Top crap
Media Dish: Reality Bites/LATimes/September 2007
“Top Chef” is the jackhammer of the food world. Even with earplugs, it is impossible to tune out.
The reality show in which cooks compete in various staged challenges is already in its third season on the Bravo channel. But even for someone who might be fortunate enough not to know a remote from a microwave, there is no escape: “Top Chef” is also covered relentlessly — exhaustively, even — on blogs and websites and online discussion boards.
Time to gild the zucchini
Los Angeles Times/August 2007
All I was hoping for at lunch in the Nice-Cote d’Azur airport was something slightly better than the chicken or “beef” Air France would undoubtedly be shoveling out. What I got was a good table with a view of the sea (and runway), an even better rosé and the best idea for late summer cooking. Read the rest of this entry »
Pensive deviled eggs? Irate gazpacho?
Los Angeles Times/August 2007
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Hugo Liu says he hates recipes; the whole concept seems hopelessly antiquated to a guy who starts cooking by sniffing spices and thinking. Yet he has invented a revolutionary way of developing them. Read the rest of this entry »
Wine of the moment? ‘Le Picpoul’
Los Angeles Times/July 2007
MONTPELLIER, France — The four women at a nearby table at lunch in the Medieval quarter here looked as if they had tottered in straight out of a Gallic translation of “Sex and the City”: made up, dressed up and hoping for something more than salads. Any silly resemblance ended with their drinks, though, because the waitress was delivering not a tray of cosmos but a bottle of what she cheerily announced as “Le Picpoul.” Read the rest of this entry »
Immersion blenders: Crazy kitchen power
Los Angeles Times/June 2007
Not long ago I watched a chef visiting from Italy make a showstopper of a dish, little pasta “hats” stuffed with beets, drizzled with a three-cheese sauce and garnished with twists of beet greens and cubes of beet gelée. He blazed right through this elaborate production not only with knives and whisks but with an immersion blender: puréeing Gorgonzola, mascarpone and Roquefort cheeses with cream for the airy sauce, dissolving gelatin in beet juice, whizzing beet juice and soy sauce into the inevitable foam.
And it was not the first such performance I had seen lately. The immersion blender has become so essential to chefs it could almost be considered a third hand, and not just because of the molecular craze. No other tool seems to work such immediate magic in emulsifying, aerating, puréeing and whipping. Read the rest of this entry »