Some American writers had nibbled at the idea of professional restaurant criticism before this, including Claiborne, who had written one-off reviews of major new restaurants for The Times. But his first "Directory to Dining," 50 years ago this month, marks the day when the country pulled up a chair and began to chow down. Within a few years, nearly every major newspaper had to have a Craig Claiborne of its own. Reading the critics, eating what they had recommended, and then bragging or complaining about it would become a national pastime.
As the current caretaker of the house that Claiborne built, I lack objectivity on this subject. Still, I believe that without professional critics like him and others to point out what was new and delicious, chefs would not be smiling at us from magazine covers, subway ads and billboards. They would not be invited to the White House, except perhaps for job interviews. Claiborne and his successors told Americans that restaurants mattered. That was an eccentric opinion a half-century ago. It's not anymore.
In this Smithsonian interview, University of Minnesota history professor Jeffrey Pilcher drops serious knowledge on the history of tacos. Among other bits of taco trivia, Pilcher, author of the forthcoming book Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food, roughly disabuses us of the lie spread by Glen Bell (of Taco Bell) that Bell invented the hard shell.
What made the fast-food taco possible?
The fast-food taco is a product of something called the "taco shell," a tortilla that has been pre-fried into that characteristic U-shape. If you read Glen Bell's authorized biography, he says he invented the taco shell in the 1950s, and that it was his technological breakthrough. Mexicans were cooking tacos to order -- fresh -- and Glen Bell, by making then ahead, was able to serve them faster. But when I went into the U.S. patent office records, I found the original patents for making taco shells were awarded in the 1940s to Mexican restaurateurs, not to Glen Bell.
Pilcher's other books include editing The Oxford Handbook of Food History, and writing The Sausage Rebellion: Public Health, Private Enterprise, and Meat in Mexico City, 1890-1917 and Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity. The Sausage Rebellion indeed.
So how did that buttermilk, the original buttermilk, turn into the thick, sour, yogurty beverage I sampled at Threadgill's? The confusion surrounding this drink dates back to the 18th century or before. Until the age of refrigeration, milk soured quickly in the kitchen, and most butter ended up being made from the slightly spoiled stuff. As a result, some historical sources use the word buttermilk in the Laura Ingalls Wilder sense, to describe the byproduct of butter-making; others use it to describe butter-making's standard ingredient at the time-milk that had gone sour from sitting around too long. To make matters more confusing, the butter-byproduct kind of buttermilk could be either "sour," if you started out with the off milk that was itself sometimes called buttermilk, or "sweet," if you started out with fresh cream (like Laura's mom did). So, prior to the 20th century, buttermilk could refer to at least three different categories of beverage: regular old milk that had gone sour; the sour byproduct of churning sour milk or cream into butter; and the "sweet" byproduct of churning fresh milk or cream into butter.
We occasionally get the real stuff for making the world's best pancakes and it definitely makes a difference.
Hand-mined from ancient sea salt deposits from the Khewra Salt Mine in Pakistan, Himalayan salt is rich in minerals and believed to be one of the purest salts available -- hence its frequent use in spa treatments. It ranges in color from pure white to shades of pink and deep red. Hand cut into slabs, Himalayan salt is frequently used as a surface for serving food. Due to their ability to hold a specific temperature for an extended period of time, these slabs can be used for anything from serving cold ice cream to cooking fish, meats, and vegetables. Himalayan salt can also be used as a cooking or finishing salt. Or use it to rim the edge of a glass for a warm-weather cocktail.
Tom Scocca wonders why recipe writers don't tell the truth about how long caramelizing onions really takes.
Onions do not caramelize in five or 10 minutes. They never have, they never will-yet recipe writers have never stopped pretending that they will. I went on Twitter and said so, rudely, using CAPS LOCK. A chorus of frustrated cooks responded in kind ("That's on some bullshit. You want caramelized onions? Stir for 45 minutes").
As long as I've been cooking, I've been reading various versions of this lie, over and over. Here's Madhur Jaffrey, from her otherwise reliable Indian Cooking, explaining how to do the onions for rogan josh: "Stir and fry for about 5 minutes or until the onions turn a medium-brown colour." The Boston Globe, on preparing pearl onions for coq au vin: "Add the onions and cook, stirring often, for 5 minutes or until golden." The Washington Post, on potato-green bean soup: "Add the onion and cook for 8 to 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until golden brown."
It's sad but true that plenty of New York restaurants will raise an eyebrow if you bring in the kids. But plenty won't! Consider spacious, friendly Coppelia downtown (Latin fare) or Kefi uptown (Greek) for great food that's inexpensive for a sit-down spot and has enough simpler options that there will be something for picky eaters. The next morning, take the kids to Doughnut Plant (if you're willing to sacrifice the notion of a balanced breakfast) for all sorts of flavors they'll stare at wide-eyed. PB-loving kids will love Peanut Butter and Company for lunch, where they can get their favorite sandwich in a dozen ways. Other good options include Shake Shack for burgers or Bark for hot dogs, if you're out in Park Slope.
If you need a snack uptown, the gigantic chocolate chip cookies at Levain should do the trick (take note: these are big enough to share). Kefi's a logical choice nearby for dinner, but if you find yourself downtown, consider Mario Batali's Otto, where parents will appreciate the sophistication and kids will love the huge plates of pasta. (Try to make a reservation as waits can be long, which might not be good with tired kids.)
If there was a "Jason shortlist" category, I would include Ssam Bar, Shake Shack, Gramercy Tavern, Marea, Per Se, Mendy's (chix salad sandwich), Katz's, Ma Peche, Spotted Pig, Fedora, Joseph Leonard, Parm, Despana, Xi'an Famous Foods, Colicchio and Sons, Tia Pol, The Modern Bar Room, Pastis, Patsy's, Morandi, Murray's Cheese Shop, Hill Country Chix, Grey Dog, Nice Green Bo, Peter Luger, Keen's, Artisinal, Bouchon Bakery, Burger Joint, and The Beagle. Ok, not such a short list and I'm sure I forgot some of my favorites. (via @anildash)
Paul Simms lists various violations of a hypothetical restaurant mental health code. A couple of favorites:
Solo diner blows out table candle to avoid accidentally setting his newspaper on fire, only to have it relit repeatedly by busboy.
Member of all-white waitstaff barks at member of all-Hispanic busboy staff in way that makes customers feel like those who just stood by and watched in Vichy France.
Poultry-growing literature has recommended Benadryl to reduce anxiety among chickens, apparently because stressed chickens have tougher meat and grow more slowly. Tylenol and Prozac presumably serve the same purpose.
Researchers found that most feather-meal samples contained caffeine. It turns out that chickens are sometimes fed coffee pulp and green tea powder to keep them awake so that they can spend more time eating. (Is that why they need the Benadryl, to calm them down?)
And yet foie gras is the big problem. Right. Sadly, I imagine that hogs aren't treated any differently.
Chickens in the United States produced for meat are not given "arsenic" as an additive in chicken feed, or any of the other compounds mentioned in this study. Some flocks used to be given feed that contained a product called Roxarsone, which is a molecule that includes organic (carbon-rich, pentavalent) arsenic - not the inorganic, trivalent form that is considered a poison. This product was removed from the market last year, it is no longer manufactured and it is no longer used in raising chickens in the United States. Regardless, as the study's authors point out: "There's no evidence that such low levels of arsenic harm either chickens or the people eating them."
In fact, organic arsenic is a naturally occurring element in our environment that is widely distributed within the earth's crust. It is not surprising that in this study arsenic was detected on bird's feathers because it is naturally present in the air, soil and water.
