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slkinsey

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Posts posted by slkinsey

    Vermouth

    in Spirits & Cocktails

    Posted

    The quality of the vermouth always maters. But certainly the defects of a crappy or turned vermouth will be most apparent in a drink where the other component is flavorless ethanol.

    Pizza screens

    in Kitchen Consumer

    Posted

    Scott, some of this may have to do with the size of the pizza the cook is trying to bake, and also the amount of the toppings. If I'm making a 12-inch diameter pizza with perhaps a quarter cup of ground San Marzanos and a few blobs of fresh mozzarella here and there, I find I can blow it up and get good results pretty fast. More toppings/larger pizza takes longer of course. I'm doing the whole works in the under-oven broiler drawer of my Crapmaster 9000 NYC apartment stove.

    Pizza screens

    in Kitchen Consumer

    Posted

    I think this all depends on what kind of pizza you want to make. Billy Reisinger (who hails from the pizza mecca of Minneapolis - Saint Paul) appears to be going for a pizza aesthetic that splits the difference between a cracker crust and a pizza-parlor deck oven crust. There doesn't appear to be much in the way of puffiness or airy lightness to his pizza crusts, and they give every appearance of being rather dry. If this is the style you're going for, then using a pizza screen might be just fine. Indeed, if you don't plan to bake the pizza on a baking stone or some other kind of stored thermal energy material, using a pizza screen might be a pretty good idea. This is not a style of pizza that interests me, so I don't see any particular reason I'd want to do it.

    All that said, I do take exception with some of his claims:

    The holes in the screen allow the bottom surface of the dough to cook by convection and radiation (as opposed to conduction with a pizza stone). Translation: crispier crust.

    Conduction is a much more efficient way of transferring thermal energy compared to convection and radiation. To the extent that baking on a pizza screen (and to be clear: he advocates using a pizza screen just sitting on an oven rack) might result in a crisper crust, there is some question in my mind as to just how desirable this is. Because convection and radiation are so much less efficient, the baking time will be considerably longer. A longer baking time will result in a crust that is overall dryer compared to one baked on thermal material in a shorter time, and this is undoubtedly a reason his pizzas look so dessicated.

    In my aesthetic, what you want is a crust that has a thin layer of crispness on the bottom but is otherwise moist and pliable. Not possible using a pizza screen this way.

    The screen speeds up cooking, because you don't have to heat up a stone first.

    I'm not sure how legitimate this is. The screen doesn't speed up cooking. It actually makes cooking take longer. It just means that you don't have to preheat your oven as long. Generally speaking, I have at least 60 minutes between the thought "I'd like to make pizza" and actually having everything together to make pizza. This is plenty of time to heat up a thermal baking surface.

    A screen won't shatter if dropped on the floor or heated improperly, like a pizza stone.

    Um. Sure, I guess, yea. But neither will a thick piece of aluminum or carbon steel. These will be a lot heavier, of course, but can also be used stovetop as griddles, flame-tamers, and as a kind of improvised French top when cooking for company.

    You'll find that, unlike your pizza stone, nothing sticks to the screen (as long as you don't have any big holes in your dough).

    Well, no, actually. You won't find that. You may find something like that if you make a fairly dry pizza dough, like Billy Reisinger does, but you certainly won't find that to be true if you use a wet dough.

    You can put toppings on the dough while it is on a screen, which is hard to do on a pre-heated pizza stone.

    Yes, you can put toppings on the dough while it is on the screen, and yes this is hard to do once the pizza is on the stone. But who does that? Who puts toppings on the dough once it's on the hot stone?

    The long answer is that a pizza screen can be a good choice if that's the kind of pizza you want to make. But in my opinion it doesn't result in the kind of pizza I'd particularly want to have when going to the trouble of making pizza at home. Pizza screens tend to result in a pizza crust that is at once dry and bready. Personally, I haven't found any home technique that's comes close to being as good as the Modernist Cuisine-recommended method of baking on hot thermal material under the broiler. Sure you have to preheat for an hour or so, but on the other hand your pizza cooks in about 120 seconds.

    "How would you like those eggs cooked?"

    in Food Traditions & Culture

    Posted

    Over Easy/Medium/Hard (I assume Hard is an option although it seems, like a well-done steak, something that should be eschewed).

