Category: food

Only the Best

I have a love/hate relationship with the Times Union’s big Best Of thing that they do every year.

I love to read it, but it’s a terrible way to determine that something is “best.” It relies on voting that is often skewed by the nominees — and in some cases, what these winners are “best” at is drumming up votes.

The paper supports this campaigning by pitching advertising to the nominees where they’ll encourage people to vote for them.  If you have money for marketing, you have a better chance at being named best? That doesn’t sound fair to me.

But let’s talk about Kay’s Pizza for a second.

I’ve been to Kay’s — and yes, it was alright — but there is no way on God’s green earth that Kay’s is the best pizza in the area. No! Their pan style pizzas are heavily topped in a way that the crust does not support. What you get is a pizza that’s difficult to eat with your hands and requires silverware — and that’s a dealbreaker. Sorry, but this is New York and that’s the pizza of the provinces.

Do they have a devoted clientele? Yes. Is it a fun and busy place steeped in tradition? Of course. Do those who choose Kay’s think it’s great? Obviously. Is it the best pizza in the area? No fucking way.

Nevertheless, year after year, Kay’s comes out on top. Look, pizza debates are far too numerous (and tedious) and we don’t need another one. And I’m not going to imply that people in Rensselaer County wouldn’t know a good pizza from a hole in the ground. No, I’d never say that. And I won’t suggest that we shouldn’t trust the people who voted for Steve McLaughlin to vote for the best pizza. That would be a cheap shot.

But I will say this: Get online and cast your vote. My choices would be De Fazio’s or Romos, but it’s up to you. You have until March 3 to help stop the madness.

Turkey Time (Again)

I don’t usually repost things, but the holidays are about doing the same things over and over again. This one is from 10 years ago:

Oh, you poor ignorant bastard.

That’s what I thought at 7am when I saw the guy behind me at Price Chopper with a huge frozen turkey. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was sort of screwed, and the turkey sitting in his cart should probably already have been thawing for two days.

Truth is, you can cook a frozen turkey, at least according to the Iowa State University Extension. The problem with this is that dark meat always takes longer than the breast meat — and being frozen will make things worse — so there’s absolutely no way each will be edible. Which do you want to be cooked? It’s sort of like a Thanksgiving version of Sophie’s Choice — but I would probably not describe it that way to my guests while we’re sitting down to eat.

I was not there to buy a turkey, though, I was there for sweet potatoes — because it’s time to make my Albany Eye Sweet Potato Crunch. We’re not hosting Thanksgiving this year, but we’re bringing this to my sister’s. I’m also dropping off a tray of it at a local shelter so some less fortunate folks will enjoy it on Thanksgiving.

This recipe, whose roots are in the deep South, is one of the most decadent things you can get away with serving as a main dish. It’s creamy, fluffy, and sweet — and you should be prepared to fight over the leftovers.

Three notes: don’t ever, ever, ever use canned sweet potatoes. Also, I favor baking the sweet potatoes rather than boiling. Where I’m sitting right now I can smell them in my oven. And of course, double the recipe.

Finally, if you’re frying a turkey please try not to burn your fu**ing house down. Happy Thanksgiving.

The Right Vey to Do Things

Boasting is poor form  (and frankly, I don’t have much to brag about) but I’ll make an exception on the soda bread.

Over the years my Irish soda bread has won awards at a local competition held by Albany’s Irish American Heritage Museum. People often ask me what my secret is and I never know what to tell them — but this year I actually gave someone this useful advice: “You must vey your ingredients.”

They looked at me puzzled. “Vey my ingredients?” Yes, always vey them.

A little background.

A number of years ago I took a day-long baking class at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park. The instructor was one of the school’s professors in their baking and pastry arts program who was from Germany. Not to traffic in stereotypes, but he had a Teutonic commitment to precision when baking, and pounded in our heads that real bakers use a scales and only fools use measuring cups.

“Vey your ingredients,” he said. “ALWAYS vey your ingredients.

Hmmm. What about water?

“Vauter? You vey it. It’s an ingredient, and vee vey the ingredients.”

You get the idea.

Today I weigh my ingredients when baking, even though it sometimes hurts my brain to convert cups and ounces to grams. One exception I make is with very small amounts that are measured in teaspoons and tablespoons; kitchen scales can be flakey, and a tiny error with baking soda can mean soapy tasting bread or cookies.

But I do have a confession: In veak moments, I don’t always vey my vauter.

