Category: Food and Drink

How to cook blackened fish

Grind fresh white pepper and black pepper in equal parts, and add about three times as much red chili powder, alternatively red cayenne pepper.  Put in fresh thyme, basil, and oregano, each in parts roughly equal to the white or black pepper.  Pour melted butter over your uncooked fish.  Rub in the spices.  Cook the fish rapidly over high heat, as high as you can manage, in butter, hoping to create a crust by searing the spices.  It is yummy even if you fail to create the crust, squeeze on lemon at the end.

Le problème du pain

Bread is one of the great pleasures of Paris.  The croissants melt in your mouth, the tarts have a crust that is to die for and when you break a baguette the bloom crackles perfectly and yet the inside is moist and chewy.  Moreover, I’m not talking about the best bread in Paris (which is likely the best in the world), I’m talking about the bread that you can find in any of thousands of neighborhood boulangeries and patisseries.  Why is the bread in Paris better than any that I can find in Washington?

Two answers come quickly to mind.  First, competition is intense.  Every neighborhood has at least half a dozen shops to buy bread.  Second, the French are used to high quality and will reject anything of low quality so tourists benefit from the informed local demanders.

I find both of these explanations wanting.  We do have artisanal bread in the United States and take a look at your local supermarket, competition on bread quality is intense.  At my local supermarket, there are dozens of different breads all of which compete with an on-premise bakery.

Furthermore, isn’t bread making about knowledge? – i.e. the paradigmatic example of a public good and one that is supposed to diffuse easily around the globe.  How difficult can it be to follow the recipe?  (I know, that is my point.) 

Comments are open if you have some ideas about why bread isn’t nearly as good in the United States as in Paris.  But you might also have guessed that I have a larger point in mind.

Le problème du pain is this – if it’s difficult to spread the art of bread making from Paris to Washington then how can we ever hope to spread democracy from Washington to Baghdad?

Lunch with Tyrone

I have had lunch with Tyrone many times.  He is never invited.  Tyrone is devious, untrustworthy and worst of all, brilliant.  It often take days to sort out the fallacies, sophistries, and half-truths that invade my mind after lunch with Tyrone.  Sometimes it takes much longer.   He makes my head hurt.  Even when Tyrone is not at lunch, I worry.  Tyrone does not always announce himself.  Maybe he really was at lunch…I told you he was devious.

Please do not encourage Tyrone.   He is a bad, bad, man.

Baltimore pit beef barbecue

Baltimore, of all places, has its own barbecue tradition, called "pit beef."  Imagine slow cooking directed toward the end of a perfect thinly-sliced roast beef sandwich.  It is an artisanal version of Roy Rogers, with excellent french fries to boot.  It is best served rare with [sic] horseradish. ("Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.")  Chaps is one place to try; Big Al’s is another.  Both are first-rate for people-watching.  Did I mention that the entire tradition appears to have started on a dilapidated industrial highway, set among whorehouses and sex shops?  The style can be traced by to 1987, and it has spread to Camden Yards as well. 

Mexico fact of the day

1.2 billion tortillas are consumed each day [TC: I believe that includes the tortillas consumed by pigs; surely the counting occurs on the production end].

That is from Lonely Planet Blue List, one of the most fun books for browsing and lists I have encountered.  Imagine a travel provocateur in print form dedicated to helping you overcome your status quo biases.  Highly recommended, and did you know that Serbia is right now one of the best countries in the world to visit?

Why don’t Asian restaurants have good desserts?

I’ll let you all bicker as to whether the stylized fact is true only in the USA, or across the world.  I don’t know if the following explanation is true, but finally I have heard an explanation which might plausibly be true:

…many traditional desserts require a great deal of work to make, at least when compared to stir-frying some shreds of this and that together.  Most restaurateurs are simply unwilling to go to the trouble, particularly since the profit margin on desserts is generally smaller than that on the main dishes.  The same phenomenon occurs in other ethnic restaurants.  In the old country, desserts and snack foods are made in specialized shops where the volume keeps labor costs down [TC: and freshness up…btw, the emphasis is added].

That is from A. Zee’s Swallowing Clouds: A Playful Journey Through Chinese Culture, Language, and Culture.  The author also suggests that the Chinese prefer to eat desserts apart from regular mealtimes; for some reason this is supposed to lower the quality of restaurant-based desserts.  I prefer the first explanation.  Indian sweet shops are fantastic, but U.S.-based Indian restaurants have only so-so desserts.  Comments are open, I am eager to hear your opinions…

The best sentence I read yesterday, a continuing series

Jess tells me that enthusiasm is more important than definitive knowledge, that many diners simply want a server to help them get excited about something.

The article had two good runner-up sentences:

"Some people are interested in having the experience of being disappointed," Tina says.

And:

"People [in restaurants] are hungry, and then they’re drinking," he noted. "Two of the worst states that people can be in."

The article, which concerns a restaurant critic working for a week as a waiter, is interesting and humorous throughout.

How I stop myself from eating too much dark chocolate

I buy dark chocolate when I should not.  But I buy for the immediate moment.  I have no problem buying less than my impulsive self ideally might desire.  I run out of the stuff quickly, even though when I run out part of me wishes I had bought more (this is similar to "gamma discounting.")

I need only make fewer trips to the store.  Each time I go, I should fill the cart with milk, grapefruit juice, and cereal, so I need not return for a long time.  Fewer store trips mean fewer chances to be weak.  Being myopic in my weakness of will, I won’t much adjust using larger chocolate inventories.

Chocolate below 70 percent is not worth my while.

The best solution to my self-constraint problem is to tell my wife where the chocolate is hidden.

Sadly, I know she does not like the 85 percent.

Why was British food so bad for so long?

English cuisine was historically bad in the cities because England urbanised fast and hard in advance of good transport and good food storage – hence corned beef, pickled everything, and mushy tinned peas. After that it’s a matter of lack-of-demand creating lack-of-supply – until recently. Multi-ethnic British cities are a fantastic place to find food these days (it ain’t the 50s any more, folks).

That is from reader comments on Brad DeLong’s blog, do have opinions on why British food was so bad?

How to drink less (more?)

Pour into a tall, vertical glass:

If you pour champagne into a tall, slender glass, you’ll probably serve yourself less than if you pour it into a short, fat glass. But the human mind plays tricks, so you’ll almost surely think it’s the other way around.

Brian Wansink, professor of marketing, applied economics and nutritional science at Cornell University, has spent years studying how the shape of containers influences our consumption, and he has weighed in with a new study just in time for New Year’s celebrations.

In the study, published in the current issue of the British Medical Journal, Wansink and Koert van lttersum, assistant professor of marketing at Georgia Institute of Technology, demonstrate that even professional bartenders get the amount wrong much of the time, although their expertise improves with experience.

Three separate studies yielded similar conclusions, regardless of the beverage. Teenagers concerned about their health poured less fruit juice when they were given tall, slender glasses than when they were given short, squat tumblers, although they believed the opposite was true.

What is at work here is how we measure quantities in the mind’s eye, Wansink says. We tend to rely more on a vertical than a horizontal measurement, so it appears at first that a taller glass holds more than a shorter one, even if the short glass is wider. "Elongation," to use the researchers’ word, is the trickster here.

Here is the full story, and thanks to www.geekpress.com for the pointer.