    Hard would be cooked through. Also some people prefer a broken yolk, which results in a mind of "medium-hard."

    Scrambled - Easy/Medium/Hard? I'm not sure what Hard would be.

    There is no such designation as "scrambled eggs easy." There is soft (or wet), medium and (usually) dry, although one could also say hard. Dry would be the more accurate description, and pretty much explains what you're getting.

    "How would you like those eggs cooked?"

    in Food Traditions & Culture

    Posted

    Most decent diners here in NYC will give you your scrambled eggs either "soft" or "hard" (sometimes also called "dry") or "regular" (in which case you don't have to say anything). And you can get your fried eggs over "easy," "medium," "hard," "sunny side up"all with or without broken yolk. At some delis you can special order your egg on a roll "chopped," which means that they will fry an over-easy egg (rather than a blended egg) and chop it up right before putting it in the roll.

    Food Heresies

    in Food Traditions & Culture

    Posted

    There are several hundred people in the world who have done the Master's of Wine qualification who have performed this task successfully in a standardised fashion in blind tastings. One would think that many more who have not chosen this path would be able to do so. The difference is skill development and expertise.

    Passing the Masters of Wine practical (three 12-wine blind tastings in which papers are written assessing the wines for variety, origin, winemaking, quality and style) doesn't necessarily mean that these people could accurately distinguish red wine varietals in a triangle or ABX test at a rate significantly above chance. In fact, the MoW practical doesn't in any way seem to assess for this skill. Regardless of whether they can or not, the fact that a minuscule percentage of the population can distinguish certain differences doesn't make those differences relevant in the real world when Joe Schmo is claiming that X is clearly superior to Y. And that's the point being made here by Shalmanese. In the vast majority of instances, when Joe Schmo is claiming that X is clearly superior to Y, the reality is that he can't accurately distinguish between X and Y in a properly controlled test.

    Maybe it's me but I shudder every time I see the phrase "reasonably well educated" before someone saying that this is proof that something doesn't work. Even more so when I see someone say that they need to see results first hand before they will believe them. Just because you or your friends cannot perceive differences doesn't mean that others can't.

    One of the issues, of course, is that even reasonably well educated and smart people can fail at this sort of thing. In fact, reasonably well educated and smart people with some level of expertise may be even more prone to making certain mistakes because they assume they're smart enough and experienced enough to "think around" the usual confounding factors and don't need to bother with a properly conceived, controlled and blinded test. Do a search back through the archives for the thread on the "wine clip" (a magnetic clip that goes around the neck of a wine bottle and purportedly improves the wine poured out of a "clipped bottle" by magnetism) and you will find some extremely smart, well educated and experienced people "testing" the wine clip and finding an unambiguous positive result.

    Cynar

    in Spirits & Cocktails

    Posted

    Thanks, Sam. I guess I can't fight the authentic recipe (2:1/2:1/2 + OJ), but the Negroni-style is awesome. I reluctantly changed KC to the authentic version and moved the Negroni-style ratio to the variation. I made it two nights ago with Punt e Mes, which of courses messed up the cute name. Delicious.

    Just a note that there is no orange juice in the Cin Cyn recipe in the Babbo cookbook. The rest of the recipe is identical to what you entered in the Kindred Cocktails database, with the gin specified as Junipero.

    Right. Babbo cookbook has it as 2 oz Junipero, 1/2 oz Cynar, 1/2 oz Cinzano sweet vermouth, orange bitters, orange twist.

    Cooking with "Modernist Cuisine" (Part 3)

    in Cooking

    Posted

    200 grams of rice cooked in 1,000 grams of water gave you a pot of mushy rice? 200 grams is around one cup of rice. 1,000 grams more than four cups of water, which is more than double the amount one might ordinarily use to cook one cup of rice and should result in a thin gruel. Then, after the rice is cooked, an additional 500 grams (more than two cups) of water is added, which should thin the mixture out even more. One cup of rice with more than six cups of water should not result in a thick paste if pureed coarsely (which I take to mean pulsing in an food processor rather than running through a blender).

    Is if possible that you either (1) didn't use the correct amount of water, (2) cooked the rice too high or too long and boiled away too much water, (3) didn't use the recommended types of rice, and/or (4) pureed the mixture too finely?