Punching Down

You might say that Times Union food critic Susie Davisdson Powell did not enjoy the lamb-stuffed poblano peppers at Farmhouse Tap and Tavern.

In a single paragraph she compares them to a ball tucked in a sock, a comet with a meatball for a head, and — finally — a dick. She also adds that they’re hard to cut and undercooked.

One example would have worked, but she went with three. That’s commitment!

Davidson Powell recently ravaged Farmhouse Tap in a scathing review that was more of a bitter attack against the restaurant than a balanced critique. It was gleefully malicious, oozing anger and sarcasm with every tart observation and clever turn of phrase. But that’s her thing, isn’t it? Being nasty is much more entertaining than being fair.

It was about as bad as a local restaurant review gets — and it made me wonder why it’s OK for a big media company like the Times Union to take down a small local eatery?

Davidson Powell defends restaurant reviews, lumping them in with other arts criticism, like that for theatre or music productions. Bullshit, I say. A restaurant may be an expression of someone’s creative energy, but first and foremost it’s a business, and your review has the potential to ruin someone’s livelihood. The Times Union doesn’t review a car dealers or furniture stores, so what makes restaurants fair game?

Yes, I know — restaurant reviews are a staple of newspaper journalism. People are obsessed with content about food and can’t get enough. Six straight hours of Chopped anyone?

Now, full disclosure here: I’ve reviewed restaurants on Yelp — and that’s totally different. My lone opinion doesn’t hold the weight of a major media outlet, and in forums like Yelp and Trip Advisor, the view of one person is balanced by the other contributors. Not the same as taking almost a full page in the Sunday paper to fuck with someone. And this isn’t the New York Times going after Guy Fieri, this is people with power stomping on people without any.

Oh, one last thing: Farmhouse Tap is owned by the woman who runs 518 Foodies, a website that focuses on the local dining scene. Huh. You can draw your own conclusions, but something about this stinks like last week’s fish.

Relish Redux

Editor’s note: I rarely re-print stuff, but I heard Susan Stamberg going on about her relish this morning, and felt it was worth dusting off this ten-year-old post.

Yes, it's really that color. If you listen to NPR, you may be familiar with the Thanksgiving tradition of Susan Stamberg sharing her mother-in-law’s cranberry relish recipe. She’s been sharing it and sharing it. Sharing it since 1972, in fact. That’s a long time, even in NPR years. Ira Glass was just 13-years-old when she started in with the relish.

I actually served the crazy pink mess of cranberry, onion, sour cream, sugar, and horseradish one Thanksgiving. While I sort of liked its tart-tangy-sweet flavor, nobody else touched it. Maybe it was the color. Maybe that it looks more like a desert than a side dish. Maybe they were not Morning Edition listeners.

Anyway, I thought I would give it one more shot and taste test it on my family before turkey day. Reviews were mixed.

My 22-year-old son said it was “unique and interesting” and said he’d like to see it on the holiday table. My 15-year-old called it “weird.” My wife said that it was “too oniony.”

And oniony it was. The trouble with onions is that they can vary wildly in their pungency, so even the small onion called for in this recipe can pack an unexpected wallop. I’d recommend going easy — or even using a sweet onion to temper the effect.

Based on my unscientific sample, maybe half the people might like this stuff — but since it only takes a couple of minutes to prepare, why not? Be prepared, though: the relish will signal you as an NPR geek. Depending on your family, they will either see you as worldly and enlightened or an elitist snob. But as they say, you can choose your radio station, but you can’t choose your family.

Mama Stamberg’s Cranberry Relish Recipe

Fuggetaboutit

I was about to peek in the oven when I noticed them, the raisins on the counter that were supposed to be inside my soda bread. Oh, shit.

This was in the middle of a busy morning of baking for the annual soda bread contest at the Irish American Heritage Museum. This loaf, one of two for the “family style” competition would not do. I needed to start over.

My wife was like, what? How could you forget the raisins?

I didn’t have a good answer for that one — and I hustled into mixing my ingredients.

Everything was under control — until later in the morning when I got a sick feeling about my traditional loaf. I peered in the oven and saw that things were not right. I forget to add the baking soda to the soda bread.

These traditional loaves only have four ingredients — flour, buttermilk, salt and baking soda — and without the baking soda, you have something that’s inedible, like a big white hockey puck. What kind of idiot leaves out an ingredient that’s right there in the name?

This kind of idiot.

