slkinsey

Boodles, I'm not sure I understand what your product is. Is the syrup made by reducing/sweetening the unfermented grape must, or is it reduced/sweetened wine?

Bless you, Dave. I agree. and I also agree about Luksusowa. Especially when price is considered, I've never found a reason to keep any other vodka around.

The Imperia is a cool machine. I have the Imperia my mother had when she was living in Italy over 50 years ago. When I bought one for a friend a few years back, I was pleased to see that it appears to be the exact same machine with no substitutions of cheap parts or construction. That said, now that I have the KA pasta roller attachments, I never use the Imperia any more. It's just so much faster and easier with the KA. FWIW, I never use the cutters. I've never been entirely happy with the extent to which they separate the strands of pasta, and I find it's easier/better to simply roll up each sheet of pasta and cut it to whatever width I'd like by hand. Now sure I agree that fresh pasta is better than store-bought pasta, if we're talking about comparing fresh to dry pasta. They're really two different animals, and artisinal dry semolina pastas like Latini, Rustichella d'Abruzzo and Setaro are as good as any fresh pasta you'll ever have. Now, if you're saying that homemade fresh pasta is way better than store bought fresh pasta, I'm with you 100%. This is the sort of thing where having a recirculating water bath heater really comes in handy.

If they turned those NY apples into Applejack, they'd be a lot cheaper to ship. And they'd have a better shelf-life.

Okay, but what I'm wondering is why you're setting up a big list of drinks with only one alcohol ingredient. Is there some taste-based reason? Economic? Philosophical? I ask because, while there are a number of good and complex one-spirit drinks (the Jack Rose comes to mind), limiting yourself to one alcholic ingredient only is... well... very limiting.

Danne, if you don't mind my asking (and I think it might help us make suggestions for you). . . why don't you want more than one alcohol ingredient? You would accept a drink with 5 non-alcohol ingredients plus tequila, but not a drink with 1 non-alcohol and one alcohol ingredient plus tequila? That doesn't make sense to me, but if you'd share your reasoning maybe it would. If you're looking for essentially two ingredient drinks like a tequila and orange juice, I'm not sure why you'd need suggestions. Just try many variations of tequila plus _____.

My guess is that it's simply due to a lack of awareness. In the United States, that mindspace is occupied by cast iron. In some other countries (France perhaps?) it might be reversed and we might be asking why heavy cast iron isn't used more. That said, it's also a fact that unlined cast iron isn't used all that much either outside of the foodie community and certain specialty applications (cornbread, etc.). This is simply because it can't be washed in the dishwasher. Most of this is explained in the eGCI class (hard to remember this is the Q&A thread to a class, I know). Cast iron works better than stainless because cast iron has better thermal conductivity. Because stainless has such crappy conductivity and high thermal capacity, stainless cookware is generally made very thin. This results in an overall low thermal capacity. Low conductivity and low thermal capacity equals less heat being conducted into the meat, which equals lesser performance on searing and browning. It is not the case, however, that stainless steel has poor properties as a surface for searing and browning. Stainless lined heavy copper, stainless lined thick aluminum and stainless disk bottom cookware all excel at browning and searing. Enamel is a slightly different story. There are two kinds of enamel cookware. Enameled carbon steel is enamel over a very thin layer of carbon steel. This suffers from the same conductivity and thermal capacity problems as stainless, only even worse due to the fact that enamel has drastically lower thermal conductivity than even stainless steel (so much so that enamel might be better characterized as an "insulator" rather than a "conductor"). Enameled cast iron is much better at browning and searing than enameled carbon steel, but still suffers compared to copper, aluminum and unlined iron. The lesser performance has to do, I'm guessing, with the very low thermal conductivity of the enamel.

Ciroc is a very good vodka. But, Brad, I have to say I'm a little surprised that someone with your palate would say that you can't use cheap stuff for penne alla vodka and bought a superexpensive vodka like Ciroc in order to make it. Of course something like Popov might bring some off flavors to the table. But the next time I'm in your neck of the woods we'll do a side-by-side tasting and I'll bet you a hundred bucks you can't tell the difference between penne alla vodka made with $35/liter Ciroc and $11/liter Luksusowa. Of course, if you bought the Ciroc in order to use a couple ounces of it with the penne and drink the rest... that's different.

No. But, on the bright side, when I ran into the estimable doctor at Pegu Club recently, I was able to give him shit about it in person.

My predictions were that rye and rhum agricole would be significant trends in the cocktails community. That's absolutely happened with respect to rye, and to a lesser extent with respect to rhum agricole. I'm glad to see that applejack appears to be making significant inroads into the cocktailian psyche, as I had hoped, and Laird's bonded is now available for sale in NYC. Bitters also seems to be starting a minor explosion in the second half of 2006, with many new brands and types available commercially as well as lots of people experimenting on their own. All in all, I'm pretty happy with how my predictions turned out.

