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 has to be clever to construct pizza crust that is mushy on the inside, crispy outside, under baked, absent of yeast flavor and salt, pale and ugly. But whoever designed this recipe shows himself to be an evil genius of pizza couture in the way he managed to make the pizza smell like a CINNAMON DONUT!

Yes, you read that correctly, the crust has something in it that makes it smell like cinnamon. And no, it wasn’t an accident, I searched (googled) for posts about PEACE O PIZZA (apparently it’s a franchise operation) and found others who made the same comment.

Peace O Pizza makes the frozen stuff in the supermarket and public school cafeteria pizza look like high art.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Critic’s Notebook – The Cult of the Artisanal Pizza – NYTimes.com

Recently they have tried to convince us that hamburgers are worthy of endless permutations, concomitant criticism and marketing buzz. Now it looks like the hipsters of the restaurant establishment are gearing up to turn pizza into an “it” food. Yawn. What is going to be next, hot dogs or salad perhaps?

Of course I know that these trends involving gussied up low food cost products are fueled by economic necessity. And I certainly have nothing but respect for the people who make the stuff well. It is the sturm und drang of the critics and consumers that I find so tedious in its sameness from fad to fad.

Critic’s Notebook – The Cult of the Artisanal Pizza

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Coffee roasting made dope or fly

If you have a hard time believing that there is anything fly or dope, about roasting coffee this promotional video for Doma Cofee Roasting Company, might just change your mind. Doma Coffee Roasting Company is owned and operated by Terry Patano, who, even though I’ve never met him, I regard as something of a homeboy or “homie” in the street parlance of my particular hood.

Seriously now, I first tried Terry’s coffee last year when he graciously sent some samples to my crib. Then I tried it again when he sent more and now that he sells the stuff online my wife, who gets goofy when she drinks the stuff, orders it about once a month. It’s certainly the best coffee I’ve ever been able to buy on a regular basis. No Starbuck’s style blast furnace treatment here. Every bean is roasted just enough to acheived a complex and robust nose, and no more.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

3 cents on the Kuma dollar

by Mike Pardus

I’m not even going to try to recall the avalanche of plates that consumed us on Saturday night. Suffice it to say that King has his chops DOWN. All of the basics are solid – braised things are meltingly tender, fried things hot and crisp, reductions unctuous and powerfully flavored, dressings and dips balanced and suited to their accompaniments. I think the highlights for me were the steamed edamame ( so simple, but perfectly cooked and dressed with such a light touch of Lime/thai basil oil that there was debate at our end of the table as to weather it was there at all, or just in our imaginations) and the braised-then-grilled baby octopus – a difficult protein to do properly. Tender but chewy, soft interior-crisp outside, briny and spicy…yum.

I have some photos of various plates to upload later. One warning – when you go looking for Kuma Inn don’t be put off by its exterior. The Blade Runner chic entrance is just the way it should be and says, in effect,

No “Tourists” Allowed

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Me, a gavone?

Call me whatever you like, but I don’t think you can call me a gavone unless one day of virtual filter feeding in New York City is enough to make me a glutton. Wow, did I ever eat and drink a lot last Saturday during a gastronomic ramble through NYC’s Chinatown and Little Italy. Last year’s tour of Little India in Flushing, NY did not involve one 1/3 of the calories that I ingested during this masticatathon.

It began with a desultory train ride in a dirty grey Amtrak train through Philadelphia and some of the most miserable hyper-industrialized landscape in North America, viz. the marshlands (Really called The Meadowlands; but my standards of literacy will not permit me to refer to a swamp as a meadow .) of New Jersey. It was not until the train slid into the tunnel that leads into Penn Station that my mood blew up over what I was about to do.

See, I love Manhattan. When I’m in Manhattan my heart beat slows down and my mind goes into a state where it is perfectly alert to its surroundings yet it daydreams like mad. It tosses up images of what the city looked like when I was a kid or what it imagined it looked like when my grandparents lived there as children. It even throws in images of things I read in books and saw in movies. The city becomes a split screen experience where now plays opposite to the imagined past and the living walk side by side with ghosts.

My brain did not start amusing itself by populating the city in earnest with ghosts until I was in my ‘30’s and was working on 34th Street at the New York Restaurant School. I taught classes at night that ended around 11PM. It was during my walks up to Grand Central Station that my brain started to embroider the present with the past in earnest. Now it happens every time I’m in there, and I love it like salt. But whoa, I’m running way off topic!

I checked into my hotel in Union Square (Way cool digs!) around noon, grabbed a cup of coffee at a Starbucks where some guy with red spots on the back of his neck was milling around asking people if they’d seen the bottle of detergent that had been given to him by the “Health Department” (more like “Brain Police”). Coffee-in-hand and heart-in-mouth hoping that the guy wouldn’t accuse me of stealing his soap, I made my way down to the corner of Mott and Pell St. to meet up with my crew.