I'll just quickly note a couple of things about this. This bit -- "the top priority for America's chicken farmers and processors is to raise healthy, top quality birds" -- is pretty hilarious. But it's the National Chicken Council...what are they gonna say? Also note they did not specifically deny giving chickens caffeine and the active ingredients in Prozac, Tylenol, and Benadryl.
If I hadn't seen it on the official Emmentaler web site, I would have thought this video about cheese producers using geckos to produce better cheese was fake.
Pesky flies buzzing around our cows cause them stress. And this affects the quality of the milk. Which is why we quite simply put a gecko on our cows which gets rid of all these pesky flies -- by eating them. The result is milk that is smoother, and cheese that is smoother too.
(thx, urs)
Update:sigh This is likely an early April Fools joke or whatever. INTERNET, I THOUGHT WE HAD AGREED THAT APRIL FOOLS IS STUPID AND FOR STUPID PEOPLE AND EVEN IF THAT IS NOT THE CASE TO CONFINE THE STUPIDITY TO ONE DAY, APRIL FIRST, AND NOT DO ANYTHING BEFOREHAND. God, I hate April Fools Day. Fuck you.
Allan Benton makes ham, some of the most delicious ham you'll ever taste. In a pair of documentaries, Benton talks about his approach to life, business, and ham. The first is short, just a couple of minutes, and offers a taste of Benton's daily schedule:
And this one is a more straightforward documentary look at Benton and his philosophy of ham.
It's not the dollar that motivates me so much as the compliment.
and profiled by Gourmet in 2006, in which Benton takes a trip to some of the NYC restaurants using his products:
David Chang of Momofuku, the iconoclastic ramen and small plates bar, is a stalwart. He has been using Allan's bacon and ham since January 2005. When Allan and Sharon arrive, Chang beams. He genuflects. He stands tall by the stove and dishes a soup of cockles in a ham broth. He whisks a ham-skin-scented dashi into a pan of yellow grits, then tops them with a poached egg, crescents of ruby shrimp, and a thatch of crisp chopped bacon. And as Allan and Sharon fold their napkins, Chang exits the galley kitchen and joins them at the counter.
Allan, who has the countenance and intellect of a presidentialera Jimmy Carter, ducks his head and grins. He snags an afterthought of bacon with his chopsticks and drags it through a puddle of yolk. "I had no idea what you were doing with my bacon and ham," he says, his face twisting upward, the corners of his mouth gone vertical. "This is amazing, just amazing, especially for a purebred Tennessee hillbilly."
I get the Benton's ham every time I go to Ssam Bar. You can order hams and bacon from Benton's web site, which, with its odd URL (bentonscountryhams2.com) and default page title ("Network Solutions E-Commerce Web Site - Home"), is just as delightfully old timey as the rotary telephone in Benton's office.
Frank Bruni, who was the food critic at the NY Times for five years, was recently diagnosed with gout. Since his diagnosis, he's had to cut back on much of his previous food and drink favorites.
You never really quite appreciate just what a cornucopia of food alternatives exists -- just how many culinary directions you can set off in -- until a few are cut off and you're forced to re-route yourself. That's a lesson that people with celiac disease and with diabetes have learned. It's what vegetarians have long asserted. And it's what gout is teaching me. In diet books, the word "substitution" comes across as some pathetic euphemism for "sacrifice" and "compromise," a positive-spin noun born of negative circumstances. But substitution is indeed a plausible course, and not necessarily a punitive one. At breakfast, oatmeal thickened with a heaping tablespoon of peanut butter can provide the same wicked indulgence that pork sausage does. At dinnertime, chicken prepared with care and ingenuity can go a long way toward replacing lamb, and the right kind of omelet can be wholly satisfying.
Cocktail enthusiast Martin Doudoroff explains how to make an Old Fashioned without using any of the "various bad ideas" (e.g. "There is no slice of orange in an Old Fashioned") that have crept in over the years.
Sugar (and the scant water it is dissolved in) mellows the spirit of the drink. Not much is required, just a little, as the quality of today's spirits is so much higher than it typically was when the Old Fashioned was born. A little splash of simple syrup generally suffices. Gum syrup, rich simple syrup, demerara syrup, brown sugar syrup, sugar cane syrup (the variety filtered of molasses solids) all are great choices. Agave syrup or other neutral diet-sensitive sweeteners may suffice.
Honey, maple syrup, molasses or other strongly-flavored sweeteners do not belong in an Old Fashioned, which is not to say you cannot or should not create nice variations on the Old Fashioned with them.
How the burger could change lives I never divined, but on occasion it was magnificent, as beefy and flavorful as the outer quarter-inch of a Peter Luger porterhouse.
More often, though, the meat was cooked to the color of wet newsprint, inside and out, and salted so meekly that eating it was as satisfying as hearing a friend talk about a burger his cousin ate.
Even when the burgers were great, they could be great in one of two distinct ways. In the classic Shake Shack patty, a tower of ground beef is flattened against a searing griddle with a metal press and made to stay there, spitting and hissing, until one surface turns all brown and crunchy. A patty handled this way takes command of a Shackburger, standing up to its tangy sauce, its crisp lettuce, its wheels of plum tomato.
Sometimes, though, the grill cook hadn't had the energy needed for smashing and searing. Instead the patty was tall, soft and melting, so pink inside that its juices began to soak the bun at the first bite. Good as this version was, it was anomalous.
The Shack Burger is still my favorite hamburger and sitting in Madison Square Park eating one on a warm night with friends -- hell, even waiting in line for 45 minutes catching up -- is one of my favorite NYC activities.
I love these cauliflower explosions done by Brock Davis...you can find them in his Food Stuff set on Flickr. Here's the Challenger explosion in cauliflower:
Though his several wins came early on in the competition's history, El Wingador is still competing in the Wing Bowl. In the 2012 competition, held today, El Wingador came in third while Takeru Kobayashi completely demolished the competition in his first attempt, eating 337 wings in the process.
From the This Must Be the Place series, a lovely short film about the Prime Burger Restaurant in midtown Manhattan. The restaurant opened in 1938 and one of the servers, Artie, has been there since 1952.
For many of the guys that work here, the restaurant is like a second home -- some of them have been slinging burgers, making shakes, and waiting on customers at this location for decades. Opened in 1938, the place hasn't been altered since the early '60s, and it looks all the better for it. Here the waiters and workers of Prime Burger discuss their views on their chosen profession, and the unique nature of the place itself.
So why the need to order right? Because to keep up with the fast food chains, the DiMicelis started par-broiling their burgers. Par-broiling produces a less juicy burger. So when you order at Prime Burger specify you want your burger ($5.25 for a hamburger, $5.95 for a cheeseburger) made from scratch, and that you're willing to wait the extra few minutes.
It turns out that if you didn't grow up with Oreos and develop an emotional attachment to the cookie, it can be a weird-tasting little thing. And this started a whole process in the Chinese division of Kraft of rethinking what the essence of an Oreo really is.
Key terms in this article include "the essence of Oreoness" and "Twist, Lick, Dunk".
If your idea of a holiday workout is lifting glasses of beer late into the night, then it's not just the extra calories you need to worry about. Randy Nelson and his team at Ohio State University in Columbus found that mice exposed to light at night weighed 10 per cent more at the end of the eight-week study than mice that had experienced a standard light/dark cycle, even though they ate the same total number of calories and did the same amount of exercise.
In recent years, authors have claimed that many seemingly boring things have changed the world but a particularly strong case can be made for the potato and Charles C. Mann makes it.
