slkinsey
-
Posts
11,151 -
Joined
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Store
Help Articles
Posts posted by slkinsey
-
-
At a seminar I attended a couple of years ago, Dale DeGroff taught a "tasting" technique that really opened my eyes. We had seven different bottlings to taste, each represented by a half-ounce pour in a small plastic cup, and when I took my seat, I was sure that I was in for palate fatigue, gustatory confusion and slight inebriation. Here's what he told us to do: put your nose and mouth over the sample and breathe through your mouth.
Unless you clamp your nose, you'll still get significant sensory input, and you won't burn your nose hairs with the alcohol. It also gives your tongue a small dose of ethanol, so it gets gently tempered for the onslaught to come. What that means is that you don't need to ingest so much alcohol to register the differences in brands, ages, etc. (It also reminds you how much aroma matters.) The only improvement I could suggest is a piece of paper with a checklist for each spirit, so students can note their impressions immediately; I'd include common descriptors and a few blank lines.
Humans are actually unique in the extent to which we experience retronasal olfaction while eating. This means, more or less, that while we are chewing, scent molecules work their way backwards up into the nasal area and thence to the main olfactory receptors. This is the main reason why, for example, humans savor their food and eat slowly compared to, say, dogs -- and why our appreciation of flavor (note I didn't say "taste") is more important to us.
-
A mojito criollo has cracked or crushed ice. That's the only real difference afaik.
Eben is making a mojito criollo in his video. IMO his iteration could probably use some swizzling to blend the ingredients.
-
I've had good luck using a crappy glass vase to hold the cleaning solution. Couldn't be more than 1.5 liters. All you need is something large enough to contain the apparatus of the circulator. It's worth noting that you can re-use the CLR solution.
-
Mojito Criollo, I'd say.
-
Patsy's, IMO, is not a slice shop. With an oven that hot, I don't see how you could double-bake a pizza without burning it unless it was deliberately undercooked.
But you should be able to order a whole pie to go that's as good as what they serve in the restaurant, no? Especially if you eat it the minute you get into the car.
Yea, I suppose. Although I will say that I have never had a pizza from anyone that has been as good after steaming in a box for 5 minutes or more as it was out of the oven, onto a platter and directly to the table. Patsy's pizza, in particular, seems especially time-dependent (probably because it's so thin). Even in the restaurant, after 10 or 12 minutes, it's not what it was when it first came to the table.
-
Patsy's, IMO, is not a slice shop. With an oven that hot, I don't see how you could double-bake a pizza without burning it unless it was deliberately undercooked.
-
-
The same problem doesn't occur with the next cocktail, the Jack Rose, which I think actually works with 2 oz applejack, 1 oz lemon, 1/2 oz grenadine. (Again, I like 'em tart.) So why this outlier?
I rather suspect that he didn't actually drink a lot of these drinks, and so simply stuck with his ratios throughout. The entire section on Sours is rife with unbalanced cocktails. For example, the Appendicitis De Luxe, consisting of 8 parts gin, 2 parts lemon juice and 1 part Grand Marnier. Things such as the basic sours made with 3:1 simple syrup or equally saturated grenadine work out fine. Everything calling for liqueur to balance citrus is a mess.
ETA: Very strangely, as my drink warmed during the above writing, it improved. Go figure.Our perception of sweetness is inhibited at cold temperatures.
-
Well, either way, I agree that a "solvent-like" smell is a flaw.
-
A lot of people like to use everclear for infusions, tinctures, and liqueurs.
The smell of highly refined alcohol is a flaw to me and I feel like I can detect it in just about any infusion or liqueur.
I think the problem with something like Everclear (and other high proof grain alcohol brands) is not so much that they are high proof but that they are high proof but not highly refined/purified/rectified/whatever you want to call it. As a result, there is a fair amount of other stuff in there besides just ethyl alcohol. I know people who have had good luck "home refining" high proof grain alcohol by filtering it through activated charcoal. This seems to do quite a bit to strip out the objectionable impurities.
