Then I moved into a professional kitchen, and promptly realized that my home kitchen was crap.

A home kitchen is set up to look nice. A commercial kitchen is set up for efficiency. Efficiency of space, efficiency of equipment, and most of all efficiency of work. And if you’re a form-follows-function type like I am, then the home kitchen’s efforts to look good are dripping with irony: when compared to the elegant, streamlined functionality of a well-designed commercial kitchen, a home kitchen just looks ugly (Sub-Zero-type paneling be damned).

Getting a home kitchen to function exactly like a commercial kitchen takes some serious doing and isn’t worth it for many; however, there are a few quick, cheap things you can do that will make your kitchen a bastion of efficiency for years to come.

1. Get a speed rack.  Key items in a commercial kitchen are all based on the 18 x 26-inch dimensions of the sheet pan. Commercial refrigerators and ovens are sized to accommodate the sheet pan, and the link between them is the speed rack, which holds loaded sheet pans in a vertical stack. Having a speed rack in the mix means that you can cook something in the oven, take it to a nearby speed rack to cool, then stick it into a refrigerator afterwards – all without changing the original baking tray and without spreading out all over your precious counter space.

You can replicate this at home – your oven and fridge probably can’t hold a full-sized sheet pan, but they can most likely accommodate a half sheet pan (13 x 18 inches), which the speed racks are designed to hold just as well.

Just do it. A half-height speed rack, which can hold ten full or 20 half-sheet pans, can find a home in most kitchens. It can replace a section of adorable-looking cabinetry that you’ve got near the oven, and will do you a lot more good. When you’re not cooking, the speed rack is a highly efficient and easily reconfigurable shelving system, which you can use to hold utensils for the stovetop, half hotel pans (#4 on this list), and key shelf-stable ingredients like salt and oil. Here’s one.

2. Get a small bain marie and leave it by the stovetop. A bain marie is a metal container with vertical walls, narrower than it is tall. They’re great for holding liquids, but in this case it serves a more essential purpose for the home cook: it hangs onto all of the utensils you’re using to cook securely, without taking a lot of space and without letting the mess from that oil-covered spatula spread all over your kitchen like wet leprosy.  This one would do fine.

3. Get rid of single-purpose kitchen gadgets. That the silicone garlic peeler? The tomato knife, with its very fine serration able to gently cut through the ripest tomato without bruising it further? Out. You’d be surprised how much you can get done with a single knife – if you don’t want to gangster out with something from Korin then go with the totally rad and very inexpensive Victorinox chef’s knife. And keep it sharp.

4. Get a bunch of half hotel pans.  These are great for holding the food you’ve just cooked on the stovetop, freeing up your favorite pan for its next assignment. They also fit nicely in the fridge and, if you get lids, stack nicely.

5. Store your pot lids vertically and separately from the pots and pans they cover. It seems like a natural choice to store your pots with the lids on them. No. Separate ‘em, and store the lids in something like this. This will make the lids more accessible and will allow you to nest all of your pots, saving a lot of space. Pot lids have an annoying habit of moving around in the cabinet and falling out avalanche-style when you open it. (amazingly, the Internet seems to have zero videos of someone opening up a kitchen cabinet and getting buried under a pile of pot lids – I looked. And looked. But it does happen).

6. Get your serving stuff out of the kitchen. Most of the storage space in a home kitchen centers around presentation items: dishes, glasses, and silverware, and serving bowls take up much of the prime real estate in a home kitchen.  This is a lot of space that can’t be used for, you know, the tools that you need to make food. In a commercial kitchen, this stuff is out of the way. The kitchen I use has all the serving stuff is in the basement. At home you don’t want to do that (as the flatware is most likely in frequent use), but give some thought to taking the less-used service items – which are totally useless in the preparation of food – and get them out of the way in favor of the stuff you need to cook.

And boom! You’re on your way to ultimate efficiency in the kitchen. Use the time you save to watch the greatest television show in history.

Neither was it managing to keep  my custom-made climbing tuxedo, made entirely of technical fleece and waterproof soft-shell material and stitched together by the reanimated corpse of Ermenegildo Zegna himself, looking crisp on the ascent.

