Dada v. Mukasey (No Food!)

* Non-Food content *

I'm writing to explore an ambiguity in the Supreme Court's very recent opinion, Dada v. Mukasey (June 16, 2008). It may be that I have misunderstood what is a complex statutory framework. But if I have, I can at least take some comfort in the fact that I don't think the Court has adequately explained itself. I have two specific questions, which I explore a bit below: (a) does the rule pronounced in Dada apply to aliens facing inadmissibility proceedings, or only to aliens, like Dada, subject to removal on deportation grounds and (b) If the rule does apply equally to both cases, why?

Just to recap, at the center of Dada is a fairly simple statutory problem. 8 USC Section 1229c allows aliens, subject to certain restrictions, to accept "voluntary departure" rather than removal under 8 USC 1229a. Choosing voluntary departure has many positive benefits for the alien - as the Supreme Court observes, the alien avoids extended detention pending completion of travel arrangement, is allowed to choose when to depart, and can select the country of destination (slip opinion, p. 8). In addition, the alien avoids certain statutory consequences of removal, such as not being allowed back into the country. In exchange, the alien has to leave the country within 60 (or 120, in some cases) days.

Alternatively, Congress has allowed aliens the right to make a motion to reopen removal proceedings after a negative result. 8 USC Section 1229a(c)(7). The problem that Dada, the alien in this case, ran into is that if one makes a motion to reopen, the Board of Immigration Appeals may not reach a decision on your motion until the 60 or 120 day period for voluntary departure has passed. Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to voluntarily depart are high. For the next ten years, an alien is ineligible for a wide range of immigration benefits. Thus, the alien is stuck between leaving the country, and letting his motion to reopen lapse, and staying, and suffering the consequences of violating an agreement to voluntarily depart. As the Supreme Court puts it, dramatically, the alien is "between Scylla and Charybdis". In view of that mythological bind, the Court majority decided to reinterpret the statute to allow the alien to withdraw his agreement to depart while staying and pursuing his motion to reopen, thus avoiding the consequences of violating 8 USC 1229(c).

The ambiguity I'm interested in arises from a certain looseness in how the Court used what I believe to be immigration terms of art. As I understand it, Section 1229(a), the removal statute, is actually a hybrid of two, distinct, concepts. First, 1229(a) handles what used to be deportation matters. In other words, matters concerning an alien who was once legally in the United States, but is now illegal. But 1229(a) also handles removals for something called inadmissability - in other words, proceedings to remove aliens from the United States who never should have been here.

The Court, however, uses the concepts of inadmissibility and deportation interchangeably. While Dada was fighting a deportation order, for example, the Court cites to consequences he would suffer if he were finally judged inadmissible ("An alien who has been ordered removed under . . . Section 1229(a) of this title (i.e, removal) and who again seeks admission within 5 years of the date of such removal is inadmissible", slip opinion 9, citing 8 USC 1182, the inadmissibility provisions). Similarly, the Court cites INS v. St. Cyr, 538 U.S. 289, 320 (2001) for the proposition that ambiguities in deportation statutes should be construed in favor of the alien, without noting that St. Cyr says nothing about inadmissability, and relatedly observes of Dada that "we must be reluctant to assume that the voluntary departure statute was designed to remove this important safeguard (a motion to reopen) for the distinct class of deportable aliens most favored by the same law." It seems to me that the most natural way to read the opinion is to assume that the Court meant for its rule of lenity to apply to both deportable and inadmissible aliens. Am I wrong?

But unless I've dramatically missed the mark, there are significant differences between deportable and inadmissible aliens, or at least there ought to be. Most fundamentally, deportation has, I think, long been understood to have been a much graver consequence than inadmissibility, even if the real world consequences both consist of removing an alien from the country. The deportee is being expelled from a place they were legally, at one point. In that context, it makes sense that some lenity be applied, because they may have been operating on settled expectations of being residents. Following the trail of St. Cyr's interpretive rule back in time, the centrality of deportation to the idea that removal statutes ought to be interpreted with some consideration for the individual becomes clearer. In Delgadillo v. Carmichael, 332 US 388 (1947), for example, the Court observed that "[d]eportation can be the equivalent of banishment or exile. The stakes are indeed high and momentous for the alien who has acquired his residence here". Or, as the Court noted equally in Fong Haw Taw v. Phelan, 333 U.S. 6 (1948), "[deportation] is the forfeiture for misconduct of a residence in this country".

