slkinsey

Octaveman, I wonder if the vast array of whisks you see available for sale is another example of professional specialization bleeding over into the home kitchen. This has clearly happened with knives, for example. There are peeling, trimming, fluting, bird's beak, sheep's foot, and utility paring knives in a variety of lengths. There's no way the home cook needs 10 different kinds of paring knife (although I'm sure some buy them all anyway). But the point is that, if you're working in a professional kitchen and you're making 250 fluted mushroom caps every night, it's nice to have a fluting knife. Similarly, if you make a big batch of roux-based gravy every day at work, it might make sense to have a specialized whisk that is optimized for mixing up fat and flour in a large flat pan. But, in both cases, unless one is a collector like andiesenji, the specialized knife and whisk are overkill for a home cook.

Re Peach Brandy: One hopes that, with the rise of small-batch artisinal distilleries, someone will take it upon themselves to revive this liquor.

Dave and George: Would this have been slices of lemon/lime fruit, or peel?

Yea. Rittenhouse bonded makes an awesome julep.

If'n you're agin it, I'se agin it too. What you say regarding glassware makes plenty of sense with respect to professional bars (it's still fun to use metal cups at home). Now, if only more of them would stock fresh mint leaves and properly crushed ice... I'm also with you on getting away from the Kentucky hegemony of bourbon orthodoxy. I like juleps will all kinds of base liquors (try a genever julep sometime!).

Interesting, Dave. You're not fond of metal (silver?) julep cups? Also, do you find that shaking produces a notably different result from simply dumping in the ice?

I understand the distinction you're making, John, and I've made it myself. But I'm not sure I'd say that the cooking with which you grew up represents the state of mainstream Italian-American cooking during those times. I'd say that mainstream Italian-American cooking (and, to a large extent, culture) in the US evolved largely from Italians who emigrated to the United States in the largest wave from the late 1800s to the beginning of World War I and their descendants. We're talking about spaghetti with meatballs and Sunday gravy. I have a hard time believeing that the kind of linquini with clam sauce your family might have made was the same as what was being served in Italian-American restaurants in the 60s.

If doing the pureed clams trick, which I've done with chowder, I'd recommend using frozen chopped chowder clams. It would be prohibitively expensive to do this with littlenecks (which are anyway less flavorful than chowder clams, albeit much more tender) and if you simply steam and puree whole chowder clams without engaging in a good bit of nitpicky cleaning, you're not going to be happy with the color. I bet the Ducasse/Psaltis chowder uses pureed razor clams because they have a large proportion of pink meat.

Dean, I wonder if your frustration is due to the fact that you may be trying to make a dish that has the intensity of the Italian-American version (made with canned clams and extra bottled clam juice or chicken stock) using Italian ingredients and techniques. I'm going to suggest something radical: This is impossible. I don't think there's any way to get that intensity of flavor using nothing but fresh clams, garlic and herbs. This has something to do with the migration of what we think of as "the main event" as Italian cooking migrated into Italian-American cooking. I have noticed (and have noted in these forums before) that, as certain dishes and styles of cooking were transformed by the Italian diaspora in America, what was originally thought of as a condiment or enhancement came to be regarded as the focal point of the dish. In the Italian aesthetic, the pasta itself is the most important part of the dish, and the sauce should never be so abundant or intense that it obscures the experience of tasting and eating the pasta. As a result, many Italian pasta dishes have a meager amount of sauce, and especially the seafood pasta dishes can be quite delicately flavored compared to their Italian-American counterparts. In the most common Italian-American aesthetic, on the other hand, the sauce is the most important part of the dish, and the pasta is normally little more than a vehicle swimming in sauce. So, I'd suggest that there are three paths you can take: First, you can just do it the Italian-American way and use extra clam juice. Second, you can adjust your expectations to something lighter and more pasta-centric, and do it the Italian way. Third, you can make adjustments to try to get the Italian-American flavor using modified techniques. For example, you could get some chowder clams and puree them to ramp up the clam flavor. You could just cook the dish with a ton more clams and reduce the liquid. You could melt in an anchovy. Of these methods, only the last one strikes me as "Italian."

