slkinsey

Indeed, most Siciliani would say that sfincione is not pizza. Chicago Style Pizza I suppose falls within the definition of what we call pizza in the United States. But, really, Americans will call anything that involves a bread-based base topped with some combination of something vaguely saucy, something vaguely cheesy and/or something vaguely Italian-tasting "pizza." Thus, a lamejun is an "Armenian pizza" and a tostada is a "Mexican pizza." Even focaccia, which is certainly not pizza, could fall under this definition (and is considered a kind of pizza by many Americans). Chicago Style Pizza certainly has more in common with a casserole and many other non-pizza dishes than it does with pizza. I would argue that it is only the vaguely Italian flavors, including the copious use of tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese, that makes Chicago Style Pizza "pizza." For example, if you take a thin crust and top it with some braised lamb, thin potato slices and cheese and bake it in a hot oven, you've got a lamb and potato pizza. Make that same dish "Chicago Deep Dish Style" and you have a Shepherd's Pie. The foregoing notwithstanding... for better or worse, we call it "pizza" in the States and, if you're me anyway, it can be delicious. But I agree that most Italians would not consider it pizza.

Vacuum seal and keep it in the refrigerator. If you can, see if you can pick up the half-bottles instead of the full bottles.

I don't know if it is a typo, but there is no space between cio and ciaro -- although I can understand how one might think there is a space considering that that it is capitalized as CioCiaro on the bottle. (I swear there is more to this post than nitpicking spelling.) The reason this struck me as odd is that Amaro CioCiaro is named after a small sub-sub-region in the Southwest of Lazio called Ciociaria and I can't think of why they would capitalize it that way (except maybe because it looks cool?). A person from this region would be called a Ciociaro, which is also the name of the local dialect and would further (as in the the case of the amaro) describe something coming from that region. This name is probably derived from ciòcia (from Latin soccus, which gave us "sock"), which I can best describe as traditional footware of shepherds comprised of a leather slipper bound to the foot with leather straps which are further wound up the legs. Hard to describe, but you would recognize them if you saw them. Anyway, I thought that was an interesting bit of trivia about Amaro Ciociaro that was brought to my mind by the capitalization.

I think one of the best ways to keep a PTFE coated surface clean is to immediately spray it down with hot water as soon as you take the food out of it -- while it's still warm and none of the oil has had a chance to bond to the surface. If you let an oily residue sit on a PTFE surface, my experience is that it does like to stick around.

High heat cooking. Have you ever cooked something at high heat in a stainless pan and when you're done there is a light brown residue (usually around the inner sides of the pan) that is tough to scour away? That is polymerized fat. Polymerized fat is also the "seasoning" that builds up on cast iron cookware. If that's what it is, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that it's relatively easy to keep cookware free of built-up polymerized fat: just make sure you diligently clean it all away after every use. The bad news is that once it does build up, it is very difficult to clean away without resorting to chemical means. I've spent as long as 20 minutes working on the outside of a Calphalon frypan scrubbing as hard as I can with Bar Keeper's Friend and a brand new Scotch Brite pad, and still didn't get it all off. The further bad news is that, as you may imagine, the treatment I just described is not advised for a PTFE-coated surface. Indeed, the polymerized fat is harder than the PTFE coating, so there is little hope of scouring it off or dissolving it with chemicals without hurting the nonstick surface. The moral of this story is that PTFE coated pans shouldn't be used for high heat cooking unless they are "throwaway" nonstick pans you expect to burn through and replace in a year or less.

Is this oily surface on the inside or the outside? I assume it's on the inside? My best guess is that it may be polymerized fat. Does the oily surface cover the entire cooking surface of the pan? If it's polymerized fat, I don't see how you'd get it off without scrubbing away the PTFE coating. If you're talking about the exterior of the pan, you might try finding an aluminum-safe pan and oven cleaner.

