→ June 19, 2008
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The Next Food Network Star.

Anyone else watching The Next Food Network Star? I finally caught this week’s episode – it didn’t record Monday, long story – so I figured I’d throw some thoughts out there.

First, the format: The show is little short of a hazing. The contestants are asked to do some ridiculous things, like cooking brunch on a moving train or throwing together a potato dish that is “personal” in thirty minutes with zero advance notice. The connection between the tasks and an actual cooking show is tenuous at best.

Also, there is way too much crying. Stop crying. All of you.

As for the contestants, they’ve whacked some pretty clear not-going-to-win-anythings so far, although they still have some serious weeding to do before they get down to the legit contenders. Here’s who remains after Jeffrey – whose delivery is all wrong for TV, and whose mouth appears to naturally form a frown, even when he’s smiling – was eliminated in week 3, ranked from worst to best:

7. Nipa. Pro: Sounds like she can actually cook. Con: Her range is limited to Indian cuisine. She never smiles. She’s not inventive in her cooking. And if she’s not a wicked little witch, she should sue the show’s editors for making her look like one. The whole took-all-the-cayenne thing? If I was Aaron, I would soak Nipa’s entire wardrobe in cayenne water … and her sheets too.

6. Lisa. Pro: Appears to have some solid food ideas and be willing to go outside the box; she’s got a reasonably well-articulated culinary vision. Con: The vision doesn’t always sound appealing. Incredibly weird looking. Squints when she talks to the camera. Has a nose ring.

5. Jennifer. Pro: Big on comfort foods, which are always marketable, and she wants to keep it kid-friendly/family-focused, which is also a great niche. Con: Totally boring on camera. Mashed potato pizza is a disgusting idea, too.

4. Adam. Pro: High-energy. Camera likes him. Into guys’ food (his dishes in week three were bacon cheese fries and, in the “make your own jarred product” contest, a barbecue rub). Referenced Alton Brown in this episode. Con: Dorky, but maybe in a passable way. Served raw food each of the first two weeks. Not sure he’s much of a cook.

3. Kelsey. Pro: She’s very cute. High-energy. Pretty good food concepts, although I can’t figure out why she thought she could cook a gratin in 30 minutes. Con: Comes across as too polished, on which the judges really hammered her this week. No one is going to tune in to see a cute girl cook if she’s fake.

2. Shane. Pro: I think this kid – he’s 19, the youngest ever on TNFNS, apparently – can really cook. He’s good-looking and the camera likes him. Con: Very unpolished, and gets nervous easily; I think both of those can be fixed with training. Tried to do vichyssoise in 30 minutes without stock, which was just a bad judgment call.

1. Aaron. Pro: Can flat-out cook; he’s won plaudits for everything he’s made on the show, and his ideas are rock-solid. Also seems to get time management. Very charismatic; the camera loves him and he presents well. Con: His delivery could use some polishing, and he can trip over his words sometimes, but that’s very fixable. He’s my pick to win.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food, Media Tagged With: , ,
→ June 19, 2008
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Starbucks (and chat).

There will be a KlawChat today at 1 pm EDT.

When Starbucks first introduced their “Light Note” blends a few years ago, my father-in-law – who, like me, prefers coffee that threatens to dissolve your spoon – referred to them as “coffee for people who don’t like coffee.”

Having tasted Starbucks’ new Pike Place Roast, I wish he had saved the quip, because I don’t know if I’ve ever had a cup of coffee that tasted less like coffee than this crap.

Starbucks apparently decided that they were losing too much coffee business to Dunkin Donuts (which I believe is now the nation’s #1 purveyor of coffee) and McDonald’s (which makes a surprisingly drinkable if anonymous cup of joe), so they decided the best thing to do was to piss off all of the people who went to Starbucks for a stronger, more distinctive brew and offer a dull, flavorless, inoffensive coffee instead. Go to any Starbucks after 11 am or so and you’ll only have Pike Place as an option; they won’t brew a fresh pot of their “bold” coffee after 11 am or noon, depending on the store.

I’m not the biggest Starbucks partisan around, mind you. I think the “Charbucks” nickname is earned, as they overroast their beans, and their espresso is totally undrinkable. They brag about the roasting dates for their coffees, but those dates are usually ten to fourteen days in the past, which makes the coffee stale in my book and unusable for espresso. But I’ll take a cup of slightly burned Sumatra or Kenya, both of which have distinctive flavors unique to their growing regions, over the bland, slightly muddy taste of Pike Place. In the meantime, there’s a Peet’s not too far from my house if I’m desperate and don’t want to brew my own, although it’s more likely that I’ll just stick to my Nilgiri tea in the morning instead.

