slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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I've seen them in the open stock olive section in Fairway.
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2 oz Lemon Hart 151. Teaspoon or so demerara sugar. Peel of a whole lemon. Fill the balance with hot water (figure maybe 3 or 4 ounces boiling water).
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Ever since I PIDed my Silvia (including the steam temperature) I've had great steam power. But lately I've noticed that the microfoam isn't everything I'd like it to be. In particular, what I find is that the microfoam looks great until I swirl the stretched milk, at which point medium sized bubbles coalesce that are resistant to knocking out. We normally have 2% milk around the house. I've noted that this doesn't seem to be an issue when I use whole milk. Has anyone else noticed this sort of phenomenon?
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I've had a bit of a cold lately, so it's been toddies. In particular, Lemon Hart 151 toddies. Great for a cold. (I've already got plenty of hair on my chest, so I figured using the 151 wouldn't change much.)
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On Jan 2 2009, 12:58 PM, Toliver said:On Dec 31 2008, 02:36 PM, dockhl said:
somewhere here I found the suggestion to cut the tendons on your drumsticks before cooking. What a difference! I used to hate the little buggers and now they are one of my favorite tender little morsels.
I think this trick was originally posted in either a discussion about spatchcocking or cooking Thanksgiving turkies by eGullet member slkinsey. And it is a great tip, indeed.
This is perhaps my single greatest contribution to eGullet (originally appearing here as part of an offhand comment in a discussion about chicken skin).
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For some reason they don't seem to recommend the dry container with the Vita Prep, and tell you you can do all those things with the regular blade. Not sure why that is. The dry blade assembly isn't even offered as an "official" accessory.
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I would imagine that, for virtually everything, at worst it's a matter of batching. The higher powered models can handle larger, tougher jobs without straining the motor. But the way to get around this would be to simply blend a smaller batch. In this way, it's no different from buying cookware or even a stove. To my thinking, it was worth the relatively small extra money to get the higher powered professional model. But that $80/20% increase may be outside some else's tolerance -- and, of course, many people would never pay 400 bucks for a blender in the first place, and it's still true that a 50 dollar blender can do most of the things a 400 dollar blender can do.
Yesterday I more or less liquified a large Spanish chorizo in the VP3, getting a thick purée I'm going to use in a few applications.
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I think some food costs are likely to come down. Some, such as dry aged prime beef, are not likely to come down enough to make a difference.
As for rents in NYC... we'll see. Where I live in the upper reaches of the Upper West Side, I see any number of empty storefronts that had previously been occupied by tenants of long standing who were forced to vacate doe to exorbitant rent demands from the landlord (Oppenheimer Prime Meats being a good example). It's possible, but I won't hold my breath waiting for NYC landlords to reduce their rents.
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As a category, steakhouses could come under some pressure. A glut of them opened in the 2005–07 time frame. You hardly ever see a steakhouse close, but all of these places are pitilessly expensive, and many of them depend on expense account dinners.
Might some of them lower prices in an attempt to stay open?
Some restaurants can lower prices, but it's unlikely they can lower their margins or their net profit and continue to stay afloat. This will manifest itself in lower-value dishes. The prices may be lower, but the food cost will be even lower. Portions will be smaller and less expensive/lower quality ingredients will be used. This is something that Ben Benson touches on in the NY Times article I linked to. You'll start seeing those 28 dollar plates of pasta that had a 5 dollar food cost come down to being 22 dollar plates of pasta with a dollar fifty food cost. Some places will not be able to do this, and steakhouses are among them. A prime steak costs what a prime steak costs. It's unlikely that the price of prime beef will come down significantly, and steakhouses already have the highest food cost in the industry. There's no way Peter Luger can reduce the price of their steaks enough to make a difference and make it up on volume. Similarly, they can't just start buying cheaper steaks. No one is going to go to Wolfgang's to eat a wet aged choice steak they could get at Sizzler.
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You're talking about the Portion Blending System Advance, I gather. Seems complicated.
Like you, I think I'd rather stick with a more "normal" blender system in that context. I guess that the advantage of the Drink Machine is that you can put your product in there and get the blend you want with the press of a button by using one of their preprogrammed settings?
