Artichoke Pizza

No, not a pizza with artichokes (though that too) but Artichoke Pizzeria, the newest entry into the New York city-wide pizza wars. Artichoke has been clogged with people since it arrived, and yesterday was no exception. Although I arrived at 5 pm on a Wednesday, there was already a crowd of about 20 snaking out of the restaurant, a problem which is exacerbated by the fact that Artichoke isn't really the kind of place that rewarms slices that have been sitting around the entire day. 45 minutes later, I arrived at the front, only to find that there weren't any regular slices. When would they be ready? "Shrug", the man behind the counter said. But, luckily enough, a huge artichoke and spinach pizza had just come out of the oven. I pointed at that, forked over my three dollars, and went scurrying out, the lengthening line staring enviously at my score as I squeezed by them.

How was it? Alan Richman's verdict (what I linked to above), is spot on:

This isn’t just pizza. This is the way ordinary food used to taste in New York—superficially no different from food anywhere else, but in reality considerably better. It had little to do with superior ingredients and everything to do with New York know-how.

Is it an amazing Italian style pizza? No. It's not meant to be. It's thick. And big. And cheesy. What it does, however, is explain to skeptics raised on doughy, mushy, "New York style" fast food why a New York pizza was once thought to be something special. I only wish I could wander around Times Square diverting tourists down to Artichoke, and away from the depressing places they end up in. But then, the wait for me would get even longer.

Cashiers

In the comments to her post on haggling (which I also dislike, although I'm less annoyed by it if the expectation that one haggles is clear - what I really hate is not knowing whether to haggle or not, as my haggling personality is alien to me and can be unpleasant, and so it takes a bit of warning to clothe myself in it), Amber says, " I don't even like making conversation with cashiers. Half of them can barely handle ringing me up or making a return, much less negotiating a discounted sale."

I couldn't agree more, which explains my preference for self check out lines where available, especially in grocery stores. An example: recently, my local grocery store's computer broke down, so they were ringing us up by hand. I had three items. One cost $4.49, the second $3.49 and the third $5.99. The cashier asked me for $5.99. I told her that I owed more than that and gave her a $20 bill. She pointed at her calculator. I said that I saw the calculator, but since a single item was $5.99, and it said $5.99 in big numbers on it, it was highly unlikely that my total was $5.99. She didn't answer, and then just said $5.99 again. I tried to convince her again that it wasn't $5.99. She went to get the manager. The manager came, and pushed "total" on the calculator.

Flurgh. Give me the machine any day.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, I've been a cashier. It's no more fun on that side of things.

Why Stuff?

Mark Bittman writes today about a chicken stuffing. His contention - that most stuffings are for appearance's sake rather than for taste. I think he's basically right, and certainly I have no soft spot for turkey stuffing at thanksgiving. But there are exceptions, which I posted as a comment on his blog. Hopefully, I'll have started a conversation:

It’s an interesting argument, and I think you’re usually right. I guess I can think of a couple of reasons besides aesthetics, though, to stuff things with other things. (a) The stuffing would taste good alongside, but the stuffing melts, or otherwise renders itself difficult (b) Convenience - packages of things are sometimes easier to manipulate than one thing flopped onto another thing (c) surprise or disguise - need to convince someone to eat beef cheeks? Want to surprise your guest with a little pop of raisin in a grape leaf, or cheese in a chicken? The answer is stuffing.

Goat cheese and fava flatbreads

I served the artichoke and spinach stuffed chicken below with a puree of fava beans, which are precisely in season right now, combining olive oil, cooked favas, and a little bit of heavy cream into a soft, unctuous paste. And for something to nibble on while I finished cooking the main course, I thought using some of the leftover favas along with some cherry tomatoes that I was worrying about losing to age would be great. So I roasted the tomatoes at 175 degrees (f) for four hours to concentrate their flavor, making a olive oil rich flat bread in the meantime (flour, water, salt, and olive oil - what I imagine a pissaladiere crust to be like). Instead of topping the bread with the cheese and other condiments, I cooked it first, and then slathered on the cheese while it was hot, dotting it with favas and tomatoes shortly thereafter, once the cheese had firmed up a bit. The flatbreads paired beautifully with the puzzlingly sweet Vouvray we were drinking, and it occurred to me in mid-bite that the same recipe could work wonders with the other darling of the moment, baby artichokes.

Die Chicken is boned

* Better pictures with a real camera of full meal to come


Ever since reading a review by the Washington Post's secondary food reviewer about five years ago about a boneless chicken stuffed with rice and raisins dish in suburban Virginia, I've been wanting to perfect the technique of boning out a chicken.

It turns out, ultimately, that it is far more intimidating than difficult. The trick is to watch Jacques Pepin do it on television about 40 times with a chicken sitting on your lap while waggling the drumstick, and then to leap back into the kitchen manically repeating his instructions so you don't forget them.

"Pull back the skin, and move the wing. I can feel zee articulation of the joint, and so my knife goes here. I'm in zee articulation now, but if I was not, I would just wiggle the knife, and it would slide in".

Wiggle wiggle. Slide.

"Then, put your fingers through the carcass here, and pull out like so".

Fingers in carcass. Pull meat out a chicken is surprisingly cathartic.

"Now pull all the meat away from the front of the chicken, until you see the oyster, you see? And then pull the leg up, and then pull it out like this to break it, and then cut zee sinew"

I don't see the oyster. I just see indifferentiated meat and other things that I don't recognize as meat. Where? Where?

Oh. I didn't pull the thigh hard enough. Oyster found. Leg up, like a Rockette, and then pull out and break with a satisfying crack. There are more sinews on my chicken than his. Hum.

"Scrape the meat off the thigh bone, like this, and then break the leg to pull the thigh bone out like this."

I have no idea what my landlord thought of the loud pounding which constituted my efforts to break the damned chicken's foot, but suffice to say that the back of my knife was ineffective, and I resorted to an extremely heavy stone pestle (in case you're not getting the idea, you break the bone where the leg meets the foot. This way you can pull out the drumstick, but you leave in the last joint, to help keep the skin from shrinking). And unless you actually are Jacques Pepin, scraping the meat off a thigh bone of a chicken should be done with a dull knife, not one's chef's knife. As amazing as you think you are with it, the idea that it's not going to slip and and, say, slice off your hand, is a little optimistic.

"It should not take you more than a minute to bone out a chicken".

Says Jacques. It should take 20 sweating minutes if you're me.

Travails aside, in the end I had a boned out chicken. I made a stuffing of artichoke hearts and spinach, and tied the chicken up for roasting. The result was delicious. Now, to perfect that rice and raisin mixture for next time.

Momofuku-d

Finally, a Momofuku Ko reservation!

Now comes all the shame for succumbing to such a ridiculous fad. And yet, it should be fun... I'll report back after the dinner next week.

