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gerald

Perilla - Harold Dieterle's New Restaurant

Perilla, a member of the mint family, also known as Shiso, is wildly popular in East and Southeast Asian cuisine. It's also the namesake of Harold Dieterle's new restaurant. There's a website up and running, but it's barebones, not giving too much away except for Dieterle's name and Alicia Nosenzo's of Beanstalk Restaurants: Perilla.

edit 5/6/07: The Top Chef Blog has posted an inside look at the newly opened Perilla.

Another Rachel Ray Show

You either love her or you hate her. Food Network's favorite girl next door, with the help of her fairy godmother Oprah, is moving on up to ABC for her own talk show. From rachelrayshow.com:

Rachael Ray, TV's most down-to-earth and relatable star launches her brand new, one-hour daily syndicated series, appropriately named "Rachael Ray" on September 18. The show will be an exciting and unpredictable hour of fun that celebrates the can-do spirit in every person and gives viewers the essentials for whole-hearted living.

Host Rachael Ray will present simple solutions for everyday issues offering viewers unique take-away information as well as entertaining ways to squeeze just a little more out of life every day.

Showcasing Rachael's signature warmth, energy and her boundless curiosity for all aspects of life, the series will engage viewers and in-studio audiences with a personal, hands-on, celebratory approach to life the Rachael Ray way. While Rachael will continue to heat up the kitchen with her creative signature dishes, she will also take her audience beyond to explore all facets of life and good living.


There will be unpredictable escapades that will open eyes, encourage smiles and portray life in new, interesting ways. There will be no boundaries, no guidelines and no topics untouched. "Rachael Ray" will focus on the good of everyday people and celebrate life in its most authentic forms. Viewers will discover something new, learn something fun and realize that life just doesn't have to be that hard because everybody needs a little R and R.

Drowned Panna Cotta - Bar Pitti

I recently had this panna cotta, Italian for "cooked cream", at Bar Pitti in the West Village. It was sublime. The panna cotta was rich and creamy without too heavy a note of sweetness and it was drowned in chocolate sauce. The picture evoked this comment on flickr: "SWEET BABY JESUS! (chomp)."

Panna Cotta is a custard that's held together with gelatin instead of egg whites, so in a way it's a little healthier, relatively speaking, for you than say, Creme Caramel. The basic recipe is very neutral, so it's able to take on to a myriad of variations like Clotilde's Strawberry Panna Cotta or even a savory Goat Cheese and Basil one from delicious:days.

Be cafeful about making it with too little fat or too much gelatin. In an effort to healthen one up a little, I tried making it using skim milk and over-compensating the loss of fat with more gelatin. It was disgusting. I ended up with a dense block of opaque white jello that went straight into the trash.

Vanilla Panna Cotta
3/4 tsp. gelatin
500 ml heavy cream
75 g sugar
1/2 vanilla bean, scraped or 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
pinch of salt

Bar Pitti
268 6th Ave
Phone: (212) 982-3300

Family Meal - Lime-marinated Flank Steak

On Wednesday, my group rotated to Family Meal and it was the best time I think I've had in school ever. After a while, doing super classic French recipes started getting monotonous and working family meal was a nice change since we got to choose our own, more contemporary, recipes. The main course was a lime-marinated flank steak that we found in Staff Meals at Chanterelle by David Waltuck, served with Spanish rice, spicy black beans, and grilled corn on the cob slathered in a spicy mayonnaise.


Working the station was awesome. I almost started to forget the feeling of actually cook for people instead of just doing the same recipes over and over, honing our technique and timing, only to throw the plate away later. My group worked well together. We all decided to get to class a little earlier than usual since we had no idea of what to expect of the day and wanted to get a head start on prep.

While one person took care of making the marinade, I started the rice and beans, and the other two started trimming all the steaks. Afer the meat had soaked about 30 minutes, I grilled off all 60 pounds of it. Working the grill was fun, even through all the smoke inhalation and heat. It was also one of the first times I started gettting a feel of what rare, medium rare, and medium feels like. It's hard to tell when you're only doing 1 or 2 steaks, but when you make 60 of them, feeling for doneness gets really easy.

There's only one that that's really important when working Family Meal, besides the glory of trying to outdo the other teams, is that dinner is served exactly at 8:30. At 8:30PM, a line starts forming at the beginning of the buffet with people, plates in hand, who'll stare you down with hungry eyes until they can get some food onto their plates. Our timing was spot-on and fortnuately we didn't have to worry about that at all.

I think dinner was a hit. Unless they were just being polite, everyone seemed to like the steak, corn, and beans. It's probably because we were cayenne-happy and made sure they all packed spice. The slathered corn was the first to go and we went through 7 hotel pans worth of steak and 2 humongous rondeaus (pots that are as big as "cauldrons") of spicy black beans.