I'm curious: Do you get this same flawed smell in, for example, gin? Because just about every gin starts off with 96% alcohol, and even the final distillation is likely to go up to around 85% alcohol.
-
Think about this: How could it possibly be true? Some smoked rib recipes call for pre-boiling the ribs before they even go in the smoker (taking the temperature well over 140F) and yet they turn out plenty smoky.
-
I think with carbon steel you can season it in the manner of cast iron, but you don't have to. My carbon steel frypan is seasoned cast-iron style, but my carbon steel crêpe pan has never wanted to season up this way, and does better if I scour it before use and simply preheat with plenty of oil and wipe down before use.
-
Out of curiosity I checked the Vollrath website for aluminum seasoning instructions, and Vollrath would seem to be the source for the instructions on the Globe Equipment site. Click here to download a PDF from Vollrath--
Right. And I note that they also recommend a similar "seasoning" procedure for stainless steel. Which no one does. In fact, they seem to recommend seasoning of every uncoated metal.
The other question is, do you want this [seasoning]? A seasoned surface, in my opinion, gives you a more specialized pan. It's great for eggs; it's handy for fish and other delicate protein if you want to be lazy with technique; but otherwise it just gets in the way. It retains and transfers strong flavors, it can discolor light colored sauces, and the dark surface makes it harder to tell how browned your pan drippings are.There is also the problem that the seasoning will burn above a certain temperature, further limiting the utility of the pan.
-
Right. It's mostly in the drinks where the sweetness comes from liqueur that it starts getting ridiculous.
-
Just so.
And also note from Dave's Esquire column that the bitters are not dashed on at the top for a layered effect, nor is the mint muddled.
Neither of these techniques is employed in this more historical recipe either, which I note calls for "dark rum."
KD1191, I was around when swizzlemania was running through the NYC bars and everyone was making them (which, of course, wasn't all that long ago). I daresay I was drinking swizzles when the whole layered effect thing caught on. Certainly it's not the case that everyone was making them layered even as recently as 5 years ago, whereas now it seems to be common practice. Of course, we should be mindful of the fact that the high-end cocktailian community was very small at that time, and still continues branch from only a few broadly interconnected trees. Toby Maloney, for example, was one of the first bartenders I knew who made layered swizzles. Lo and behold, Toby worked at Milk & Honey and Pegu Club and any number of other important cocktail bars. Lo and behold again, Toby has been sprouting up bars all across America, including places like Chicago and Minneapolis and Nashville. Lo and behold, there has been a lot of cross-talk and inspiration and influence between NYC cocktailian bartenders and Seattle cocktailian bartenders. Lo and behold, lots of the 'tenders in Los Angeles have come from or been heavily influenced by people from NYC and Seattle. Understanding this, it shouldn't be a surprise that the layered presentation caught on. Look how fast the Last Word made its way from Zig Zag to eGullet to Pegu Club and then throughout the cocktailian community.
Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with making a QPS, or indeed any kind of swizzle, with a layered effect. It looks cool. But I hesitate to say that it's necessary, and I don't advocate making compromises as to ingredients in service of a layered effect. This goes back to my original comment, which is that I don't think it's a good idea to use a white, Cuban-style rum in a QPS simply because it makes the layered effect look better. Is it a good drink? Probably. But replacing demerara rum with white Cuban-style rum in a QPS is like replacing bonded rye whiskey with white dog in a Manhattan. And I think we would agree that vermouth and white dog would not be a Manhattan.
I also think it's meaningfully incorrect and not particularly understanding of the tradition to suggest that the main utility of swizzling is the facilitation of layering effects -- especially in consideration of the fact that people have been swizzling drinks for far longer than the layered effects have been in vogue. Indeed, one of the most common swizzling techniques I have seen involves spinning the swizzle stick back and forth while simultaneously plunging it up and down in the glass.
-
Another possibility is perhaps something like: Aluminum becomes seasoned over time, as it's used repeatedly for cooking. This seasoning, which does not necessarily appear as black or brown but is more along the lines of a sealant, makes the pan less reactive, gives better release properties, etc. A well-seasoned aluminum pan can be used for tomato sauce, berry sauce, et al., no problem. One way to season aluminum is to cook in it over a period of years. The other way is to do what Lincoln Smallwares and Globe Equipment say to do and then rub the brown stuff off with elbow grease but without abrasive scouring.
