Pickled Onions

Get a gander of my latest adventure in lactic acid fermentation: pickled (or more precisely “pickling”) onions.
I started this project last Friday morning as I pulled into the farm and immediately began yanking onions out of the onion field adjacent to the parking lot. After about an hour of yanking, I rinsed them off [...]

In Pickle

Like a lot of you, I’ve been bitten by the “make-pickles” bug this season.
Between an endogenous lust for fermented things (no idea how it happened) , the superabundance of my garden during this summer of wet and mild weather, and an ever-escalating awareness that anything worth eating is not that hard to make -I [...]

Near Proof

Finding a slice of pizza in my refrigerator 6 days after it was brought into my house is not quite proof that it was the worst pizza we have ever come in contact with (See Consumer Advisory Warning) , but it’s damned close. I’ve never seen left over pizza last more than a [...]

On the Need to Know

I never thought I did an especially good job of leading my students at The Culinary Institute of America to understand that knowing why food behaves in the ways that it does when we manipulate it, is just as important as knowing how to cook. I think at best I probably reinforced the belief [...]

Consumer Advisory Warning

The Worst Pizza I’ve Ever Tried to Eat
Last night I had pizza that was so bad that I could not believe how bad it was. There was nothing redeeming about, nothing. The sauce was sweet and thin, the cheese was typical pizza shop quality mozzarella (tasteless and rubbery) but the kicker was the crust.
One [...]

Evidence of Genius: Exhibit 1

Not that anyone has ever had any reason to doubt the depth and breath of my intelligence. But it can’t hurt to publish a reminder of how miraculously smart I am to warn off those who might try to get over on me during one of those moments when I pretend to be in a [...]

Curing salt for pancetta

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Crawling

by Mike Pardus*
Bob and I and a few other foodies started getting together a couple of years ago for occasional (mostly biannual) binges of food, drink, and discussion.
This year we decided crawl around Lower Manhattan-Chinatown. Armed with a map of the area and a list of well recommended street stalls, markets, dives and restaurants. Six [...]

I’m a bloody rock star!

I’ve wanted to be a rock star ever since I first saw real live rock stars on the stage at the Fillmore East in, I think, 1969. I was 13 when I saw Albert King, Chuck Berry and The Who tearing it up a what was arguably one of the two best venues for rock [...]

Give me some skin

It’s a little embarrassing to admit this, but there was a time in the early 1980’s when I used to pull the skin off of chicken to make stock. I seem to recall thinking that removing the skin would make it easier to degrease which, of course, is true. However, skin is [...]