An inadmissible alien who has the right to choose voluntary departure, however, is in a different position. Even with long tenure living here, I don't see how they can really be said to have "acquired a residence", nor can they plausibly said to have been exiled or banished when removed. Indeed, DHS itself notes that the vast majority of those choosing voluntary departure are Mexicans turned back by the Border Patrol. It doesn't seem obvious as a matter of statutory interpretation that those aliens should be treated in the same way as someone, like Dada, who had once entered legally. Just as important, different rules may be necessary to take into account the different consequences of being removed under an order of deportation as opposed to removal for inadmissability. Even the Department of Justice rule proposal on which the Court relies, for example, asks for input on whether a rule might be crafted allowing an alien to accept a voluntary departure, actually physically leave the country, file a losing petition for review anyway and still be allowed to escape the consequences of having challenged the immigration ruling (72 Fed. Reg. 67682). That alternative, I think, is unavailable under the Court's ruling in Dada, because the Court has provided that aliens fighting inadmissibility charges can stay in the country without suffering the penalties for violating their voluntary departure agreement.

The right answer here may be that deportation removals and inadmissability removals should be treated the same under the statutes I've been discussing. But I am confused by the fact that the Court seemed not to grapple with the subject. To some extent, it may be because I've got the law wrong. I am not an immigration law specialist. But the sheer complexity of the subject suggests to me that Justice Scalia's inclination to allow the regulators to use their discretion to blunt the harshness of the statutory rule is the best answer, (Scalia dissent, p. 8) because that discretion could take into account the different positions of different aliens subject to Section 1229a.

The two worlds of sweet and savory

Watching the Top Chef finale last week, it became painfully obvious that none of the contestants had the slightest idea how to make dessert. Richard, a molecular gastronomist from Atlanta, managed to cut bananas into pseudo-"scallops" for about the fourth time, and serve them with bacon (actually, pork belly) ice cream. The winner, Stephanie, made what was obviously a mediocre ricotta pound cake. And Lisa who shouldn't have been anywhere near the last round, made a sort of rice pudding that had the virtue of (apparently) being tasty.

I am surprised about the apparent chasm between sweet and savory cooking. I understand that someone who has been cooking meat on the line since they were 15 is likely to be much better at savory dishes. But why the utter incapacity at baking on display during the show? No one made bread, nor even a barely acceptable cake. Even for the ultimate episode, when the contestants had two months to prepare, knowing that they might be asked to make a dessert, the results were still underwhelming. Although, compared to other seasons, they still did well - Hung, the winner of Season Three, served a molten chocolate cake for his dessert. Un-ironically, I mean.

I know, fundamentally, that if I was given two months to prepare, I would have a dessert that would knock people's socks off ready. Frankly, with some tweaking, even my almond semi-freddo of the weekend is flatly better than anything the contestants made. With a week of thought, I would have a restaurant style dessert that would take me all of 45 minutes of prep time and would look perfectly creditable. Yet, three different professional chefs, and countless others throughout the show, seem utterly incapable of making anything sweet.

I can only assume that as one advances in cooking, the temptation to jettison anything that isn't one's speciality becomes overwhelmingly strong. Even so, it strikes me that a chef who is completely incapable of making a cake is missing something fairly significant. But then, perhaps that's why I'm not a professional cook.

Breaking News

In yet another boring article about how increasing food prices are challenging restaurants, the Washington Post has the following gem:

"At Equinox, a D.C. fine-dining restaurant where business is down around 5 percent, one strategy is to get as much out of a chicken as possible. That means that in addition to using the breast meat for a light chicken salad, the legs feed staff and the bones help create chicken stock."

And what were the people at Equinox doing before? Throwing chicken carcasses and legs to the dogs? Cutting the filet off a porterhouse and getting rid of the rest? In all seriousness, does any restaurant not do the things above, even in good times?

A meal to celebrate my deck furniture

The weather cooperated on Sunday to let me show off my new deck furniture. The menu (pictures to follow) was as much as I could manage on the no-air conditioning basis that I'm going to be living on until I actually manage to get to a store.

Crostini with artichoke - (I sauteed artichoke in olive oil until tender, then whizzed with a little cream and lots of lemon. The crostini (more accurately bruschetta, I guess) were soaked in olive oil and then toasted on top of a naked gas flame from my range).

Cornish hen stuffed with rice - (Boned cornish game hen, stuffed with rice flavored with raisins and cinammon, tied en saucisse, and then roasted).

Green salad with arugula, lemon and oil, with sauteed mushrooms, and an egg cooked starting with cold water to just set.

Almond Semifreddo - (My favorite ice cream substitute. Egg whites whipped to hard peaks with sugar, mixed with cream and almonds, and then frozen. It needed overnight to really set (as the leftovers in my freezer demonstrate) but it is still delicious).

2003 Olivier Rion Cote de Nuits Villages La Pretiere - An inky, deep, Burgundy. We detected a lot of earthy flavor, though not much of the cherry advertised. I'm still not convinced of my ability to pick out flavors.

