slkinsey

Makes sense to me!

I think the first recipe (for a drink in equal parts) appeared in Robert Vermiere's "Cocktails: How to Mix Them" around 1922, where it is credited to one MacGarry of Buck's Club in London. The "motorcycle sidecar myth" strikes me as just that: a myth. Or at least something that can't be substantiated. As far as I can tell, this myth originated with Embury. Others may have better information. Me? I like Embury for the technique abnd approach, but take much of what he says (including the ratios) with a grain of salt. Seems like a fairly straightforward descendant of the Brandy Crusta.

This seems to be the crux of the matter. Looking at Josh, can someone describe a situation in which he gave disproportionately positive and/or copious attention to a restaurant, company or product that was clearly undeserved and not a reasonable matter of opinion? I mean, I don't agree with him that Di Fara is better than Franny's or that you can get a better steak at Sammy's Roumanian than a less-than-perfect Peter Luger -- but I don't think one can make the argument that Di Fara and Sammy's Roumanian had somehow nefariously influenced him to profess those opinions.

Here's another part of that question: There is a real cost associated with attracting, training and keeping a staff that gives exemplary service. What kind of service should be the expected at a place where you can get eggs benedict, coffee and a glass of orange juice for eighteen bucks? And how should that impact the percent tip? For example, perhaps the service Holly got would be considered reasonably okay at a place charging twelve dollars for more or less the same items. And clearly it would be considered unacceptable at a place charging twenty-four dollars. Interestingly, these might all come out to the same dollar value of the tip. Assuming a 20% "standard" tip: three bucks would be a 20% tip plus change at the diner (good), a 16.5% tip at the middlebrow restaurant (mild disapproval) and a 12.5% tip at the higher end restaurant (stiff). I'd think that you'd need to go down to somewhere in the general area of 10% before the waitstaff will really notice. 16.5% is not going to register, since that's likely fairly close to other people's "standard."

But what basis do you have for making this assertion? Other than some kind of vague suspicion? This would seem to imply that, for example, Pat LaFreida approached Josh and somehow massaged and duped him into liking and evangelizing about LaFreida's hamburger blends. What basis do you have for implying that, to make a counter example, Josh didn't simply notice that there were a few places serving burgers that he really liked, found out what meat they were using, then got various information about Pat LaFreida and his operation, met with LaFreida, saw the operation, etc., and then started telling people about it? Or that the didn't start telling people about it, and then meet with LaFreida (etc,), be even more impressed with the product, and then told people about it even more? You're suggesting, also, that someone with an inferior or non-exceptional product could "cultivate" Josh and receive favorable/positive/disproportional treatment as a result. Like Steven, I may not agree with all of Josh's opinions (he doesn't like Franny's and he believes Di Fara is the best, to make the most obvious examples) -- but I have never had the impression that he touted any restaurant, company or product that he didn't believe in. If you believe otherwise, then I'd suggest you start providing some examples. If some restaurants, companys or purveyors have opened their doors to Josh's approaches more than some others, and if this has resulted in those restaurants, companys or purveyors receiving more coverage than others... this is only natural. How else is it supposed to work? If Josh had called up Pat LaFrieda, said that he wanted to learn more about the company, its products and the burger blend in specific, and if LaFrieda had given him the brush-off, there would have been less of a basis for Josh to write some of the things he has written about LaFrieda. Who cares? Because it is hard to know whether to take someone's recommendation seriously, unless you know what they are comparing it to.This is a guy who goes around the city eating things like hamburgers every day. I think it's safe to say that Josh has tried the beef from just about every purveyor that there is. Is anyone suggesting that there is a single meaningful player in the NYC hamburger scene that Josh hasn't sampled at least once? If he tasted one or two burgers that he thought were really special and stood head and shoulders above the others in terms of beefy flavor, and then noted that these one or two restaurants used the same blend from the same purveyor, I'd say he's on to something there.

