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.
14. I don't care if the restaurant is pouring Chateau Latour into Minnie Mouse mugs, don't walk into a restaurant carrying your own wine glasses. It's more pretentious than wearing a monocle and spats.
The beer-like way of serving champagne was found to impact its concentration of dissolved CO2 significantly less. Moreover, the higher the champagne temperature is, the higher its loss of dissolved CO2 during the pouring process, which finally constitutes the first analytical proof that low temperatures prolong the drink's chill and helps it to retain its effervescence during the pouring process.
If you are filming a Girls Gone Wild video or are in the late stages of a wedding reception, pouring champagne directly into a person's mouth is also an effective bubble-preservation technique. (via @matthiasrascher)
Jamon Iberico, the so-called "best ham in the world", is made from a breed of pig that has been raised in Spain for 10,000 years. Fear of disease made it unavailable in the US until 2006, when one Spanish importer was finally approved. (An American company, La Quercia in Iowa, is also making waves, though purists will argue...)
In the 1500s, Spanish conquistadors exploring the new world would drop off pigs in the interest of creating a food source should they ever come back around that way again. These pigs were direct descendants of Iberian pigs, but as America settled, these pigs were passed over in favor of pigs easier to raise in captivity. Except for on Ossabaw Island, GA, where the breed remained mostly pure for 400 years. However, since pigs are about as destructive a breed as you can introduce into an ecosystem, Georgia has been working to cull the population on Ossabaw Island since 2000.
Thanks to the efforts of "hamthropologist" Peter Kaminsky, a few small farms in North Carolina are now raising Ossabaw pigs, and working to keep the breed alive. The Ossabaws suffer from insular dwarfism, making the pigs smaller, and low-grade diabetes caused by an advanced fat-storing tendency, but Kaminsky says the meat is a close approximation.
Things I learned from this article about a Thomas' English muffin executive who wants to take a new job with Hostess Foods.
Only seven people "worldwide...know the recipe and manufacturing process that give Thomas' English muffins their trademark 'nooks and crannies'."
Thomas' English muffins' parent company is named Bimbo USA.
Bimbo USA is a Division of a Mexican conglomerate called Grupo Bimbo.
English muffins, not found in England, are an American invention now sold by a Mexican company. Still completely delicious, though.
The number of states with an adult obesity rate of 30 percent or more has tripled, to nine, since 2007, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report today. Mississippi had the highest rate, 34 percent. About 75 million Americans are considered obese, the Atlanta-based CDC said.
'You've got gray, mushy broccoli out? They take a bite of that, and they may never eat broccoli again. Ever. Their whole lives,' Schwisow said, her eyes wide.
Michael Pollan on $4 peaches and $8 for a dozen eggs.
Smoothie shop Jamba Juice is responding to McDonald's jump into the smoothie market with a mock campaign selling a smooth and creamy cheeseburger smoothies. The video is a nice touch.
Somewhat related to this story, the large McDonald's smoothies have more calories than a cheeseburger. But it's the good kind of calories. Now all I want to know is if the smoothie cheeseburger has more calories than either the regular cheeseburger or the fruit smoothie.
The new menu at Alinea is 21 courses long and takes about 2.5 hours for a meal according to a Tweet by Alinea chef Grant Achatz. In June, Alinea announced they would only be offering one menu, down from two, though that menu was discussed as 15-16 courses.
According to the In-N-Out nutrition guideline, replacing the Spread with ketchup results in a decrease of 80 calories per sandwich. I know that ketchup has about 15 calories per tablespoon, so If we estimate that an average sandwich has about 2 tablespoons of sauce on it (that's the amount that's inside a single packet), then we can calculate that the Spread has got about 55 calories per tablespoon (110 calories in two tablespoons of Spread minus 30 calories in 2 tablespoons of ketchup = 80 calories difference in the sandwich). With me so far?
