slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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Right. We've pointed out several times in the past that, despite the conventional wisdom that the Times only awards four stars to French restaurants, there have actually been Chinese, Japanese and other types of restaurants with four New York Times stars -- just not in the past 15 or so years.
I'm curious... what non-French types other than Japanese and Chinese? More to the point, what European types other than French?
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A little goes a long way, though.
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Greg, if you're looking for "bottarga tonnato" that might be why you are not having much luck finding anything. That means, more or less, "tuna-ed bottarga." Bottarga is dried and salted fish roe. There are two kinds of bottarga, bottarga di tonno (tuna roe, from Sicilia) and bottarga di muggine (grey mullet roe, from Sardegna). Bottarga di muggine is, in my opinion, far superior to bottarga di tonno.
When you buy bottarga, it's important to buy whole bottarga and not pre-grated bottarga (which tends to taste like cat food). Gustiamo.com sells whole bottarga di muggine and also pre-grated bottarga di tonno, both for a reasonable price.
Bottarga is a wonderful product, and adds a mysterious funky flavor to many dishes. One good and almost foolproof dish to try at home is maccheroni alla chitarra with oven dried tomatoes, red chiles and bottarga di muggine from Mario Batali's The Babbo Cookbook.
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Everyone loves a good rack, that's for sure.
They also make adjustable racks where one can vary the angle from 180 degrees to something fairly acute. But I don't think any of those have a nonstick coating.
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Mostly what you want is something reasonably sturdy and heavy. I wouldn't worry too much about whether it is clad aluminum or anything like that. All-Clad no doubt stopped using fully clad aluminum for its roasting pans because they realized they could charge the same for just stainless and it didn't affect the performance at all.
The reason most people have given for prefering the old A-C tri-clad roasters have been their performance on the stove top after roasting for making sauces, citing the even heating with the aluminum core. Do heavy all steel pans do the same?
Well... I think there are a few things at play here:
First, one shouldn't discount people's ability to convince themselves that this is actually happening. As we know, many people who have remarked on the"even heating" of All-Clad's roasting pans were actually using regular stainless with no thermal core.
Second, it's not clear to me that one even needs particularly even heating to make a pan sauce in a roasting pan. A roasting pan with a thermal core will provide more even heat, but so what? To make a pan sauce, we're talking about a few seconds on the stove, maybe make a little roux, splash in some liquid to deglaze, whisk it around, pour it out. Anything more than that (simmering, reduction, etc.) should really be done in a saucepan. During the brief moments the pan is on the burners, a little unevenness of heat won't hurt anyone. Certainly not to the tune of a 1100% markup over Steven's example (All-Clad's 16 by 13 roasting pan retails for $275 USD).
I'd rather have the 25 dollar stainless steel pan, spend $165 on a 3.4 quart Falk Culinair stainless lined heavy copper saucepan and use the rest on a couple of prime beef tenderloins which I could roast in the roasting pan and sauce with a sauce from the saucepan. Ultimately, I think that's a better expenditure of money.
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And when am I going to get a sample of these beans? Hmm?
Some questions: what beans are you roasting, and what are you roastng for (drip, presspot, espresso)?
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I assume the same characteristics that make for good stove top cookware would also make for a good roaster… is that a correct assumption?
I would say that is not a correct assumption under most circumstances. If, for example, you are roasting something on a rack, the thermal properties of the roasting pan are nearly irrelevant. Roasting is not about the pan cooking the food; it's about the air in the oven cooking the food and the pan is there mostly to secure whatever is roasting and to catch drippings.
I agree with this for the most part. It's true that the thermal properties of the roasting pan make very little difference when one is roasting. It's not quite accurate to say that it makes no difference, because tests (and my own personal experience) have shown that dark colored anodized aluminum roasting pans provide more browning than light colored stainless roasting pans. But it's a minute difference.
Mostly what you want is something reasonably sturdy and heavy. I wouldn't worry too much about whether it is clad aluminum or anything like that. All-Clad no doubt stopped using fully clad aluminum for its roasting pans because they realized they could charge the same for just stainless and it didn't affect the performance at all. The reason you want something reasonably heavy and sturdy is simply so it doesn't bend or warp when you lift the roast our of the oven. It also helps the pan's versatility, because you can use the pan as a bain marie while cooking a bunch of miniature soufflés, you can use it as a pan for lasagne al forno, and so on. As others have pointed out upthread, you're really better off using a copiously preheated heavy frypan for those instances when you are roasting a fairly small food item (say, 3-4 pound spatchcocked chicken) and you want to take advantage of convection heat from the pan as well as radiant heat from the oven.