In fact, the hardest part was that the winds constantly buffeting the rocky north face make it really difficult to put down a good line of blow.

But who doesn’t like a good challenge, right?

I was taking a break from my mission to discover the perfect Paleo meal to bag one of the Seven Summits, the tallest mountain in each continent. My reason for being in Indonesia: beef rendang, the classic beef dish invented by the Minangkabau ethnic people of Sumatra in the 16th century. I realized that the coconut-based, highly-spiced thick sauce, originally designed to preserve meat in the pre-refrigerator era, was in fact a perfect Paleo meal.

Here’s how you make it:

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon coriander seed

1/4 teaspoon turmeric

3 tablespoons ginger, roughly chopped

4 shallots, roughly chopped

3 tablespoons chili flakes

2 stalks lemongrass (white parts)

4 kefir lime leaves (or zest of two limes, if you can’t find this)

3 tablespoons galangal (or more ginger, if you can’t find this)

Put into blender until you’ve got a paste.

Oil for frying (paleo folks use rendered animal fat or, in a pinch, olive oil; non-Paleo folks use vegetable oil if you must)

2 pounds good stewing beef (I use chuck), cut into chunks

Heat a pan until very hot. Add oil and sear beef in oil until browned. Remove beef from pan. Sear spice paste until fragrant, about 15 seconds.

2 cups coconut milk

Add coconut milk to pan, along with beef, partially cover, and cook until tender – about three hours. Remove beef, uncover pan, and cook down sauce until liquid is brown and almost completely evaporated. Return beef to pan.

 

Headcheese needs a new marketing department. Really? We couldn’t come up with a better name than “headcheese?”  I did a quick search to see what the French had come up with – surely, they’d come up with something a little more, how you say, sophisticated.  Suprisingly, they came up with fromage de tête – literally, “cheese of head.”

The Italians also go the cheese route with formaggio di testa.  They have several other names too – including testa in cassetta, or head in a box.

Someone redid that whole scene with stuffed animals in place of Messrs. Pitt, Freeman, and Spacey:

But back to headcheese. In my day I’ve learned a few things, and one of them is this: little good can come of things that are not cheese, yet contain the word “cheese.”

Texturally, a good headcheese shouldn’t hold together at all – it should be closer to a slightly chunky liquid than to the cold-cut slice that you find in cheap renditions.  However, this disjointed blob of food, devoid of identifiable anything, opens the door for the headcheese novice’s imagination to run wild wondering what’s actually in there.

Headcheese does have plenty of head. And that’s where the second problem comes in. “Headcheese” strongly suggests brain, which makes people uncomfortable. There are no brains or internal organs in headcheese. It’s external parts – skin and muscles from the face. Now “facecheese” is clearly not a significant improvement; however, much of the choicest meat on the choicest of animals, the pig, comes from the face. Guanciale, a fantastic italian bacon, is made from the jowls of the pig. But I didn’t realize how valuable pigface could be until a few months ago.

We had three small pigs at our wedding feast; when I met with the guy who roasted our pigs, I told him I would be a man of considerable station at the event and that I could probably get the cut of my choice.  I then asked what part of the pig I should have for my wedding dinner.  He didn’t have to think about it.

“The jowls,” he said immediately.  ”Go for the jowls.”

The jowls.  Well, the meat on a pig’s head is at least half jowl. So you’re missing out if you don’t tuck into some headcheese.  But the name desperately needs work. I immediately gravitate towards something completely nondescriptive – some good marketingspeak, phrased in Italian for good measure, perhaps piovuto dal cielo (heaven-sent), which alludes to the ethereal texture of a good headcheese without getting into the messy matters of head and/or cheese.

Any thoughts?

The best chocolate cake ever was discussed (recipe available here).  We also enjoyed Moroccan-style lamb tagine, whose recipe follows.

MOROCCAN-STYLE LAMB TAGINE 

Serves 12

5lbs lamb stew meat, trimmed of fat and cut into 1-inch cubes

8 cups chicken stock

2 cups chopped onions

4 teaspoons ground black pepper

2 tablespoons grated ginger

2 cloves chopped garlic

1 tablespoons salt

Take ingredients and put in a heavy-bottomed pot. The lamb should be covered in liquid; if it isn’t, add some water. Bring to a simmer on the stove and put in a 300-degree oven. Cook for two hours, stirring occasionally.