Landmarc has an excellent brunch on the weekends. The French toast is not to be missed. Good cocktails. Excellent wine program.

"soixante-quinze" = "seventy five" "soixante-dix-cinquième" = "seventy fifth" Is it possible that the author either made a mistake, or that Meier's iteration of the French 75 ("soixante-quinze" being indeed the French name of the famous artillery piece) had the addition of a rinse of absinthe or some such trick?

They make them that way because they are good at staying "touchably cool" while the pan is on the stovetop. Very few home cooks actually move their fully loaded pans in the air while cooking, so tha ability to grab a handle without using a towel or hot pad rated higher than ergonomics for tossing/flipping. They also look cool, which is important to All-Clad considering that they probably do 90% of their business on looks and marketing. The handles as designed are also quite light in weight. This is important for a two reasons: First, as is demonstrated in many eG Forums discussions on cookware, many home cooks don't have sufficient arm strength to lift heavier cookware. Second, since the body of the pan is made of lightweight aluminum, the handle has to be fairly lightweight in order to balance properly. Finally, solid handles such as those employed by Falk, Mauviel, et al. are considerably more costly from a materials standpoint.

Is the Falk pan hard to shake when it's empty? If you can move the Falk frypan well when it's empty but are having difficulty shaking it fully loaded, it's not clear that you won't have just as much trouble with a fully loaded All-Clad frypan. Also, if you're finding that the Falk frypan is too heavy for your use and are more-or-less seeking to "trade it in" for a lighter All-Clad frypan (which is to say that All-Clad will become your primary frypan) one way to defray the cost of the All-Clad pan would be to sell the Falk pan. You could probably get 75 bucks for it, and then the All-Clad pan would be free. Disk bottoms work great in certain contexts. I would not recommend a disk-bottom frypan, or a disk bottom pan that is too close in diameter to the size of the burner flame. For things like large saute pans, tall sauce pans and stockpots, however, I think it's a great design. I'm not quite sure which line you're talking about here. All-Clad has the "Copper Core" line, which has an internal thermal layer of copper fully clad in stainless steel. It also has the "Cop-R-Chef" line, which has an internal thermal layer of aluminum, an internal cladding of stainless steel and an external cladding of copper. The Cop-R-Chef line does not benefit from any of the thermal properties of copper, as the external "display layer" of copper is too thin to meaningfully impact the overall performance of the pan. There is some talk that All-Clad has reduced the thickness on their cookware, but the last time I got data from them they said the aluminum layer on the MasterChef line was 3.9 mm. I bring this up because it's a mistake to think that Demeyere's aluminum layer is 4.8 mm. That's the total thickness of their "seven layer" design. If we assume that the non-aluminum layers are comparable in thickness to the 0.44 mm cladding All-Clad uses (and there's no reason to suppose they are not), then the thermal layer in the Demeyere "seven layer" pans is approximately the same. On the other hand, this is certainly thicker than the aluminum layer employed in All-Clad Stainless. A few things: First, if the Falk pan is too heavy for you, you should make sure you won't have the same problem with All-Clad Copper Core before spending the money. Also, try out the handles on the All-Clad pans. Many people (myself included) find them awkward for tossing the pan. You might consider bringing something to the store (marbles or whatever) to simulate the approximate weight and volume of whatever you might want to toss around in the skillet and try out the various ones you are considering. Also, given what it sounds like you want to use the pan for, and your discount, I don't see why you'd want to spend any more than the 75 bucks.

Nice article in today's NY Times about tonic water. Talks about Q Tonic, Fever-Tree Premium Indian Tonic Water and Stirrings tonic water. Also has a nice quote from one of my favorite bartenders:

You bribed the maintenance guys?

FWIW, and taking nothing away from Marcus Samuelsson's knowledge and talent, it strikes me that he's only a little more Ethiopian than Mario Batali is Italian. Yes he was born in Ethiopia, but he was brought to Sweden at age 3 and raised there by adoptive parents. It's not like he was brought up in Ethiopia eating injera at his father's knee, and according to him he rarely ate Ethiopian food until he moved to New York. This doesn't make his opinions non-relevant, of course, but does point out that he's hardly NYC's reigning expert on what does/doesn't make for a good Ethiopian restaurant. According to this article, Yeworkwoha Ephrem, the owner of Ghenet, is his "adviser on Ethiopian cuisine." Here's an interesting quote from the article that I thought was relevant to Ethiopian food in general, and Awash in particular:

