no harm, no foul. But if it is actually possible, what's the problem with that? As Yvonne has pointed out about LPQ, and I've pointed out about LP, some things are on the borderline. I think there's a further error on his part because not only do we use the term artisanal to describe things that taste like they are made by hand, we use it to exclude things made artisanally but of poor quality. They are not worthy of the distinction. Nobody calls the sauvignon blanc that is so acidic and has so little fruit that it is undrinkable artisanal, even if it is. Robert S. - I would say it's artisanal because when I tasted it, I would quickly ask how come it tastes that way. And the answer to that question(s) would no doubt disclose that it was fabricated "artisanally."

I used Toby's recipe. Two minutes per side on a ridged non-stick stove top grill pan and then 4 1/2 minutes in the oven. The steaks were perfectly rare/medium rare. What I am complaining about is the quality of the taste. I find that quite often people recommend steaks to me and then I go try them only to find that they are not to my liking. In fact the odds of getting a good steak from a butcher in this town are quite slim if you ask me. No matter where people recommend, The French Butcher, Shatsky's, Ottomanelli, none of them are of adequate quality as far as I'm concerened. To me, if you don't have restaurant quality steak, it ain't worth eating. Now in London I'm not sure where you would find top quality beef? Isn't there a good butcher in Scotland who ships? There was that place in Scotland that RW Apple used to swear had steaks in the same league as Peter Luger. The name was the Champanny Inn and I believe it was in Lilingoth (sp?) If they are still there, you should find out where they get their steaks from. If I recall the chapter in Apple's book, he compared them to Luger, L'Ami Louis in Paris and Sostanza in Firenze (they make a great steak there.) A friend of mine who lives in Laussane was telling me how poor the steaks are in Switzerland and that every time he comes to the states he sneaks in as much steak in as he can. He can get it he says but the price is some astronomical amount that makes it not worth eating.

I always thought it was a cover for their secret desire to be capitalists.

I used to be able to do that with my dates before I got married.

Mush steak is just ribeye without a bone and sliced thin. Since it's usually used in places that keep kosher, the salting process seems to give the steak a mushy texture. But whatever, it's better then those Newport steaks at the Florence providing they use top quality beef. In fact I would choose Park Easts's mush steak over the Newport anytime.

Well to go from the ridiculous to the sublime, if you tasted something and it tasted as if it was made artisanally, how would anyone know if it wasn't? Would you ask for a certfificate of authenticity? And the same question in reverse? If someone claimed something was artisanal and it tasted like crap, would you ask them to prove it?

The language has already been subverted with no credit due to me. You can either go with the flow or you can be one of the lone people in the crowd who keeps trying to make the point revolve around language while others are using it in the context of taste. At some point if the use I am describing becomes prevelant, it will become a definition listed in the OED. But I wonder why that surprises anybody since I am sure that many words or terms have come to be defined as a product of how people use them? And that is true even if that is somewhat different from the original definition.

Maybe I'm just spoiled by Lobel's strips and the aged prime rib they now have at Eli's Market. But Suvir is correct, they were very nice and gracious at Florence. Including the butcher explaining to me that they invented the Newport Steak. And I don't mean this to be a blight on the rest of their meat. It's just that I'm picky about my steak. Actually butchers are only as good as their suppliers. And Florence is either getting meat from the top tier wholesalers or as they say, they isn't. Hard to tell from this cut because it was so unsual.

Oy veh, arguing over goodness. Those who aren't willing to allow the use of word artisanal in the greater marketplace are doing themselves a great disservice. The fact of the matter is that we who love and enjoy top quality food products are desperate for marketing terms that allow us to simply and quickly communicate that a product meets a certain standard of quality. To quibble over whether it's intended to describe the source of the quality (how it's constructed) as opposed to the standard of quality a product acheives is like shooting yourself in the foot. We are all much better off it the commonly held definition in the trade is a product that TASTES LIKE IT IS MADE BY HAND. And for those of you who want to put the English language ahead of being able to get good quality food products in the hinterlands, I suggest you read the dictionary while you eat food from tins. It never fails that the people here would prefer to argue about the use of language rather then discussing the way food tastes. Because while I raised pain Poillane as an example of something being artisanal/not artisanal, nobody here has said, yes I tasted the bread and it tastes or doesn't taste artisnal to me. Which to me, is the only issue that's worth discussing. Unless of course you like the English language better then food and then you can discuss if the term is being applied correctly ad infinitum. But excuse me if I tear off another slice off pain Poillane while you argue about it. Because in the end, as Robert Brown says, the proof is in the pudding and I don't really care if something isn't artisanal. I just care that it tastes as if it does.

