kottke.org posts about food
The Rolling Stones favorite American dish is something the band invented called Hot Dogs on the Rocks:
10 frankfurters
5 potatoes, or enough instant mashed potatoes to serve five
1 large can baked beans
Prepare instant mashed potatoes, or boil and mash the potatoes. (Use milk and butter, making regular, every-day mashed potatoes.) Cook the frankfurters according to the package directions and heat the baked beans.
On each plate, serve a mound of creamy mashed potatoes ringed by heated canned baked beans. Over all the top of this, slice up the frankfurters in good-sized chunks.
Emily from Dinner is Served made some Hot Dogs on the Rocks; this is what the finished product looks like:
The recipe is from a 1967 “scene-makers cook book” called Singers & Swingers in the Kitchen (at Amazon). In addition to the Stones’ contribution, the book contained recipes like Paul Anka’s Party Spaghetti, Crepes Suzette by Liza Minelli, Leonard Nimoy’s Cold Soup Nimoy, and Barbra Streisand’s Instant Coffee Ice Cream. I dunno…I think I’d take burgers from Sinatra, Dean Martin, or even Hemingway over any of this celebrity fare. (via if charlie parker was a gunslinger)
From All-You-Can-Eat Press in Brooklyn, the New York Ramen Map.
Attention noodle lovers: this is your lucky day! Our third publication-the New York Ramen Map-is here !! It features 33 of New York’s most interesting and delicious noodle shops, plus a special glossary and regional map of ramen in Japan.
Not sure I see my favorite place on there. Same folks also do a New York Doughnut Map and a New York Burger Map.
This year’s allocation of Pappy Van Winkle’s cult bourbon was recently released. There’s never enough supply to meet demand, which means two things: lines rivaling iPhone release day queues and high resale prices.
On Craigslist in NYC, bottles of Pappy are for sale for hundreds and even thousands of dollars. One seller is offering a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle 23 Year for $1,250…that’s right around $80 for each 1.5 oz pour (without any markup).
Luckily, there are some close-but-not-quite alternatives. As this article on the bourbon family tree notes, the W.L. Weller 12 Year contains the same whiskey as Pappy 15 Year, but aged three fewer years. It can be readily found online for around $26 a bottle. To bump it perhaps a little closer to actual, Bourbonr has concocted what they call Poor Man’s Pappy:
Pick up a bottle of both W.L. Weller 12 (90 proof) and Old Weller Antique 107 (107 proof). They will cost around $20-$30 each. Start off with a 50:50 mixture of the two Bourbons. The easiest way to do this is with a digital scale. If you don’t have a scale just add a tablespoon from both Bourbons to your glass. With a 50:50 ratio you have a 98.5 proof delicious Bourbon.
Next, try a different ratio. Try mixing 60:40 Antique to 12. The Bourbon blend is now 100.2 proof and much closer in taste to the 107 proof Pappy 15.
Anyone else tried this? Thoughts?
A chart of where many varieties of bourbon come from, along with five things you can learn from the chart.
Pappy Van Winkle is frequently described by both educated and uneducated drinkers as the best bourbon on the market. It is certainly aged for longer than most premium bourbons, and has earned a near hysterical following of people scrambling to get one of the very few bottles that are released each year. Of the long-aged bourbons, it seems to be aged very gently year-to-year, and this recommends it enormously. But if you, like most people, can’t find Pappy, try W. L. Weller. There’s a 12 year old variety that retails for $23 around the corner. Pappy 15-year sells for $699-$1000 even though it’s the exact same liquid as the Pappy (same mash bill, same spirit, same barrels); the only difference is it’s aged 3 years less.
The chart is taken from the Kings County Distillery Guide to Urban Moonshining.
Written by the founders of Kings County Distillery, New York City’s first distillery since Prohibition, this spirited illustrated book explores America’s age-old love affair with whiskey. It begins with chapters on whiskey’s history and culture from 1640 to today, when the DIY trend and the classic cocktail craze have conspired to make it the next big thing. For those thirsty for practical information, the book next provides a detailed, easy-to-follow guide to safe home distilling, complete with a list of supplies, step-by-step instructions, and helpful pictures, anecdotes, and tips.
