It involves finagling some uncooked frozen fries from a local McDonald’s under the ruse of a scavenger hunt. Kenji Lopez-Alt explains.
I’ve been literally giddy with the quality of the fries that have been coming out of my kitchen for the last two days. My wife won’t hear the end of it. Even my puppy is wondering why his owner keeps exclaiming “Holy s**t that’s good!” every half hour from the kitchen. I’ve cooked over 43 batches of fries in the last three days, and I’m happy to report that I’ve finally found a way to consistently reach crisp, golden Nirvana.
Here’s the full recipe/instructions. BTW, Kenji’s series of posts on Serious Eats is one of the best things going on the web right now (you might remember his sous-vide in a beer cooler hack). Passionate down-to-earth writing about cooking and food backed by some serious skills and scientific knowledge…it’s really fun to read.
Keep a food diary not of what you eat but what you experience. She says, “There’s a pretty big difference between eating and tasting.”
What she means is considering and taking note of the entire experience of tasting: The way the food feels in your mouth, what your beer smells like cold and if it’s different when it’s lukewarm, what you notice with the first piping-hot bite of sauce compared with the last chilled streaks you scrape up before the server takes the plate. Do you feel one sensation more than others as you chew, a citrusy tingle at first, followed by rush of sweet?
Mr. Marzovilla welcomes young children at his restaurant, even discounts their meals on Sunday evenings, and is not above serving a simple appetizer portion of pasta to please little ones. But he has strong opinions about food, and about the messages parents convey to their offspring through what they eat. Children’s menus aim too low, he argues — they’re a parenting crutch.
Changes in regulations governing school vending machines by states like New York and California are making healthy options more prominent. This is a good thing.
This spring the Alliance for a Healthier Generation reported an 88 percent decrease in beverage calories shipped to schools from the first half of 2004-05 to 2009-10, mostly due to calorie reformulations and reduced container sizes.
Grant Achatz, Nick Kokonas, and his team are opening a restaurant called Next:
No reservations…you have to buy tickets, like for a play or a ballgame.
Your tickets will be fully inclusive of all charges, including service. Ticket price will depend on which seating you buy — Saturday at 8 PM will be more expensive than Wednesday at 9:30 PM. This will allow us to offer an amazing experience at a very reasonable price. We will also offer an annual subscription to all four menus at a discount with preferred seating.
The menu changes four times a year and each menu will be influenced by a particular place and time (Paris 1912, Hong Kong 2036). A Mad Men-era NYC menu please?
The big difficulty with sous vide cooking at home is keeping the cooking temperature constant. Traditionally that has meant expensive emersion circulators with built-in heaters, although the price is down to $450 for the Sous-Vide Supreme. If only you could find something that insulated the water so that it stayed at a uniform temperature while cooking…
Fill up your beer cooler with water just a couple degrees higher than the temperature you’d like to cook your food at (to account for temperature loss when you add cold food to it), seal your food in a plastic Ziplock bag, drop it in, and close your beer cooler until your food is cooked.
Oh, and it’ll work on camping trips as well (as long as you take your thermometer along).
“Early on in our research, it became apparent that the majority of salt on a snack doesn’t even have time to dissolve in your saliva because you swallow it so rapidly,” explained Mehmood Khan, senior vice president and chief scientific officer and a former Mayo Clinic endocrinologist. A Wall Street Journal story later reported only about 20 percent of the salt on a chip dissolves on the tongue, and the remaining 80 percent is swallowed without contributing to taste.
I’m confused as to why “an understanding of crystal chemistry” is necessary. Why couldn’t they just crush/grind the salt into a fine powder instead? Are the cubic crystals still too big even when crushed?
Despite having no natural enemies and belonging to a species that completely dominates its ecosystem, local IT manager Reggie Atkinson opted to consume the processed corn snack Bugles Monday.
Fully embossed cover, 3 ribbon place markers and double expandable inner pocket. Informative pages: food calendars, food facts, measurements and conversions. 6 theme-based sections to fill in: appetizers, first courses, main dishes, side dishes, desserts, cocktails. 6 tabbed sections to personalize and 16 blank pages in which to unleash your passion’s creativity.
The magic to our hamburgers is quality control. We toast our buns on a grill — a bun toaster is faster, cheaper, and toasts more evenly, but it doesn’t give you that caramelized taste. Our beef is 80 percent lean, never frozen, and our plants are so clean, you could eat off the floor. The burgers are made to order — you can choose from 17 toppings. That’s why we can’t do drive-throughs — it takes too long. We had a sign: “If you’re in a hurry, there are a lot of really good hamburger places within a short distance from here.” People thought I was nuts. But the customers appreciated it.
Good name too. My son frequently asks if we’re “going to go visit the five guys” to get “hangleburgers and peanuts”.
Visitors to the restaurant are ushered into an air-conditioned, flood-lit hall filled with dozens of glass-topped tables. Unlike North Korea proper, which is wracked by economic sanctions and constant famines, the food here is fresh and abundant. The menu features specialties such as Pyongyang “cold noodle” (served encrusted with ice), barbecued cuttlefish, stringy dangogi (dog meat) soup, and countless variations on the kimchi theme, all served with glutinous white rice.
Researchers at Princeton have shown that if you keep the number of calories the same, rats eating high-fructose corn syrup “gained significantly more weight” than rats who ate table sugar.
Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn’t true, at least under the conditions of our tests,” said psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction. “When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they’re becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don’t see this; they don’t all gain extra weight.
But not so fast sugar lovers:
The new research complements previous work led by Hoebel and Avena demonstrating that sucrose [i.e. “regular sugar”] can be addictive, having effects on the brain similar to some drugs of abuse.
From the 52 paintings, which date between 1000 and 2000 A.D., the sizes of loaves of bread, main dishes and plates were calculated with the aid of a computer program that could scan the items and rotate them in a way that allowed them to be measured. To account for different proportions in paintings, the sizes of the food were compared to the sizes of the human heads in the paintings.
Chicken availability over the past 100 years illustrates the effects of new technologies and product development. Increased chicken availability from 10.4 pounds per person in 1909 to 58.8 pounds in 2008 reflects the industry’s development of lower cost, meaty broilers in the 1940s and later, ready-to cook products, such as boneless breasts and chicken nuggets, as well as ready-to-eat products, such as pre-cooked chicken strips to toss in salads or pasta dishes.
Diet is 85% of where results come from…for muscle and fat loss. Many don’t focus here enough.
If you eat whole foods that have been around for 1000s of years, you probably don’t have to worry about counting calories
Our dependence on gyms to workout may be keeping people fat…as walking down a street and pushups in your home are free everyday…but people are not seeing it that way.
With traditional cookery, when you are exposing your meat to temperatures much hotter than their final desired temperature (say, cooking a steak to 130°F in a 550°F skillet), timing is crucial. The center of your steak is getting hotter and hotter, and it’s your job as cook to take it off the flame at precisely the moment that it reaches the desired final temperature. Miss that precise moment, and dinner is ruined.
The beauty of sous-vide cooking is that since you are cooking your steak in a 130°F water bath to begin with, there is absolutely no chance your meat will ever get above that temperature. Guests are an hour late? No problem — leave the steaks in the water bath, and they’ll be exactly the same an hour later.
This list of secret restaurant menus is informative, hilarious, and possibly innaccurate in places. Fatburger will serve you something called the Hypocrite (veggie burger topped with bacon) and at the classy Long John Silvers you can get a Side of Crumbs, a free box of the fried batter parts that have fallen off of the fried seafood items. Mmmmmm!!! (via cyn-c)
Update: Several of my British moles have informed me that it is common practice at some fish and chips shops to ask for a “bag of scraps”, which is where LJS got the idea for their Side of Crumbs. More info here.
“We found that the people who were sensitive to fat, who could taste very low concentrations, actually consumed less fat than the people who were insensitive,” Keast told AFP. “We also found that they had lower BMIs (Body Mass Indexes).”
Chef Keller looked down at the magazine and spoke softly: Read this tonight when you go home. His food really sounds interesting, and right up your alley. I think you should go stage there this summer….I will arrange it for you.
I don’t read Spanish and the translation is a little rough in spots, but the gist of this article from the Spanish newspaper El País is that Ferran Adrià says that El Bulli will not be closing permanently and calls what was published on Friday by the NY Times “a misunderstanding”.
In 2014 we will serve meals, but we will consider the format used and the booking system. But still two years of operation of El Bulli and four years to open the doors again.
Or perhaps the restaurant is moving to Austria? Or will become a McDonald’s franchise? Who knows what El Bulli news tomorrow holds! Stay tuned. (thx, susan)
Update: Here’s some clarification from The Guardian. The restaurant will cease to be a commercial enterprise and will instead be a non-profit foundation “similar to those that run museums and art centres”.
Adrià has given himself two years to think about what the new foundation will do. “We are open to suggestions,” he said. But he is absolutely sure it will involve cooking and serving food on El Bulli’s hallowed premises.
(thx, iñigo)
Update:The NY Times clarifies (is that even a word we can apply to this mess at this point?) Adrià’s earlier statements about closing the restaurant permanently…it sounds as though he doesn’t exactly know what he’s doing with it:
“There is nothing defined except that when El Bulli opens in 2014 it will be as a foundation,” he said. “We have not decided what the structure of that foundation will be,” he continued, noting that many culinary foundations “serve food to the public.”
Sales of CJ Corporation’s snack sausages are on the increase in South Korea because of the cold weather; they are useful as a meat stylus for those who don’t want to take off their gloves to use their iPhones.
Update: More than one person has suggested that this whole thing is a hoax. Video or it didn’t happen? Feast thine eyes on someone playing a rhythm game on the iPhone with two of the meat sticks in question:
The free afternoon program will consist of four panel discussions: “Zoning Diet,” about the hidden corsetry of policy, access, and economics that gives shape to urban food distribution; “Culinary Cartography,” a look at the kinds of things we can learn about New York City when we map its food types and behaviours; “Edible Archaeology,” about the socio-economic forces, technical innovations, and events that have shaped New York food history, in the context of the present; and “Feast, Famine, and Other Scenarios,” an opportunity to collaboratively speculate on changes to the edible landscape of New York in both the near and distant future.
The event takes place in NYC on Feb 27th; it’s free and the entire thing will be available online as well.
elBulli, the Spanish restaurant routinely named the number one restaurant in the world, will close for two years beginning in 2012.
Adrià and his team will still be working at elBulli, developing ideas and trying to figure out what comes next. But he says the restaurant’s current format is finished. “When we come back in 2014, it’s not going to be the same,” Adrià says.
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