The wife eyed me suspiciously. Was he finally losing his shit, she must have thought, giving in to the early effects of dementia?

I assured her that I was not incompetent — or senile — and pushed ahead. Even with the delays, my loaves made it into the contest with five minutes to spare.

They say all’s well that ends well, and after all the trouble, my family style bread won second place. Nevertheless, I’m beginning to think that I may need to keep better track of what’s going on while cooking, the way I always go to the grocery store with a list these days. When I remember to bring it.

Rolling Boil

Dominick Purnomo grew up around the work, stress, and pain that comes with carrying the weight of a restaurant. His parents, Chef Yono & Donna Purnomo are local legends in the food world, so he saw the business at its best too, with all of its triumph and joy. It’s a tough game. Restaurants are a place of great successes and epic failures. 

Dominick’s parents may have tried to steer him away, but he jumped in with both feet.

On Thursday, he tweeted a copy of a letter he was sending the Times Union, setting off a skirmish on social media where food and journalism collided.

You can read Susie Davidson Powell’s review here. To say she hated Boil Shack is understating things, for her review wasn’t just negative, it was gleefully nasty.

It’s fair to say that some people find Powell’s reviews annoying. When she started at the Times Union, her pieces were thick with Britishisms, so full of pip-pip-cheerio nonsense that they sounded like parody. Not so much now. Thank God for editors.

The president has taught us that Twitter is a great place to show how thin skinned you are, so Purnomo’s post drew a tart response from several prominent TU folks, like managing editor Casey Seiler.

Maybe Purnomo will get a polite and reasonable response to his letter from a senior manager at the paper, but that time isn’t now.

I don’t completely agree with Dominick Purnomo on this. A restaurant can have a bad night and fix it the next day, but your bad night may have ruined somebody’s special occasion. Or maybe you took the $100 bucks they put away for a nice dinner and you didn’t deliver. There’s no taking that back. 

As for Susie Davidson Powell,  her schtick is unfair and unprofessional. She may have been right, but she was not just.

Big Bird

Maybe I’m just getting old, but this year’s turkey was a gigantic pain in the ass.

Clocking in at more than 25 pounds, it was a huge and unwieldy bird that was challenging every step of the way. Next time, I think I’d be better off cooking two smaller turkeys. It would be more work in some regards, but after wrestling with the mega-brid, it’s worth considering.

Did I mention the stuffing incident?

When I was taking the turkey out of the stove, the roasting pan slipped and dropped onto the oven rack. It didn’t fall more than a couple of inches, but the impact was enough to launch a load of stuffing straight into the air. Some of it ended up in my hair, some on the floor, and some was on the cabinet doors.

My son walked into the kitchen. “What’s that up there?”

Holy crap — several clumps of stuffing were clinging to the ceiling.

Overall, it was not the easiest day, but the trouble was worth it. The turkey was spectacular — probably the best I’ve ever cooked — but more importantly, it was a great crowd of friends and family and everyone had a wonderful time. Spirits were soaring on our all-American holiday, soaring almost as high as the stuffing.

The Inspector Calls

In Ballston Spa, a seven-year-old ran afoul of state regulators by operating a lemonade stand without a permit. An overzealous state health inspector made him close up shop after alleged complaints by fair vendors — and America erupted in outrage.

Years ago, I myself had a brush with the the food police.

I was in charge of the hot dog stand at our Cub Scout pack’s annual pinewood derby race. It was nothing fancy: dirty water dogs, potato chips, slices of pizza — you’ve seen these ad hoc food concessions at youth sports and school events. You’ve probably eaten a lot of that food, too.

A woman approached. “Do you have a permit?”

Excuse me, for what?

“I do food inspections at the health department. Most people don’t know this, but you need a permit to serve food –  and if you don’t have a permit, I could shut you down.”

I laughed. Her son was one of the scouts and I figured she was just pulling my leg.

“I suppose we should be wearing gloves, too, right?”

She looked around. “Yes, actually, you should.”

OK, this woman’s not kidding. For a moment I considered trying to bribe her with a free hot dog, but thought better.

I thanked her and said we’d look into getting a permit next year. We never did.

Even though we were not sanctioned by the county or state to serve food, we managed not to kill anyone with our cheap hot dogs. And thank god for that. Poisoning an entire Cub Scout pack is not something you’d get over easily.

Rules are rules, and stupid rules are still rules. But it seems like the one rule we really need is the one about common sense. There’s no regulating that.