Why do wedding cakes usually suck?

I've probably had a good slice of wedding cake, but I can't recall it. My wife and I went to some length to make sure ours was better than average - we ordered carrot cake w/ cream cheese icing, figuring that we'd have better odds if we could avoid entirely the words "butter cream" and "genoise" - but, in the event, it was disappointing. Don't take this personally,but in all likelihood, your wedding cake sucked, too.

But why? I'm about to spend all day on an airplane in order to attend a wedding, so I have vested interest in the answer. On the face of it, the problem is not a budget constraint: We Americans spend, by most counts, between $3 and $5 per slice on our wedding cakes. A slice of cake from a quality baker generally costs a bit more than that, but I've had plenty of very good slices of cake for that sort of price, and that is by the slice. Clearly there are economies of scale to cakes: The cost of the ingredients may be roughly proportional to the number of servings, and perhaps even declining, because you use less frosting per unit of cake as the cake gets larger (butter costs more than flour, and ratio of surface area to volume should fall with size); and the larger input, labor, should clearly exhibit increasing returns to scale (it takes no more time to bake 2 layers than 1).

So if we spend enough to get a good cake, why do so often fail to do so?

In praise of street food

What could be a more proximal kitchen, at least from the consumer's perspective, than street food? In my own cooking, I generally think about the proximity of my primitive food sources to my kitchen, but the cart warrior offers another perspective: He (or she) cooks it fresh, all day long, right in front of you, not in some glass-walled, Michelin-starred kitchen, but on the sidewalk. I don't know about you, but I reckon whipping up massive quantities of super tasty food, on a sidewalk in midtown Manhattan, without giving your customers food poisoning, with Mobius-like repetitive consistency, is one of the great culinary feats of our times. I mean, seriously, are you kidding me? The best of the best of the street food community - not to be confused with the ones serving stale pretzels and three-day-old boiled hot dogs, I mean the ones preparing food of real quality, fast, cheap, and on the street - is, if you'll excuse the language, the effing bomb.

This particular thread occurred to me because the finalists for the Vendy - the biggest award in the street food hierarchy, the moral equivalent of a third Michelin star or a food-tops rating in Zagat's - were just announced. If you're not familiar with NYC street food, and you get the opportunity, I highly recommend working off of NY Mag's list of the Concrete Elite (it is to the undying credit of the city and the vendors that this list, while dated, remains virtually unchanged by either name, location, or qualitative scale). Seriously, the Vendys are fine, but why bother buying tickets and fighting the throngs on Governor's Island? If you had the choice, would you rather have Thomas Keller cooking for you in his own kitchen at the French Laundry, or at some kitschy demo for the Food Network? I say, go to the carts. You can do unfathomable arterial damage well inside of a 10-block radius in midtown, so why mess with it?

I have not had the pleasure of eating at any of this year's finalists, but I was in NYC last month, and I made a point of visiting what I take to be The Best Halal/Gyro In The Known Universe, the guys on the southwest corner of 53rd St and 6th Ave. There are dozens of impostors, and many within a one-block radius, so if you go, be sure to check the corner; you'll know when you're there, because the line is longer than the competition by a thoroughly justifiable order of magnitude. What other gyro-style stand has its own Wikipedia page? Who else make lamb-on-rice so good that you can get knifed for cutting in line (yes, it really happened). Where else have the customers taken to referring to the white sauce as "crack sauce"? Trust me, it's worth it.

I'm sure the other guys (they are almost exclusively guys, sorry) have their own merits, but if I were to do the street-meat tour, and I faced either temporal or gastrointestinal constraints, I would - in addition to the Halal gurus above - make sure to stop by Rolf's Hallo Berlin sausage cart at 54th and 5th (between the Democracy Special and the Dictator Special, you can't go wrong) as well as Mohammed Rahman's Kwik Meal at 45th and 6th (the only street chef I know of who trained at the Russian Tea Room and marinates cubes of lamb - not pressed into gyros, fresh cubes - in his own concoction of papaya juice to tenderize it - be sure to try it with a side of his freaky, very hot, not-quite-Middle-Eastern green jalapeno chili sauce).