The effects of this transformation were so striking that any general history of Europe without an entry in its index for S. tuberosum should be ignored. Hunger was a familiar presence in 17th- and 18th-century Europe. Cities were provisioned reasonably well in most years, their granaries carefully monitored, but country people teetered on a precipice. France, the historian Fernand Braudel once calculated, had 40 nationwide famines between 1500 and 1800, more than one per decade. This appalling figure is an underestimate, he wrote, "because it omits the hundreds and hundreds of local famines." France was not exceptional; England had 17 national and big regional famines between 1523 and 1623. The continent simply could not reliably feed itself.
The potato changed all that. Every year, many farmers left fallow as much as half of their grain land, to rest the soil and fight weeds (which were plowed under in summer). Now smallholders could grow potatoes on the fallow land, controlling weeds by hoeing. Because potatoes were so productive, the effective result, in terms of calories, was to double Europe's food supply.
During our visit, Paul Rosenblatt told us that he aims to ripen fruit in five days at 62 degrees, but, to schedule fruit readiness in accordance with supply and demand, he can push a room in four days at 64 degrees, or extend the process to seven days at 58 degrees.
"The energy coming off a box of ripening bananas could heat a small apartment," Rosenblatt explains, which means that heavy-duty refrigeration is required to keep each room temperature-controlled to within a half a degree. In the past, Banana Distributors of New York has even experimented with heating parts of the building on captured heat from the ripening process.
To add to the complexity, customers can choose from different degrees of ripeness, ranging from 1 (all green) to 7 (all yellow with brown sugar spots). Banana Distributors of New York proudly promise that they have "Every Color, Every Day," although Rosenblatt gets nervous if he has more than 2000 boxes of any particular shade.
Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in in the fall. Mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive-requiring a trio of cows-and demand many acres of land. There's just no sense in it.
A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors-in all likelihood, a couple of dozen-and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh.
Famed pizzeria Grimaldi's is being forced out of their space under the Brooklyn Bridge and is moving up the block...without their coveted coal oven. But now comes word that Patsy Grimaldi, former owner of Grimaldi's, is moving into the old space with a new restaurant called Juliana's. If I recall correctly, about half of the Grimaldi's menu is devoted to a telling of the Patsy's/Grimaldi's feud...looks like they're gonna need another page or two.
Sour candy is sour because of the acidity level. The Minnesota Dental Association has compiled a chart listing several popular sour candies, all of which are acidic enough to cause tooth enamel loss and some of which are almost as acidic as battery acid! Here's part of the chart:
Update: I meant to add that the ph scale is logarithmic (like the Richter scale) so that a pH of 3.0 is 10 times more acidic than a pH of 4.0. That means that even the pH 1.6 & 1.8 candies on the list aren't quite battery acid, but it also means that a pH 2.0 candy has 100x more acidity than is required to cause enamel loss, not just 2x.
Drinkify matches up the music you're listening to with a suggested drink. According to the site, Daft Punk pairs best with 6 oz. Bombay Sapphire Gin served neat, Philip Glass should be accompanied by a bottle of red wine, The Clash goes with 1 oz. cocaine + 1 oz. grenadine served in a highball, and you can probably guess what you drink while listening to Snoop Dogg:
Next is a restaurant like no other. Every season the menu and service explore an entirely different cuisine. Buying a ticket is the only way to get in... and the entire season sold out in a few hours. The inaugural menu took diners back to Paris: 1906, Escoffier at the Ritz for a multi-course pre fixe dinner that was described by the New York Times as "Belle Epoque dishes largely unseen on American tables for generations."
Ok, someone needs to do this: 1. Open a restaurant (in New York, say) that features old menus from Next every three months using the Next cookbooks to plan menus. 2. Call it Previous. 3. Profit!
At this volume, and with the impermanence of the sandwich, it only makes sense for McDonald's to treat the sandwich as a sort of arbitrage strategy: at both ends of the product pipeline, you have a good being traded at such large volume that we might as well forget that one end of the pipeline is hogs and corn and the other end is a sandwich. McDonald's likely doesn't think in these terms, and neither should you.
Oh and speaking of pipelines:
And for its part, the McRib makes a mockery of this whole terribly labor-intensive system of barbecue, turning it into a capital-intensive one. The patty is assembled by machinery probably babysat by some lone sadsack, and it is shipped to distribution centers by black-beauty-addicted truckers, to be shipped again to franchises by different truckers, to be assembled at the point of sale by someone who McDonald's corporate hopes can soon be replaced by a robot, and paid for using some form of electronic payment that will eventually render the cashier obsolete.
There is no skilled labor involved anywhere along the McRib's Dickensian journey from hog to tray, and certainly no regional variety, except for the binary sort -- Yes, the McRib is available/No, it is not -- that McDonald's uses to promote the product. And while it hasn't replaced barbecue, it does make a mockery of it.
The results show that the pollen frequently has been filtered out of products labeled "honey." The removal of these microscopic particles from deep within a flower would make the nectar flunk the quality standards set by most of the world's food safety agencies.
The food safety divisions of the World Health Organization, the European Commission and dozens of others also have ruled that without pollen there is no way to determine whether the honey came from legitimate and safe sources.
In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration says that any product that's been ultra-filtered and no longer contains pollen isn't honey. However, the FDA isn't checking honey sold here to see if it contains pollen.
It's that last sentence that really pisses me off...the FDA and USDA are pathetic jokes.
Anyway, there is speculation that the pollen removal is masking the use of unregulated, uninspected, and illegally imported Chinese honey.
Eric Wenger, director of quality services for Golden Heritage Foods, the nation's third largest packer, said his company takes every precaution not to buy laundered Chinese honey.
"We are well aware of the tricks being used by some brokers to sell honey that originated in China and laundering it in a second country by filtering out the pollen and other adulterants," said Wenger, whose firm markets 55 million pounds of honey annually under its Busy Bee brand, store brands, club stores and food service.
"The brokers know that if there's an absence of all pollen in the raw honey we won't buy it, we won't touch it, because without pollen we have no way to verify its origin."
Michael Pollan and Maira Kalman come together to create an enhanced Food Rules for hardcover, now beautifully illustrated and with even more food wisdom.
Michael Pollan's definitive compendium, Food Rules, is here brought to colorful life with the addition of Maira Kalman's beloved illustrations.
This brilliant pairing is rooted in Pollan's and Kalman's shared appreciation for eating's pleasures, and their understanding that eating doesn't have to be so complicated. Written with the clarity, concision, and wit that is Michael Pollan's trademark, this indispensable handbook lays out a set of straightforward, memorable rules for eating wisely. Kalman's paintings remind us that there is delight in learning to eat well.
Ed Levine, whom Ruth Reichl calls the "missionary of the delicious," and his SeriousEats.com editors present their unique take on iconic foods made and served around the country. From house-cured, hand-cut corned beef sandwiches at Jake's in Milwaukee to fried-to-order doughnuts at Shipley's Do-Nuts in Houston; from fresh clam pizza at Zuppardi's Pizzeria in West Haven, Connecticut, to Green Eggs and Ham at Huckleberry Bakery and Caf'e in Los Angeles, Serious Eats is a veritable map of some of the best food they have eaten nationwide.
Covering fast food, family-run restaurants, food trucks, and four-star dining establishments, all with zero snobbery, there is plenty here for every food lover, from coast to coast and everywhere in between. Featuring 400 of the Serious Eats team's greatest food finds and 50 all-new recipes, this is your must-read manual for the pursuit of a tasty life.
You'll learn not only where to go for the best grub, but also how to make the food you crave right in your own kitchen, with original recipes including Neapolitan Pizza (and dough), the Ultimate Sliders (which were invented in Kansas), Caramel Sticky Buns, Southern Fried Chicken, the classic Reuben, and Triple-Chocolate Adult Brownies. You'll also hone your Serious Eater skills with tips that include signs of deliciousness, regional style guides (think pizza or barbecue), and Ed's hypotheses-ranging from the Cuban sandwich theory to the Pizza Cognition Theory-on what makes a perfect bite.
