Michelle Ng x

Anthony Bourdain, I think is his name. He retired from chefdom soon after publishing the book. His kitchen equipment recommendations were the least offensive part of the whole misguided effort but they were still laughable.

I've found that depends on what you cut with them. I have some Japanese knives in carbon steel and they work as you described in most cases but if you get them near acidic items like lemons forget about it! They also go dull faster, the flipside to being easier to sharpen.

Are you operating with the assumption that one type of sauce is thicker than the other? Because you can adjust either to be thick or thin.

There's a difference between good and authentic. The Asian sesame pastes have their own flavor that makes them different, not better or worse, but different than the Middle Eastern ones. Asian sesame pastes are made from toasted seeds, Middle Eastern ones are made from raw seeds. You can pretty easily taste the difference between sauces made with one or the other.

What kind of sesame are you using? Mistake number one here is using Middle Eastern style tahini. Is yours from an Asian market?

I'm not familiar with cultured butter. What am I missing? Does it have anything to do with liking opera?

Wasn't there recently a new magazine launched that deals with food history and academic food subjects?

If you do a search for "food history" on Amazon nearly a thousand titles come up, many of which are relevant.

I wish I could say that being 1/4 Taiwanese (sort of, it's a long story and it's very political the terminology of what it means to be Taiwanese) meant I could help you here! My grandmother goes every few years and might be a source of information although I don't think she eats at many restaurants when there, instead staying always with family and cooking. But I will ask this weekend. Maybe she knows some good websites. Not! :)

Some people do not, can not, or are not willing to have a good time at any restaurant fancier than a TGI Fridays. A lot of those people are in the so called food press. Fat Guy I'm surprised you waste your time trying to convince them otherwise. Honorable but futile.

I'm sure you all have very good motives and find Iron Chef fascinating for its culinary content, but you're totally atypical. You're like the people who read Penthouse for the articles, a small group within a larger group that reads it for the naked pictures.

If you want to delude yourselves into thinking Iron Chef could retain one tenth of its audience if it didn't make Japanese people look like a bunch of clowns, fine. I've suffered through three Iron Chef parties and observed enough people laughing at (not with) the show to see what's going on. This is not a cultural exchange, or pure joy expressed at the beautiful art of cooking. It is humiliation for money and ratings.

A conscientious viewer can extract the educational value from anything, but I assure you most in Iron Chef's audience aren't watching to learn and aren't learning anything of value. Mostly they just laugh on account of self-deprecating and borderline racist stereotypes perpetuated by the producers of the show. I predict the American version will be a failure because it doesn't give any opporunity to laugh at those funny talking Asians with bad taste and that is the big draw of Iron Chef. But if it succeeds it will be taken as more evidence that real cooking shows should be eliminated in favor of joke entertainment.

I'm sure the show will be highly entertaining. But it will also be another brick in the wall of the decline of the educational mission of food programming. The Iron Chefs are serious chefs too, in real life, but on the show they are merely entertainers, a circus act.

Heaven help us. Soon there will be no more real cooking shows on TV, only cooking comedy shows, cooking game shows, and eventually maybe cooking music videos.