onions.
If you've been in a professional kitchen, you might've heard this order being placed:
"two containers micro arugula, a case of organic toybox squash, three cases of the t&d wiley bloomsdale spinach....and a bag of onions. Yellow, whatever's cheapest."
Onions. What's the big deal? They're onions for fuck's sake. Well, what do you use for the base of most of your cooking? That pristine rabbit jus you're planning on making--are you going to just throw anything in there?
Throughout my cooking career, i've cut many many onions, garlic cloves, and shallots. My thoughts were always on my cuts being uniform, not wasting, and working quickly. At Nopa, for the first time the emphasis was on the oxidation of the aliums--something rarely talked about. Ruhlman writes about Grant Achatz cutting his own shallots--how important doing so was to him...so what about how you store them?
eating.
places the misses and I have eaten at recently:
serpentine. meh. feels cold in there, and I dont like to eat strawberries with chicken liver mousse.
spruce. good bar menu. expensive. funny getting gougeres and petit fours when all you really want is a burger.
fish and farm. a note to the boys in that kitchen: salt makes food taste good.
coco500. it's still awesome.
anchor and hope. cold white wine + oysters + hot day = happy
magnolia. people don't seem that into it. i go almost every week.
ducca. spoiled is when you turn your nose up at burrata and salumi plates.
notes:
478 covers. dang.
blanching fries to order can be difficult.
these comics are amazing: y the last man, ex machina, the sword, girls, grendel, dmz, runaways.
i miss collecting records.
i hate best buy.
one day someone will bridge the gap between new cookery techniques and rustic cooking, and it will be good.
serpentine. meh. feels cold in there, and I dont like to eat strawberries with chicken liver mousse.
spruce. good bar menu. expensive. funny getting gougeres and petit fours when all you really want is a burger.
fish and farm. a note to the boys in that kitchen: salt makes food taste good.
coco500. it's still awesome.
anchor and hope. cold white wine + oysters + hot day = happy
magnolia. people don't seem that into it. i go almost every week.
ducca. spoiled is when you turn your nose up at burrata and salumi plates.
notes:
478 covers. dang.
blanching fries to order can be difficult.
these comics are amazing: y the last man, ex machina, the sword, girls, grendel, dmz, runaways.
i miss collecting records.
i hate best buy.
one day someone will bridge the gap between new cookery techniques and rustic cooking, and it will be good.
2 comments:
Love this post!! In her book Vegetables Alice Waters talks about how garlic oxidizes and begins to turn acrid after about 15 minutes of exposure to air.
That point has always stuck with me and one day I was treated to a cooking "class" in a local kitchen where the sous chef showed us how they prep garlic -- by bashing it with a knife (so its juices spill out everywhere) or using a Cuisinart. Then they put it all into a big plastic bin.
Guess where I don't eat? :)
I like Cosentino's approach to garlic. Whenever I go to Incanto it's almost always sliced paper-thin crosswise, as if with a mandolin.
cheers. Good points all around. Poor Jason. Have to check our Brandon at Magnolia. Guess who assisted the top soigne chef for a bachelor party. it was fun.
"one day someone will bridge the gap between new cookery techniques and rustic cooking, and it will be good."
Make it happen dood. Let's keep talking about it.
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