It just so happens that relish has about the same caloric density as ketchup (15 calories per tablespoon), and that mayonnaise has a caloric density of 80 calories per tablespoon. Using all of this information and a bit of 7th grade algebra, I was able to quickly calculate that the composition of the Spread is roughly 62 percent mayo, and 38 percent ketchup/relish blend.
The world's oldest drinkable champagne has been discovered...it dates back to the time of Louis XVI and may have even been in his actual possession.
The corks kept their seal and the cold and dark of the deep Baltic preserved the champagne. Inside the bottle they found champagne, and not just champagne but drinkable champagne, complete with fizz. Ekstroem contacted champagne vintners Moet & Chandon, and they identified it with 98% certainty from the anchor marking on the cork as 18th century Veuve Clicquot.
According to records, Veuve Clicquot was first produced in 1772, but the first bottles were laid down for 10 years. "So it can't be before 1782, and it can't be after 1788-89, when the French Revolution disrupted production," Ekstroem said.
ScienceBlogs has added a blog about "innovations in science, nutrition and health policy" sponsored by Pepsi to their roster. Posters to the blog will include Pepsi research staff. Some of the other bloggers on ScienceBlogs are not happy.
However, that said, I am completely mystified by ScienceBlogs' latest development: adding the PepsiCo "nutrition" Blog. How does ScienceBlogs expect to maintain their (OUR) credibility as a science news source (we are picked up by Google news searches afterall) when they are providing paid-for content under the guise of news? Further, I cannot imagine what sorts of credible nutrition research PepsiCo is doing that they can or will actually talk about publicly, nor can I possibly imagine any "food" corporation actually caring about promoting public health. PepsiCo is a corporation, not a research institute, fer crissakes!
La Central has its own postcode, its own 700-member police force, and its own border-style entry gates, but during my visit, its enormity truly hit home only when we had to take a taxi to get from flowers to fish. It was a solid fifteen minute ride from one section of the market to another!
We just found this old bottle of Mellwood Whisky in Meg's grandparents' pantry. No date or anything on the label. Anyone know anything about it? I suspect it's at least 50 years old...would it still be drinkable or would we go blind?
Tuna then are both a real thing and a metaphor. Literally they are one of the last big public supplies of wild fish left in the world. Metaphorically they are the terminus of an idea: that the ocean is an endless resource where new fish can always be found. In the years to come we can treat tuna as a mile marker to zoom past on our way toward annihilating the wild ocean or as a stop sign that compels us to turn back and radically reconsider.
Greenberg has written extensively on this and related topics in his forthcoming book, Four Fish. Humans have primarily selected four mammals (cows, pigs, sheep and goats) and four birds (chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese) to utilize for food, and are now in the process of choosing four fish (cod, salmon, tuna, and bass).
From a collection of old menus from Colorado, the 1892 menu from a Denver restaurant called The Boston Bakery and Lunch Room (For Ladies and Gents).
Porterhouse steak with mushrooms: 70 cents. This particular menu also contains a sort of customer bill of rights: an explanation of how waiters should treat customers and how the restaurant will catch you if you try to skip out on your check.
Now, we want your trade, and we do not care whether your check is 5¢ or $5; you will be rightly treated and correctly waited upon, or we will know the reason why, if you will only report any neglect to the head waiter or to us before leaving your seat.
The waiters are instructed to be civil and polite to every one, whether they are so to them or not, for even should the customer use bad manners, the waiter must not.
Have no conversation with the customer, except what is strictly necessary.
Give everyone a napkin who asks for it.
p>Give each one a glass of water as soon as seated.
Be as quick and quiet as possible.
Place the orders down quietly; don't slam them down.
Give each customer a check as son as you serve the order and see that it is kept in sight. Very few beats come in here, but experience has taught us that there are some. We will give any waiter $2.00 who will give us information that will enable us or the head waiter to detect any one in the act of Check Beating.
We want to call the customer's attention to the fact that when we are looking at your checks and orders, it is as much to see that you are rightly served and not over-checked as that your not under-checked. Most would understand this but some might not.
