slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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You mean she's not a fat male detective who never leaves the house?
Damn me for typing too fast, though. You leave out one "s" and it changes everything. Sigh...
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hee hee hee! I can hardly wait until you have to do something like: taste one tablespoon each of extra virgin olive oil, virgin olive oil, pomace oil, peanut oil, canola oil, corn oil, vegetable oil and sunflower seed oil.
What's pomace oil?
Pomace oil is the lowest grade of olive oil. From this site:
Virgin Olive OilsVirgin olive oil is obtained from the fruit of the olive tree by mechanical or other physical means that do not lead to deterioration of the oil. It does not undergo any treatment other than washing, decantation, centrifugation, and filtration.
Two grades of virgin olive oil are available to retail consumers:
Extra Virgin Olive Oil: This is the fruity oil obtained from healthy, fresh green or ripe olives. How fruity it is depends on the variety and ripeness of the olives. This fruitiness can be perceived through both flavor and aroma. Extra virgin olive oil has no smell or taste defects.
Virgin Olive Oil: This oil has only the slightest taste and smell defects. When measured by professional tasters, the intensity of the defects must not be over a specified level. It must be perceptibly fruity.
[Non-Virgin Olive Oils]
Olive Oil: This is the name given to the blend of refined olive oil and virgin olive oil; the proportion of each depends on consumer tastes. Virgin olive oil is added to the refined oil to restore flavor, aroma, color and antioxidants that are lost during refining.
Olive-Pomace Oil: This is the name given to the oil obtained by using solvents to extract the residual oil from the olive mash (olive pomace) that is left after producing virgin olive oil. It is then refined and blended with varying proportions of virgin olive oil.
I'd say the others, with the exception of EVOO and OO would probably have kind of a neutral taste....right?Oh, I don't know... I imagine peanut oil and corn oil and canola oil taste fairly different. Certainly more neutral than the various olive oils, of course.
The whole thing is a joke, of course. Tasting a tablespoon of all those oils would mean that she was drinking a half cup of oil. Probably would result in some fairly spectacular gastrointestinal effects, I am guessing.
(edit: make sure the "s" key depresses all the way)
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Their espresso tastes like ass. That's why I don't like them.
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For those of you who can read Italian, the true bible of Italian regional cooking is "LE RICETTE REGIONALI ITALIANE" by Anna Gosetti della Salda, ed. Solares.
This book is famous in Italy, and has been reprinted many times from its first edition, about 30 years ago.
Anyone have an ISBN number or possible purchase information for this? Is there a current Italian edition in print?
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Seriously, though... That constant tasting and whatnot must give you a stomach of lead. Or do you find that you need to keep a supply of Gaviscon and Immodium at the ready?
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What are your thoughts about organizing a menu around a central theme?
I, for example, like the idea of "a journey through the fifth quarter." Perhaps starting with tripe in tomato sauce, then some chicken liver quenelles in broth, then some rigatoni with intestines and mint, then maybe a few pieces of head cheese with a tart little salad, then sauteed sweetbreads... That kind of thing.
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hee hee hee! I can hardly wait until you have to do something like: taste one tablespoon each of extra virgin olive oil, virgin olive oil, pomace oil, peanut oil, canola oil, corn oil, vegetable oil and sunflower seed oil.
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Found a better one *I think*, but I have a stone from pamperedchef and love that. I would love one of those hearth inserts.
Here is the hearth if you really want to spend some bucks!
Much better and cheaper to go to your local purveyor of building stone and get a piece of one inch thick soapstone custom cut slightly smaller than the size of your oven floor.
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Perhaps we could have a second part - a practical examples section, where you go through "typical" uses of cookware, and then your reasoning for choosing a particular size, shape, material, brand, etc. How much higher end cookware would make a difference. What your ideal pan would be given no budget constraints.
That's an interesting idea, but perhaps a little outside the scope of this kind of article. Do do such a survey in any kind of meaningfully comprehensive way would require an article of a length that might make Chad's knife sharpening epic look short. That said, I am happy to answer any such questions here in the Q&A.
I am also reluctant to make specific brand recommendations in the body of an article, because the idea is that I am trying to convince people I am unbiased. Most of the time there is no clear cut winner anyway, as many things come down to style and personal preference. In these informal Q&As, however, I am much more free to answer questions as to my own personal brand preferences and recommendations. 90% of the time, my personal pan of preference would be heavy copper with an interior lining of stainless steel if cost were not a consideration. My dream pan, however, would probably be 2.5 mm of copper with .2 mm of brushed stainless steel on the inside and the outside, and a solid cast stainless steel handle. This would offer the thermal benefits of straight gauge heavy copper, but would be dishwasher-safe.
