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If you left the house with a lemon, some copper clips, some zinc nails, some wire, and steel wool but somehow forgot your matches, you can still start a fire. I imagine if you had a large enough lemon and enough wire and metal bits, you could also jumpstart a car or a human heart. (via @kathrynyu)
The PBS Ideas Channel talks to Brooklyn bar owner Ivy Mix about all the different kinds of glassware that cocktails are served in. The most interesting bits are about how factors other than taste influence how people enjoy drinks, as with wine. Men in particular seem to have a difficult time enjoying themselves with certain types of glassware and drink colors.
The common button or white mushroom, the crimini or brown mushroom, and the portobello mushroom are all the same species of mushroom.
Agaricus bisporus has increased in popularity in North America with the introduction of two brown strains, Portabella (sometimes also spelled portobello, portabello, or portobella) and Crimini. The three mushrooms you see to the right are all actually the same species. Portabella is a marketing name the mushroom industry came up with for more flavorful brown strains of Agaricus bisporus that are allowed to open to expose the mature gills with brown spores; crimini is actually the same brown strain that is not allowed to open before it is harvested.
See also the magical Brassica oleracea plant (cabbage, kale, broccoli, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, collard greens, and cauliflower are all the same species of plant). (via @dunstan)
Questlove is coming out with a book about food and creativity next month called something to food about.
In conversations with ten innovative chefs in America, he explores what makes their creativity tick, how they see the world through their cooking and how their cooking teaches them to see the world. The conversations begin with food but they end wherever food takes them. Food is fuel. Food is culture. Food is history. And food is food for thought.
Love that cover.
It’s so soothing and satisfying watching this person unslicing tomatoes. (via digg)
The Booker and Dax Cocktail Cube is a plastic cube you put into your cocktail shaker to simulate a big ice cube and achieve “awesome texturizing effects” for your cocktails.
One year in front of a large audience I ran a test intended to prove that big ice cubes were all show. I shook with different types of ice and dumped the drinks into graduated cylinders to measure the amount of foam the shaking had produced. To my surprise, and embarrassment, the large cube had a positive, repeatable effect on foam quantity. I don’t know why the big cube does a better job, it just does.
I’m not sure my homemade cocktail game is quite good enough to be worrying about texture at this point, but yours might be.
Chef Joshua Smookler took a hunk of waygu steak and dry-aged it for a ridiculous 400 days. No surprise, it tasted like “funk”.
Prison Ramen is a cookbook of instant ramen recipes from prison inmates and celebrities (Samuel L. Jackson wrote the foreword).
Instant ramen is a ubiquitous food, beloved by anyone looking for a cheap, tasty bite-including prisoners, who buy it at the commissary and use it as the building block for all sorts of meals. Think of this as a unique cookbook of ramen hacks. Here’s Ramen Goulash. Black Bean Ramen. Onion Tortilla Ramen Soup. The Jailhouse Hole Burrito. Orange Porkies — chili ramen plus white rice plus 1/2 bag of pork skins plus orange-flavored punch. Ramen Nuggets. Slash’s J-Walking Ramen (with scallions, Sriracha hot sauce, and minced pork).
(via @marcprecipice)
Chef’s Table, the excellent Netflix show by filmmaker David Gelb (Jiro Dreams of Sushi), which I like to think of as Other Chefs Dreams of Other Foods, is coming back with three additional seasons.
“The idea was to do a series about chefs with a really cinematic quality.” As Gelb has said before, the BBC’s Planet Earth was his visual inspiration. With one season behind him, Gelb now has a process. “The hardest thing is to choose the chefs… choosing chefs that are at the absolute top of their field, are dynamic story tellers, have interesting stories in their personal lives,” he explains. He asks a lot of questions: “What are the epiphanies that made them want to be a chef? How do their cooking and personal lives intersect?”
And then from a practical perspective, do they have the time and will to commit to this shoot? “We shoot two weeks very intensively, and they have to be willing to give us their time. Finally it’s about how do we balance the chefs, how do we make it so each story is different, so that the different stories complement each other. While each film can stand alone, together they should form a greater whole.”
Among the chefs to be featured are Grant Achatz, Ivan Orkin,1 and Michel Troisgros. If you’re curious about season 1 (trailer), the Francis Mallmann and Massimo Bottura episodes are the ones to watch.
Update: The trailer for the second season is out. May 27th!
Gordon Ramsay shows us how to chop an onion, cook rice, debone a fish, cook pasta, and sharpen a knife. We’ve been watching a lot of Gordon Ramsay videos at our house recently. My daughter’s class is studying how restaurants work1 — they’re operating a real restaurant in their classroom today — so she’s been really curious about food.
On a recent weekend when it was just the two of us, we watched Ramsay cook his soft-scrambled eggs (and then made them the next morning), which sent us down a rabbit hole of beef wellington, tacos, turkey, and donuts. If you’ve only ever seen him yelling at mediocre chefs and restaurant owners on TV, you should give his cooking videos a try…he’s a super engaging chef that gets you excited about food and cooking.
The kids’ school is big on social studies. As the students move through the grades, they first study the school, then their block, their neighborhood, Manhattan, Mannahatta (same location but adding the dimension of time), and eventually the country and wider world. Minna’s group is studying the neighborhood this year and to that end have visited several local businesses, including restaurants, to observe their role in the neighborhood dynamic.↩
From a new video series by Eater featuring “culinary-minded individuals who are hard at work perfecting their crafts”, sushi chef David Bouhadana visits a sushi apprentice honing her skills in NYC.
Gear Patrol collected a number of coffee cups from coffee shops around NYC. Prices for a small cup ranged from $1 to $4.50. I’m guessing the latter was not 4.5 times tastier than the former. (via @mccanner)
Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs of Food52 are coming out with a new book called A New Way to Dinner.
A smart, inspiring cookbook of 100+ recipes from the founders of the powerhouse web site Food52 showing just how they — two busy working parents — actually plan, shop, and cook for delicious dinners (and breakfasts, lunches, and desserts) — all through the week. The secret? Cooking ahead.
I need this. I want to cook more, eat better, and not dine out so much, but I just haven’t been able to get it together. And I love the title…”dinner” cleverly works both as a noun and a verbed noun.
At Serious Eats, the Food Lab’s Kenji Lopez-Alt reverse engineers (and improves) the Egg McMuffin for the home cook. Clever use of a Mason jar lid for cooking the egg.
Ben Schott collects some instructions from the cookbooks of noted chefs that will likely never be attempted by the home chef (unless you’re this woman). Like this one from A New Napa Cuisine that calls for phytoplankton:
20 grams marine phytoplankton
100 grams water
4 matsutake mushrooms, peeled and left whole
Or this one from Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck Cookbook to make frankincense hydrosol:
50 grams golden frankincense tears
100 grams water
I’ve owned several cookbooks where one recipe on page 107 calls for the product of a recipe on page 53 which in turn calls for the output of a recipe on page 28. Rube Goldberg cooking. Living in NYC, it’s often easier, faster, cheaper, and tastier to walk to the restaurant in question and just order the damn thing. Or head to Shake Shack instead.
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