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If there is only two feet of clearance between your head and the ceiling, I would say that it's unlikely you'll want pans dangling from the ceiling where you are going to be working. Many frypans are more than two feet from the end of the handle to the other side of the pan.
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In a restaurant, on the other hand, heavy use can be conservatively estimated around, say, at least 4 hours a day. This means that Vita-Mix is confident that you can use the VP3 for around 4,380 hours without anything breaking. If we extend those hours back to the assumed one hour per day habits of home users, we get 12 years.
This assumption is that the blender is literally ON for four hours a day - hogwash. I've worked in restaurant kitchens, and when the soup needs to be pureed, or whatever needs to be blended, the blender is on for maybe 10 minutes - unless they're making enough soup for 1,000 portions. And then they're buying a really big blender made by John Deere.
If it's a professional kitchen that is using the blender for multiple items such as pureed sauces and marinades, coulis and the like, smooth soups, house-made mayonnaise and other dressings, nut butters, and more at any real volume... it seems very likely that they're using the blender at least four hours over the course of a 10 hour day. You use it for one thing, clean it out, and use it for something else. Looking at some of the higher-end cookbooks, I have been surprised at how often one would like to use a high power blender. Meanwhile, of course, the vast majority of home Vita-Mix users is actually racking up something closer to an hour a week (and probably more like 2 hours a month) rather than an hour a day of operation. I don't think it's reaching at all to suggest that a blender in a restaurant is getting 4 times the use of a typical home blender. It's actually being quite generous in favor of the home user.
More to the point, from a purely money-wise perspective, I don't quite understand why someone who is already willing to spend 400 bucks on a blender wouldn't be willing to spend 20% more on a model with 50% more power that is designed to stand up to the rigors of being bashed around a professional kitchen.But perhaps that person was going to buy a $100 blender to start with and has now upped that by 300%?
So, the $100 buyer would have to go up by 300% to get a 5200 and 380% to get the VP3. They're still in the position where the VP3 costs only 20% more.
For sure there isn't a huge list of things you can only do with the VP3 or that you can do significantly better/easier with the VP3 compared to the 5200. But, then again, the list of things you can do in the 5200 that you can't do in the $134 L'Equip R.P.M. the Cook's Illustrated guys liked isn't all that long either. Why not buy that and save yourself 266 bucks over the 5200? The reason is that you're spending that 266 bucks in order to be able to do the few things you can't really do in the L'Equip R.P.M. If you don't care about those things -- don't buy the 5200! I could say similar things with respect to buying the VP3 over the 5200, but the price difference both in terms of percent and real dollars is much smaller than the difference between the 5200 and the L'Equip R.P.M.. The reason I would still recommend buying the VP3 over the 5200 is simply because if you want the 5200 it's already clear that you want to do these things, and since the percent increase in price is small relative to the percent increase in power, why not have the extra capacity?
As for Cook's Illustrated... let me just say that they rarely test for the things I am likely to find important.So, your blender is used for none of the following, which CI tested: ice crushing, smoothie, soup puree, hummus and peanut butter? I realize they did not test the ability of the blender to do wood chips.
I often have problems not only with the things they test, but also how they test them. I wouldn't say that ice-crushing is a major priority for me. But I also have my doubts as to whether the CI people used the adjustable speed in the 5200 in the best way for this task. In addition, as I have done myself to satisfy my curiosity, the VP3 (and the 5200 as well, I imagine) can turn a container packed full of ice cubes into dry snow in relatively short order. Is this something any of the other machines can do? Meanwhile, the Vita-Mix excelled at making smoothies and soup purees, both things that are important to me. But how about how well the various machines were able to make a smooth puree out of a fibrous raw vegetable such carrots or fennel? How good were they at making a thick puree of parsley or cilantro, including the stems and without any added liquid? While we're at it, just how smooth were those soup purees? How long did it take to pass them through a chinois? Were they making a potato puree (easy) or a carrot puree (significantly more difficult to get smooth)? Could they do what I did yesterday in making a shrimp bisque, and drop in cooked rice, boiling shrimp stock and raw shrimp that came out silky smooth and passed straight through a chinois? What technique were they using to make the hummus? Since I often find that their criteria for various dishes are not the same as mind, I also have to ask: What were their goals in making the hummus, and are they the same as mine? I could go on, but suffice it to say that my preferences for cookware and also for cooked dishes do not often coincide with CI's. Some of CI's conclusions directly contradict my own. For example, they say that having a tapered base is critically important. Really? Well, I suppose this is true when you have a lot of liquid in there. But my experience is that if you want to make a relatively thick puree, a narrowly tapered base makes this impossible unless you add enough liquid to create a vortex -- which is exactly what you don't want to do.