The secret ingredient that makes the mortar so strong and durable is amylopectin, a type of polysaccharide, or complex carbohydrate, found in rice and other starchy foods, the scientists determined. The mortar's potency is so impressive that it can still be used today as a suitable restoration mortar for ancient masonry.
A new Subway has recently opened in Manhattan...hanging on the outside of the 27th floor of the skeleton of 1 World Trade Center. The Subway will move upwards as the building is constructed and it is hoped that construction workers will dine there instead of heading off-site for long lunches via a slow hoist.
"I don't think the veggies will be a big seller," said Mr. Schragger, who owns four other Subways in Manhattan. "I imagine most of the guys will want protein. Philly Cheesesteaks and the Feast."
Philly Cheesesteaks and the Feast would be a great name for a band.
I've only had a few of these...I am clearly not exercising my sandwich muscles enough these days. (Although the Brazilian sandwich at Project Sandwich has been treating me well lately.)
Of course, there are trade-offs. Bimbo is not as good as a bolillo. A machine-made tortilla is not anything like a homemade tortilla -- it's not even in the same universe.
Mexican women that I have talked to are very explicit about this trade-off. They know it doesn't taste as good; they don't care. Because if they want to have time, if they want to work, if they want to send their kids to school, then taste is less important than having that bit of extra money, and moving into the middle class. They have very self-consciously made this decision. In the last ten years, the number of women working in Mexico has gone up from about thirty-three percent to nearly fifty percent. One reason for that-it's not the only reason, but it is a very important reason-is that we've had a revolution in the processing of maize for tortillas.
This blog post and accompanying videos show you how to preheat your frying pan to the precise temperature at which your food won't stick. It involves waiting until a small splash of water in the pan forms a single mercury-like ball that floats (literally!) around the pan. Too hot and the water will disperse into smaller balls; too cold and it'll just boil off instantly.
The water "hovering" over the stainless steel pan like mercury happens due to the phenomenon known as the Leidenfrost effect. You can read more about it on wikipedia, but the basic idea is this: at a certain temperature known as the Leidenfrost point (roughly around 320F for water, but varying with surface and pressure), when the water droplet hits the hot pan, the bottom part of the water vaporizes immediately on contact. The resulting gas actually suspends the water above it and creates a pocket of water vapor that slows further heat transfer between the pan and the water. Thus it evaporates more slowly than it would at lower temperatures. At the proper temperature, a similar effect happens with the food you place in the pan, preventing the food from sticking.
This is possibly the best kitchen tip I've ever heard. (thx, jim)
Monday for lunch I ate the leftovers, including a bunch of whole pine nuts that had fallen to the bottom of the dish. By Tuesday evening I had a weird taste in the back of my throat, so weird that when I when I woke up during the night, I couldn't get back to sleep.
The taste was so bad that she doesn't really feel like eating anything. That got me thinking: the pine nut diet. When you need to drop some pounds, eat a few of the offending pine nuts and boom!, eat as much as you want...as long as you can stand the taste.
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.
Popeye finally came clean Monday, admitting he used spinach when he delivered a savage and unlikely beating to romantic rival Bluto in 1998. Popeye said in a statement sent to The Associated Press on Monday that he used spinach on and off for nearly a decade. "I wish I had never touched spinach," Popeye said in a statement. "It was foolish and it was a mistake. I truly apologize. Looking back, I wish I had never sailed during the spinach era."
This video deftly skewers the food industry's current fixations, including This-Is-Why-You're-Fat-grade hamburgers, fancy TV dinners, and junk food masquerading as wholesome:
We take the finest ingredients and put them in a bowl with salt and butter.
And "hide your salad" describes my salad dressing technique perfectly...it ends up more like ranch soup, really.
Cooked food is more digestible than raw food. And not just by a little, but by a lot. Learn how to control fire, use it to cook your food, and you free up extra energy -- plus time that would otherwise be spent masticating. Spend that time hunting, and your metabolic equation gets even better.
Between 1977 and 2002, the percent of the American population eating three or more snacks a day increased to 42 percent from 11 percent.
