slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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Exactly. With respect to supermarket mushrooms, I have found drying to be a consistent factor only with shiitake mushrooms -- which corresponds with Chris's results. As one might expect, I have also often found that supermarket shiitake mushrooms need some moisture in the pan to cook properly. Now, it's nice to be able to splash in some flavorful liquid (or fat) to be absorbed by the shiitake mushrooms, but nothing wrong with plain old water.
Really, though, I'm not sure that the question of moisture absorption from washing has any particular relevance to supermarket shiitake mushrooms. I've never found them to be particularly dirty or in need of cleaning of any kind, never mind washing or soaking in water. The only "dirt" is usually found at the very base of the stem where it is easy to cut off and discard. In fact, the stems of supermarket shiitake mushrooms are usually too dry and fibrous to use at all, and I often discard them entirely.
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The easiest way to give preference to certain parties in this situation would be to make it discretely known to a small number of people that they can reserve seats in advance of the date when those seats actually become available (e.g., bu sending someone on the team an email). If the seats are still going so quickly, no one would think about it one way or another if they logged on to the reservations site at 10AM and saw that 4 seats were already taken. Maybe those seats were "pre-reserved" in the system . . . maybe four people beat you to the reservations interface by half a second. No way lf knowing.
This would be an easy way to give a small amount of preferential consideration without having to set aside a certain number of covers after the reservation date.
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Really, I look at the whole thing -- not just the reservations system but the entire restaurant concept -- as an experiment. Changs other places also opened as experiments to one extent or another. Noodle Bar seems to have worked pretty well from the get-go. Ssam Bar, needless to say, went through considerable evolution. And both places continue to evolve. This is fundamentally different from many restaurants. Babbo, for example, really hasn't changed meaningfully since its doors opened, and while Gramercy Tavern has certainly changed plenty under the new chef, it's still not on the same scale of change that we've seen at Ssam Bar.
So, he's trying out a new idea. The chances are that it won't work out quite the way it was expected to work, and I have the feeling that we'll see plenty of evolution in all aspects of Ko. I hope we all agree that trying new things is interesting and good, and I certainly feel that Chang's willingness to try new things (and then try more new things based on results or unexpected developments) is one of the most interesting things about his work.
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I think it's possible to see both sides of this.
Of course a regular will get, should get and reasonably does expect a certain amount of special treatment. That's the nature of the business, and of course the nature of the perks change from business to business. In some contexts, the perk may simply involve simply being recognized by the staff or being able to say "the regular" and get your food and/or drink just the way you like it. In other contexts, it may involve comping, preferential reservations, etc. Certainly I have stopped going to some perfectly good restaurants because I didn't feel like my continued patronage was sufficiently appreciated, and eventually took my business elsewhere -- not necessarily deliberately, but rather that the restaurant's lack of special attention made it easy for another place to win my affections with their easygoing special attention. I've posted about this in the past with respect to the demise of the excellent Upper West Side middlebrow neighborhood restaurant, @SCQ. Ultimately @SQC failed, in my opinion, because they never were able to sustain the kind of loyal following and repeat business they needed due to FOH problems and a failure to adequately reward regulars with perks. In contrast, the second time I went to the TriBeCa Landmarc, I was recognized, seated at the same table I had requested on my previous visit, told about an offal special that would be of particular interest to me, etc. Despite the fact that the food at @SQC could be more refined and innovative than the usually straightforward fare at Landmarc, it was pretty easy to transfer loyalty and business to Landmarc after getting better treatment on my second there visit than I had had over the course of several years patronizing @SQC.
On the other hand, Momofuku Ko is a very different kind of restaurant. For one, it's not clear to me that this is a restaurant that will depend greatly upon repeat business from regulars at Momofuku Ko in order to sustain profitability and popularity. To the extent that the restaurant is sustained by regulars, these can be regulars at the other Momo businesses who are perked at those venues according to the somewhat unique practices associated with the Momofuku brand. And while it does seem clear to me that the other Momofukus do perk their regulars, it's also true that it seems to be a fairly different kind of perking that happens at these venues. As Momofuku regulars have observed, for example, they still sometimes have to wait an hour to be seated rather than being jumped to the front of the line as would be both normal and expected at most restaurants. This suggests to me that a Momofuku regular is not the same sort of person as, say, a Grammercy Tavern regular or a Landmarc regular. If the discussion here is any indication, it seems that around 95% of Momofuku regulars, semi-regulars and fans (or, rather 100% minus 1 person) kind of like the idea of Momofuku Ko's unusual reservations system. And, just as much as these regulars don't mind waiting an hour for a seat at Noodle Bar (which "normal" regulars would never abide) they don't seem to mind Ko's reservations system. Again: these are people who are Momofuku regulars, but are unlikely to become Momofuku Ko regulars -- and trips to Ko are likely to be a special treat. It's not clear that, under Ko's model, there can be such a thing as a "regular" at Momofuku Ko. Can this work and be sustainable? We'll see. Chang so far has a pretty good track record of having success doing things a little differently than conventional wisdom says he should. He also has a pretty good track record of making whatever changes and tweaks are required to succeed. It will be interesting to see what happens the first few times someone who's tight with the Momo crew asks if there's some way they can sneak in a few reservations in advance as a special favor. Of course, unless that person blabs, no one will ever know.