For a variety of reasons I've found myself on airplanes a lot recently, and as light airplane fare have been reading some detective books by Sicilian author Andrea Camilleri. One thing that is very interesting about Italian popular fiction is that the authors often spend significant time describing what the characters are eating, and the characters are often great lovers of food. Camilleri's stories are set in the Sicilian town of Vigàta, and his protagonist, commissario Montalbano, eats fish and seafood almost exclusively (one gets the impression this is true of most everyone there). Many wonderful dishes have been described, and I find myself in serious need of guidance and inspiration in making these dishes and others like them for myself. Ideally what I'd like is a Southern Italian fish and seafood cookbook. Failing that, a comprehensive Italian fish/seafood cookbook or a fish-heavy Sicilian cookbook would be just the thing. Recommendations?

I recently improvised a Caipirinha variation I thought was pretty good. I julienned around three slices of fresh ginger and muddled that in around a half-ounce of cachaça. I let that sit off to the side while I cut a small lemon in half and removed the center pith (I would have used limes, but didn't have any). Muddled the lemon in a rocks glass with superfine sugar, strained in the ginger-infused cachaça plus an additional few ounces, dropped in several large ice cubes, topped with a small mixing tin, shook the whole thing and poured it back into the rocks glass. The milder-flavored lemon let the ginger come through more than lime might have, and the fresh muddling provided a nice backbone of bite.

As the owner of both a heavy anodized aluminum roasting pan and an All-Clad Stainless roasting pan dating fom the days when they actually had an aluminum core in their Stainless roasting pans (they no longer do), that is the opposite of my experience: The anodized aluminum roasting pan warps, the stainless-clad aluminum pan does not.

Unlined aluminum cookware for home cooks is rarely manufactured at a sufficiently heavy gauge to avoid warping. There are some professional lines at >5 mm that I imagine don't warp. Anyway, the stainless lining does seem to provide some kind of structural integrity that helps to prevent warping in clad aluminum cookware.

I'm not sure there is anything special about Kold Draft cubes and temperature, except for the temperature to which the freezer is set. If you have the freezer set to -2F (-19C) then any ice inside the freezer will be at -2F. In practical situations, bar ice is almost always considerably less cold than home ice. This is because home cocktailians take their ice directly from the freezer (typically below zero degrees F) whereas professional bartenders take their ice out of a open bin. The probable reason Toby's chunk and shard ice is colder than regular "shaking ice" is that it is stored in the freezer. If the temperature of the shaking ice is equal, there are many things that give Kold Draft ice an advantage. Due to the way the ice is formed, it is denser than many other kinds of ice. This means that it has a larger thermal capacity compared to other ice of the same size, which equals a colder drink. Also, when you are shaking, it is advantageous to have larger pieces of ice with a smaller surface area to volume ratio because you can shake longer (again, resulting in a colder drink) without overly diluting the drink. There is a theoretical optimal size and surface area to volume ratio for chilling a shaken drink with approximately 20% dilution, but I'm not sure what that is. It's something I plan to look into in the future. Interestingly, the physics change for stirred drinks, and we would rather have smaller pieces of ice with a greater surface area to volume ration. This is why we typically use big pieces of ice for shaken drinks and smaller pieces of cracked ice for stirred drinks. The difference between using cracked and whole Kold Draft ice for stirred cocktails was clearly demonstrated by johnder and myself one evening at PDT when we prepared two sample drinks, one with whole Kold Draft cubes and one with cracked ice. After stirring to the approximate same dilution, it was obvious that the cracked ice drink was colder. On the other hand, if we had shaken the same samples, the cracked ice drink would have been watered.

Yea. Kold Draft is awesome. Not quite sure where the figure "40% colder" comes from, as that doesn't make any sense from a thermal standpoint (is 100C "twice as hot" as 50C? or is 212F "twice as hot" as 122F?). But they're nice dense cubes with good clarity. Most of the best places are using Kold Draft.

Interestingly, lately I've been getting limes with almost two ounces of juice, and lemons that barely have a half-ounce.