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I'd be willing to bet that both machines are designed to be used pretty rigorously, with very similar raw materials. After all, if there's only an $80 price difference to the end user, it's not like they're using titanium in the Prep vs. balsa wood in the 5200
Those are deep discount eBay prices. A typical retail price of the VP3 is around $650, and I've seen it listed for more.
As mentioned above:since my experience is that my KitchenAid food processor can do most anything specified for the Robot Coupe food processorAlso as mentioned above, I found that this wasn't true with respect to blenders.
And just to take it a step further, let's suppose that each unit fails after it's warranty period is up. And we're going to need the blenders for the next 11 years.Now, with the Prep you've spent $1,920, whereas with the 5200, you're still on your second blender, and you've only spent $800, a savings of $1200 - easily enough for a Robot Coupe but not quite enough for that John Deere lawn mower.
That's assuming that they fail immediately after the warranty period. Which I do not assume would happen. But if you want to look at the warranty, we shouldn't look at your assumption, we should look at the manufacturer's assumption. The manufacturer issues a warranty because they assume that you won't need to use it. So, Vita-Mix assumes that the 5200 won't need warranty repair for at least 7 years of normal home use and the VP3 won't need warranty repair for at least 3 years of restaurant use. So, let's assume fairly heavy use of both machines and do the math. Someone who really used his Vita-Mix a lot would be using it, say, an hour every day. This is an extremely generous assumption, by the way, because most culinary home users of the Vita-Mix won't use it nearly this much (serious "health juicers" might). This means that Vita-Mix is confident that you can use the 5200 for around 2,555 hours without anything breaking. In a restaurant, on the other hand, heavy use can be conservatively estimated around, say, at least 4 hours a day. This means that Vita-Mix is confident that you can use the VP3 for around 4,380 hours without anything breaking. If we extend those hours back to the assumed one hour per day habits of home users, we get 12 years.
So, if we follow your calculus and assume that the product will need to be replaced based on the warranty expectations, then after ten years, we have spent $800 on the Vita-Mix and only $480 on the Vita-Prep.
More to the point, from a purely money-wise perspective, I don't quite understand why someone who is already willing to spend 400 bucks on a blender wouldn't be willing to spend 20% more on a model with 50% more power that is designed to stand up to the rigors of being bashed around a professional kitchen. Your lawnmower comparison fails, because you will always have the same lawn. If, on the other hand, you might need to mow different kinds and sizes of lawns on different days, then you would be well-advised to acquire the more powerful mower. Because a lack of power will limit your ability to do certain things, not having too much power. No one ever said: "My blender is too powerful to make this mayonnaise. How I wish I had a less powerful blender!" This is because you can always adjust the blender speed down. On the other hand, plenty of people have lamented that their blender is not powerful enough to make a smooth, thick puree out of fresh parsley with no liquid added, or because they choked the blender on that second batch of hummus for a dinner party.
As for Cook's Illustrated... let me just say that they rarely test for the things I am likely to find important.
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Fudgie the Whale, yo.
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In This NY Times article, Ben Benson is quoted as saying that "up to date we’re off 6.2 percent . . . In the restaurant business, if you’re off between 5 and 10 percent, you’re knocking profits down 25 percent. What surprises me is our food cost has not come down." Another example he makes is that "last night we did 350, which is terrific. Last year on the same night, we did 450." He concludes saying that "in the '89 recession we were resistant. After 9/11 we bounced back. But this is lingering. Last summer, we were supported by the Japanese and European tourists who thought we were an inexpensive restaurant. I’m concerned about whether they’ll be back this summer."
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I suspect you're missing the point. Three years of restaurant use is thousands of times more than 7 years of home use. Calendar days are meaningless. It's the miles you put on the blender that matter.
