slkinsey

I find it interesting that, unless I am mistaken, most of these less than stellar reviews seem to have come from UK-based writers.

I think your chef friend got it slightly wrong. The general sule of thumb is that you either use okra or file in a gumbo, not roux or file. I don't like okra, so I always use file. You just shake a little into your bowl of gumbo right before you eat it. Or, if you want to do the whole batch, you can stir in some file off the heat. I prefer to do it portion-by-portion, because once you put in the file you really don't want to bring it back to a simmer and this can be problematic in terms of reheating leftovers.

Yea, it should work okay on your electric cooktop. If you were using gas, I think you might notice a reduction in responsiveness compared to aluminum or copper based cookware. But you won't notice with electric -- and, of course, one would expect the responsiveness on induction to be excellent.

Here is a good picture of some ramps. A ramp is a kind of wild onion that grows in North America from roughly Southern Canada down to the Carolinas. They are completely edible, from the blade-shaped onioney leaf to the garlic-like bulb at the root end. Ramps are very seasonal, only growing for a few weeks in the Spring.

I don't see why you think this is odd. Many is the time I've been visiting friends in Pittsburgh who have said, "I could really go for a pizza with ähnchenbrustfilet, Blattspinat, Knoblauch and Creme fraiche."

Nice looking 'za, Behemoth. Patrick and others, one comment regarding prosciutto. You want to put the prosciutto on the pizza after it comes out of the oven, not before. This is the way I've always seen it done in Italy. Anyway... if you're like me, you usually have some leftover ingredients the day after making pizza. A little leftover dough, a little leftover mozzarella, a little leftover broccoli rabe, a little leftover tomato, a little leftover sausage... what to do? Why, make a calzone, of course!

Absolutely. Demeyere only has a thin external magnetic layer. With Mauviel Induc'Inox the entire inner thermal layer is magnetic.

Exactly. Crack a few raw eggs on top just before the pizza goes into oven. The eggs cook through before they dry out (mostly, imo, by "frying" from the heat coming up through the crust). It helps to have very fresh eggs for this, as they will not spread as much as older eggs. This is, needless to say, only possible to do well with a very thin crust and a very hot rock. It's a much more elegant presentation in true Neapolitan-style single-serving format. That way you have one egg in the center of the pizza.

I don't measure exactly, but I'd say I use around 25% - 33% cake flour. No preferred brands, really. The cake flour was Swans Down, because that's what seems to be available around here. I often use Hecker's, which I think is a good quality AP flour. As chance would have it, I used Hodgson Mill AP flour this time. I prefer either Hecker's, Hodgson Mill or King Arthur. The cheese is under the eggs. Primarily, I guess I avoid drying by simply not baking it for very long -- around 5 minutes. And I like to use a fair amount of tomato on the pizze with eggs, so perhaps the steam mitigates any drying.

I ran out of 00 flour, so I used regular AP flour mixed with cake flour (highly refined, low protein flour) -- which I find is a good approximation of 00 for pizza.

Mauviel Induc'Inox.

This article by Tony Cecchini in today's NY Times magazine had some interesting information about maraschino cherries: So, it appears that the real think is simply sour cherries marinated in maraschino liqueur. The author used frozen Cascadian Farms whole organic sweet cherries (which apparently actually contains sour cherries) and marinated them for several days in maraschino with delicious results. Anyone with access to a farmer's market could probably do even better with fresh sour cherries.

I've discussed this a number of times on eG. Yes, real Italian pizza flour is lower in protein than American bread flour. It's also perhaps a bit lower than American AP flour as well. In addition, "00" flour is more highly refined. That said, not all "00" flour is the same (the "00" refers to the level of refinement, not the protein level). "00" flour for pizza is higher in protein than "00" flour for pasta. Still not as high as American AP flour, though. A lower protein, more refined American flour might work well, such as the biscuit flours from the Southeast. I personally find that a lower protein flour gives a crust that is more to my liking. But I make what are fundamentally Italian-style pizze. American style pizze have a lot more stuff on top of them, and it is likely the case that a stronger dough is required in order to support those toppings.

