The Internet Food Association

By Ben Miller

One thing that surprised me about this week’s episode of Top Chef was that the fourth judge ended up being Jerome Bocuse and not Thomas Keller who had made a special visit to the kitchen earlier in the show. Turns out, as Tom Colicchio notes on his Bravo blog, Keller’s basically too much of a nice guy to sink to the snarky lows (cough, Padma, cough) often seen at Judges’ Table:

One more note:  You may have noticed that Thomas Keller was at the meal but did not participate at the Judges’ Table. We tried to convince him to be there, but he decided against it, citing that he didn’t want to have to be negative towards the contestants.

Also, did anyone else notice Tom guffawing at the very end of the episode after something I believe it was Kevin said? It’s hidden in the back right of the frame while he’s shaking hands with the judges.

by Kriston Capps

All these nice District-area food bloggers have called for an assembly, a gathering of Internet food associates, if you will, a happy hour, at ChurchKey, which basically everyone agrees is the cat’s pajamas.

Two things about ChurchKey. Well, three: Go to this happy hour. But two other things. Despite the fact that Beer Organ (that’s what I’ve taken to calling ChurchKey, because, c’mon, they have a beer organ) features beers on draft and on cask and about 4 gazillion other beers in bottles, the best pull in the city can still be found at The Saloon, about a stop away on the Circulator. Over a couple of visits to Beer Organ, I didn’t find anything to compete with the Schloss Eggenberg Spezial Dunkel, which is to my mind the best beer to be found in the District.

Second thing: I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do at Beer Organ. It’s too cavernous for a date, too crowded for a party, too much of a tavern for dinner. I don’t recall televisions, but in any event, it’d be no good for watching a game: it’s too fine. It’s a grand place and I have enjoyed drinking there, but every time I have gone it has been for the specific purpose of going there—either for my first visit or for someone else’s. (For those of you joining us from outside the District, there was a lot of hype surrounding the opening of this bar and its adjoining restaurant, Birch & Barley.) Now, there is no doubt in my mind that this spot is exactly right for a foodie happy hour, but there are lamentably too few of these to fill up my evenings. I get the idea that ChurchKey is something of an important bar that doesn’t serve any obvious purpose in my life the way other important bars do.

Photo by Flickr user Curtis McCormick. Creative Commons license.

by A.A.

Chocolate chip cookies. You love them, I love them, and we can all agree that anyone who doesn’t love them is not to be trusted.  Unlike other desserts, though, there hasn’t been a lot of notable innovation in chocolate chip cookie baking.  As a kid I used to make the standard Toll House recipe fairly often, but it was generally just a ruse so that my brothers and I could eat massive amounts of raw cookie dough.  I thought about it recently, and decided that the Toll House recipe can’t be the final word. With so many amateur home cooks and their delicious baking blogs, and with foodie reinterpretations of comfort food at an all-time high, I figured somebody must have taken the time to update that old chestnut.

After some dutiful googling, I discovered that there are a handful of new recommendations to improve chocolate chip cookies.  Basically, they are:

• Melt the butter. Melt it carefully on a double-boiler and let it cool before combining it with the white and brown sugars.  Toll House et al. always said to simply “cream” softened/room temperature butter with the sugar, but melting it makes for a smoother butter-sugar end product. Which, let’s be candid, is delicious in and of itself.
• Double, triple, or quadruple the amount of vanilla. Not one teaspoon. More like one tablespoon.  And of course, I don’t even need to stress the importance of using real vanilla and not “imitation” extract, right?
• Refrigerate the dough overnight, anywhere from 12 to 36 hours depending on your baking schedule.  I don’t know why this is assumed to help, but I tried it anyway and refrigerated my dough for about 24 hours.  Note that this makes it much harder to work with the dough before baking, so you may want to consider rolling the dough into balls and then refrigerating them.
• Sprinkle sea salt on top before baking.  This is another example of the saltification of desserts that’s all the rage.

I tried all of these tips, and added one of my own, by readjusting the white-to-brown sugar ratio from 1:1 to one-half cup granulated sugar and 1 cup light brown sugar.  This makes the cookies a little bit darker, but richer.

Verdict?  Success.  These were definitely better than your everyday Toll House-recipe cookies.  Despite using the same amount of butter (1 c.) as a normal recipe, these tasted very buttery – I credit melting the butter.  The best ever, though? I don’t know.  They still flattened out a bit too much for my liking – any ideas on how to minimize that?

And the key takeaway is that no matter what recipe you use, chocolate chip cookies, like most baked goods, taste best when eaten warm out of the oven.

Recipe below the jump. Add your tips in comments.

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By Matthew Yglesias

The Daily Beast has the hot excerpts from Sarah Palin’s new book:

If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a salad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore: If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat? I love meat. I eat pork chops, thick bacon burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak. But I especially love moose and caribou. I always remind people from outside our state that there’s plenty of room for all Alaska’s animals—right next to the mashed potatoes.

I’ll let Ezra and other food moralists mull the merits of this sophomoric vegetarian-mocking. But nobody who purports to love meat should be eating a medium-well steak. And that’s doubly true if you’re talking about a super-lean meat like moose or caribou.