slkinsey

I think these are largely valid points. Certainly the various megadiscussion sites have lost a certain amount of the leading-edge currency they had 5 years ago. I also believe that the first online discussion forum that figures out a way to aggregate participating blogs from a wide variety of platforms in a seamless way that manages to preserve the individuality and control of the blogs for the bloggers, makes it convenient for participants to find, view and comment on a large number of blogs that interest them, and which also preserves the "start a thread and have a group discussion" aspect of the megadiscussion forums, will stand a very good chance of becoming or remaining the "next big thing." This is, of course, largely a technological matter.

If you want to re-crisp roasted chicken skin, may I suggest a blowtorch? (No, I'm not kidding.)

The flavor is different if you saute the onions (which also destroys the effect of starting everything together cold) Try them side-by-side sometime. When you just put in a whole onion, it contributes a very subtle but discernable flavor and perhaps a touch of sweetness to the sauce, but the sauce remains fundamentally light and tomato-flavored. You discard the onion because, after it has contributed its flavor to the sauce, it is mushy and flavorless. Adding whole aromatic vegetables to tomato sauce which are later discarded after having contributed their flavor is a fairly common Italian technique. When my mother lived in Rome after the War, their family cook used to simmer tomato sauce with a whole stalk of celery that was discarded at the end. And, of course, it is quite common to simmer the sauce with a few whole cloves of garlic that are either discarded or not intended to be eaten.

Needing to be in Pforzheim of an afternoon for a business meeting, I am interested in knowing what the top fine dining restaurants are in this city. Anyone here have any ideas?

My personal belief is that American-made tomato sauces for pasta (which is to say, not a sauce where the tomato plays an equal role with other ingredients such as bucatini all'amatriciana) typically suffer because (i) they have an overabundance of herbs, frequently dried; (ii) there is too much garlic; (iii) they are overwrought, with far too many ingredients; or (iv) all of the above. The very most that might be needed for the most elaborate basic tomato sauce would be a one or two lightly crushed cloves of garlic, a medium onion, a stalk of celery, perhaps a touch of carrot for sweetness and a few branches of thyme. Once you go beyond that and start throwing in the dried basil and oregano and celery seed and rosemary and fennel and mushrooms and red wine and sausage and peppers and olives and sun dried tomato and etc, etc, etc. . . . To my taste, it just becomes muddled and not all that good.

Seems to me that it's a lot easier and more effective to bring the liquid up to a hard boil so that it does coagulate, then run it through a fine sieve.

Ah yes, the classic "simple" project sauce. A mere 14 ingredient, nine step , three and a half hours preparation-and-cooking tomato sauce.

Blend it smooth, thin it out with a little water or white wine, maybe swirl in the merest whisper of cream and you've got yourself a pretty nice bowl of tomato soup.

Do it however you like. You can hand-crush the tomatoes to whatever texture you like, you can pass them through the coarse die on a food mill (what I usually do) or you can put them in there whole and crush them with a fork or potato masher after they're cooked. Honestly, to me it is the simplicity of this sauce -- and particularly the absence of garlic -- that makes it so special.

Yea. It's the same "school of mixology" as at all of the other Petraske-partnership places. This is a fairly conservative school, I find, and most of the drinks are either classics (e.g., Brooklyn, Rye Silver Fizz) or neo-classic style (e.g., Red Hook, Silver Lining). Occasionally there will be a drink from this school that breaks out of the style just a bit, such as the Penecillin. All of which is to say that I find you can get more or less the same cocktails all in more or less the same stylistic space in all of the Petraske-partnership bars, and it doesn't tend to be mixology that is forward-looking in the way that it is at some of the other top cocktail bars in the city. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, by the way. I think it's wonderful to be able to avail ourselves of such fine craftsmen working in the "classic style" aesthetic space. Whether the ice makes a difference to you is hard to say. I think it's pretty cool. But all the top cocktail bars are already using pretty good ice at this point.

Try it with the best canned tomatoes in your budget, and I think you will be well satisfied. This is a recipe and technique that I think is in one of the Marcella Hazan books. But I was first introduced to it by my friend and ace cook Joe Bavuso, so to me it has always been "salsa alla Bavusiana."

Yep. I thought I had re-posted on this, but guess I hadn't got 'round to it. I asked Richie and he said that, as of right now, it is only Dutch Kills that is using the clear commercial block ice. At some point I plan to go there and take some photographs when they break down the 300 pound blocks.

Just about anything. I've used it with penne and spaghetti (usually with crushed red pepper and parsley). I've used it with fresh pasta (where the inclusion of butter makes it work much better than oil-based tomato sauces). And it's my go-to sauce for gnocchi.

