slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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Interesting point, Stephen. It seems to me, however, that the alcohol fumes would not be particularly pronounced in a properly chilled and diluted cocktail.
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I keep vodka in the freezer just so it pours cold. There are experts here, though, who may have additional reasons.
It not just pours cold but the viscosity of the liquid changes at a lower tempature. This is for both gin and vodka, and ideal for doing shots.
FWIW, and interestingly enough, the viscosity and mouthfeel of many liquors also notably "thickens" upon the introduction of a small amount of water. I have observed this adding a bit of water to blended and single malt scotch, and also with martinis when they come out of the cocktail mixer (one argument, in my book, for not freezing the gin if it is for use in martinis).
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Is there a reason for the martini glass? Does a martini need to "breath" or is it purely aesthetic?
I think it is mostly aesthetic, although the stem does help prevent the warming of the drink somewhat (not that the conical design of the bowl confers an advantage in this regard over any other stemmed glass designs). Certainly it doesn't have anything to do with the oxidation of the drink, or anything of that nature. It is worthy of note that cocktail-era martini glasses were significantly smaller (50% or less) than the gigantic bathtubs employed today. This size not only made it possible to enjoy multiple cocktails without getting completely shitfaced in the process, but also helped to ensure that the drink would remain cold.
Also is Martini & Rossi a decent Vermouth? It is the most expensive brand my liquor store carries...($6)I'd say it is okay, but nothing special. If you can get Noilly Pratt, which sells for around the same price as M&R, you should go with that. Vya makes the only vermouth I think tastes good enough to drink on its own.
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russ mentioned high heat braising durng his Q&A. Anybody tried it?
Jim
Isn't that called boiling?
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Do you live anywhere near a "Chinatown?" I am usually able to find cut up pig's feet in Chinese butcher shops.
I'm sure you could use oxtails. My only caveat would be that you might want to start the oxtails several hours before putting in the potroast meat. Oxtails take forever before they start to give up their goodness and become tender. I personally find that potroast is best if it is only braised long enough to melt the connective tissue. If it goes much longer I find it overly dry and in need of a sauce as opposed to complemented by a sauce (this is one problem I have always had with the "leave it in the crock pot all day on low" method). This is especially true of pot roast cuts that don't have a great deal of internal fat.
Just braised some short ribs last weekend in the crock pot. They turned out awesome, and I simply sat them in a foil-wrapped pan in a warming oven while I strained/defatted/reduced the braising liquid and then mounted it with butter. Worked like a charm. Tons of flavor, nice consistency and mouthfeel.
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beef tendon + pig intestines, served cold
I want to have dinner at your house.
tell ya what, sam.
next time i'm in new york (actually, planning to see a friend november 1), you and kathleen/kathy/katherine/variant thereof can take me to chinatown and we can have all the intestines, tendons, etc. you want.
Sounds like a plan. Have you been to Grand Sichuan? They have awesome spicy beef tendon, and I bet they have an intestine or two on the menu. Wherever it is, we'll have to sneak in a few bottles of our latest infused vodkas, of course.
Oh... and you got it right the first time: Kathleen.
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beef tendon + pig intestines, served cold
I want to have dinner at your house.
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OK, raise your hand if you're heading to a store within the next 12 hours to buy some Pringles so you can light them on fire.
*raises hand*
These demonstrations were performed on a closed track by a trained driver. eGullet and slkinsey, inc. do not recommend using Pringles in a manner inconsistent with the manufacturer's instructions, and are not responsible for any property damage or bodily injury that may result from such use.
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How do the fat contents compare. My experience shows a simple formula: %fat + potato chip = good eats.
The scary thing about Pringles -- I have never been able to duplicate this with a normal potato chip -- is that you can hold a match to one, and it will catch on fire and burn like a little potato candle until there is nothing left.
Pray tell, why did you set a Pringle on fire?
To see if I could do it.
There has to be a lot of fat in something like that to burn like a candle. You can see the fat bubbling out of the burning Pringle like tar from a Russian cigarette.
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How do the fat contents compare. My experience shows a simple formula: %fat + potato chip = good eats.
The scary thing about Pringles -- I have never been able to duplicate this with a normal potato chip -- is that you can hold a match to one, and it will catch on fire and burn like a little potato candle until there is nothing left.
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The question about whether or not rice cookers "are worth it" is a relative question and old Usenet threads used to go on for days discussing the pros and cons, so excuse the length of my reply. In short, it's not at all necessary but it's very convenient.
Ah, good old rec.food.equipment!
Great class, Trillium! I have to try some of these now.
As an OT asside, I've "e-known" you for years, and always assumed "Trillium" was your handle. :d'oh!:
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My secret ingredient for fried rice has always been bacon fat.
Duck fat is pretty good too.
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Sam, what kind of music does that ferret like?
Oh, he's not much of a sophisticate, despite my efforts to expose him to canzoni Napulitani.