TIME‘s James Poniewozik more or less agrees with me. Consumer Reports didn’t hate it or love it; they agree that it lacks complexity but complimented its “smooth” character. If I want smooth, I drink tea.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: ,
→ June 17, 2008
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Equipping a kitchen on the cheap.

Stumbled across this year-old article from the New York Times on equipping a kitchen for under $200. It does start with two assumptions that won’t hold for all readers: Relatively basic cooking plans (including little to no baking) and access to a restaurant-supply store. But it’s a useful reminder that what Bed Bath & Beyond wants to charge you isn’t necessarily a fair price.

On the plus side, he nabs a chef’s knife for about $10, a sheet pan for under $6 (then he says it’s not ideal for cookies – I only use “half-sheet pans,” lined with Silpats, for cookies), various useful and inexpensive gadgets, and a 14-inch stainless steel pan with steep sides for $25. He gets a decent-sized Hamilton Beach food processor for $60, which is insanely cheap, since Cuisinarts (they did invent the device) run $150-200 for similar sizes. He recommends a Microplane grater, although he then claims that box graters aren’t used much any more. (Bzzt! But thanks for playing!) His knife collection is simple: chef’s, paring, bread.

On the minus side, his pots are mostly aluminum, which I find is less effective than cast-iron or stainless steel at heat retention or diffusion. (Copper is best, of course, but it’s ragingly expensive.) There is also the potential health concern about cooking acidic foods in aluminum, although that may be much ado about nothing. He buys a “coffee and spice grinder” for $10, which I’m sure is good for spices and lousy for coffee, and he doesn’t mention that you can’t use it for both. He claims that a standard blender is more useful than an immersion blender, which isn’t the case in my kitchen. He also recommends the purchase of a whetstone to keep your knives sharp, which is a terribly bad idea unless you want to buy a new knife every year or so.

Where he really got my dander up was his list of ten things you really don’t need. The problem is that he’s assuming that you, the reader, are a moron. He disses the microwave – great for reheating, but also for quick melting or for warming up liquids to go into risotto or other grain dishes. He says of the stand mixer:

Unless you’re a baking fanatic, it takes up too much room to justify it. A good whisk or a crummy handheld mixer will do fine.

I use my stand mixer for cookies, bread doughs, cake batters, meringues and egg foams, whipped cream, and brownies, at the least. You try to knead a bread or pizza dough with a handheld mixer. So does making bread or cookies make a person a “baking fanatic?” I doubt it.

On the boning knife:

BONING/FILLETING KNIVES Really? You’re a butcher now? Or a fishmonger?

Everyone should at least buy poultry on the bone, and knowing how to butcher a chicken or duck is both a useful skill and a way to save money and get more out of what you buy. (Poultry bones make a great and highly versatile stock.) Whole Foods sells 3-4 pound chickens, formerly known as broiler-fryers, for about $2 a pound; the cheapest boneless, skinless chicken breast they sell goes for $5 a pound, and you don’t get the bones or the delicious dark meat. If the author is telling people how to cook on the cheap, at least to some degree, then dissuading people from doing any of their own butchering is counterproductive.

Last up, the stockpot:

The pot you use for boiling pasta will suffice, until you start making gallons of stock at a time.

Here’s a tip: Use your stockpot to boil pasta. That’s what I do – it’s lightweight, so it’s easy to carry when it’s full of water. True, it doesn’t have the matching strainer, but it was under $20, and the point here is to save some money, right?

I like his advice to seek out restaurant supply stores, ignore brand names, use what the pros use in their restaurants and not what they use on their cooking shows, and stop worrying about looks when utility is what matters. But some of his specific choices … well, they wouldn’t go very far given the way I cook.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , ,
→ June 15, 2008
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Birmingham and Jacksonville eats.

I hate doing food writeups four weeks after the fact, but I’ll do the best I can off of my memory.