 

12 ounces chopped pitted prunes

1 tablespoon ground cinnamon

Add to pot and cook for 1 hour more, stirring occasionally.

 

You’ve got the sweet-and-savory thing going on. And, of course, there’s the matter of  the resulting combination BEING MADE ENTIRELY OF BACON AND CHOCOLATE.

Vosges makes a chocolate-bacon bar, and I don’t like it.  I wanted to like it; however, it just doesn’t deliver the goods. I always attributed that dislike to the company’s use of milk chocolate over dark (almost never, in my opinion, a good idea). So the idea remained pure: Bacon and chocolate. Chocolate and bacon. The holy two-inity of lusted-after foods in this country.

By happy circumstance last week, I had a strip of awesome pastured bacon left over and a freezer full of flourless chocolate cake squares. So I could put the combo to the test with no excuses for poor choice of chocolate, or ingredient quality in general.

It disappoints.

You’d think this would be a synergy-type situation, with each flavor getting on the other’s shoulders for a complementary boost.  Instead, it’s like the two flavors are in a Thrilla in Manila-style brawl, beating the hell out of one another only to emerge, forever changed for the worse. The bacony bit tastes not as good as bacon, the chocolatey bit not as good as chocolate.

So stick to this method to make chocolate cake, which is the most addictive thing since… well, something really, really addictive.

Don’t get any porky ideas.

SELL-YOUR-MOM’S-TELEVISION CHOCOLATE CAKE

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

1 1/4 lbs dark chocolate (I use the 60% Jacques Torres disks, available at their place in Brooklyn; Valrhona at about 65-70% also works wonderfully and is much easier to find, as is Lindt at 70%).

5 oz. coffee

Melt the chocolate completely in the coffee. Use a covered heavy pot over the lowest possible heat.

6 eggs

1/4 cup sugar

Beat together (I use a hand mixer) until eggs are pale yellow and doubled in size.

1 cup heavy cream

Beat until soft peaks form.

With a rubber spatula, fold together the eggs and chocolate.  Then fold in the cream until the mixture is a solid color.

Line a 9×13 baking dish with parchment paper and oil or butter it up lightly. Pour the batter into the baking dish and smooth the top flat.  Place the baking dish into a larger dish; fill the larger dish with water so it comes up halfway up the sides of the baking dish.

Bake for 45 minutes. Remove baking dish from larger dish and let cool. Run a knife around the side and invert onto a cutting board.  And hello, what have we here?

About half of my business is making meals for people following the Paleo Diet.  The Paleo Diet’s basic premise is this: don’t eat anything that wasn’t available to your ancestors before the advent of agriculture. Vegetables, meat, nuts, fruit, eggs. The logic goes that the 10,000 years since man first dipped his toe in the non-hunter-gatherery waters of an agricultural society is no time in evolutionary terms, and man’s gut has not figured out how to handle other foods properly in that time.  By contrast, man has had millions of years to adapt to eating paleo foods.

(Incidentally, there’s a school of thought that it was the discovery of alcohol that led humankind to agriculture – man embraced the agricultural lifestyle, with its longer, harder hours, primarily so he could get shitfaced after. But that’s another story entirely).

The single biggest no-go on the Paleo diet is the grain category. Any grain. That means no bread, pasta, rice, crackers. Not even brown rice or the wholest whole wheat bread. Sugar’s out too (though trace amounts of honey or maple syrup are ok).  And dairy. And soy.

Paleo theory holds that the greatest evildoers are lectins, sugar-binding proteins that are abundant in grains. Where there is disagreement is in the significance of this fact. Most nutritional wisdom doesn’t consider high consumption of lectins to pose health-related problems (as you may have guessed, if for no other reason that you probably have never heard the word “lectin” bandied about in any reading you’ve ever done about human nutrition – at least, I hadn’t).