(via df)
Felix Salmon shares perhaps the most reliable technique for turning money into happiness: buying and drinking expensive wine.
But here’s the trick: if you can’t buy happiness by spending more money on higher quality, then you can buy happiness by spending money taking advantage of all the reasons why people still engage in blind tastings, despite the fact that they are a very bad way to judge a wine’s quality. If you know what the wine you’re tasting is, if you know where it comes from, if you know who made it, if you’ve met the winemaker, and in general, if you know how expensive it is — then that knowledge deeply affects — nearly always to the upside — the way in which you taste and appreciate the wine in question.
From the Indiana Daily Student, the last days in the life of a Waffle House in Bloomington, Indiana.
Most of the students had stopped visiting years ago. The smoking ban forced out the puffers. Many of the regulars grew so old that they died or went to nursing homes.
Once Bud decided to close, it all slipped away even faster. Some of his staff had taken other jobs. The gumballs emptied out of the shiny red machine. No one bothered to mark the white board with the daily special.
They would close at precisely 3 p.m. Bud checked his watch, ignoring the broken wall clock, its hands frozen for more years than he could remember, stuck in time.
It suited the place.
Care of Google Maps, here’s the Waffle House before it got torn down. (via unlikely words)
Real Kitchen, a small Chicago eatery that mostly does take-out food, dressed up as Michelin 3-star Alinea for Halloween. Some genuine LOLs here, especially the table-side dessert to-go.
Hmm, this looks interesting: an upcoming book on the science of booze written by Adam Rogers.
In Proof, Adam Rogers reveals alcohol as a miracle of science, going deep into the pleasures of making and drinking booze-and the effects of the latter. The people who make and sell alcohol may talk about history and tradition, but alcohol production is really powered by physics, molecular biology, organic chemistry, and a bit of metallurgy-and our taste for those products is a melding of psychology and neurobiology.
Proof takes readers from the whisky-making mecca of the Scottish Highlands to the oenology labs at UC Davis, from Kentucky bourbon country to the most sophisticated gene-sequencing labs in the world — and to more than one bar — bringing to life the motley characters and evolving science behind the latest developments in boozy technology.
Rogers wrote the piece about the mystery whiskey fungus I linked to a couple of years ago.
On the occasion of leaving New York, Rebecca Flint Marx writes about one of her favorite New York City places (Russ & Daughters) and a particular counterman there, Paul.
Being a regular is a funny thing in a big city. Outside, you’re just an anonymous schmo. But if you come inside often enough, each visit starts to feel like a family reunion of sorts; like the extended members of your biological family, the people you encounter will likely be happy enough to see you, though they probably have little idea of who you actually are as a person. But there’s a beauty in deciding how much of yourself to offer as part of the general exchange of money and goods: You can be the thoughtfully curated version of you — the one who always smiles and never has any problems. The one who is a good person simply because she says “please” and “thank you,” exchanges salty banter with the cantankerous counterman, and bakes a cake for the Yom Kippur rush, as I started doing for the staff a few years ago.
What a lovely piece. See also the joys of being a regular.
You pull up to the fast-food drive-through window and pull out your wallet. But the cashier tells you to put your money away because the person in the car in front of you already paid for your meal. For some reason, that’s been happening to more and more people.
Whereas paying it forward in drive-throughs occurred maybe once or twice a year a decade ago, now fast-food operators said it might happen several times a day.
Last December, 228 consecutive cars paid it forward at a fast food joint in Winnipeg. According to one woman who pays it forward at least once a week:
It’s about giving, and letting people see not everybody is bad, and there are nice people out there and maybe we can turn it around.
Pretty cool. But these folks ought to pay forward some fruits and vegetables once in a while.
Here’s how Balthazar, one of Manhattan’s busiest and most-beloved restaurants, serves 1500 meals every single day.