Death and Company

After a fairly pathetic effort to get into PBT (I'm not totally convinced by a bar one enters through a secret door in a mediumly good hot dog stand, but I didn't get in, so I'll pass on making a judgement), my girlfriend and I ended up at Death + Company on Friday night, an intentionally old style bar that has recently gotten some good press (see here). We decided to start off with a martini, and sat bemused as our bartender flew around, breaking apart blocks of ice with some sort of pick, pouring other kinds of ice in and out of various cups, tasting, and mixing. A few minutes later, we had two pretty startling martinis, my girlfriend's with a little squeeze of orange bitters, and a generous second helping hanging out in an ice bath in front of us. We sipped happily, and devoured a very passable hot crab dip that I ordered to try to make amends for some atrocious fries I bought while we were waiting to try to get into PBT. When the bartender came back to clear things away, I just told him to make me something archaic, since I don't know anything about drinks anyway. He whirled about again and presented something made with rye, some twists, something red, and some other things, which was really wonderful. My girlfriend, for her part, stuck with gin, and asking for something with mint, got a wonderful South Side. (I'm not claiming the link is the recipe they used, but you get the idea).

Above all, Death is a comfortable bar with moderately loud music, and a vibe that's acceptable even for someone who dislikes bars, and trendy places even more. Highly recommended.

Gordon Ramsay gets too excited

I see that Gordon Ramsay has proposed banning out of season ingredients in restaurants. I can't take such an effort all too seriously - I'd especially love to be in on the committee that gets to decide which restaurants have to abide by the "law", or when seasons start, or what to do with frozen vegetables, or what people are supposed to eat in places where they only get potatoes - but it sparks the question in my mind as to whether there is any, or whether there should be any, constitutional limit on how much the government can regulate cooking. Isn't cooking an expressive outlet? What if New York city banned cooking with butter in a commercial kitchen? Or banned Romanian food?

A restaurant experiment

For the last couple of weeks, I've been watching a veritable living experiment in my neighborhood. Without naming names, about a month ago, a mediocre Chinese restaurant that had abruptly closed down reappeared as a new sushi/hibachi bar. Rugged Astorians, included ourselves, trooped there for the restaurant's grand opening and in the days immediately afterwards. We thought the place was awful. Our sushi was tasteless. The vegetable tempura was so greasy that it tasted as if they had dipped it back into the frying oil as a sort of dressing after it cooled, and they made two different mistakes in our service, which was remarkable because we only ordered two things.

Everyone else apparently agreed with out assessment. Poor reviews poured into the local Astoria chat rooms, dismissing the place for its wretched service, bad food, high prices, and puzzlingly dark interior. The result is a total massacre. The restaurant is empty. There's now a sign advertising Chinese food again outside. And it's still dark. We estimate the place has another month of life left.

The obvious lesson is that the New York restaurant market is highly efficient. That is to say, it rapidly aggregates knowledge about a restaurant, and brutally punishes underachievement. The more subtle correlary to this all is that I am now more convinced than ever that a large part of the superiority of French bread is an equally efficient market in baguettes in Paris. Just like for our nameless Astorian sushi hut, the typical pattern in Paris is for a boulangerie to open, pioneers to test, and then spread the word, after which the boulangerie either collapses entirely or has lines out the door. Fixing your reputation after that first wave, I suspect, is extremely difficult. Just like in every other industry, these ceaseless churning has, over years, created a tremendous, seemingly inexplicable, bread superiority in Paris over almost anyone. By contrast, very mediocre bakeries survive in New York routinely, and mostly because they are not expelled by the market as they would be in Paris. Hence, the gap in bread between the two cities.

Momofuku Ko Spreadsheet

I don't really know whether to be intensely irritated by Momofuku Ko or intrigued (for those not in the dubious "know", Ko is a 12 seat restaurant serving some sort of uncategorizable cuisine via an impenetrable internet reservation system that has the New York food press in a giant, giant, tizzy), but this spreadsheet comparing the major food critic's descriptions of each of Ko's standard courses is brilliant. (HT: Eater)

And yes, I am trying to get Momofuku reservations, more out of curiosity and a healthy respect for Chang's marketing genius than out of any overwhelming desire to eat shavings of a frozen foie gras torchon, or cereal infused panna cotta. Question: In five years, is Momofuku Ko the subject of slightly embarassed nostalgia? I say yes.

I am bad at faces

I was standing next to someone pretty darned famous this morning in an elevator, and literally had no idea, except that I noticed their face was exceptionally symmetrical. It's not that I hadn't heard of the person, or had never seen them on TV, or didn't roughly know what they looked like. My brain just has a terrible time comparing the particular face I'm presented with against its stores of names, and nothing clicked until the frantic chattering when he/she left the elevator.

I beat the same dead horse yet again

I hate to keep hammering away at the same topic, but Ezra Klein recently returned yet again to his theory that expensive meat would make us all healthier (for my previous forays, see here and here ). He continues to be super-duper wrong.

The problem I think, is that he has decided that food is somewhat like petrol. So, if the price of gas (meat) rises, then people will either live closer to their jobs (grains) or will use public transport (fish, fruits, vegetables). What he doesn't seem to understand is that in the food arena, one has the choice to fill one's car with ultra cheap sub premium (doritos) that makes your car go really fast (tasty!) for a short time before breaking down (fat). And if you really push on prices, people are going to start putting coal in their cars (vat grown meat).

UPDATE: What's the real answer to the problem, you might ask? I don't know, but my guess is continue to value growth, make people richer, and then hope that people pick good food as a main aspirational goal, like getting a big television. In the meantime, we need to keep producing food to feed people, while ameliorating, to the extent we can, the worst aspects of industrial production.

Saturday Night

We were both feeling a little protein deficient recently, so I decided to make some steak for dinner. Since we don't eat beef all that often, and steak even more rarely, I thought some good USDA Prime beef (as people repeat endlessly on TV shows, Prime is less than 2% of all beef graded by the USDA - the best beef most supermarkets stock is one grade lower, Choice) would be a tasty move.*
Now, I don't normally like America's Test Kitchen recipes. Their exact proportions, instructions, and hints strike me as just so much paint by the numbers. I like my food to seem like food rather than a chemistry experiment, and I'm willing to give up some exactitude to get there. In any case, it always baffles when they measure out salt or pepper into a recipe by the teaspoon. I understand the importance of measures in baking, and obviously, if you're trying to scale up a 4 person savory recipe to 300 for a military mess or some such, I understand that exact measures might be useful. But cooking for your family? How about you taste the food instead?

But anyway, watching the show last week, they did have an idea which made sense. I've always had trouble cooking steak so that the crust is crunchy and caramelized, and yet the inside is a good medium well. If you go with the high heat method, the outside chars nicely, but the inside is bloody, which I like but others do not. And if you turn down the heat, you get grey crust. Their idea to help this problem is to put the meat into the oven at 225 fahrenheit for 20 minutes. This brings up the internal temperature so that when your char is done, the meat is medium well too. I tried the technique, and as I think anyone would agree, the results were positive.

And yes, that's girlfriend's real camera, not my Iphone. It turns out to make a difference.




* Yes, yes. Prime beef is corn fattened, not grass. Grass is better. But USDA corn fed prime is a different food, and though not as healthy, has its own special flavor profile a lot of people like.

Another Simple Way with Goat Cheese

I've been on something of a goat cheese kick recently, and last night the urge struck again. This time, a full garlicky goat cheese wrapped in a horn of puff pastry with sauteed vine tomatoes. Mmm.

Brown busted

Non-Food!

Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister, has been given a big thumping in the local elections held yesterday. I don't care much, except to say that "I told you so". Writing three years ago, I noted, given the likelihood that Brown would succeed the then reviled Tony Blair, that laborites who thought that Brown was some sort of electoral panacea were likely to be disappointed. As I argued, not only was Brown unlikely to be the true labor leftist a certain type of activist was pining for, but he was probably a pretty inferior politican too:

The problem, of course, is that the moment Blair leaves, the tories will revive. The labour left's assumption, that there's something about tory policies that the country has foresaken forever, is flatly wrong - they've thought this before, and they got themselves Thatcher. Rather, the problem is the now reviled Mr. Blair - he's got the tories so totally flummoxed that they've resorted to the hoary chestnut of immigration, along with bizarre posters that say things like "Are you thinking what we're thinking?". With Blair sitting solidly on the precise center of British politics, I doubt very much that the Tories would ever win.

But Brown cannot equal Blair's achievement. If he does live up to the advertising, and goes left, then the tories will simply re-take the center. No one in Britain wants a return to the 70s, when what is now a vibrant economic power asked for help from the IMF. And if a man known as the Iron Chancellor does what seems more likely,and tries to remain where Blair has been successful, I think it very unlikely that he will be as good as Blair. Does anyone believe Gore had even a twentieth of the political skills of his master? If he did, he would have been president, and not Bill.

In the interim, Brown has become Prime Minister, got himself into a variety of preposterous muddles (including the latest, which involves pushing five million people currently paying a 10% tax rate into the 20% bracket) and has not assuaged any of the leftists' complaints. Whoops.

* Now, to go find all those examples where my predictions were really really wrong, to balance this out.

Baba

So, this is yet another example of when a better camera would have been helpful. Alas. The other night, I got a hankering for Baba au rhum, after seeing Lidia Bastianich's aged mother devour one happily on Lidia's Italy, a somewhat underrated program usually seen on public television. I didn't have rum, though, or limoncello (as Lidia recommends), so I just used some wonderful scotch whiskey I had cadging around. The recipe is basically a simplified, yeasty brioche, to my untrained eye - buttery, eggy, and most importantly, spongy, in order to soak in the spiked sugar syrup the breads are immersed into at the end. The babas themselves emerged perfectly out of the oven, rising above the ramekins I had put them in to give me the classic bulbed shape. I could feel the perfect texture inside. And they greedily slurped up vast amounts of syrup, growing almost once over again.

But questions abound - would it be better if they had slow risen, like I do with bread, overnight in the fridge? Should both syrup and baba be cool before baptising the babas, or just the syrup, or just the baba (I did hot syrup and cool baba, to good effect)? Should it taste of liquor or sugar?

Dissonance

A few days ago, I heard someone near my office building say to her friends, in an exasperated tone, "I don't understand how people can pour carbs into their body. It's so unhealthy."

Fine, I thought, as I walked off to Bella Napoli on 49th street* to pour carbs into my body. A little preachy, but her prerogative.

Coming back after having gobbled two slices of pizza, I found the same woman outside. Smoking. As in cigarettes.

* Bella Napoli is the most acceptable pizza I know of in the area between 8th Avenue and 6th Avenue, 55th to 45th streets, which is about reasonable walking range during a light to medium work day. The superior Naples 45 takeaway is too far. Sullivan Street Bakery is on 10th Avenue and 48th, within walking distance, but also not hot (it is served at room temperature), and in any case sometime one wants margherita, which SSB does not serve. Two Boots, which recently (and inexplicably) won a poll at Midtown lunch, is also slightly outside my radius, and also awful. The fairly good pizza trucks on Park Avenue are also slightly outside range. The 99 cent pizza is unacceptable, as is Amish Market, as are all the "Ray's" and "Ray's" derivatives.

Pizza nut

My former classmate, Amber, points to this extraordinary site, detailing one man's obsession with achieving the perfect home pizza. I had seen it previously linked on Stuart Buck's website, but I can't find my post about it, and the author's efforts are so startling that it's worth another look. And no, New York pizza isn't good because of the water, just like French bread isn't good because of the water.

UPDATE: I found my old post!

The Burger King Kobe Burger

Via Loccusolus, I see that Burger King is going to serve up an 85 pound ($170) Kobe beef hamburger. It's obviously a marketing ploy, like the various $1000 sushi rolls and $500 pizzas floating around, but what struck me was the price. 85 pounds? How does ground kobe with foie gras add up to that much? Even at Craftsteak, true Japanese Wagyu steak costs only $30 an ounce ($120). One has got to figure that Craftsteak has just the tiniest bit higher overhead than Burger King. Fine, so this is all nit-picking of a project designed to make a splash, but I'd still like it to make sense.

By the way, to be au courant with the current trend in New York, my back of the envelope calculation is that even if the Wagyu was a relatively lean 50% fat (some Wagyu is much more), the resulting quarter pounder would have 56 grams of fat, excluding the foie gras, sauce, bread, etc. How's that for healthy?

So, what think you now?

Ezra Klein has a post today being sad about the effect of the rising cost of food on people's diets (from a story in the New York Times). That's all well and good and all, but perhaps Ezra might reconsider his post about how great it would be if food was more expensive, from a month ago (and which I made fun of back then)? Or did he just mean it would be nice if food was more expensive and humane, and yet through some kind of magic, people would be unaffected?

Leftover Rosa del Rosa and Scrambled Eggs

I had about a glass of Rosa del Rosa leftover from Saturday night, and I was alone for Sunday lunch, so I decided to have a sort of light brunch. What better than scrambled eggs (in the French soft curdy style, rather than the chewy mess it often is over here). I tried Gordon Ramsay's technique (linked by E. Klein), but found it no better than my usual (in short, he starts both the butter and eggs cold, whereas I usually melt the butter before adding the eggs. Eh.) With a couple of smoked salmon trimmings from my local supermarket (the ends of large planks of smoked salmon are often sold for two or three dollars by the supermarket in little plastic tubs - they are a great value for scrambled eggs, pastas, smoked salmon sandwiches, creme fraiche pizzas, etc, etc) and some toast, I settled down in front of my computer for some writing.

Wine Note: Properieta Sperino, Rosa del Rosa

I'm no Professor Bainbridge when it comes to wine, but I enjoy buying and drinking the stuff, especially from the wonderful Moore Brothers. I was introduced to Moore Brothers when I was living in Delaware (one of them was sommelier at Philadelphia's well known Le Bec Fin) and was delighted when they opened their New York location. It is a pleasure to drink wine chosen by people who know what it is supposed to taste like. I have never had a bad bottle from them.

In any case, yesterday we had a terrific rose from Italy, Proprieta Sperino, Rosa del Rosa. The wine has a immensely powerful aroma, which my girlfriend thought was apple and I couldn't identify. Flopping around the internet, I found a tasting note by someone else that gave me a clue as to what I was smelling - which is to say, extremely pungent raspberries. In any case, I agree with the commentator at The Tasting Note. "This is a ****ing good rose."

(Dinner, incidentally, was chicken breast taken off the bone and sauteed skin side down on my gas griddle for fantastically crispy skin [fried chicken without the guilt, I said] with a simple red potato salad [boiled potatoes, spring onions, dijon vinaigrette but made by replacing half the red wine vinegar with lemon]).