Yea, as Toby points out, staff buy-in is important in any endeavor like this. One thing I think you have to be willing (and able, depending on the circumstances) to do if you are trying to "convert" an already-opened bar or restaurant bar into a serious cocktail spot is get rid of people who aren't with the program and replace them with people who are interested in buying-in to your way of doing things. This is fundamentally no different from what happens in restaurant kitchens when a new chef comes in. However, owners may have more resistance to moving out uncooperative bar staff as opposed to an uncooperative line cook. A big part of this is developing talent (something that is becoming increasingly important in NYC with the huge proliferation of cocktailian bars). It's not enough to have a consultant come in to train the staff and create a list of drinks. You need to have someone on-site who knows what he/she is doing training the staff and developing talent. If you can do this, you may be surprised at how far you can come in a short period of time. Some of the best NYC 'tenders today were the "new guy" in the cocktailian community not too many years ago. But the moral of the story is that, if you find yourself in a position where you have to ram jiggers down the gullets of your bar staff, it's time to start looking for some new bar staff. Friends of mine who have worked in situations with unionized bar staff, have had to struggle against quite a bit of institutional resistance -- and ultimately I think a lot of people in those situations simply resort to batching the specialty cocktails.

As chance would have it, I'll be in Houston this weekend and hope to have a few things to report on this subject.

Toby has impressive knowledge and technique, he's also got some of the best body control I've seen behind the bar and just the right touch of understated flair.

Exactly. It was Eagan's. Excellent back bar, but no one there who had the faintest idea how to make use of it and they don't have rudimentary tools such as jiggers on hand. I'll also add that, while the bar is well-stocked, the back bar is more designed as decoration than as a cocktail bar that takes advantage of that inventory (you shouldn't have to climb up a ladder to get at the Luxardo). That said, they do seem enthusiastic and interested, they have the right clientele, and I think there is potential there. Yea. Really what it takes is for someone dedicated to start a trend. Anyplace that already has a respectable number of people in the right demographic (and Eagan's certainly fits that bill) can only benefit by becoming known as a temple of the cocktail. WRT jiggers, the most common justification for free-pouring I hear is that it's much faster than using a jigger. Well, I'll put up the NYC jiggering crowd (which pretty much consists of anyone coming out of the Flatiron-Pegu-Milk & Honey school) against any free-pouring bartender on specialty cocktails and be confident that the jiggering guys will at least match the free-pouring bartenders on speed and kill them on consistency.

It's worth noting, however, that there is some fluctuation in the price of this, and all oils at Fairway. I don't recall buying it for more than around 20, but have definitely bought it for less in the past.

Oh yea, the finish holds up fine. However, for 100% anodized aluminum, I find that those spots tend to be "sticky spots" on the pan. This is one reason I no longer cook on anodized aluminum surfaces (I do have some nonstick with anodized aluminum exteriors).

WRT salad dressing: I agree, if we're talking about the kinds of salad dressings we're likely to make these days (which tend to be lower in oil and to emphasize vinegar and other strong flavorings). The Italian way of dressing salad tends to be a lot more like what Steven suiggests: the greens are mostly dressed with oil, and then a little vinegar is added as a counterbalance. The point is to taste the oil. WRT similarities to cooking with wine: There is definitely something there. Certainly it wouldn't make sense to cook with a $40/liter olive oil, because everything that makes the oil special would be lost in the cooking process. However, there are some instances where it does make sense to cook with one wine over another wine (perhaps one wine has really heavy tannins and you either do/don't want that in your dish). At the high end, the things that distinguish olive oils from one another are fairly subtle "top note" qualities that are likely to be lost in cooking. However, between the middle range (let's say $13-$20/liter) and the bargain basement there are often larger, more obvious differences. I've never found an olive oil selling at 10 bucks a liter that can compete with middle range oils such as the Barbera oils or the various Fairway oils (which are excellent) on intensity and depth of flavor, and that has to carry through cooking to some degree, just like it would if you chose a strongly flavored wine over a weak and watery wine. This is especially true if, as I suggest upthread, you add a little raw oil at the end (if I'm watching the fat content, I prefer to be miserly with the oil I use for cooking so I can add the balance raw at the end). Of course, there are certain instances where it doesn't make sense to use any kind of olive oil at all. If I'm browning meat at high temperature, I'll just use something neutral and high-temperature stable like grapeseed oil. This is perhaps getting a little off topic, but I wonder if others have this experience. As I've grown older I've started paying more attention to my fat consumption, and actively worked to reduce it. This has led me to various techniques where I try to get the maximum flavor impact out of my fat calories (such as the "adding some back in raw" technique I describe above) and has led me to the practice of using different fats, both animal- and plant-derived, in order to take advantage of their various properties and flavors. As a result, I find that I am much more sensitive to the flavor contributions of various fats than I have been in the past. There are certain dishes where I might previously have reached automatically for olive oil where I will now use a different fat because I don't want the olive flavor that now seems to come through so strongly. For example, unless I am specifically going for an Italian or Spanish effect, I don't cook eggs in olive oil (or even any of the filling ingredients if I am making an omelet).