To paleo dieters, lectins are the most important thing to limit. The theory goes, once they get into your system, they turn into a gloopy mess that sticks to your intestinal wall and cover up the villi, the little nubbins that absorb nutrients as food passes through your gut. This, in turn, prevents you from properly digesting what you eat, depriving you of vital nutrients and leaving you perpetually hungry.

That’s the theory. I was skeptic, but decided to give it a shot myself – it’s the recommended diet for folks that do Crossfit, an exercise regimen of which I’m a big believer. Life’s too short, as the Crossfit folks are fond of saying in endorsing Paleo, not to fuck with your diet.  Adopting a paleo diet, they argue, is a sort of miracle cure for all that ails you – weight and hunger management, chronic disease management, and athletic performance improvement.

After three days I was convinced the Paleo dieters were onto something. Not because of any of the reasons cited above – after all, I’m not overweight, or sick, and athletic performance takes weeks or months to measurably improve.

It was because I was pooing like a champion.

Every morning, like clockwork. Effortless, and I kind of felt like I was flying after.

THE POO SCALE OF EXCELLENCE (PSE)

I use a 40-point system:

0-20 POINTS: Satisfaction when you’re done.  For a perfect 20, not only do you have to feel like you’re flying when you’re done but you probably also had to be in significant discomfort prior, as it’s the change in your comfort level (∆C) that determines the score.  Basically, if you go from this to this, put a 20 on the board; otherwise, there’s room for improvement.

0-10 POINTS: Ease in passing.  It takes complete effortlessness to earn a 10 here. For a 0, you probably curse your ancestors at some point in the process; a goose egg here is as close as a man gets to the feeling of giving birth to a child with a large head.

0-10 POINTS: Ease of wipe.  This score is simply 11 minus the number of wipes until one turns up clean.

0-40 POINTS TOTAL

Have you ever taken an accidental step in elephant poo, noticed its soft consistency, and thought “my poo doesn’t look like that”?  Have you noticed a horse effortlessly dropping the deuce while in a full walk like it ain’t no thing, all the while toting an obese tourist on its back, and wondered why things don’t come as easy for you?  Well, I have. But no more.

And all I can say is, when you get that whole business sorted out, things just seem a little righter in the world. I gave this a go in January, and Paleo eating is now my default – I deviate all the time (alcohol, chocolate, really good bread, whatever you’re serving when I come over for dinner), but keep coming back to Paleo eating as a baseline.

Life’s too short not to fuck with your diet. You should consider giving it a shot.

Not the beef you eat (we will get to that, though). The beef you have. Like a dispute.  I was thinking specifically about the rap beeves of the 1980s and 1990s – the East Coast-West Coast beef of the mid-90s, which really owed itself to the intra-N.W.A dispute between Dr. Dre and Eazy-E, or even the 1980s beef between Kool Moe Dee and LL Cool J (who were legit rivals, once upon a time). Lots of other musicians disliked each other, but these were the ones that I remember because the action spilled out onto the albums – Dre killed Eazy with “Fuck Wit Dre Day (And Everybody’s Celebratin’),” which directly taunted Eazy with lines like “(you) can’t scrap a lick, so I know you got your gat” and the massively underappreciated “you fucked with me, now it’s a must that I fuck with you.” Of the music beeves I remember from my youth, this was easily the most one-sided; Eazy’s response to Dre Day, “Real Muthaphuckkin G’s,” sucked, even seemingly copying the Funkadelic-styled beats that his former groupmate had just popularized, and I haven’t heard it since its initial rotation on MTV. In fact, no one has.

People between the ages of 30 and 45: want to feel old?  You do? Then put on Dre’s masterpiece “The Chronic.”  You know when Snoop comes on at the beginning and says “nine-deuce?” That is a reference to 1992, the year that album came out.  As of this writing, that’s twenty years ago. Thought you’d like to know.

In the signature rap beef of the mid-1990s, Tupac upped the ante, just eviscerating Biggie, the Artist Formerly Known as Sean “Puffy” Combs, the oddly-placed-apostrophe-having Lil’ Kim and a half-dozen other east coast rappers in “Hit ‘Em Up.” Tupac goes absolutely Keyser Soze on B.I.G. with perhaps the pimpslappinest lyric ever written: “You claim to be a player, but I fucked your wife.”