    Undercooked chicken liver (pate) and food poisoning

    in Food Traditions & Culture

    Posted

    I'm not familiar with the Momofuku recipe. But there could be some curing salt added to keep the interior pink and to more effectively kill off the nasties. Most of the pâté recipes I come across use a little Prague #1.

    Nope. It's equal parts ground pork and pureed chicken liver with shallots, fish sauce, sugar, salt and 5-spice. It's a crumbly spreadable pate, kind of in-between the spreadable mousse style and the sliceable country style.

    Outrageous prices for specialty cookware

    in Kitchen Consumer

    Posted

    For the most part, certain brands (ahem, All-Clad) have gigantic advertising budgets and swanky detail design in order to convince people that they are "the best." So they charge extra-high prices for them, which ironically reinforces the belief in certain buyers that they are getting "the best," which in turn promotes brand loyalty. Some, or perhaps even many of the most notoriously overpriced brands are actually very, very good products. But of course still ridiculously overpriced. Why on earth would someone need a $100 egg poacher made out of anodized aluminum when a crappy stainless steel pan and a few cheap egg poaching baskets do the job equally well (or better!) for ten bucks? Or just use your own pan and only buy the poaching baskets! Oh, I see... this one is made by Calphalon and costs a zillion dollars because its "the best." So, from what I can tell, the outrageously high prices for specialty cookware come when already overpriced manufacturers make these items. All-Clad and Calphalon (et al.) are hardly going to start charging less for their wares just because their egg poachers can't possibly work any better than ones costing 10% as much.

    This is exactly the reason I wrote my paper on cookware physics, so that people might have some basis of knowing what they're getting and some basis to decide whether it makes sense to spend $100 bucks on that All-Clad pan or $60 bucks on that other pan with effectively the same composition. This also lets us understand that certain pans are just going to be more expensive. Stainless lined heavy copper will always be more expensive than a stainless pan with an aluminum disk bottom. It's up to you to decide whether the big difference in price is worth the smaller difference in performance, It's also true that some materials such as cast iron will always be inexpensive, and this can be a good solution if you're willing to take the tradeoffs in performance that come along with them. Cast iron, for example, is great but never as nonstick or even-heating as its proponents claim. But one of the things that's nice is that you can often get specialty pans made of these materials quite inexpensively. I have a cast iron ebelskiver pan that was quite cheap, and I also have any number of inexpensive specialty pans (fish, omelette, crepe, etc.) made of thick carbon steel.

    Onion Rings

    in Cooking

    Posted

    The massive aeration dies down pretty quickly, so the best technique is to dispense a little bit, dip a small batch and go quickly into the oil. Then repeat. There is definitely a big difference in the quality of the fried batter from rings dipped into just-dispensed batter and rings dipped into batter that's de-fluffed a bit. My subjective observation is that the just-dispensed batter tends to adhere in a thicker layer as well (which is a positive in this particular case).

    Onion Rings

    in Cooking

    Posted

    I did onion rings not long ago using 50/50 rice flour and Wondra with a touch of baking powder and beer as the liquid. Put the whole thing in the cream whipper and dispensed as needed to coat batches of rings. Worked very well. Lacy, airy and shatteringly crisp. Same batter worked very well on pieces of cod as well.

    I'm not sure how/why double cooking would work on onion rings. They're not monolithic blocks of starch the way french fries are. Really all you need to do is crisp the batter.

    The Old Fashioned Cocktail: The Topic

    in Spirits & Cocktails

    Posted

    Part of the fun of Martin's take is that it's somewhat curmudgeonly, which to my mind perfectly befits the ethos of a deliberately old-fangled drink that wasn't even given its name until it had evolved several generations of fangling away from its root form.

    I'll skip over Kosar's snide attitude towards Martin's qualifications to hold his opinion and merely point out that Martin was deeply involved in the cocktail movement when Kosar was still finishing his education. Moreover, it doesn't seem to be a matter of dispute that the ur-version of the cocktail to which state of fangling the Old Fashioned attempts to revert was as Martin describes. Kosar seems to fall victim to the belief that "the way it is now is the way it's always been" and apparently believes that the "fruit salad" iteration should be held as definitive.

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