Speaking of fruit, you may think a banana is just a banana, but it's not. Dole and other banana growers have turned the creation of a banana into a science, in part to manipulate perceptions of freshness. In fact, they've issued a banana guide to greengrocers, illustrating the various color stages a banana can attain during its life cycle. Each color represents the sales potential for the banana in question. For example, sales records show that bananas with Pantone color 13-0858 (otherwise known as Vibrant Yellow) are less likely to sell than bananas with Pantone color 12-0752 (also called Buttercup), which is one grade warmer, visually, and seems to imply a riper, fresher fruit. Companies like Dole have analyzed the sales effects of all varieties of color and, as a result, plant their crops under conditions most ideal to creating the right 'color.'
Paul Newman's character amazingly eats fifty hard-boiled eggs in one hour in Cool Hand Luke. Sixty-five hard-boiled eggs eaten in sixty minutes and forty seconds is the actual world record, held by Sonya Thomas.
As to why he didn't drink water, an inebriated W. C. Fields purportedly responded, "Fish fuck in it."
"As if I swallowed a baby," said William Makepeace Thackeray about eating his first oyster.
Huitlacoche (pronounced weet-la-KOH-chay) is a fungus, called corn smut in the US, that has recently become something of a delicacy. "Before, it was seen as a food of the poor. Now it's the food of the rich," following the same track as lobster. The cultivation of huitlacoche is growing dramatically, as an infected stock sells for more than a normal corn cob. The flavor is described as earthy and unique, perhaps most similar to a mushroom.
In recent decades -- before huitlacoche really took off -- the fungus largely was sauteed with garlic, onions and poblano chile strips and served by street vendors in quesadillas, folded-over corn tortillas. Then cooks realized its flavor would make nearly any dish sensational. Restaurants sometimes offer it with beef, fish, in crepes with chipotle sauce, with eggs, in cream soups or with shrimp.
One thing you might not be familiar with is the fact that some NYC pizzerias use anthracite coal to cook their pizzas. (Then again, I know that Brooklyn-based Grimaldi's has made inroads into Texas, so maybe you do know coal-fired pizza.) Pizza geeks have long been into coal-fired pizzas. The ovens cook at a hot-enough temperature that a skilled pizzamaker can create an amazing crust that is both crisp and chewy at the same time and that is not dried out and tough. Also, the way that most of these old-school coal-oven places make the pizza, they just sort of know how to make a nice balanced pie, one that doesn't go too heavy on the sauce or pile on too much cheese.
Take five minutes to read this and you'll be talking NYC pizza like an expert.
Punchfork is a recipe aggregator that does ranks and rates recipes from popular food sites around the web. I really like the visual layout of the recipes; the site has a nice feel all around.
Charlie Ayers, former executive chef for Google, once worked alongside a former cook for Elvis Presley and that cook gave him his special recipe for fried chicken. Ayers says it's "the best southern fried chicken I [have] ever tasted". The recipe uses Google-sized portions...here's a recipe converter to scale it down.
It is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP), the notion that in the long run exchange rates should move towards the rate that would equalise the prices of a basket of goods and services around the world. At market exchange rates, a burger is 44% cheaper in China than in America. In other words, the raw Big Mac index suggests that the yuan is 44% undervalued against the dollar. But we have long warned that cheap burgers in China do not prove that the yuan is massively undervalued. Average prices should be lower in poor countries than in rich ones because labour costs are lower. The chart above shows a strong positive relationship between the dollar price of a Big Mac and GDP per person.
A live squid with its head removed is served on top of a bowl of sushi rice, accompanied by sashimi prepared from the head (usually sliced ika (squid) and ika-kimo (squid liver)) as well as other seafood. Seasoned soy sauce is first poured on top of the squid to make it "dance".
AGHHHH!! Gak! That is just about the freakiest thing I've ever seen. Delicious torture! (via mlkshk)
A handful of New York Times articles from the same month describe attempts to wipe out the "flavor bug," which tastes "fishy to some palates and like cucumbers to others," and "may even have tonic properties" despite its unpalatability. City officials began their efforts by building a bypass to cut out the Kensico reservoir at Valhalla from the New York water supply system. However, as the Times laments later in the month, "that Synura taste again taints water," with a newly discovered colony in the Ashokan reservoir producing the "most pungent fish-and-cucumber flavor" yet recorded.
Chef Dave is really inspired by a children's book right now, and our next menu can be entirely built on that. Or we can be an exact replica of another time and place. One menu might be from my memory: My first day at The French Laundry. It comes down to trying to be expressive. You can be expressive with a plate of food, or with the whole concept of a restaurant.
Another menu we're planning is El Bulli. One course from each year from 1983 to 2003. I'd work with Ferran [Adria] to choose the dishes that he feels are his most significant; I'd need to get him on board with that.
That El Bulli menu? Fucking crazytown. And this is the third or fourth time I've heard about the "first day at The French Laundry" menu and every single time my mouth starts watering and my hand reaches for my wallet. (via @kathrynyu)
At a Boston ice cream shop, the cost of ice cream cone has risen 10% in the last four months. The Boston Globe investigated down the supply chain and detailed where the price increases are coming from.
Ice cream may be a deliciously simple combination of milk, butter, and sugar, but the true cost of an ice cream cone is no simple business calculation. Toscanini's price tag is part of complex and increasingly interconnected world economy, one that links a dairy farm in the tiny Western Massachusetts town of Colrain to the sprawling neighborhoods of Beijing.
Also of note: pistachio ice cream might be difficult to find this summer because the cost of pistachios has increased sharply in recent months. (via girlhacker)
The Inn at the Crossroads is a blog dedicated to exploring the cuisine of George R.R. Martin's Fire and Ice book series, from which HBO's Game of Thrones is adapted.
The Queen took a flagon of sweet plum wine from a passing servant girl and filled Sansa's cup. "Drink," she commanded coldly. "Perhaps it will give you courage to deal with truth for a change."
A rare sighting, the A-Hole label is usually more than a label. Often, the whole bottle is some unique shape. Look! I'm a wine bottle in the shape of a shampoo bottle! Deal with it! Whatever. What to Expect: I wouldn't know, for I do not condone this sort of behavior. And neither should you.
David McCandless made a data visualization comparing the Atlantic Ocean fishing stocks in 1900 and in 2000. It's a literal jawdropper...here's just a little bit of it:
That's not just depleted...the fish are just gone. Click through for the full craziness. (via @daveg)
Using data from the ACNielsen HomeScan database, which employed bar-code scanners to track every purchase made by roughly 33,000 U.S. households in 2005, the two economists compared identical products sold in cities big and small, both at high-end grocery stores and discount retailers. In nearly every case, New York products were cheaper than in places such as Memphis, Indianapolis and Milwaukee.
Clearly the In-N-Out burgers making their trans-continental trip by plane would be at a disadvantage to the made-fresh-in-the-same-city burgers from Five Guys and Shake Shack, so in order to compensate for this, we made the decision to handicap all three burgers by the same amount. After a careful synchronization of watches, burgers were ordered from their respective establishments at precisely 1 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time (that's 9 p.m. EST, 6 p.m. Pacific) and not tasted until the following morning.
I used to be a big In-N-Out fan (their burger is still a great fast food burger), but the slightly more upscale Shack Burger is my favorite burger in the whole wide world...it is indeed, as the article states, "a marvel of beefy engineering".