The Moe Dee/LL beef, predating both Tupac and Dre, holds a special place in my heart because it went visual: in the rivalry’s finest moment, Kool Moe Dee poses on the cover of his album “How Ya Like Me Now” with LL’s trademark Kangol cap getting crushed under Kool Moe Dee’s Jeep:

I really, really, REALLY like ya now

Oh, that’s good. Kool Moe Dee may have lost the war – he may have gotten obliterated in the war – but boy, did he win this battle.

What do all these have in common? All these dudes need to pay homage to the music beef that started it all: the Lynyrd Skynyrd/Neil Young beef of 1974.

Young had written a few songs that were none to flattering to the southern man.  For example, the song “Southern Man.” Skynyrd, then still toiling in pre-Freebird obscurity, had their first hit in ’74 with “Sweet Home Alabama,” a direct riposte to Young’s South-ripping:

Well I heard mister Young sing about her
Well, I heard ole Neil put her down
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A Southern man don’t need him around anyhow

Sounds like fightin’ words to me! It’s no “gap teeth in your mouth, so my dick’s got to fit” (Dre, 1992), but remember this was nearly forty years ago. If you adjust for the year, cost-of-living-index-style, then this was racy – kind of when the blanket maintaining the chastity between Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert came down in “It Happened One Night”, which was super-hot in 1934.

A little research shows that this feud may have just been clever horseplay; by many accounts Young and Skynyrd frontman Ronnie Van Zant were friends, most of Skynyrd were Neil Young fans, and Van Zant often used to wear Neil Young t-shirts at concerts. Young even performed the song with the surviving members of Lynyrd Skynyrd at a memorial concert after three members died in a plane crash in 1977.

Could this, then, be not only the first example of a music-related beef of any kind, but the first such example of an imaginary beef, foisted upon a gullible public for the purpose of selling more records?  These guys might be more prescient than I thought.

When it comes to actual beef, specifically steaks, there is no beef: the ribeye rules.  While most cuts stick pretty closely to the formula F + T = k, where F is flavor, T is tenderness, and k is a constant.  This means that there are always tradeoffs; the tenderest cut, the filet mignon, doesn’t have the flavor of, say, a sirloin, but the toughest cuts can have a leathery, cuddy feel that will have you craving a buttery bite of filet.  The ribeye is an outlier, having tons of flavor but surprising tenderness.

The ribeye really shines if you give it a good rogering with the Jaccard Supertendermatic, a set of dozens of tiny blades on a plunger that works as a meat tenderizer and marinade takeup enhancement device. This thing had me at “Supertendermatic,” a Popeilian word if ever there was one, but there is way more to the Supertendermatic than the name.  It takes a New York strip steak and makes it as tender as a ribeye; a ribeye, once Jaccarded, becomes almost as silky smoove as a filet. I’ve never Jacc’d up a filet mignon out of fear the thing will just float away with tenderness.  Or it might be the meat equivalent of crossing the streams, putting the universe in jeopardy. I’m playing this one safe.

It works equally well, if not even better, on the tough cuts.  Stuff like sirloin has a tendency to resist your best efforts to chew it into submission, yielding an experience that can only be described as “cuddy.” It becomes pleasant to chew post-Jaccard. Ditto stewing meats; the shank meat, the toughest cut on a cow and one that doesn’t yield to hours of slow-cooking, softens up markedly after it’s been Supertendermaticalized.

BEST HOMEMADE STEAK EVER, IF YOU AIN’T GOT NO GRILL

Ribeye steak from a good supplier

Salt

Piment d’Espelette

Cooking oil (I use rendered animal fat when I can, which has a pretty high smoke point; clarified butter also works or, for non-Paleo folks, most vegetable oils work wonderfully)

Give the steak a thorough trip through the Supertendermatic, about 25 plunges per steak (at 48 cuts at a clip, this means you’re putting over a thousand tiny incisions into your steak – the steak will look a little rundown after you’re through with it, but don’t worry – it’ll bounce back into shape once it hits the pan).  Cover with 3/4 tsp salt per pound of meat and an equal amount of Piment d’Esplette (a pepper grown in the Pyrenees; you can get it here).  Get the pan super-hot; ideally this means letting a cast iron pan sit on high heat for a good five minutes, letting it start to smoke before adding the oil and, five seconds later, the steak).  Get a good sear; this should happen in a minute or two per side.  Remove to a plate and let the steak rest for at least five minutes.