I had two pretty good finds in Birmingham. One was an accidental find, a local outpost of a growing barbecue chain – yes, a chain – called Jim and Nick’s. It looks as if they started in Alabama, so at least I was close to the First Location. First meal I had there was a pulled pork sandwich, possibly the second-best pulled pork I’ve ever had (sorry, still loyal to Eli’s in Dunedin, FL). The pork was perfectly smoked, moist, with a clear but not overwhelming smoke flavor (sorry – again – but I’m not good enough to tell you the type of wood). My number-one criterion for pulled pork is how much sauce it needs to be edible. Zero is the ideal figure. On a scale of zero to ten, Eli’s pulled pork gets a zero, and Jim and Nick’s gets a one. For a side, I went with the baked beans, which had good flavor but about four times as much black pepper as they needed.

My second meal was a bit disappointing – a big green salad with pulled pork on it. I think the problem was that I got it to go, so the pork continued to cook in its little plastic container, and ended up a little dry by the time I got it on to my salad. Serves me right for thinking healthy.

The other solid find was breakfast at Bogue’s, a slightly run-down local joint that does traditional southern breakfasts and meat-and-three lunches. They’re known for their “sweet rolls,” which are pecan rolls without the pecans, or maybe cinnamon rolls without the cinnamon: a sweet brioche-like dough wrapped around and drizzled with a sugar-butter combination. They are, oddly enough, rather sweet, so while they’re delicious, the one I ate made for a weird lead-in to a savory meal. My eggs-bacon-biscuits breakfast was solid-average, maybe one grade above for the biscuits (good texture, not buttery enough in flavor).

Moving along to Jacksonville, I was only there for one meal, and decided to hit a downtown spot called Chew that seemed to promise an upscale take on comfort food. I ordered the duck confit, which had obviously been roasted to try to flavor and crisp the exterior, but in the process dried out the meat. The one hit of the meal, for me, was the cassoulet of white beans, thickly-sliced bits of bacon, onions, and shaved fennel. I’d write more, but their website is down today, their phone number just rings and rings, and given how sparse the crowd was on a Saturday night, I’m wondering if they’re still in business.

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→ June 11, 2008
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Organic, Inc.

Samuel Fromartz’ Organic, Inc. might be the most balanced nonfiction book on a contemporary subject I’ve ever read. Even though Fromartz is clearly a pro-organic partisan, he focuses the work on the food and the various personalities that helped turn organic food from tasteless hippie health food into the panoply of choices the organic-minded consumer has today.

Organic, Inc. is part history and part description of what “organic” really means, both today and what it meant in earlier eras. The history is interesting enough, as Fromartz discusses how natural farming methods were slowly and then quickly overtaken by more industrial production methods, from the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to the loss of critical agricultural techniques like crop rotation, and then shifts gears to focus on the various organic-food advocates who, for health or culinary reasons, pushed back against the agro-industrial complex. While many of the characters Fromartz presents were – to my eyes, at least – certifiable kooks, some, like chef Alice Waters, who is responsible for introducing Americans to “spring mix” or mesclun salad, were just passionate about one specific aspect of organic food (in Waters’ case, taste) and matched it to a niche in the market that would allow them to sustain and even grow their food-related businesses.

Fromartz also provides two chapters that delve more into the way Big Bad Corporate America has gotten its grubby mitts on organic food. One chapter talks about soy milk, going into the history of White Wave, the company behind Silk that has since sold out to Dean Foods, which has introduced non-organic products under the Silk name. (I checked at Whole Foods yesterday; even chocolate Silk can’t call itself organic because the cocoa used in the drink isn’t organic.) The last chapter goes into the pitched battles, some still ongoing, between the hardcore organic community and the growth-oriented side seeking to ease labeling rules and guidelines for organic agriculture and husbandry. Fromartz builds the first six chapters to leave this conflict as somewhat inevitable, and manages to keep his own views out of the fray, although it would be hard to read that chapter and side with the “growth” crowd when you see what they would like to make acceptable under the label “organic.”

Fromartz’ prose was the one obstacle that was tough to surmount, however. His word choices are often awkward and occasionally wrong, referring to one veterinarian as “widely regarded” without saying how he was regarded or what he was regarded as. I also caught a handful of grammatical errors or funky word orders that made the subjects of sentences unclear. I also would have preferred to see inline citations; the book has a thick Notes section, with notes by page number, but the lack of inline citations creates a game where you guess that there might be a citation for what you just read and check the Notes section to see if there’s one there. Given the frequency with which he uses the “Some people say” device, inline citations are a must.

If you care about food, or the environment, Organic, Inc. is a solid and informative read. I know I’ll be looking for organic strawberries wherever possible, and will probably shift what little conventional dairy buying I do to organic as well, all the result of the information Fromartz gave in the book, rather than any rhetorical or polemical arguments I’ve read.