Erawan

We had lunch at Erawan in Bayside on Saturday, a Thai restaurant that gets fairly good reviews in places like Zagat's. Although the food tasted ok, one gets the impression that they have tamed the spice much overmuch for the western taste. Unlike our own better priced and fiery Bangkok Tasty, Erawan somehow turns Thai food insipid, a bland curried noodles and an eggplant stew that hardly set the mouth afire. Of course, one ought really not trust Zagat's for much of anything, but we were still surprised by the blandness of it all.

Reflexions

I just finished Richard Olney's Reflexions. It is a puzzling, difficult book of a great man, but I enjoyed it very much. Most interesting to me is how important Olney felt his Time Life series, The Good Cook, was as a legacy. I picked up the collection a few years ago at a rummage sale, completely unaware that it was edited by Olney, and was more and more surprised as I leafed through it at its sophistication and depth. I now understand why.

NY State judges decision

Unrelated to food, but very interesting, a New York judge today ordered the state legislature to raise judicial pay. Of course, New York judges should get much higher salaries (they should be paid sufficently, I would think, such that working as a temp in a law firm is actually a losing proposition) , but I really have to wonder about the wisdom of a judge siding with a lawsuit filed by judges in order to raise judges' pay. I'll have to read the opinion, but this should at the very least make the person sitting in judgment just the tiniest bit queasy.

A hobby as job

From an article about a star-chef booker in this morning's New York Times

“The thing that’s amazing about Lee is you can’t distinguish what’s his hobby and what’s his job,” said Christina Grdovic, publisher of Food & Wine. “It’s all a big blur.”

May we all be so lucky.

The tomato problem

The only positive coming out of the tomato salmonella problem that has the country in an uproar is that it happened in June and not August or late July. If I was kept from tomatoes at the height of tomato season because someone all the way across the country had discovered some bacteria on tomatoes that had about as much to do with the tomatoes I was planning to eat as, say, my firm has to do with a public defender's office, I would be really, super, duper annoyed. It is, though, fairly astounding that our food network is so intertwined that salmonella there is causing tomato-less salsa here. Depressing, to say the least.

The industrial food machine and change

A good post from Paul here. I'm especially in agreement with the last paragraph. Simply put, if there are ever going to be major advances in how we treat animals, Mcdonald's is going to lead the way.

Top chef thoughts

I've taken to watching the TV show, "Top Chef". All good fun, but I've begun wondering whether people are begining to mistake the usual judge's pet criticisms of the food for actual food criticism. Especially irritating is the repeated claim that dishes "don't sing". It's a nice enough turn of phrase once, but not every time that one encounters a disappointing dish, I'd think. More on this later, hopefully.

The Senate dining room

An amazing story here about the Senate's sub par dining room.

It always amazes me how poorly extremely powerful and rich men and women eat at their jobs in this country. Speaking from personal experience from spending a lot of time around a certain kind of the species above, it's really very startling.

1000 AD

There's a great thread at Marginal Revolution going on right now. The premise:

I wanted to ask for survival tips in case I am unexpectedly transported to a random location in Europe (say for instance current France/Benelux/Germany) in the year 1000 AD (plus or minus 200 years). I assume that such transportation would leave me with what I am wearing, what I know, and nothing else. Any advice would help.

As I note in the comments, I'd head for the nearest kitchen. Modern kitchen technique, even dumbed down due to lack of equipment, is so superior to what was available in 1000 AD that you could possibly get yourself installed as a sort of mascot in some noble's courtly apparatus.

Some people are assuming that because a modern professor (which is what the original questioner is) is more intelligent and highly educated than even a medieval intellectual, he'd be able to make his way into the church. The problem from an immediate survival perspective is that the modern marketing professor isn't more educated at the only things that matter from the church's perspective - Latin and religion. Unless you're supremely handy with tools, I don't think you'll be able to make anything modern to sell either. I think being a sort of travelling doctor might work, since you at least know about germs, but I think this sort of underestimates the problem of being a person with no place in a feudal world which is governed by a hierarchy in which everyone has their place.

Frankly, I think you'd do very well to end up as a serf, and would most likely die very soon. A great thought experiment, though.

UPDATE: Obviously, all bets are off if you happen to be a modern expert in, say, metallurgy. Medievals weren't dumb. If some guy showed up with steel, it wouldn't take long for someone to notice them.

Avec Eric

The mighty Eric Ripert, of Le Bernardin, has a blog. One gets the sense of Ripert that he is a fundamentally decent fellow, and oh, what a cook. My only beef with the great man is that it can sometimes feel as if plans on performing surgery with his food, so antiseptic is his approach, but his food remains delicious for all that.

His entries so far consist of a video recipe for broiling red snapper in a toaster oven. Looks delicious, but if you're wondering about what I mean by antiseptic, watch the video.