Mike Pardus had called me to say that he and Megan Jessee were going to be a few minutes late because their GPS –probably cold cocked by the same stupid inducing radio waves that caused the recent economic crisis- got confused in the Financial District. But Krishnendu Ray and David Livert were already there munching on ice cold perfectly ripe lychee fruits. Kris had a big bag of them and man, they tasted great as we stood there sweltering in the heat of the midday sun. My hands soon became sticky from the sugar and I got a little annoyed when no one would let me wipe them on their clothes. (I mean: WTF?) Then out of the crowd Pardus and Megan appeared, then Anne E. Mcbride materialized and we were off.

It was pure coincidence that we met Pardus’ friend and collaborator Wendy Chan with her family as we were deciding whether or not to go into Aji Ichiban to ogle and sample its snack food. Instead the Chans proposed that we join them for lunch at Ping for dim sum (see slide show). After Ping we stumbled into Aji Ichiban and rummaged through bins of sweet squid, tiny crispy and sweet crabs and a whole lot of stuff that would make my kids recoil in horror at the mere thought that anyone would eat such stuff (What else is surprising thank you?)

After Aji Ichiban the afternoon was a blur until we stopped at Oriental Garden for beer and a big bowl of whole stir fried shrimp (Don’t worry, the eyes only look cool, they don’t have much taste.). Then a hurried walk to Bahn Mi Saigon Bakery and another Vietnamese sandwich shop so that Pardus could check their Banh Mi against the version he makes at CIA (the geek was actually taking notes), a chop stick shop (YunHong Chopstick Shop) with chop sticks that made me sad that I eat with a knife and fork unless I’m eating Chinese or Japanese food (which is not very often)and a tea shop whose name I forgot long before I will ever forget the beauty of its design.

We stumbled into a fierce and beautiful downpour as we made our way east past not much of interest except a 40 plus story cobalt blue glass apartment building that was the most beautiful ugly piece of architecture I’ve seen in a long time until we reached our final stop, Kuma Inn on Ludlow Street where we had a reservation for dinner at 7:00PM.

Of course by this time I felt like eating like I always feel about prostate exams. However, I had very good reasons to overcome my queasiness over swallowing another dose of food. King Phojanakong, the chef and owner of Kuma Inn had been my student in Introduction to Gastronomy in 1996 and again after he returned from his internship at Restaurant Daniel for my class in Advanced Culinary Principles (aka Experimental) class. He was also in Mike Pardus’ charcuterie class. In other words the chef was one of us.

I’m going to leave it to Mike Pardus to explain what the meal was like and how King is doing in what is probably the most competitive restaurant market in the world. Suffice it to say here that the food is highly idiosyncratic to King’s acculturation as a Thai-Pilipino, native New Yorker who is highly trained in French culinary technique, design and philosophy. I came away gob smacked by the experience.

But how could I not have been? I was in the city I love more than almost any other place on the planet with great friends eating and drinking with a former student (Who doesn’t seem to hate me!) and -wait a minute, I almost forgot to mention Neil Guillen, another former student was working there too- you know, I may not be a gavone for food, but I wish I could eat that kind of experience all day every day. Sigh.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

In Case You Were Wondering

I despise the term “foodie” as it applies to people who, like me, center their lives around food and cooking. Because it ends with the diminutive suffix “ie,” foodie trivializes a habit of mind and craft that very many of us take seriously enough to try to earn our living by it. Foodie also symbolically lumps, professional chefs, food historians and Food Network fans into a silly sounding category similar to the one inhabited by obsessive fans of Star Trek (trekies) rock bands (groupies) and dope (junkies).

However, even though I think the word demeans everyone who uses it and everyone it applies to, I use it anyway because I know of no other term in popular speech that works as well to describe the mostly loosely affiliated network of people who spend most of their time thinking through food and cooking.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Bread Heads

These are religious (Buddhist) icons but still, don’t you think you could totally nail Ruhlman’s BLT challenge with one of these? I’d pry open a mouth, stuff the bacon lettuce and tomato in there, maybe pipe some mayo…

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Bad Game

Padma Lakshmi, game show referee

For once I will not mince words and say exactly how I feel about television shows that present cooking as a competitive sport: I hate them, they suck.

Top Chef, Iron Chef, The Next Iron Chef can all metaphorically burn in Hell’s Kitchen and their ashes scattered across the field that holds the bones of similarly inane cooking shows like The Galloping Gourmet and Emeril’s Kitchen.

There are lots of reasons why I don’t like the idea of “cooking as contest”. But the bottom line is I believe that cooking for a medal or prize money is contrary to what professional cooking is fundamentally about.