Next up: A return to the TIME 100 with Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant.

Filed Under: Food, Nonfiction Tagged With: , ,
→ May 27, 2008
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Radio etc.

I’ve been slacking on the blog here as I write predraft content, but I’ve got some radio coming up – today at 4:15 on our Nashville radio affiliate, at 4:40 on our Madison (WI) affiliate, at 6:15-ish on ESPN 890 here in Boston, and at 6:30 on the FAN 590 in Toronto (that’s for my buddies at DrunkJaysFans). I’ll be on AllNight tonight with guest host Amy Lawrence. I’m also trying to schedule something on Bernie Miklasz’ show in St. Louis for Wednesday.

In the meantime, check out one of the best food blogs, I’ve ever seen, Chocolate and Zucchini, written by an impossibly cute Parisian native who worked as a software programmer before becoming a full-time food blogger and author. The post to which I linked is about her loathing of hotel breakfasts, which you all know I share, and her makeshift solution to the problem, which I admire but refuse to follow on grounds that one of my rewards for taking business trips is bacon.

And if I catch my breath, I’ve got some eats to write up and that Calvino book too.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , ,
→ May 18, 2008
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A new trend this year for America: wasting food!

Quick note: I’ll be on ESPN Radio’s Gameday in about 20 minutes (1:20 pm EDT).

Found this interesting article in the International Herald Tribune via Gmail on how much food we waste:

In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste. An update is under way.

I have to admit that nothing makes me more upset than throwing food away. In the past few years, I’ve decreased my food purchases to more or less just what I know I’ll use, making more trips to the store (which isn’t feasible for everyone) and, for ingredients that can’t be purchased in small enough quantities, planning several meals around them to avoid waste. I also convert foods that maybe are past their primes for eating straight and convert them into other foods, like using fruit to make pies or cobblers or jams, or taking stale bread and making fresh bread crumbs by tossing it in the food processor. And yet I still find myself tossing, usually via the garbage disposal, way more food than I’d like – leftovers usually.

Unfortunately, short of tailoring your purchases to more closely fit what you eat, which isn’t easy for people who shop for food once a week, there’s not much you can do to reduce the impact of what you waste. Composting isn’t for everyone, and with skunks and raccoons in our neighborhood, it’s definitely not for us. There’s just no way to get the food I’ve bought and won’t or can’t use into the hands of someone who needs it.

Anyway, it was an interesting read for me, because I’m conscious of what I waste. Just the other day, my wife and I both bought strawberries without realizing the other had done so, and one batch (mine, I think) had mold on half the berries by the next day. With a two-year-old in the house, it wasn’t worth taking chances on the “clean” berries, so out they went. It’s just a shame.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , ,
→ May 15, 2008
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Georgia eats.

On the first season of Feasting on Asphalt, Alton Brown and his crew stopped at a tiny place in Toccoa, Georgia, called Shirley’s Sole Food Café. Ethan Martin, a likely first-rounder in this year’s Rule 4 draft, goes to school in Toccoa, and when I finally put two and two together the night before I flew down there, I figured I had to eat a meal at Shirley’s as sort of a pilgrimage. Unfortunately, I was there on a Friday, which is all-you-can-eat fish fry night at Shirley’s, meaning I didn’t get the menu that Alton et al got on their visit. The meal was slightly disappointing, although I was impressed that nothing tasted fishy. The fish is fried in large batches and placed in warming trays up front; you walk along the counter and point to what you want. The fried shrimp were the best option, in a crunchy crust (like panko, but can you really get panko bread crumbs out there?), while the fried tilapia ended up a bit chewy. It was $12 for the fish fry, plus another $8 if you wanted fresh steamed crab legs … which I did, receiving more crab legs than I could eat. They were fresh and had a lot of meat, but the meat itself was a little bland, lacking that distinctive undertone of sweetness that, for me, has always separated crab from lobster.