Grom

I also walked over to Grom yesterday from my firm's offices for a third visit. The pistachio is as good and rich as I remember it, and the espresso flavor was intense, powerful - perfectly evocative of the kind of coffee one gets in a French or Italian cafe. Yes, Eater, Grom is worth $4.75.

Twilight Picnic

We had a delightful twilight picnic in Astoria Park last night, overlooking Manhattan. Dinner was good turkey sandwiches, rubbed generously with kalamata olive paste, and thick slabs of Greek pastry from the usually excellent Artopolis bakery. Also, one of the park's indigent inhabitants came and yelled at us about "the blood of science and god" for five minutes, but that didn't spoil the mood.

Torture

Warning - Non-food content!

Professor Sandy Levinson at Balkin has a post today concerning the moral gravity of torture compared to, say, carpet bombing. It resembles, in a way, a colloquy I had with Prof. Levinson when I was his student during his visit to HLS. Briefly, I tried to push him to provide a clear answer to why torture was worse than any of the other barbarities that accompany war. The only answer that has even remotely satisfied me is that torture involves the infliction of pain on someone entirely in your grasp. It is, in that sense, especially barbaric, an indicative manifestation of a basic incivility. But I do not see how dropping an atomic weapon on millions of civilians who do not know it is coming is any worse.

I suspect that Prof. Levinson's answer to the conundrum is rather different than mine, in that he would likely say that both the bombing (as well as a host of lesser civilian oriented attacks) and torture are equally indefensible, constitute war crimes, etc. During my talk with Prof. Levinson, and on my old blog, I've gone on the record saying that I am willing to defend our obliteration of Germany during WWII, as well as Hiroshima/Nagasaki, while I am not willing to permit torture (in which I include waterboarding). But my distinction is not based on morals - the man or woman who orders either, I think, bears an equal and possibly indelible, moral weight - but on practicality. Torture doesn't work, it can be used on our men and women, and it looks horrible in a conflict where we are fighting an ideological war as much as anything else. But is the distinction really one of gravity, as people seem to think? I'm not sure.

The Chart Explained

Pinkberry, the luxury frozen yogurt brand sweeping the nation, has recently been exposed as, well, not especially natural (as it had been advertised). I'm not surprised, because I tried it about a year ago and wasn't impressed,suggesting that I would have been equally happy with a McDonald's soft serve ice cream cone. Now that the Pinkberry ingredients have been revealed, probably courtesy of the law suit contesting their claim to be natural that was recently settled, we can see exactly how Pinkberry yogurt compares with its much cheaper, down market competitor. Below, you'll see a chart comparing all the ingredients of each dessert, drawn from their respective web pages.

My methodology is pretty simple. I found the ingredient lists of both frozen treats, and attempted to categorize each ingredient by way of google. For those ingredients that differ, I have provided a link to what I found. My conclusions are below, and I present them with the obvious caveat that since I'm not any kind of food scientist, I may well have something wrong. If so, tell me, but even if some additive is a emulsifier and not an acidifier, I think the point is basically made. At about four times the cost, Pinkberry has more ingredients, more additives, and more food coloring than Mcdonald's. Advantage Golden Arches.

1. As you can see, 10 of the ingredients (the Red) are basically the same. Yes, Pinkberry has yogurt and Mcdonald's has cream, but effectively, there is no difference or superiority here.

2. Both are full of additive emulsifiers (What I've coded as Green)

3. Pinkberry includes starch. That is to say, a pure filler.

4. Pinkberry includes three different kinds of acidifiers (Purple). I couldn't find any in Mcdonald's, but this may have something to do with the need for Pinkberry to be tart.

5. Pinkberry is colored with Yellow 5 Lake. That is to say, tartrazine, an often controversial coloring required to be reported on a label by the FDA because it causes reactions in some people. Pinkberry's color is as natural as Mountain Dew.

Mcdonald's Soft Serve	Pinkberry
Milk	Skim Milk
Sugar	Sucrose
Cream	Nonfat Dry Yogurt
Nonfat Milk Solids	Nonfat Dry Milk
mono- and diglycerides	mono- and diglycerides
guar gum	guar gum
dextrose	dextrose
sodium citrate	sodium citrate
artificial vanilla	natural and artificial flavors
Corn Syrup Solids	Fructose (a corn syrup extract) maltodextrin (corn syrup based thickener)
sodium phosphate (emsulsifier)	lactoglycerides (emulsifier)
carrageenan (emsulsifier)	propylene glycol esters (stabilizer, emulsifier)
disodium phosphate (emulsifier)	soy lecithin (emulsifier, stabilizer)
cellulose gum (stabilizer)	sodium acid pyrophosphate
Vitamin A Palmitate (fortifier)	Starch (filler
	Tocopherol (Vitamin E, preservative)
	Yellow 5 Lake (tartrazine)
	Citric Acid
	magnesium oxide
	calcium fumarate

Prune

I took the opportunity of a fairly early night to dine at Prune last night. For those who don't know, Prune's Gabrielle Hamilton is, by all accounts, the quintessential chef's chef. She runs the restaurant herself, chefs eat there, and it is beloved of the New York food cognisenti (see, for example, the Amateur Gourmet, who had a few of the things I had when he visited) . It also has about 24 seats. Consequently, it is effectively impossible to get into on the weekend, so we weaseled in at 9 pm last night.

Hamilton's signature is the utter simplicity of her cooking. It is almost off-putting, to tell you the truth. A dainty slab of monkfish liver (which I have never had before, and had no idea that monkfish had a liver of that size) dressed in nothing but balsamic. Enormous, langoustine sized shrimps, grilled whole, and served in nothing but an anchovy butter. Or, my girlfriend's grilled quails with raisins and escarole, which brought to mind a Jewish pasta I once learned involving schmalz, pine nuts, and raisins. As for dessert, at my first bite of the ricotta ice cream with butterscotch croutons, I thought, "Eh". At my fifth, my spoon started scrunching imperceptibly towards my girlfriend's side of the scoop. And at the end, I was scraping the plate to get the last bit of butterscotch. A truly understated, delicious, ending.

Two questions: 1) Why is it called Prune? (Aha! It was Hamilton's childhood nickname!) 2) Why, why is it so small? (Presumably to allow the chef to keep total control (she was there, after all), but wow. How do you make money in such tight confines?).

World's Best Restaurant

I see via a couple of sources that the "world's best restaurants" list released for this year. It's sort of an inane list, of course, because the idea of saying that El Bulli is better than The Fat Duck is sort of a meaningless construct. Everything on the list is very good. There are other very good restaurants. Enough said.

What interests me about this is the extent to which food today really is a transnational enteprise, though. Gordon Ramsay is as famous here as he is in Europe. Everyone knows about El Bulli, etc, etc. We are apparently at a point in the development of a world economy (and, really, a world elite, given what these places charge) that it is entirely plausible for someone to casually note that they prefer Troisgros to Le Bernardin, but Mugartiz is better than both. My actual sense is that this convergence has helped the United States very much, and has hurt France, both in reputation and quality (as French chefs feel compelled to ape America).

Where should we go? I know! The British Library!