Also, this is a great use of quotation marks:
Kara Nielsen, a "trendologist" at the Center for Culinary Development, a brand development company in San Francisco, cites the proliferation of activities, from soccer to chess club to tutoring sessions, that now fill children's afternoons.
That's actually not a "real" "job", is it? (via @megnut)
Call it overrated if you'd like, but Ssam Bar is still the only place in NYC (or perhaps the world) where you can eat, using chopsticks, German-inspired cuisine served to you by a native Spanish speaker while drinking a glass of sparkling red wine and listening to 90s hip-hop in a restaurant conceived by an American junior golf champion from Virginia whose parents were from Korea.
What I miss is the society. Lunch and dinner are the two occasions when we most easily meet with friends and family. They're the first way we experience places far from home. Where we sit to regard the passing parade. How we learn indirectly of other cultures. When we feel good together. Meals are when we get a lot of our talking done -- probably most of our recreational talking. That's what I miss.
If I had to choose my all-time favorite restaurant dishes, the smoked haddock chowder from The Spotted Pig would definitely be on there, possibly in the top five. Years after I asked Ed Levine of Serious Eats if he could get the recipe, he finally posts the recipe for me.
When infusing the haddock, think of making a cup of tea. You want to pull all the smoky flavors out into the cream. This will result in a deeply rich soup. Once you make this you will never go back to another chowder.
Thank you Ed and April! (I'm really holding back on the exclamation points here; I'm almost irrationally excited to cook this for dinner tomorrow night...if I can find smoked haddock somewhere in NYC...)
John Mackey, the co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market, refers to the company as his child-not just his creation but the thing on earth whose difficulties or downfall it pains him most to contemplate. He also sees himself as a "daddy" to his fifty-four thousand employees, who are known as "team members," but they may occasionally consider him to be more like a crazy uncle. To the extent that a child inherits or adopts a parent's traits, Whole Foods is an embodiment of many of Mackey's. A Whole Foods store, in some respects, is like Mackey's mind turned inside out. Certainly, the evolution of the corporation has often traced his own as a man; it has been an incarnation of his dreams and quirks, his contradictions and trespasses, and whatever he happened to be reading and eating, or not eating.
"A hamburger stand is a very democratizing amenity," he said. "We hope that each new Shake Shack can become both a citizen of, and mirror of, their communities."
So says the first line of Paul Greenberg's story on fish oil. Which is weird for me because I had been wondering this very thing in my bathroom the other day while staring at my wife's bottle of omega-3 pills.
Nearly every fish a fish eater likes to eat eats menhaden. Bluefin tuna, striped bass, redfish and bluefish are just a few of the diners at the menhaden buffet. All of these fish are high in omega-3 fatty acids but are unable themselves to synthesize them. The omega-3s they have come from menhaden.
Menhaden are also top-notch algae eaters and, no surprise, overfished. (via djacobs)
The ham sandwich theorem is also sometimes referred to as the "ham and cheese sandwich theorem", again referring to the special case when n = 3 and the three objects are
1. a chunk of ham, 2. a slice of cheese, and 3. two slices of bread (treated as a single disconnected object).
The theorem then states that it is possible to slice the ham and cheese sandwich in half such that each half contains the same amount of bread, cheese, and ham. It is possible to treat the two slices of bread as a single object, because the theorem only requires that the portion on each side of the plane vary continuously as the plane moves through 3-space.
No idea how this is related to the I Cut You Choose conundrum.
But it's not what you think. At Le Bernardin, one of the highest calibre restaurants in NYC, Eric Ripert and his chefs use "cheap, fake Swiss cheese full of artificial flavors" as a baseline to normalize everyone's palates so that sauces can be judged fairly in the kitchen.
In terms of flavor, that cheese tastes identical all year long...so it give us a reference, and we can judge fairly.