On a purely chemical basis, reinforced by the appearance of the Beacon pans, this does not seem likely. At the very least, there is no possibility that the "seasoning over time" which you postulate would be the same kind of seasoning which your pretreatment seeks to establish or which is what we commonly think of as seasoning with respect to cast iron (i.e., selective oxidation of iron to magnetite, and the buildup of successive layers of polymerized fat and carbon). There is no way to get that kind of "seasoning" without the dark color. Perhaps there is some enhanced formation of the aluminum oxide layer that can happen over time. That's more difficult to say. Or, of course, it could all just be restaurant mythology and there is no difference.
A good reactivity test for cookware is to melt some butter in the pan and crush some garlic directly into the butter. Often times in reactive pans, the garlic will take on a slight blue-green color. This is actually from copper, and not aluminum, but most aluminum alloys contain copper. It's not a foolproof test, by any means, because the alloy may not contain any copper. But it's one way to look at it.
A well applied seasoning can handle almost any scrubbing you throw at it. I'd stop short of steel wool or ajax.I don't entirely agree with this. The durability of polymerized fat seasoning is greatly dependent on the hardness of the metal underneath it. Iron is quite hard, and as a result the seasoning on cast iron is durable. Aluminum and carbon steel, on the other hand, are quite soft. Since it is still quite easy to scratch or dent an aluminum or carbon steel pan right through a layer of polymerized fat, it is therefore not nearly as difficult to scour away that layer of polymerized fat (along with a bit of the aluminum underneath). I have easily removed well-established (and in some cases decades-old) seasoning from a carbon steel pan and also from an aluminum broiling pan using nothing more than a Scotch Brite or SOS pad and a bit of elbow grease. This would not be possible with cast iron.
-
Right. Note that this looks nothing like the pans in the pictures from Beacon.
I wouldn't say it looks nothing like them. It's just that the discoloration is much more pronounced. Probably if I scrub harder, or with the next level up of scrubbing sponge, it will look more like this, where the discoloration is less overt but the pan still looks quite different from a new one:
[image snipped]
I think those pan surfaces look radically and fundamentally different. Have a look:
Your pan clearly shows the beginnings of built-up polymerized fat. This is what we would see on a carbon steel pan or, were it not for the color of the iron, a cast iron pan in the early stages of the "seasoning" process. The pan from Beacon just doesn't show any evidence of any polymerized fat whatsoever, except perhaps for the carbonized scunge built up around the rivets. The difference between your pan out of the box and the Beacon pan is that your pan is shiny, unscratched and flat, whereas the Beacon pan is scratched, dull and warped (which is clear when you see the two pans side-by-side).
Yes, it's true that if you get a hard abrasive and scrub away all of the polymerized fat from your aluminum frypan you might have something that looked like the Beacon pan, but you'd get that without building up the polymerized fat in the first place.
What the Beacon pan looks like to me is similar to the grooved "steak broiling pan" my parents have had for around 50 years. It's made of thick aluminum and shaped to fit inside a larger wooden serving platter. I'm sure everyone has seen one. It's scrubbed clean with a hard abrasive every time it's used. I'd be willing to bet that the guys in the Beacon kitchen scrub out their aluminum frypans too.
For your experiment, I think it was worthwhile to follow the instructions and season the pan. But I think it's pretty clear that this is not the condition in which these pans are ever really used. So now it's scouring away the seasoning and starting over.
-
In general, I find Embury more useful for the path and method of exploration it suggests than for any of the specific recipes, most of which I think are not very good in the ratios he suggests.
-
Right. Note that this looks nothing like the pans in the pictures from Beacon.
-
Steven: I think that "filling in the holes" and whatnot is pretty much exactly what you get. You do the same thing with carbon steel as well. And it's important to understand that you have to do this more or less every time you use the pan, if the pan was cleaned in between uses.