Usually he likes it best when I pick him up and sing something along the lines of: "whooooo is the dorkiest ferret of all? Zebulun... Zebulun" (repeat ad infinitum with other ridiculous words while tickling ferret's tummy).
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Matthew, I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill here because you think someone put down your musical preferences.
As I suggested before, I think he was making a comparison between "high" and "low" art/cooking/whatever -- and it seems an apt one. Whether or not you like Pearl Jam better than Chopin, there is no measure by which you can suggest that Chopin's music is not more complex, more nuanced, more subtle, more varied and with a richer and more developed tradition. That doesn't make Chopin's music better, but it does make it fundamentally different for people who care about such things. Similarly, it does seem to make sense to compare cooking on different levels such that high-fine dining and medium-fine dining are not evaluated on the same level. Furthermore, if one is going to consider things such as the degree of difficulty and the level of expertise it takes to produce such products, it makes sense to rank the "higher" things as "higher" on the scale, if one is going to use such a scale. And I think most people would agree that it's a lot more difficult to pull off a meal at ADNY or to write Rigoletto, and that the abovementioned qualities are more developed in these examples than at a taqueria or in a Pearl Jam song.
I note, by the way that Grimes did not say "Thai food can't grip the imagination the way French food can." What I think his example implied is: medium-fine dining is not able to grip the imagination the way high-fine dining can. And when he says that, he is saying it from the same perspective from which one would say the same thing about Chopin versus Pearl Jam... of course, it's only true for one who appreciates a certain complexity, nuance, subtlty, variation and rich, well-developed tradition. I don't think there can be any argument that there exists such a separation between restaurants such as Grocery and ADNY, nor do I think there can be any argument that such a separation exists between Chopin and Pearl Jam.
All this said, I think one should enjoy what one enjoys and not worry that someone else might be looking down their nose at it.
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In that case, Grimes is spending a slow news day rehashing an extremely old and correct argument against the Zagat method and throwing in offensive and lame analogies.
What, exactly, are the "offensive" analogies he employed? Are you seriously offended that he had the temerity to suggest a difference between the substance of Chopin and Pearl Jam?
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I couldn't possibly agree with Grimes less.
"Olympic diving might offer the best analogy. A perfect reverse somersault with one turn cannot earn as high a score as a perfect reverse somersault with two and a half turns. By the same token, the perfect three-minute pop song cannot grip the imagination and hold it the way a three-minute polonaise by Chopin can."
Pop music is my favorite thing in the world.
I think the comparison being made here is one of "high food" and "high art" versus "low food" and "low art" (or middle or whatever). In this sense, it is proper to associate Verdi with ADNY and Dave Matthews with Burritoville. This is not necessarily saying that Verdi and ADNY are intrinsically "better" than Dave Matthews and Burritoville -- sometimes a good burrito is exactly what you want -- but it does accurately reflect the different traditions, levels of complexity, etc.
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This is sounding just a wee bit elitist. So those of us who can afford a good restaurant are allowed to dine out, while those who can only afford BK should stay at home and cook instead? Even low income people (and I have been there) want a meal out occasionally. Perhaps we should be complaining about the lack of quality restaurants in the BK price range?
I don't quite uinderstand what you're getting at here. Who is saying this and how, exactly is it elitist?
I don't think anyone is suggesting that no one should ever go to BK. I think people are suggesting that going to BK five times a week because it's "cheaper than cooking" and "there is not enough time to cook at home" is a lame excuse. That is not quite the same thing as saying that low income people should never go out to eat. In fact, if most low income habitual BK patrons cooked as Steven has suggested, they could certainly save enough money on food to eat at a better place a few times a month (assuming that they have such a priority).
As for quality restaurants at the BK price level... this is exactly why people shouldn't go to BK and should instead support their local businesses. The sad thing is that quality local places (burger and other) with a similar convenience/price point still lose business to the BKs of the world, because of television advertising.
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Never and I mean never buy pre-cooked brats, obtain the fresh ones.
I'm afraid my palate must be hopelessly naive. I thought my precooked, broiled brats turned out pretty darn good.
I bet they did! But obtaining fresh brats next time will bring you one step closer to bratvana.
Ahh Grasshopper, when you can grab the brat from my hand, then you will be a master.
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The people of Alto Adige are Italian only because of war and politics. Their heart and souls are Austrian.
I have a map of Italy from ~1610. Very interesting -- especially up in the North.
Of course, most of Italy hasn't been "Italy" for all that long.
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I certainly appreciate the efforts some of you are going to for this product and I am not ridiculing you. I simply am trying to point out that your testing is nonconsequential. In fact when you come right down to it, wine tasting is nonconsequential.
I think it depends on what you mean by "testing." I would argue that a well-designed, controlled and analyzed test as to whether or not tasters can tell the difference between clipped wine and non clipped wine is not inconsequential or scientifically invalid -- some "hard" scientists' bias against perceptual psychology research notwithstanding.