As for how much difference high end cookware makes... that is a very tough one to answer. All great cookware does is make the job easier. It doesn't really make the result better. To make an example, I have little doubt that Jean Georges Vongerichten could make a much better meal using a crap stove and cheap thin stainless cookware than I could do with stainless lined heavy copper and a restaurant stove. To make another example, using a Falk Culinair sauciere does make it easier to make a Hollandaise over direct heat without fear and with great control. But, you can make one that is just as good using a "double boiler" made from a cheap stainless saucepan filled with barely simmering water and a cheap stainless mixing bowl on top. In general, as with all things, the differences become smaller and smaller the higher the price point gets. There is a huge jump up in performance characteristics from a 15 dollar stainless saute pan and a 65 dollar Sitram Profisserie saute pan. The jump from the Sitram Profisserie saute pan up to a Falk Culinair saute pan at 235 bucks? Not nearly as big.
For example, sauteeing 2 chicken breasts, then making a simple pan reduction sauce.So, let's have a go at this one. The first thing to understand is that we really don't saute chicken breasts. If you refer back to my description of the saute pan, you will see that the French verb "sauter" means "to jump." When we saute, we have a number of small items in a pan over high heat, and the pan is constantly agitated in order to jump the ingredients around and expose every side of the ingredients to the heat. The straight, relatively tall sides of the saute pan help to bounce food around back into the pan. You don't really need to "toss" or "flip" the ingredients to saute either. All you need to do is simply shake the pan back and forth vigorously on the burner. My impression is that home cooks don't tend to do all that much real sauteing.
Sauteing is, then, something you might do with chunks of chicken breast, but not with whole chicken breasts. Whole or flattened chicken breasts just sit there in the pan and fry. Fundamentally there is no reason you shouldn't use a fry pan to do this. Among other things, it will be much easier to get a spatula under the food when it needs to be turned if it is in a fry pan. As for the pan sauce, if all you are going to be doing is deglazing with a little white wine and maybe swirling in a little butter there is no reason you couldn't do this right in the fry pan. I'd recommend a nice heavy fry pan.
But, let's take a slightly different approach and see how that changes the pan requirements. Let's say we want to fry some chicken thighs until they are nice and brown together whith some small onions then add some white wine to the pan and quickly braise/steam the chicken until it is cooked through, at which point the solid ingredients will be removed and the liquid will be reduced and mounted with butter to form the sauce. In this case, a saute pan would be much better -- even though you are not sauteing -- because the higher sides and the lid make it a better environment for the quick braise and subsequent reduction part.
It seems that the only way for a lot of us to learn about the best values in cookware is not by trying, but by word-of-mouth on the Internet. (I also read Cook's Illustrated/Fine Cooking, and when they rate cookware they never mention the brands you cite). So perhaps a FAQ which codifies information about good cookware brands would be extremely useful. Thanks.The Internet and places like eGullet can be a great place to gather information. Now that you are among the cultural elite that is the eGullet membership, you know about cookware makers like Sitram, Paderno, De Buyer, Falk Culinair, Mauviel, Demeyere, Staub, Chasseur, Griswold and so on. My only advice is to beware people who are dogmatic about a certain brand of cookware being "the best." If someone has a collection of nothing but All-Clad Stainless and Le Creuset, there is a very good chance that he/she is heavily invested in the marketing hype that these brands represent the best cookware available. I got into a fun debate with a guy on Usenet several years ago who insisted that Demeyere was the best cookware available because "it says so right here in their brochure." There are also some interesting books that are worthwhile checking out. The Well Tooled Kitchen by Fred Bridge, the ledendary owner of Bridge Kitchenware, is a great reference book and the classic one, IMO. There are also interesting books here, here and here. But also, as I hoped my article explained a bit, an understanding of the materials used and the properties of those materials can really inform your choices. A lot of the time, you can get the cookware company to give you some of their materials specifications. For example, until someone from rec.food.equipment emailed All-Clad and posted the information, I had no idea that the Stainless line had so much less aluminum than the MasterChef line -- never mind that I was previously going on my best guess as to how much aluminum there was in any of their lines. This kind of information can be very valuable.
I hope this answers your questions somewhat. Please post again if there is any clarification I can offer.
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I've owned a George Tichbourne K6 chef's knife. It was wonderful but so big that it frightened my children. No, I'm not kidding. I ended up selling it to another knife collector/cook. Definitely worth taking a look at, though.
The K14 looks very interesting as a knife that woulldn't duplicate what I already have. Do you have any thoughts/experiences/reviews to relate about this one?
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Thanks for the info, Chad. I do have some knives (cast dendridic steel) that I want to keep nice-looking...
