slkinsey

Actually, the (supposed) beauty of smart cards is that the data is carried on the chip rather than in a centralized system. There was already the capability to carry multi-vendor information and different kinds of information on a smart card back when I was working on them, and I can only assume that there has been a great deal of progress in that area. We were already talking about putting financial information, cash and emergency medical information (among other things) on a single smart card at least 5 years ago. When you think about the kind of data a place like Starwich might like to put on the chip, it's really not very many bits of information.

Nice work, dude. I worked on smart cards for several years at one of my day-jobs in Citibank. If it gives you some idea of the times, the entire Citibank internet group in NYC was maybe a dozen people. We did a big pilot of an "electronic purse" on the Upper West Side where people were storing cash on their smart ATM cards and using the stored value to make purchases at Fairway, Zabar's, etc. Steven, do you know if they're gone forward with their smart card program? If anyone is interested, there is a good thread on Starwich Salads & Sandwiches in the NY Forum. Current NYC locations of Starwich include: 153 East 53rd Street (at Lexington Avenue) 63 Wall Street (between Pearl Street and Exchange Place) 525 West 42nd Street (at Tenth Avenue)

There are times when muddling makes sense and times when it doesn't, I suppose. There is not much to be gained from muddling a sugar sube with bitters, if that's all you do, compared to simply combining the bitters and the appropriate amount of simple syrup. However, if you muddle the bitters and the sugar sugar cube together with a fat slice of lemon zest and "abrade" the surface of the zest against the sugar grains, you will extract flavors that are simply not possible with an aggressive twisting of the lemon peel. Try it and see. Similarly, there is an obvious difference in flavor between a drink that has been made with muddled citrus and one that has not. Try making a Sidecar with regular fresh lemon juice and then make the same drink by muddling the lemon in the mixing glass. The flavor will not be remotely the same, and again, the flavor of the muddled drink would not be possible with aggressive twisting. First of all, you would have to twist the peel of an entire lemon into the drink to equal the same amount of lemon peel. Second, muddling directly into the mixing glass is simply a more efficient and thorough method of oil extraction. Third, muddling will also extract a small amount of the bitter flavors from the pith. There is a certain pungency that results from muddled citrus that is not available any other way. This is not to say that muddled always equals better, by the way. I wouldn't want a muddled Sidecar. In other cases, I think you're exactly right. It's simply the most efficient way to incorporate things like strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries into a drink. It's relatively simple to do, and you wouldn't want to have to make up a batch of "strawberry juice" before service every night. I assume there would also be serious issues of flavor degradation with things like fresh strawberry or blueberry juice. You do have a point with respect to muddling tender herbs into drinks that you're planning on shaking hard. But whether the drink can be shaken hard enough without risking dilution will be highly dependent on the ice you're using (ice has been the subject of much discussion among my friends in the bar biz of late).

This is a standard explanation for why we add things like vodka and wine to foods, but turns out to not be true. It is true that certain substances are only (or better) soluble in water or in alcohol. However, a solution of water and alcohol does not have the same chemical properties as pure water or pure alcohol. More to the point, it does not follow that an alcohol-soluble substance will necessarily be soluble in a water-alcohol solution. This is explained in some detail by Robert Wolke in his new book, What Einstein Told His Cook 2: The Sequel: Further Adventures in Kitchen Science. He did an experiment where he took annatto seeds, which are coated in an alcohol- and oil-soluble but water-insoluble yellow-orange pigment, and attempted to infuse the seeds into test tubes of water, 13% abv white wine, 40% abv vodka and 95% pure ethyl alcohol. He would judge the amount of potential flavor extraction by observing the change in the color of the liquid. After several days, the water and wine showed zero color change, the vodka was a very mild yellow and the 95% ethyl alcohol was intensely yellow. This, he concluded, demonstrates that the liquid must be at least 40% abv to dissolve even a minimal amount of an alcohol-soluble/water-insoluble compound. He also points out that these concentrations never happen in cooking anyway: adding half a cup of vodka to a quart of sauce yields a solution that is only 5% abv. Expensive vodkas are usually differentiated from less expensive vodkas on the basis of having less flavor, the idea being that the flavor components in the less expensive brands are "off flavors." (It's actually a little more complicated than that . . . the big secret of the vodka industry is that they are allowed to "add back" minute amounts of things like glycerin and citrus oils after the vodka is rectified, but I digress.) In the context of a vodka sauce, it's clear that you don't want to use total rotgut that might bring medicinal flavors to the dish, but there is plenty of inexpensive vodka of quality to be found. I'll put up Luksusowa against any "super premium" vodka costing three times as much. And, of course. Smirnoff was recently judged best in the NY Times. The vodka will make a difference, yes. This is not because the alcohol extracts alcohol-soluble/water-insoluble flavor components, but rather because the alcohol reacts with the acids and oxidizing substances in the sauce to create esters and aldehydes. This makes some sense if you like the strong flavor of alcohol in the dish. Whether you want that will depend on the dish. Penne alla vodka is often a very rich sauce and can perhaps benefit from being "cut" by plentiful unevaporated alcohol. Of course, the alcohol never boils off completely no matter what.