More on Blue Hill

I have a moment now to speak a little more freely on Blue Hill, so some further tasting notes.

I'm not sure one can approach Blue Hill without conceding the centrality of its location. Of course, the farm is the source of much (though clearly not all) of the food you're going to eat. But there is something special, to my mind, in driving to a place with the sole intention of eating, and luxuriating in the experience. Perhaps a stroll before the meal, perhaps a melancholy wander afterwards, as you realize the meal is over. When I lived in Scotland, I had the same fundamental feeling about the Peat Inn, a similar countryside oasis, though I doubt I had pinpointed what exactly I found so alluring. Even were Blue Hill to serve middling food, the fact that it is on a farm, with geese, and butter, and eggs, and nature would make it worth a quick trip.

Thankfully, however, Blue Hill's food is hard to describe as middling. Lacking a lot of the technological sizzle of a WD-50 (although Dan Barber, Blue Hill's chef, is said to admire Ferran Adria), or the pork sodden, sometimes flailing, virtuosity of Momofuku Ko, this is Chez Panisse for the east coast, food coaxed gently from the landscape. It is rhubarb season here, and hence, a rhubarb jus surrounding a light, delicate island of Maine Crab. Asparagus is fresh, and it is that fresh asparagus that is nestled next to the delightfully runny egg, breaded and deep fried to a crusty, golden, crunch. It's spring, and there's spring lamb, cooked to a boggling tenderness, sitting delicately atop literally nothing but the freshest possible carrots wading in their own clever "butter". One detects only a few notes of dissonance - the (nonetheless delicious) chocolate bread pudding rather than something fruity, while wonderful looking strawberry layer cakes streamed by to some other tables (why chocolate at all? The season demands clafouti). The fact that our table was graced with the beet burger amuse bouche (masterful), but not, oddly, the light herby spritzer others received in addition. And, above all, the dainty portions, which are perfect for my taste, but probably stand right on the precipice of seeming like a bit of a mockery to others (we thought, laughing, of what exactly our respective parents would say, or do, with the plates of food we were presented).

But these are quibbles. The meal was well priced. It was delicious. The settings were a relaxing escape from the concrete canyon of New York city. Blue Hill should continue to be a success.

Blue Hill at Stone Barns

Much has been said about Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a farm driven restaurant situated in working agricultural park. Ruhlman, for example, recently called Dan Barber (Blue Hill's chef) "one of the most important voices in the chef world".

I think I'll have more to say about our excellent lunch at Blue Hill last Saturday later, when my work allows me. For now, let me reproduce our lunch, which was served sans menu based on a quick chat with our server at the beginning of the meal:

Maine crab with a rhubarb jus and tapioca pearls

soft boiled farm fresh egg, bread crumbed and fried, served with spring vegetables (it looked like the egg in the link)

Grass fed, pastured, lamb (almost certainly cooked sous vide) with carrots and carrot butter

Chocolate bread pudding with caramel ice cream

Milos

I had a pleasant lunch today with some of our summer interns at Milos Estiatorio, a high end greek restaurant in New York. Delicious octopus, and a well grilled dorade with plump, juicy, capers.

I also got the opportunity to eat the single most overpriced course I have ever seen or heard of in any restaurant anywhere on the planet in my life.


Milos Special - Paper-thin zucchini, eggplant and saganaki cheese, lightly fried. $27.75

Is it a giant tub of vegetables? Or a huge, table sized plate? Ooh no. It's a single, little pile of vegetables with about two tablespoons of yogurt sauce in the middle, flanked by three miniscule saganaki rolls. $28. Seriously. On my own dime, I would beat a path to the similarly good Agnanti every time, for a quarter of the price.

Jump For Heart

I spent great swathes of my childhood trying to poison my elementary school classmates against the Jump for Heart program. (I remember theatrically throwing the sign up sheet on the ground). I can't say I had a reason for my intransigence based on economics, though. More likely, it was my usual antipathy for group activities into which one is guilted, or, perhaps, an effort to keep my classmates from realizing that I was very fat, and so unlikely to do much jumping for my heart or anyone else's.

The Great Cork Debacle of 2008

I mentioned, in my post on Montauk, a little trouble I had with a cork. We had innocently enough bought a Long Island Viognier to sip with a little cheese and salami, and the day before, had purchased a $1 corkscrew from a Montauk town vineshop. Grabbing the wine cold out of the fridge, I inserted the corkscrew, and started pulling at it to remove the cork. A few second later, I had the plastic base of the corkscrew in my left hand, and a wine bottle including this cork in my right. A little tugging quickly convinced me that the broken metal screw wasn't about to come out of the plastic cork, or at least not without a lot of help.