Pie for Breakfast

Championship Brunch: pie, coffee, Mimosa

Come-clean: This is not my pie. In point of fact, I don't really do sweets and, with the notable exception of pizza, I rarely bake. Suffice it to say that we all have our place in the kitchen, and mine is not at the pastry station.

Which is by way of saying how exceedingly fortunate I am to have married a woman who can bake her butt off, because just saying the word "pie" makes me happy. Seriously, until you've had one of my wife's pies, your gastronomic bucket list will remain at least partially incomplete. She has no weak suit: My birthday happily coincides with our own lemon crop, so Lemon Meringue has always been my personal favorite. But they are all exceptional: Chocolate Pudding (filled with a homemade dark chocolate custard), Apple (which I otherwise don't even eat), and - one of the Himalayan peaks of the pie-baking landscape - Mixed Berry, defined by whatever local berries are currently at their peak, and what I was lucky enough to have for breakfast this past Sunday.

What makes a great pie? The trivially obvious: A great crust (consisting, as I understand it, of all of three ingredients, flour, fat and salt), and a great filling (which can be relatively complex, as in puddings, as well as incredibly simple, as in most fruits). It is this very simplicity which belies the difficulty in achieving pie-greatness:

Just-filled with Middleton Farms' berries

• Consisting of almost nothing while demanding great attention to small technical details, a great crust offers the cook boundless opportunity to screw things up; the crust must remain structurally sound in the oven, it must cook evenly, and it must not only be flaky - both light and rich, crunchy and soft - but it should exhibit the same flakiness on the bottom as it does on the top. When it comes to crusts, technique is everything.
• Fillings are similarly unforgiving, if for different reasons: When it comes to filling a pie, there is nowhere to hide. No amount of sugar, lemon juice, and stove-top wizardry will impart flavor to bland berries, texture to mealy apples, or the scent of a perfectly ripe Meyer to bitter lemon juice. When it comes to fillings, there is no way around the imperative to start with great fruit. 

My advice, as a non-participant in the pie kitchen, is this: First, buy the best fruit you possibly can. Almost any fruit can make a great pie, but no great pie can be made from fruit of poor quality. (Please don't list for me the virtues of instant pudding mixes. They have their place, but not in homemade pie. If you are going to roll out your own crust, then by all means, cook your own custard.) Second, read up on pie crusts, paying particularly close attention to the technicalities of temperature and speed (see McGee or Corriher, for instance - and sorry for the AMZN plug, I don't care where you buy it, the link is just to get you the title).

And last, but most certainly not least, always save a slice for breakfast.

Mac-n-Cheese, v1.0

Mac-n-Cheese I: Ziti regate w/ provolone & parmigiano

OK, it's Monday, enough of the booze chatter. We promised to engage in the pursuit of mac-n-cheese perfection, and here in the Proximal Kitchen, we don't take such promises lightly.

If you caught my previous post on mac-n-cheese, despair not yet another trip by the culinary pulpit, because today's post - our introductory foray into the mac-n-cheese sweepstakes - is all business. I have little doubt that my previous wax-on, wax-off meanderings will return to this thread, but not now.

I've been reading up on mac-n-cheese. Unsurprisingly, the Internet produces information overload: Lots of great-sounding recipes, a far larger number of suspect ones, and all sorts of claims and factoids, both interesting and banal, about the history of this profoundly American dish (Thomas Jefferson apparently loved to serve a baked macaroni and cheese). My first realization: I will need to focus and compartmentalize this project. I am not going to try every conceivable variation; nor do I think I have to, because I have a pretty good idea about what I want the final result to be, and it doesn't include broccoli, brie, or artificially-low fat substitutions. I also believe quite strongly that you can train your palate to 'think', to envision the character of a recipe, and the likelihood of its success, before you ever make it.