Absolutely not! I would be willing to bet that if you took a survey of Italian-American restaurants in America, or even on the Northeastern Seaboard, at least 75% of them are either incorporating grating cheese into the dish or offering grating cheese at the table to go with the dish. I'm not saying that "cheese with seafood" reflects my own preferences and practices, or that it reflects those of more recent Italian immigrant culture. But I do think it reflects the reality of most mainstream assimilated Italian-American cooking.

There's also something else that makes it "white" clam sauce, I think. In Italy, there is a preparation I've usually seen called "bianco di scoglio" which is made with seafood (clams in this case, but could be mussels, squid, shrimp, mixed seafood, etc.), parsley, garlic, a touch of crushed red pepper and a lot of extra virgin olive oil -- but that's not the same as the Italian-American "white clam sauce" which is usually, well... white somehow. I wonder if the familiar Italian-American version includes cheese? The Italian version is somewhat less emphatically flavored than the Italian-American version. As Dean surmises, the familiar Italian-American restaurant version is usually spiked with extra clam juice or even chicken stock. It's also typically made with chopped chowder clams rather than littlenecks or cherrystones. I don't bother adding the extra juice or stock, but it wouldn't be unthinkable to melt in an anchovy fillet or two at the beginning if you want a stronger flavor. Anyway, I find that I get better flavor, and a certain slight hint of iodine I appreciate, by using cockles rather than clams. And, in the Italian style, I don't bother taking them out of the shells. While the (dry!) pasta is cooking, I throw the cockles into a massively preheated pan with some olive oil and chopped garlic, toss in some dry white wine and slap on a lid. You can actually hear the cockle shells pop open. By the time the pasta is around 2 minutes away from being done, all the cockles have opened. I then add the pasta and a little bit of the pasta water to the pan and continue cooking until the pasta is almost perfect (it will continue cooking on the way to the table), then toss in a big pinch of crushed red pepper, a handfull of chopped parsley and a healthy slug of extra virgin olive oil off the heat. Done. For variations, I sometimes like to include pancetta or guanciale, crank up the red pepper a bit and cool the whole thing out with some chopped fresh mint.

Well, we have to understand a few things. . . 1. Death & Co. has just barely been open for three months, and they were closed for a significant chunk of that time. It's unlikely that too many Time Out readers went to D&C given it's diminutive size and relative newness. 2. The catgory is for "new bar of the year" not "best new cocktail bar" or "best new cocktails." Different people have different reasons for liking a bar and the majority doesn't have a preference for cocktailian temples. ReBar (which is upstairs at a multipurpose space) seems to be a place that has a decent wine list and lots of good beer on tap in a nice room, and it has live music and DJs. That's the kind of thing for which a certain segment of the bar-going public is looking. 3. It's interesting to note that all of the places under consideration (ReBar, Beatrice Inn, Death & Co., Marshall Stack, Union Hall) offer food. Actually, I'd hardly call some of them (Beatrice Inn, Union Hall) "bars." 4. The "new bar of the year" was selected by Time Out readers, who I have to believe were biased more towards "scene" when thinking about bars. I wonder where D&C would have ranked in critics' picks.

Water has way better thermal conductivity than a folded-up rag.

It's not clear to me that the peel oil of bitter orange is particularly more bitter than the peel oil of sweet oranges, just different (similarly, the peel oil of sour oranges is not sour). I think all citrus oil is fairly bitter when it comes down to it. Anyway, I would assume that the manufacturers are able to control the bitterness balance of their product without having to use salt. For one, they use plenty of sugar. As for your rum punch, I wouldn't think of salt as a sure-all for excessive bitterness. Grapefruits are made to taste a little sweeter with salt, but when it comes down to it they're really not all that bitter to begin with and even the "adjusted" taste impression has bitterness. All the salt in the world isn't going to do much to change the taste impression of something that's truly bitter.

Dave: Has All-Clad Copper Core been around for 7 years? I thought it had only been in production for maybe 3 years. I agree, by the way, that if you would like to have stainless lined heavy copper for its performance characteristics, it does make sense to have some lower-maintenance/less high-end pans around for making grilled cheese sandwiches and the like. Bourgeat, Falk Culinair and Mauviel are a bit like the Ferrari's of the kitchen. High performance but also high maintenance, and most people who own one also have a more prosaic car for picking up groceries.