What do you figure it will cost to get a strong, sanitary, food-safe weld on that thing? More than the cost of a new one, I'm guessing. And what do you figure heating it up to welding temperature will do to the rest of it -- specifically, that fancy enamel coating that's the whole reason you paid that much for it.

It's not going to help, I'm afraid. Think about it: What are you going to do? Melt the iron back together? Using what? And at what expense? And what would that do to the rest of the pot?

I have done side-by-side comparisons making this sauce using butter in one and olive oil in the other. There was no comparison. The butter version was lightyears better. The olive oil version, in fact, actually wasn't all that good. All of which is to say that butter is crucial to this sauce.

No, there is no way to save the pot. I even doubt it would be possible to get a free replacement under Le Creuset's lifetime warranty, although it may be worth a try.

I'm not saying that these people wouldn't be successful at doing those traditional foods. I'm just saying that there would be a healthy amount of skepticism from the people working in those culinary areas. And I'm also saying that it's not automatic -- not by a long stretch -- that Ferran and Albert would ever be good enough at whole hog barbecue to compete with Ed Mitchell. I mean, for goodness sake, give these other guys some credit for the decades of experience that made them this good at what they do. Is it possible that the Adriás could make brilliant pizza? Sure. Of course. They're good cooks, and I have no doubt that if they approached opening a pizzeria with the same rigor that they employ in their work at ElBulli, it could possibly be very good. But, at the same time, I have a hard time imagining that this pizzeria is going to become Ferran and Albert's new post-ElBulli restaurant. So how much attention are they really going to be able to give it, when they're doing ElBulli-type stuff with such intensity for so much of the year? Of course, if it were just some schmo in Spain who was going to open a pizzeria, no one would care to comment. I think that people are saying something because there are going to be automatic assumptions as to the "greatness" of such an undertaking simply because it is associated with Ferran and Albert Adriá. And make no mistake, this pizzeria is going to have to be absolutely outstanding in one way or another, or it will be considered a failure. The reputation of the Adriás desn't afford them the luxury of opening a "pretty good" pizzeria any more than it was okay for Luciano Pavarotti to sing a "pretty good" high note. To me, it's a bit like when Shaquille O'Neill proclaimed years ago that he thought he could be a pretty good professional football player in the NFL. On the one hand, you look at the guy and you think that he's got a pretty good body type for football, he's clearly an elite athlete in peak physical condition, he used to play football back in high school and had some success, so why not? On the other hand, I would expect such a move (i) would generate huge media attention and an automatic assumption by plenty of fans that he would translate into an elite football player; (ii) would be treated with a certain amount of skepciticism by working NFL players; and (iii) wouldn't necessarily mean that he'd be the next Reggie White and have anywhere near the success in the NFL that he was having in the NBA. It's not surprising that the Adriás are getting a similar reaction from people who have devoted careers to a culinary niche in which the Adriás have yet to dip their toes.

My best advice: Forget all the herbs and spices and multi-stage preparation. You want a brilliant tomato sauce that is inexpensive and mind-blowingly delicious? Get a can of high-quality tomatoes, an onion, and a nice big lump of butter. Skin the onion and cut it in half. Crush or mill the tomatoes to whatever consistency you would like. Put the onion, butter, tomato and some salt into a cold saucepan. Turn the heat on low. Allow the sauce to come up to a gentle simmer over around 20 minutes, by which time the butter will emulsify into the sauce and the onion will have contributed its flavor. Discard the onion and use the sweet, tomatoey sauce. Add a little crushed red pepper or some minced fresh parsley off the heat, if you like. But nothing further is necessary.

I suppose they are reacting in the same way Ed Mitchell might react if Ferran and Albert Adriá said they were going to open up a whole hog barbecue place, or perhaps the way Asturianos might react if Alain Ducasse (or, better yet, Grant Achatz) announced he was going to open a restaurant dedicated to fabada.

taion, I don't know whether or not the size of the bar area is an "accident" or not (I suspect not), but what I think you don't understand is that the size of the bar area is not the reason there is not much breadth within individual spirit categories there. The reason there is much breadth within individual spirit categories there is because there is not very much storage space. Bars don't store their spirits in the bar, for the most part. That's just where they keep the bottles they're using (or perhaps as much as one additional bottle of each). Most bars have a big back room or a basement you never see, where they keep their inventory of spirits. The smaller your storeroom is, the smaller the inventory you can keep. The smaller your total inventory, the less breadth within individual spirit categories you can have, because you're using up all of your storage space just to have enough categories of spirits, nevermind breadth within them. The reason it's unlikely that a bar so small would ever be able to have much breadth within individual spirit categories is that it becomes uneconomical to devote more than a certain percentage of your square footage to things like storage that aren't making you any money. Understanding that, we understand that a tiny bar will necessarily have a tiny (or perhaps almost nonexistent) storage area. Spirits, on the other hand, take up a fixed amount of space. Since cases of bottles are the same size whether you have a big storeroom or a small one, it's easy to understand how it is that tiny bars with tiny storerooms have their hands full just making sure they have enough room in there to stock a case each of a good brand for all the basic spirits and modifiers -- having 4 different kinds of rye is out of the question.

