kottke.org posts about food
The celebrated food vendors at Red Hook’s ball fields have been awarded a six-year permit to “operate an ethnic and specialty food market in Red Hook Park, Brooklyn”. Says NYC food meister Ed Levine of the vendors:
The Red Hook Ballfields, where Latino families put up makeshift restaurants serving real, honest food of their home countries, is one of the last bastions of real food to be found in NYC. If it’s replaced by a Starbucks or a series of dirty water dog carts or some generic high bidder, it would be a travesty.
A recent favorite Buzzfeed trend: Insane Sandwiches.
It starts simply enough. At some point you decide you like cheeseburgers better than hamburgers. No big deal. Then one day you try your cheeseburger with bacon. And then after a while you think, you know what would be really good on this? Jalapeños. Jalapeños would be really good on this. And then you’re stuck. Hooked on Jalapeño Bacon Cheeseburgers, and you realize you can never go back.
Update: Speaking of cheeseburgers, feel free to blast these to bits. (thx, jeff & swissmiss)
Update: Aaron points me to the Luther Burger: “a hamburger, specifically a bacon cheeseburger, which employs a glazed donut in place of each bun.”
Ed Levine says the best gelato in NYC is being served in a tanning salon. My favorite banh mi (and perhaps the best baguette in town) can be found in the back of a jewelry store. Any other odd places to find good food?
The Riverdale Garden Restaurant in the Bronx is trying out a novel way of staying in business: they’re asking for their regulars to pledge $5000 in exchange for a year of free dinners.
Michael had put The Riverdale Garden up for sale for the past several months and had a buyer. However, the landlord “killed” the deal. We are now forced to close for good or rely on our best customers to put their money where their mouths are! Quite literally…….. You will be eating your investment. Bottom line is we have 12 couples so far ready to invest $5000 in dining credits, however we need 38 more.
(via eater)
The other day I posted a link to an article about Hervé This that mentioned how to unboil an egg.
He explains that when an egg is cooked, the protein molecules unroll themselves, link up and enclose the water molecules. In order to ‘uncook’ the egg, you need to detach the protein molecules from each other. By adding a product like sodium borohydride, the egg becomes liquid within three hours. For those who want to try it at home, vitamin C also does the trick.
Michael Pusateri tried it out (using vitamin C) and it didn’t work so well.
The egg was whole and appeared completely unaffected. The texture of the egg outside felt normal and in no way ‘unboiled’. While I am a professional engineer, I am a amateur scientist. There are several reasons this process might not have unboiled the egg.
Any molecular gastronomists out there want to give this one a shot?
How to unboil an egg:
He explains that when an egg is cooked, the protein molecules unroll themselves, link up and enclose the water molecules. In order to ‘uncook’ the egg, you need to detach the protein molecules from each other. By adding a product like sodium borohydride, the egg becomes liquid within three hours. For those who want to try it at home, vitamin C also does the trick.
That’s from an article on Hervé This, a French chemist whose medium is food.
Not much to say about this but this “I Love You, but You Love Meat” headline is best said aloud in Barney’s singsong voice.
Ok, there’s a bit more to say. When Meg and I first started dating, she was an almost-vegan (she ate fish and maybe eggs (I forget)). Now she eats meat and cheese and the like with greater zeal than I do. Sometimes I feel as though encouraging her to abandon veganism was my greatest contribution to our relationship; that we enjoy eating similar things has made things a lot easier.
Oh, and I love the word “vegangelical”…reminds me of Buzzfeed’s vegansexuals trend.
Jürgen Stumpf owns three wine bars in Berlin that operate on the honor system.
For the price of 1 euro (about $1.50), you rent yourself a glass and get to sample as many of the wines as you want. At the end of the night you throw some bills or coins into a big jar, the amount based on what you think is fair.
Pop quiz, hotshot. There’s a bomb on a bus. Once the bus goes 50 miles an hour… Who fares worst health-wise, diet soda drinkers or fried food eaters? Surprisingly, researchers have found a correlation between diet soda consumption and metabolic syndrome.