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TVC: Your figures are looking at ascorbic acid -- aka vitamin C. Rather, we would like to look at citric acid.
Dave: My forays in to sourdough microbiology suggest that the perceived sourness contributed by a slug of citrus juice to a cocktail is more attributable to total titratable acid than the pH of the juice.
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Unfortunately (I feel), starting in 1986 Lillet reduced the quinine component in their flagship product.
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. . . The [gins] that are over $25 or so for a bottle are typically (with notable exceptions, see Junipero) of a softer more modern style. . .
Most, but not all of them, created with vodka-drinkers in mind, IMO.
I noticed [the low prices of great gin] recently as I picked up a bottle of Plymouth for a good price, then looked to see what a good 100% agave tequila was going for.OUCH!
There are a lot of reasons for this price difference, as we discussed over in the thread on mezcal. Here's what I had to say, and the same things are true for tequila.
. . there are some things that contribute to the high price of quality tequila and mezcal (it is, of course, entirely possible to buy cheap, crappy bottles of either product). Some of it is certainly a matter of supply and demand. This is undoubtedly especially true in the case of high-end mezcal. It's also extremely expensive to make a high-end mezcal. The agave plant has to grow for something like eight to ten years before the piñas can be harvested. That's a large initial investment of time, money and risk before the raw ingredient is even ready to be used, and there is really no comparison to other raw ingredients used for distillation such as grains, fruits and potatoes, all of which are ready to be used within one season. Finally, in order to make a mezcal worth drinking, the distiller has to lightly bake the piñas with wood in small ovens for several days, ferment a mash of 100% agave for a month or more and then do multiple small-batch runs through a pot still. Each one of these steps adds cost.Compare this process and time investment to what it takes to make Plymouth gin:
Here's what Plymouth does to make their gin:- Begins with neutral spirits and rectifies to >96% alcohol.
- Dilutes that alcohol down to approximately 69% alcohol.
- Puts the botanicals into that 69% alcohol wash and fires the still.
- Distills the flavored wash to produce gin at 85% alcohol.
- Dilutes the gin to 41.2% alcohol for their main bottling.
That is a much smaller investment of time and money -- especially considering that Plymouth most likely buys all its ingredients (including the unrefined neutral spirits if they don't actually to the initial fermentation and distillation themselves) on the open market, whereas tequila and mezcal producers may own the agave plants and the land used to grow them.
- Begins with neutral spirits and rectifies to >96% alcohol.
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The beauty of the Negroni (and most, if not all, cocktails) is that you can make successful, albeit different iterations with a wide variety of brands. The only brand-specific ingredient is Campari, and even there I wonder what it might be like with Luxardo Bitter.
So, if you prefer your Negroni with Hendrick's gin and Noilly Prat sweet vermouth, there's nothing wrong with that -- not to say that I wouldn't like the opportunity to talk you into a better sweet vermouth such as Carpano Antica Formula (Noilly Prat's dry is tops, the sweet not so much).
Mostly it struck me as unusual that you held what seems an unusual choice of gin for a Negroni as the sine qua non, while at the same time reacting to the store owner's offer of a brand largely held among the handful that define quality in gin as though he had offered you an inferior product.
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Hendrick's for a Negroni? Hmm. That wouldn't even be on my radar. Tanqueray, on the other hand, I feel is an absolutely first-rate product and while some might prefer other brands I'd be hard put to say that any other brand of gin was definitively "better." This is a fairly common feeling among cocktailian circles.
Getting back to the Negroni, I had a nice variation the other day from Giuseppe Gonzalez at Flatiron Lounge. It was a Negroni Swizzle made with gin, Punt e Mes and Campari swizzled in a tall glass with crushed ice and garnished with a half-moon slice of blood orange.
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Grapefruit juice is also very tricky to use as a mixer -- even more so than orange juice. It is not particularly sour, and it also has a certain bitterness.
Ultimately, though, I think grapefruit juice is more rewarding and interesting than Meyer lemon juice.