I was, of course, too embarassed by all this to take up my girlfriend's idea of asking the hotel people for a pair of pliers, so I started trying a few much less logical methods that had the chief benefit of not having to talk to anyone. Unfortunately, they were mostly pretty stupid. It turns out, for example, that trying to stab through a plastic cork with a knife doesn't work. Nor, apparently, does trying to slip corn on the cob holders on the sides of the cork to try to imitate a double pronged cork remover work especially well. In fact, what it actually does is scratch the glass, leading to the hilarious possibility that you may now have glass shards in your white wine.

Finally, my girlfriend hit on the solution. Go buy a new corkscrew, and hook the new corkscrew's cork around the broken screw. Once it's attached, pull it out. Although I almost broke the new corkscrew in the process, it worked, coming out with a satisfying pop. As for what to do about the glass shards, I filtered the wine through a very fine coffee filter, after having discarded the idea of decanting the whole thing into a bowl and skimming the top (the logic being that the glass might sink) after deciding that the bowl was probably too shallow for that ploy even if the glass played along.

Given that we both feel fine a week later, I guess nothing bad happened. But the whole episode definitely delayed dinner.

Grilled blackfish and potatoes

As I mentioned here, I made a dish of pan sauteed fish in Montauk last weekend. Here's the picture. As you can see, I got nice, crunchy caremelized color on the potatoes by boiling first and then pan frying, and added the fish to the skillet at the last minute. I served with mesclun salad and a Long Island Riesling.

A note on stewed fruit

I'm not sure why I hadn't discovered stewed fruit before, but apparently, any summer fruit baked at about 300 degrees with a little sugar, cinnamon, and corn starch (if it's very watery) becomes delicious, with or without an added crumble. Last night was stewed Georgia peaches, with a little mint chocolate chip ice cream.

Bad Bread

We walked into the Montauk Bake Shop last weekend, looking for some bread to eat for breakfast. They had a pumpernickel loaf that looked suspiciously identical to the white loaf, just brown, but I bought it anyway. At least it's made by a bakery, I thought.

It turned out to be a truly wretched loaf. Tough, flavorless, and unappetizing. So much so that we bought an industrial rye bread the next day, and resolved to think about what to do with the pumpernickel later. I am trying to find a way to use it. The rye bread wasn't any good, of course, but it was a perfectly acceptable vehicle for apricot jam.

The whole episode made me think about one of the truths underlying the current power of our large food conglomerates. Simply put, on average they provide tastier food for lower prices than single proprietors. Am I saying that your local bakery isn't as good as Wonder Bread? No, of course not. Many local bakeries are much better, and some transcendent. But what people sometimes forget is that for a long time, local meant unpredictable, unhygienic, and just plain old bad. Ben & Jerry's isn't better than Grom, but it is better than the bad "artisan gelato" we had in Montauk. IHOP, sad to say, beats up on many local diners. McDonald's, yes McDonald's, does what it does better than some local burger joints. The alternative, in other words, to industrial food from some heartless factory is often terrible food from a local scoundrel.

Of course, here in New York we're insulated from that to a large extent by what has become an extraordinarily ruthless food market. But that wasn't always the case, and one need not think back too far to remember a New York where Starbucks was a dramatic, world changing improvement to the coffee scene. Yes, yes, local, local local. But let's remember what our industrial friends have bought us.

Molecular Gastronomy

Combining Michael Ruhlman's post on the meaning of molecular gastronomy with Jeremy's post about miracle fruit brings me to an interesting problem. How can we be living in a moment where both haute barnyard (earthy, back to the farm, fresh, local) and "molecular gastronomy" (chemical, forward looking, industrial) are the two dominant food paradigms? A world where one can get reservations to neither WD-50 (Wylie Dufresne's molecular gastronomy mecca) or Blue Hill at Stone Barns (Dan Barber's fanatically farm driven simplicity)? To me, they are nemesis, and yet people talk about both phenomena as if they are part of the same world.

I don't discount Adria, Dufresne, Achatz, and the rest of the molecular gastronomers, by the way. Assuredly, many of their methods will fade away, because they are flawed. But to the extent what they are doing is using modern cooking methods on traditional foods, like all innovators, other novelties are going to stand the test of time. I don't doubt that there is a place in this world for agar as a stabilizer, especially in dessert, for example. But I am willing to put my money on haute barnyard as the more lasting trend, because, fundamentally, it's not a trend. It's how everyone used to eat, and hopefully will eat once more.

Gum Arabic

A few years ago in college, the ice cream maker of the wonderful Jannetta's ice cream in St. Andrews, Scotland, came to give a talk to the university's wine and cheese club. I stood up, and asked a question about the gooey, oozy, ice cream I used to eat in Syria, which we called booza. Since I loved it, I proudly asked the man how they did it, expecting to hear some kind of exotic, interesting ingredient.