Having now read a goodly number of varations of, and hypotheses concerning, macaroni and cheese recipes, I would separate the key decision variables as follows:

1. Unadorned or All Dressed Up? You can make a compelling case for mixing in diced ham or broccoli, for a crispy shallot topping, for any number of additions that raise the apparent sophistication of the dish. I don't object to any of them, so long as they serve a purpose. But none of them are essential, and that is what I'm after; howsoever wonderful bacon may be, the soul of mac-n-cheese does not depend on it, and neither will our recipes. (I'm undecided on breadcrumbs; my intuition says "no", but I'm kind of a sucker for crumbly toppings, and I'm reserving the right to try one variation.)
2. Sauce or Just Cheese? Most of the classic recipes start with some version of a bechamel sauce, and then build a cheese sauce from there - essentially, a variation on the classic Mornay. But not everyone agrees; there are those who argue that flour has no place in a true mac-n-cheese, and that the cheese alone should be sufficient to bind the pasta. Like the question of adornment, I don't need to cook to answer this one: I will never get the texture and depth of flavor I want - both crusty, gooey, and creamy all at the same time, with layers and layers of flavor permeating into the noodles  - without some sort of a mother sauce in which to embed background flavors, to mix and bind the cheeses, and to fill in the the spaces between the layers of pasta. All our recipes will start with a basic white sauce based on the classic bechamel.
3. Just Cheddar or Something Else? Most of the recipes I read, and particularly those of the more "classic" variety, depend heavily, if not entirely, on cheddar cheese. I'm unconvinced, and this is where I expect to invest the most time, because, quite obviously, the dish will ultimately fail without the right mixture of cheeses. Furthermore, when I think about the classic cheese sauces, typically some variation on Mornay, I tend to think of Swiss, Alsatian, and Italian cheeses, more than I do cheddar (both Larousse and Michel Roux, in his essential "Sauces", agree). Cheddar also presents some textural challenges, as I find that it has a proclivity for breaking (the fats separate during cooking) and for turning grainy. For all these reasons, I'm going to try Swiss- (broadly construed), Italian-, and cheddar-styled cheeses before taking my final stand. 
4. Choice of Pasta. It may seem oxymoronic to debate the shape of pasta for a dish that is named after one particular shape, but in fact the Italian root - maccherone - is used to refer to most any tube-shaped pasta cut into short, regular lengths. The more important feature, it seems to me, is how particular shapes hold the sauce and whether they maintain their integrity during the second cooking (baking in the sauce after boiling). Also important is how a particular shape sets up because - no disrespect to the oozing-pile approach - I'd prefer to serve a structurally coherent slice of the final product without it spilling all over the plate.

A quick inventory of the cheese drawer yields some aged Provolone, a chunk of Parmigiano Reggiano, but no real cheddar or Swissy-type stuff. The pasta shelf has a few options, most of them (spaghetti, capellini, and a variation on the corkscrew the kids are fond of) inappropriate to the task at hand. I spy some ziti regate, an over-sized, grooved version of penne, which sounds like a good test-case of a larger, straighter tube than th elbow-macaroni benchmark, and also strikes me as fine in its own right. As regular followers already know, I depend heavily on leftovers (indeed, I take the creative and productive use of what is already sitting around to be a badge of honor - it saves time and money, it reduces waste, and it forces me to think like a cook), and thus my first attempt at mac-n-cheese is born of a Provolone-based white sauce over some big, fat pasta tubes.

