slkinsey

I'd say the jury is still out on this one. After all, everyone was saying the same thing about Chinese cleavers when they were in vogue a while back, and they are hardly ever seen these days. I don't dispute the fact that Japanese knives are very good, and even the best solution for certain tasks. But I also believe that the Western style hasn't been such a success for no reason. Right. To expand on this a bit, and restate it: If you have an edge on your knife, you do not need to sharpen it. All you need is to steel the knife and bring the edge back in line. I'd also add that the occasional use of a very fine ceramic steel (along with the regular use of a smooth metal steel) with a light touch can extend the time required between sharpenings by "micro sharpening" as it straightens the edge. In re to polished edges: I am not sure it's the best edge for all applications. A highly polished, very fine grained, acute angled edge is important when you want to do the minimum amount of tissue damage... like when you're shaving or performing surgery. If one is push-cutting very delicate fish for sushi or something like that, I can see how this could make a big difference. However, minimal tissue damage is not necessarily a priority when you're cutting up a chicken or dicing vegetables -- especially if you're using a sawing action in addition to the push-cut action. In these cases, my experience is that a coarser edge has a much more aggressive "bite" and actually does the job a little better. This kind of edge also seems more durable and responds better to steeling. That's my experience, anyway. ymmv.

The most obvious difference was the absence of white pies in the Brooklyn places we visited. Our local visits include basic red and white pies to taste the crust. cheeses, seasonings and red sauce without any influence from the extras. That's odd. I'm not sure whether Di Fara offers a white pizza, but Totonno certainly does:

I think Di Fara's square pizza is significantly thicker than a regular pizza crust, but since we in NYC trend towards a thinner crust than the national standard, maybe it wouldn't be considered all that thick. But I think you're probably right about the "doughiness." Some people, myself included, just can't get past the underbaked crust. To illustrate what I'm talking about, here is a (not very well focused) side view of an L&B slice: That darker area just under the sauce is a big soggy stripe of not-quite-baked-through dough. For something more in line with the real Sicilian model (sfincione, they would insist, not pizza), I like these from the Sullivan Street Bakery. Anyway... getting away from that, did you guys notice any characteristic differences between NYC pizza and Philly pizza? You guys seemed to go much more towards ordering multiple (and therefore heavier) toppings than we usually do here.

Since you're baking the pizza in an oven, you don't really need the long handle of a traditional peel. One option that offers you more versatility for your Looney is a large rimless cookie sheet, like this one. Used for pizza, it functions more or less like a metal peel with no handle. As for the dough sticking to the peel, there are a few tricks. As others have pointed out, a sprinkling of cornmeal can help. But in my experience (I use a very wet dough) the most important thing is to have your mise all set up so you can get the pizza built and off the peel as quickly as possible. If you watch a professional pizzaiolo at someplace like the East Harlem Patsy's, the pizza is built in around 60 seconds once the dough hits the peel. If you're really stuck, try dragging a string between the dough and the peel just before you go to the oven.

I think Spumoni Gardens gets the short end on PIZZA surveys because (despite the 24 ovens) it's more of an Italian restaurant that happens to serve pizza. The Sicilian (or square) pie there was an excellent example of it's type, and again, I thought the sauce was really good. Interesting. Our overall reaction was that L&B didn't make a particularly good example of "Sicilian" (e.g., thicker, square pizza) -- especially compared to Di Fara's square pizza, which I think is the best of that style in the City. And we weren't all that fond of the sauce (which, like their canned mushrooms, comes out of big #10 cans of "pizza sauce"). But, of course, part of this is a matter of preference. I can understand that some people are fond of L&B's undercooked doughiness (they do huge business, after all), it's just far removed from the things I personally value in a pizza. Anyway... sounds like you guys had a great trip!

Sounds like an awesome time was had by all. Just to clarify on the above: The cheese in slices is low moisture mozzarella (not fontina); next comes a few dabs of the fresh stuff; then comes some parmigiano (not pecorino). Di Fara is a special place for sure, and Dom is a real artisan. For those who are interested in comparing, there is a clickable index at the top of the NY Pizza Survey thread that will take you to the various places we've visited as a group. I'll be interested especially to read reactions to L&B, which seriously underwhelmed the NY group.

Here's the thread. I'm still not totally convinced about mixing the soup into the pork -- although it makes a bit more sense to mix cubes of gelatinized stock into the pork as opposed to liquid soup (the recipe you found says "use before it gelatinizes"). We should get someone to ask Cecil at China 46 what he does to make his.

The problem with granton edges on non-slicer knives, in my opinion, is that they shorten the usable life of the knife. Once you sharpen to the point where you're getting up into those divots, you've got a screwey edge.

This is an odd recipe, Todd, because the soup is actually mixed in to the filling. I don't see how this would produce what we commonly understand to be xaiolongbao filling (i.e., a meatball surrounded by soup). Not sure why people think otherwise, but pork skin is chock full of gelatin. As these guys at the NC State School of Engineering say: "The best raw material for the derivation of gelatin is pork skin."

You can still post links, yes! That said, it's not considered good form to post a "deep link" (i.e., one that goes directly to just one image on a page rather than to the whole page in the context intended by the creator/owner).

