slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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My Pegu question (and maybe this is OT): Do they still toss the yolks from their egg white drinks? If so, why? If not, what is happening to them? The first time I went there (with therese
), we sat at the bar hunched over our cocktails, telling the bartender what we'd do with all those egg yolks. Mayonnaise. Creme anglaise. Etc.It's not really sanitary for them to keep them or do anything with them in that context.
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Remeniscent of Daniel Boulud's foie gras burger at DB Bistro Moderne back around 2003. Apparently a burger comprising 10oz of ground sirloin wrapped around a core of braised short ribs, foie gras and black truffles. In a brioche bun with chips. Set you back $59 or $99 if supersized with extra truffles.
To be absolutely correct, the reviews were not universally glowing. Most of the New York based publications seemed to find the idea of dead-eyed Wall Street succubi ploughing into these meat mountains ironic and amusing. By the time the story had hit everyone else’s papers, however, it was being spun as another example of obscenely conspicuous American consumerism.
It seemed a shame really. Though I can’t imagine myself ever attending the DB nor ever making that kind of crass gesture in a menu decision, the idea of a burger flavoured with foie gras was still profoundly appealing.
Excellent PR stunt too.
The "Original db Burger" is a sirloin burger filled with braised short ribs, foie gras, and black truffles topped with tomato chutney and served on a parmesan bun with pommes soufflées or pommes frites. It normally goes for twenty-nine bucks, and to the best of my knowledge the reviews have all been fairly positive.
Now, that does sound pretty expensive for a burger. But I wouldn't say it's a "hamburger" so much as it's a fancy dish riffing on the concept of a burger. There is also the point to be made that this burger costs as much as it does simply because of the ingredients it contains, which were chosen for their gustatory contributions rather than their cost or supposed luxury status. Unfortunately, since that time there have been myriad imitators who have latched on to the idea of a "really expensive hamburger" and created absurdely overpriced sandwiches with what I feel are often extremely inappropriate ingredients (Kobe/Waygu beef, for example, is just a stupid idea for a hamburger). Most of these have been reviewed as just this side of "terrible" -- but that's to be expected when one is creating a dish more for the purpose of inflating the cost than inflating the taste. That, I think, is a bit of the case with Selfridge's sandwich, which doesn't sound all that good to me.
If you do ever make your way into db Bistro Moderne, I definitely recommend you try the dB Burger. It's well worth it.
Really what I'd like to see is reastaurants taking this concept in the opposite price direction. . . a tiny bit of foie tucked inside a burger would be delicious, and need not cost a zillion dollars. I could easily conceive of a burger that was made of, say, ground chuck filled with braised short rib meat, a touch of foie and some rehydrated porcini that went for $15 instead of $29.
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The general feeling is that the lowest-priced home machine/grinder setup of quality is the Rancilio Silvia/Rocky combination. That will cost you around $750 (~$500 for the machine and ~$250 for the grinder). I wouldn't use anything less in a restaurant setting, and even that will have serious limitations (e.g., you can't steam too many cappuccini in a row before it will lose power and need to heat back up, it is a single boiler design so you can't go directly between pulling the shot and steaming milk without a period of heat up or cool down time, etc.). If you can't spend more than $250 for an espresso machine, you're much, much better off simply trying to have a good regular coffee program. A $250 espresso setup won't just produce espresso that isn't mind blowing -- it will produce espresso that flat out sucks.
Espresso is one of those things that is fundamentally dependent on the quality of the equipment. A sufficiently skilled cook doesn't need great cookware. He can still produce a mind blowing piece of fish with crappy stainless cookware. This is to say that a $250 saute pan doesn't necessarily lead to better food than a $2.50 saute pan. On the other hand, not only is is impossible to produce good espresso with a $100 machine, it is also more or less the fact that a $1,500 setup will produce better espresso than a $750 setup, all other things being equal.
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Heh. Liquid yeast. Liquid yeast is what you want. The wild stuff you definitely do not want.