It's not food related, but I love the idea that one of the great crises in British academia is that hordes of noisy undergraduates are crowding academics out of the British Library. I mean, really? There are so many undergraduates clamoring to study in the British library that there aren't any seats? This was not my experience of British undergraduate study, let me tell you. And if it were true, isn't it a good thing that undergraduates are crowding research libraries?

Carbonara

I'm surprised to see that Michael Ruhlman's carbonara has cream in it. To me, as some people mention in the comments, that's an unnecessary diversion towards alfredo. Still, he does add the egg raw at the last minute, which I think makes things twice as tasty.

Le Bernardin VIP

I am trying to figure out how to become a Le Bernardin VIP so that I too can get baby eels.  Unfortunately, I suspect it involves eating at one of New York's most expensive restaurants a couple of times a week for a long time, so I'll just content myself with looking from afar.  They do look like pastas, though! 

Malaysian curry

We're off to a wedding in another state today, which will be a lot of fun.  Yesterday, though, I tried to imitate my favorite dish at our local, everyday Thai restaurant, the inimitable Bangkok Tasty.   I used a simple combination of red curry paste, sauteed briefly in oil, and then combined with fish sauce, lime, green beans, coriander, coconut milk, bean sprouts, sugar, and firm tofu.  It was, indeed, tasty, but next time I would greatly reduce the sugar and up the curry paste, and add cauliflower.  Nonetheless, once you get through chopping the ingredients, a wonderfully quick dinner for a night you really need to spend packing, but did not.

El Bulli taking the piss?

I followed Tyler Cowen's link to a well blogged visit to El Bulli, probably the most famous restaurant in the world today.   I'm sure the food is actually good - too many people say so to be wrong.  But looking at the pictures, I just can't get away from the feeling that they're taking the piss, just a little bit.   On the other hand, the restaurant does look beautiful. 

Pizza hut pasta

I don't really know how to explain Pizza Hut's new pastas, which I learned about via Instapundit via the Speculist. I don't understand the business plan (why would I buy frozen pasta from Pizza Hut rather than, say, Stoffer's?), I don't understand the market, and I don't understand why I would want to eat a beef pasta listing so many foul ingredients as this one.

Un-force fed foie gras

Michael Ruhlman writes about a new foie gras from Spain that isn't force fed, as is traditional foie gras, but relies on the goose's natural inclination to gorge itself. I'm skeptical, not only because Gordon Ramsay appears to have rejected it as inferior (and though Ramsay's television persona is something of a joke, he is a very serious, very great chef), but because I had a version of what I believe to be a humanely raised foie gras at the wonderful L'eau a la bouche outside Montreal last year. While it was delicious, and to me tasted better objectively than real foie gras, it wasn't foie gras. It was very fatty, unctuous, liver, and there's a big difference between the two.

Word of the Day

"Pellucid", meaning transparently clear, from Justice Stevens' otherwise puzzling opinion in today's Baze v. Reese, upholding Kentucky's method of execution.

UPDATE: As in, it is pellucidly clear that most TV chefs have research staffs find them other people's recipes for use in their shows.

"My" special risotto, says she

The interesting part about the Cindy McCain mini-recipe kerfuffle (in which it was discovered that recipes listed as the McCain's personal home cooking were actually drawn verbatim from Food Network) is that every single current Food Network TV chef does much the same thing, and I've long found it highly obnoxious. "Oomph", groans Giada, as she decorously slithers her "favorite" lasagne into her mouth, or such and such dish like "her mother used to make". The number of Rachel Ray's dishes that she claims she "usually" makes in X or Y fashion are legion. And I won't even get into the pastiche clown, Guy Fieri.

In reality, no one has a ready repertoire of favorite dishes which they've served multiple times in the past vast enough to cover 3 dishes a day for even 30 episodes a year. My own grandmother, for example, a highly talented cook who fed a family all three meals every single day for 40 years, can count perhaps 10 dishes that would qualify as "favorites", or specialties, or about which she can claim with any plausibility "I usually serve it this or that way". She knows of, and can probably execute, any number of other dishes, but those are always in the context of having learned them from some woman in the past, or once having been served it at dinner. In the same way, listen carefully to Batali or Pepin on TV. Very rarely does either use the Food TV code. Rather, they learned the dish in Amalfi, or know puff pastry to be made in this way, or once ate it and remember the flavor vividly. There is none of the forced, fake, intimacy of Rachel Ray's apparently bachannalian home feasts, at which we are to suppose she serves 14 dishes a night to an army of hungry omnivores. Of course, professional chefs have a much larger mental library to work from than the rest of us. But that is obviously not what they're invoking on TV.

None of this is to say that there's no value in Food Network, or that I hate the hosts. There is, and I don't. But it is rich of someone to complain on Rachel Ray's behalf that Cindy McCain['s intern] stole her recipes as her own.

A quick weekday dinner salad

For most of 2007, I spent every day and much of every night in the office. The economy was piping hot, and legal practice for a corporate lawyer in New York was an unending stream of deals and transactions. In those circumstances, even the quickest home meals were impossible. The best I could do was order hummous, or taboule, or the like, from some of the middle eastern restaurants here in New York, and lose myself for a moment or two in nostalgia for home.

But the economy has slowed down, and my life is much better. I don't mean to downplay the wretched effects of economic stress on many people, but I have enjoyed very much coming home before midnight, the opportunity to see my girlfriend for more than snatched meals outside my office, the chance to breath some fresh, non-air conditioned air. And, of course, to cook during the week.

Weekday dinners need not be complicated, or time consuming. The last thing many people want to do after coming come from work is to wait for a stew to thicken. With spring finally here, furthermore, the vegetables are improving every day. With that in mind, dinner last night was this grilled goat cheese (from Vermont's Coach farms), atop a salad of tangy, spicy, dandelion leaves and thinly sliced apple, just to soften the sometimes astringent dandelions the tiniest bit. No, it's not fancy, but it'll do.

PS - I often get into arguments with other people who have long running issues with weight over whether one can plausibly eat, say, a 4 oz. chunk of goat's cheese healthily. All I have to say is that a 4 oz. goat's cheese like the above has about 250 calories, has great "mouth feel" (to use one of the worst food industry phrases) and "umami" up the wazoo. I'll take that over a frozen diet dinner any day of the week.

A worthy pro-bono project

I had never before heard of the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, but now that I have, I'm enthused. Among other things, they're engaged in defending small farmers from the ravages of New York and California's state agricultural regulators, who are (as are all American agricultural regulators) evangelical about rubbing out raw milk. Especially interesting is the saga of Meadowsweet Farms, which apparently distributes raw milk and other dairy products through an LLC into which someone wishing to enjoy good food contributes capital. The profits produced by the cows fed by the capital contributions happen to be sweet dairy goodness. Unfortunately, Meadowsweet is under withering attack from the government, which is attempting to prove that it is illegally "selling" raw milk. A fascinating situation, and a worthy pro-bono project for any (ahem) lawyer.

Commodity Prices force school lunch cuts

The Washington Post reports the disturbing news that rising commodity prices are causing bad changes in school lunch programs. The really disturbing part of all this are the choices the schools are making to react. One school district has replaced "healthier options" (presumably milk) with Yoo-hoo. Another school has removed tomato slices (inappropriate given the season anyway) and replaced them with celery. And yet another came up with limiting fruit to twice a week.

