slkinsey

If they price Plymouth significantly over stalwarts such as Tanqueray and Beefeater, they will effectively kill the brand in the United States.

You must not wash the dishes in your house. Why would I want to dirty another pot, when I can do everything in the roasting pan and just have one pan to clean? My roasting pans get plenty of use and I'm an advocate of buying a good one. My point is that a heavy gauge stainless steel roasting pan to the tune of around 33 bucks (such as this one) will work just fine for deglazing, etc. so long as you don't plan on simmering a starch-thickened gravy in there for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, with the extra $47 to $87 you'll save over the pans Tim suggests (not to mention $167 saved versus an All-Clad roaster) can be used on a really nice saucepan. If the deglazing or whatever is going to be short duration, there is no difference between how these pans will perform. If the liquid is going to be reduced, manipulated, etc. as the sauce as made -- yea, I'll dirty another pan. It takes about three seconds to clean a saucepan that's been used to make a sauce (or less, if you toss it in the dishwasher). Meanwhile, you get a whole lot more functionality out of your money. (Fixed formatting)

Yes. Having a roasting pan with advanced thermal properties for the stovetop, because there's no need to deglaze and reduce in the roasting pan. I'd think the money would be better spend on a cheap roasting pan and a really good saucepan. Just deglaze and then pour the fond into the saucepan for further reduction, keeping warm, mounting, whatever (this has the added advantage of freeing up considerable stovetop real estate). Meanwhile, the saucepan has many other uses, so you get much more bang for your buck.

Better yet is something like this: http://www.amazon.com/RSVP-Classic-Ice-Cracker/dp/B000684HYQ Or, if you like vintage, one of these: http://www.mildreds-antiques.com/images/red_tap_ice_200.jpg

This is the standard technique for making "cracked" ice, which is what I always use for stirred drinks. For crushed ice drinks and shaved ice drinks such as the swizzle or julep, one really needs an ice crusher (electric models are easily found on eBay). Here's what I said back in 2007 in this thread:

Doesn't Beacon have a long tradition of doing interesting and unusual things? I think of the beefsteak dinners, etc?

Sure, it's possible to use other processes to convert starch to sugar. This is most often done, as you observe, by heating (pinas are treated in a smiliar way for making tequila). And, indeed, one uses cooked pumpkin for making pumpkin beer. But this is not "malting." Rather, it's a process commonly referred to as "baking." But... don't take my word for it.

malting is just the transformation of starch to something fermentable. I'm sorry, but this is incorrect. Malting has a very specific meaning, and yours is not it. Malting means the partial germination (to produce amylase enzymes) and drying (to stop the sprouting process) of grains. Converting starch to sugar is not the same as malting. For example, American six-row barley, when malted, has a very high amount of amylase enzymes. These are the enzymes that are produced as part of germination, and their job is to convert the starch in the seed's endosperm into sugars that the plant will use to sprout. This is why "malting" involves partial germination: to produce those enzymes. Anyway... American six-row barley malt has such a high amount of enzymes that it is enough to convert other starches into sugar beyond just those in the barley grain's endosperm. So, you can make a mash with American six-row barley and throw in some corn (Miller) or rice (Budweiser), and there will be enough enzymes from the barley to convert the starches in the corn or rice into fermentable sugars. This is not "malting" the corn or rice, this is "mashing" the unmalted corn or rice. If you germinate and dry the corn kernels, then you have "malted" corn. Pumpkin, being a gourd and not a grain, can not be malted.

I would say that there is more than convincing "proof" (to the extent one can prove a negative) that neither the use of raw aluminum cookware nor PTFE-coated cookware creates any meaningful health risk.

Just as a point of clarity: "Malt" is a grain that has been germinated and then dried. There is no possibility of there being such a thing as "malted pumpkin." To the best of my knowledge, pumpkin beers are not made by mashing the pumpkin in with the grains. Rather, cooked pumpkin and spices are added to the wort during the boiling stage of the process. Once the wort is cooled, the pumpkin debris is held out along with the other trub, yeast is pitched and the beer is brewed as normal.

Ed Levine's take Frank Bruni's take

Frm a health standpoint, there is nothing wrong with cooking with aluminum. The supposed connection to Alzheimer's has been exhaustively debunked. A few examples: Think about it: aluminum is the third most abundant element in the earth's crust! As for cooking . . . plenty of restaurants cook on raw aluminum. It's cheap and it has good thermal properties. Most of the time, depending on what you're cooking, there is nothing wrong with using a raw aluminum cooking surface. The only problem is that aluminum is highy reactive, and cooking certain foods on raw aluminum (especially acidic foods) can cause off-flavors. This reduces the versatility of the cookware. Other than raw aluminum, there is anodized aluminum, which is aluminum that has been treated with an electrolytic process to create a harder surface that is still somewhat reactive, but significantly less so than untreated aluminum. Calphalon is the most widely known example. The problems with anodized aluminum, in my opinion, are that it is very difficult to keep clean, it is fairly expensive, it's soft, and like all unclad aluminum, it has a tendency to warp -- especially at high heat. Beyond that, you get into clad aluminum and whatnot. But, in these cases, you are using the aluminum only for its (excellent) thermal properties -- the food never actually contacts the aluminum, but rather contacts the cladding. All this and more in my cookware class: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=25717

Exactly my thinking as well.

Like I say, anything's possible. But, Sean Combs notwithstanding, I don't think history is rife with examples of people who have successfully pursuaded everyone to stop using a reasonably well recognized and widely used designation in favor of a somewhat silly-sounding invented alternative.