The salient differences are three: 1. Either brand can have a better price, depending on the piece. For example, an All-Clad Copper Core 8 inch frypan will run you around 145 bucks versus around 175 for Falk Culinair or 162 for Mauviel. On the other hand, an All-Clad Copper Core 2 quart saucepan costs 235 bucks versus 199 for Falk Culinair at 2.3 quarts or 210 for Mauviel at 2.6 quarts (to make them totally equal, tack on another 10-15 bucks to buy lids for the copper pieces -- although the ability to buy the lids separately, or not at all, is a bonus in my estimation). 2. The All-Clad Copper Core pieces can be cleaned in the dishwasher (I think) -- although this would presumably tarnish the exposed copper detailing. 3. Stainless lined heavy copper has a lot more copper than All-Clad Copper Core. This will make them heavier, and will also make them perform better on certain cooking tasks.

In what way can they be a plus? . . . Do they ever really work and stay meaningfully cool in a wide variety of situations where regular handles would not? In my experience, they simply don't work very well at not heating up. Sure, the handles on my 1 quart All-Clad saucepans don't get very hot when I'm making a little bechamel. But, then again, the cast iron handle on my Falk Culinair 1.5 quart sauteuse evasee doesn't tend to get very hot when I'm making a little bit more bechamel either. More to the point, however, the handles on both brands get hot of the pans sit on the stove doing a reduction for 45 minutes. I suppose the All-Clad's "stay cool" handles take a few minutes more to heat up, but this is not a meaningful difference in practical terms. Well, just to put your theory to a test, I put two saucepans about 2/3 full of water on the stove, covered them, brought the water to a boil and then turned the heat down to keep the water simmering. One saucepan was a Demeyere Sirocco, 2 liters. The other was a 1.5 quart Mauviel professional pan. The results: At 15 minutes, the Mauviel was really warm, and by 20 minutes, I could hold the handle just long enough to slide the pan off the heat. At 25 minutes, it was too hot to lift at all, although I didn't burn my hand by simply touching the handle. I turned the heat off at that point, and a half hour later, it was still too hot to hold. After more than an hour, I could still lift the Demeyere easily, and hold it more than long enough to carry it across the kitchen to the stove and empty it out. (Incidentally, not that anyone asked, but at 5 minutes, the lid handle on the Mauviel was too hot to touch. The lid handle on the Demeyere was still cool at 1 hour.) I'd say that's a meaningful difference. That is a meaningful difference, but unfortunately it's not a very meaningful test for a number of reasons: First, the handle on the Demeyere pan you're talking about is not a "stay cool" handle of the kind we have been describing. Are those handles hollow? The Sur La Table site describes them as "solid, cast 18/10 stainless steel." This works very well in this application because stainless steel has very poor thermal conduction properties. A solid, massive stainless steel handle will take a long time to heat up and may never heat up appreciably in the conditions of your experiment. A drawback of this design, however, is that once the handles do get hot (e.g., in the oven) they have accumulated a lot of thermal energy and will take an extra-long time to cool down. Anyway, the typical "stay cool" handle looks something like this, whereas Demeyere's handle looks like this -- completely different. As I said before, I'm not in love with welding as a method of handle attachment, but I think there's not much to worry about with respect to a smallish saucepan. Second, all you have to do is look at the design of the two pans to see that a lot more thermal energy will be conducted into the handle of the Mauviel pan. The Mauviel pan is a straight-gauge heavy copper pan, with a nice thick layer of heat-conducting copper going right up the side of the pan and connecting directly to the handle. The Demeyere pan, on the other hand, is a disk-bottom pan. The conductive thermal material is on the bottom of the pan only, and the sides of the pan where the handle is attached are made of not-very-conductive stainless steel. An ideal comparison would be to have two identical pans, one with a standard handle and one with a "stay cool" handle and compare them. Next best would be to have fundamentally similar pans (either two disk-bottom pans or two straight gauge pans with reasonably similar thermal characteristics). This would be something like comparing a 2 quart Mauviel saucepan with a 2 quart All-Clad MasterChef saucepan. I should hasten to point out that I'm not 100% opposed to "stay cool" handles. I just have some issues with the most common shapes of them and the way they're attached, and I don't think they work well enough to make it worth those negatives. But a riveted-on, sturdy, firm-gripping handle that balances well with the weight of the pan and doesn't have the inherrent structural weakness of narrowing towards the pan sounds perfectly okay to me.