Last night I had a bunch of friends over for one of my pizza-making marathons. These are fundamentally Italian style pizze, but in a larger size so everyone can have a piece of each one. I don't have any pictures of the dough or anything like that, but here are the finished products: Here are all the ingredients. I use a fairly wet dough that fermented for around 12 hours (I usually go 24 hours, but realized last night that I was out of flour). Fat Guy and I traveled up to Arthur Avenue for some of their amazing best-of-class fresh mozzarella -- as good as any fior di latte mozzarella I've had in Italy. We started with a margarita. Shitake mushrooms and cubes of pancetta. Fresh artichoke and filetti di pomodoro. Red peppers with eggs "fried" right on the crust. Here is a picture of an egg slice. Spicy broccoli rabe. Shrimp and chives. Sausage and ramps. A "pizza nonna" -- a tomato/mozzarella pizza topped with a dressed salad (upland cress, in this instance) with prosciutto draped over the top. Littleneck clams baked right on he crust. Gorgonzola picante and asparagus. You can see that the stones in the oven were beginning to lose heat by this point. Here's my oven setup. As you can see, it's a crappy residential stove -- actually pretty good for a Manhattan apartment. There are two levels of stones, with the stone on the bottom being a slab of slate from docsconz's back yard. I only baked on the two lower stones, sometimes transferring a pizza from the bottom stone to the middle stone if we weren't quite ready for the next pizza. Especially in the beginning, the slate stone was throwing up some serious oven spring and baking the pizze in around 5 minutes. I estimate that the slate weighs around ten times more than the conventional baking stones. Here is a view of the bottom of the crust towards the end of the run. Still getting good thermal performance from the slate, although the baking time increased to around ten minutes by the last pizza.

THERE we go. Thank you, thank you. That is a classic martini at least by the history I've read. . . Well, to pick a nit, I love the formula (2:1 or 1:1 with a dash of orange bitters), but I always stir my martini as I don't like it to be cloudy. Besides, I am given to understand that, if you use cracked ice, the drink actually comes out colder if you stir rather than shake.

Actually, when using bitters on the finished drink, one is usually adding a drop or two rather than a dash or two. A classic example is the Pisco Sour, where pisco is shaken up with sugar, lemon juice and raw egg white, strained in to a cocktail glass and then garnished with several drops of Angostura bitters. Looks cool and produces an entirely different effect than adding it to the shaker would.

The effect of a dash of something like curacao, maraschino or grenadine depends greatly on the other ingredients and how the dash is deployed (dashes on the top of a finished drink have a different effect, for example, being more noticable in the nose). And, of course, on the hand of the person who is doing the dashing. In a drink formula like the Savoy's Aviation, we have 2 ounces of gin, 1 ounce of lemon juice and two (presumably fairly heavy compared to a dash of, say, Angostura bitters) dashes of maraschino. I wouldn't say that the maraschino in this drink is being used "just for color adjustment" (not least because maraschino is colorless). But, of course, a single dash of maraschino is unlikely to make a difference in the taste of, say, a Negroni. Some liquors are, of course, used in dash quantities for coloration purposes (the odious blue curacao comes to mind), but I'm not sure it's fair to suggest that this is typical of all or even most such uses. On the contrary, I would suggest that a dash or two of kummel or curacao or maraschino or strega (etc.) could absolutely cause a different and unique impression depending on the context. Whether the addition of a dash of X or two dashes of Y makes for a new drink is a subject that's up for debate. It is absolutely the case that, back in the old days, there were differently named drinks that had the exact same ingredients for all intents and purposes. Sometimes the name of the drink might change simply based on the brand of liquor. But, then again, it's also the case that some drinks with radically different formulations shared the same name. No need for any apology. I think it's just the case that some people find gin more challenging than others, and some people only like the flavor in certain contexts. Hey, some people don't like foie gras. I happen to hate everything in the squash family, but a lot of people love squash. And don't even get me started on the discussions I've had with people here about okra. PS. For a gin and cream drink, try a Ramos Fizz (shake it hard for at least a minute).

Interesting. To my eye, those drinks do not appear to be using gin as a diluting agent. They are gin cocktails (1, 3 and 5) and cocktails where gin is being used as a flavoring agent (2). The most unusual cocktail is #4, the Bunny Hug cocktail, with equal parts gin, pastis and bourbon. A case could be made that part of the function of the gin is to dilute the flavor of the pastis. But, at the same time, it still brings the unique gin flavor to the drink. In fact, I have to disagree with the assertion that gin can "dilute existing flavors without adding many strong flavors of its own." One of the reasons you and others may have difficulty with gin is precisely because it most often does contribute strong and distinctive flavors when it is used in a cocktail. Is Tanqueray or Gordon's less assertive than, say, Old Overholt rye or Bacardi silver rum? I wouldn't say so.