Well... it will be interesting to see how it worrks out. It seems to me that the proponents of a particular style or movement don't often get to decide what it is called. For example, I don't think you'll find too many popular musicians of the l;ate 1970s and early 1980s who preferred to have their work described as "New Wave" -- and yet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_W...nds_and_artists

The reasons I can virtually guarantee it are (1) the fact that "molecular gastronomy" already has plenty of traction (it's much more difficult to replace an entrenched designation than it is to come up with a new one for something new); (2) the simple fact that the word "technoemotional" does not trip easily from the tongue (consider that we're having enough trouble getting world leaders to correctly pronounce "nuclear"); (3) it seems highly likely that plenty of chefs working in this style won't like the word "technoemotional" any more than they like "molecular gastronomy," further hindering any possibility this new designation has at replacing the current one; and (4) while certain infulential "movement" chefs are currently using the term, this doesn't seem like a group that is exactly known for tenacity when it comes to terminology, which makes me wonder what term they might prefer in 2010.. I mean... it's possible we'll all be saying things like, "the technoemotional cuisine of Ferran Adria" three years from now. But, if I were a betting man, I'd put pretty heavy odds on "technoemotional" seeming like a silly affectation when we look back in 2011. What's the Spanish word for it? I'd give that much better odds of sticking around in the English-speaking world (after all, "nouvelle cuisine" works much better than "new cooking").

I don't think "technoemotional cuisine" describes this style of cooking (or approach to cuisine or whatever you want to call it) any better than "molecular gastronomy." And I can virtually guarantee that the former will never catch on. The reality is that words describing a certain style or more-or-less cohesive historical stylistic period (etc.) come to signify the things that they describe rather than the other way around. What's so "new" about the style/approach we would now commonly recognize as "nouvelle cuisine"? What's so "romantic" about Rossini and Verdi, who wrote during the so-called "Romantic Period," that is "not romantic" about Mozart, who wrote during the so-called "Classical Period"? The answer is that "nouvelle" and "romantic" and "classical" have different meanings in these specific contexts... they have come to signify the things that they describe, regardless of whether "Il barbiere di Siviglia" is understood according to the usual meaning of "romantic" (etc.).

If the drink must be a new creation, then I agree that Audrey Saunders would probably have to be the creator. I would, however, maybe suggest the alternative of the Red Hook and its variations (Little Italy, Slope, etc) for perhaps their better espousement of the zietgeist, being variations on old-school drinks, all containing Rye, and all having bitter flavors as primary components. I think that the difference between some of Audrey's better-known cocktails, such as the Tantris Sidecar, Gin Gin Mule and Earl Gray MarTEAni, and something like the Red Hook and its variants, is that these drinks of Audrey's are clearly evoked from a paradigm of classic mixology, but are also modern in a way that makes them wholly of our time. The same cannot be said of the Red Hook, et al. One would not be served the MarTEAni or Tantris Sidecar at the Old Waldorf=Astoria . The Red Hook, on the other hand, would fit right in.

I wonder how difficult it is to "tool up" for a run of Malacca gin. I'd think they could run a batch once a year, and have very little difficulty selling all of it.

I certainly would. Exactly. While I think there are good reasons to suggest the Aviation for the "cocktail of the 2000s," I think it ultimately fails for just this reason. I would propose that such a cocktail would likely be one that is in the classic style, reflecting the emphatic return of the classic approach to mixology during this decade, but a new drink. Something like Audrey's Tantris Sidecar comes to mind as a possibility, because it is famous and influential, inspired by an iconic classic cocktail, and pushes the envelope a bit. Not sure what this refers to. I don't think anyone in the linked thread wrote that the Aviation fails as the "drink of the 2000s" because it was a revived historical cocktail rather than a contemporary cocktail.

I think it's difficult to proclaim anything a "drink of the decade" at all, but certainly not one that has only been around for the last year of that decade. In order for something to be a "drink of the decade" one would like to see that it (1) reflects, in some way, the cocktailian zeitgeist of a ten-year period; (2) attained some level of popularity, both in terms of its presence on menus and in the minds of cocktailians; (3) was influential; (4) was original; and (5) could be considered, perhaps on the basis of the foregoing, a "modern classic." It's possible, I suppose, that by 2015, fat-washing will be seen as the major cocktailian innovation and trend of the decade from 2005 and 2015. And, in that context, the Benton's Old Fashioned might come to be seen as a popular early adoption of that technique, and emblematic of that particular fork in the cocktailian road. But I'd suggest that it's a bit too early to make any such determination at this point. Regardless, in consideration of the fact that fat-washing is a technique that really is only beginning to be explored in the last years of this decade, I wouldn't think that a fat-wash Old Fashioned would be a particularly good choice to represent the mixological trends of this decade. (Not that it isn't a brilliant and delicious drink, of course.) In a similar phenomenon, one notices that recent athletes and recent musicians and recent songs and recent writers and recent movies often figure too prominently in any "the best of" lists compiled during any era. For example, if one were to look back at a list of the "25 greatest quarterbacks of all time" voted upon by football fans in 1990, it would likely include a number of names from current players in that era that would seem ridiculous on such a list today. That said, it perhaps seems that in picking a "cocktail of the decade" one isn't seeking to pick a "best" cocktail of the decade, but rather an outstanding and influential cocktail created during a ten year period that also somehow captures and embodies the cocktailian zeitgeist of the decade. In considering this question, we would need to think not only of what might represent the cocktailian zeitgeist of today, but also of 2002 and 2006.

eBay.

"Maw" is an colloquial word meaning "mouth" or "jaw". . . or, curiously enough, meaning "stomach." In the American South, if you hear "hog maw" it most likely refers to a pig stomach. Caul fat is a fatty membrane that surrounds the internal organs of a pig, cow, etc. Completely different.

That's about as good as it gets on the UWS.

Hmmm - so one eats steaming hot bowls of ramen on the street? Ramen-ya. . . Street. . . Same thing.