Mac-n-Cheese I

1. Cook the pasta: Boil about a 1/2 lb of dried, large-ish tubular pasta, preferably grooved to help grab on to the sauce, such as ziti or rigatoni, in a large pot of salted water (I tend to cook a little extra and then adjust the final quantity of pasta to match the final volume of sauce). Cook only until just barely al dente - the pasta will continue to cook in the oven, and you don't want it turning to mush. In practice, assuming you are using an Italian boxed pasta that has been packaged for American distribution, this will generally mean you want to pull it off the burner about a minute before the low end of the recommended range (and certainly no later than said lower end). While you're at it, pre-heat the oven to 350F.
2. While the pasta is boiling, start the sauce: Make 1/4 cup of blonde roux by cooking 3 tablespoons of flour in 3 tablespoons of butter over medium-low heat. You want to cook the flour, but whisk it around and watch the heat so as not to let it color. Scald 2 cups of whole milk or even cream (although, honestly, I used 2% and it still came out fine) add it slowly to the roux, whisking constantly to avoid lumps (if it gets lumpy, your milk was likely not hot enough, or you added it too quickly; you can always strain it out if that happens). You have what is now a bechamel sauce, but you need to season it - add a pinch of freshly grated nutmeg (maybe 1/8th of a teaspoon - not too much), white pepper (black pepper will screw up the color - this isn't sausage gravy, it's a white mac-n-cheese), and salt. Don't skimp on the salt; it's important to season each layer of the dish, or the final result will be under-seasoned and bland. Bring to a gentle boil and cook until the sauce thickens up and you no longer taste a raw, floury taste. Don't forget to take the pasta off the heat and drain it while this is going on!
3. Stir in the cheeses, starting with about a half-pound of shredded, aged Provolone (slices will melt OK as well). I would not use Mozzarella (not the right texture for melting, or flavor profile, really), but a 50/50 blend of Provolone and Fontina would probably work very well. Once the Provolone has melted completely and the sauce is hot, turn off the heat and stir in most of a gently packed cup of finely grated Parmigiano Reggiano, either by itself or mixed with a little Pecorino Romano for extra bite; reserve a small handful. Check the final sauce for seasoning and adjust, if necessary.
4. Combine the pasta and the cheese sauce: Transfer most of the pasta back to the pot from which it came, or to a large mixing bowl (glass better than metal, because everything will still be quite hot), pour most of the sauce over the pasta, and gently fold them together to avoid damaging the pasta. Reserve a small amount of pasta and sauce so that you can adjust the quantities, if necessary. Make sure to distribute the sauce uniformly in order to coat all the noodles. The stuff should look like almost as much sauce as pasta, with every noodle heavily coated in a thick slathering of the sauce.
5. Bake the pasta: Gently fill a small, buttered casserole dish, pie plate, or earthenware crock, pouring the pasta and sauce down in layers; delicately compress the pasta as you go in order to ensure it is basically solid and of a uniform density throughout. Pour any remaining sauce over the top and then sprinkle with the reserved cheeses and dot with butter. Transfer to the bottom rack of a 350-degree (F) oven for about 20 minutes; it will be done when the top and sides are bubbling and just starting to brown. Turn the oven to broil - this will brown the top and create a bubbly, cheesy crust. But watch it carefully, now is not the time to do anything else! (I never, not ever, turn the broiler on without setting  a timer for a minute or two.)
6. Let it set: Do not attempt to taste or serve for at least 10 minutes - 15-20 is probably better (I'm assuming your kitchen is pretty warm; if not, adjust accordingly). Like any baked pasta, you need to give it time to cool and bind up with some structural integrity; it will also save you and your family from a blistering case of pizza-mouth. Alternatively, if you're worried about the top getting cold, or timing it for service, remove it from the oven when it's done, but before broiling it, let it set, and then return to the broiler just before you're ready to serve it.

My family had the version pictured above for dinner last night, and found it very satisfying. It was a little too sharp for the kids, but I knew going in that this would be a more adult version (the same basic recipe with just a bit blander cheese, and a little less of it, would be more kid-friendly). However, this was only an experiment, and I'll definitely change some things next time:

• I'm not sure the large pasta shape was ideal; next time, I'll either use a smaller shape like penne, or the classic elbow macaroni. 
• The cheeses had great flavor, but were a little one-dimensional, so I'm going to move into the Swissy or Cheddary families next, although I can definitely envision a cheese blend including some of what was used here (particularly the final sprinkling of Parmigiano). Also, the texture was good, but not perfect - the final sauce, out of the oven, would ideally be a bit smoother and more consistent. 
• I think I would raise the proportion of cheese in the sauce in order to make it slightly less like a cream sauce and slightly more chew in texture.

