slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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A few weeks ago my friend and I wen to DiFaras, had a pie - and then decided to drive directly to Totonnos where we had another. Ok, we're crazy.
Now that's what I'm talking about! And they said it was crazy to visit the Patsy's branches in one afternoon. Hah!
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Man... chicken liver risotto! In my mind, one of the greatest things about a dish is when you find yourself slapping your forehead and thinking, "of course! why didn't I think of that?" I mean, I like dirty rice with chicken livers and gizzards... I like chicken livers... I like chicken liver ragu... I like risotto... I like risotto con ragu... so why not chicken liver risotto? This is a must-try at home.
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All these places rcan stand a certain number of repeat visits, IMO.
wannabechef, given your passion for pizza, we'll be very disappointed if you don't come with us for the next outing.
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Nope. Decided on raw power. Your description of how it handles chicken bones tipped the balance. Serious piece of machinery. I am already casting about for other things to grind.
Ground up some chuck steak with some pancetta and made killer hamburgers the other night. Right on! Now you'll be on the Northern Tools mailing list too and you get the catalogue in the mail. Ahhhhh. Tool catalogues ... they almost make me wish I was a guy ...
Actually, I doubt I'll ever be buying from them again. When I submitted my order I had them ship to my day-job work address, because I don't have anyone at home in the afternoon to sign for packages. So... when I finally get an email confirmation from them, the address is wrong. It had the correct street address, but did not include the name of the business. As I work in a large office tower with dozens of businesses and thousands of employees, this is a problem. So, I emailed them saying that I didn't understand why they had omitted that part of the address and asking that they correcthe delivery address immediately. I even attached a saved html file of the web page confirmation I got upon completing my order, which displayed the correct full delivery address. Some 4 days later, they sent me a reply email saying "we shipped it to the address you submitted" -- arguing with me about the address rather than just making the change. I had to get the tracking number off their web site and call UPS myself to have the address modified after the first delivery attempt failed. Then, the meat receiving tray was seriously dented (who cares, of course, but I paid for it) and the sausage stuffer attachments were cracked. I plan to have both replaced, but I dread dealing with their crappy customer service people again.
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I rate the "big 6" coal-oven/fresh moz. pies that I'VE been to:
1. Totonno's
2. Nick's
3. Grimaldi's
4. John's
5. Arturo's
6. Lombardi's
You haven't been to Patsy's in East Harlem, I gather? That is the place which is generally regarded as the clear #1 (although we will naturally make up our own minds). Of course, the beauty of the whole thing is that we'll never all agree on what we like best. For example, as much as he enjoyed Grimaldi's and can appreciate some of the unique effects, Pan still prefers Di Fara. And why not? Di Fara is a great pizzeria. What's not to like?
As I remember them, Arturo's and especially John's are both pretty lame, but I do hear good things about Nick's. Needless to say, all these places will be visited. The Big 5 are the Big 5 by virtue of their reputations, pedigrees and histories. I don't think Nick's is quite there yet. This doesn't mean, of course, that it might not be better than some of the Big 5 pizzerie. We might have an eGullet 5 by the time we're finished. That's for us to discover! I hope that you are sufficiently motivated by your fondness for Nick's to leads us on an excursion out there in the future.
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Finally we had the ruby roast pork. What a great dish! We finished the whole thing easily between the four of us.
Definitely one of the best Shanghaiese places around.
Best rendition of the dish I've tried. Did you have any sesame buns with the pork?
Of course.
I have to try those jiaozi. How do you pronounce it, so I can order it with minimal confusion and embarassment? jeeo-ZEE... JEEOW-tzi...?I say: jow-zee with more or less equal stress.
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Oh, hell yea! This grinder kicks ass!
Hey, I thought you were getting the one with the reverse switch???? That one is just like mine. Cool, innit?
Nope. Decided on raw power. Your description of how it handles chicken bones tipped the balance. Serious piece of machinery. I am already casting about for other things to grind.
Ground up some chuck steak with some pancetta and made killer hamburgers the other night.
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What more can be said about the excellence of this place that hasn't already been said? Went there last PM with bergerka, Eric_Malson and a non-eGullet friend we're luring over to the dark side.
Now... I've been to C46 around four times. Couple times with Jason and FG and a couple times with FG. Not all that many times. And yet, the minute I walked into the place Cecil walked right up to me, said,"how are you, I haven't seen you here in a while" and took us right to the nice big table where we always seem to sit. As always, we were offered recommendations and sampled dishes not on the regular menu. Now, that's customer relations. There are plenty of "white tablecloth" places in Manhattan that could learn a lot from Cecil.