This week, I was driving down 19/41 to Griffin to see Tim Beckham when I passed McGhin’s Southern Pit Barbecue and saw the parking lot was pretty full for lunchtime on a weekday, so I pulled in. It certainly looked the part, and the menu was pretty straightforward without a lot of descriptions – the type of place that assumes you know your Q. However, it turned out to be more evidence that, as JC Bradbury told me last year, there is no good barbecue in Georgia. I went with a pork/beef platter, which came with piles of shredded meat plus two sides and “cracklin’ cornbread.” That cornbread was the only item on the plate to which I’d give an average grade (it was plus, plenty of fat in it and no sugar). Both meats were very dry and more chopped than shredded; I hate to be forced to add sauce to pulled pork or beef because it needs the moisture, and it was worse because the sauce was North Carolina style, heavy on the vinegar, which to my palate means one-dimensional. The baked beans were also too vinegary and more like a soup than actual baked beans. I didn’t even touch the coleslaw because it was sitting in a pool of a mayo-based dressing; God only knows what microbes might be living in there. For dessert – I had room – I got the peach cobbler, when in Rome, etc. It was more of a deconstructed peach pie, with a pie crust mixed in with the filling of a peach pie. (A cobbler dough is more akin to a biscuit dough than a pie crust dough, lighter and a little cakey rather than the flaky and tender and very fatty characteristics of pie dough.) The filling was overcooked and had way more cornstarch than needed to thicken it. I have to give the waitress credit, however; when I said I didn’t know what Brunswick stew was and, after she described it, decided not to order it as a side, she brought a tiny dish of it to me anyway so I could try it. I wish I could have said better things about the food, but I’m not going to lie to you – it just wasn’t good.

It’s also time for another update on Paschal’s. I went to the original location on MLK Jr. Drive in downtown Atlanta for breakfast, and the food was generally quite good and was made to order. I decided to branch out and try the salmon croquettes, a platter that comes with two eggs cooked to order, home fries, and a biscuit. The waitress actually asked me whether I wanted my eggs scrambled hard, medium, or soft, which is the first time I’ve ever been asked that; I went with soft, and they were perfect for me, although if you like ‘em runny they may seem overdone. The biscuit was excellent, very soft, but without much of a crust – the top was golden, but it was like a thin layer of parchment paper rather than the traditional semi-hard crust. The supposed star of the dish, the croquettes, were obviously made from tinned salmon and had a fishy taste that couldn’t really be avoided.

I also revisited the Paschal’s in the Atlanta airport before my flight home, and at the suggestion of one of you, tried the collard greens. They had a strong cured-pork flavor – I’m assuming ham hock – and the sweetness of a little sugar, although nothing can disguise the fact that collard greens, even cooked properly for hours, are bitter. And this time around, I got my quarter-dark fried chicken, which could not have been more perfectly cooked.

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→ May 10, 2008
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The top ten home cooking mistakes.

I did promise this post in my Thursday chat, so here you go. I apologize if some of the formatting doesn’t work, but I’m posting this between flights from O’Hare and I’ll clean it up later on.

1. Salt. The food police have everyone running scared of good old sodium chloride, but it’s incredibly important from a culinary perspective as a flavor in and of itself and as a flavor enhancer. Salt intensifies other flavors in every dish by hitting the fifth taste known as umami; without salt, most foods will taste bland, flat, or even stale. Salting foods early in the process allows you to use less salt in total because you can often infuse your foods with salt by dissolving salt in the cooking liquid. Pasta water should always be heavily salted, and the cooking liquids for small grains like rice, barley, or quinoa should also have salt. Seasoning the exterior of meats helps prepare the surface for the Maillard reaction that occurs during the application of direct heat on a grill or on a stovetop pan, producing that brown crust that, for me, is the #1 argument against vegetarianism. I prefer kosher salt for most applications because it doesn’t dissolve too quickly and is easily pinched due to the coarse grain size, but I use table salt for baking because kosher salt will not integrate evenly in most doughs and batters.

Someone asked in chat what I would recommend for someone with high blood pressure who has to limit his salt intake. The best answer is an unfortunate one, but the reason that monosodium glutamate originally became popular is that it’s a tremendous flavor enhancer that delivers that same umami hit that salt does, perhaps even more powerfully. MSG has a nasty reputation and can trigger a fatal reaction in a person allergic to it (a close friend of our maid of honor’s sister died of anaphylaxis after eating MSG), so it’s not for everyone, and I personally don’t use it because I don’t need to, but it will do the job. Failing that, there are some potassium-salt products that can be used in moderation as salt replacements, and using acids like lemon juice, vinegar, onions, and citrus fruits can also help fill the no-salt gap.

EDIT: A few commenters have said that salt and umami hit different receptors on the tongue. I remember reading in a technology magazine – might have been Red Herring seven or eight years ago about umami, where the writer identified salt as the primary flavor enhancer and thus primary umami delivery mechanism in our diets.