Why can't you get a slice of pizza at John's on Bleecker or Patsy's? Allegedly because of Al Capone:
In his 1981 book on the mob called Vicious Circles: The Mafia in the Marketplace, the late Jonathan Kwitny detailed how Al Capone -- who owned a string of dairy farms near Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin -- forced New York pizzerias to use his rubbery mob cheese, so different from the real mozzarella produced here in New York City since the first immigrants from Naples arrived in Brooklyn around 1900.
As the story goes, the only places permitted to use good mozzarella made locally were the old-fashioned pizza parlors like Lombardi's, Patsy's, and John's, who could continue doing so only if they promised to never serve slices. According to Kwitny, this is why John's Pizzeria on Bleecker Street still has the warning "No Slices" on its awning today.
Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation came out ten years ago but this chapter on how much the taste and smell of food is chemically manipulated is still well worth a read.
Today's sophisticated spectrometers, gas chromatographs, and headspace-vapor analyzers provide a detailed map of a food's flavor components, detecting chemical aromas present in amounts as low as one part per billion. The human nose, however, is even more sensitive. A nose can detect aromas present in quantities of a few parts per trillion -- an amount equivalent to about 0.000000000003 percent. Complex aromas, such as those of coffee and roasted meat, are composed of volatile gases from nearly a thousand different chemicals. The smell of a strawberry arises from the interaction of about 350 chemicals that are present in minute amounts. The quality that people seek most of all in a food -- flavor -- is usually present in a quantity too infinitesimal to be measured in traditional culinary terms such as ounces or teaspoons. The chemical that provides the dominant flavor of bell pepper can be tasted in amounts as low as 0.02 parts per billion; one drop is sufficient to add flavor to five average-size swimming pools. The flavor additive usually comes next to last in a processed food's list of ingredients and often costs less than its packaging. Soft drinks contain a larger proportion of flavor additives than most products. The flavor in a twelve-ounce can of Coke costs about half a cent.
What's more, the Times adds, nearly 2,000 gamma radiation-induced mutant crop varieties have been registered around the world, including Calrose 76, a dwarf varietal that accounts for about half the rice grown in California, and the popular Star Ruby and Rio Red grapefruits, whose deep colour is a mutation produced through radiation breeding in the 1970s. Similarly, Johnson tells Pruned that "most of the global production of mint oil," with an annual market value estimated at $930 million, is extracted from the "wilt-resistant 'Todd's Mitcham' cultivar, a product of thermal neutron irradiation." She adds that "the exact nature of the genetic changes that cause it to be wilt-resistant remain unknown."
Now, I'm not here to judge anyone, but I'm totally judging: this is insane. A gender cake party goes like this:
My husband and I would like to do a cake party to find out the sex of our baby. So basically we will have the ultrasound tech put the sex of the baby in an enveloppe and we will give that enveloppe to our cake maker. The inside of the cake will either be pink or blue so when we cut into it our family, friends, as well as ourselves will find out what were having. We planned on having our close family and freinds over for this big moment....sounds lovely right?
Another thing they love is magic -- and recent culinary discoveries have opened up extraordinary possibilities for the chef to serve things that the customers had never thought were possible. Foods that change temperature when you eat them, a cup of tea that is cold on one side and hot on the other, an edible menu, a "Styrofoam" beaker that turns into a bowl of ramen when the server pours hot water over it, edible clay and rocks, a pocket watch that turns into mock-turtle soup, a bar of soap covered in foam that is actually a biscuit with honey bubbles, a milkshake volcano -- these are the kinds of thing with which the modernist chefs amaze their audience.
"Marshmallow pillows are terrific," shouted Mr. Wonka as he dashed by. "They'll be all the rage when I get them into the shops! No time to go in, though! No time to go in!"
Lickable Wallpaper for Nurseries, it said on the next door.
"Lovely stuff, lickable wallpaper!" cried Mr. Wonka, rushing past. "It has pictures of fruits on it -- bananas, apples, oranges, grapes, pineapples, strawberries, and snozzberries..."
"Snozzberries?" said Mike Teevee. "Don't interrupt!" said Mr. Wonka. "The wallpaper has all these pictures of all these fruits printed on it, and when you lick the picture of the banana, it tastes of banana. When you lick a strawberry, it tastes of strawberry. And when you lick a snozzberry, it tastes just exactly like a snozzberry..."
"But what does a snozzberry taste like?"
"You're mumbling again," said Mr. Wonka. "Speak louder next time. On we go. Hurry up!"
Hot Ice Cream for Cold Days, it said on the next door.
"Extremely useful in the winter," said Mr. Wonka, rushing on. "Hot ice cream warms you up no end in freezing weather. I also make hot ice cubes for putting in hot drinks. Hot ice cubes make hot drinks hotter."
What you actually find when you arrive at L'Ami Louis is singularly unprepossessing. It's a long, dark corridor with luggage racks stretching the length of the room. It gives you the feeling of being in a second-class railway carriage in the Balkans. It's painted a shiny, distressed dung brown. The cramped tables are set with labially pink cloths, which give it a colonic appeal and the awkward sense that you might be a suppository. In the middle of the room is a stubby stove that also looks vaguely proctological.
Kenji from Serious Eats went to In-N-Out, found a willing employee accomplice ("Awesome! I've been waiting for this day ever since I started working here!"), and proceeded to order one of everything off of the menu, the well-known secret menu, and the not-so-well-known super secret menu.
That should make you feel better about yourself when you tuck into the meat and cheese fest known as the Flying Dutchman -- the ultimate Atkins-friendly menu item. Two slices of cheese melted between two burger patties. No rabbit food, no wimpy buns, just pure protein and fat. Want to kick up the manliness by yet another factor? Ask for a Flying Dutchman Animal Style and they'll add a scoop of diced onions to the cheese. Pickles and spread will come on the side, so you'll have to add them yourself. "I wish we could add the spread and pickles for you, but it's just too messy for the cooks," explained an apologetic Thomas. The result definitely wins the award for messiest menu item of all time.
In On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee notes that there is a liquidy part of the egg white and a viscous one. If you let the liquidy part drain, before poaching, you will have a beautiful poached egg. (People tell you to put vinegar or lemon juice in poaching water -- this does nothing in my experience.) The problem was, my perforated spoons were so shallow the egg always wanted to jump out. No longer. The deep bowl of The Badass Perf spoon easily contains even a jumbo egg, as well as heaps of beans, vegetables, and pasta.
Well, sorta kinda maybe almost not really discovered it. But the story is still well worth a listen...I've never heard Ira Glass quite so on-the-edge-of-his-seat giddy.
The formula for Coca-Cola is one of the most jealously guarded trade secrets in the world. So we were surprised to come across a 1979 newspaper article with what looked like the original recipe for Coke. Talking to historian Mark Pendergrast, author of For God, Country and Coca-Cola, we were even more surprised when we found reasons to believe the recipe is real.
For six months of the year, heralded chef Ferran Adrià and his team of experts concoct new dishes for the 30 course menu of the world famous El Bulli Restaurant. Here we watch their behind-the-scenes process, an artistic laboratory of tasting, smelling, designing and carefully recording each new idea, then selecting their top choices.
The two of them -- the spare, driven artist and the comfortable, fluid patron -- evoke a modern Michelangelo and Medici, bonded by mutual trust and now locked into a very public artistic endeavor. With Next, Mr. Achatz is operating at a level of creative and financial freedom enjoyed by very few artists and only a handful of chefs in history.
And this line got me more excited than I should admit:
A menu might be designed around a single day -- say, the Napa Valley on Oct. 28, 1996, the day Mr. Achatz started work at the French Laundry, where he remained until 2001.