Since there were only four of us, we didn't get a chance to sample too many different things, and since it was the first time there for two of us, we wanted to have some of the "greatest hits" dishes. We started off with the spicy capsicum noodles. Delicious, slippery and nicely spicy. I hadn't really had any spicy food at C46 before, and this did not disappoint.
Then we had both kinds of soup dumplings (pork and crab & pork). Our friend, who is a regular at Joe's Shanghai in Elmhurst, declared C46's version an overall winner, although he liked the broth at Joe's a little better. Is the Elmhurst Joe's significantly less expensive than the one in Chinatown? Interestingly, he said that the soup dumplings were a little less expensive at Joe's Shanghai, which struck me as interesting because I am almost positive this is not the case where the Chinatown branch is concerned. They were, as always, excellent. We also got the "eGullet special," a nice platter of jiaozi and a saucer of raw garlic. These are great. Not to be missed. Should be on the menu.
Next we had the fish (flounder?) wrapped in tofu skin and fried, on Cecil's recommendation. Some of you who were at the Chinese New Year's party might remember this. I wasn't there, so this dish was a revelation. So light and crunchy. Perfect with a little vinegar.
After that came some pork anc cabbage stifried with rice cakes and some Sichuan peppercorn. I love this one. Simple and always delicious.
Finally we had the ruby roast pork. What a great dish! We finished the whole thing easily between the four of us.
Definitely one of the best Shanghaiese places around.
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The observed difference in the crust is 90% due to the difference in temperature, if not more. Grimaldi's says that their oven is at 850F, and I have to believe that it's even higher than that in early on in the cycle. Before they started doing pizze, they roasted an entire full sheet pan of red peppers stacked upright (around 2 cases of peppers) in around 2 minutes. You can see the peppers in my one shot of the oven:
In contrast, this brand new stainless gas-fired oven specifies a thermostat that goes up to a maximum of 650F, which means that the temperature is never expected to actually go that high. Given the age and general decrepitude of Di Fara's oven, and the time it takes to bake a pizza (which is longer than it takes me to do in my "Crapmaster 5000" residential stove), I would imagine the oven temperature there is closer to 500F.
There are certainly some small differences in the dough between the two pizzerie, undoubtedly optimized for the resources and philosophies of the respective pizzaioli. But fundamentally, they are starting with fairly similar doughs and I think the Di Fara dough would be very different were it baked in Grimaldi's oven.
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What's next on your top five list?
The "Big 5" are:
Di Fara (done)
Grimaldi's (done)
Lombardi's
Patsy's East Harlem
Totonno's Coney Island
So far, I think we seem to be in agreement that it would be more fun to wait until it's warmer to hit Totonno's, since that offers us the chance to explore Coney Island after lunch and maybe head over to Brighton Beach for a Russian dinner after working off the pizza. That leaves Lombardi's and Patsy's. I'm think it would be interesting to visit Patsy's next, because of the connection between Patsy's and Grimaldi's. But if someone really wants to do Lombardi's first, I'm hip to that too. Especially if we have someone who has been there a lot, knows the ropes and would be willing/able to lead the group like Joe did so ably with Grimaldi's.
Really, although I made the first post and have blabbered on about a few of my pet topics, I don't really want anyone to be "in charge" of this -- least of all me. That's why I like the idea of different people "sponsoring" the pizzerie with which they are familiar and think are worthy of note, and taking the lead in this thread by organizing a trip. Joe's experience at Grimaldi's really demonstrates how valuable it is to have the inside scoop. If I had been putting that trip together we might have gone at 2:00 or something, and the result would have been very different.
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Fascinating post--you articulated very well and with fascinating detail the reasons (most of which I guess I knew more subconsciously than consciously!) why I prefer pizza crusts from coal-fired ovens.
Thanks! Perhaps we can persuade you to join us for the next outing? Don't make me e-twist your virtual arm, now.
One project that might pique your coal oven interest is my thought of doing a "Patsy's tour" once we've hit the Big 5. I think it would be enlightening to start off at Patsy's in East Harlem to have just enough pizza for everyone to have one slice and then proceed directly to some of the other coal-oven Patsy's establishments, like the one on the UWS, for similar samplings. This way we could see how the quality of the pizza changes in less expert hands as well as which desirable elements of the "coal oven effect" are still apparent and to what extent, while keeping the technology and quality of ingredients more or less the same.