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I may be wrong, but I think they've been doing Pisco Punch recently.
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Audrey was working on a cocktail which was basically a Martini with a small amount of Scotch in it. I forget what they were naming it, something like the Smoketini. They used a very smoky Scotch, but very sparingly.
I beleive that was probably the Dreamy Doritiny(maybe) made with an Islay.
Proper full name of the drink would be:
Dreamy Dorini Smokin' Martini.
I think it's the glass rinse of Ardbeg scotch that provides the Liqiud Smoke flavoring equivalent in that particular drink.
It's been around for a while & appears in Gary's 2003 book:
. . .I have enjoyed Audrey's "Dreamy Dorini Smoking Martini." It goes a little something like this:2.0 oz : vodka (Grey Goose specified)
0.5 oz : Laphroaig 10*
2-3 drops : Pernod
Stir with ice, strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with lemon twist.
* I have used other intensely smokey single malts, such as Lagavullin, with success
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They had a very nice Pineapple Pisco Sour at Pegu when it opened. Just pineapple-infused pisco in the regular formula.
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Interesting stuff, Rob. Keep it coming.
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There is still, however, a question of originality, both in the sense of first and in the sense of creation. Just as there can't be copyright protection for the statement "1 + 1 = 2" there probably shouldn't be copyright protection (or any plagiarism ethics issues) surrounding a fried onion. There's probably a legitimate debate to be had on the issue of just how different the Bloomin' Onion® is from a run-of-the-mill fried onion, just as there are similar debates all the time with respect to paintings, sculptures, songs, etc.
Okay, but isn't part of the point that if you write a sucky detective novel that isn't all that different from a thousand other sucky detective novels, you still have copyright protection?
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Yep. And there are many castings of Rodin's "The Thinker."
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Okay -- some of the examples were total ripoffs. I'm sure most of us can think of a dozen more. However -- using the music and art examples, at what point would a chef lose his/her "copyright"? A song is written, played with, produced in a studio, cut, and out there, the same thing for everyone. A sculpture isn't produced fifty to a hundred times a day. What's done is done!
As has been said a dozen times before, food is fluid. What if a chef decides that the fennel is too fragrant NOT to use to scent a sauce? The food isn't the same every single day unless it's produced by a machine.
Well... not exactly. It was once commonplace for operatic composers to rewrite, rescore or reconfigure their operas in order to suit the singers and orchestral players who would be performing them. Mozart's Don Giovanni, for example, actually exists as two discrete versions of the opera -- the original version for performance in Prague with a strong tenor, and an adjusted version for performance in Vienna with a weak tenor and a strong seconda donna (interestingly, the currently performed "standard edition" is a combination of both versions, which was never contemplated by the composer). This is roughly akin to your example of deciding to use a little fennel one day because it is so fragrant (or to not use any fennel one day because it isn't very good).
Whether or not we think it makes sense (and I may think it makes sense), neither copyright law nor the ethics of plagiarism has anything at all to do with the merit of the work being protected. In the case of copyright law, governments have -- probably wisely -- chosen a value-neutral approach so as not to be in the business of judging the merit of art (though they turn around and judge the merit of art in many other government-administered programs...). In the case of plagiarism ethics, the offense of plagiarism is mostly about the doer -- in other words the failure to attribute; the passing off of someone else's work as your own. The quality of the work has little to do with it. If someone is stupid enough to choose to copy Britney instead of Verdi, that doesn't make the person any more or less ethical or any more or less of a plagiarist.Right, but that's what we're saying here. In the other thread, I brought up the example of Outback Steakhouse's "Bloomin' Onion" which has been widely copied and never credited (if indeed theirs is the original). People seemed to feel that the Bloomin' Onion is not deserving of the same legal or ethical considerations as Dufresne's prawn pasta. You're saying here (and I have been saying) that, given a value-neutral approach, it is.
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Heh... I forgot about your vast library of Spearsiana.