I have a heavy gauge carbon steel frypan at around that same size you could add to the frypan comparison matrix.
-
There are many kinds of "seasoning." When we speak of "seasoning" cast iron, we speak of selectively oxidizing the surface into magnetite (black iron oxide instead of rust) and building-up layers of polymerized fat mixed with carbon.
One potentially can season most any cookware this way, although it appears to be more difficult to get this kind of seasoning to adhere to certain base materials than others, and of course the oxidized . For example, it is not difficult to remove the seasoning from a carbon steel (aka blue steel, aka black steel, aka French steel, aka mild steel) using a scouring pad. This is perhaps because carbon steel is much softer than cast iron. Aluminum is softer still, and whatever "cast-iron type" seasoning one can build up on aluminum appears to be even less durable and persistent.
It sees quite clear to me that aluminum cookware is not typically seasoned in the manner of cast iron. Look at the pictures from Beacon. Do those look seasoned? They don't look seasoned to me. I don't see any ten years worth of built-up polymerized fat. What I see is the somewhat dull finish I would associate with oxidized aluminum. On everything except for the frypan, which looks fairly shiny to me -- and which I assume is of considerably newer provenance than the other pieces (large frypans are the most notorious warpers).
Considering that these pans are being washed any times a day, I think we can dispense with the idea that they are "seasoned" in the same sense that we consider cast iron to be "seasoned." Even if it were true, it's not the case that the seasoning of cast iron eliminates reactivity. It simply reduces it from what it would otherwise have been. Some people notice the iron taste in certain foods in cast iron, and some people don't. But, on a chemical basis, it's in there.
So, to whatever extent "seasoning" of aluminum happens, it's not the same kind that we do with cast iron. To whatever extent there is any "seasoning" of raw aluminum with fat, it is more along the lines of "filling the pores" once the cookware is heated and expanded.
As others have pointed out, metallic aluminum is one of the most reactive metals there is. But, when exposed to the atmosphere it almost immediately forms a layer of aluminum oxide (aka alumina) which is both harder and less reactive than aluminum. This layer isn't exactly durable, however, being a mere 4 nanometers thick and having soft aluminum underneath. It doesn't take much to scrape through the aluminum oxide, or for a strong enough acid to erode the aluminum oxide and expose the much more reactive metallic aluminum underneath. Certain foods can take on a gray coloration, and certain foods can take on a slightly metallic taste -- especially if, say, whisked frequently with a metal whisk. Now, depending on what you're cooking, and to a lesser extent what your sensitivities are, maybe you won't notice a difference. For most foods, it shouldn't make a difference. But sometimes it will. Plenty of people have covered a dish of tomato sauce with aluminum foil overnight only to find the nest day that the sauce has corroded a hole in the foil. That same thing happens in the pan. I admit to being a bit surprised that the berry sauce cooks that long in raw aluminum with no apparent negative impact. Perhaps the sugar level has some kind of protective effect or perhaps the flavors are so concentrated that any metallic flavor is unlikely to be noticed.
I agree that 90% of the things we might like to do in the kitchen can be done perfectly well on raw aluminum. I don't like aluminum frypans because they are notorious for warping (and no, you need not toss a hot pan into a cold sink of water to see this happen). The problem for home cooks is that, when you want to do something in the other 10% and all you have is aluminum cookware, you don't really have anywhere to go.
-
Anchovy butter.
-
I agree that there are plenty of good reasons to use heavy gauge raw aluminum. As you say, it's light, excellent conductor, inexpensive, etc. Some thoughts:
2. It's durable. The cookware depicted above, in use last night at Beacon restaurant in New York City, has been with the restaurant since it opened in 1999, under heavy commercial use on very powerful ranges and in a wood-burning oven.It's a certain kind of durable, it's true, especially if it's the extra-thick kind. That said, call me a bit skeptical that Beacon has never replaced a frypan in ten years. Those frypans, in particular, just don't look dirty and dinged up enough to have been abused for ten years.
5. The surface releases pretty easily. More on that later.I'm not sure that I think it releases any easier than any other metal. I'll be interested to see what you say here.