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Okay, I'll weigh in with my impressions and respond to a few points raised upthread.
We showed up at around 11:55 and Joe and I ducked our heads into the empty restaurant, upon doing which we were immediately greeted by a surly chorus of "we're not open yet" from a group assembled near the oven. After Joe explained who we were and that we had telephoned the previous day, they loosened up a little bit but no one made any overt effort to welcome us and show us around or anything (which I thought was a little odd, considering that the restaurant was empty and most of them were just standing around). Anyway, Joe was eventually able to engage one of them with some interesting questions about the oven and the coal, etc. Somewhere in there I snapped a picture of the oven and was told "no pictures of the oven" by the oven man. It was hard to tell whether this is a policy of the restaurant or whether the oven man just didn't want his picture taken. In any event, most everyone seemed in a distinctly unfriendly mood for 12:00 on a Sunday.
Right around that time Chris, the guy we were told would answer all our questions, showed up and began demonstrating a thorough disinterest in answering any questions or showing us around beyond a curt "if the oven man told you 'no' that means 'no.'" At that point, customers had begun to stream into the restaurant and, sensing that we had worn out our welcome, we retreated to our table. I guess that, to a certain extent, they are getting their comeuppance now that this attitude is described in the pages of a widely read food oriented web site.
While I don't think it's necessarily an excuse, since the comparison has been made, I think there are things that help explain the difference in attitude between Grimaldi's and Di Fara. While Di Fara is growing in reputation and becoming more widely known among Internet food-types and food writers, it is still fundamentally a small neighborhood place that does not attract a great deal of tourism, etc. Indeed, Di Fara is still relatively unknown among New Yorkers. Grimaldi's, on the other hand, has a reputation that is known much more widely. For example, Japanese tourists are frequently seen there laden with cameras and with guidebooks in hand. It's a much larger operation, and they bang out more pizza between 12:00 and 2:00 than Di Fara does in an entire day. What this means is that they undoubtedly have to deal with people who want to ask the same old questions and take their pictures and think they are deserving of some special attention on a daily basis. This kind of thing gets tiring awfully fast, and can definitely lead to a certain attitude -- especially when they know they don't have to rely on repeat customers to stay in business. In contrast, this kind of attention and inquiry is still a relatively rare occurance and a special surprise for Dom at Di Fara, who has also developed a personal style one would expect from someone who had cultivated the repeat business a neighborhood pizzeria needs to stay alive for so many years. Without a doubt, the atmosphere figures into the experience at Di Fara in a way that it is not at Grimaldi's.
Anyway, on to the pizza...
This pizza was closer to the way I prefer it, which is to say that it was mostly about the crust. Michael, Joe and I had a brief but interesting conversation about the different ways one can approach certain elemental foods like bread and pasta. For some people, pasta is mostly a vehicle for the sauce. They tend to prefer their pasta dishes with the sauce playing the primary role, and if there is a tasty sauce they would prefer to have plenty of it. For others, pasta is mostly about the pasta and the sauce is merely a condiment. This is not to say that the sauce isn't important, but rather that the most important thing is that one is able to taste the pasta itself. Needless to say, this second group tends to prefer a lot less sauce on their pasta. I definitely fall in the latter group, and this also happens to be the Italian aesthetic.
For me, the best pizza is all about the crust and the other toppings are there to complement the crust. In that sense, I felt that Grimaldi's pizza approached my own ideal in that the toppings were understated and few. As Joe pointed out, the sauce was little more than filetti di pomodoro, salt and a little evoo. No herbs, no garlic, no extras. The toppings were applied with a very moderate hand, and there was usually a nice expanse of unadorned crust around the edge -- my favorite part, as I remarked a number of times. What I really prefer, and what one finds in a good pizza Napulitana, is when the ingredients are applied so sparingly that there are expanses of bare crust throughout the pizza interspersed with a dab of tomato here, a piece of cheese there, a little sausage over there, etc. Michael remarked that he preferred a "tastier" pizza with a more emphatic flavor from the toppings, which puts him in the opposite camp from mine, but it's still a legitimate view to take. For me, as much as I enjoyed tasting the more extensively topped pizze we had (sausage and peppers, olives and onion), I felt that even the small addition of these ingredients tended to detract from the main event and the crust suffered somewhat in both execution and importance in the overall pizza. The plain margherita and the sausage pizze were, in my opinion, the stars of the afternoon.