2. A real knife. You can do a lot with a good chef’s knife, and you can’t do shit without one. It doesn’t have to be an expensive model; America’s Test Kitchen has recommended this Victorinox 8″ chef’s knife (or its 10″ version, about a buck cheaper!) for years, although I have grown accustomed to the handles on my Henckels Four-Star knives. Buy a good chef’s knife that feels comfortable in your hand, with a blade 8 to 9 inches long, and buy a honing steel to keep it sharp. Avoid home sharpeners, though, which “sharpen” your blade by destroying it.

3. Cooking by temperature. Most recipes say “bake for 20 minutes” or “grill for 15 minutes,” but those directions assume a median size and shape for the food being cooked and a degree of consistency in ovens and grills that simply doesn’t exist. The food you’re cooking is dead – even lobster dies when it hits the boiling water if you haven’t already killed it – and doesn’t know when the timer goes off. Your roasted chicken breast is done at 161 degrees, whenever it gets there, and you’re not going to know when it gets there unless you check it with a thermometer. I keep two in the house: A cheap instant-read thermometer (also useful for checking the temperature of water for green tea, which is best brewed at 160 degrees) and a probe thermometer with an electronic alarm. I wouldn’t roast a turkey or a pork loin without one of the latter.

4. Using fresher spices. If you’ve got a cheap $10 coffee grinder with a rotating blade, I have two things to say to you: It’s useless for grinding coffee, and it’s great for grinding whole spices. Buying spices whole and grinding them yourself is cheaper two ways and maybe three. One, the whole spices tend to be cheaper per unit of weight. Two, they’ll last far longer than ground spices, which go stale in six months to a year; a whole nutmeg will last for several years, while ground nutmeg is sawdust in a few months. And three, if you’re buying your ground spices at a regular grocery store, there’s a chance you’re getting fillers in addition to your chile powder or allspice. Buy your spices whole, toast some before grinding (cumin, coriander, and fennel seeds in particular), and grind them as you need them. I recommend Penzey’s for mail-order spices, although I may be biased because I have one near my house. I’ve been very happy with their quality and prices on almost everything they sell. A corollary to this rule is to use fresh herbs when you can, especially in season. A $1.29 package of thyme from my local farmstand will keep for two weeks if left in its plastic box in my vegetable crisper drawer, and the volatile oils in fresh herbs give them a deeper, richer flavor than dried herbs can provide. This also means that those spice mixes you buy in stores are a particularly bad deal – they often contain fillers, they nearly always contain salt as the first ingredient, and they take the control out of your hands. Make your own spice mixes in small batches as you need them.

5. Fry – or, as Alton Brown’s plastic chicken once said, “fry some more.” Everyone’s afraid of frying just as they’re afraid of salt, but if you fry right, the fried food will absorb very little of the cooking oil and will amaze you with its texture and moisture. When you keep the oil hot and remove the food before it’s overcooked, the food’s exterior (usually a batter or breading) won’t absorb the fat in which it’s being cooked. The keys to frying are simple:
* Use a huge pot of oil or fill your electric fryer. The more oil you use, the faster the oil temperature will rebound after you add your cold food, which can easily knock a small pot of oil down fifty degrees.
* Use a frying or candy thermometer and monitor it. Too low and you’ll get greasy, undercooked food. Too hot and you’ll get smoke and eventually fire.
* Keep an eye on the food. If it stops sizzling or emitting steam, it’s probably starting to overcook. The force of the food’s internal moisture escaping as steam prevents oil from seeping in, but when the steam stops escaping, the food is dry and will start to suck up oil from the pot.
* Use a fire extinguisher. Duh.

6. Brine. I’ve preached the brining gospel here plenty of times, but here it is in condensed form: Brine lean meats before cooking them. That includes most pork, chicken, and turkey, and you can brine shrimp as well. Brining infuses water and some salt into the meat, helping prevent the meat from drying out as it cooks, which lean meat does tend to do, especially if you like to push your pork past medium.

7. Using proper heat. You need to learn your stove over the course of many meals to understand where “medium-high” really lies. On medium-high, a chicken breast seared in a hot pan in a little bit of oil should develop a nice brown exterior in under three minutes, but more than two. A chicken cutlet (sliced and/or pounded to ¼” thick) should cook through in two minutes per side, and a properly seasoned piece of salmon should have a slightly crispy brown crust in about two and a half minutes. Cooking over heat set too high will result in uneven cooking, with a raw interior and a perfectly-cooked exterior, or a perfectly-cooked interior surrounded by leather.