He wrinkled his nose, and told me that it was gum arabic, and that its job was to be a filler and to keep ice cream from melting as quickly. Since then, I've been quick to pick it out.

So as soon as we got our "artisan gelato" at 668 , I knew what was up. It oozed like a Twix in the commercials, or like Bubble Yum pulled by a kid out of his mouths. The dull, un-fresh flavors were no more promising, and for $4 a scoop, we were really disappointed. We left yearning for Ben & Jerry's (which leads me into another topic, which is the technical superiority of industrial food over most food, which I'll get to), and wondering why no one else is doing something better in a town that is almost exclusively a sea-side resort. Puzzled, we stumbled on to dinner, unsatisfied.

Montauk

We spent the long weekend in Montauk, New York, a sea side community at the very tip of Long Island. To get to Montauk, you have to pass the heart of what people call the Hamptons. I had not appreciated quite how ritzy those places were until I saw the Tiffany & Co. in the middle of what was clearly otherwise just a series of small fishing villages. Why, precisely, anyone needs a Tiffany's in a fishing village is unclear to me, but there it is.

I'm going to post a number of more specific observations and notes, but I'll first reprise generally for reference. We arrived on Friday, settled in at the perfectly adequate Sun N' Sound hotel, and then headed to the Montauk Harbor area in search of food. My research (i.e, trolling Chowhound for 15 minutes before I left) had told me that Gosman's Dock was a good place to start, so we hit the main restaurant for an excellent lobster roll and lobster salad, served overlooking the sea. We then went off to explore the area, stopping at an Edy's for a nostalgic (but bad) mint ice cream, and on the way (due to my urging) hit up Gosman's fish market for supplies for the evening. A while later, and with a bottle of local Long Island Reisling, we headed back to the hotel, and I cooked up a skillet dinner of pan roasted potatoes, Long Island wild blackfish, and baby carrots with a local mesclun salad (picture forthcoming). The next day, breakfast was organic eggs with some perfectly bad pumpernickel bread from the Montauk Bake Shop (more on this later) and coffee. We visited the Montauk Point Lighthouse Park for some delightful wandering (except for rude employees at the snack bar, and some party pooping visiters who mocked the lighthouse) and ended up on Duryea's Lobster Deck for some mussels (delicious) and another lobster roll (also delicious). Were it not for the swarms of odd, throughly disgusting flies plaguing the sea air, it would have been a truly wonderful meal. Then it was off to Nick's beach for some further wanderin', and diverted ourselved to Gig 668 for what they claimed was "artisan gelato". Chewing through the gummy, flavorless roasted pistachio and coffee flavors, we decided it was neither. Why there isn't anyone making ice cream at a sea side resort town is beyond me. Later we bought another bottle of wine from the good people at Finest Kind Wine shop, which we took back home with some snacks to nibble before heading out for dinner.

That set the stage for the great wine debacle of 2008, about which more later. All I'll say now is that it involved buying another corkscrew, coffee filters, lots of pulling, and a much delayed meal.

When we did eventually eat, it was at Gosman's again, but this time we tackled the pure lobster itself. Delicious, except that we much preferred the boiled to the broiled article. As wonderful as the seafood was, we spent the next twenty minutes stewing jokingly that the waitress stole my girlfriend's coleslaw from under her nose. I realize you want to go home. But it was good. Why take it?

We headed home the next morning, sated and a little more tan, except for a minor detour about which I WILL NOT talk about. As I say, more detailed thoughts and pictures will follow.

Reflexions, Richard Olney

I've loved Richard Olney's writing ever since I first opened up Simple French Food. His food, to me, is the acme of cooking. His Ten Vineyard Lunches is my candidate for most overlooked cookbook on the planet. Concise, but masterful. So when I picked up his autobiography, Reflexions, I was ready to be entranced.

I'm still reading, so no conclusions yet. My first impressions? One does not think of sex when thinking about Richard Olney, but there is an awful lot of it in this book.

Second, I found this delightful passage, which it pays to meditate on in the wake of our over-the-top dinner at Ko:

It (a restaurant in Piraeus, Greece) was an odd place. Except for the staff, there were no Greeks present. The food was banal, but they had created the formula, a quarter of a century before the nouvelle-cuisine loonies launched le menu degustation, of the non-meal - fifteen or twenty little dabs of unrelated foods, served in interminable succession, one after the other . . . .

Oh, math

There are about fifty million things wrong with this student article published by the law review of my old law school (HT: Amber and Abovethelaw), but possibly my favorite is the following stupidity:

"But the point about debt is merely another
version of the argument for making lots of money. Debt is nothing
more than a monthly payment — it can thus be thought of as a portion
out of your salary. Suppose you choose a public interest job that
pays $4,800 per month. If your debt payments are $500 per month,
then your monthly earnings become $4,300. On an annual scale, that
debt turns a $57,000 yearly salary into a $51,000 yearly salary. The
desire to make a higher wage is no different than before — the fact of
debt does not change the moral calculation because it is simply another
example of the urge to earn more money"

Apparently, our author has not heard that there is such a thing as government, and the government exacts (a lot of) taxes, and student loans are paid out of after tax salary. Whoops.