In short, this is very much worth making, but stay tuned for future upgrades.

Lavender Gimlets (sort of)

I'm not a big drinker of cocktails in general, and I'm even less of a drinker of gin. That being said, cocktails clearly have their place: Less so with food, and more before - or after, or occasionally instead of; as an alternative to beer, when the weather or environs don't seem conducive to wine; and certainly, as a welcome to guests who have just endured the Bay Area's northbound assault on wine country traffic on the first Saturday in August, a category which counted my wife's brother and his family as victims this past Saturday. Gin, for its part, is still rarely my favorite, but I'm being slowly one over by two things: First, I've had some exceptional gin cocktails, most recently a crisp, refreshing, and generally excellent Cucumber Collins, with just the right balance of aromatic gin, citrus, sweetness and acidity, at the new SpoonBar here in town - in point of fact, the Cuke Collins was so good, I skipped the other 8 pages of the bar menu and ordered another straightaway; second, gin does exceptional things with lime juice and, as a rule, I can't get enough limes in my cocktails. I cannot tell a lie, I do in fact have a lime tree in the yard.

Thus, with guests on the road, the fog burning off, and a small vat of lavender simple syrup in the fridge, I tooled around with the idea of a lavender-infused Gimlet. If you like odd factoids from history, spend a few minutes reading about the history of the Gimlet at the Thinking of Drinking blog, For our purposes, the salient facts are that (a) the Gimlet, named eponymously for a British naval surgeon in the 1860s, Dr. Gimlette, was invented as a means to get sailors in the Royal Navy their ration of lime juice, and thereby to prevent scurvy; (b) the historical use of the Rose's Lime Cordial dates to the same period, when Lauchlan Rose invented Rose's Lime as a means of preserving the citrus juice for long journeys without the use of alcohol. (One can infer the history of the derogative "Limey" easily enough from there.) You have to love the British sense of irony: Mr. Rose patents a means of preserving lime juice for sailors without the use of alcohol, and a Royal Naval surgeon simultaneously invents a cocktail with which to get sailors to drink it.

Long and sundry is the list of arguments and citations to the effect that a Gimlet must contain Rose's, but I can't agree, and I think the argument stops here: The modern-day Rose's is no longer the same stuff as it was in 1867 (it now includes natural flavors other than lime, artificial preservatives, and - in the US, where I would buy mine - high fructose corn syrup in lieu of sugar). The other thing about Rose's is, well, it's kind of disgusting.

Since Rose's is basically just sweetened lime juice with preservatives, and since I'm not subject to the uncertainties of 19th century refrigeration technology, I figured, how hard can it be to make a proper lime cordial from fresh lime juice? Equal parts lavender simple syrup and freshly squeezed lime juice (which I passed through a strainer for seeds and pulp), and voila, a fresh, homemade, lavender-infused lime cordial. Mix with an equal part of your favorite gin or vodka for a Gimlet, or add soda water and serve over ice for a quasi-Rickey, and garnish with sprigs of mint, fresh lavender, a lime peel, and a straw, if it's watered down and over ice. Whichever way go, the perfume of the lavender really plays off of herbal aromatics of the gin; yo just can't go wrong.