Here are the basic guidelines of our recipes:

Flank Steak Marinade
Lime Juice
Fish Sauce
Soy Sauce
Red Chilli Flakes
Minced Garlic

Black Beans
2 Cans of Black beans (with liquid)
1 Can of Black beans, strained and processed (used as a thickening agent)
Minced Onion, Minced Garlic, Minced Jalapeno
Salt and Cayenne Pepper to taste

Slathered for the Grilled Corn
1 Part Sour Cream
3 Parts Mayonnaise
Paprika, Cayenne, Grated Parmesan Cheese to taste


After dinner was served and we had cleaned up, we started prepping our meal for Friday by making a dry rub for 6 pork shoulders that we'll be using for pulled-pork sandwiches.

On the Shelf: Kitchen Sense

Here's something new for the site that I've been putting off for a long time - a book review. Since moving to New York my collection of cookbooks and books about food has grown exponentially. Some of them I like a lot. Some of them a waste of money that I haven't cracked open more than once. Maybe these blurbs will help to keep your collection of good ones growing and bad ones small.

Here's the first book (and it comes with a disclaimer: the publisher mailed it to me): Kitchen Sense: More Than 600 Recipes to Make You a Great Home Cook. The book is by Mitchell Davis, a professor at the NYU Food Studies program as well as a director for the James Beard Foundation.

My one gripe with the book is that there are no pictures or diagrams of anything, which is really a necessity for tips on quartering or trussing chickens. However, although you won't find any captivating or mouth-watering pictures of food porn, the book makes up for it by being quite informative and a good general reference manual. Alongside the hundreds of basic and approachable recipes are useful notes about "Advance Prep", "Leftovers", and "Variations". Also, every couple pages are sections called "Kitchen Sense" with random, but practical tips like:

Mailing baked goods (CBBP and EBBP'ers: this one's for you!)
Making your own vanilla extract and vanilla sugar
Fixing broken mayonnaise
Cutting fresh corn kernels off the cob

The book is very comprehensive: covering appetizers, soups, and salads, all the way to poultry, meats, sauces, and desserts. It also covers all cuisines. It's actually pretty similar to How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman except it's half as thick and half as heavy, making it more manageable to work with while cooking.

Pastry Curse

Salty Lemon Souffle Tarts
I think my group has been vexed. In the last two sessions of being at the Patissiere station everything that could've gone wrong went wrong. The fridge was broken so it screwed up our puff pastry, our genoise sunk, and there was salt mysteriously at the bottom of the sugar bins. We didn't even notice we had butter-and-"sugared" our tartlet pans with salt until someone came into our room asking us if anything we made was salty. He came in to replace the salt that had been put in the sugar shaker used for coffee.

I'm glad we're done with Pastry. Next week we're in the Family Meal station meaning we're cooking dinner for the staff and students, 150 people total. Everyone says this is the funnest station and I hope it's true. We'll be making lime-marinated flank steak, Spanish rice, grilled corn on the cob with chili and mayo, and black beans on Wednesday. At the same time, we're going to start smoking some pork shoulder that we plan on using for pulled-pork sandwiches on Friday.

A Little Taste of Memphis in Madison Square Park

Seeing the hungry crowds of pork-fanatics jammed in the park with smokers fired up billowing hickory and mesquite into the breeze you would think that you were at Memphis in May, but looking up and seeing the Empire State Building reminds you that you're somewhere else - the Big Apple BBQ Block Party. It's the fourth time it's been thrown and it gets bigger and bigger every year. With 10 of the best pitmasters in the nation, including Memphis in May Champion Bob Gibson, the crowds waited in lines that zigged and zagged for a $7 taste of some BBQ and a little cup of a side.

Big Bob Gibson's (Alabama): Pulled Pork Sandwich and Spicy Coleslaw

Mitchell's BBQ (North Carolina): Chopped Whole Hog Sandwich and Coleslaw

17th St BBQ/Memphis Championship Bar and Grill (Las Vegas): Baby Back Ribs and Baked Beans

My favorites were the spicy coleslaw spiked with a healthy splashing of hot sauce and the chopped whole hog sandwiches that were tangy and moistened with vinegar and had hidden surprise crunchy bits of skin in every bite.

After having lived in Memphis for 7 months, I'm a sucker for dry rub pork babybacks and pulled pork shoulder served with Wonderbread. Brisket and chicken, take a hike! For one of the best BBQs in the Tri-State area without having to wait for the 5th Annual BABBQBP, leave Manhattan and make your way to the Tropicana in Altantic City where you'll find a satellite location of Corky's BBQ from Memphis.

Know a good place to get dry rub babybacks in NYC? Drop me a tip!

Corky's BBQ
Tropicana Hotel
Brighton & Boardwalk
Atlantic City, NJ 08401

The 4th Annual Big Apple BBQ Block Party
Madison Square Park

Beer for Bags

The Crumpler Beer 4 Bags 2006 promotion.