Mr. Uyeda, who owns a bar named Tender in the Ginza district, is the inventor of a much-debated shaking technique he calls the hard shake, a choreographed set of motions involving a ferocious snapping of the wrists while holding the shaker slanted and twisting it. According to his Web site, this imparts, among other things, greater chill and velvety bubbles that keep the harshness of the alcohol from contacting the tongue, while showering fine particles of ice across the drink's surface.
Cooking, perhaps more than any activity, lets an actor exude absolute physical and intellectual mastery without seeming domineering or smug. Why is that? It's probably because, while cooking is a creative talent that has a certain egotistical component (what good cook isn't proud of his or her skills?), there's something inherently humbling about preparing food for other people. It doesn't matter whether you're a workaday gangster footsoldier giving lessons on how to cook for 20 guys, like Richard Castellano's Clemenza in The Godfather, or a hyper-articulate, super-fussy kitchen philosopher like Tony Shalhoub in Big Night, ("To eat good food is to be close to God..."), when you're cooking, it's ultimately not about you; it's about the people at the table. Their approval and pleasure is the end game.
There is much about the restaurant that is inefficient, as MBAs are quick to note: Adrià should lower his staff numbers, use cheaper ingredients, improve his supply chain, and increase the restaurant's hours of operation. But "fixing" elBulli turns it into just another restaurant, says Norton: "The things that make it inefficient are part of what makes it so valuable to people."
For her latest GOOP newsletter, Gwynyth Paltrow asks a few friends -- Ferran Adria, Nora Ephron, Mario Batali -- to recount their most memorable meals.
3. Put something more than a teaspoon but something less than a tablespoon of salt in the flour. That is like "three pinches." It doesn't really matter how much! Saltiness offsets sweetness! People, who are animals, like salt!
4. Put about the same amount of sugar in the flour! Give or take! IT DOESN'T MATTER.
Choire also notes at one point that the crust "should look sort of gross".
Nathan Myhrvold, ex-Microsoftie and founder of an invention company called Intellectual Ventures, is also really interested in food, so much so that he's writing a monster cookbook (currently ~1500 pages) about the science of cooking.
In another discovery of culinary heat transfer physics, Dr. Myhrvold said the bulbous shape and black color of Weber grills were wrong. To achieve an even cooking temperature across the cooking grate, the inside of the grill should be vertical and shiny to reflect the heat. That can be fixed by adding an aluminum insert to the grill. "So we have directions for that," Dr. Myhrvold said.
For his piece Steak Filter, Noah Feehan ran a video signal of a steak cooking through the actual steak. The deterioration of the video signal becomes a sign of how done the steak is.
Quite literally, I am plugging composite video into a big steak, which is then cooked. The video signal going through the steak is the image of the steak cooking. Gradually, the steak loses moisture and signal can no longer pass.
The videos don't really show too much, but I love the idea. (via eat me daily)
For the first time ever, a Michelin Guide reviewer knowingly sits down to a meal with a journalist, New Yorker writer John Colapinto. The resulting article is pretty interesting; here's my favorite bit:
Le Bernardin was one of only four restaurants in New York (along with Jean Georges, Thomas Keller's Per Se, and the now defunct Alain Ducasse at the Essex House) that earned three stars in the debut issue of the Michelin guide, and it has held on to its three stars ever since. Ripert estimates that revenues increased by eighteen per cent when the first guide came out, but the pressure to hold on to his stars has also escalated.
An 18% increase? Assuming that Le Bernardin was already booked solid before the guide came out and expenses remained constant, that means that the same number of diners generated that increase...presumably Michelin Guide readers spend more on dining than even Le Bernardin regulars do. Margins on Manhattan restaurants, even the fancy ones, generally aren't that large...an 18% increase is insane.
Update: A slight clarification. I fudged the 18% revenue increase into an 18% increase in profits...which isn't the case. But since I'm assuming that the revenue increased was generated by the about same number of customers and that most of the expenses (rent, staff, etc.) stayed the same, the profit margin had to increase by some significant amount (for a Manhattan restaurant). And if those new customers ordered more tasting menus or more expensive bottles of wine, I would assume that the profit margin on those items are higher than average as well. So, my guess is that if you asked Eric Ripert if Le Bernardin's profit margin increased after the Michelin Guide came out, he would answer in the affirmative...but it wouldn't be an 18% increase.