The moral logic in Pollan's hugely successful book now informs all food writing: the refined palate rejects the taste of factory-farmed meat, of the corn-syrupy junk food that sickens the poor, of frozen fruits and vegetables transported wastefully across oceans-from which it follows that to serve one's palate is to do right by small farmers, factory-abused cows, Earth itself. This affectation of piety does not keep foodies from vaunting their penchant for obscenely priced meals, for gorging themselves, even for dining on endangered animals-but only rarely is public attention drawn to the contradiction. This has much to do with the fact that the nation's media tend to leave the national food discourse to the foodies in their ranks. To people like Pollan himself. And Severson, his very like-minded colleague at The New York Times. Is any other subculture reported on so exclusively by its own members? Or with a frequency and an extensiveness that bear so little relation to its size?
I tweeted earlier this evening about the Buffalo wings blue cheese dip I made for tomorrow's football festivities and a couple people were wondering about the recipe, so here you go. Legend has it this is the original recipe from the Anchor Bar (aka the birthplace for Buffalo wings), clipped out of a Buffalo newspaper by Meg's mother in the 70s and copied out longhand in Meg's recipe notebook.
2 tbsp finely chopped onion
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 cup finely chopped fresh parsley leaves
1/2 cup sour cream
1 cup mayonnaise
1 tbsp fresh-squeezed lemon juice
1 tbsp white vinegar
1/4 cup crumbled blue cheese
Salt, black pepper, and cayenne pepper to taste
Combine. Chill. Me? I did the onion and garlic first and then added the lemon juice and vinegar and let that sit while I measured out the mayo and sour cream. Salt and peppers after everything else is mixed. Tastes great! Go Buffalo!
Probably the most exciting thing about it is when you have real ice -- that's where the snow has been gradually compacted and eventually formed into ice, and the density has increased. When that happens, if the ice is old, it will often trap air bubbles in it. Those air bubbles can contain carbon dioxide from ten thousand years ago or even a hundred thousand years ago. And when you put an ice cube of that ice in a glass of water, it pops. It has natural effervescence as those gas bubbles escape. You get a little a puff of air into your nostrils if you have your nose over the glass. It's not as though it necessarily smells like anything -- but when you think about the fact that the last time that anything smelled that air was a hundred thousand years ago, that's pretty interesting.
For his wedding reception, Mayewski had water from "Greenland ice and Antarctic ice" for his guests to drink. (thx, finn)
If I didn't know any better, I'd have thought Twitter was built specifically for the purpose of cracking wise about the lack of everything on the everything bagel. In recent months, several tweetists have taken to site to complain in often amusing fashion:
Come on, Everything Bagels, who you tryin' to fool? You got like 6 seasonings on there. That's a lot, but it ain't everything.
-- @patrickmarkryan
Hey everything bagel, you don't have everything on you, so shut the fuck up.
-- @ihatejeffbaker
This "everything bagel" is great. Has onions, poppy seeds, garlic, cheese, q-tips, Greenland, fear, sandals, wolves, teapots, crunking...
-- @johnmoe
You call this an everything bagel?! Where are the french fries & the pizza & the pot brownie & the Taco Bell fire sauce?!
-- @ronniewk
Flossing after an everything bagel is important b/c as the name implies, you don't just have *something* in your teeth, you have every thing.
-- @phillygirl
Last time I had an everything bagel I got poppy seeds, Mira Sorvino, and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit all over my shirt.
-- @dwineman
The title "everything bagel" is a gross exaggeration.
-- @avphibes
The "everything bagel" really only has like three things. Just what I want for breakfast. Lies.
-- @missrftc
You might want to scale back on calling yourself an "everything bagel." I mean, right away I can see there are no M&M's on here.
-- @friedmanjon
Aaand that's about all there is to say about the everything bagel.
Life, on the Line is the forthcoming memoir of chef Grant Achatz about his early life, his training at The French Laundry under Thomas Keller, the opening of the reigning Best Restaurant in America, and his diagnosis of a life-and career-threatening illness. Somewhat unusually, the book was jointly written by Achatz and Nick Kokonas, his friend and business partner. The newly launched companion web site has more info, including excerpts.
"Chef, you have Ruth Reichl on line two," one of the reservationists whispered to me as I peeled asparagus. I walked to the host area and saw the light for line two blinking; I grabbed the handle and pushed the button.
After exchanging greetings she spoke up. I was wildly and unexpectedly nervous.
"Grant, I don't know if you know this, but every five years Gourmet does a restaurant issue where we rank the fifty best restaurants in the country." I told her I recall seeing it back in 2001, and remembered that Chez Panisse coming in at number one and the Laundry at three.
"Well, the issue will come out this October, and I wanted to call you personally and tell you that we have chosen Alinea to be on the list." She paused for dramatic effect. "At number one."
Before we can figure out how to improve our end results, it's important to understand exactly what's going on when an onion browns. First, the onions begin by sweating. As they slowly heat up, moisture from their interior (they are roughly 75% water by weight) begins to evaporate, forcing its way out of the onion's cells, and causing them to rupture in the process. This breakdown of the cells is what causes onions to soften during the initial stages of cooking.
"I don't think that even chefs understood at the time what these tools made possible," said Leonard Lee, founder of Lee Valley Tools in Ottawa, Canada. "When you grind a hard cheese, you get little cubes with little surface area. When you use a Microplane and shave a cheese into ribbons, you get five times the surface area."
"And when you maximize the surface area, you put more of the cheese in contact with the taste buds," said Mr. Lee, whose wife, Lorraine Lee, was one of the first to imagine the kitchen crossover possibilities in 1994. "That maximizes taste."
Not only does it give you tasting notes on 200 North American oysters, but it lets you rate them -- a great thing if you're always forgetting which types you do or don't like.
Maybe it's because I have an oddly intense interest in croissants, but I found this 10-minute video about how to make them fascinating. Watch at least until the 1 kg sheet of butter is placed on the dough to be folded over several times.
Spoiler: they turn out great, which was unexpected because so often croissants are more bready and dry than flakey and moist, even in France. (thx, aaron)
With little more than two weeks before the planned opening, he was still formulating the initial menu and pricing. For one appetizer he envisioned a Gruyere, leek and potato veloute; for another, Arctic char in aspic. For entrees he was mulling a pork cheek, a veal shank, Dover sole for two. These would probably be served as part of a three-course prix fixe for $58, he said.
Nothing too unconventional there. But beyond the plate, he said, anything goes. Although he'll take reservations, he's bypassing the Web service Open Table (too cumbersome). And he's curious about having a marching band stomp through some night. Obligatory resourcefulness has given way to revolutionary thoughts.
It's called Finesse and it's available at any of Thomas Keller's restaurants.
The theme of the 64-page first issue is history, so Keller and co. have collected stories -- and the expected gorgeous photography -- all about the Laundry and every aspect of the restaurant: longtime staffers, former cooks, journalists.
Ruth Reichl and Michael Ruhlman pen articles. Chefs of all kinds make cameos. But it's more than that -- the magazine also highlights lesser known, yet essential parts of the French Laundry machine, like the wine producer who partners with the restaurant to create the Cuvee French Laundry.
Over at Serious Eats, Kenji Lopez-Alt has a long piece about a visit he took to a foie gras producer in New York's Hudson Valley and what he learned about the ethics of foie gras production.
Even if you haven't eaten foie, pretty much everyone is familiar with the abhorrent images of mistreated ducks peddled by PETA and sites like nofoiegras.org, and indeed they are truly disturbing. Ducks crammed into wire cages just big enough to stand in with their filth-encrusted heads sticking out a hole in the front. Their feathers are scraggly and wiry (if present at all), there's often blood coming out of their nostrils, and their faces and feathers are caked with vomit and corn meal. A duck drinks scummy water out of a communal trough running in front of it while just upstream one of its less fortuitous bunkmates sits dead with its head lolling sideways, half submerged in the cloudy green water.