Yerba maté isn't particularly bitter unless it is infused into boiling water. I would say it's somewhat similar to green or oolong tea, only without the bitterness and astringency.

For sure cooking makes a difference in the way olive oils are perceived. And I think it's true that the more the oil is cooked, the more the oil's unique qualities are obscured. It would have been interesting if you had done a control sample with the potatoes using a neutral oil such as grapeseed oil. Now, that said... To a certain extent, I do wonder whether using a better quality olive oil or an olive oil with certain properties contributes to the overall quality and characteristics of a dish in some undefinable way (this is what markk is talking about). For example, if you have two people making a pasta sauce and one person uses low priced but reasonably good supermarket-level olive oil, canned tomatoes, onions, garlic and fresh thyme from those little plastic containers, and the other person uses Frantoia Barbera, DOP San Marzano canned tomatoes, onions on the stem and hardneck garlic and fresh thyme from the greenmarket... The second guy's tomato sauce is going to taste a lot better. The thing is that any one of these ingredients on its own would be unlikely to make a big difference in the quality of the dish. Rather, it was the layering of one higher-quality ingredient on top of the other that made the difference. Like markk, I think I can taste the difference in simple preparations between using one oil or another. But, more than anything else, I choose what I think of as a middle-priced olive oil as my everyday oil because I like to add a little raw oil off the heat and I'd rather not be bothered with having to use stock 5 different grades of olive oil. As Steven pointed out, a quick light drizzle of oil off the heat is the best way to showcase the qualities of an olive oil. I find that this practice greatly enhances the deliciousness of a dish (as does a quick swirl of raw butter off the heat in other dishes) and so I use this technique extensively. Something like Frantoia Barbera is excellent quality for use as a raw "finishing oil" for family meals at home, and really adds a lot. I'm only breaking out the $50/liter or hand-schlepped-from-Italy stuff for company and special occasions, and I don't care to use lesser grades of oil this way.

MC is still thicker than Stainless. But it's not as thick as it used to be. I have a bunch of 17 year old calphalon, and the cooking surfaces have gotten beaten to hell ... knicks, dents, dings, and faded anodizing. But the outside surfaces, including the parts that get banged and scraped across stove grates, have held up beautifully. It's curious. I find that oil and high temperature cooking inevitably equals spots on the exterior of an anodized aluminum pan that are far more tenacious than the worst tarnish I've ever got on the outside of a copper pan. Some spots can be tenacious on the outside of stainless as well, but with stainless you can always just spray the pan down with oven cleaner and leave it in a plastic bag overnight. You can't do this with anodized aluminum without ruining the pan.

The thing to do would be to determine exactly how much 1:1 (or 2:1) simple syrup has the same weight of sugar as a half teaspoon of superfine. Then have someone else make two Daiquiris (several Daiquiris would provide a more convincing result, but would be wasteful) and serve them to you. See if you can taste a difference between the two.

Not vastly different. But when you're measuring sugar this precisely and in these small amounts, it's difficult to do with simple syrup. How do you get a half teaspoon's worth of sugar out of a 1:1 simple syrup?