Just to inject a little bit of definition into this discussion, I think the appellation "shill" needs a little bit of clarification here. The word is of fairly recent (20th century) coinage, and originally referred to a paid confederate who acted as a decoy or enthusiast in concert with a gambler or auctioneer with the goal of driving up the wager or auction price. In later years, it has come to mean someone who is secretly paid or otherwise compensated to edorse a product publicly while pretending to be impartial. In internet usage it may either have the modern meaning above, or may refer to someone using a false internet persona to promote himself (or his business). Unless someone is suggesting that Josh is somehow compensated by, for example, Pat Lafreida for evangelizing about his products and services, then there is no way Josh can be said to "shill for Pat Lafreida" or anyone else. Enthusiastic promotion of a business or product does not equal "shilling." I have, for example, enthusiastically professed my admiration of the pizza at Franny's in Brooklyn. Does that make me a "shill"? Are people suggesting that Pat Lafreida is giving Josh bags of steaks in exchange for positive mentions in the media? Will Pat Lafreida cut off the supply of steaks if Josh writes that he found an ever better burger somewhere that doesn't use Pat Lafreida's meat? Steven sometimes gets boxes with amazing meats from Lobel's. Steven has occasionally written about Lobel's being one of the best butchers around. Shill?

Interestingly, yes. Although not bugs as in beetles. No, Bugs as in Bunny. Yessir, Luxardo Bitter gets its color from tiny, cute, fluffy little bunnies.

Hi Joe. Thanks for stopping in. Question for you when you have a chance: Has Kold-Draft ever thought of rolling out a machine making larger cubes? Say 3 inches to a side? Or are there some practical size limitations to the technology?

Exactly. It's more or less similar to Campari & works wherever Campari would.

Interesting. I have a hard time even thinking of these products as "gin." Perhaps I'm wrong from a historical perspective, but I think of redistillation as intrinsic to gin.

Cool. I might experiment with super ripe bananas. Any thoughts on how you'd go about retrograding starch in bananas that you wanted to roast / brown? That's an interesting question. I can't eat bananas, so I can't say that I've got much experience with them. Would it be possible to heat/cool them in water for this step, either in the peel or out? Or what about sous vide, either "real" or using ziplock?

Paul is correct and Dave is mistaken on this one. It is the starch in potatoes and other starchy vegetables that makes them gluey when overworked. Paul, the starch retrogradation trick should work on bananas. You can also mitigate this problem somewhat by using extremely ripe bananas. The mushiness shouldn't matter so much since you are going to puree later. The reason for doing this is that unripe bananas are around 25:1 starch to sugar, whereas ripe bananas are around 1:20.

I take exception with those arguments as well, Holly. I simply also believe that Colicchio's primary motivation for doing the Coke commercial is that they gave him a bunch of money for doing so. That said, I don't believe there is anything wrong with that, and I agree with you that being able to get paid for doing things like this Diet Coke commercial are a perk (or rather the just reward) one gets for all the hard work that resulted in his "celebrity" status.

Certainly perceived "prestige" and what they feel it would do to their image is part of the consideration that many "celebrities" make in deciding whether to accept an offer for a product endorsement (along with other considerations such as overexposure, dilution, etc.). This is one reason why so many Western celebrities refuse to do commercials or print advertisements in the Western media, but happily take big bucks in Japan and elsewhere in Asia. Whether or not they "really like Diet Coke" is pretty near the bottom of the list, in my experience -- and this is supported by just about all the examples you make (which all, in the end, boil down to money considerations). As for your little jab... let ms just say that, in my experience, the primary consideration most opera singers would have about appearing in an Olive Garden commercial would be whether or not being associated with the chain would negatively impact their "highbrow" and "luxury-associated" image. This would only apply to the top 1% of 1% (e.g., Placido Domingo, et al.) who are "famous" and making huge money. You take 1,000 tenors working in the regional market, make that offer, and 999 of them will take it. The other one guy missed the message from his manager. Believe it or not, musicians don't generally feel that one's credibility as a performing artist depends upon one's culinary preferences.