I've no doubt that farms like this exist in the world, and it is a terrible, atrocious tragedy. If this is how all foie-or even all meat-is produced, I'd become a vegetarian today. But video or photographic footage of one badly managed farm or even a thousand badly managed farms does not prove that the production of foie gras, as a practice, is necessarily harmful to the health or mental well-being of a duck. Foie gras production should be judged not by the worst farms, but by the best, because those are the ones that I'm going to choose to buy my foie from if at all.
So the real question is: is the production of foie gras torturous under even the best of conditions?
Those on one side would answer yes. How could force feeding an animal ever be considered anything but torture? On the other hand are those who claim that American foie farms are positively idyllic with ducks waddling around spacious pens, even queuing up for their gavage, that for a duck, none of the things we consider uncomfortable stress them out in the least. But who's right?
With the current popularity of the craft cocktail bar, massive ice cubes, and vigorous cocktail shaking techniques, comes the risk of injury.
"When they're shaking a drink, it's very similar to the motion of a pitcher, or a tennis serve or throwing a football," said Lisa Raymond-Tolan, an occupational therapist in New York. "It's the same motion, back and forth, back and forth, rotating up high. You have a heavy weight at the end of the arm, out in the air. It's not just the shoulder. It's the wrist as well."
One of the bartenders at Varnish, Chris Bostick, shook his cocktails so vigorously that he ripped out the screws that had been inserted in his clavicle after a snowboarding injury. He was sidelined for weeks.
Maybe instead of Tommy John surgery, they'll start calling it Johnny Walker surgery.
Whether the mission is baking cookies or flipping pancakes, young Padawan cooks will love using our official Star Wars spatula featuring the fearsome Darth Vader.
Galactic Empire™ Cupcake Decorating Kit - "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the Jedi Kitchen Council devised a powerful new way to spread fun through the galaxy. Jedi Master pastry chefs created this extraordinary collection of tools..."
Sandwich Cutters with Vintage-Style Tin - "Transform your Jedi's favorite sandwiches into high-energy fuel for lunches, snacks and parties with Millennium Falcon™ and Darth Vader's TIE fighter™ sandwich cutters. Created by the Jedi Kitchen Council to celebrate the Rebel Alliance's victory over the evil Empire, these cutters are fun and easy to use -- just press and cut." [The "Vintage-Style Tin" is actually, how you say, a metal lunchbox.]
Pancake Molds - "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a Jedi Kitchen Master used the Force to create three pancake molds in honor of his favorite galactic hero and villains: Yoda, Darth Vader and a stormtrooper. Use these molds to add whimsy and fun to your next pancake breakfast." [The Vader pancake looks a lot like Hannibal Lector in his mask.]
What, no Jar-Jar Binks Home Preserves Kit? (thx, meg)
I wanted T.G.I. Friday's to feel like a neighbourhood, corner bar, where you could get a good hamburger, good french fries, and feel comfortable. At the time, it was a sophisticated hamburger and french fry place -- apparently, I invented the idea of serving burgers on a toasted English muffin -- but the principle involved was to make people feel that they were going to someone's apartment for a cocktail party.
The food eventually played a larger role than I imagined it would, because a lot of the girls didn't have enough money to stretch from one paycheque to the other, so I became the purveyor of free hamburgers at the end of the month.
I don't think there was anything else like it at the time. Before T.G.I. Friday's, four single twenty-five year-old girls were not going out on Friday nights, in public and with each other, to have a good time. They went to people's apartments for cocktail parties or they might go to a real restaurant for a date or for somebody's birthday, but they weren't going out with each other to a bar for a casual dinner and drinks because there was no such place for them to go.
Incanto owner Mark Pastore explains why his restaurant isn't on Opentable. His analysis is that Opentable is too expensive and monopolistic to offer much in the way of value to restaurants.
The recurring themes were the opinion that OpenTable took home a disproportionate (relative to other vendors) chunk of the restaurants' revenues each month and the feeling of being trapped in the service, it was too expensive to keep, but letting it go could be harmful. The GM of one very well known New York restaurant group, which spends thousands of dollars on OpenTable each month, put it to me this way, "OpenTable is out for itself, the worst business partner I have ever worked with in all my years in restaurants. If I could find a way to eliminate it from my restaurants I would." Another high-profile, 3.5-star San Francisco restaurateur told me he feels held hostage by OpenTable. For the past several years, his payments to them have been substantially more than he has himself earned from 80-hour workweeks at his restaurant. But he believes that if he stops offering it, his customers will revolt and many would stop coming to his restaurant. So he keeps paying, but carries a grudge and wishes for something better.
Many of the fancy-dan cocktail bars serve their drinks with huge ice cubes so that even slow sippers don't have to deal with over-watery cocktails (less surface area = slower melting). If you want to do the same thing at home, get yourself the impressively named Tovolo King Cube tray; it'll churn out an infinite number of 2-inch cubes for about $8. (via american drink)
This amazing apple has three times the vitamin C of other apples and nearly half as much vitamin C as an orange. Use Calville Blanc d'Hiver apples for fresh eating out of hand, or baked in any cooked apple desert. It also makes a sprightly apple juice and hard cider. This apple is the French choice for tarte aux pommes and unlike its rival, the legendary English Bramley, Calville Blanc holds its shape when cooked.
This isn't animal fat versus no animal fat. Before I was eating lots of butter, I was eating lots of pork fat. It's one type of animal fat versus another type. Nor is it another example of modern processing = unhealthy. Compared to pork fat, butter is recent.
But watching the video of the talk, it's unclear what's actually being measured here...it could be that the butter is making his fingers faster at pushing the buttons. Or look at the graph...might a single line that indicates steady improvement over the course of the year also fit the data?
It was a cheeseburger that initially encouraged Mr. Blaustein, 36, to pursue his project, "The Value of a Dollar." When the economy was in the midst of its downward spiral, he visited a fast-food chain in New Mexico, where he lives. "On one menu they had a cheeseburger for a dollar," he said. What caught his eye, though, was another menu, which featured a double cheeseburger for the same price. That additional piece of meat, and the extra slice of cheese, somehow didn't change the price.
4. Searing "Locks In" Juices. This is the oldest one in the book, and still gets repeated-by many highly respected cookbook authors and chefs!-to this day. It's been conclusively proven false many times, including in our own post on How to Cook a Perfect Prime Rib, where we found that when roasting a standing roast, it in fact lost 1.68% more juice if it was seared before roasting rather than after! The same is true for pork roasts, steaks, hamburgers, chicken cutlets, you name it.
Last November, Chipotle made the decision to go it alone and bring advertising in-house. After spending at least six months selecting Butler Shine from a group of 27 agencies, Mr. Crumpacker said it didn't make sense to take the time to pick another agency. "By the time we picked one and got them up to speed it would have been a year," he said. "The only reasonable thing to do was to do it ourselves."
The chain is shifting away from traditional advertising anyway, Mr. Crumpacker added, noting that advertising, generally, is becoming less important to Chipotle. Not to mention that Chipotle's co-CEO, Steve Ells, isn't exactly supportive of advertising. "For Chipotle, I guess I'd say [advertising] is not less important to our CEO, because he never thought it was that important," Mr. Crumpacker said. "He's asked me [whether] should we do advertising at all."
On Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road, beer is the best seller by far, accounting for more than half of all drink purchases. Budweiser and its calorie-conscious cousin, Bud Light, make up about 45 percent.