That said, while it isn't easy it is possible to duplicate the quality of the food if management is dedicated to that proposition and not just in it to make money by franchising the name. A perfect example is the (sadly defunct) Philly branch of Lombardi's Pizzeria, which made a high quality pizza and maintained high quality while the original went into decline.

"Resting" seems to be one of those things that is necessary for conventional cooking methods, where the cooking environment is substantially hotter than the target temperature of the meat. But even in the LTLT method Shalmanese propounds, it would seem that resting is somewhat necessary, so there has to be something to the idea that a reduction from the meat's peak temperature is beneficial with respect to cooking method regardless of cooking method. Whether something like Shalmanese's method LTLT cooking followed by another LTLT reduction in temperature constitutes "resting" is perhaps another question entirely.

My father used to regularly win bets from his colleagues at MIT by gargling liquid nitrogen. I'm not sure what the trick was, but he never burned himself. I'll have to ask him about it.

This sounds very interesting. Can you explain how you do it?

Nothing like a good "spit julep"! Nicotini, garnished with a cigarette butt speared on a safety match? Oh, the irony. You think this isn't done? It's done, alright.

I have been reading a very interesting book lately, The Botanist and the Vintner : How Wine Was Saved for the World by Christy Campbell. As the subtitle of the thread indicated, it's a book about the phylloxera aphid and the plague it caused among the vines of Europe in the mid-1800s. I recommend it very highly. For those who are not aware, phylloxera (aka Daktulosphaira vitifoliae) is an aphid of American origin that is a grapevine parasite. It has a very complex lifecycle involving both above-ground forms that cause leaf galls and below-ground forms that are root suckers. American grapes (Vitis labrusca, V. berlandieri, V. riparia, etc.) have some natural resistance to phylloxera, but European grapes (Vitis vinifera) do not. Unfortunately, V. vinifera is the good king of grape for wine making. Starting in around 1865, grape vines in France began to die for some unknown reason. This turned out to be the arrival of phylloxera in Europe. In only a few decades, most of the European wine-producing regions were infested with phylloxera and the wine industry was in a shambles after massive die-offs of the vinifera vines. Eventually it was determined that the solution was to graft traditional European vines that produce the wines we love onto American roots that can resist phylloxera. The journey from first "outbreak" to this solution is a fascinating one. This was a time of tremendous social and economic change in France, as well as a period of great scientific progress. But you have to understand that evolution and natural selection -- the key theory informing the eventual solution to the phylloxera problem -- were still very controversial subjects. Darwin's The Origin of Species had been published less than ten years before the outbreak. It is almost impossible to underestimate the extent to which the phylloxera plague changed the face of France and Europe. Prior to the phylloxera, a peasant in the wine-growing regions could support himself and family making vin ordinaire from a small plot of grapes, and people would come down from the hills to work as vignerons during the growing and harvesting seasons. This all ended as the vines died off. Many small growers simply abandoned their plots. The economic devestation was tremendous, and the solution for many was to move to other areas of the world where the phylloxera was not to be found -- places like Algeria and South Africa and Australia. When the vines came back decades later, the entire social structure had changed. It's also interesting to note that many growers took the opportunity presented by replanting with grafted rootstock to change varieties, or a change was dictated according to which European varieties were easier to graft to the available American rootstocks. Thus "the old varieties of Mourvèdre in Provence and Négrette in the Tarn were abandoned when they proved difficult to graft. The once Pinot-dominated vineyards of Sancerre were remade on grafts of Sauvignon to make a white wine which would be fêted in Paris. La Folle Blanche, the traditional grape for making brandy, was supplanted in the Charente by Ugni Blanc." The author does a remarkable job of presenting a good amount of historical and scientific information in an easily-digestible form, and weaves a compelling and interesting story while he's at it. If you're interested in wine, put this book on your reading list.

