slkinsey

That's an interesting question. It definitely seems to be the case that some things are allowed to be sold unregulated in certain forms, regulated in other forms and not at all in other forms.

I see what you're saying, I just don't agree that it's something to be concerned about. You can still get wormwood, can't you? I don't think we're in any danger of seeing the government ban the sale of all bitter orange peel. The only potential issue would be if the FDA were to ban dietary supplements containing bitter orange peel. One could still buy ephedra herb legally in the US even while the FDA ban on ephedra supplements was in effect, because the FDA ban only applied to dietary supplements containing ephedra. Regardless, in April of 2005 a judge in Utah overturned the FDA ban on ephedra supplements and told the FDA they would have to do more testing to determine safe levels if they wanted to continue the ban. Very few companies are coming to market with ephedra supplements after the lift, most likely because of liability issues and concerns that the public won't buy it after the negative publicity. So, again, I have very little fear that we will see a ban of any kind on bitter orange peel in the forseeable furure. Look on the bright side: if they ban bitter orange peel dietary supplements, that means that there will be even more available for brewing and other culinary applications. There is plenty of other stuff in the two orange bitters with which I am familiar (Fee's and Regan's). Plus, I have to believe that you'd have to drink an awful lot of orange bitters to get a dose equivalent to one of those diet pills.

Interesting. Whether a piece of heavy copper loses a lot of heat when, for exmple, introduced to a large piece of meat depends on a lot of variables: how hot was the pan preheated, how high is the flame, how powerful is the stove, what kinds of heat source are you using, how large is the piece of meat, is the pan being taken off the heat and put into the oven, and if so how soon, etc. There is little doubt that cast iron or stainless with a thick aluminum disk bottom is the better choice for certain food items and for certain cooking tasks. However, I usually find that I wish cast iron cookware was substantially heavier than it is. There is often only a marginal difference in the heat capacity of similar sized heavy copper and cast iron pieces, and most cast iron pieces are not thick enough to avoid significant hotspot problems. That said, I'll usually reach for some of my old cast iron if I'm going to be searing a steak or a pork chop and finishing it in the oven. I don't often use cast iron for something like a spatchcocked chicken I'm starting skin side-down on the stove and finishing in the oven, but that is simply a shape issue: I don't find the cast iron skillet shape to be very good for this task and prefer a frypan shape. If they made large extra-heavy cast iron pans with low sloping sides I'd use them. I'm curious. . . what kinds of things do you do where you feel that copper loses heat for you?

I'm not convinced that this will be a problem that affects the brewing or liqueur industries. There are plenty of things used in herbal infusions and brewed into beer that are dangerous when consumed in the massive megadoses used in diet pills. I think regulation is moving more in the direction of allowing small amounts of these suposedly "dangerous" substances to be used in traditional beverages. For example, real absinthe is becoming legal all over Europe and I think it's only a matter of time before it's legal here. And yet, thujone is a dangerous poison. For that matter, it's quite easy to kill yourself in short order with another common poison: nicotine. No way is whatever there is in bitter orange peel as dangerous as thujone or nicotine. If anything comes of this (which I think is doubtful) it will hopefully be the banning of megadose bitter orange peel diet pills. Is there anything taken as a diet pill that isn't bad for you?

Let's keep all the discussion in one thread -- the one cdh links to.

It's such a dense, viscous, strongly flavored cocktail that I assume the water is necessary just to provide additional dilution beyond the normal 20% you'd get from shaking. Many of the ingredients are so intensely flavored that the drink really needs to be thinned out quite a bit. Think about what you're getting in each serving minus the water: 2/3 ounce genever, 1/2 ounce rich simple syrup, 1/2 ounce Chartreuse, 1/2 ounce heavy rum and a teaspoon each of orange curaçao and Angostura bitters. That's just too much strong flavor and too much sweetness without taking extreme measures to thin the drink. It's incredibly strongly flavored even with the additional dilution. That's my guess, anyway. It is odd, though, isn't it? It's the only recipe I can recall that calls for water.

That's spelled: Mojito Criollo. I always thought the difference between a regular Mojito and a Mojito Criollo is that the former is made with regular ice cubes and the latter is made with crushed ice. Yes?