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To test it via tasting, but using the standard controls and experimental design employed in studies involving qualitative perception. Again, the point of using a "placebo clip" on the non-clipped bottle is to establish as closely as possible that, if there is a statistically significant finding of a perceived difference in taste between clipped and non-clipped wine, it is due to an effect created by the magnets in the Wine Clip.
If you were going to really control for perception problems, some of your subjects should taste wines that both have a 'false' clip on them and some should taste wines that were both 'clipped' and you should let all of you subjects know ahead of time that all of these treatments are possible. Otherwise subjects will seek a difference between the two wines that you may incorrectly attribute to the clip, when it may be due to some other factor, or completely nonexistant.
Indeed. Hence the words "standard controls and experimental design employed in studies involving qualitative perception." Part of a good study, BTW, would be that each subject would compare multiple test pairs -- i.e., do 30 blind comparisons all with the same wine rather than using 3 wines and doing 1 comparison each.
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I understand the need for scientific proof on this for obvious reasons, especially if it prevents some unlucky rube from blowing $80.
Right. That's the exact point. The only reason I think it is important to test is because the claims as to how it works (i.e., the "power of magnets") does not make much sense to me from a scientific standpoint. If a company were marketing a special pourspout for wine that was designed to quickly aerate the wine as it was poured, and if that company claimed that their device made the wine taste different, I wouldn't give it the slightest thought. This is because the effect of aeration on wine is well understood. Furthermore, it would be quite easy for the company selling such a device to run an analysis and demonstrate conclusively that wine run through their device contained more dissolved oxygen than wine from a normal pour.
I do have one question though... Are you proposing to chemically analyze the test wines, or via tasting?To test it via tasting, but using the standard controls and experimental design employed in studies involving qualitative perception. Again, the point of using a "placebo clip" on the non-clipped bottle is to establish as closely as possible that, if there is a statistically significant finding of a perceived difference in taste between clipped and non-clipped wine, it is due to an effect created by the magnets in the Wine Clip.
If the perceptual experiment comes out in favor of the Wine Clip, then one can perhaps move on to attempting some kind of physical analysis... but at least it would be established that the magnets were doing something that effected the taste. Of course, another logical step would be to do evaluate the value of the Wine Clip by running another perceptual study looking at clipped wine versus regular wine swirled in the glass for 2 minutes.
In the interest of science, they cost $49.95, not $80. Mr. Wine Clip made a joke about the price going up, which I imagine it will after FG and Sam's experiment, but it is still $49.95 according their website.I didn't get the impression he was joking at all. Quite to the contrary, I got the impression he was dead serious.
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I tried this device in a totally unscientific setting with Mark last night. Present were several importers, a winemaker from Bordeaux, chefs, wine geeks, lots of cigarette smoke etc.
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For my palate, the wines were subtly different. Say what you want about scientific method, they were different...
Just for the sake of clarity... no one is necessarily saying that they aren't different -- although they are suggesting that they haven't been proven to be different from a scientific standpoint (to the extent that one believes that perceptual studies can "prove" anything).
But, assuming there is a difference for the moment, some question remains as to whether the difference is attributable to the magnetic device or other factors. One of the reasons to use a "placebo clip" in a controlled experiment is that it is possible the presence of significant chunk of metal around the neck of the bottle is subtly influencing the temperature of the wine or the way the wine is poured, etc. in ways that might influence the oxidation of the wine, etc. What this means is that one might be able to get an equivalent or similar effect by going to a hardware store, buying a two dollar length of black pipe and sliding that onto the neck of the bottle instead of an eighty dollar Wine Clip.
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As I have posted elsewhere, I am partial to Brilliant which goes for around 20 bucks a bottle.
I should add, although I imagine most everyone agrees with me, that it is only worth the money for "top shelf" vodka if it is going to be consumed by itself. If used for mixing, while I wouldn't recommend using Popov, using expensive vodka is a huge waste of money. As to whether or not any vodka is worth the kind of money one spends on single malt scotch (60 dollars?!)... that just seems crazy to me for a beverage that is supposed to taste as much as possible like nothing.
eG Foodblog: herbacidal - pushed grudgingly into service
in Food Traditions & Culture
Posted
What I like even more is to just buy fancy creamline milk. That way the anti-fat people can pour skim and the rest of us can have a little fat in our milk. I, of course, derive great pleasure from pointing out that full fat milk is still only 4%, and that they're getting a lot more fat from one pat of butter than they do from an entire cereal bowl of milk. You have to drink a LOT of milk before skim versus whole makes a significant difference in your fat/calorie intake.
Another thing I like about creamline milk is that I find it tastes creamier than homogenized whole milk and yet feels lighter at the same time. This, I think, has something to do with the smaller size of the fat particles in homogenized milk and the fact that the homogenization process acts to thicken the milk slightly.