Sous Vide Cookery - Doing It Under Pressure and In A Bag.

Anyone growing up in the early sixties should be familiar with the boil-in-a-bag dinner. Before the widespread advent of microwaves, a short-form re-heating method was to drop your entire meal (carefully sealed in plastic) into a pot of boiling water. Of course, vacuum sealing has been recognized as a valid preservation technique from even farther back. But the combination of the two, their subsequent adoption by your higher-end professional kitchen, and the consequent coining of the term molecular gastronomy, has been sliding around the edges of the culinary scene for only two decades or so. These days more casual restaurants, and even some home cooks, are experimenting with what we’re now calling cooking sous vide. Sam Gundy, co-owner of Olliffe, a high-quality meat shop in Toronto, wrote a list of the top 10 carnivorous trends to watch in 2010. Right at the top? Sous Vide.

But will it be more than just a fad? A curriculum advisor from the Culinary Institute of America once told me that culinary schools have to be incredibly careful when choosing new courses; as respected institutions, they really can’t afford to chase a trend that might disappear tomorrow. So I think it speaks of the enduring nature of this particular cooking method that I’d like you to check out The French Culinary Institute’s primer on sous-vide cooking. Great temperature guides, thorough explanations and it’s well written to boot.

Now, unquestionably, as a technique, sous vide cookery has certain problems; it's much more reliable when applied to vegetables than to certain proteins, it creates a unique product but doesn’t necessarily always taste better than more traditional methods, and the professional-grade tools are quite expensive (my favorite is Polyscience). On the other hand, when used appropriately, sous vide can definitely create the sublime. So why not make up your own mind? Follow these instructions for making an immersion circulator out of a beer cooler, stage a competition, and see which technique will have it in the bag.

How Servers Represent Your Restaurant - Some Tips on Tips.

Now that I’ve covered why you should work on dealing with allergies, and I’ve covered how you can do so in the back of the house, there’s just one last frontier to deal with…though it’s the first frontier to face your guest. Your server. Or, well, at this point it becomes their server. And according to restaurant marketing firm You Got Meals, for better or for worse, to your customers their servers are your restaurant. So it’s absolutely no use taking the greatest of care in the kitchen if it isn’t reflected out on the floor.

Almost all critics and patrons agree that service will often prove more important than the food. A caring and passionate staff can even erase the memory of an overflowing plate of culinary missteps. So you can imagine how powerful that might make a problem-free kitchen! Moreover, that server pride usually ends up having a positive effect on customers’ financial appreciation as well. So it should be easy to convince your front of the house to adopt a positive attitude. According to the critics (and founders!) of ChefSeattle.com, a great site dedicated to food and foodservice in the Northwest United States, there are eight key tips to stand out, service-wise, from the rest of the culinary crowd. Here are the ones I think we most often forget, but you should definitely head to the article for the complete list: 

-       Your opinion as a server does matter: If the guest asks for your opinion they probably actually want it!

-       Learn your wines; surprisingly, people drink wine without knowing that much about it, which means that they’re going to look to you for expert advice. Be ready with some.

-       Learn how to handle the negatives. Lord knows that customers are going to complain, sometimes with validity, sometimes not. Handling these moments with verve and professionalism is the mark of a truly great server.

-       Smile! 

Working with Gluten-Intolerance - The Wheat Wasteland.

In 1922, T.S. Eliot wrote that April was the cruelest month of the year but, no offense to the great poet, it just happens to be my favorite. Besides the promise of summer, April offers two great holidays to keep us occupied: Easter and Passover. And since Passover, among other things, concerns a huge dietary restriction, it seemed like a great time to discuss the Gluten-Intolerant Guest as part two of my series on staying allergy conscious.  

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There are several different strains of the gluten-constrained breed, and, according to this LA Times article, the ranks are swelling fast: The doctor-diagnosed Celiac, the self-diagnosed Celiac, the Wheat-Sensitive and the Carb-Free. Yet, with a little planning, it’s easy for the restaurateur to come up with one common, economical system to deal with any gluten-related contingency. Considering that you’ll be well re-paid with free advertising on sites like the Gluten-Free Restaurant Awareness Program (which will even send you helpful info free of charge) and the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness, it’s entirely worth it.

Obviously, I’m not recommending you close up the bakery and go totally gluten-free. I’m just saying that an occasionally over-looked component of the food service industry is the effort to make people happy. Moderating our tendency to declare: “Take it or leave it!” might just help us in the big-picture sense of the long run. So, with that in mind, here are a few helpful hints at satisfactorily satisfying the gluten-intolerant, courtesy of Gluten-Free Cooking For Dummies:

-       Line cookware with foil and bam! Sterilized for gluten-free work.

-       Think of arrowroot, cornstarch or tapioca starch before you automatically reach for the flour. All of these work just as well as thickeners (and in some cases, better!)

-       Cornmeal or Masa can double as a breading in the fryer, plus they have a better flavor and a neat texture to boot.

-       Be wary of crumbs. Even 20 parts per million of gluten can make a celiac sick, so that means thinking about using typically un-food related areas of your kitchen to plate their dish and turning off the convection feature on an oven or toaster to avoid gluten-y dust.

-       Finally, be aware that gluten, like radar traps, can lurk in some surprisingly places. Amusingly, Passover Matzah is actually on the list of gluten-full items…and less obviously, so is soy sauce, malt vinegars and couscous. Here’s a small list of surprisingly unfriendly foods and here’s a more comprehensive list of banned items, if you'd really like to pore over it.