I think that for the most part, the thesis of Danny's post is correct: People appear in commercials -- and this includes people who are appearing in a commercial as known public figures rather than "anonymous" actors -- because they are compensated for doing so, and for no other meaningful reason. Of course, everyone has the option of not appearing in a commercial for a product or on behalf of a corporation if they find that product, corporation or endorsements in general morally repugnant, distasteful, harmful to the public or professional persona they would like to project, or simply because they don't believe in commercials or endorsements. These choices are no less true for the "anonymous" actors as they are for the public figures. Plenty of commercial actors, for example, would not appear in a commercial on behalf of a tobacco company. But it's nowhere written or implied that these things are done, when they are done, for any reason other than financial remuneration. To believe otherwise is naive about how these things work. I abhor Olive Garden, but if they had approached me to be that "opera singer guy who just loves Olive Garden" in their commercials, I would have taken it in a second and never looked back. It would never have crossed my mind to care that I didn't like their food, and no one who knows anything about commercials would have ever suspected it might be true or cared whether it was -- because that's just not how it's done.

Tim, any more information on that. It's interesting in light of the fact that Akzo-Nobel recently agreed to "divest its non-stick coatings business to privately-owned, US-based company Whitford Worldwide. I'm guessing you're speaking of their Eterna product? I haven't seen anything saying that it's not fundamentally a formulation of PTFE -- but maybe I'm looking in the wrong places?

A few things here: 1. To the best of my knowledge, there is no "nonstick" without PTFE. Some manufacturers have offered non-PTFE products that they claimed were nonstick, but which in fact offered nowhere near the food releasing properties of a PTFE coating. 2. Supposing that a company invents a nonstick coating that offers the same food releasing properties as PTFE. Who is to say that this coating will be any "safer" than PTFE? It seems rather likely that most anything that offers the same benefits as PTFE is also going to release some small amount of funky stuff when heated up to 600 degrees. It seems doubtful to me that no one has ever discovered a coating that is just as "nonstick' as PTFE. Rather, it's likely that any such discovered non-PTFE coating has turned out to degrade into more/worse stuff when heated, is less durable, etc.

The FDA says:

I wouldn't think it was a great place to keep a parakeet, but I doubt that the particles of flour that might be in the air at a bakery are sufficently fine or present in sufficient concentration to be a major danger. That's just a guess, of course. The one place you definitely wouldn't want to keep your parakeet is in a flour mill, where flour dust is sufficiently fine and present that there can be a serious risk of explosion if it gets into the air.

Chris, the comparison I was making was to compare Bayless's endorsement of Burger King to another (hypothetical) person's endorsement of a company whose practices the endorser has publicly decried -- in this case, the endorsement of an apartheid-supporting and profiting company by an anti-apartheid activist. It is an apt comparison. It is not an apt comparison to compare Colicchio's endorsement of Diet Coke -- rather, it is appropriate to contrast Colicchio's endorsement of Diet Coke. If you believe that Diet Coke tastes so bad that Colicchio couldn't possibly truthfully enjoy it, then the proper comparison would be to, say, Emeril Legasse's endorsement of the not-so-great "Emeril Ware" line of cookware (although Legasse has dug himself into a considerably deeper hole here). As Daniel points out, the only ethical concern that is important with respect Colicchio's endorsement of Diet Coke is whether he thinks it's a decent enough product to endorse. Perhaps if he had been on record numerous times railing against the evils of the Coca Cola corporation and the disgusting taste of Diet Coke there would be a problem here -- but this isn't the case. It's no more an ethical conflict than Dale DeGroff and Gary Regan designing cocktails for the likes of Alisé. Whether or not Colicchio's opinion of Diet Coke differs from your own matters not one whit.