I realize that the budgets are stretched. But it seems obvious to me at least that part of this has just got to be incompetence. Not because they're out of money, but because the apparent solutions have such deleterious effects that they're clearly worse than the disease.

Melton Mowbray gets PGI status

A very old interest of mine, the Melton Mowbray pork pie, has finally won European PGI protection. The real story here, as I first discussed about four years ago, is that the proposed geographical indication essentially shut one of two main competitors out of the market. It was a business ploy rather than some sort of artisanal impulse towards tradition. With the competitor now apparently safely situated in the protected area, all is apparently well.

Buyer Uncertainty

Via Larry Ribstein, I see this paper on "Buyer Uncertainty and Two-Part Pricing: Theory with Evidence from Outsourcing and New York Restaurants".

I have not throughly studied the economic theory as yet, but there is definitely something wrong with the empirics here, apparently because the authors didn't think enough about how people order in restaurants.

The idea is this: the researchers noticed that appetizers, desserts, and soups cost more (6-20% more) in comparison to main dishes at restaurants categorized as "romantic" in Zagat's guides than at restaurants categorized as "business dining". From this fact, the researchers extract the theory that restaurants are responding to a sort of uncertainty. Because couples on a "first date" don't know whether they are going to like each other, the authors argue, first date restaurants price "ancillary courses" more aggresively than the obligatory main course, because by the time the couple decides to order an ancillary, they'll have decided they like each other or not, and will thus be willing to pay a premium.

I can't even count the number of things wrong with these empirics when you look at them through the lens of New York restaurants.

1. The ancillary courses used as examples are totally disimiliar - one orders soups and appetizers before or at the same time as the main course, and only dessert afterward. The fact that the empirical results are the same across all three strikes me as fishy. I suppose one might argue that by the time the couples gets to the restaurant they know whether they like each other or not, but in New York you often meet your date at the table.

2. Business meals are often also highly uncertain affairs. You might be making a pitch for a client, or meeting an adversary for some hard words. If it goes badly, shazam! Just a main dish.

3. There are deep structural differences between business dining and dates. One of the most obvious is that business is typically done at lunch, and dating at night. And it is almost certainly much more common to have just a dish at lunch than at dinner, so restaurants might respond to that by attempting to extract more value from the main dish, and then discount the ancillaries to lure lunchers into buying additional courses.

A cool note on Pate au choux

Listening to Colameco's food talk show on the radio this morning, his guest (the pastry chef at Gotham Bar & Grill) mentions that a great way to know whether a choux pastry has been beaten sufficiently (a choux pastry is made by boiling water or milk, adding butter, then flour, then cooking the newly formed ball until it dries over the heat, and then beating yolks into the mixture) is that it falls off, rather than sticks to, the Kitchen-Aid paddle or whisk.

Thoughts for the Day

1. The increase in the number and sophistication of food blogs since I was last writing actively in 2005 is staggering.

1a. I have no value add in the world of (a) describe recipe (b) take picture of recipe. I'll still do that, because I enjoy it, but there are people who are better at both elements than I am.

1b. My value add in this market (to the extent I have one) is in depth of knowledge, and lively but formal, writing. Target is Steingarten rather than, say, Clotilde. Which is to say, in the things I used to write on the old Crescat Sententia. Whether that effort is popular or not, I don't know/care.

2. Aran has made a beautiful Japanese inflected opera. If I had to make a criticism (and I would probably be better off not), I would say the layers of cake are thicker, and the layers of cream thinner, than I would like. But it is beautiful nonetheless.

Colameco has a radio show?

One of the least appreciated food personalities in New York, Mike Colameco, apparently has a radio show! It's wonderful, and it's archived.

Queso Fresco

To jump onto an old soapbox of mine, Belle of John & Belle draws our attention to the success of a small cheese maker in Mexico with microfinance. I don't really have much of an opinion about the main issue of "for-profit" lenders getting into the microfinance business, but I do want to note that our own FDA thinks that Alejandra Abúndez's cheeses (among others) are unsafe to eat (see the bottom of the handout). Forget whether she'll survive paying 90% interest - at least Mexico lets her try.

Weekend Meal

Possibly my favorite way with fish (other, of course, than the fryer, but I'm not supposed to admit that, I think) is to cook it in pappillote - that is to say, in a parchment paper envelope. The fish steams perfectly, seemingly without effort, a ready made sauce is made from the lemon and olive oil one uses to dress the fish and vegetables, and clean-up is almost instantaneous. The actual mix of fish, veg, and accompaniments are entirely up to you and what's available at the fishmonger, of course, but in this case I used some nice grouper, small sweet peppers, bok choi, and dandelion leaves. Some potatoes cut into thick coins and then baked for an hour for a golden, dark, crust were the perfect side dish.

Wedding Cake

In the comments below there is a brief discussion of wedding cake. In fact, I was supposed to think about the issue, and come up with cakes other than the traditional tiered cake, and other than my initial thoughts of Opera and Sachertorte.

I've thought about it, and am sad to report that I have no new ideas.

I guess the initial point is that I think that traditional wedding cakes are just awful, a pointless combination of airy fluff and American style buttercream. I have never eaten such a cake other than because I had to. I realize that you can't stack too many other kinds of cakes to make the spectacular displays brides expect, but I have to confess that every time I've seen some bride to-be gushing about the cake on one of those wedding shows my sister makes me watch when we're together, I really don't understand what they're talking about. Yes, it's a chocolate/yellow butter cake with [Put in your UNIQUE cream here]. Like a Duncan Hines. Yes, even the one from Soutine's. Woot.

So, what to do? You want something festive and different. So out go the brownies, the cookies (except as additions, where they are very nice to have) pies, quickbreads, and tarts. I'm not sure which of the canonical French cakes, traditionally served individually, one can have, except that I could imagine a very large Paris-Brest working. I also played with the thought of a dense, raisin-rich, carrot cake, which I think would be very nice, though I suppose some people might well complain. But in the end, if it was me, and if I was stuck in New York, I think I would call Payard and talk them into making a very large Opera.


UPDATE: Ah. You don't have to talk them into doing anything. They offer Opera for up to 100 people.

The Modern World

In honor of the various articles about annoying iphone users

My girlfriend and I were supposed to meet some friends at Luca Lounge on Friday night, putatively at 13th Street and B Avenue here in Manhattan. Stupidly, I didn't call to make sure they were open. It wouldn't have mattered, because they were. Just, no longer at 13th Street and B Avenue, but elsewhere entirely.

By the time we found out, I was already at Union Square, a shortish walk to Luca Lounge, and our guests were on their way. So as I walked along 14th Street towards Avenue B in the desperate knowledge that we might end up at the local taco place, I pulled out my iphone and logged onto chowhound. A search for "Avenue B" turned up Back Forty, one of the leading "back to the farm" restaurants in New York. Google maps told me it was less than half a mile away from where Luca Lounge used to be, so I called my girlfriend, who was still on the train in Astoria, to redirect her, had her check in with her friends, called the restaurant from the imbedded link in the post discussing Back Forty at chowhound to discover that they don't accept reservations, and then opened the menu to figure out what to get. I did all of this before I got to Avenue A. I got to the restaurant, realized I had to wait because everyone else was late, watched a couple of politics related youtubes, and then had dinner. I took a picture of the place with the phone's camera, and then spent the trip home drafting a blog post about the dinner I just had.