It's a good sign that this book is a year old and I'm still enjoying it. I take issue with one or two of the formulations (in particular the Pegu Club recipe, which is both way off and strangely ahistorical given the premise of this book), but all in all I think it's a wonderful book and many of the formerly forgotten cocktails it features have entered the standard repertoire not only at the slkinsey household but in many of the better NYC watering holes. So, having finally procured some genever, and having temporarily sated my craving for the Improved Holland Gin Cock-Tail, it was time to try one of the more peculiar drinks from Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, the Alamagoozlum. This is a very unusual cocktail given the long list of disparate ingredients as well as the fact that the recipe makes three cocktails rather than just one. I'm going from memory here, but it goes something like this: Alamagoozlum 2.0 oz : genever 2.0 oz : water 1.5 oz : Jamaican rum 1.5 oz : Green or Yellow Chartreuse (I used green) 1.5 oz : gomme syrup (I used 2:1 simple syrup) 0.5 oz : orange curaçao 0.5 oz : Angostura bitters one half of an egg white Shake all ingredients with ice hard, like your very life depends on it, until very, very cold. Strain into three cocktail glasses. As you may imagine, this is a very spicy cocktail and there are a lot of flavors going on -- but somehow they all play well together. I would call this a cocktail for late fall/early winter due to the rich, sweet spicyness. It's like pumpkin pie in a glass. Interestingly, it's also quite thick and viscous on the palate, unlike any other cocktail I've had. Has anyone else tried this one? Any other interesting or strange discoveries from Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails?

Hmmm. That is an awful lot of bloating. But I think I have read that certain vegetables tend to be gassy when cooked. Perhaps the mushrooms? Or the alcohol from the wine? Others will know more about this than I.

Bag bloating is supposed to be an issue with FoodSaver bags compared to bags vacuumed and sealed by the commercial machines. I don't think it's a big deal from a safety standpoint, as long as you cook for a sufficient length of time (there is safety information in the main sous vide thread). How much air are you talking about? I just did a bunch of short ribs for around 30 hours at 60C using a FoodSaver bag and a circulating bath with very little air showing up in the top of bag. That said, I carefully positioned the short ribs in the bag to minimize any hidden air pockets, I did an extended vacuum before sealing, and after sealing I sealed the bag again much closer to the meat (essentially eliminating a lot of extra bag space to which air or liquid might migrate). What do you have in the bag besides short ribs?

I don't own the seven inch Falk curved sauteuse evasée, but I do own the regular straight sided sauteuse evasée in the 1 quart size. It is not particularly "tippy." If a small saucepan has a tendency to tip over unless it is full, I think that's an indication that it is not very well designed. A piece of cookware should balance. Also, I think it's likely that such a pan would be constructed from poor materials anyway -- most likely thin stainless steel -- if the handle is almost the same weight as the body.

This is just a "trendy looking" version of Bialetti's Moka Express. It's a perfectly good moka pot, if that's a kind of coffee you like. But it's not espresso by any means. I think the Bialetti Brikka is really a better moka pot. Here is a good thread on moka that you may find informative.

So, after discovering that my Lauda MS was defective and finding a Lauda B instead, I was finally ready to do my first sous vide experiment this weekend. I cooked beef short ribs at 60C for 30 hours. The short ribs were not browned before or after. I had trimmed the external fat from the short ribs beforehand, had rendered out the fat and had used the meat scraps and a few of the smallest bones to make around a quarter cup of super-concentrated beef stock. Both were frozen and added to the bag with the short ribs before I sealed it. Here is the result: I made a sauce out of the defatted liquid from the bags. This tasted much more like a gravy made from roast drippings than it did a sauce made with stock. Very interesting. I served it with kale and smoked garlic mashed potatoes. As you can see, the meat is quite pink (ambient light) Here is another look at the meat (with flash) It was very interesting. Next time, I think I'd go longer with the cooking. It was very tender with some resistance. Not dissimilar from a strip steak, I'd say -- which is to say that it wasn't cut with a spoon tender. But it was quite interesting to eat what was more or less medium rare short rib that was tender like that. More thoughts later. . .