WRT a Jack Rose-alike with Meyer lemon juice: Not sure I have much hope for that. The Jack Rose depends on the acidity of the citrus juice to balance out the grenadine. With something like Meyer lemon juice, you'd either have to use a ton of the stuff in order to get sufficient acidity or you'd have to use a minute amount of grenadine in order to avoid an overly sweet drink. Either way, it doesn't sound particularly harmonious.
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What I think it interesting is that, 5 years ago, there's hardly a food writer around who would have even thought to comment on "over shaking" of drinks and the size of ice cubes. It goes to show how far things have come even in that short time that now we have one of those "a little knowledge is more dangerous than no knowledge" situations.
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Erik: This is not to say that there aren't great bartenders and cocktaiks in California, or that fresh ingredients don't have a place in cocktails. Just that I prefer for my cocktails to be about the booze, with the fresh ingredients as an accent, rather than being primarily about the fresh ingredients.
Andy: Meyer lemons have substantially less acidity compared to standard lemons, so exactly the opposide of calamondin (aka kalamansi) in that respect. FWIW, I think kalamansi juice is about 1000 times more interesting in cocktails than Meyer lemon juice.
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Clearly someone somewhere thought of breading and deep-drying pieces of boneless chicken breast before the introduction of the Chicken McNuggett in 1983.
For example, Chris has pointed to a 1960s era Chinese-American menu listing "chicken fingers." Whether these had much relationship to what we now think of as "chicken fingers" is another question. I wonder whether they were breading or battering these to order, or just dusting with corn starch -- which would make a very different product.
To make another example, these guys in Alabama claim to be the "original chicken finger specialist" dating back to 1978.
However, just like the "Jalapeno Popper", it strikes me as very likely that it was the availability of frozen pre-breaded chicken fingers that restaurants could drop into the fryer that made their ubiquity possible. It sounds like Robert Baker's process for adhering breading to chicken probably had something to do with making this possible, and of course it was the popularity of McDonald's Chicken McNuggets that exploded "little bits of deep fried bonelsss chicken dipped into a sauce" into the American consciousness.
My strong recollection is that "chicken fingers" didn't find their way into standard American menus until after the success of Chicken McNuggets. And I'm not sure they were called "chicken fingers" with any kind of regularity until quite some time after that. This says to me that, irrespective of any pre-McDonald's examples, for all intents and purposes the chicken finger evolved from the McNugget because they became a common part of the culinary landscape due to the industrial techniques required for fry-from-frozen chicken fingers and the popularity of McNuggets.
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I've never been particularly fond of Meyer lemons for cocktails. Like eje, I think it's only useful in the few cocktails that have been designed specifically for Meyer lemon juice -- and those tend to be in what I'd loosely call the "California Fresh Produce" school of mixology, which is not one that has much appeal for me.
To be clear: the Meyer lemon is a kind of citrus fruit, but it is not a "kind of lemon" any more than a tangelo is a "kind of tangerine." I would argue that there is more comonality between Persian limes and Mexican limes than "regular" lemons and Meyer lemons.
The Meyer lemon has some lemon-like qualities, but is missing the true lemon's bright acidity as well as its unique ability to contribute to a cocktail in the background without necessarily standing out as a parsable flavor. This makes Meyer lemons somewhat similar to oranges with respect to mixability -- which makes some sense, since the Meyer lemon is supposed to be a hybrid of a lemon and a sweet or mandarin orange.
The difficulty with Meyer lemons (and oranges) is that, since they don't pack the acidity or strong flavor of lemons and limes, you have to use a lot of the juice in order to get much of a flavor impact. This presents a bit of a mixological challenge, which is also one of the reasons there are so many more cocktails with lemon and lime than there are with orange juice. Adding to the difficulty, for me anyway, is the fact that, unlike orange juice, I don't find Meyer lemon juice particularly pleasant in the concentrations required to make an impact worth the trouble of procuring a Meyer lemon.
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well, Ryan Sutton knows nothing about cocktails:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...vXv4&refer=dine
. . . Be wary of the cocktails. Bartenders over-shake and serve drinks with small cubes. The result is consistently watered-down libations. . .This strikes me as unlikely. Are they using Kold Draft cubes?
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I do my sous vide using a Lauda clamped to a 5 gallon stainless steel stockpot. Typically I stretch some plastic film most of the way across the top of the stockpot (there is some open space where the unit clamps on), and secure it with a large rubber band. Even as high as 80C, I get very little evaporation.
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More Munchos trivia: Munchos were invented in an attempt to recreate Biblical manna out of potatoes.
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I have found that pre-salting steak is a good idea. It allows the salt to penetrate the steak better, and it draws out a minor amount of fluid which facilitates the creation of a maillardized crust (the amount of fluid drawn out is significant to the formation of the crust, but insignificant with respect to overall juiciness).