While I am on the subject of crust, I'd like to point out one important benefit of a super hot, coal fired oven. If you look at the crust, you can see that the "oven spring" created by the hot oven floor "blew up" the little pockets of air in the dough at the same time it was crisping the bottom. This creates a small zone of flexible, extensible, soft crust between the crisp bottom and the toppings. The example below shows the edge of the crust where it is most apparent, but the same phenomenon is present throughout the crust to various degrees. Because the pizza cooks so quickly, this intermediate layer also retains a certain amount of moisture, which contributes to the morbidezza and flexibility of the crust. This is simply not possible in a gas oven. The pizza must cook a lot longer to achieve a crisp bottom, which means that most of the moisture is cooked out, and the lower temperature doesn't produce the same oven spring. The inevitable result is that that the intermediate layer is lacking, and along with it the contrast/complement effect of a pizza that is both crisp and soft, firm and flexible.
The other unique effect is the all-important char. For a crustophile like me, there is nothing like the smoky bitterness imparted by a slighty charred crust.
The ingredients are also cooked on the crust (i.e., the sausage is raw) by the intense heat, which causes their essential flavors to inhabit the entire pizza regardless of whether one is actually eating a bite of the olive, pepper or sausage.
For both of these things we have to thank Grimaldi's "sponsor" for this outing, Joe Bavuso. I was interested to see what the pizza would be like there, because I had heard a lot of mixed reviews about Grimaldi's -- especially about the crust, which some people said was great and others found fairly pedestrian. Well, as it turns out Joe learned something very important about Grimaldi's after going there a number of times: it's very important to go early while the oven is still really hot. As the lunch or dinner hour moves on the oven begins to give up its heat and the crusts start to suffer. Perhaps this has to do with their practice of firing the oven only half an hour before service and only stoking it significantly once a day, right before dinner? Or maybe the oven itself is simply not all that massive and doesn't hold all that much heat? Regardless, it would seem that it's crucial to go for an early lunch or dinner in order to catch the oven while it is still at maximum heat.
All in all this was a fun trip, and an interesting one. I think we should probably hit Patsy's in East Harlem next, since the two establishments are so closely linked (they even detail the lawsuit on the placemats!).
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I'm wondering, in contemplation of the "coal" comment. Is this lump charcoal, I assume it is.
Nope, it's the mined fossil fuel variety rather than coarcoal, which is made by burning wood in a low oxygen environment. Probably anthracite coal, as I assume bituminous would burn too dirty. They burn the stuff right in the oven where the pizze are made.
Ok, but..
this certainly needs more explanation. As most anthracite coal is mixed with different additives to make stuff like Kingsford, which never burns very hot.
I'll look around, but accept your explanation, for now.
The kind of coal they use in NYC coal-fired ovens is the exact same kind of coal people used to use to heat their houses. Big, shiny, black rocks the size of an extra-large russett potato. Looks like this It is definitely not charcoal.
According to The Clean Coal Technology Compendium, anthracite coal burns very hot.
[Anthracite coal is] a hard, black lustrous coal, often referred to as hard coal, containing a high percentage of fixed carbon and low percentage of volatile matter. coal, found deep in the earth. It burns very hot, with little flame. It usually has a heating value of 12,000-15,000 British thermal units (Btus) per pound. (Emphasis mine.) -
I'm wondering, in contemplation of the "coal" comment. Is this lump charcoal, I assume it is.
Nope, it's the mined fossil fuel variety rather than charcoal, which is made by burning wood in a low oxygen environment. Probably anthracite coal, as I assume bituminous would burn too dirty. They burn the stuff right in the oven where the pizze are made.
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We're running out to C46, so I'll post more detailed comments later. For now, some pictures:
Here's the oven. We were told "no pictures of the oven." Oh well...
Here is our "reference standard" plain cheese and tomato pizza:
Plenty of char on the underside:
Here is a look at the interior of the crust, showing the effect of a hot coal-fired oven:
Next was a sausage pizza:
A slice of sausage:
Roasted red peppers:
A slice with peppers:
An onion and olive pizza:
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In my opinion General Tso and other heavily sauced batter fried dishes are best eaten at the restaurant, not as takeout. They tend to steam up on the way to your house in those little containers and the fried coating gets soggy. You want it to be as crispy as possible. Theres a very short window of time in those containers when General Tso can be really good, and then becomes soggy mushy.
I totally agree. I had noticed that the GTC is usually really good in some of the Chinese places in my 'hood, and then will be awful when ordered as delivery from the same place. Of course, this means that I hardly if ever eat GTC, because I always order delivery unless I am going out to a special Chinese place like C46 or Grand Sichuan -- in which restaurants ordering GTC should be punishable by flogging.