A harder steel can keep an edge longer, but it also takes a lot longer to get it sharp again once it does go dull. Hard steel is also usually more brittle and prone to chipping. This is not to say that harder steel isn't as good as softer steel... but it's also to say that it isn't definitely better either. It's always a tradeoff of sorts wrt hardness. Full carbon knives go in the opposite direction. They're soft and lose their edge fairly rapidly... but at the same time they return to a razor's edge with a swipe along a steel or a brush across a stone Is one better than the other? Not really. Just depends on what you want.

Again, for posterity, a short quote from Expatica:

Mmmmmmm... splenocytes! If you're able to read the article, I'd love it if you could post your thoughts and maybe a short quote from the abstract.

For posterity, it is always halpful to include a short excerpt: Some related BSE talk on eG here.

As you can see, I have edited some posts upthread. I'd like to take a moment in my moderator's hat to remind everyone of our Copyright & Fair Use Policy. Two things in particular: You can't post a picture without permission if it is owned by someone else. It's a copyright violation. This includes pictures from other web sites. You can't post pictures that reside on another web site, unless you have permission or unless that web site belongs to you. This is called "bandwidth theft" because every time that image displays on our site, it uses some of the originating site's bandwidth... bandwidth that they pay for. Thanks for understanding and cooperating!

Are we to gather that you are of Finnish, Italian and Japanese ancestry?

Here are some of my knives. They are custom made, cast (not forged) "dendritic steel" with Brazilian ironwood handles. I like a heavy, Western-style knife. Here's a closeup where you can see the dendritic pattern:

Everyone is going to find a reason to qvetch if their favorite vodka wasn't tested. But they reasonably couldn't taste them all. 21 vodkas is a lot. What they said was: "Notable brands that we omitted included Chopin, Finlandia, Rain and Tanqueray Sterling. But our tasting included 5 of the 10 best-selling unflavored vodkas in the United States and the 5 best-selling imported vodkas." 5 of the top 10 best-selling and the 5 best-selling imports plus 11 others in that price range strikes me as a reasonable sampling of high end vodkas. One could argue that they all pretty much taste like nothing. And indeed that seems to be part of the point the panel is making. If the top ten list is "heavily weighted with mixing vodkas" it is because the panelists found these brands better than the super premium vodkas that did not make their cut (which brands include Ketel 1 and Cîroc). By the way, according to these guys, the world's top selling vodkas are Smirnoff, Absolut, Stolichnaya, Bols, Finlandia, Skyy, Gordon’s, Koskenkorva, Gorbatschow and Grey Goose. Presumably, the top-selling brands that were left off the list were omitted because they were not considered premium or superpremium vodkas. As they say, Smirnoff was only left on there as a sleeper they didn't expect to do very well.

I don't know the brand, but it's frozen in rectangular double plastic bags. If you ask the guy which brand of coconut milk they have is best, this is what he will show you.

Ditto Orik and JJ on the Mosco Street place. If you're thinking of going with a premade paste, I believe they sell some that they make themselves. They also sell what is IMO the best coconut milk you can get in the City.

Gothamist says "brick oven," which could mean any number of things. It suggests wood burning to me, but as you know not all wood burning ovens are created equal.

Those green ones on the left look suspiciously like the thick, doughy, disgusting (to me) steamed vegetable dumplings sold by the typical UWS/UES "Ming's Empire Cottage Balcony Garden Chinese" delivery place.

What the text I quoted above suggests to me is that the Smirnnoff "distillery" doesn't actually do any distilling. It would seem that they get the raw neutral spirit from Archer Daniels Midland (or similar), then treat that spirit in different ways to make the different brands. In other words, perhaps they send the spirit through a charcoal or quartz filter for Smirnoff but not for Popov. Increased "improvement" of the raw spirit may explain the difference in price -- although, as noted by the panelists, sometimes a product is priced higher simply because this increases the perceived quality of the product. For sure, they aren't using one grain and one still for Popov and a better grain and better still for Smirnoff.

Very interesting article in today's NY Times, in which a panel tasted and compared 21 different vodkas. There is also a nice interactive feature on the web where you can hear the various panelists talk about their experiences and impressions in the tasting. The most interesting result, to me, was that the "new breed" of expensive super-premium vodkas did not fare particularly well. The most expensive vodka to make the cut was Belvedere at thirty-four dollars a liter. More interesting yet was the hands down winner: Smirnoff at thirteen dollars a bottle. Noted brands that did not make the cut include such top-sellers as Grey Goose and Ketel One. The panelists did observe perceptible differences between brands, but these differences were described by one panelist as "microscopic." Another panelist observed that, while there are some distincs differences between brands, they are also clearly not the reasons why people buy one brand over another (those reasons largely having to do with brand image and marketing). I found this bit of information especially striking: Interesting stuff. They apparently sampled the vodkas at room temperature, but do note that cocktails are "overwhelmingly the vehicle for consuming vodka." One wonders how a tasting would come out in the context of a chilled cocktail.

I think you're better off, for the sake of versatility, adding the simple syrup to taste as you drink the stuff. That way you could have a sweet kaffir lime leaf cordial by mixing it with some simple syrup, but you could also make a kaffir lime leaf cocktail that wouldn't taste like drinking maple syrup out of the can.