That's more or less my feeling as well. Vodka doesn't bring any flavor to the game, so I don't like to use it except in certain drinks where one can take advantage of its usefulness as a dilutant. Audrey's Dreamy Dorini Smoking Martini is a good example of this, as is Paul Harrington's "Drink Without a Name," which dilutes 1/4 ounce of Cointreau and 1/8 ounce of Green Chartreuse with 1.5 ounces of vodka. In both drinks the vodka is used to "spread out" otherwise intensely flavored indredients (Laphroaig 10 and Green Chartreuse, respectively), and in so doing to expose flavors that might otherwise have been obscured either by combination with other strong flavors or the inherrently concentrated flavors of the products themselves. Most of the time, though, vodka only brings alcohol to the game. To my mind, if I am drinking something that tastes like orange juice mixed with lime juice and cranberry juice, I feel no need to add any alcohol. In that case, you're only making a "cocktail" for the effect of the alcohol -- and that's not the reason I drink cocktails.

Do we have any reliable evidence that Mitchell's is closed? Or is it all rumor at this point?

If you preheat for a long time, it means that everything in your stove -- not just the air inside the oven -- will come up to temperature. This is important in terms of radiant heat, and its important in terms of temperature recovery when you open and close the door of the oven. Also, if you have a gas oven and the stones are on the floor of the oven, the burner is more or less firing directly into the stone. With careful manipulation of the oven, or simply turning it to "broil," you can easily get the stones over 550F. If you're making thin crust pizza, this is a good thing.

Hmm. I guess we'll just have to chalk this one up to a radical difference in taste, then. If I had to give up one liquor and never use it in cocktails again, I would choose vodka without hesitation. I daresay most cocktail enthusiasts would say the same. Gin is a remarkably complex liquor. Although juniper is the key note, it varies in prominence from producer to producer. And, while certain cocktail recipes and certain cocktail ingredients allow the juniper quality to shine through more than others, I don't agree that any successful cocktail "cancels out the juniper flavors" -- or indeed any of the flavor components of gin. It is often said that a truly successful cocktail has a flavor that isn't entirely identifiable as belonging to any of the constiuents of the drink. Dave makes a similar point upthread in saying that "a proper gin Martini . . . tastes neither of gin nor of vermouth, but of Martini." Think of it as adding that tiny grinding of nutmeg to a ragu Bolognese. The end result doesn't taste of nutmeg, but a ragu Bolognese made with nutmeg does taste different from one made without. Gin can do the same thing. So, while some gin cocktails may not feature up-front juniper flavors as a key note, this does not mean that the juniper (and other flavors of the gin) aren't making a difference in the overall impression of the cocktail. As I said earlier with respect to the Pegu Club cocktail, it is quite easy to prove this point by tasting two examples of the drink side-by-side, one with gin as the base liquor and one with vodka. Try it. See if you don't think that they taste different. If they do taste different, then this means that the flavor of the gin has not been "canceled out" -- even if you can't definitively say "I taste juniper." I absolutely prefer the version with gin, and I think most cocktail enthusiasts would be in the same camp. But if you prefer the version with vodka, there's nothing wrong with that. It just means that you don't like gin all that much. except in certain limited contexts -- which, like it or not, seems to be what you've been saying. I go in the other direction. It's hard for me to think of a vodka cocktail that I wouldn't rather have made with gin.

As Dave implied above, a drink doesn't necessarily have to smack of juniper in order for the gin to make an impact. Try it for yourself: make a Pegu Club with gin and make the same drink with vodka. The difference in flavor will be inescapable. Now, you may prefer the vodka version. All this tells me is that you don't care for gin all that much. I guess it's in the eye of the beholder (tongue of the taster?). My family has been making goose braised in orange juice and gin longer than I've been alive. To my taste, gin and orange go together like... well, gin and orange. I think a more perfect match is hard to find. There are about a zillion classic cocktails that include gin and either tciple sec or orange curacao. If I'm not mistaken, orange peel is a fairly standard botanical used in gin formulae. Again, I suppose this is a matter of taste. Gin is certainly a natural for sour fruit, but I've made or consumed any number of cocktails where gin is married with apricot, pear, cherry, all manner of berries, cassis, etc. In addition, I've had successful cocktails with gin and sherry, gin and nut liqueur, etc. I don't see what you're saying here, except that you don't care for juniper. That's fine, of course. But that makes it hard for to recommend anything. cocktailDB, a database of cocktails from the golden age, lists 1381 gin cocktails. This compares to 531 aged brandy recipes, 595 bourbon and rye recipes, 497 rum recipes and 59 tequilla recipes. This, to my mind, speaks loudly about the mixability of gin.

Sounds good, Janet! But... isn't Damrak an "international style Dutch gin" rather than a London dry gin (which is to say, more of an updated genever)?

From what I have been able to gather, they are similar. The Magnum Pro has a more "consumer friendly" handle.