The one-third who ate the most fried food increased their risk by 25 percent compared with the one-third who ate the least, and surprisingly, the risk of developing metabolic syndrome was 34 percent higher among those who drank one can of diet soda a day compared with those who drank none.
What I Learned Today did some further digging and found a different study that links diet soda consumption and obesity.
For diet soft-drink drinkers, the risk of becoming overweight or obese was:
- 36.5% for up to 1/2 can each day
- 37.5% for 1/2 to one can each day
- 54.5% for 1 to 2 cans each day
- 57.1% for more than 2 cans each day.
The Incompatible Food Triad. Are there three foods that don’t taste good together but every pair of them does?
There are many ways to interpret this “going together” but an example solution would be three pizza toppings — A, B, and C — such that a pizza with A and B is good, and a pizza with A and C is good, and a pizza with B and C is good, but a pizza with A, B, and C is bad. Or you might find three different spices or other ingredients which do not go together in some recipe yet any pair of them is fine.
(via josh)
Noted food scientist Harold McGee takes a look at the microbiological consequences of double dipping a chip into a bowl of dip.
Prof. Paul L. Dawson, a food microbiologist, proposed it after he saw a rerun of a 1993 “Seinfeld” show in which George Costanza is confronted at a funeral reception by Timmy, his girlfriend’s brother, after dipping the same chip twice.
Over at Slice (the pizza blog!), Adam Kuban has compiled a list of all the different pizza styles found in the US.
Once the Italian immigrants brought their Naples-style pies to the States, it evolved a bit in the Italian neighborhoods of New York to something I’ve seen referred to as “New York-Neapolitan.” This is basically what all the coal-oven pizzerias of New York serve. It follows the tenets of Neapolitan style in that it’s thin-crusted, cooked in an ultra-hot oven, and uses a judicious amount of cheese and sauce (sauce which is typically fresh San Marzano tomatoes, as in Naples). It deviates from Naples-style in that it’s typically larger, a tad thinner, and more crisp.
There’s a surprising number of styles.
1. Usually when you order meat or cheese at the deli counter (e.g. “I’ll have a 1/2 pound of pastrami, please”), the person behind the counter tries to get as close as they can to the weight you ordered but it’s often a little over and you’re charged for the overage. I’ve noticed that what they do at Whole Foods is that they only charge you for what you asked for but they give you the little extra for free. So yesterday I asked for a 1/2 pound of roast beef, but it came out to 0.57 when he weighed it. He lifted a bit of the meat off the scale until it read 0.50, printed the ticket, and put the little extra back on the scale. It’s a nice gesture and a good example of using customer service instead of marketing or advertising to give a current customer a warm and fuzzy feeling about the company…and it only costs them 20 cents-worth of roast beef.
2. We went out to eat with some friends the other night but the restaurant was tiny, packed, and didn’t have anywhere to put Ollie’s stroller. So the owner took the stroller and put it in the back of his truck that was parked out in front of the restaurant. (While there, we dined on a cheese plate with, like, 30 to 40 different cheeses on it, some of which were made by the stroller valet himself.)
The tales of Kobe beef cattle being raised in comfort with massages and the occasional beer might be a stretch of the truth: Kobe is expensive, delicious, but inhumanely raised beef.
From the time they are a week old until they are three and a half years old, these steers are commonly kept in a lean-to behind someone’s house where they get bored and go off their feed. Their gut stops working. The best way to start their gut working again is to give them a bottle of beer.
Who wins the Super Bowl of Food: New York City or Boston? Ed Levine says it’s no contest: New York all the way.
What has Boston bestowed upon us, foodwise? Brown bread, baked beans, Boston cream pie, and Parker House rolls. Pretty slim pickins’, don’t you think? How far would you go out of your way for some baked beans or some brown bread? I’d only go a block or two at the most. Now if you expanded the geographic food purview of the Patriots to all of New England, that might be an interesting discussion, because then New England clam chowder, lobster rolls, and fried clams would enter into the fray.
Ed’s a bit hard on Boston here…there’s some excellent food to be found in the city and its surrounds.
Dave Pell, peanut butter expert, has found the best peanut butter in the world.