I'm not saying that the 5200 isn't a good machine. I'm sure it's a great machine and that you'd be happy with one. But, just doing a casual search on eBay, I see that a new 5200 goes for around 400 bucks. A new Vita Prep 3 1005 goes for around $480 on eBay. For an additional 80 bucks, you're getting 50% more power and you're getting a machine designed to stand up to the rigors of use in a professional kitchen. Seems like a no-brainer.
One interesting demonstration I saw on youtube demonstrates the difference that a 3+ horsepower motor can make compared to the 2 horsepower motor. When you want to power through some tough, thick, fibrous material, that extra power is going to be the difference.
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Specific gravity?
Anyway, if I were going to suggest a cocktail setup for the newbie or infrequent home cocktailian, I'd suggest the OXO measures and an all-metal Boston shaker. The OXO measures are easy to use for someone with little experience, and it's both easier to hold for shaking and easier to separate an all-metal Boston shaker setup (it also has the advantage of producing a colder drink).
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That's certainly worth considering. Although I should point out that were talking about 7 years of predicted home use versus 3 years of professional restaurant use.
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Whatever, grampa. Why don't you admit that broccoli rabe gets stuck in your dentures, and that's why you won't endorse it? It's delicious on pizza, not to mention being appropriate by tradition.
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I think that a 50% increase in power over the Vita-Mix 5200 definitely makes a difference. A lot of what makes the Vita-Prep so great, and what enables you to do some of the things you can do (especially without burning out the motor) is the power. This is not to say, of course, that the 5200 isn't pretty cool.
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Well, since France is on neither coast, let me tell you, just for fun, some of the combinations on the menu of our local Rapido Pizz, which delivers on a scooter within 15 minutes of your order:
There are Halal pizzas, which include combinations like kebab, Emmenthal, tomato, onions and olive, or one with merguez, tomato, onions, olives, and crème fraîche. There are the Northern pizzas, like the Alsacienne with bacon, onions, emmenthal, olives, and crème fraîche, or the Savoyarde, which is the same but with the addition of potatoes. . . .
I'll make another axiomatic statement about pizza: It needs to be comprised of ingredients that can reasonably fall within the culinary range of Italian flavors. "Somewhat flat bread with stuff on it" is, after all, not a uniquely Italian phenomenon. Why should we devalue the Armenian tradition by calling lahmajune "Armenian pizza"? Why would the French want to call tarte Alsacienne "Alsatian pizza" or pissaladière "Provençal pizza"?
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Just for fun, I'd be interested to try this cube jigger that measures 0.5, 0.75, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0 and 2.25 ounces. It is quite large, however, clocking in as a 3-inch cube.
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Yea, the adjustable teaspoon is awesome. This KitchenArt measure is the one to get, I think. (This one is less useful, but also worth having. It goes from 1 teaspoon down to an eighth.) I know some people who have the Nuscüp from Dalla Piazza, and I'm not a fan.
Mezzalunas
in Kitchen Consumer
Posted
An ulu is significantly different from a mezzaluna. Most significantly, the ulu has a single handle in the center of the crescent, whereas a mezzaluna has separate handles at each point of the crescent. A mezzaluna is often implemented with two or three blades (which an ulu never is) and, as a general rule of thumb I'd say that a mezzaluna is larger than an ulu (most ulus are around 6 inches, which is the size of only the smallest and least useful mezzalune).
As for both knifes... almost anyone can fall in love with almost any style of knife, but I don't find either one particularly useful and believe that they are among the most commonly unused kitchen tools. I was gifted an ulu several years ago, and despite the fact that it's sitting right there next to my other 20 or so knives, I've never once used it. I've just never had a single kitchen task where I thought to myself, "the best knife I have for this is the ulu." Then again, I don't find myself scraping the skin off seal blubber all that often. As for the mezzaluna... I suppose it might be handy if you want to make large quantities of very traditional pesto. But it's pretty rare in my experience that you'd want to chop that many herbs -- and when you do need to chop that many herbs, you're usually going to break out the food processor.
The ulu and mezzaluna share a similar problem with the santoku: people see them and think, "that looks cool! I want one." Then they get them home and discover that they don't really like using them very often. Of course, some people love their santoku and Peter loves his ulu... but this seems like a minority to me.