slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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White flour has no nutritional value and routinely destroys blood chemistry.
I can't let this one pass. I assume/hope it's hyperbole, but would anyway like to point out that it's a ridiculous assertion if not deliberate hyperbole. There are plenty of peoples throughout history who have subsisted largely on food products made of white flour, so it is incorrect on its face to say that it has no nutritional value. As to whether it "destroys blood chemistry," I've never seen anything with any credibility whatsoever to suggest such a thing.
Here are some interesting and relevant quotes from "On Food and Cooking" (1st Ed):
"...the popular view today is that whole grain bread, because it contains the vitamin-rich germ and fiber-rich bran, is more nutritious and better for our general health than refined flour breads. This, in turn, is a relatively recent reaction against centuries, even millennia, of a rather unreflective preference for lighter breads."...as for whole wheat in particular: it is true that whole grain flour contains more protein, minerals and vitamins than refined flour, including as it does the nutritionally valuable germ and aleurone layer, as well as the mostly indigestible bran. But it is also true that most of these nutrients pass through the digestive tract unabsorbed because the indigestible carbohydrates complex with them and speed their passage out of the system. The nutrients in white bread do not suffer such losses.
"...the epidemic of rickets that struck the children of Dublin after three years of wartime rations of dairy products and whole wheat bread. The combination of marginal supplies of calcium and vitamin D and the calcium-complexing activity of phytic acid, which is concentrated in the aleurone layer, was enough to tip the balance from health to serious disease. Similar problems with iron and zinc have been studied among the poor in Egypt and Iran."
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One of the most interesting tidbits from the kitchen tour was learned when I asked about what kinds of adjustments they had had to make in opening a reataurant in America and New York City as opposed to their usual UK stomping grounds. I was expecting to hear something about using different provisioners and ingredients, or changing things to account for the NYC palate, etc. No... the first thing that came to his mind was that they had to be a lot nicer to the personnel in the kitchen, that the strong language and rough-and-tumble of their UK kitchens simply wouldn't fly here.
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Dude. Seriously. The next time we go to NGB, let's see if we can take a peek into the kitchen. Then let's see if we're willing to ever go back after that.
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I wonder if there are statistics available regarding the relative safety of food from 1- fast-food/quick-service type places, 2- nice sit-down restaurants and 3- home kitchens.
You make some interesting points, Steven. Like yourself, I have had the opportunity to see plenty of food preparation areas in your three categories. If I had to pick one as the cleanest of the three, it would be the kitchen of a well-run McDonald's. If I had to pick one as the dirtiest of the three, it would be the kitchen of a lowbrow to middlebrow sit-down restaurant. Sure, the kitchens at Per Se and ADNY look like operating suites on the Starship Enterprise, but the kitchens of $20 - $50 places are frequently appalling. And I don't know about you, but I never want to see the kitchen at, say, New Green Bo.
What makes the fast food places like Taco Bell much more dangerous from a food safety standpoint compared to a "Chez Annie's Basil Grill" is that Taco Bell is likely getting all their beef from one processing plant, all their scallions from one grower, all their sour cream from one dairy, etc. -- and they're storing it all in one place as well. So, if any one of these products or processors or storage facilities becomes a source of contamination, that contamination goes out to a zillion Taco Bell restaurants and a lot of people get sick.
One way to prevent this -- and if I were a betting man I'd put money on this becoming SOP within a decade -- would be for Taco Bell's storage and shipping facilities to incorporate irradiation capabilities. That way, all the scallions (for example) at the holding and distribution facility would be sealed in airtight plastic for transportation, and before they were released from the facility all the boxes of sealed-up scallions would be irratiated. That would go a long way towards eliminating a major potential contamination risk, and would have the added benefit of giving the food products a longer shelf life.
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Okay, cool.
Important question: What's the tannin presence like in the syrup?
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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?
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Wild Turkey 101
Rittenhouse Bonded
Old Forester Bonded
Booker's
Ancient Ancient Age
Sorry...couldn't resist the drive-by snark. And the Luksusowa is quite good, in my opinion.
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.
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I actually have TheManInWhite's pasta machine on loan at the moment. It's made by Imperia but I'm not sure what exact model number it is. Maybe he'll come out of the shadows and comment.
I've been meaning to get the KitchenAid pasta roller attachment but been putting it off as well. Once I give this back though I'll have to finally pick it up. Fresh Pasta is so easy to make and better than store bought pasta.