PS: By the way, how did the Harvard Law Review staff miss such a preposterous mistake? Yes, so the author's (stupid and unconvincing) point isn't necessarily obscured (even relatively impoverished elite laywers still make enough to support their families, and debt obligations are just a monthly payment) but it's like adding that point to a sentence that suggests the moon is made of wasabi dusting, and then not suggesting that the author perhaps fix that part of it.

Also, our friendly writer might be lucky enough to have had a $500 student loan payment, but if I hadn't paid mine off, the monthly bill was four times that. The plucking of some plausible figure the poor devils with debt might have to pay back strikes me a bit like when the old President Bush hadn't the slightest idea what milk cost.

Faux pain au levain

I had a chance to make my faux pain au levain over the last few days. (I call it a faux levain because it's made with yeast rather than wild sourdough, as it ought).

I've been perfecting my technique over about four years, and it's really my signature bread. Roughly, it's equal parts white and wheat flour, kneaded, and then slowly ripened in the fridge for at least 24 hours. Then I place it in a brotform (actually, a plastic colander with a clean towel) for its second proof, and slide it onto a baking stone or tray in a 450 degree oven, in which I've left a tray of water evaporating for moisture during the entire preheating period, for slowish baking.

As you can see, the result is really a nice bread, with great distribution of holes (large, medium and small), a thick crust, and a subtle, yeasty aroma and flavor.

A detox spinach sandwich

In a continuing effort to detox post Ko, I've been keeping fish-o-vegetarian for the week. Dinner last night was this super simple spinach sandwich - some fresh spinach blanched, drained, and then sauteed in olive oil with garlic, flaked red pepper, salt, and pepper, all stuffed into a Sullivan St. ciabatta piccolo with some grated cheese.

Momofuku Ko dish ranking

Instead of writing a classic review of our meal at Momofuku Ko, I've decided to rank the dishes instead. Note that it's really an 8-10 course tasting menu, but at points they serve different dishes to each member of a couple or group, so you end up with rather more, if you assiduously taste each other's food. NB: This meal was accompanied by the $50 drinks tasting menu, which included a number of wonderful wines (sparkling and otherwise) , sake, beer, and sweet sherry.

To comment globally before embarking on the parade below, Ko is a valuable, interactive experience. Valuable because one sees a modern commercial kitchen at work. Much of the food is pre-prepared, and needs only warming, or dressing. What is cooked is cooked in ways that you wouldn't necessarily even care to duplicate at home (or do you enjoy pouring butter over and over on your pan seared halibut as it cooks, or deep frying enormous tubes of stuffed chicken?) Interactive because the cooks jabber, and shimmy, and twirl right in front of you, like a high class sushi bar and hibachi rolled into one.

The food? Ah. I am tempted to gush. It was good. Very good. But at some point, there must be some line where the chef says, "no more". No more fat. No more grease. I must relent before I cross the line into vulgarity. Chang mocks that line. He laughs at it while blithely crossing it. Vulgarity of this sort is apparently his badge of honor. The result is the menu below, packed full of pork fat, and other fat, at literally every turn. I reeked of pork and fat this morning, I dreamt of pork and fat last night, I woke up sweating porky and fatty bullets of sweat. As trendy it is these days to revel in bacon and smoke, this is not my ideal situation. Don't get me wrong. I have a wrought iron stomach. But I was not comfortable going home last night, and I wonder very much if everyone else is able to shake off this bachannalian excess unscathed. I do not think even the most dedicated of French carnivore chefs would inflict such a tasting menu on his audience. I leave open the possibility that I am overreacting.

1. Long Island Fluke "sashimi" with buttermilk, yuzu, and poppy seeds - I would never have thought in a million years that buttermilk on raw fish would taste even acceptably well, but this tart creation was revelatory. So simple, and so good, and yet disappointing, in a way, because it shows that Chang can cook something other than pork fat sauteed in pork fat.

2. Pork Belly and Oyster in Kimchee Consommé with Napa cabbage - I've never had such powerful flavor from a broth, though I could discern no kimchee whatever. Paired with the fatty, unctuous, pork belly, it tasted like tonkutsu gone on steroids. And the oyster was a briny treat amid all the pork. A magnificent, unexpected dish.