Steven, I absolutely agree on that point. But I have some question as to whether the works of Brittney Spears deserve the same kind of IP protection as the works of Giuseppe Verdi (which, ironicaly, do not have any such protection).
And, that's part of what I have been trying to say: People are arguing that Adria and Dufresne ought to have legal IP protection for their "artistic works" and yet, as you say, "no matter how bad your work sucks, it's protected just as much as the Mona Lisa and the Ode to Joy" (again ironically, both works for which I doubt any IP protection exists). So, here's the deal: You want to give Adria and Dufresne IP protection after they "publish their artistic works" by serving them in their restaurants. . . you had better be prepared to do the exact same thing for the guy who figures out a way to make cheese-stuffed hot wings.
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The writing of literature, composition of music, sculpture etc etc - are not and contain far greater individual expression than any dish ever will, including the platings.
If you think the work of Britney Spears has more artistic merit than the work of Ferran Adria, you're certainly entitled to that opinion. But you're wrong. Not to mention, if you're visiting El Bulli because you're hungry . . . .
First of all, to the best of my knowledge Brittney Spears is a performer, not a composer. Therefore it is more appropriate to compare her to a line cook at El Bulli rather than Ferran Adria (or perhaps a cook at Olive Garden?). But here, as you have pointed out many times, we're talking about ethics and not law. Brittney Spears recordings have certain IP protections because of copyright law, but I for one don't feel that there is a great ethical obligation there.
If you're asking whether I think the work of Giuseppe Verdi and Pablo Picasso have more artistic merit than the work of Ferran Adria, if I feel that Otello and Guernica are far greater artistic expressions than melon caviar and carrot air. . . Yes. Yes, I do. And this is not taking anything away from Adria's brilliance.
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Uhhh, I'd say creating a dish is exactly like a piece of music. The music only exists as long as your ears can hear it, then it's gone. You fix it on sheet music (or in a recipe) to preserve it so it can be reproduced. But the copyright is on that first performance, of music OR food.
Uhhh, no it isn't. There is no copyright on "that first performance" of a piece of music. There is only a copyright on the score of the music. The only time a performance can sort-of be copyrighted is when it is recorded. And, even then, the performance isn't copyrighted -- the recording of the performance is.
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Tomatoes had some trouble gaining acceptance in Italy, but were widely consumed by the 1700s. That's a couple hundred years of culinary use -- plenty of time for them to be considered firmly traditional.
But why stop there? Consider that the spicy chili peppers featured so prominently in Thai and Chinese cooking also came from the New World.
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Damn the lawyer haters, I think chefs who perform at that "haute" level of cooking deserve intellectual property rights.
Well, here's the thing about IP rights: they apply to everyone irrespective of perceived "level." Danielle Steel's copyrights -- or mine for that matter -- are just as valid as Philip Roth's.
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Very well stated, Pedro. Makes some good sense.
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. . . as a conceptual matter it's a no-brainer to understand that the culinary arts should be treated the same as the visual, performing or studio arts -- unless one believes the culinary arts are somehow inferior to all other arts.
At the risk of offending the core audience in these forums, I'm not sure I'd classify cooking in the same category as composing a symphony, writing a novel, directing a movie or creating a sculpture. One might conceivably equate cooking with an interpretive art such as a musician actually executing a composition, or an actor actually performing a role. But those interpretations have zero protection, only recordings of those interpretations have protection (and only in the US, for that matter). If someone performs the role of Othello and substantially imitates Laurence Olivier's interpretation, there are many ways this might be viewed -- but "plagiariam" isn't one of them. Personally, I am more inclined to equate cookng with building a really amazing chest of drawers than I am composing an opera, which is to say high artifice rather than high art. Needless to say, there are a few notable exceptions.
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. . .I do work with some bartenders who have other reasons for being at work and providing good customer service isn't one of them. Most of them just want to pour beer and bang out rum and cokes, but they expect a good tip for these simple tasks.
This is kind of sad, I think. Where is the joy in that? Where is the pride? Where is the intellectual stimulation?
