slkinsey

The "burnt crust" bread is likely Pane Pugliese from Sullivan Street Bakery. It is indeed supposed to be like that (ironically, their picture is one of the lightest colored examples I've seen).

LindsayAnn, I don't think anyone is suggesting that no one can ever get a headache from MSG... or rather that no one can ever get a headache from exposure to a certain amount of free glutamate, since as I mentioned above there is no chemical difference between the glutamate you get from MSG and the glutamate you get from, say, parmigiano-reggiano. If you get migraine headache from eating Doritos and aged parmigiano-reggiano and real dashi and concentrated tomato paste and soy sauce and dried mushrooms and canned soup, etc. -- then, yea, it sounds like you have a real migraine trigger from glutamate. It's certainly true that some people do have this sensitivity, juas as some people trigger migraines from chili peppers or alcohol or caffeine or bad rap music.

Well, yea it's sweet and syrupy. It's a liqueur. Straight creme de cacao or curacao or even Cointreau can be a little off-putting as well. Dave Wondrich recommends a dry style of apricot brandy in at least one of his books. Maybe we can get some brand recommendations out of him.

A friend tells me that, according to the Marie Brizard folks, "there are bottling issues" with Apry and we shouldn't expect resolution any time soon.

Whenever I have a dinner party or some such thing, I'll just make whatever I think might be an interesting cocktail -- the same cocktail for everyone. Needless to say, if I know that one of them is a huge fan of gin I might make a gin cocktail, or if one is a Manhattan drinker I might make a Red Hook, or if one is a Cosmo drinker I might make something like a Juniperotivo. If I get someone who says, "I really don't like anything other than vodka Gimlets" I'll usually ask them to give my cocktail a try, but reassure them that they don't have to finish it and that I'll be happy to make them a vodka Gimlet if they don't like it. After a while, if it turns out to be the case that that one friend really does only like vodka Gimlets, I'll just make her a vodka Gimlet and thank God that the only cocktail she likes doesn't have nine ingredients.

I think it might be useful to provide some information about what glutamic acid is, what glutamate is, what "glutamates" are. This seems insufficiently understood. Glutamic acid is an amino acid having the chemical formula C5H9NO4. This is a common and important amino acid, playing roles in the human organism in both cellular metabolism and as a neurotransmitter. Glutamate is the commonly occurring anion (negatively charged ion) of glutamic acid. "Glutamates" are salts or esters of glutamic acid. Monosodium glutamate is a sodium salt of glutamate (meaning that it is glutamate plus a sodium atom). When monosodium glutamate is dissolved in water, it dissociates into free sodium and glutamate ions, much the same way that table salt dissociates into free sodium and chlorine ions. There is, then, no difference between the glutamate ions that come into your body from monosodium glutamate and the glutamate ions that come into your body from other sources of free glutamate.

Moderator's note: I've split out a side-discsssion from this thread on the subject of MSG. I'm reworking that into a thread, and will move it back into the forums shortly. Please continue in this thread with discussion of Momofuku Ssäm Bar only. Thanks.

Slacker.

Functionally there is no reason you shouldn't be able to scrub them with copper scrubbies. The reason All-Clad doesn't want you to do this is because it will leave scratches on the surface of the pan and the cosmetic appearance of All-Clad Stainless is important to most people who purchase it. Personally, I'd recommend Bar Keeper's Friend over a copper scrubbing pad for this use. Either way, you're not going to have that mirror finish any more. I should point out that a certain amount of discoloration on your All-Clad Stainless isn't going to change its performance one bit. I gather we're talking about this post here where I said: If you're asking about Falk's "oval casserole," most of what I said about their "stew pot" also applies here. I just don't see why it's worth sprending the money for copper and would gravitate towards enameled cast iron, which has the added advantage of being much less expensive. If you're talking about gratin pans, it gets a little more complicated. The thing about a gratin pan is that looks do make a difference, because you will be bringing the pan to the table. Whether copper makes sense will largely depend on how you think you might use the pan. Strictly for making things "gratinée" (which is to say, cooked in the oven or under the broiler until brown and crispy on top), it probably doesn't add anything to use copper and you might as well use porcelain. Metal gratin pans can have added functionality, however, because they can be heated on the stove. You could use it as a "sizzle plate" to finish items in the oven. You could toss in some fat and garlic on the stovetop, start a whole fish in the pan, and take the whole thing to the oven. You could roast poultry in the gratin pan, use the same pan to make a pan sauce, return the poultry to the pan and take the whole thing to the table. There are a lot of things you could do with a metal gratin pan. For many of these extended applications, heavy copper could really come in handy. Keep in mind, however, that the 1.6 mm Mauviel line is called "table service." It is fine for the oven, but is too thin for stovetop cooking. That last bit is actually quite important. Mauviel's Table Service line is not intended for stovetop cooking, and won't perform well in that context. From a purely functional standpoint, something like Falk Culinair's large gratin pan pan at 2.5 mm thickness would have good versatility in that it could be heated on the stovetop. You couldn't really do that with a piece of Mauviel Table Service.

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN! Oh well, I'm still getting a bottle of it.

Another tidbit: Hotaling's should hit NYC around September/October.

Some more info from friends: Blackwood's gin should hit the NYC market sometime in September/October.

Friends in the know have passed along some exciting news: Sometime in the October/November timeframe we should start seeing Rittenhouse 21 year old in NYC. Brian from Pegu Club was able to try some of it during a recent trip down South, and he told me it was outstanding. I can hardly wait.

The sad reality is that common grits (i.e., Quaker Grits) are not made from hominy. It's nothing more than coarse white cornmeal. You have to get the fancy stuff if you want hominy.