Here's the thing about lever espresso machines: It is theoretically possible to get the best shot of espresso with a lever machine, because the barista (you) can completely control the pressure, extraction, etc. But (and it's a big but) the learning curve is 100 times steeper than it is with a semiauto pump machine. So, unless you are willing to invest a lot of time building and maintaining your technique, you are actually unlikely to ever produce a shot that is comparable with everyday shots from a machine like the Rancilio Silvia. I have friends who have been using a lever machine for years and swear by lever action, and yet I have never had a shot from their machine that is as good as the shots my Rancilio was producing after only one week of tweaking.

A ratio of 2:1 or 1:1 is what one is likely to find in recipe books dating from the glory days of the Martini, and I have come around to thinking that it is best. The Martinis people were throwing back in the old Thin Man movies and the like would have been 1:1 or 2:1 Martinis at around three ounces (in his opening scene Nick Charles throws one down in one sip, which gives you an idea of the size). 1:1 with a drop of orange bitters is the way Audrey Saunders is making them at Pegu Club. Try 1.5 ounces each of Tanqueray or Boodles with 1.5 ounces of Noilly Prat, a drop of orange bitters and a lemon twist. I think it might change the way you think about a Martini.

The Ti Punch is actually an interesting subject in the discussion of Swizzles. A Ti Punch is nothing more than ruhm agricole, a bit of cane syrup and a disk of lime peel, mixed and swizzled with crushed ice (although I understand that it was probably originally not made with ice at all). So is a Ti Punch a "Swizzle," or is it rather a "drink that is swizzled"? To my mind there is a difference, but I am willing to be set straight.

Yes, I absolutely agree. This is part of what I was getting at when I said that AB's writing makes people like him and that it's one of DP's weaknesses in his book. But you say it better. That said, isn't it generally par for the course for people at DP's stage in the game to be headstrong and arrogant? I wonder if the book would have had a much different tone if it were written 5 years from now, even if the content and opinions were mostly the same.

Interesting. I usually make demerara syrup at 2:1 and white syrup at 1:1 (these are the concentrations usually specified in the recipes I use). It strikes me that a 2:1 white syrup would normally have a greater concentration of syrup than a 2:1 demerara syrup simply because most demerara sugar comes in big chunky crystals whereas white sugar usually comes in fine granules. As a result, a cup of fine white sugar contains more sugar than a cup of rough demerara sugar. On the other hand, some health food stores have demerara sugar granulated so fine it is almost powder. If you're using that, it would of course produce a syrup with greater concentration than white. When making cocktails at home with 2:1 simple syrup from the refrigerator, it's always a good idea to put the syrup bottle into a pan of warm water while you're getting the rest of your ingredients together. That way it will pour just fine by the time you're ready to add the syrup to the shaker.

If tony left anything unflattering about himself out in his book, it was only because it was either boring or not applicable. I'd say he came pretty clean. i haven't heard anyone call him a liar, and surely they would have by now. (First I should point out that I'm using AB as an example merely because he is a convenient and well-understood one, not because I have anything to say about him in particular. I like him and his work.) So, here's the thing: Who decided what was boring or not applicable? Tony, of course. So it's possible that some things were left out that other people might find important. It also seems possible to me that one reason no one has come out to call Tony a liar (or one reason you haven't heard about it anyway) is that many of the people described in the book who might care to do so are not important enough for anyone to listen to them. I mean, it's hardly likely that a discussion like this would be happening if a few Puerto Rican line cooks had said "there was no drunken ass-grabber at the Rainbow Room named Luis." This is because people don't really care what a few Puerto Rican line cooks at the Rainbow Room have to say, and the line cooks certainly can't email their well known Rainbow Room line cook-partisan friends Michael Ruhlman and Ruth Reichl (or whoever) to stick up for them. Now, if someone in the eG Forums posted that they had it on reliable information that no one was grabbing Bourdain's ass at the Rainbow Room, that might cause some people to doubt the veracity of everything else in the book. But it's not likely for a variety of reasons. One reason is that no one really cares about the line cooks at the Rainbow Room. Another is that the Rainbow Room line cooks are hardly likely to have the loyal figures like yourself arguing on their behalf. Yet another is that the Rainbow room line cooks are not famous, do not have "sacred cow" status, there is no "Rainbow Room line cook's cookbook," etc. And perhaps most importantly, one of the strengths of Tony's writing is that it makes readers want to like him (whereas this is one of Psaltis's weaknesses), and when you like someone you're more willing to cut them some slack. As a general question, I'm curious: Do we have the sense that Psaltis is being called a "liar" or rather that he is being criticized for only telling his side of the story?