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Sounds great. If only I knew someplace in NYC or Houston to find Torani Amer...
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Right. The one with calvados is called Fallen Leaves, and is credited to Charles Schumann in 1982. The one with reisling is called Falling Leaves, and was created by Audrey Saunders not long ago. This thread is cross-polinated into Drinkboy's forums in this thread by Myers.
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I was at Union restaurant in Seattle last night and they had this on their drink menu. It didn't mention the Reisling though?? The bartender mentioned something about DrinkBoy's website.
Funny. The thread on Drinkboy's (very good) forums references this very thread for info on the Falling Leaves Cocktail. -
You might also want to look at http://www.pizzaovens.com/specifications/m...s/woodtogas.htm
It's an article by someone who sells pizza ovens for a living. He points out that wood burns drier than gas, and that a wood burning oven will produce a drier pizza than a wood burning one. I'm also somewhat doubtful that wood is very consistent, and that someone can always get good enough wood that will always burn hotter than gas. Coal is much hotter than wood or gas, and there was an article in the NYT I think recently about that. In any case, the oven isn't a big point, unless you like charred pizzas from a coal oven (I don't).
More specifically, it is an article by someone who sells gas pizza ovens for a living, and has a vested interest in making it seem like gas can compete with wood and coal. It is also worthy of note that he is not talking about regular gas deck pizza ovens. These are special (and very expensive) ovens specifically designed to mimic wood burning pizza ovens. The one argument he makes for gas with which I completely agree is that "you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to master a wood-burning oven, but getting things right does require a bit of training and labor, which many employers are reluctant to provide." A lack of training does go a long way to explain the mediocre pizza some of the wood and coal places serve. But the bulk of his argument seems to be that wood fired ovens are the best, but these special gas fired "faux wood" ovens are almost as good and a lot simpler to use.
The bottom line is this: standard gas-fired pizza ovens go up to a maximum of 550F, whereas a properly fired coal- or wood-fired masonry pizza oven will be between 750F and 840F. This is a huge and significant difference, and as a result there are things that are possible with a coal- or wood-fired masonry pizza oven that are simply not possible with a gas-fired oven. This fact alone suggests that that the assertion "ovens are basically ovens" cannot possibly be true unless one believes that there is no difference between 550F and 750F when it comes to making pizza.
Now... different does not necessarily mean better, depending on one's tastes. A medium thick, "Ray's style" pizza cannot be made well in a hot coal- or wood-fired oven. So, for someone for whom pizza is mostly about the toppings and lots of them, the oven makes much less difference since they're all going to be using standard gas-fired deck pizza ovens at right around the same temperature.
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I remeber my first post on this thread said something to the effect of "copper..who needs copper". Well I have been bitten by the bug. I bought a few peices in thrift stores. I also picked up a calphalon copper sauce pan cheap.
Cool. What copper pieces did you get? The Calphalon, btw, is not "real" copper. It's a thin outer layer of copper, an internal core of aluminum, and an inner layer of stainless.
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Owen, when this all went down, Ellen said "Maybe you should do that near a window?" Normally the range hood, which theoretically (though I am not convinced) vents to the outdoors, is up to the task, but I think I'm going to need to reevaluate.
Hmmm... I was almost sure you had a regular NYC recirculating hood. Anyway, if you put it next to an open window when you roast, it makes a big difference in terms of smoke,
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aliénor, E. Dehillerin can provide great deals but for people in the US it's only really worth it if they are able to bring it back to the US themselves. For example, Falk's eleven inch sauté pan sells in the US for $235. E. Dehillerin sells one for €113.88, which comes out to about $155 with today's credit card exchange rate. So far, so good. It's a savings of 80 dollars. But, you have to ship it over to the US and you have to pay tax. The cost of shipping a 4.08 kg pan from Paris to New York, plus tax, is more than 80 dollars.
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Comments from him:
(1) Ovens are basically ovens.