Vodka is far more popular than other spirits, making up half of all hard liquor sales. (One bartender, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing her job, confided that her stockbroker customers "all drink vodka," while construction workers "are all about the beer.") Gin and scotch are a distant second and third.
While much has been made online about ginger ale's unexpected aerial dominance (apparently one in ten drinks ordered in economy on American Airlines is a ginger ale, compared to its puny three percent terrestrial market share), there seems not to be a sustained geographical analysis of the beverage consumption patterns on different routes and airlines -- or even different seat positions. Do window-seat people disproportionately favour vegetable juice, for example, or is that just the case on the routes I've been flying?
And what do people drink with goats? Would you, could you, with a goat? Oop, sorry, things got a little Seussical there.
And as long as we're on the subject of factory food, this post has been making the rounds lately.
Say hello to mechanically separated chicken. It's what all fast-food chicken is made from-things like chicken nuggets and patties. Also, the processed frozen chicken in the stores is made from it.
Basically, the entire chicken is smashed and pressed through a sieve -- bones, eyes, guts, and all. it comes out looking like this.
There's more: because it's crawling with bacteria, it will be washed with ammonia, soaked in it, actually. Then, because it tastes gross, it will be reflavored artificially. Then, because it is weirdly pink, it will be dyed with artificial color.
I wish the person who wrote the original entry would correct it because I'm tired of seeing it popping up everywhere. The truth is strange enough without having to say that chicken nuggets contain eyeballs, bones, and large quantities of ammonia.
The limitations that we have are, I think, severe. We don't have a freezer, anywhere. We don't have ice cream or sorbet, we don't have anything that needs to be frozen, it's all fresh, fresh, fresh. We've got refrigerators touching each other over there. We've got ten burners, two ovens, a fryer and a salamander. That's what most people have as a prep kitchen. It's really impressive when I look at how we've got five seafood entrees, five meat entrees, thirteen appetizers, all done with these varying, beautiful techniques and preparations. I tip my hat to everything that Jim and the team in the kitchen have been able to pull off.
It took awhile for my wife and I to warm up to it, but Joe Leo is our go-to neighborhood restaurant now. On our one child-free night out a week, we generally end up there.
Mr. Kendall, 43, described himself as a bit of a wine poseur. He has vacationed in Italy and Napa Valley and has a cellar at home, but he cannot remember a label from meal to meal. He knows just enough, or perhaps just little enough, to become suspicious whenever a waiter recommends a vineyard he does not know.
"In the back of your mind," he said, "you're always thinking: 'O.K., is this some kind of used-car special? Did they just get 200 bottles of this?' "
But Mr. Kendall said the ratings he found on the iPad -- by the wine writer Robert M. Parker Jr. -- carried credibility. He decided that the price of the cabernet franc was justified by Mr. Parker's award of 92 points out of 100. "I found a bottle of wine that I never would have tried, and it was wonderful," he said.
Over at Serious Eats, Kenji Lopez-Alt assures us that while you can't make restaurant-quality Neapolitan pizza at home, you can come damn close. Best thing is, his technique doesn't involve lining your oven with bricks and is actually as easy as making regular pizza at home.
After cooking for around a minute and a half, the bottom crust achieved the perfect degree of char-even better than what I was getting on the stone. Interestingly enough, the pan was actually cooler than the stone I was using, maxing out at around 450 degrees. So how does a 450 degree pan brown better and faster than a 550 degree stone? It's a matter of heat capacity and density.
The heat capacity of a material is directly related to the amount of energy that a given mass of material holds at a given temperature. Even though stone has almost twice the heat capacity than steel (.2 kcal/kg C vs. .1 kcal/kg C), it loses in two ways: it is far less dense than steel, and it has a much lower rate of heat conduction than steel. The pizza cooking in a skillet is not just getting energy from the pan-it's getting energy from the burner below the pan as it gets rapidly conducted through the metal.
It's a clear demonstration of how when cooking foods, what matters it the amount of energy transferred, not just the temperature you cook at. The two are often directly related, but not always.
I have said it before but will repeat: I love Kenji's nerdiness about the science combined with the ability to come up with the solution that's easiest for non-nerds to appreciate and implement. It is a rare and wonderful thing to observe.
From the Guardian, a review of a book called Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie. In it, Fairlie argues that meat production isn't actually that inefficient when done properly and veganism as an ethical response leaves something to be desired.
But these idiocies, Fairlie shows, are not arguments against all meat eating, but arguments against the current farming model. He demonstrates that we've been using the wrong comparison to judge the efficiency of meat production. Instead of citing a simple conversion rate of feed into meat, we should be comparing the amount of land required to grow meat with the land needed to grow plant products of the same nutritional value to humans. The results are radically different.
If pigs are fed on residues and waste, and cattle on straw, stovers and grass from fallows and rangelands -- food for which humans don't compete -- meat becomes a very efficient means of food production. Even though it is tilted by the profligate use of grain in rich countries, the global average conversion ratio of useful plant food to useful meat is not the 5:1 or 10:1 cited by almost everyone, but less than 2:1. If we stopped feeding edible grain to animals, we could still produce around half the current global meat supply with no loss to human nutrition: in fact it's a significant net gain.
The cheese was a going-away present for Burson's paternal great-grandfather Charles Wainman (nee Yehezkel), upon his emigration from Lithuania, around 1893, to Johannesburg. For reasons lost to history, he never ate the cheese but kept it in a trunk that travelled with him while he worked as a trader among the Zulus, and then when he fought, on the Dutch side, in the Boer Wars.
Warning: once you make edamame2003's version, you may never be able to go back to commercial sriracha again. The vibrant color and piquancy of the fresh fresno peppers, combined with plenty of garlic and a boost of vinegar, make for a zippy, versatile condiment that would be great with anything from banh mi to scrambled eggs.
Pseudovariety -- "the illusion of diversity, concealing a lack of real choice" -- is when you go to the store and see an entire aisle filled with hundreds of different kinds of soda but most of those soda varieties are owned by three companies. Click through to see a neat visualization of soft drink brands and their market shares and owners.
He both writes and thinks about food in the present tense. Ask about favorite foods and he'll scribble a note: "I love spicy and Indian." An offer to bring some New Jersey peaches to his summer home here on the shore of Lake Michigan brings a sharp defense of Michigan peaches and a menu idea. "Maybe for dessert we could have a salad of local fresh fruits."
"Food for me is in the present tense," he said. "Eating for me is now only in the past tense." He says he has a "voluptuous food memory" that gets stronger all the time.
"I can remember the taste and smell of everything, even though I can no longer taste or smell," he said.
Here are the opening couple of paragraphs from the post that evolved into the cookbook:
First, get the Pot. You need the simplest rice cooker made. It comes with two speeds: Cook, and Warm. Not expensive. Now you're all set to cook meals for the rest of your life on two square feet of counter space, plus a chopping block. No, I am not putting you on the Rice Diet. Eat what you like. I am thinking of you, student in your dorm room. You, solitary writer, artist, musician, potter, plumber, builder, hermit. You, parents with kids. You, night watchman. You, obsessed computer programmer or weary web-worker. You, lovers who like to cook together but don't want to put anything in the oven. You, in the witness protection program. You, nutritional wingnut. You, in a wheelchair.
And you, serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. You, person on a small budget who wants healthy food. You, shut-in. You, recovering campaign worker. You, movie critic at Sundance. You, sex worker waiting for the phone to ring. You, factory worker sick of frozen meals. You, people in Werner Herzog's documentary about life at the South Pole. You, early riser skipping breakfast. You, teenager home alone. You, rabbi, pastor, priest,, nun, waitress, community organizer, monk, nurse, starving actor, taxi driver, long-haul driver. Yes, you, reader of the second-best best-written blog on the internet.
