slkinsey

Who are you going to believe, John, Tasca Lanza or me? Seriously, though, it if works for her it must work. That said, her results notwithstanding I can't imagine how it woud work if you did it with warm, fresh risotto. AFAIK, arancini di riso were "invented" to use up leftover rice.

Those are awesome, Janet! You must go out now, get a digital camera and take some pix of those things in use!

Thanks for the report, Gary. For those of us not in the know, what are xiaolong bao? Is there a more common English name by which we might know them? Also, what are the characteristics of first-rate xiaolong bao we should be looking for?

A couple of suggestions: 1. Make the arancine from leftover risotto. If you know you want to have arancine, make extra risotto a day or two earlier. The cold storage time seems to firm things up. This is the only time I tend to make arancine: when I want to use up a bunch of leftover risotto. 2. Make sure the risotto is a dense one. No vialone nano rice sull'onda. 3. Make sure that the risotto recipe you use is a mostly-rice risotto rather than one with a lot of chunky ingredients. Risotto alla Milanesa is perfect. This doesn't sound like it was a problem for you, but its worth mentioning. 4. The egg binder is a good idea. I also stiffen the mixture with extra grated parmigiano reggiano and fresh untoasted no-crust bread crumbs. The idea is that the mixture is relatively dry and coherent when you start to form the bals. The use of fresh bread crumbs, in particular, seems to give the arancine structural strength without making them tough or heavy. 5. Don't overfill the arancine. If you're filing with ragu, peas and mozarella, I assume you're only using a tiny bit of each.

I have found Luksusowa to be the least expensive vodka that is good enough to be a premium vodka for mixing.

As always, I cowtow to slkinsey. Hee! Eeeexcellent. My evil plan is working. Now, if only I can get everyone else to fall in line... Beefeater is actually an underrated gin, I think. It's got a nice clean taste and the juniper's right out front iirc. Now that I think about it, once I run out of the huge jugs of Bombay and Gordon's I got on sale, I'm getting a 1.75 of Beefeater.

I hope you three understand that we're expecting detailed reports of the fun upon your return...

Very interesting stuff, David. Thanks.

I have to confess that using something relatively delicate like Plymouth in a G&T seems like a waste of premium booze to me. If I were going to use an expensive gin, I'd want something like Junipero, which has an assertive flavor that's heavy on the juniper.

To follow up a bit on Bux's comments, I think it depends a little on what you're looking for. Certainly, if you're looking for top-end fine dining, I don't think any other American city comes close to competing with NYC. Assuming from your list of NY places you visited, though, I gather that this is not the case for you. So... let's look at the places you went: Lupa: Seems like your main criticism here is that the bucatini all'amatriciana was oversauced. Everything else you described as "outstanding." Lupa is a good restaurant, I think, but I think it is fundamentally a neighborhood osteria that has come to much greater attention due to Mario Batali's involvement. This is to say that I wouldn't expect a "peak Italian experience" at Lupa so much as I would expect competently-executed Roman-style osteria food. And I think that's what you get. As Bux points out, Lupa is no substitute for Babbo and it's not designed to be. Gray's Papaya: The thing about Grays' Papaya and similar places is that it's not about outstanding high quality, not really. I mean, they deliver a quality product... but the deal at Gray's is that you get an incredibly large amount of food for a pittance. It's reasonable that you wouldn't be blowin away by the hot dogs there. I think your NY experience would have been better had you gone to Katz's instead for a pastrami on rye. Les Halles: A nice place, but by no means standing above a large crowd of similar places. I'm guesing you probably wouldn't have gone here had it not been for the attention Tony Bourdain's celebrity brought to Les Halles. Not a place too many of us would have recommended as a "must try place." Lombardi's: Yea, well no wonder you weren't impressed. Lombardi's has seriously slipped and is generally considered the worst, by a large margin, of all the old-school coal-fired NYC pizzerie. A much better choice would have been Patsy's in East Harlem or Grimaldi's under the Brooklyn Bridge or, for a less NYC-centric wood-fired pizzeria, Franny's out in Prospect Heights. As for the prices... there is no getting around the fact that NYC is expensive. A dollar will certainly go farther in Seattle than it will in NYC. On the other hand, for every dollar someone earns in Seattle, the same job is paying a dollar fifty in NYC. In terms of "food bought for hours worked at the same job" NYC is no more or less expensive.

Interesting. I wonder if this isn't reflective primarily of Americans of a certain generation. I've heard about it, generally from people roughly in my parents' generation, but have never known anyone to drink coffee throughout dinner.

CS, AFAIK, the smoking martini is an Audrey Saunders special. Not terribly difficult to spell out, though. You're right that it's a strong drink, but fundamentally no more strong than a martini. Part of the trick is not to make a 5 ounce drink. The one I made had only 2 ounces of vodka.