3. Pea Soup with crayfish and morels - Tremendous pea flavor, and crayfish deeply redolent of their home. And, wonder of wonders, a small packet of morels right in the center. They made the dish for me. As Frank Bruni (Ny Times, of course) says, "[t]here’s a Georgia pea soup with such resonant pea flavor that you wonder about the bastard pedigree of all prior peas in your life and almost fail to notice the morels and the delicate crawfish in the soup."

4. Deep fried sous vide short ribs - beef short ribs cooked in a vacumm until extraordinarily tender, and then deep fried. Bruni calls it a "miracle of tender crisp contrast", and I think that sums it up terribly well. It's served with a spring onion, two carrots, and pickled mustard seeds, which looks like a sort of yellow caviar, and is more interesting texturally than as a flavor.

5. Grilled trout with bacon puree - Terribly wonderful New York river trout, paired, astonishingly, with pureed bacon. Why? I don't know. But the combination works wonders for a fish that by definition needs a little help.

6. "Smoked" Egg with onion soubise and chips - an egg masterfully cooked to a set white and completely liquid yolk, dipped in liquid smoke, knifed open, and served with what amounts to an onion jam and tiny, cornflake-like potato chips. I've love this for brunch, perhaps with the fatty english muffin.

7. English muffin with whipped lard - I hesitate to rate this as a "dish", but I don't know what else to do. Like eating bready pig.

8. Fried apple tart with sour cream ice cream - delicious. As everyone else has said, a cool play on the McDonald's apple pie, except that the McDonald's apple pie is now baked, and this is fried, in god knows what unholy oil. I've ranked it this low only because, in the end, it's fried apple pie, wasabi dusting or not.

9. "Lasagna" with whipped ricotta, roasted ricotta salata, the flowers of broccoli rabe, burgundy snails, and mushrooms - two squares of pasta plucked delicately out of the boiling water with some kind of forceps, and then topped with the bewildering flurry of ingredients above. My verdict? More snails, less whipped ricotta, please. I loved the broccoli rabe flowers.

10. Sorbets - Mine, an "arnold palmer" sorbet (half iced tea, half lemonade). Hers, Canteloupe on a base of cashew butter. The canteloupe, given the season, was surprising but terrific.

11. Chicken stuffed with morels and ramps (?), cooked ( I think), and then deep fried until crisp - salty fried goodness, but not as good as the short ribs that were the alternative.

12. "Cereal milk" panna cotta, with avocado creme - I didn't get the avocado, I didn't get the cereal milk, I didn't get the cornflake granola accompaniment. Blurgh.

13. Frozen foie gras, white wine jelly, lychee, and pine nut brittle - a snowy blizzard of fat (i.e, foie gras grated through the small end of a box grater) on top of a Riesling jelly embedded with lychees and sticky chunks of pine nut brittle. Inventive? Yes. Tasty. Eh. There was already so much fat, so much unct, in this meal. What I wouldn't have given at this point for something lemony, to cut through the seemingly endless parade of bellies, fats, creams, and fries. Instead, we got a foie gras dish with a caramelized sugar accompaniment that works no better than the atrocious foie gras creme brulee at Jean Georges.

14. Custard with caviar, asparagus, argan oil and cashews - A sort of cold set custard topped with asparagus, poached cashews, hackleback caviar, and oil. To my mind, a waste of space. The custard wasn't delicious, and the cashews nondescript. Argan sounds great when described, but in the dish it fades away to nothing.

A rhubarb crumble

I am just back from a long (so long that I'm still remembering dishes half an hour after sitting down to write down notes) and mostly splendid meal at Momofuku Ko, and am far too full and drunk to write anything substantive at all. My only comment - does one meal really need so much pork? So much??

Instead, I'll sign off tonight with Saturday night's rhubarb crumble, and leave the Momofuku review for the morning. The secret to the crumble - bake the topping separately from the fruit, yielding a crunchy, independently tasty streusel. I'd normally top with ice cream, but I had made the rhubarb too sweet, so I compensated with tart, tangy, greek yogurt.

Funny fish

I guess this is ok, so long as they're not serving the fish.

Friday Night Dinner

Sauteed fiddle head fern and ramp (baby wild leaks) risotto. I sauteed the ferns and the ramp leaves in butter and olive oil, and stirred them into my risotto at the last minute to warm. I made the rice with a chicken stock from an organic chicken, real parmesan, and Irish unsalted butter.

As a second course (I was feeling Italian last night) I served pan fried porgy dipped in flour with chopped parsley and lemon.

Dessert was little chocolate bouchon from Bouchon bakery, here in New York. Not much dessert, but oh so good.

Artichoke II

One more note - I was walking with my pizza from Artichoke back to Union Square, and was stopped by a guy in the street. "Is that from Artichoke?", he said. "Yeah", I said. "Is it good?", he asked earnestly. "Very good", I said.

"F$#@ yeah!", he said, and then ran almost at a sprint towards where I had just come from.

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.