When the recipe says “simmer,” that doesn’t mean “boil the shit out of it.” Turn the heat down until the bubbles are small and aren’t coming too quickly. When the recipe says “sweat,” don’t sauté. Stir the cut aromatics in the hot oil, sprinkle with salt to draw out moisture, and let the mixture sit over medium to medium-low heat for six or seven minutes until the onions are translucent and golden.

When pan-frying, use plenty of oil and add the food when the oil starts to shimmer, which may mean starting on high or medium-high heat and backing it off as the oil heats. If it smokes, it’s too hot – and yes, I know ATK likes to talk about wisps of smoke, but they’re wrong, because smoke means the oil is breaking down. You might consider a splatter-screen if you pan-fry often, and always remember to turn the gas off or take the pan off the burner before adding any alcohol to a hot pan. (I have, in fact, ignited a few pans, and am fortunate that alcohol burns at a pretty low temperature.)

Remember that long cooking times typically mean indirect heat. On a grill, that means putting the food on a part of the grate that isn’t directly over the heat source.

8. Buy better ingredients. It depresses me to walk into the local Stop and Shop and see the sad excuses for fruits and vegetables offered in that section of the store, especially since a mile away is one of the best farmstands in the area (Wilson Farms), selling superior-quality produce at comparable prices. Food is no different than anything else in life: garbage in, garbage out. If you start with bad produce, no amount of cooking skill or seasoning is going to create a great salad or pie or contorno. Some basic rules of thumb when shopping for fresh produce, meats, fish, and cheeses:
* Produce should be brightly colored and, with a few exceptions like basil, stored in a cool area. Leafy things shouldn’t be wilted or have brown spots, and if any part of a leaf has started to break down into a slightly oozy green substance, then it’s gone bad. Solid fruits and vegetables should be heavy for their sizes, indicating the presence of plenty of moisture in the fruit. Buy whole when you can, as it lasts longer and avoids risk of cross-contamination at the store. Carrots with the leaf stems on top are better than trimmed carrots, which are better than peeled carrots, which are better than the fake “baby carrots” sold in bags (nothing more than peeled, cut full-sized carrots tumbled to give them smooth, rounded exteriors). Fresh beats frozen, and the only acceptable foods in cans are beans and, if the quality is high enough, pears, which are nearly impossible to get out of season because they store and travel poorly.
* Fish shouldn’t smell fishy; if it does, it has already gone bad, and no amount of seasoning will get rid of that taste. Don’t be afraid to ask the monger to let you smell the fish before you buy it. Fish should be stored on ice, and the monger should provide ice for the trip home if you ask for it. In warm weather, bring a small cooler to the store. Color is not an indicator of quality in salmon, since salmon farms can alter the fish’s coloring by changing the feed. Shellfish can make you extremely sick if it’s not handled properly, and salmon can even carry a rare but dangerous parasite that’s killed in cooking.
* Meats and chicken are easier to pick out, as long as they’re stored properly in a cold case and there’s good turnover at the meat counter. As with produce, the more it’s been handled, the greater the risk of cross-contamination, and the less you know about what’s in the product. If you’ve got a good knife, especially a sharp boning knife, buy whole chickens and butcher them yourself; you’ll get more bang for your buck and can save the bones (and wings, if like me you find them to be a waste of time for eating) to make stock. Remember that seasoned or marinated meats rob you of your chance to give the meat a visual inspection before buying. When buying steak, more marbling will mean a more tender end product (and higher cost, but it’s worth it). And try duck. Not only is the meat delicious, if you render the subcutaneous fat, you get one of the greatest cooking fats on the planet.
* The flavor of cheese is entirely determined by what the cow, goat, sheep, or water buffalo eats, so that “Parmesan” cheese from Argentina or Wisconsin isn’t going to rival the Parmiggiano-Reggiano from Italy. Buy cheeses from the right places, looking for an official seal if it’s from Europe (Denominación de Origen from Spain, for example). A good cheesemonger should be willing to give you a taste of any cheese you want, and be willing to cut to any size you’d like. Buy in small quantities that you expect to use in a few days; soft cheeses go bad quickly, hard cheeses can become too hard to eat out of hand, and all cheeses are prone to absorbing other flavors in the fridge. Wrap your cheese in waxed paper to give it some room to breathe, then plastic wrap to keep off flavors out. Shredded or grated cheese is halfway to stale when you buy it, and any cheese can be dismantled quickly with the use of a good box grater.