Dude, there's a Houston's in Citicorp -- excuse me, Citigroup -- center.

This is interesting, because I don't gather that Smirnoff is all that less expensive than Luksusowa and, IMO, Luksusowa is a far superior product. Just looking at NYC retail prices, Smirnoff is around $16/liter while Luksusowa is $17/liter. Finlandia, on the other hand, is $16 for only 750ml (also not as good as Luksusowa, IMO). (Prices from Sherry-Lehmann.com)

Out of curiosity, what do we know about Old Tom gin other than it was sweet? Would it be possible to make a reasonable Old Tom facsimile just by adding a little sugar? I have always understood that people who have tasted examples of Old Ton Gin found it more or less indistinguishable from London gin mixed with sugar. Weren't there, at least as of a few years ago, some brands of Old Tom for sale? Boord's comes to mind.

Actually, responding to both Curlz and Tommy, I have always found their prices very reasonable... for what you get. And what you get, mostly, is high-end professional stuff. High-end restaurant stuff is not, as a rule of thumb, particularly inexpensive.

Here is a little page of information on New York Metro. The Village Voice singled them out for "gooiest okonomiyaki" in their 2000 "Best of NYC." Here is a short piece by Cynthia Killian in the NY Post.

We have some "temple recommend" LDS friends who have been over a few times. Alcohol was served at all of those meals, and they never had a problem with it. Unlike members of many other religions with dietary restrictions, who might be offended or religiously "tainted" to even be around you while you consume proscribed foods, I have not found this to be the case with Mormons and "mind altering substances" like caffeine and alcohol. I mean, I wouldn't bring a cup of coffee into an LDS church, and I wouldn't serve pork if some of my dinner guests were religious Muslims... but I wouldn't not offer coffee after a meal just because some of my guests were Mormon.

SWEET!!! Bridge has always been my go-to kitchenware store in the City.

I have to try some of these. I have to confess that I tend to stay away from Rieslings grown/produced outside its traditional geography because they don't seem to taste like Riesling to me. Do the NY ones taste anything like traditional Rieslings?

Why not cultivated grain? Humans have been eating cultivated grain for something like 10,000 years, and their closely-related wild ancestors far longer than that. I think it's a mistake, also, to assume that cultivated grain is somehow "unnatural." The process through which wild grains became domesticated grains was entirely natural (e.g., mutated wheat stalks that didn't shatter were more likely to be collected by hunter-gatherers, etc.). Other crops transitioned from wild to domesticated in a similarly native fashion (e.g., melon seeds passing through the digestive tract and later sprouting plants in latrine sites). It's as natural as, well, evolution.

Are you talking about Fee Brothers bitters? If you're looking for orange bitters, I suggest you find yourself a recipe for Gary Regan's orange bitters (it's in a number of his books) and make it yourself. It's 100 times better than Fee Brothers' and should be less expensive in the long run. Fee Brothers' aromatic (similar to Angostura) bitters is also very good. As for Regan's Orange Bitters #5 (I think it's #5)... I am thinking about making a massive quantity and offering some to the eG crowd.

Depends on the single malt, really. I went around 5:1 vodka:scotch with this one, and thought that was just about right. Lagavullin is a very full-bodied scotch, though. With something lighter-bodied, like Ardberg 10, you could go 4:1. Somewhere between 5-4:1 strikes me as about right, depending on how much you want to stretch out the flavor of the malt. As long as you use an Islay malt (which is the whole point), the smokyness is going to be right there at either ratio. It mostly depends on how much of a malt backbone you want in the glass.

Aw, shucks. One thing I like about it is that it's a very large shaker, so I can mix several drinks at once and still get good aeration. And now, since I'm thinking of Audrey, here is her Dreamy Dorini Smoking Martini. It's essentially vodka with a splash of smokey single malt scotch (the original recipe calls for Laphroaig 10) and a few drops of Pernod. I used Ricard and Lagavullin with equally interesting results. The barware -- both the mixing glass and the stirring spoon -- is all ancesteral. Especially interesting is the glass. It's not a shaker. It's designed for stirred cocktails. I've never seen another one like it. Ingredients. In the cocktail stirrer. Here's a top view of the stirrer. You can see it is designed to hold back the ice when pouring the drink. Finished drinks (sans lemon twist, because I didn't have a lemon in ths house). So... that's another few pieces of cool barware. I encourage you all to try the Smoking Martini. The dilution of the single malt by the vodka really exposes a lot of interesting flavors that are often obscured when drinking the product straight (which is always mostly an olfactory experience) and spreads them out for examination by your palate.

Yes -- and more, I think. I gather that it also means, "not long time refrigerated."