I love peanut butter. But more importantly for the statement you are about to read here, I know peanut butter. I know peanut butter the way Da Vinci knew fluid mechanics, the way Einstein knew physics, the way Grand Master Flash knows a turntable, the way Tom Brady knows how to perfectly balance throwing touchdowns and humping supermodels. I have eaten it. I have coddled it. I inhaled. What can I say? That’s how I spread.
A fine AV Club interview with the surprisingly down-to-earth Anthony Bourdain…much of it isn’t even about food. On selling out and endorsements:
Yeah, I’ve been offered cookware lines, some really gruesome reality shows that would have made me boatloads of money. The usual endorsements. I don’t know. Maybe it goes back to the heroin thing. I know what it’s like to wake up in the morning and feel ashamed of what you did yesterday. I’m just having a hard time crossing that line. I’d like to sell out. I really would!
I also learned that he writes crime novels.
Good news: Alinea’s Grant Achatz announces that his cancer is in remission. Achatz found out earlier this year that he had cancer of the mouth and instead of the traditional surgery route, he worked with his doctors on a treatment that would allow him to continue to cook, his profession and passion.
Foodpairing: extensive diagrams showing which foods go with other foods. See also the Synesthetic Cookbook.
NYC restaurant advice from a huge douchebag Don Juan about where to wine her, dine her, and then complete the rhyming trifecta later that evening.
I have given much thought to this question of romantic restaurants. In each case you have to study the girl and find the right restaurant for her. One If by Land, Two If by Sea. Forget it. A joke. The Terrace. Never. Never. The minute you walk in she knows what you have in mind. You might as well write her a note ‘Tonight I expect to do it.’ It’s too obvious.
(via eater)
If you can handle just one more, GQ has a long article on David Chang, the chef/co-owner of NYC’s Momofuku restaurants.
Three years ago, David Chang was an obscure cook with a failing Manhattan noodle bar. Now he is being hailed as the most innovative and exciting chef America has seen in decades.
Decades? Please. I’m not backing down from my effusive review of Ssam Bar (Ssam Bar is one of my favorite restaurants of all time), but this decades business is bollocks. Just let the man (and his collaborators) cook and open more yummy restaurants.
The just-released Michelin restaurant guide for Tokyo awards more stars to that city’s restaurants than New York and Paris put together. And 8 get a 3-star rating, only 2 fewer than in Paris.
Tokyo has more restaurants - at least 160,000 that could be classified as proper “restaurants” - than almost any other urban centre. Paris, by comparison, has little more than 20,000 and New York about 23,000.
There’s a lot of handwringing about Tokyo restaurants getting so many stars, but to look at it another way, Paris has 8 times fewer restaurants and has more 3 stars than Tokyo. Not bad.
(via marginal revolution)
Whiskey enthusiast, reacting to 2400 bottles of antique Jack Daniel’s possibly being poured down the drain because of unlicensed sales: “Punish the person, not the whiskey.”
The annual report for Podravka, a Croatian food company, has to be heated in the oven before you can read it.
Called Well Done, the report features blank pages printed with thermo-reactive ink that, after being wrapped in foil and cooked for 25 minutes, reveal text and images.
Well done, indeed. (thx, judson)
Anthony Bourdain on the best method for finding good food in any city: provoke the nerds.
Take the city you want to go to and just google up some restaurant names that serve the dish you’re after. Then got to chowhound or another foodie site, and rather than asking about restaurants, you put up an enthusiastic post talking about how you just had the best whatever you’re looking for at one of these restaurants.
At that point, […] the nerdfury will begin. Posters will show up from nowhere to shower you with disdain, tell you how that place used to be good but has now totally sold out and — most important to your quest — will tell you where you would have gone if you were not some sort of mouth breathing water buffalo.
I wouldn’t have guessed that there’s actually an upside to Internet Jackass Syndrome. (via clusterflock)
This post about the carbon footprint of wine contains an interesting map at the bottom. It’s a map of the US with a line splitting the country in two. West of the line, it is more carbon efficient to drink Napa wine while to the east of the line it is more carbon efficient to drink French Bordeaux. You can almost see the coastline of the eastern and Gulf states struggling westward against the trucking route from California. The Vinicultural Divide?
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