The NY Times reports today that Brown-Forman, the liquor company known for brands such as Jack Daniel's, Southern Comfort, Finlandia and Canadian Mist, will acquire Mexican tequila company Casa Herradura for $876 million. Following this sale, only top-seller Jose Cuervo among the three largest tequila makers will remain Mexican-owned (Sauza, the #2 company, is owned by Fortune Brands).

Here's another tidbit I got from a friend that you can pass along to your liquor store and bartender friends regarding Laird's Apple Bond in NYC: Paramount's item number for Laird's Bonded 100 proof is #825200. It is not listed as "Bonded" in the system or the book, only as "Lairds Apple Brandy 100 proof."

Although the two pans seem to be the same size and shape, I find it very interesting that the MC2 pan is called the "Ultimate Covered Sauce Pan" and the Stainless pan is called the "Ultimate Sauté Pot." The Macy's links you provide don't give any dimensions so it's hard to say exactly, but the pictures sure look a lot more like sauce pans than they do sauté pans. The sides appear to be too high, and the cooking surface too small, for them to be particularly useful at sautéing. I also find it extremely strange that the Stainless pan is over a hundred dollars less expensive than the MC2 pan. Stainless is usually a good bit more expensive. In general, MC2 and LTD will provide better performance than Stainless. This is because these two lines have a thicker layer of aluminum compared to the fully clad Stainless line. More aluminum means better performance. IMO, the MC2 line is All-Clad's best line, because it has the thickest layer of aluminum and you aren't paying extra for the hard-to-clean anodized exterior on the LTD line (MC2 is All-Clad's least expensive line). lorea, I'm not sure what you're looking for a pan to do. Why would you want this pan? If you're looking for a sauté pan, I think you can do a lot better than this particular shape, and I think you could do a lot better on price. You could get a Sitram sauté pan with a thick disk bottom on amazon.com for around half of what Macy's is charging for the All-Clad "Stainless Ultimate Sauté Pot." The Sitram pan would, in my opinion, be better for sautéing. Then again, very few home cooks actually use a sauté pan. As for saucepan functionality... it is very rarely worth the money for a home cook to have a fully clad six quart sauce pan. A lot of people end up spending big bucks on All-Clad saucepans that end up being massive overkill because they're mostly using them to boil water, steam vegetables, make soup, etc. Six quarts is a lot of sauce. What is is that you would like to do in the kitchen that you feel you currently cannot do well with the cookware you currently own?

Tomorrow marks one year since Pegu Club's official opening. Congratulations to Audrey and everyone else on the team.

I don't understand. What do you mean "their not serving wine?" They certainly sell wine, as this wine list demonstrates.

Thanks for the info, phlip. There are several meanings of the word "tea" and I wonder if there isn't a small confusion of terms here. Tea can mean not only refer to the tea bush Camellia sinensis and a beverage made from its leaves, buds, etc., but can also refer to beverages made in a similar manner using other herbs, buds, flowers, whatever. We might refer to these preparations loosely as "herbal teas." When I think of tea-infused-liquor for the purposes of this discussion, I'm specifically thinking of liquor that has been infused with tea leaves. As I noted above, tea leaf infusions have the somewhat unique challenge of tannin. Something like hibiscus-infused syrup I would consider a herb-infusion rather than a tea-infusion, despite the fact that we call hibiscus flowers steeped in water "hibiscus tea." Phlip: do you know whether the jasmine-infused gin used in the cocktail at Pegu is infused with jasmine flowers or whether it is infused with jasmine tea consisting of (usually) green tea that has been perfumed with jasmine flowers?

No, in fact this wouldn't be right. First of all this entire "impurities" idea is based on the premise (largely promoted by vodka makers) that hangovers come substantially from exposure to congeners (vodka is low in congeners). This is a mistaken premise. Yes, there is some evidence that high levels of congeners can contribute to the headache portion of a hangover, but there are many aspects to a hangover and many root causes of those aspects. Second, given the nature of the distilling, rectification and filtration process that goes into making vodka, I am quite sure that there is no chemical difference between "organic" vodka and "regular" vodka out of the still.* According to the sense in which "impurities" is used with respect to vodka, it would be easy to make a "not organic" vodka that had substantially fewer impurities than an "organic" vodka. * This is why I think the idea of an "organic" vodka is silly if you're concerned about the product itself. If you're more concerned with the environmental impact of standard agricultural practices, there may be some point to buying "organic" vodka. Although, personally, if that's the reason I'm buying a certain liquor, I hope someone comes up with a "sustainable agriculture" vodka soon. The point is, though, that there would still be no difference in the bottle.

The only real tea cocktail I've had is the Earl Gray MarTEAni, and tannin is fairly prominent in that one (albeit tempered by the egg whites). I'm interested to hear the extent to which tannin is present in other tea-infused-liquor cocktails. I'm not surprised, for example, to hear of more green tea-infused-liquor cocktails than black tea-infused-liquor cocktails, because green tea is substantially lower in tannin.

I've always wondered about that "half an egg white" and it never made much sense to me, unless you're making a drink with only 2 ounces or ingredients or something. Modern recipes (or old recipes reworked for modern usage) may call for a half an egg white because the standard size today seems to be extra large to jumbo, whereas the old recipes most likely were calling for the white of a medium egg. One way to avoid waste is to use medium eggs and keep the egg yolks in a container in the freezer. When you have enough yolks, let them thaw out and then make creme anglaise, egg yolk pasta, whatever.

Audrey's Earl Gray MarTEAni. I had once thought that Lapsang Souchong would make an interesting infusion into alcohol for a cocktail - but after trying it, it turns out that smoky-tea-infused-liquor is just as hard to mix with as scotch.

Audrey's Earl Gray MarTEAni has been a popular drink for several years. It's essentially a silver gin sour made with Earl Gray-infused Tanqueray.