This is not true, despite what he may have said. While it is true that a coal or wood burning oven doesn't necessarily produce a better result than a regular gas oven, it is also a fact that there are some things one can do with a superhot coal or wood oven that is impossible with gas. Think about it: in order to produce that crisp crust, places like Di Fara have to bake the pizza for around ten times longer than places like Patsy's East Harlem. That means that the toppings will be much more cooked and substantially more water will have evaporated from the crust of the gas oven pizza. This is one reason why the crust of a gas oven pizza can never have that ethereal, soft, extensible light inner layer between the crisp bottom and the toppings, and also why the gat oven pizza can never compete with coal or wood on oven spring. That some places are able to produce crusts that compete with some of the coal oven pizza in NYC speaks more of the skills of the pizzaioli in the respective pizzerie than it does the potential of the respective technologies they employ.
(4) Skill counts.Without a doubt this is the single most important variable.
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Totally different experience, atmosphere and price point. Bianca is very good, but it's not really a "destination" restaurant. It's a very good neighborhood restaurant.
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Definitely the best place in town. I'll be going back again this xmas.
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You might also check out one of the larger Fiesta Marts and a big HEB may be a possibility. What part of town?
Southside Place (just South of Rice University).
I've been to Rice Epicurean and Whole Foods. No dice (although Whole Foods did have Kaffir limes).
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Any ideas where I might find bergamot oranges or Seville oranges in Houston? I'm here for the next 8 days and would like to try some things with bergamots.
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What's the zest like? Would "bergamotcello" be interesting?
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FWIW, I think the food is better at Bianca. A real telltale is the chicken liver dish, which is always perfect at Bianca and always just a little overcooked at Celeste.
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I don't get why anyone would want to drink one of these curdled drinks. A dare? They sound like horrible college-kid fare.
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The excerpt from the Gothamist exemplifies what I was saying before... What seems to matter in these pizza afficionado comparisons of old school/new school pizza, is not the toppings, but the pie.
Una Pizza Napoletena has such a limited selection of toppings that the pie, with/without sauce and cheese is THE thing.
My point being--- If you want to say Patsy has subpar toppings-- so be it--but when it comes to a pizza pie comparison, Patsy's pie with sauce and cheese is excellent and I think they were falsely accused of "coasting on their bloated reputation."
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "pie" here, but am assuming it is the crust. I agree with those who suppose that most of the game is in the crust, and that the ingredients should complement but not detract from the full expression of the crust.
I also agree with you that Patsy's East Harlem (and only in East Harlem) is operating at a very high level, and doesn't really deserve to be lumped together with places like Lombardi's that are in serious decline. Patsy's is clearly head and shoulders over the other old school places, although Grimaldi's can come close on the rare occasions when they are 100% on top of their game.
That said, while one cannot say that Patsy's is in decline, it's not growing and improving either. It's holding steady. Unfortunately (to me) it's holding steady at in the pizza world of the 1980s, when things like black olives that taste like the can were de rigeur. I can't imagine that Patsy Lancieri used ingredients like this back in the day. The crust at Patsy's is definitely still excellent, but the fact is that there are really only two or three pizze they make that are truly excellent, while the others are not nearly on the same level, being brought down by the toppings. All this is to say that I think Patsy's is great and the crust is amazing, but I think they could be even better if they offered better toppings. But, then again, ingredients like better olives, better sausage, maybe something like prosciutto, etc... those things also cost more money, and that might actually cut into their business.
Out of curiosity, what is the cooking temperature in a wood-fired oven?As with all ovens, a lot depends on oven management and whether the oven is kept sufficiently hot. That said, a well fired Neapolitan style wood burning "beehive" oven should get up to somewhere between 400C/750F to 450C/840F.
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Bizarre. It's not coding properly. Try this:
http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2004/12/08/grimaldis_vs_una_pizza_napoletana_oldschool_new_york_pizza_goes_up_against_the_new_kid_in_town.php
bottarga tonnato
in Pennsylvania: Dining
Posted
These are good people, whom I believe are formerly the American side of Esperya before the management changed. I haven't bought anything from them (although I have bought from Esperya), but people I trust recommend them quite highly. That said, I have had the Tre Torri ventresca and tarantello di tonno they sell. It is as good as it gets, especially the ventresca. But don't take my word for it. David Rosengarten says:
Read the rest of his review, and you'll finish wanting to order some immediately.