this is the only relevant point in this too-long conversation. I'm curious about something, and I'm not asking this to be snarky, I'm really curious: Do you suppose that your friend Tony Bourdain hasn't left some unflattering things about himself out of his books, or indeed any items that others familiar with the various situations described might consider significant omissions? Do you suppose that everything in Ruch Reichl's however many memoirs she has now written is factually accurate, and that nothing others might find significant was omitted and that nothing was made up out of whole cloth? Since I hardly see how the answer could be "yes," given human nature, do you feel that everything else they say is automatically suspect? Or do you think your thoughts on this particular item may be especially strong due to the fact that the other party is Keller? This isn't advocacy for Psaltis or his book, I just have to say that I find some reactions curious given, for example, Bourdain's notorious slagging of other chefs -- in particular those who could be seen as competition in the field of food-related television (something I should point out I don't particularly have a problem with). I'm not saying this to impugn either AB or RR, both of whom are writers whose work I enjoy. But more to make a point precisely because most of us do like them. In a side-related note, I wonder if it were the case that Psaltis were a bit more self-deprecating and if his youthful arrogance didn't come through so clearly, if people would care about this a bit less. Certainly one of AB's strengths has always been to seem like a nice guy while at the same time saying that Rocco DiSpirto is "the most despised chef in New York" or that there are "few New York restaurateurs more loathsome" than Jeffrey Chodorow and he hated him within three seconds of their first meeting.

Isn't it viande fumée a l'Américain?

I'd say we got there sometime around 7:45 or 8:00, and left around 11:00. Tuesday probably just isn't a busy night.

The fact is that, unless you are a duck, it's not entirely possible to draw any 100% definitive conclusions. All we can do is rely on as much evidence as we can gather. But, it has to be the right evidence. What I have observed on the anti-foie side is a pronounced tendency to anthropomorphize and a failure to take into account the fact that duck physiology/psychology differs markedly from human physiology/psychology. As far as we can tell with any reasonable certainty, based on an understanding of duck physiology and psychology and relying upon whatever other scientific investigative means are at our disposal, ducks raised for foie gras do not seem to suffer any more than other animals raised for slaughter. The author did not observe any overt signs of undue distress on the part of the ducks who were being subjected to gavage. Just about the "worst" thing he seems to have observed is that the ducks tend to pant as a means of cooling themselves down and have some difficulty getting around for the last few days before slaughter, when they are at their very fattest. This strikes me as not dissimilar from anything one is likely to observe in animals who are being raised for slaughter in their final days (say, a cow in the feedlot).

Went to Churrascaria Tropical again last night, and it continues to impress. Hands-down it is the best lamb and pork to be found in any NYC-area rodizio. The lamb was sprinkled with rosemary and nicely pink on the inside, and the pork was literally dripping with juice and coated with some kind of garlic glaze. These two meats are done so much better than any other rodizio is doing that there is simply no comparison. We also had several meat items I've never had before. For example, in addition to the usual turkey wrapped in bacon there were chunks of fillet mignon wrapped in bacon. There was also a dish the server called "fillet with garlic" which was, as far as I could tell, slices of picanha (including a nice strip of fat on the top) rubbed with garlic and roasted on a skewer. Delicious! He also brought out an impressive piece of "prime rib" that looked like it belonged in an episode of the Flintstones (I am not sure that it was what we would normally call prime rib at all). It was the approximate size and perhaps half the thickness of an accoustic guitar body, whatever it was. What impressed me the most was the consistently high quality given the fact that my party of seven comprised most of the customers in the restaurant. Normally a rodizio has to be packed with customers and really moving the meat to get this wide variety of meats and to get meats that haven't been overcooked and dried out. This is a must-visit place for NYC carnivores.

The stainless steel deck pizza oven is the standard pizza oven across America. AFAIK they are allmost all gas-fired ovens. Here are some representative examples.