Hmm. Who knows? It's still made by Fratelli Branca, but I notice that appears under the "Branca line" on the company web site as a separate beverage, rather than together with Carpano Bianco, Carpano Classico and Antica Formula under the "Carpano line." And the bottle is now different. I'm not sure what this means, except that they rebranded. This seems odd to me, since Punt e Mes was developed in the shop of Antonio Benedetto Carpano (the supposed inventor of vermouth as we know it).

I highly recommend you do not get tin-lined copper for a saute pan. The melting point of tin is only 232C/450F. It's very easy to get a saute pan up above that temperature, and I would argue that higher temperatures are most useful for sauteing.

Hmm. Andrew and Karen are good and generally reliable writers, but the chemists with whom I spoke told me that adding sodium chloride would have no effect on pH. Could you summarize what they wrote about pH and salt?

I'm getting ready to embark upon a gomme syrup experiment. Question: has anyone, either in making gomme or regular old simple syrup, experimented with the clarification procedures outlined in the Charles Schultz appendix to "How to Mix Drinks"? He says that sugar and water should be mixed with well beaten egg whites, put on the heat, allowed to rise and subside three times, the resulting scum skimmed off, and then the whole works strained. Is there any point whatsoever to doing this, or was this procedure developed to deal with loaf sugar that was not as refined as today's white sugar. He's also got an even stranger procedure for "extra white" clarified sugar, involving ivory black (charcoal made from ivory, but fundamentally "bone char" -- which is animal bone charcoal). After doing a little googling, I see that most white sugar nowadays is already decolorized either with bone char or activated charcoal. I suppose this would make clarification superfluous?

Um... Out of curiosity, where have you been reading this? To the best of my knowledge -- and I just asked some chemists -- table salt, which is to say sodium chloride, is not a buffer and does not have any effect on pH.

In Killer Cocktails, Dave Wondrich writes:

Well, right. Of course he meant the performance properties. But the fact is, of course, that the performance of a pan is determined by its physical properties. I love carbon steel. I think it's great, and I've advocated it many times. As I say above, I think it's especially nice that it's not a big expense to acquire single-use specialty pans in carbon steel. I've owned/used carbon steel frypans in various sizes over the years, and I still regularly use a carbon steel omelette pan and a carbon steel crepe pan. So, it's not that I don't like carbon steel. Rather, as someone who has and uses several pieces of both cast iron and carbon steel, I just don't think carbon steel is well described as "cast iron minus the weight." Other than the fact that they are both "seasoned," I don't think the experience of cooking with cast iron and cooking with carbon steel is all that similar. Carbon steel cookware is unique. It doesn't have the high thermal capacity of heavy cast iron, or the properties that make cast iron so great for applications where one wants to maintain a constant temperature. On the other hand, it's a lot lighter, and it's quite a bit more responsive. If I had to describe it by comparing it to more commonly-understood materials in the home, I'd say it split the difference between cast iron and aluminum -- having some of the good qualities, but also some of the bad qualities of each. (I would also take exception with the description of either seasoned cast iron or seasoned carbon steel as "non-stick," but that's probably better for another discussion. )

In what way can they be a plus? (I ask about the metal "stay cool" handles -- I can understand why it might be practical for some people to have a plastic handle on a saucepan they only use to boil water.) Do they ever really work and stay meaningfully cool in a wide variety of situations where regular handles would not? In my experience, they simply don't work very well at not heating up. Sure, the handles on my 1 quart All-Clad saucepans don't get very hot when I'm making a little bechamel. But, then again, the cast iron handle on my Falk Culinair 1.5 quart sauteuse evasee doesn't tend to get very hot when I'm making a little bit more bechamel either. More to the point, however, the handles on both brands get hot of the pans sit on the stove doing a reduction for 45 minutes. I suppose the All-Clad's "stay cool" handles take a few minutes more to heat up, but this is not a meaningful difference in practical terms. Personally, if given the opportunity to choose between the awkward "stay cool" handle shape used by All-Clad and the new Calphalon lines and more substantial (and, in my opinion, ergonomic) standard handle -- I'd choose the standard handle every time.