In my view, the baseline purpose of all professional cooking is to provide nutrition to others in an aesthetically pleasing form. If high income is generated along the way, or one becomes famous for the rare aesthetic value of her work, all the better, but entertainment (which is the primary purpose of all of these shows that pit chefs against each other) should never be thought of as anything more than an unintended coincidence.

Of course, the environment within a kitchen can be competitive, and it can be healthy for cooks to compete with one another to see who can do the best work in the least amount of time. But I think it is not only silly to turn a process whose fundamental purpose is to keep others alive and edified in art into the culinary equivalent of a boxing match, it also degrades the profession.

Surgeons and dentists are charged with a job that is similar to that of professional cooks and understand that their fundamental job is to attend to the health of their patients in manner that assures their survival and sense of “well being.” Yet there is no reality TV show where teams of heart surgeons compete against a clock to replace heart valves or a contest where dentists perform root canals while being judged on the aesthetic value of their work.

I’m sure there are many reasons why there is nothing on TV called “Iron Thoracic Surgeon” or “Hell’s Dental Chair,” and one of them has to be that most doctors understand that participating in such things is undignified and would lower the public’s opinion of their profession. So why are there so many chefs willing to risk appearing as if the most important thing in the world was winning a game?

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Like F-ing Natural Artisan Mumbo Jumbo

It may be only children and pedants who believe that once a word is coded into more than one dictionary its meaning becomes fixed and immutable. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Consider the “f-word” which can mean virtually anything depending upon the context in which it is used. The word “like” is equally adaptive and, in the mouth of a skilled user, can indicate a simile (as in “I’m like wasted.”), affinity or affection (“You like what?”) indecision (“I was like what?”) or nothing at all (“Like, you know.”).

Likewise, in the world of commercially produced food, there are many words and whose applied meaning have little to do with their formal definitions. Take the word artisan, for example, which normally indicates a person who is skilled in a trade and works largely with his hands and hand tools.

Nowadays, most supermarket bakeries sell artisan bread that is made in factories. The flour for the bread is ground in automated mills, sifted by mechanical sifters, mixed in dough mixers and baked in automated ovens. If it is hard to imagine a role for an artisan in the process of making thousands of loaves of bread a day, it’s only because you don’t know that the baking industry has expanded the definition of artisan to include a minimum-wage worker with only enough skill to cut and slash a loaf of bread in exactly the same way 10,000 times a day.

People who sell chickens and turkeys can label them as fresh even though their poultry has been frozen because they have a different understanding of definition of the meaning of the word frozen. According the National Turkey Federation

“evidence exists that (freezing) occurs somewhere between 0 and 10 degrees F, but the precise temperature eludes us.”

It doesn’t matter at all that meat is mostly water and that the public understands that water is widely defined as freezing at 32 degrees Fahrenheit (okay, the water in chicken contains solutes so it’s freeze point is probably around 28 degrees) because the poultry industry understands that language is mutable, and either assumes that the public understands that it knows which versions of the words fresh and frozen it is using or, to take a more cynical view, is too dumb to know that it’s being duped.

Forgetting for the moment that since the fundamental definition of the word natural means “present in or produced by nature” only foods that are still in their native habitat, or are not in anyway added to or reduced by human hands or their machines can truly be said to be natural, it is possible to see a broad range of natural food products that appear to be natural in ways that would give nature pause to wonder if it knew what it was about. Tyson and other chicken producers sell “100 percent Natural” chicken breasts that are injected with salt water and seaweed extract. Since salt water and seaweed are natural products, adding them to chicken does not, according to Tyson and the USDA, render the chicken unnatural anymore than smoking tobacco or injecting narcotics turns a natural born fool into a manufactured dope.

Even highly processed foods like ketchup and frozen fish sticks can be labeled natural as long as they don’t contain anything that was synthesized in a laboratory. According to the Code of Federal Regulations a natural additive is:

“the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice …”

Well, I suppose that enzymolysis is natural enough.

Of course, unless you believe that you are being harmed by eating fresh natural artisan chicken that is not fresh, not produced by an artisan and not natural, there is no reason to rise up in arms about the loosey-goosey ways that food companies are using your language. On the other hand, it is like (f-word) annoying when like, think you are being played for a like, dupe.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Vintage TV: David Susskind and Six NY Restaurateurs

Watch five once-famous restaurateurs and Sirio Maccione talk about what is takes to make a great restaurant. You will notice that none of them are chefs and recall that it was not that long ago that chefs became the principal public representatives of the restaurant business. Before chefs, it was the “suits” who ruled the roost -and still do in many cases. However nowadays, if a suit is in charge of the house he puts the chef out front because he knows the public likes us better.

Why the public prefers to see chefs out front is not something that I pretend to understand. It is not in any way obvious to me that cooks are, as a species of worker, intrinsically more or less entertaining than a matre d’ hotel or a busboy for that matter.

This is from Hulu.com which seeds in short commercials.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.