I mentioned on Twitter last week that I made slow-poached eggs using a technique from the Momofuku book. A few folks asked about a recipe so here are the details:
Fill your largest pot with water and put it over super low heat on the stove. Put something in the bottom of the pot to keep the eggs off the bottom...you want them to be heated by the water, not the flame underneath. Use a thermometer to heat the water to 140-145°F and slip the whole eggs in (no cracking). Let the eggs sit in there for 40-45 minutes, maintaining the temperature the whole time. I found that turning the heat on for 30-45 seconds every 10 minutes or so was enough to keep the temperature in the proper range.
To serve, crack the eggs and discard any clear whites. If you're not serving them immediately, chill the whole eggs in an ice bath and store in the fridge. To reheat, run under hot water for a minute or two.
This takes a little longer than making poached eggs in the traditional way, but you can do several eggs at once (like dozens if you have a big enough pot), this technique is less messy and fussy, and results in a poached eggs with a super-creamy white. The whites on my first batch were a little too runny for my taste, so I'm going to try a slightly higher temperature next time to (hopefully) achieve something between soft boiled and poached.
That's it. There's a lot more context and advice in the Momofuku book (which is excellent and includes a technique for frying your slow-poached eggs); I'd suggest picking up a copy if you're interested.
Meet Shanna Pacifico, the chef de cuisine & butcher at Back Forty restaurant in New York City. She helped devise a sustainable meat program that brings in whole animals to make up their menu, where everything gets used and nothing goes to waste.
NSFV (not safe for vegetarians). (via serious eats)
After discovering the recipe for Robie's Buttermilk Flapjacks in a magazine a year or two ago, my wife has been making them for breakfast most Saturdays and they are, no foolin', the best pancakes I've ever eaten. They are fluffy and moist and delicious. Here's what you do.
Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl, whisk, set aside:
2 cups flour
2 tbsp sugar
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp fine salt
Combine the wet ingredients in a second bowl, whisk:
Add the wet ingredients to the dry and whisk until just combined. Fry in a pan with butter. Top with maple syrup and devour.
Don't skimp on the ingredients here. Use real butter and real vanilla extract, but especially real maple syrup and real buttermilk. Depending on where you live/shop, actual buttermilk might be difficult to find. The term "buttermilk" formerly referred to the liquid left behind after churning butter but nowadays refers to a cultured milk product not unlike drinkable yogurt. The only real buttermilk we've been able to find (in VT and MA) is Kate's Real Buttermilk; even at the NYC Greenmarket, the best you can find is cultured buttermilk made with whole milk. At least attempt to avoid most grocery store buttermilk; it's made from skim milk with added thickeners and such, basically buttermilk without any richness, which is, like, what's the point? Oh, and no powdered buttermilk either...it messes with the texture too much. The point is, these are buttermilk pancakes and they taste best with the best buttermilk you can get your mitts on.
I was all fired up to make eight from-scratch servings of ramen last night after looking through the Momofuku book, but ulitmately the book is a Trojan horse for enticing people into the restaurants. As in: "Konbu? 5 pounds of meaty pork bones? Fuck that, let's just go to Noodle Bar."
The NY Times has a really sweet story about Thomas Keller and the rekindling of his relationship with his father.
Mr. Keller ate many of the dishes in the book with his father at Ad Hoc. Even after the accident they would go, despite the physical challenges of getting his father out of the house. Ms. Cunningham said she used to worry about how customers might feel watching the famous chef feed his father. "Here he was taking care of his father just like a baby," she said. "For Thomas, it didn't make the slightest difference. Whatever he could do to make his dad comfortable he did."