Here's a link and a brief quote for posterity:

I suppose it depends on the place. It's quite impressive to see the bartenders at Flatiron Lounge knock out multiple-ingredient-with-fancy-garnish drinks (including flourishes like flamed citrus twists) in volume during the rush. Of course, good drinks don't have 15 different ingredients anyway, and I rather imagine that some of the places mentioned above are mixing some of their ingredients in batch. I doubt it. Although much like anything in a birdbath glass becomes the something-or-other-INI these days, I suspect anything with some mint and lime could be called a mojito variant. But if it isn't a rum based drink, it just isn't a mojito or even a faux-jito. And rum just isn't as popular a spirit as vodka or gin, so I don't think it has the same potential to become as ubiquitous. I don't think it will go as far as the Martini in losing meaning, but "Mojito = rum drink with mint" strikes me as a serious dilution of the meaning of Mojito. And look at the Daiquiri. Here is a very simple drink of white Cuban-style rum, lime juice and a touch of sugar. Now, who the hell knows what a Daiquiri is? Some kind of sweet frozen drink? If you served the average American a Daiquiri that was nothing more than 2 ounces of Havana Club, a half-ounce of lime juice and a teaspoon of simple syrup shaken with ice and strained into a cocktail glass, they would tell you it wasn't a Daiquiri (and don't even get me started on the typical "dack-uh-ree" pronunciation). Note, by the way, that the Sly Honey Mojito above uses honey-infused vodka and ginger ale (and, based on the picture, mint).

Well, iced tea is a natural for barbecue. The tannin cleans the fat and smokiness from the palate. I would suggest starting with a tea-infused light bourbon and go from there. This could easily be used at full strength in "up" cocktails, but also mixed with ginger beer or something like that in a highball, or shaken with some egg white, lemon and simple syrup for a fizz. Mint could fit in there somewhere, too.

New York Magazine has an bit on Mojito variations in NYC. Libation's O'jito uses orange-flavored rum and muddled tangerines; King Size's Negril Sunset uses 126-proof Ray & Nephew rum and grapefruit soda; Odea's Lychee, Strawberry, Raspberry, and Apple Mojito includes a fresh fruit puree; Sly's Sly Honey Mojito uses honey-infused vodka and ginger ale; Soho 323's Pineapple Mojito includes muddled pineapple and brown sugar; Sutra's Holy Moses has citrus juices and tequila; and Cabana at the Maritime Hotel has a Frozen Mojito. Hmm. . . Is the Mojito going to become the next cocktail for which the name of the drink begins to lose all meaning?

This was also mentioned in this week's NY Times Dining Section: Eastern Noodles 28 Forsyth Street (Chinatown) At Canal Street (212) 941-7678

Further to the discussion of things like bouillabaisse (which is not only a discussion about authenticity but also a discussion about nomenclature) is the restaurant practice of giving dishes what I will call "quotation mark names." This is to say, they're not giving you the dish, they're giving you something that they think is evocative of the dish. Thus Keller's salmon "chop" and things like Thai-style salmon "bouillabaisse." Part of what happens, of course, is that too many quotation mark dishes begins to change the public's perception of the dish, and "bouillabaisse" comes to mean "fish soup." Back to the nomenclature thing, I think a lot of this comes out of simply not understanding foreign languages. For example, this is how "bruschetta" is coming to be known in America as "any old thing with chopped fresh tomatoes, raw garlic and basil on it." Likewise, this is how "panini" and "biscotti" are coming to be known in America as names for single items, as in "give me a panini." In fact, there have been plenty of discussions in these forums with members forwarding the argument that this is okay and exactly how it should be -- that "panini" now means "single vaguely Italian-style grilled sandwich" in America. This all seems to get away from the central question of what is "authentic," however. It may be inevitable, or okay in some minds, for "bouillabaisse" to mean "a vaguely French-style fish soup" in America, but there is no way a bouillabaisse made with salmon and without rascasse can be called "authentic" or (which I think is more useful) "traditional."

I'm pretty sure that's the beef hanger steak, also known as the butcher's steak. Demand for those is so high now, though, and there's only a handful of real butchers left out there, so now it's just "hanger steak, $27" at your favorite restaurant. Or "onglet, $31."