Ultimately, people get into this business to make a profit -- not just to stay in business. I'm not sure if you're talking about the physical size of the space or the selection of booze. The latter is easy to figure out: It is a tiny space with serious storage constraints, and the liquor inventory and selection is curated accordingly. As for the size of the bar area. . . It seems to me that a bar can take up quite a lot of room that could be occupied by paying customers. They don't really need any more bar space to serve 24 customers, and it strikes me as likely that there is no way they could have a larger bar without sacrificing capacity -- and they're already about as small as you can get and still make a buck. I'm also not sure that the size of the bar are or the fact that one bartender is servicing 24 customers at capacity is the reason the volume is lower than it is in other places. Heck, at Flatiron Lounge on a Friday night, the bartenders are serviging a lot more than 24 customers each, and they do a ton of volume. Rather, I think that the very nature of Milk & Honey, the very things that make it a cool place to hang out (more quiet, more intimate, less frenetic, etc.) lend themselves to a slower pace of imbibing. And, of course, because of their reservations model, tables may go empty for as long as 30 minutes while they wait for the next people in line to arrive. These things all act to reduce volume.

If she was Italian, then she was also a bartender.

My preference for gin over vodka goes back to the early 80s as well, and legal drinking age was some ways in the future for me back then. This is because a bottle of vodka was unknown in our house, and yet all the grownups were Martini drinkers. Heck, I can go one better than that: I had my first taste of Fish House Punch in the mid-1970s, most likely long before Dave Wondrich had even heard of it. Later, as the 80s progressed, stealing from the family stash of FHP, which my parents aged in multiple gallons for a year before using it in their annual Xmas parties, became the standard way for all the Kinsey children to get illicit booze. The point of all this is that, whule there were a few places that made a servicable if not particularly distinguished Sidecar, Old Fashioned or Manhattan back in the pre-revival days, they were not exactly thick on the ground. It is more or less accepted as fact that it was mostly, although not exlusively home bartenders who kept the craft of the cocktail alive between Prohibition and the revival. Is it any coincidence that the most important cocktail book written in this period was written by and for home bartenders? What makes you think Milk & Honey is so profitable? Depth of inventory and breadth of inventory are two different things. Even if you don't go through all that much rye, you can still have 4 different brands. You just don't keep a case of each brand. M&H has a relatively narrow selection of brands because they just don't have all that much space to accommodate that many brands. So they pick the two gins that they like, and that's it -- they decide they can have dry white vermouth, but not Lillet. These are the compromises you have to make when working in a tiny space (which are compounded by not doing all that much volume). This is why only the larger places such as Pegu Club are able to have 14 different kinds of gin.

Just to elaborate, how is any of what you describe more of a burden than going to a bar in the East Village (where I don't live), getting told there's an hour wait, leaving, going to another bar in the East Village (where I still don't live), getting told there's an hour wait, leaving, going to a third bar in the East Village (haven't moved there yet), getting told there's an hour wait, and then either going over to the northern edge of Soho, where I know I'll be able to get in, or going home (which is what I usually do at that point)? You mean like if you tried to go to Momofuku Ssam and it was an hour wait, and then you walked to Momofuku Noodle bar and that was a 45 minute wait, and then you walked to Redhead and that was a 45 minute wait and then you walked to Soba-ya and that was an hour wait? Same deal. But somehow we don't have the expectation that we'll be able to walk into Momofuku Ssam whenever we want. Honestly, I never have a hard time getting into the EV cocktail bars because I either go at opening, or late at night. And I never try to go on Thursday, Friday or Saturday. If you want to get in there at 9 PM on Friday. . . Right. I get that. And I can understand your frustration, and even share it. Partly, I suppose your work schedule is to blame. If you aren't ready for that after-work drink until 7:30 or 8:00 most nights, you're behind the 8-Ball for getting in to most places. This is also trur with respect to getting into most small, popular restaurants at this hour. Me? If I'm going out for a cocktail after work, I can be there at 6:00 and get a seat. But it's certainly true that I'd go to these bars a lot more frequently if it weren't so cumbersome to get in for much of the evening -- which is a double-edged sword, because I want to see my friends, but I also want them to have success and to make money and sometimes these things are mutually incompatible. Along with the fact that Audrey is my cocktailian friend of longest standing and the fact that I think Del, Kenta and Scott are doing really great work right now, the fact that I can almost invariably get a comfortable seat with little hassle is another reason that I often find myself at Pegu Club for cocktails (or course, I don't try to go there at 8:00 on Thursday through Friday either).