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This is a really cool thread, guys. Not only for the interesting look into something we just don't have in the States, but also for things we don't hear much over on this side like this: "young luvvies and half-luvvies and friends of luvvies, listening to that rocky rolly music."
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Oh, hell yea! This grinder kicks ass!
Here it is from the side:
More:
A better look at the business end:
The grinding parts:
Tried it out for the first time last night... it blew through a whole chicken, bones and all, like it was a piece of Wonder Bread. So worth the money. To give an idea of how the experience differs from using the KA grinder attachment:
Before
- 8:00 - Cut up chicken. Take all meat off bones. Chop bones into small pieces. Set up KA with grinder attachment.
- 9:00 - Start grinding bones and move on to the meat. Stop every so often to clear grinder when it jams up. Stop several times to allow the KA to cool down. The bones must be double-ground. Sounds like this: grrrr grrrr grrrr grrrr grlrl grlrl grlrl grlrl... grlrl... rlrl... rl... <gonk> (then I have to clear the stuck grinder and start over).
- 10:30 - Start cooking the chicken and cleaning the grinder.
- 11:00 Get in argument with bergerka about how there are tiny bits of raw chicken strewn all over every surface of the kitchen. Put cooked chicken in metal refrigerator container.
- 11:30 Kitchen is now clean.
- 12:00 Go to sleep alone on couch in living room.
After
- 8:00 - Cut up chicken into large chunks. Whack pieces with heavy knife to break up bones. Set up grinder.
- 8:10 - Fire up grinder and start feeding through large pieces of chicken. Sounds like this: hummmmmmmmmmgerzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzoooooooooooooorchhummmmmmmmmm.
- 8:20 - Start cooking chicken. Take apart grinder and wash parts in sink.
- 8:40 - Put cooked chicken in metal refrigerator container. Wash Le Creuset cooking pot.
- 8:50 - Play with ferrets, etc.
- 8:00 - Cut up chicken. Take all meat off bones. Chop bones into small pieces. Set up KA with grinder attachment.
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This sounds very interesting. I'll definitely try to check it out.
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Casa Mono and Bar Jamon are reviewed in the March 01, 2004 issue of New York Magazine. A small excerpt:
If this doesn’t sound like any tapas meal you’ve ever had, that’s because the food at Casa Mono isn’t really tapas at all. It’s a canny variation on the currently fashionable trend toward smaller, more eclectic portions (nothing on the menu costs more than $15), and if you order like you’re at a tapas bar, you’ll soon hit a caloric brick wall. At least, that’s what happened to us when the coxcombs arrived at our table. The rooster tops were cooked to a kind of bouncy consistency and felt so eccentric, like deboned chicken feet, that I pushed them aside after a bite or two. The sweetbreads were much more palatable (they’re round, like giant chicken poppers, with a cooling mound of fennel on the side), and so were the mashed oxtails (stuffed in dainty piquillo peppers) and the tripe, which was mostly devoid of tripey taste and simmered with soft chickpeas and little wheels of spicy Morcilla sausage. -
Hmmmm... I wonder if we could get them to sell us a few racks of veal?
Absolutely . . . if I ever had a big dinner party and needed really good veal for a dozen people I'd consider putting in a call and making a pickup.
When you two get back, we're putting this idea to the test, my corpulent friend!
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alacarte, haven't you been to a real butcher shop? All butchers use a band saw these days... probably have done so for at least 50 years, if not longer.
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my preference when going to a french bistro/restaurant is that it have FRENCH people speaking french. it adds to the ambiance & general level of enjoyment & lends itself to some authenticity. the fact that jarnac is english-owned & run does NOT make it bad, but less of a "general" ambiance. this is a very subtle point, but hopefully u will comprehend.
This seems very strange to me, as there are plenty of excellent French restaurants that are not staffed nor overwhelmingly frequented by French people. I mean, whatever floats your boat, of course... but I certainly wouldn't make the presence of a bunch of French-speaking people a prerequisite for my enjoyment of a bistro in New York City.
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Dude... go easy on the eye of newt. Unless it's really fresh, it can add an astringent, bitter aftertaste.
Sous Vide: Recipes, Techniques & Equipment (Part 1)
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Well... it will have a different flavor is all. Sometimes you don't necessarily want that Maillard flavor, and might be going for something a little cleaner, fresher, greener. One can always, of course, brown the meat either before or after cooking sous vide.