That would be Paula Wolfert, and I'm proud to have given her the seed of the idea here in the eG Forums. Her version is much more memorable than mine, of course.

I agree with Adam that "traditional" is much more useful in this context than "authentic." I don't think it's possible to identify something as an example of "authentic boeuf bourguignon" the one can identify something as an "authentic Rossini manuscript" or an example of "authentic painting of the so-and-so school."

A few days ago a friend drew my attention to this article entitled "Bars, liquor companies push weird cocktails." It's all about the proliferation of new gimmick cocktails that have started to appear now that American drinkers have become bored with Cosmopolitans and Sour Apple Martinis. The article opens with a description of a vodka infused with Bubblicious bubble gum and goes on to describe a drink made with green apple and watermelon Jolly Rancher infused vodka. The bar -- Bogart's American Grill in Raleigh, NC -- sells three gallons of this stuff a week! Needless to say, these aren't cocktails of great sophistication. As the author explains, "many bartenders lack the training to develop drinks with the proper balance between bitter and sweet" but are nevertheless "being asked by managers to follow constantly morphing directions." A somewhat typical example was a "restaurant and martini bar" that featured 50 "martinis" on its list, which changed every three months. It's not easy to come up with 20 original cocktails of quality in a year, never mind 200! Now that cocktails are back in fashion, there is pressure for restaurants to use cocktails as a profit center to offset rising food costs. Not all of this is coming from bartenders and restaurants, of course. According to the article, last year alone saw 52 new flavored vodkas and 26 new flavored rums on the American market. One way to drive sales of these products is to get them on to bar menus by hiring a mixologist consultant to create exotic branded cocktails with the new product, which are then demonstrated to bartenders and promoted in advertising. Needless to say this sort of thing is not without a little backlash, and thankfully some of our friends are standing up for all that is good and true and right.

Just got some Shake Shack-related news in my inbox. In the custard department, they are adding a "flavor of the day." It's going to be: • Monday – Peanut Butter Ripple • Tuesday – Strawberry • Wednesday – Mocha Nut Fudge • Thursday – Concrete Jungle • Friday – Coconut Chocolate Chip • Saturday – Blackberry • Sunday – Caramel Peach Evening hours are now extended to 11:00 PM. Four new sausages have been added to the menu: • Spicy Buffalo Brat – buffalo, jalapeño, and cheddar • Usinger’s Bratwurst – Milwaukee-style pork sausage • Windy Wurst – Milwaukee brat in Chicago clothing (10 toppings on a poppy bun) • Bird Dog – smoked chicken and apple sausage More info as always at shakeshacknyc.com

I tried all of Ed's rhums in one night several months ago. For reasons you will understand, I don't have entirely clear memories of each one. There are differences, of course, but they both have that distinctive rhum agricole character, and both are 100 proof.

Adam Platt weighed in on Compass under new chef John Fraser (apparently yet another new chef since Compass was last discussed here) in New York Magazine:

Admin: The discussion thread archive for Mix under chef Doug Psaltis may be found here. The discussion thread archive for Mix under chef Damon Gordon may be found here. The Ducasse/Chodorow collaboration formerly known as Mix and quite good in its original configuration has now been reconfigured once again as Francesco at Mix under Francesco Berardinelli, a chef from Tuscany. Adam Platt has some things to say in New York Magazine: I'm not sure I agree with Platt's premise that Mix "began life as a muddled fusing of French and American comfort cuisines" and that "after a series of harsh reviews . . . the original chef was dispatched." I think it's an oversimplification of the situation that happened there, and I think most participants here feel that Mix took a big step down when Psaltis left the kitchen. The relative size of the discussion threads (265 posts under Psaltis, 20 under Gordon) says something. I'll be interested to see if Berardinelli can infuse new life and interest into Mix's new incarnation as Francesco at Mix.

I was recently reminded by Strong Bad how incredibly annoying this is. I can't tell you how content I would be if I never saw another dessert menu featuring confections named "chocolate decadence souffle" or "chocolate heart attack cake" or "chocolate explosion sundae." And why is it always "chocolate heart attack" or some variant like "mocha cardiac arrest?" Why are the other ogan diseases shortchanged? Why not "chocolate renal failure pie" or "valrhona cirrhosis ice cream?" Can we all take a solemn vow never to name desserts like this ever again? If I see a dessert named "eXXtreem chocolateapalooza" or "chocolate poison" I might do something drastic. Like not eating it.