Mmmm, must be David Boye's dendtritic 440c -- very, very nice knives.
He cast the blade blanks, but another knifemaker finished them off and did the handles, etc. Super sweet knives. Very toothy, aggressive edge and it takes them forever to go dull. When I became interested in these knives, the maker sent me a sample to play with and suggested I sharpen it up and compare it to my other knives by seeing how many slices I could take from a 1 inch hemp rope until it became too dull to be effective. The dendridic knife held its edge twice as long as the others (the usual Solingen suspects plus a few others) and I eventually gave up before I was able to dull the blade.
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Thanks for the info, Chad. I do have some knives (cast dendridic steel) that I want to keep nice-looking, so I usually just put a strip of clear packing tape on each side of the blade and cut off the excess.
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I am rather of the opinion that Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is the one essential book no kitchen should be without. After that, it varies depending on taste and the regional cooking that interests you. As far as I know, there is no book that goes through all the regions comprehensively explaining why the cooking has evolved the way it has (what the agriculture and resources are like, levels of affluence, etc.) and giving representative examples of the most classic recipes from each region. The few books that I have seen which do claim to make such a comprehensive survey still focus the vast majority of their material on the few best-known regions at the expense of others. I have spent a lot of time in Le Marche, so it is always a dead give-away when a cookbook lumps Le Marche together with Umbria and Toscana or Abruzzi. If anyone is aware of a book (in English or translated into English) that actually does a good job of this, I would be interested to know about it.
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Is it possible to post photos or perhaps a link to a short video clip showing the actual sharpening motions?
I don't want to put words in Chad's mouth here, but this would be extremely difficult to do as there are a number of different sharpening systems. What you might be able to glean from watching Chad use, say, the Edge Pro system would not really help you if you were using crock sticks or wanted to sharpen freehand, etc.
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Chad, one thing I was curious about... would you consider the "stones" in the Edge Pro set to be "waterstones" per your descriptionm, or do you suggest they be used dry?
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...saute with much butter, finish with cream...
That's cheating! Isn't this good advice for how to cook just about anything?
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Yikes! I dropped a small scalpel-like knife years ago and it ended up sticking straight out of the big toe knuckle on my left foot (I was barefoot at the time). Still have a funny indented scar there.
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Blanch it in salted boiling water for a minute or two. Shock in cold salted water. Squeeze out the excess moisture and roughly chop it together with a lot of fresh mint. Saute in evoo with thin slivers of garlic, adding a generous amount of crushed red pepper just at the end. Serve with grilled meat, fish or poultry of any kind.
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... However: her cautionary tale serves to underline what I said about never taking your eyes off your knife blade while it is in motion. To do so is to practically guarantee an injury...
Yes, my point exactly. Try not to let yourself get distracted. Your flesh is much softer than most of the other things you chop!
Unless you happen to be chopping up a bunch of fingers, of course.
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I want a 100 pound soapstone.
Dude. Go for it. They're not all that expensive and it makes a huge difference. I got the idea on rec.food.sourdough back in my sourdough idealogue days.
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Yes. Thank you, Tommy.
I would like to point out a few things, and then I am going to absent myself from this conversation:
1. I have never said that "tourists are ruining Babbo" or that "people who were not from NYC are not qualified to eat at Babbo." In fact, I have quite clearly explained several times that this is precisely not what I have been saying. If certain participants on this thread decide that they want to deliberately interpret my remarks as having that meaning, there is nothing I can do about that. I have clarified my thoughts to the point where I think they would be clear to any reasonably intelligent person reading with an unbiased eye (never mind the charity to give me the benefit of taking me at my word when I explain myself).
2. What did do was speculate about whether the recent huge increase in visitors to Babbo who came to the restaurant with different sets of cultural expectations than typical NYC high-end restaurant-goers might explain part of the observed increase in complaints. The fact that New York City culture -- which is to say "the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits characteristic of that place" -- is different from mainstream medium-to-small town Midwest culture (or West Coast culture or Southwest culture or Deep South culture or Sri Lankan culture, etc.) is quite clear. It is, frankly, ridiculous to suggest otherwise. It also seems to me quite naive to assert that cultural differences don't or can't ever play a part in a customer's satisfaction at a restaurant. I see this happening all the time with Americans in European restaurants.
3. As Tommy surmises, I am not going to apologise for my remarks. I don't think there is anything wrong with what I said or with what I intended to say. That said, I am sorry and disappointed that certain people have chosen to interpret my remarks as having a different meaning and underlying motivation. Perhaps there is some history there of which I am not aware, but I really don't care. I don't think there is anything in my history here that would suggest that I share the sentiments that have been ascribed to me by these individuals. At this point all I can do is decline further interaction or discussion with these individuals and abstain from future participation on this thread -- and that is what I will do.