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Here's the question I have about this whole thing: Who says that when you walk into a restaurant and are served a certain dish that there is an inherent expectation that the dish is wholly original to the chef of that particular restaurant, from recipe to execution to plating? Where is this line drawn? Why does there seem to be the belief these principles are somehow correctly applied to lobster skewered on an injection bulb and not to, for example, the pizza-making process developed at Otto?
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In re to using live cultures of liquid yeast, one way to really kick off the fermentation is to brew a small "pitching batch" a few days before so you can grow up some extra yeast (Chris may be planning on explaining this later). This is easy to do, since you don't really care about the taste: smack the pack & when it is inflated, boil some malt powder (maybe with a few pellets of hops) with maybe a quart of water, decant it into a sanitized glass bottle and chill, pitch the yeast and put on an airlock. In a day or two, the yeast will have fermented the liquid into "beer." What's more important is that the population of yeast cells you have on hand will have radically increased. While you're boiling your wort, etc. just put the bottle in the refrigerator so most of the yeast goes temporarily dormant and sinks to the bottom of the bottle. Decant off most of the liquid, and when it is time to pitch the yeast for your actual batch of beer just swirl the bottle to stir up the yeast and pour it into your fermenter.
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Bartender Noah Esperas of le Duplex in San Francisco says, "Go to a restaurant if you want a real Mojito."
He warns, "Honestly, if I am slammed at 1 a.m. and someone asks for four Mojitos, I won't make them. If it costs $9 for a Mojito and $8 for a Grey Goose (vodka), the bar isn't losing much and I can make up for it in tips with the other people by saving time."
I really don't have a lot of respect for this kind of attitude. I've seen the bartenders at Flatiron Lounge bang out one labor intensive specialty cocktail after another while completely slammed on a weekend night.
That said, I can understand that it may be a pain in the butt to make things like a Martini or a Manhattan that have a high probability of generating complaints due to the fact that there are so many different ideas about how they are made. For example, I know of bartenders at locations where the "super extra dry" Martini is in vogue who simply don't bother using any vermouth at all -- and yet a few people will still try to return one every night because it's "not dry enough."
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Yes, a vrey nice place but, as Ed points out, not exactly bargained price. Unless one is inclined to mortgage the house and buy one of the (impresive looking) tiered seafood platters, I think other places offer similar quality for a better price. The strip steaks I've had at Landmarc, for example, have been better than the one I had at Sascha, which was a little tight in texture for my taste -- and while Landmarc's frites don't hold a candle to the gargantuan pile of fried potato that came with my steak at Sascha, I'm not sure those frites are enough to justify a five dollar price difference.
All that said, if I lived of worked in the area, I could see myself dropping into the downstairs Gansevoort Room from time to time for a burger and some of those delicious frites. The cocktail list also contains some interesting concoctions worth trying, although perhaps a bit on the sweet side for my palate.
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Re the simple syrup information... When we mix one cup of sugar with one cup of water, we do not end up with two cups of simple syrup. We actually end up with quite a bit less.
According to the Mixologist article, 1:1 simple syrup has around 17.7 grams of sugar per fluid ounce. Since a teaspoon of granulated sugar weighs 4 grams, this comes to 4.4 teaspoons per fluid ounce.
Working from that, Gary's Daiquiri recipe has 2 ounces rum, one ounce lime juice and 2.2 teaspoons of sugar. Dave's Daiquiri recipe has 2 ounces of rum, a half ounce of fresh line juice and 1 teaspoon of sugar. Gary's recipe has double the lime juice and, as a result, it has approximately double the sugar to balance the sourness. In either case, the sugar will be tweaked depending on the sweetness of the lime. Whether one prefers one version or the other will largely be a matter of preference, and beyond that may depend on the character of the rum one is using.
Drinks Using Cucumber
in Spirits & Cocktails
Posted
Eben Freeman, the prodigiously talented bartender formerly of wd-50, did a Pim's Cup riff at wd-50 with cucumber foam.