slkinsey

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.

I have always preferred side towels as an all-purpose home kitchen tool. I use them to grab hot panhandles; to clean up dribbles of sauce on plated presentations; to dry dishes, glassware, silverware, pots and pans; wet as a sponge alternative and dry as a paper towel alternative in cleaning up counters, etc.; to squeeze the water out of blanched greens I'm later going to sauté or cream; as a cover for rising dough; new and good-looking ones are nice for wrapping around a bunch of fresh warm biscuits or rolls in a bowl; and many other things. I have my towels washed with the whites in hot water with bleach, so I'm not particularly concerned about bacteria or anything like that (certainly not compared to using a sponge!). I keep my side towels folded and stacked in a deep drawer under the counter that is my main working space. As others have pointed out, they're very inexpensive. Once mine start looking ratty, they're turned into general-purpose house cleaning and furniture polishing rags. The thing that's nice about having a lot of them around is that you never feel like you have to conserve. If one of your side towels gets damp and you don't feel good about using it to protect your hands as you lift that cocotte out of the hot oven, just toss it into the laundry bin and get a fresh side towel. Personally, I hate things like oven mits because they're awkward (my grip never feels as secure with oven mits as it does using a side towel) and single-purpose. Places like Costco, Sam's Club and Bed Bath & Beyond always seem to have side towels in packs of 20 or so for a reasonably cheap price.

Meyer Corporation owns the license to cookware produced under the Farberware name. And I can't find any mention of cast iron on the Farberware web site. That makes me wonder whether this is a branding thing and makes me wonder who is really making it. Nevertheless, the design is not the same as Lodge's design. So it's nice to see some variety.

Oh, I've already got several carbon steel pans. I've had them for years. They're great, because they're cheap and you can get single-function pans (crepe pans, omelette pans, oval fish pans, etc.) for not very much money. I just wouldn't compare their performance to cast iron, and I tend to use them in very different ways. Carbon steel pans heat up more rapidly and, in the larger size, tend to have hot spots. In my opinion, carbon steel makes for a much better and more versatile all-purpose pan (I'm not particularly sold on the "all purpose-ness" of cast iron, and tend to use mine only for cooking tasks that take advantage of its unique properties). There are plenty of things where I reach for the carbon steel pan instead of the cast iron pan. But... for things where I want to use cast iron (searing steaks and chops and finishing them in the oven, cornbread, hamburgers, sausages, etc.), carbon steel is a poor substitute in my experience. Carbon steel is also substantially less durable than cast iron. It's quite easy to scour the seasoning right off a carbon steel (or French steel or black steel or blue steel or whatever you want to call it) with a Scotch Brite pad. No need to order off the internet if you live in NYC. You can walk to Bridge Kitchenware or any of a zillion Bowery supply stores and choose from a vast profusion of carbon steel gauges, shapes and designs for ridiculously little money.

Yes, Steven, that's correct with respect to these two materials. Which is why your statement to the effect that carbon steel will give you "cast iron-like" performance at a lighter weight is incorrect. Thermal capacity is the defining property of cast iron, since it has relatively poor conductivity. If the pans do not weight the same amount, they will not have the same thermal capacity and therefore will not perform the same. What you say would be more or less true if one were comparing a carbon steel pan with an unusually thin and light cast iron pan. But there's no way that a 2 pound carbon steel pan is going to perform similar to a 4 pound cast iron pan.