I would not, however, pre-season with either herbs or black pepper, as these will tend to burn on a hot pan.
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This is why it's good to go to Fairway during a rainstorm. These pictures were taken during what would ordinarily be peak hours (pardon the crappy cell phone pictures).
The entrance
Appetizing counter
Express checkout lane
What's missing? About 600 people that should be in those pictures.
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I'm not sure when Cognac went over to the current standard proof of 40% abv. I believe that, according to Dave Wondrich, most pre-phylloxera Cognac (which would then account for most 19C usage) was at around 100 proof. This would make the Louis Royer Force 53 a great spirit for Improved Brandy Cocktails and the like. I'm getting some!
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I have a friend who works at the FCI and supervises the kitchen there. I'm told that there are more or less two "teams" working the kitchen, and that these teams correspond to the two seatings. The first seating is the one you want, as this corresponds to more experience, etc.
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I'm not saying I think it's okay or entirely correct -- I'm just pointing out how it is.
At some point, it seems a bit of a quibble (as indeed this fork of the discussion is) to try to figure out how much vide equals enough vide. My semi-pro vacuum sealer at home doesn't pull a vacuum nearly as well as an expensive professional chamber machine. Does that mean that my cooking isn't "sous vide"? What about if you seal the bag while there is still plenty of air in there? Is that "sous vide"? After all, it isn't called "sous un sachet en plastique."
Eggs are a bit of a special case, IMO. Eggs come with the food part already sealed in a reasonably airtight package created by nature. If one were to put whole eggs together with water into a plastic bag, suck out some of the air and seal the bag, and then cook the bag at XYZ degrees for ABC length of time -- I suppose that might satisfy some more strict definition of "sous vide." But the reality is that (a) the eggs wouldn't turn out any differently, and (b) it would be a silly distinction. For all intents and purposes, cooking eggs in the shell is sous more vide than plenty of home and professional implementations of this technology.
Personally, if I were writing a menu, I would probably call them "long cooked " or "slow poached" or something like that. But if you say "sous vide" I think everyone in the know understands that they're being cooked in the shell to a very precise temperature -- and "sous vide" does convey that information better than those other descriptions.
(Edited to fix missing words.)
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Yes, technically "sous vide" requires cooking vacuum. But a cursory glance at the sous vide thread on this site, as well as the things that have been written about it elsewhere, will reveal that this has come to be a catch-all phrase describing the range of techniques available with sous vide technology. This includes mostly precise temperature control of ingredients vacuum-sealed in a pouch, but also is informally used to describe cooking techniques such as precise temperature control via a precision water bath heater but without a vacuum pouch (e.g., cooking vegetables at a specific temperature in an open container) and also various effects possible with vacuum equipment (e.g., "pressure cooking," compressed fruit, cucumbers vacuum-infused with gin, etc.).
Getting back to the example of an egg. . . no, the shell of an egg is not 100% airtight. But it is certainly airtight enough that it's not entirely inappropriate to describe an egg long-cooked to precise temperature inside the shell as "sous vide." As a matter of practical chemistry, the eggs are likely exposed to less oxygen using this method than they would be if they were cracked into a plastic bag which was then vacuumed and sealed. Also as a matter of practical chemistry, quite a bit of sous vide cooking isn't really done under vacuum.
I understand that "sous vide" means more or less "under vacuum." But one has to understand that there are plenty of terms that come to have a somewhat different meaning when they are imported into another language or become part of the technical jargon of a certain field. A good example might be the musical term "rubato," which is an Italian past participle adjective meaning "robbed." The full phrase would be "tempo rubato" meaning "robbed time." Employed in music this implies a certain accelleration and relaxation of the tempo within a musical phrase such that time is "robbed" from one part of the phrase and "paid back" in another part of the phrase. In English usage, however, we use this adjective as a noun. For example, "I am going to do a rubato here." Strictly speaking, this sentence doesn't make any sense -- but any classical musician in America would know what you meant if you said that. This is because the strict meaning of the word changed when it was imported into English and became part of the classical musician's technical jargon. I would suggest that some of the same things are at work with "sous vide."
Reservations and Regulars at Momos and
in New York: Dining
Posted
Just on this one point: Anthony, I would say that it's pretty commonplace that a "regular" or "VIP" at most any restaurant would receive some version of special consideration at other restaurants under the same management. I would expect a Gramercy Tavern regular to get some special treatment at The Modern; I would expect a Landmarc TriBeCa regular to get some special treatment at Landmarc TWC; I would even expect an Ardour regular to get some special treatment at Louis XV in Monaco.