Roughly one in 10 people who enter Balthazar orders the steak frites. It is far and away the restaurant’s best-selling dish, and Balthazar can sell as many as 200 on a busy day. A plate of steak and potatoes requires a tremendous input of labor if you’re going to charge $38 for it. At a smaller restaurant, cooks are typically responsible for setting up their own mise-en-place — preparing food for their stations — before each service begins, but at Balthazar, things are necessarily more atomized. The fries, for example, go through numerous steps of prep, done by a few different people, before they wind up on a plate.
Step 1 begins at about 6:30 a.m., when Diogene Peralta and Ramon Alvino, the prep cooks in charge of potatoes, each grab a 50-pound case of GPODs, from the Idaho company that sources Russet Burbank potatoes, known for their consistency, and place a massive plastic tub on the floor behind them. This morning, Alvino is flying, his left hand’s fingers imperceptibly rotating the potato between upward strokes of the peeler, blindly flipping the naked spuds over his shoulder into the tub. I pull up my phone’s stopwatch to time him for a minute, treating each potato as a lap: his slowest is 10.7 seconds, his quickest 6.4. Alvino, a shy man from the Dominican Republic, has been doing this same job for 15 years. “Like anything else, it was difficult at first,” he says, but he caught his rhythm after a couple of months. Peralta has been at it for 14 years. Today, they will peel and chip about 600 pounds of potatoes. (Since russet supplies are short in late summer, Balthazar stockpiles thousands of cases of potatoes in a New Jersey warehouse.) Next, they will soak them in water that must be changed three times in order to leach out starch. The potatoes that are peeled today won’t be fried, actually, until tomorrow, and then refried — but that’s another guy’s job.
What an intricately designed system; even the menu is designed to drive profit.
If you’re into cheese, you’ll want to take this photographic journey into a season with Swiss cheesemakers.
In Gruyeres, western Switzerland, from mid-May to mid-October, the fifth generation of the Murith family produces its distinctive mountain pasture Gruyere cheese. Each wheel of cheese weighs between 25 and 40 kilograms, and takes a minimum of six months to mature. The family produces 200 wheels each year to sell locally, using unpasteurized milk from their own herd of cows. Reuters photographer Denis Balibouse spent time with the Murith family over this past grazing season, capturing days and nights in the alpine pastures of Switzerland.
McDonald’s recently held an event where chefs took the ingredients used to make McDonald’s menu items and used them to make dishes that one might find at a nice restaurant. Thrillist has the report.
The slow-cooked beef with blueberry pomegranate sauce and Mac Fry gnocchi comes from McD’s chef Jessica Foust, and was, without a doubt, the best of the night. It’s their burger beef before it gets ground, plus blueberries and pomegranates from the smoothies, thinly ribboned carrots, and French fries magically turned into gnocchi.
See also a previous discussion of fast food and fine dining. Dammit, now I’m hungry for a Quarter Pounder… (via @jeb)
Smithsonian Mag goes way back to explain why we eat popcorn at the movies.
About 8,000 years ago, maize was cultivated from teosinte, a wild grass that doesn’t look much like the modern corn we know today. Popcorn — a name mostly associated with puffed kernels of corn — is actually a strain of corn, characterized by especially starchy kernels with hard kernel walls, which help internal pressure build when placed over heat. It was one of the first variations of maize cultivated in Central America. “Popcorn went north and it went south, but as far as I can see, it really only survived in South America,” says Andrew Smith, author of Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn. Eventually, trade and commerce brought the unique kernels northward. “Most likely, North American whalers went to Chile, found varieties of popcorn, picked them up and thought that they were cute, and brought them back to New England in the early 19th century,” Smith explains.
The NY Times on how Nacho Cheese Doritos are engineered to get people to eat as many of them as possible.
Despite the powerful tastes in Nacho Cheese, the Doritos formula balances them so well that no single flavor lingers in the mind after you’ve eaten a chip. This avoids what food scientists call “sensory specific satiety,” or the feeling of fullness caused by a dominant flavor. Would you eat a whole bag of rosemary chips? With Doritos, you go back for more.
I rarely eat Doritos (and when I do, it’s Cool Ranch), but my mouth was watering just from reading this.
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