Is all this a good thing? I have no idea. But there's no doubt that even five years ago, we would have been left with our guests standing like idiots in front of the closed restaurant, with no idea where to eat, our night would have been ruined, and everyone would have felt awful. Instead, we had fun. At least this time, technology was a net positive.

Parts of me that I don't like much

I got into the elevator here at work yesterday, and pressed the button to head down to the lobby for lunch. Two girls jumped in just as the door was closing and pushed the button for our top floor. Whoops! They were headed the wrong way. I was just about to tell them about their mistake when I heard:

"I just can't eat pigs, you know? I don't mind eating cows, but pigs, you know, are smart and stuff".

And I shut my mouth.

Bread and Chocolate

In addition to the pizza lunch below, over the weekend I tried my hand at Michael Laiskonis's "Chocolate Olive Oil". This was my first foray into even the fringes of so-called "molecular cuisine". I am firmly ensconsed in the homey side of the world, and what Wylie Dufresne is doing at WD-50 has little superficial appeal to me.

At the threshold, I've decided that I need to not do food photography with my iphone. It's a wonderful tool, but it really sells my food a little short, compared to all the other pictures floating around on the internet. But moving on to the chocolate olive oil, the finished product was delicious, but I think I made two mistakes.

1. There were small pockets of gummy something in the middle of the individual chocolate packages. I believe they must have been undisolved agar agar, but I'd like to know for sure.

2. I omitted the glucose syrup, which I think is responsible for the relatively matte finish.

Also note, of course, that I hadn't made bread, so I used a crostini instead, and I think that fleur de sel would be better on the chocolate than the sea salt I used. Nonetheless, it was a delightful experiment.

Saturday Lunch, wishing for July

Lunch yesterday was a sort of desperate yearning for July - tomatoes, cold italian style dishes, pizza. Really none of which was at its prime right now. But my pizza is good, the bean dip tasty, and the company, as always, magnificent. Now, when exactly am I going to be able to build a wood fired stove outside, so my pizza hits the next, splinteringly hot, level? Alas for Astoria.

Valomilk! Valomilk! Valomilk!

I've been looking for Sifer's Valomilks (a famous but regional candy) ever since I read Candy Freak two years ago. Today, finally, victory! While I was looking for Agar Agar at Wholefoods Columbus Circle, I ran into a whole display of Valomilks, piled six foot high. I set aside my plans to buy sea salt, grabbed four packages, and ran at a half waddle, half sprint back to my office to crunch into the dribbly, marshmallowy deliciousness. In the first picture, you can see the characteristic leakage of marshmallow filling from the hand filled valomilks, which never achieve the perfect, antiseptic seal of a Reese's peanut butter cup. And in the second, well, you can see why they say, When it runs down your chin, you know it’s a VALOMILK.” .

Ah, Pectin

So, I realize I'm being a smart-ass, but something tickled me about the quote below from an article today in the Wall Street Journal about famed baseball manager Joe Torre:


"There's something in jelly that makes it jelly", says Mr. James, senior baseball operations adviser with the Boston Red Sox. "Without that, it's runny grape juice with a lot of sugar in it".

Umm, well, there is something in jelly, he's right. Joe Torre as the pectin in the Dodgers jelly?

Petits Fours

It turns out that petits fours are extremely difficult to make, at least when you're a) incompetent and b) tired. Or, so I discovered when I made them as part of my fancy-pants valentine's day meal. Also, it is extremely difficult to pipe straight lines of chocolate icing onto a napoleon when your piping bag has ripped, and you're forced to use paper cones instead. Just for reference, since it's not obvious what I made, these are two kinds of truffles (Valrhona chocolate, covered in cocoa and in roasted almonds), and mini-napoleons, the making of which counts as one of the grand debacles of my cooking career to date.




To make up for these, I present some sweets I had on my last visit to Paris, a few weeks ago.

Olive Oil Madeleines

Cannelle & Vanille has made beautiful olive oil madeleines, which she proposes to give away. I don't have much more to say, other than to encourage any readers to compete for them.

Croissants made by Robots

The New York Times reports a croissant made by robots in New York, which supposedly helps make the croissants more tender. Color me unimpressed, but I'll go try them.

Amuses Bouches - Branzino Fumet, chanterelle, and Shrimp

I recently made this amuses bouches for my girlfriend on Valentine's Day. I'm working on a much longer post about the meal, but the idea was to attempt super fancy restaurant food as an experiment. This dish was based on a fumet made of branzino bones, flavored with chanterelle mushrooms (from Oregon) and garnished with a steamed jumbo shrimp.

Should you give your kids alcohol?

Eric Asimov, the New York Times wine columnist, asks whether parents should give their children alcohol at an early age to stave off potential abuse later on.

I don't have much to add to this, other than to say that wine, beer, etc, should obviously be introduced as early as possible just as a matter of common sense, because they're not big deals, and are part (for many people) of civilized life. Why we insist on fetishizing the whole issue is quite beyond me.

UPDATE: Read Michael Ruhlman's post on this, as he struggles with what to do with his 12 year old daughter.

How far would you go

My comment on going out of one's way for a special meal or food at Bitten had been posted as one of the "Comments of the Moment", so I'll just link here.


Being a city person, the question for me is “how far am I willing to walk?” for a particular food. I think there’s a certain charm in allowing oneself to eat anything, no matter how off diet, so long as one walks to get it. So far, my record is 3 miles for a particularly wonderful eclair made in the old way in Paris, but I’m always looking for excuses to beat that effort.

Bread with Chocolate

Michael Laiskonis, pastry chef at the wonderful Le Bernardin (where my girlfriend and I recently had a terrific meal, asks why we Americans don't have a native born combination of bread (and bread defined narrowly, as yeast, and flour and water, rather than a muffin or quickbread) and chocolate. France, he says, has the pain au chocolat, but what is our equivalent?

I would have thought that the obvious answer was the chocolate glazed donut. It is, of course, a bread. A somewhat sweet bread, though made properly no more sweet than a croissant. And, of course, it includes chocolate, and, as far as I know, is basically indigenous in this form to the United States. I realize it is fried, and the focus is on fat, in some sense, rather than bread, but on the other hand, I can think of nothing more primal than fried dough and chocolate.

UPDATE: Incidentally, Michael's recipe for chocolate ganache thickened with agar agar and served with bread looks astonishing. I will try it (and probably fail!).

The ivory tower

Ezra Klein says that meat ought to be more expensive. By which he means, presumably, that the country should move toward more humane husbandry. When pushed on the obvious problem (well, what are people who don't have a ton of money supposed to eat?), his answer is that they ought to eat more vegetables.

Obviously, everyone should eat more vegetables. But for one thing, the post entirely ignores the fact that the wide availability of (admittedly) inferior meat is one of the great advances of the last century. Meat used to all be organic, and free range, and humane, and so on. And it was available to a sliver of mankind, who were physically bigger, stronger, and better developed than the rest. Providing meat to the masses was actually a terrific equalizing accomplishment, and it is surprising that a self-described "progressive" would miss this point in an effort to be au courant with currently trendy food localism.