9. Sauce. I’m not suggesting that you whip up a hollandaise every time you poach an egg or steam some asparagus, but any time you sear meat in a pan, you’re halfway to a pan sauce. Deglaze the pan with some wine, beer, chicken stock, or chicken broth, then return to the pan to the heat and simmer most of the liquid away, scraping the pan bottom to dissolve the brown bits (known as fond) into the liquid as it thickens. Boost the sauce with a little cognac, some chopped shallot, some Dijon mustard, and chopped fresh herbs (or a pinch of dried); you can add a few tablespoons of heavy cream if you’d like, or even full-fat coconut milk. Remove from the heat and mount it with two tablespoons of cold unsalted butter, cut into small cubes, and season with salt and pepper. I’ve also shown you how easy it is to make a beurre blanc, which is great on fish, white-meat chicken, and many vegetables. Hoisin is one of the few jarred sauces I’ll use, but you can build a simple pseudo-Asian sauce with soy sauce, honey, a pinch of dried chili flakes, some cornstarch dissolved in water (which will thicken the sauce when heated, so add this to the pan with the vegetables still in it), and a shot of toasted sesame oil right before serving. You can get a lot of extra mileage out of a simple dish like sear-roasted fish or steamed broccoli by saucing it properly.

10. Play with your food. I know it’s trite advice, but it’s true. You may not feel up to experimenting right away, but there are little things even the novice cook can do, like altering or adding herbs and/or spices to dishes, or adding extra flavors when the food is off the heat, like the toasted sesame oil I mentioned above or some toasted sesame seeds, or a squeeze of fresh lemon juice, or some slivered toasted almonds or ground peanuts. There are, unfortunately, some bad combinations of foods, but it won’t take you long to understand what foods play nicely together to encourage you to experiment more, until you get to the point where you can devise your own recipes from scratch or recreate something you ate in a restaurant just by figuring out the ingredients as you eat it.

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→ May 6, 2008
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New Orleans.

I had a quick trip through New Orleans to see Shooter Hunt Рreport to be posted on ESPN.com at some point this week Рand hit two of my favorite spots in one of my favorite eating cities in America, the Acme Oyster House and CDM (Caf̩ du Monde).

Acme Oyster House is a pseudo-dive – looks like a dive, but really isn’t one, and it pulls in its fair share of tourists because it’s in the French Quarter just off Bourbon Street. Their Cajun fare is excellent and fairly predictable, although I was a little disappointed in their chicken and andouille gumbo on this visit because the roux was slightly overcooked, giving the gumbo a very slightly burned taste underneath all of the other flavors. I’ve had the same thing happen to me when making gumbo at home, so I know it’s an easy thing to mess up, but I go to New Orleans to get perfect gumbo. The shrimp po’ boy, on the other hand, was perfect. A po’ boy is a sandwich served on French bread that’s been hollowed out to hold the fried shellfish products with which it’s stuffed. I ordered mine “dressed,” meaning it has lettuce, tomatoes, and mayonnaise on it, with pickle slices on the side. It’s hard to mess it up as long as the shrimp are fried properly, and these were.

After the game, I went to the 24-hour landmark CDM for beignets and coffee. I intended to have one beignet, which is a fried dumpling made of yeast-based dough (a zeppole to the Italians and New Yorkers in the audience), served under a blanket of confectioner’s sugar. Since you can’t order just one – one order equals three beignets – I got three, and ate all three. They’re beyond good – crispy exterior, light airy interior, with that slightly nutty flavor that properly fried dough has. The coffee is New Orleans-style, where the coffee is mixed with ground chicory root, and served au lait. It’s weak as hell, and I never drink much, but a few sips with the beignets just make for a more authentic experience. Or something.

I walked around the French Quarter a bit to walk off the calories, and I was surprised at how little it had changed from my last visit, December of 2003, pre-Katrina. I’m sure the reality is that it changed, and then changed back, but it appears that significant resources went into restoring the French Quarter to its maximum touristy goodness. That’s a good thing, since tourists are money and New Orleans has long depended on tourism and conferences for its economy, but at the same time, I wonder about areas of the city that didn’t fare as well in the storm and are probably still in need of rebuilding. The one facet of the French Quarter that had changed was security: There were police everywhere, and extra security guards in my hotel, the Marriott on Canal Street, where baseball held its winter meetings in 2003. It’s a shame that it’s necessary, but tourists are indeed money, and dead tourists are bad for business.

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