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Bravo Felonius, that's a great post
I agree. And please, slkinsey STOP, STOP, STOP, ENOUGH ALREADY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You should be ashamed. When you have had a few people on these boards publicly accuse you of slandering 90% of the American population when such was not your intent, then you can lecture me on whether or not I should be ashamed. Until then, please keep it to yourself.
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For me, my charitable interpretation of what you're saying is this:
"Tourists" are ruining Babbo because they don't understand the social etiquette of Babbo (i.e., the social etiquette of eating out at finer dining establishments.)
If I'm misunderstanding you, please help me along.
Yes. If that is what you think, then you are totally and completely misunderstanding me. What I was saying was that I thought certain cultural differences, certain expectations that are by and large different for most out of town visitors to NYC than they are for NYC high-end restaurant habitues might, in part, explain the rise in the number of complaints about Babbo.
Let me give one example completely removed from restaurants: In New York City supermarkets, we don't tend to talk to the checkout people, and they don't talk to us. It is quite common that the only word that is exchanged between the cashier and the purchaser is the price of the groceries. We like it this way. It's efficient and we get out of there as quickly as possible. On the other hand, in Texas is is quite common for customers to chat a bit with the cashier -- to chat with the cashier to the extent that it takes you just a little bit longer to go through the checkout line. In Texas, this is all part of being polite. Now, let's say that one of our Texans is in a New York grocery store. He expects that the cashier will chat with him. But she doesn't. In fact, she doesn't particularly respond to the Texan's overtures to engage in banter. Our Texan is angry now! That cashier was rude to him! He writes an angry letter to the manager of the grodery store, and posts on eGrocery about how much the customer service must be slipping at Fairway because he had a simply awful experience where the cashier was unbelievable surly to him.
Do you see what happened? The cashier was not, in fact, rude to the Texan. The cashier acted in a way that is perfectly fine for a New York City grocery store. The fact that the Texan had a bad experience was due to cultural differences between the Texan's understanding of what is expected at a grocery store, which is based on his experience in grocery stores in Texas, and the New York City grocery store culture, which is completely different. More to the point, neither one of them is right or wrong or better or worse. They are just different.
I never said that one was better in the other. That was all read into my posts by other people. The closest thing I said to that was that I thought NYC people tended to behave (and I used this in the general sense, which includes reactions, perceptions, etc.) more appropriately in NYC restaurants. If you understand the foregoing, this hardly seems like a radical statement. And, as I said numerous times, one could say the same of New Yorkers in other environments.
Do you see how similar situations might arise when someone from a different part of the country, with a different set of expectations as to dress, modes of interaction, etc. and who has perhaps never been to a fine dining establishment goes to a high end New York City restaurant like Babbo? I can. And I've seen it happen plenty of times. I have also seen similar things happen with people from the Northeast in Southern barbeque places, etc. It's no big deal. Gosh, people tend to have cultural paradigms that are formed largely by the culture around them. What a revelation! Sometimes issues arise when people with certain cultural paradigms find themselves in settings that do not share those paradigms. What?! Tar and feather the guy who said that!
Now... I ask you, does that seem like I'm calling everyone in the Midwest a slack-jawed yokel?
Now "tourist" still comes across as perhaps unnecessarily pejorative but I'm looking for some shorthand. Perhaps someone has a better term?In my usage, it means someone who doesn't live here who comes to visit. Period. Nothing pejorative about it whatsoever.
I'd prefer to term the "differences" as social rather than cultural. That's another issue, but if we need to pursue it, we can do so. I'll use social differences for now.In my usage, they are the same thing. I'm not using it in the "high culture versus low culture" sense, but in the social science "American culture versus Elbonian culture" sense. 5b and c here.
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As for some of the cultural differences -- keeping in mind that they do not necessarily apply to you and other people on eGullet, nor do they all necessarily apply to all people from the Midwest -- here are some examples:
- The dress in NYC tends to be much more formal than other parts of the country.
Not sure if this is a generalization (wouldn't want that now, would we?
) but in my experience, the Northeast (Boston, NYC, Washington, Philly) is more formal in dress than the West coast, or Denver and Austin, to name two states in the middle that we've spent a lot of time in. Washington DC is a very formal town. Men go to nightclubs wearing ties, ferchrissakes. I have always percieved NYC to be far more casual than where I'm from. You fucking snobby DC people! Always calling us New Yorkers shitkickers and yokels! How dare you make a comparison?!
Oh, wait...
Staryucks
in Ready to Eat
Posted
Any ass worth having costs a lot more than four bucks.
Not to mention that I don't know too many people who would want theirs described as "grande."