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%.
read upthread about the dulche de leche. You can caramelize pretty much any milk product you want. Yogurt does well in a 180 degree bath for 24 hours.....tastes a bit like a ripe cheese.This is the sort of thing where having a recirculating water bath heater really comes in handy.
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If they turned those NY apples into Applejack, they'd be a lot cheaper to ship. And they'd have a better shelf-life.
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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.
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That´s the type of recipe I don't want to know more about, because it's more than one alcohol ingredient.
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 _____.
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i have a general question about cookware: why isn't french steel more popular as fry pan material? they're cheap, they take some taking care of but less than cast iron, and they work really well.
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.
in fact, i'm kind of interested in the physics behind searing/browning ability in general. why does cast iron work better than stainless? why is enamel worse than either?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.
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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.
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I know Sam Kinsey does not agree with the recipe for the Pegu Club in this book. However, I don't think Sam has ever chewed up a copy of it in protest
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.
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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.
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Landmarc has an excellent brunch on the weekends. The French toast is not to be missed. Good cocktails. Excellent wine program.
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Does anyone know anything about a cocktail credited to Frank Meier called a "soixante-quinte" (seventy fifth)?
"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?
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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.
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The discount is more. The pan you mentioned costs $75. . . . I do have a Falk frypan but it is just to hard to shake.
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.
I'm tired of my Sitram Profiserie pans. I just don't like the disc bottoms.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 have several pieces of All-Clad both stainless and Cop-R-Core.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.
When I started this post my main interest was fully cladded frypans. I really would like to have the demeyere proline which is 4.8mm of aluminum and no rivets.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 11" demeyere pan costs $180. I can get the 12" stainless all-clad for $75 or the Copper core for $120. I have a Falk culinair fry pan 2.3mm of copper which is just too heavy to try and shake when sauteing mushrooms etc. ... I am trying to figure out which line would be best and easiest to clean. I first only considered the all stainless but now after hearing positive remarks about the copper core I am not sure.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.
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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:
Jim Meehan, a bartender at Gramercy Tavern and the Pegu Club in Manhattan, has been working for more than a year on a subtle variation of his own that is infused with lime and lemongrass. He believes there is room behind the bar for more than one tonic water."Maybe Q Tonic tastes best with a citrusy gin like Plymouth, and a more floral tonic, like the one I make, tastes better with dry gins like Tanqueray and Beefeater," Mr. Meehan said. He conceded that the concept of tonic specificity is "an advanced idea" that might take a while to catch on.
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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:
One thing immediately apparent after visiting most of New York's Ethiopian restaurants is the similarity of the menus. ''As with any third world country's food, it doesn't have tiers of sophistication,'' Mr. Samuelsson said. ''It doesn't matter if you're the richest or the poorest, you're going to eat the same food, except that maybe the quality of the meat changes.''Eventually, though, you begin to notice subtle differences among the restaurants. Awash, a small but crowded restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue near 109th Street, excels at both vegetarian dishes and at kitfo, a raw beef delicacy invariably referred to as Ethiopian steak tartare.
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Reproduced here for ease of reading:
Spicy & Tasty gets two stars:[...]Spicy & Tasty plays lavishly with this fire, which blazed in a riveting dish called shredded lamb in fresh hot pepper. On top of thin slices of lamb and a tangle of herbs and vegetables were swaths of a four-alarm paste made from dried chili flakes. The peppercorns also entered the mix — you could feel them on your lips — and at the bottom of the wide, deep bowl, red chili oil glistened.[...]But Spicy & Tasty does justice to both sides of the ampersand, providing pleasures away from the heat. The bounciness of the dried bean curd was irresistible, and it exemplified an attentiveness to texture that also distinguished creamy tofu with minced pork and a dish of scallion and egg fried rice whose fluffiness, like its pale green color, was a revelation.[...]
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.
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Perhaps Tiki is just a feeling, rather than an actual thing.
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.
Favorite vodkas
in Spirits & Cocktails
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I would suggest that what makes vodka "vodka" is not the raw materials that are used, but rather the degree to which distinctive and characteristic flavor/aroma/etc. are removed by the extremely high distillation proof, filtration, etc.
This is to say that a spirit made of fermented molasses that was distilled to an azeotropic solution of alcohol and water at 192 proof, rectified through several subsequent distillations, filtered through quartz and/or activated charcoal, and then diluted with water to a bottle proof of 40% alcohol would not be "rum" due to the fact that the raw material was molasses. It would be "vodka" due to the process used in making it and the end result.