But let's say Klein and people who agree succeed, and somehow, humane husbandry is imposed across the board, and meat prices soar. Klein says that "other things would be cheaper". How does he know this? And how does he know that the newly deprived will make the choices he'd like them to make about food? While Klein may know that tofu is cheaper than chicken (depends on the tofu, and on the chicken, actually, as with most things, and in any case, is it really obvious that cheap genetically modified, pesticidey, tofu is better than cheap chicken?), chips are cheaper than both. As George Orwell observed in his wonderful "Road to Wigan Pier",

"Would it not be better if they [the poor] spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and whole-meal bread . . . ? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. . . .When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. You want something a little bit tasty. . . . White bread and margarine and sugared tea don't nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread and dripping and cold water."

And in any case, while humane beef is all well and good, that movement is all part and parcel with establishing proper agriculture. For someone posturing from Klein's position, all food is too cheap. So under a proper food regime, stripped of subsidies, not only would the grains the poor people are supposed to eat be more expensive (assuming they even knew how to cook them in a tasty way, which I understand from friends who work with food charities in poorer areas is actually a ludicrous supposition) but everything else would too. Milk, cheese, butter, all manner of leaves (Would Klein be cooking "asian asparagus" in February in DC if people ate properly? Umm, no) vegetables, cooking oil.

Now, it might be that the simpler world of less, expensive, food is a better one. We might well be healthier from a fat perspective. Our animals would be happier, and we'd all ingest less pesticides. But it is a much different world than the one we inhabit today, and I suspect it is one people like Klein would not like very much at all.

Morning Flight Scones

I am flying to Washington D.C. in about two hours, and decided to make some scones for the morning's fun. For someone who is so good at bread, I have a surprising amount of trouble with pie crust and its brothers, scones and biscuits. Where is the lift of other scones here? On the other hand, these taste and feel like scones as I've had them in England, so maybe it's everyone else who is screwing them up. I can't shake the feeling, though, that they should have risen higher and more evenly.

Still delicious. The recipe is from the King Arthur book.

Real Fast Food

Here is my comment over at Bittman's place recommending Nigel Slater's "Real Fast Food" (one of the great, underappreciated cookbooks of the last twenty years, in my view):

I think of Nigel Slater’s “Real Fast Food” as a sort of a minimalist for the British taste. Mustardy sardines and kippers on toast, rarebit, potatoes baked and scooped out, and then stuffed again with cream and cheese, pages of sauces for simple, poached, salmon. It’s the food that helped me learn to cook, that fed me in college, and that I turned to as a graduate student. “Real Fast Food” is what I would take with me into a nuclear shelter, faced with cooking tuna forever, but my copy is also dog eared and circled and wrinkled with stray splashes of soy here in the real world too. Slater’s other books are good, but other people take nice pictures too. “Real Fast Food” is a lifesaver.

Starbucks Sandwiches

I said more than a year ago now that "Starbucks' effort to corner some of the breakfast market [through warmed breakfast sandwiches] will fail utterly".

I realize I'm bragging, but it has proceeded to fail utterly.

Schultz already has said he's killing the ballyhooed breakfast sandwiches and says he hasn't ruled out dropping more foods.

UPDATE: I now realize there is a "Save the Starbucks Breakfast Sandwich" website. I should say, amid all this gloating, that they were actually very good sandwiches. Just completely inconsistent with the chain, with no connection to the market, etc, etc.

UPDATE 2: And here is the discussion I had with PG on the comments at Crescat Sententia. Pretty good stuff, I think. We should be hired.

-------
I had the impression that the pastries at Starbucks were reasonably popular, actually -- at least I've had them several times, whereas I think I've ventured upon a sandwich once and never again. Pastries go with a Starbucks drink, or can be an alternative when you're meeting a coffee addict there and feeding your own sugar jones. I'm not sure whether meatier breakfast food goes with Starbucks coffee; eggs and bacon seem vaguely downmarket. I wouldn't bother making coffee at home, and pastries really are a lot of trouble, but I can fry eggs and bacon with little effort.

Posted by PG at January 11, 2007 04:31 AM
PG - I think the pastries are indeed reasonably popular, but not at breakfast, perhaps. Or not popular enough. As a matter of taste, I think they vary wildly from decent to bad.

As to the second point, I agree with you, but clearly there is a market out there for egg frying with coffee. i.e, Mcdonald's. Where I think Starbucks is going wrong is that they're fiddling with the "do one clean, simple , high margin thing well" model. (let's leave for another day the debate over whether they do that thing well or not). Now they have 5,000 super speed cooking machines eating into their margins. I think that way live starbucks frozen pizzas, and trouble.

Posted by Raffi at January 11, 2007 08:32 AM
Yes, I think the egg/bacon/cheese frying with coffee market is essentially a low margin one, and it doesn't sound like McD's is raising the price of coffee even as it raises the level of quality. So people who are shopping based on price will continue to go to McD's for breakfast. Starbucks essentially is just trying to get the customers it already has for coffee to buy more. The main problem I see is trying to train staff to do more than one thing well. My friends who like coffee claim that at Dunkin Donuts is actually very good, but that it's more trouble than Starbucks because DD doesn't train its staff to focus on coffee, but on serving up donuts.

Posted by PG at January 12, 2007 01:48 AM

Sticky Toffee Pudding

Just a (honest) question about Mark Bittman's "Sticky Toffee Pudding". Aren't most puddings, in the British sense, a) steamed and b) made with suet? I realize that the answer may be that people don't eat suet anymore, and steaming is a waste of time, but I'm just wondering whether we aren't losing something. Or, perhaps, sticky toffee pudding is just named that, and was always baked like a cake.

Yogurt Cake

Meg of Too Many Chefs makes a chocolatey yogurt cake, based on a yogurt cake which both she and I got from Clotilde of Chocolate & Zucchini. It is a delicate, simple cake, and to the overstimulated American palate is really almost a quickbread. But it is delicious nonetheless.

And the best part is that it is especially easy, and fast - just the thing to whip up for colleagues on Friday afternoon. Contrary to Clotilde, I like it especially after a day in foil, when it gets less crusty (which I normally crave), and the moisture from the yogurt distributes, leaving what I would almost describe as the texture of the syrup soaked semolina desserts that so characterize lebanese (and Greek, and Turkish, and Syrian) cooking. Delightful.

Pet Peeves

Frank Bruni asks about our restaurant pet peeves. I agree with many of those already mentioned, and especially with waiters who take away one person's food without waiting for everyone at the table to finish. When I'm paying so much money, I don't expect to be treated as if I'm in a cafeteria.

Having said that, why do waiters ever ask if everything is ok? What exactly, is this supposed to accomplish? If the food is good, then I'd like to be left alone to enjoy it. If the food is bad, but not bad enough to send back, I'll tell everyone I can about the bad food. but there's nothing you can do. And, of course, if the food is so bad I need to send it back, you'll know. So what does asking me accomplish? In reality, the waiter's question is more of an ultimatum than anything else - speak now, or forever hold your peace. I disagree.