I just think this is wrong and it is not the way the market uses it. What is at issue is whether a product TASTES LIKE it was made carefully by hand. There are plenty of poor products that were made artisanally that we don't care about. Artisanal in the way that we use it, which I think is what FG asked, is what someone who is involved with quality food products means when they use the phrase. Arguing that the dictionary definition is the one that should be used is sort of a pointless exercise because we don't use artisanal to describe products other ones that meets the requisite quality requirements.

Definitions of terms to describe products are made by the market that trades in those products. This is the good part/bad part of a free market. Human Bean's example of alternative music is the perfect one. What was originally termed alternative music, which was played by bands using less then the top recording techniques, and released by independant labels, just became a type of mass marketed music. But even after it was released by major labels it was still recognizeable as alternative music. The issue with the word artisanal is how large a marketplace is interested in products that fit the mold. Right now I think it's a small market and the consumers who make up the market are interested in the product actually tasting a certain way. As the market grows larger the people will be less discerning and they will come to accept the definition as being "made in the manner of." And as long as there is some insignificant increase in quality that they can tie to the word, they will be happy. JD raised this point on the last thread on this topic. If you walk through the old town of Nice, there are loads of bakeries that advertise their products as being "artisanally fabricated" but they are selling cheaply made junk. But they are still using the phrase correctly. So Schaem I think this is more about the food elite coopting the word for their own use then this is about Kraft using it improperly. Robert S. - Thanks for that very artisanally crafted answer .

Schaem - You can use artisanal any way you want. I am just relaying how the market uses it. And the more prevelant artisanal products become, if they are commercially successful to a certain extent, the use of the term will be bastardized by large corporations. Such is life. Then those who really care about food will adopt a new term that means made by hand and high quality.

Schaem - Nobody has proprietary use of the word artisanal. If Kraft wants to make such a cheese, nobody can stop them. But in the meanwhile, before theu ruin the term, we can apply our own reasonable standard. And in reality, today artisanal only means "high quality." That's because most things of high quality are made "artisanally." But if we take your textbook definition of artisanal, if Kraft has somebody do one small task by hand when fabricating that cheese, they would meet your deifinition. At least my definition means "tastes good and is of high quality."

Well what I am trying to say that artisanal is defined as what the public accepts as being artisanal. That's why the definitions you pull out of your dictionaries don't matter. It's a marketing term that is tied to a level of quality. How they got to that level of quality doesn't matter as long as a producer provides it. It doesn't matter if it is made by hand, only that it tastes like it's made by hand. But as a practical matter, I can't imagine a producer could offer something and call it artisanal unless a material part of his product was made in an artisanal manner .

Mass produced just means that they make a lot of it. Whether it is artisanal or not is a matter of the way it tastes.

Well when I was in Paris last month and waiting on line at the Pierre Herme shop on rue Bonaparte, I started having a conversation with the French couple on line ahead of me. We started chatting about Lionel Poillane (he died the day before) and they said his bread was "mass produced" and that there were other breads in Paris which was better. Their standard of artisanal, I submit, is too rigorous. Pain Poillane would qualify as being artisanal by any reasonable industry wide standard. Even if they have a big factory on the outskirts of Paris that is mass producing the bread.

We had this discussion on the French board I believe. Or maybe it was on the NYC board. People use artisanal as a way to describe something that tastes as if it is made by hand or grown with utmost care. In reality, something can be mass produced and commercially made and still be artisanal if it meets the taste requirements. But as a practical matter, people can usually taste the difference betwen a commercially made product and a hand made product and they use artisanal to describe the latter.

Made the trek down to Florence Market today to try the heralded Newport Steak. Well somebody should send this shtick fleish back to Rhode Island as it was resolutely disappointing and unsatisfying. It was both chewy and didn't have much of a beefy flavor to it. In fact I doubt anyone would ever write anything about it if it wasn't a good story that is topped off by it being sold at one of Greenwich Villages food throwbacks to yesteryear. For someone who is a steak lover and who makes restaurant quality steaks at home all the time, this didn't even come close to being acceptable and my wife and I didn't even finish our steaks.

I was just at Astor Place wines and they have the Selbach-Oster in stock.

No the jalaneos are fresh, seeded and sliced thin. But the crab is chopped into small pieces you can pick up and suck the meat out of the shells. Don't you have a Chinese cookbook? The ingredients are just corn stach, salt and pepper. Pm Toby. She's the expert on this stuff. Maybe you can have two types of crab. One steamed and one salt and pepper. That sounds yummy to me. Get a gewurztraminer.

If you want to steam them, put them on a colander atop a pot of boiling water but put some aromatics on the crabs (lemongrass?) My favorite preparation is salt and pepper or salt baked like they do it at Yuet Lee in SF. Cut the crab into bite size pieces and just use any Chinese salt and pepper recipe and then sprinle with some thinly sliced jalapeno. But that means frying them in peanut oil.