The chef as caretaker, literally feeding a loved one...I don't see anything unusual about that at all. Isn't that what all chefs should aspire to? (thx, andy)
Upon tasting it, my immediate thoughts are mayo, ketchup, a little yellow mustard, a hint of garlic and paprika, perhaps a touch of cayenne pepper, and an elusive sour quality that I can't quite pinpoint. It's definitely not just vinegar or lemon juice, nor is does it have the cloying sweetness of relish. Pickle juice? Cornichon? Some other type of vinegar? I can't figure it out. This was going to take a little more effort.
Totally doing this for dinner one of these nights. We'll probably cheat on the ground beef...we've got some Pat LaFrieda patties stockpiled in the freezer.
Hiding at the very end of the listing is a pasta shape called Marille, which is unusual in that a) it's a recent shape, b) its designer is known, and c) it is no longer available. Marille's designer, Giorgetto Giugiaro, previously had designed some of the most distinctive cars in the world and in 1999 was named Car Designer of the Century. (via @nicolatwilley)
A round pizza with radius 'z' and thickness 'a' has the volume pi*z*z*a. That and other math jokes are available on Wikipedia. Don't you love it when people explain jokes:
In this case, DEAD refers to a hexadecimal number (57005 base 10), not the state of being no longer alive.
Due to all the Throwback tweets, Facebook fan pages, videos, blog posts, pics & pleas, Pepsi Throwback is coming back!! Starting December 28th Pepsi and Mountain Dew Throwback will be available again for 8 weeks with the same formula and natural sugar, but this time with an even more rad vintage look!
In Kashiwa, Japan, there was briefly an unusual cafe where you recieve whatever the person in front of you ordered...and you're ordering for the person behind you.
The Ogori cafe was an unforgettable travel moment, and an idea that has stuck with me: It was a complete surprise in our day. It encouraged communication between total strangers or, in this case, members of the Kashiwa community and a couple of weird guys from Oregon. It forced one to "let go", just for a brief moment, of the total control we're so used to exerting through commerce. It led you to taste something new, that you might not normally have ordered. It was a delight.
Never eat something that is pretending to be something else.
Don't yuck someone else's yum.
If you are not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you are not hungry.
Dijon mustard is to yellow mustard as a Rolls Royce is to your Honda. A 454 gram bottle sells for $6.99, and that is 5 cents per serving.
He adds up exactly how much homemade sandwiches cost based on the amount of ingredients and their correlating prices. The results are revealing: 98 cents for a processed turkey sandwich, 48 1/2 cents for a grilled cheese, and 64 cents for a pb&j. If you'd like to figure out how much bread you'll need for your picnic, try out Cockerham's sandwich calculator. For more dizzying and delicious equations, cut the corners off the drool-inducing Scanwiches.
Borsch, sticky rice with sweet bean paste, duck cassoulet, and tvorog (Russian cottage cheese and nuts) are just a smattering of the culinary variety served up in space. On board the Discovery Space Shuttle, the various offerings reflect the amalgamation of nations that make up the ships temporary inhabitants. Recent Discovery visitor Danny Olivas brought a little American fare to the deck, perfecting the zero-g breakfast burrito. If you're looking to spice up your food between the stars, be warned: salt and pepper are only available in liquid form.
Update: Nuts aren't an essential ingredient of tvorog, and it's actually not cottage cheese at all. The thickened dairy treat is a relative of German quark, and is consumed throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Its add-ins vary depending on location, but vanilla and fruit are popular additives in both the Netherlands and Germany.
Dave Nunley is a food phobic in the UK who has primarily subsisted on grated cheddar cheese since birth. Although he's eating up to three times the amount of fat recommended for the average diet, he seems to be in fairly good health, save for a vitamin B deficiency.
This isn't as uncommon as you might think. Unlike fad diets that eschew one corner of the food pyramid for another, food phobia is an actual fear-based aversion to a particular kind of vittle, either due to taste, association, or texture. The disorder, which psychologists believe has links to obsessive compulsive disorder, can lead to nutritional deficits, a compromised immune system, and a lot of awkwardness at dinner parties. Orthorexia, a similar condition, is an obsession with healthful eating that can at times become so severe that it leads to anorexia, but food phobics find their meals dominated by their fear. Ironically, legendary egg-shaped director Alfred Hitchcock was an admitted ovophobe, and was "revolted" by eggs.