I have to say that I find myself reading this thread with a smile of amusement. I mean, is this all serious? People are seriousloy questioning whether Colicchio is "taking an unfair swipe" at Achatz, Adria, et al. in this commercial?! Come on, guys. It's a joke. And the chances are that he didn't write it anyway. I mean, are we really thinking that Colicchio approached Coca Cola and suggested that it would be great to make an ad so he could trash some of his colleagues in the restaurant world? I hardly think so. He is a famous chef on TV with enough name/face recognition that it's not a surprise Coca Cola would like to have him endorse their product. More and more people are being introduced to culinary gimmickry through shows such as Top Chef and other media. Coke would like to get across the message that good flavor is better than whatever the hell it is that they make things like Red Bull out of. So they put Colicchio in a restaurant full of "weird looking food" and had him talking about how he thinks flavor comes before trickery. I have enough friends who have done commercials to have plenty of doubts as to whether he advised them on any of this. Most likely, he agreed to the concept and then showed up, read his lines and went on about his business. Meanwhile, as to "selling out" -- I don't see it. Diet Coke is a perfectly good product, if you're going to take money for endorsing a megaproduct like this. It's not like Diet Coke is some kind of awful swill. And I don't see his appearance in this commercial as any more of a "sell out" than the legions of celebrichefs who endorse crappy knives and cookware -- less so, since Colicchio isn't exactly implying that he would serve Diet Coke as the beverage to accompany a tasting menu at Craft. He's just saying it's a good-tasting diet cola. There really is no point of comparison between Colicchio appearing in this commercial and Bayless's appearance in Burger King commercials. What made Bayless's BK commercials bad is the fact that Burger King's practices stand in direct oposition to many of his most vehemently and publicly stated beliefs and political positions. It was like being an anti-apartheid activist in 1990 and doing a De Beers commercial (my recollection is that any diversion of monies from those commercials to a charity was a post facto reaction to the backlash, but may be misremembering).

I'm not sure where you're getting this. Thermal breakdown products of PTFE include toxic gasses such as perfluoroisobutene, octafluoroisobutylene, and tetrafluoroethylene. These are all pyrolysis products, Let's just say that I have my doubts as to whether meaningful pyrolysis happens in real-world situations with PTFE all that often. And when it does, I'd suggest that whatever minute amounts of perfluoroisobutene, etc. that might be produced would be the least of your worries (certainly when contextualized relastive to the various outgassings that happen all around us all the time, as Dave points out). DuPont says that PTFE coatings don't start to degrade significantly until around 660F and above. More to the point, when people overheat their PTFE-coated pans and the finches they keep in the kitchen die, this is because their lungs were clogged with the microfine particles I posted about above -- not because they succumbed to a cloud of poisonous octafluoroisobutylene gas.

It seems to me that most mushroom soups in the "cream of" family can be reduced to: 1. Simmer softened mirepoix and lots of mushrooms with some stock for an hour or so. Add herbs if you like -- parsley, thyme or rosemary being decent candidates (employ judiciously). I would argue that one can amp up the flavor here by a number of methods. For example, veal stock is better than chicken stock is better than vegetable broth. Also, you can use a mixture of different fresh mushrooms besides just button mushrooms. Finally, you can always add some dried mushrooms such as porcini. Or some combination of the above. 2. Puree in a blender. I would argue that the smoothness and silkyness of the soup can be improved here by using a good, high-powered blender such as a Vita-Prep and/or by passing the pureed soup through a fine sieve (the latter being greatly facilitated by the former). 3. Return to the heat, correct for seasonings and gild the lily. You could add back some sauteed mushrooms for textural contrast. You can add a little sherry. You can add a little cream, either straight or whipped. You can add a tiny touch more of the fresh minced herbs you used in step 1. You can add a touch of truffle oil. You can do any combination of the above. Basta. Doesn't seem like rocket science to me.

Well, as a practical matter, it certainly depends on what you can get your hands on.

I've always been given to understand that most modern day "Jamaica rum" isn't particularly in the historical Jamaica style, which was quite a bit funkier. I think Dave Wondrich, Ed Hamilton and others who know far more about rum than I, all suggest that Coruba, Inner Circle and even Myers are closer to the mark. Most "Jamaica rum" today (which now refers to a place of origin rather than a national style at this point), and this would include the Appleton rums, seem to be on the modern "cognac style" model.