Getting back to the topic, I've always found these handles useless as well, for a number of reasons. . . 1. Any time the pan accumulates any serious heat, the metal "stay cool" handles get hot anyway. 2. The metal handles get hot in the oven, which is a danger once the pan has been transferred to the stovetop if the cook is used to thinking he can grab the handle with bare hands. 3. The typical (All-Clad knockoff) metal handle shape and size is awkward any time the pan is carrying significant weight. The balance can be very precarious when lifting, e.g., a loaded twelve-inch frypan with a "stay cool" handle. 4. I have yet to see a metal "stay cool" handle design that seems structurally sound to me. Half the time they're welded, and when they're riveted they're likely to have that narrowing right at the connection to the body that Steven describes. I have to believe that both of these are destined to eventually fail under heavy use (and I do know of incidents where either the weld has broken or the thin area of the handle has bent). 5. The plastic, resin, wood, Cherokee hair, etc. non-metal handles are useless, because they can't be put into the oven. Fundamentally, I think "stay cool" handles are a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. As others have pointed out, there's no reason to grip the pan with a big old floppy oven mit. 75% of the time, the handle won't get hot enough to be a problem anyway. And for the other 25% of the time, just use a kitchen/bar towel like they've been doing in restaurant kitchens since the restaurant was invented.

This is unfortunately not true. Carbon steel and iron have the same density (7.87 g/cm^3) and fairly similar specific heat numbers (carbon steel is a litle better than iron). This means that, in order for a carbon steel pan to have a "cast-iron like" thermal capacity, it's would have to have to weigh almost as much as the equivalent cast iron pan. The difference in weight would be too small to make a practical difference. In addition, iron has better thermal conductivity than carbon steel (0.80 W/cm K compared to 0.51). This isn't a huge difference either, but might be noticable. All this is to say that, if a carbon steel pan is light enough to be noticably different from an equivalent pan in cast iron, it won't have perfornance characteristics similar to the cast iron pan. There's a reason that pans with better heat capacity properties tend to be heavier. The The Dulong-Petit Law tells us that all substances tend to have right around the same thermal capacity per mole.

Here's one of Gary Regan's SF Chron articles on the Floridita.

Very nice. I have to say that I like the Constantino Ribalaigua touch Angus mentions in his video of double straining the drink (once through the Hawthorne strainer and the second time through a fine mesh strainer) to remove any little shards of ice created by the hard shaking. Paul: I've (mostly) seen them in print simply as "El Floridita #1" (maraschino) and "El Floridita #2" (creme de cacao) -- sometimes with, sometimes without the "El" part. In speaking, people seem to most often call them both "Floridita Daiquiri #1 or 2."

There's also a recipe for a "Floridita Daiquiri" that has rum, lime, sweet vermouth, white creme de cacao and a touch of grenadine (for color?).

If the word is a foreign language word, I'd say it's never inappropriate to defer to the real pronunciation (within reason, of course: "rih-goe-leh-toe" is a reasonable enough English pronunciarion of Rigoletto and there's no need go as far as "ree-goh-leyt-toh" but "jiggly" is not a reasonable enough English approximation of Gigli). All of which is to say that, even if lawyers may pronounce "voire dire" as "voyer dyer" I am still going to die a little inside each time they do, and will continue to say "vware deer." Of course, plenty of people find it ridiculous and pretentious to point out that the Martini is made with gin and vermouth in due proportion instead of vodka and a sideways glance at the vermouth bottle, or that prime beef has properties that distinguish it from supermarket grade beef -- but plenty of us feel these are "fights worth fighting." So I guess that sort of thing is where you find it. Please feel free to skip over those parts in your reading of this thread. In general, of course, I don't go around every day telling people the proper pronunciation of "daiquiri" any more than I do the pronunciation of "absinth" (hint: it's not "ab-synth") or "bolognese." Indeed, I'm known to say both "dack-uh-ree" and "ab-synth" around 50% of the time myself. But I don't think it's inappropriate to point out the correct pronunciation of the cockail's name in the context of a discussion around the minutae of the drink, including historical origins and "definitive recipe." If one is going to invoke the likes of Constantino Ribalaigua and Jennings Cox, why not mention the real pronunciation? Anyway, that's neither here nor there. If people in America started pronouncing "Mojito" as "moe-jeye-toe" instead of "mo-hee-to" -- I'd probably mention it in passing as part of a thread on the Mojito.