Update: It seems the Brits have cornered the market on uncovering food phobias. The show Freaky Eaters on BBC Three documents individuals with such severely restricted eating that they avoid certain food groups altogether. The show aims to help each person overcome their aversions and adopt a healthy diet.
(thx jodi)
Update: Another British export is the website Adult Picky Eaters, which aims to provide a forum and self-help information for those struggling with food issues. The author also documents her struggle with picky eating, and the comments on the site are pretty revealing.
Livermush is a combination of pig scraps and cornmeal, and inhabits some culinary purgatory between meatloaf and corndog. Brought to the South in the 1700s by resourceful German immigrants who migrated from the Northern colonies, true livermush contains at least 30% pig parts and uses cornmeal as the binding ingredient. It is often fried like a patty and served in sandwich form, with mayo, lettuce, and tomato. Many people confuse livermush with liver pudding, and although the distinction between the two is somewhat vague, it's generally accepted that liver mush is the meal to the west of the Yadkin River, while liver pudding is the staple snack of the east.
Once a cornerstone of North Carolinian cuisine, there are signs that this "working man's staple" is dropping off menus. It appears that only five commercial producers are still churning out the meat mixture all of them family-owned and operated, all of them in North Carolina. Jerry Hunter, a livermush manufacturer in the town of Marion, laments the recent downturn.
"We're still running a fairly good volume, but a whole lot of us wish we could see better times. It's not just livermush. All of us is struggling to stay in existence."
Not everyone is forgetting about livermush. Areas like Marion have begun hosting livermush festivals, hoping to create a resurgence. Perhaps it just needs a few high-profile sponsors to bolster its gustatory delights. To start, the wife of former Cleveland Indians first baseman Jim Thome was asked what he was going to miss most after being acquired by Philadelphia, and she answered, "Livermush."
Update: Liver lovers rejoice, various forms similar to the 'mush are alive and well. Goetta is a German ground meat and oat loaf that is also referred to as "Cincinnati caviar," due to its popularity in the area.
(thx alex)
Update: And Mr. Thorme hopefully discovered the Philadelphia equivalent of livermush, known as scrapple. A mixture of pork bits and cornmeal, this combination is enhanced with flour, buckwheat, and spices.
(thx tim)
Update: In Northwest Ohio they have a livermush-like mixture that's sold in brick form. It's called grits, though it's different from the corn-based breakfast porridge that's also known as southern, or hominy, grits.
From scratch means: You grow your tomato, you grow your lettuce, you cure your own bacon or pancetta, you bake your own bread (wild yeast preferred and gets higher marks but is not required), you make your own mayo. All other embellishments, creative interpretations of the BLT welcome.
An interesting way to hold onto summer would be to engineer a lunchbox that comes with its own outdoor setting. For those who are craftily inclined, this article contains instructions on how to pack more than a sandwich with your mid-day snack, using turf, an image of the outdoors, and some old fashioned ingenuity. With lunch inside the box, nestled among a handmade diorama of the outdoors, complete with a patch of grass, the "Green Space Travel Case" provides a tiny slice of countryside for those confined to a concrete cityscape. Ants and screaming children packed separately.
A farmer in China has grown pears in the shape of babies. Using fiberglass and plastic moulds, Hao Xianzhang has been able to cultivate fruit in the shape of newborns. The popularity likely extends beyond those who catch the literary reference: in the Chinese novel Journey to the West a mythical fruit in the shape of an infant bestows immortality to all who consume it. Xianzhang's pears cost $7 (50 yuan) each, not too pricey for a piece of the eternal. For those who aren't inclined to snack on athanasia, the farmer plans on growing fruit in the shape of other figures, including comedy icon Charlie Chaplin.
Update: Turns out that some sources are calling these "Buddha shaped pears," not baby shaped. Chewing on a deity or consuming your young, either way, it's some peculiar produce.