Lavender Gimlet

1. Mix about a quarter-cup of chilled lavender simple syrup with your favorite gin. I like Sapphire, as I find it less assertive than some gins, so if you like a more pronounced herbaciousness, try something like Junipero. (Gin, more than most liquors, varies greatly in style from brand to brand, so it really comes down to personal preference.)
2. For a straight up Gimlet, shake over ice and strain into martini glass or tumbler.
3. Or, add 1/2 to 1 cup of water - plain or sparkling (the latter making something like a Ricky) - and serve over ice in a high ball glass or, as I've done here, with the cut up limes in a mason jar. This version is highly recommended for a warm weekend afternoon, and would be well-suited to a by-the-pitcher version. I also made a version of the watered-down, over-ice and cut-limes version with Hanger 1 vodka - maybe not quite as interesting or complex as the gin version, but an outstanding cocktail in its own right.

Kampai, and drink responsibly.

Beer snack

Soda Rock Farms' Padron Peppers & Racer 5 IPA: Two of a Perfect Pair

Every once in a while, I'm lucky enough to find a combination of flavors that just works. At its best, a food pairing transcends the individual elements, and the dominant sensation on the palate is something else entirely, something distinct from any single component, a taste  uniquely created by the interaction of all  the elements working together.

Many of the finest and most classic examples are, of course, well-known, and I use them in my own cooking all the time and without apology: Rustic lamb and vin rouge from Hermitage; mint and dark chocolate; Sauternes and fois gras; scallops and bacon; sushi and soy sauce; baseball and Dodger Dogs. (Despite a birth certificate proclaiming San Francisco as my rightful home, I'm really a life-long recovering Angelino, but that doesn't change the empirical fact that the hot dogs at Dodger Stadium put any tubed pork products served up by the A's or Giants to shame.)

Then again, someone will on occasion serve me something so completely unexpected that it completely changes how I think about flavors, not because it is so radical, but because it sounds radical at first, but is in fact perfectly natural: Think of white chocolate and caviar or salmon poached in licorice (both found at the Fat Duck), or the French Laundry's justly celebrated dish of tapioca with oysters and caviar.

But my favorite flavor pairings are the ones that I stumble upon in the normal course of every day life, that I know, with absolute certainty, will sing on the palate before I even taste it. This was my experience at the farmer's market yesterday while talking to Dan the Tomato Man of Soda Rock Farms (Dan is, in my book, the undisputed heavy weight champion of heirloom tomato growers. Seriously, he's that good. He's better than that. A multiplicity of future posts, I'm sure...). Dan was expounding the wonderful properties of Padron peppers to another shopper, and he issued the following guarantee: "If you sit down and try these peppers with a cold beer, you'll finish them off, or I'll give you your money back." And it was a big bag of peppers.

I immediately had one of those light bulb-moments of total clarity and conviction that are so tragically rare, at least for me: Blister the peppers in a pan, toss them with olive oil and fleur de sel, and serve with a chilled Racer 5 from the Bear Republic Brewery: Padrons have a mild heat and a fairly pronounced bitterness which, I felt certain, would pair perfectly with the bitter hoppy-ness of the Racer 5; the dish would require virtually zero prep, one pan, and three ingredients (OK, four, if you count the beer); and, in keeping with our theme of the proximal, both the peppers and the beer come from my town.

No offense to salty nuts, but these Padrons are, hands-down, my new favorite beer snack:

Padron Peppers, and Not Much Else

Toss over high heat to blister evenly.

1. Put a saute pan on relatively high heat (medium if you have a high-BTU cooktop, more like high otherwise) and, while the pan warms, wash the peppers and pat them dry (it's important for them to be dry - you seriously don't want to be putting water into a blistering hot pan of oil).
2. When the pan is good and hot, add a small amount of neutral, high-heat oil, and add the peppers - do them in batches, if necessary, to avoid crowding the pan. Toss the peppers frequently until they are blistered and beginning to char on all sides; they will go from hard to soft. 
3. Remove from the heat, toss with some good olive oil (something with a really pungent, green, grassy taste would be ideal), and salt liberally with fleur de sel or course-grind kosher sea salt. Serve immediately with an ice-cold Race 5 IPA (or any other beer, but preferably something with some bitterness to it).

You'll finish the beer and the peppers, or your money back.