1. Does it need to be seasoned? The cooks I spoke to last night, and other people I've spoken to, have said that unfinished aluminum needs seasoning, just like cast iron. Is this true?I don't see how it can be true that it needs to be seasoned "just like cast iron" because it's quite clear that the pans you have shown have not been seasoned just like cast iron. Otherwise, they would be black throughout.
I hear again and again that aluminum is sensitive to acidic food and both wrecks and gets wrecked by anything acidic that you cook in it. Is this really true? I've witnessed one challenge to the hypothesis: last night, as seen in that first photo above, we cooked meatballs in tomato sauce for an hour in a 600+ degree wood burning oven with no noticeable interaction between the saute pan and the sauce. I've also challenged a similar hypothesis many times with cast iron, and have never seen a problematic interaction between seasoned cast iron and tomato sauce, which by all accounts is quite acidic.Tomato sauce is somewhat acidic, but not all that acidic. And, of course, it depends on how you make it and how you balance the acids. Tomato sauce has a pH of around 4.9, depending on formulation. That's pretty acidic, because a pH of 7 is neutral and the pH scale is logarithmic. But, in fact, just about all foods fall on the acidic side of the pH scale. Red onions are about 5.3; bananas at around 4.8; cauliflower is 5.6; cucumbers are 5.2; and so on. Truly acidic foods are things such as McIntosh apples at 3.3, lemon juice at 2.1, cider vinegar at 3.1, wine can be as low as 3.2 or so, rhubarb is 3.1, and so on. These things can definitely react with aluminum.
On the other hand, in a commercial setting where the pan is constantly being used over high heat with plenty of fat and is cleaned in the right way (without too much concern for cosmetics) this can be minimized. And, of course, in a restaurant that has a million pans, if they find that one of the preparations they are making reacts in the pan, they can always use a nonreactive pan for that. But, in general, it's the constant "reseasoning" use over high heat that makes these restaurant pans less reactive than it would be for a home user. It's also true that home users need to make do with a substantially smaller battery. I'm sure Waldy wouldn't use that raw aluminum Windsor pan that the eggs are poaching in if he wanted to reduce down a ton of highly acidic pomegranate juice to make grenadine. But he very likely has some nonreactive pans around he could use for this. Home cooks don't necessarily have that luxury, which is why if you are only going to have one three-quart saucepan, it makes sense to buy one that is nonreactive.
3. How best to clean it? This is one area where I've never done well with aluminum. I don't use much unfinished aluminum (I have a lot of anodized, which plays by different rules) but I have a big stockpot and several half-sheet pans. The stockpot, if you scrub it with a metal scrubber, turns the washing water gray. The sheet pans are easily scratched, not that it matters all that much. What's the deal here?This is not entirely clear to me. The dishwasher is not the answer, because when I have put aluminum sheet pans in the dishwasher, they have discolored and eventually pitted. How are they washing the frypans at Beacon? My guess is that they may be treating them a bit rougher than cast iron, but in essentially the same way (no scrubbing at all, in other words, and perhaps just rinsing/wiping them out if that's all it takes to get them ready for the next use).
For me, I wouldn't hesitate to cook on raw aluminum. And I think it makes a lot of sense in the professional kitchen. I'm not sure it makes as much sense in the home kitchen, where one wants more flexibility and days, weeks or months may elapse in between uses of a given pan as opposed to the minutes at a place such as Beacon.
-
Silver is the best conductor. After that is Copper. Then Gold. Then Aluminum.
Here is a good chart:
http://environmentalchemistry.com/yogi/periodic/thermal.html
9 phrases to ban from restaurant menus
in Restaurant Life
Posted
Any chocolate dessert described as a sin ("chocolate decadence cheesecake"), any chocolate dessert dessert described as a potentially fatal health condition ("chocolate heart attack sundae") or any chocolate dessert described in a way that relates it to sex ("chocolate orgasm cookies").
These naming conventions would only be (barely) tolerable if named in a deliberately quirky metacommenting way, such as "chocolate sloth cheesecake," "chocolate renal failure sundae" or "chocolate backdoor love cookies."