Reproduced here for ease of reading: Read the rest of the article: Where Playing with Fire is not Taboo Before many of you jump on Bruni for this review, saying he's crazy or misguided or foolish or something, let me be the first to say that he's right: Spicy & Tasty is a great restaurant that deserves two stars. The prices are cheap, but the food is consistently wonderful. I've eaten there over 40 times, I figure, and never once have I had a dish that wasn't delicious. Not one. I can't think of any other restaurant I've eaten at so many times that I can make that statement about. Furthermore, the ground floor of the restaurant actually has quite classy and presumably expensive decor. This is a wonderful restaurant serving Sichuan-style cuisine that I could send my homesick student from Chengdu to and have her come back to me thanking me and telling me that the food was just like the food from her home town, it's got a long, varied menu, and it has classy decor and good service (though, as Bruni accurately indicates, they speak a limited amount of English, and a Chinese-speaker among your group is definitely helpful, though not essential). What's not two-star about that? Purely the price? Too cheap for you? The lack of a wine list? Please! I thought this was interesting and valuable enough from a lontgime S&T devotee to reproduce here. As always, let's keep star system criticism and metadiscussion on Bruni's reviewing quirks not bearing directly on S&T in the "Bruni and Beyond" thread.

Maybe you have a point. The "faux Polynesian" thing's got to figure in there somehow. I don't know... there's something inherrently "tiki" feeling about drinks like the Scorpion, the Demerara Dry Float and the Mai Tai -- not least of which is that they were created by the likes of Trader Vic and Don the Beachcomber specifically in the tiki tradition. If, for example, Trader Vic's had been serving a lot of Manhattans, I don't think that makes the Manhattan necessarily a "tiki drink." This is why I don't think drinks like a Margarita, Daiquiri or Mojito belong. They belong to other traditions. Now, on the other hand, if one would like to suggest that a frozen and blended, fruit flavored "Margarita" or "Daiquiri" is a tiki drink, I might listen.

Denise, a two questions. . . 1. Without wanting to invade your privacy, I'm wondering just how deep this discount is. I ask for an important reason: All-Clad is egregiously overpriced at retail, and Williams-Sonoma typically charges full retail price. For example, a 12" All-Clad Stainless fry pan at Williams-Sonoma will run you 125 bucks. The same pan as a "second" at Cookware and More will run you 85 bucks. That's a 32% reduction in price. Can your discount beat 32%? 2. Why do you want this frypan? What do you want to use it for?

I have a follow-up question: What makes a drink a tiki drink? I ask this after looking through George's webtender wiki list of tiki drinks, where I see several that I would not consider born of the tiki tradition. In particular, I'm not sure I'd call the Dark and Stormy, Hurricane, Piña Colada, Queen's Park Swizzle, any variety of Margarita or Daiquiri, or the non-Trader Vic Suffering Bastard a "tiki drink."

I think there is a growing interest in tiki drinks due to a combination of 1) there is a cocktail revival well underway; 2) many tiki drinks are nonthreatening, easy-drinking and approachable to those who cut their teeth on "vodka with 6 different kinds of fruit juice" drinks; 3) there are some genuinely good tiki drinks out there; 4) 50's-era kitsch appeals to the "ironic hipster" set these days. These things combine to make it more likely that certain individuals will say "yes" to a Mai Tai in a tiki mug.

You could add other things to it to improve the color. I am thinking particularly of curry powder, which would bring it more towards the yellow side of the spectrum. Curry and cauliflower happen to go together brilliantly. Then a little chopped flatleaf parsley for color, maybe a dice of tomato sprinkled on the top... you've got more or less the same soup, but with a different flavor and color plus some added texture, with very little effort.

Interesting. I haven't found any of these to be notably better than Awash, but I understand that the Ethiopian dishes I like are Awash's specialties. Honestly, I can't say that I notice a huge difference from Ethiopian place to Ethiopian place in the City. There was nothing about Queen of Sheba that would make me want to go to 46th and 10th rather than a few blocks away to Awash. But, then again, I'm sure I'd feel exactly the opposite if I lived around the corner from Queen of Sheba.

From a purely geometrical standpoint, they could not possibly have been 4 inches deep if they were 1 quart pans. A 1 quart (57.75 cubic inches) cylinder that is 4 inches tall has a diameter of scarsely more than 4 inches. Anyway, All-Clad's product information page gives the dimsneions of their 1 quart saucier as 6.5 inches in diameter at the top (which calculates to approximately 4.9 inches in diameter at the bottom) and 2.25 inches in depth. I agree that you wouldn't want to fill the pan more than 1/3 deep (.75 inches) with hot oil. That would give you around 1.25 cups of cooking oil to work with. If that's enough for you to work with, you should go for it. That said, the blackening is going to happen no matter what if you're doing a lot of deep frying. It's also unclear to me why you'd contemplate spending 45 bucks for something like this. If I were you, I'd look around for a 1 quart carbon steel wok. Do such things exist?