The keys to this operation:

1. A really, really hot pan.  In baseball, there’s a fielding truism (or at least an old Yankees announcer user to insist, day in and day out, that there was a fielding truism) that goes: nine out of ten go under.  That meant that for every ten ground balls that you don’t field properly, nine of them will have rolled underneath your glove, so GET YOUR GLOVE DOWN, SON!  When it comes to steaks, nine of every ten botched steaks will have as one of its root causes an insufficiently hot pan – either the steak comes out all grey, with no Maillard reaction to speak of, or else it gets a good sear but because the pan wasn’t hot enough, the entire steak is cooked so much that it becomes more discus than dinner.

2. A dry steak.  Water only heats to 212 degrees, and that won’t sear junk; if the steak is wet, the water forms a buffer between the superhot oil (deally 35 degrees or more) and the steak.  You don’t want that buffer.

3. Don’t futz with the steak once you put it in the pan.  Just once to flip, once to remove – when a steak’s got a good sear on the underside and is ready to be turned, you can usually see it at the points where the sides of the steak meet the cooking oil.  Use a spatula, not tongs; if the steak is stuck to the pan and the spatula won’t slide under it easily, then the meat’s not seared enough – and you may not have let the pan get hot enough.

4. Let the steak rest before cutting into it.  The steak should rest at least as long as the steak was cooking.  Which, if you know what’s good for you, won’t have been long.

5. Enjoy.  And let me know how it goes.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’d like to direct your attention to the use of the word “grillless” in the title, specifically its use of three consecutive letter Ls. To me, it recalls the glory of the Major Indoor Soccer League, the dynastic New York Arrows of the early 80s, and its star forward Juli Veee, who was instrumental in the team’s 1980 championship.  Incidentally, this four-time championship team ws paced by Steve Zungul, who scored an astonishing 100 goals in a 40-game season, and Shep Messing, stud goalkeeper, to form a team that’s Hall of Fame-worthy for its excellence on the field and its excellently-named players off of it.

Now, to my knowledge there are no words in English with three of the same letter in a row.  But shouldn’t “grillless” be one?

Truffles may be the most expensive canned thing in the world.  I can’t really think of anything else.  Caviar, maybe. But that’s about it.

It’s a lot of pressure to cook with such a big-ticket item.  Based on Amazon prices, the going rate for truffles is $64.17 for a 7/8-ounce container, or $73.34 an ounce; this works out to $1,173.39 a pound, or $187,743 for my weight in truffles.  I find this interesting because actuarial tables often calculate the “value” of a human life at $50,000 per year (or about $2 million for the rest of my life), that means that truffles are 9% as valuable as I am.  And I’m the most valuable thing I own.  So that’s a lot.

And truffles are awesome.  They’re the essence of umami, that mysterious fifth taste that was apparently discovered since I was a child.  Often described as “savoriness,” umami is found in mushrooms, meat, ripe tomatoes, and cheese.  In short, much of the  best stuff.  Now, my childhood books on the five senses stated unequivocally that there were only four tastes, and even mapped them on the tongue.  Which has always had me wondering: how the hell did we ever think there were only four tastes, when meat and mushrooms were certainly around in 1978?

And are there really only five?  Where does the flavor of scotch come in?  Hot peppers?  Wasabi?  For that matter, are there other flavors that we can theoretically experience, but just aren’t provided by the natural world (just like these ultravivid colors you’ve probably never seen before)?

Oh, and if you don’t know, here’s a little truffle shuffle 101:

Which of the three would bring home the gold? Hard to say for sure.  But I’ll tell you why I’m leaning Chronic right now.  The restaurant I ate at last night, whose name I can’t remember – it’s on 12th between First and Second and used to be Resto Leon – feature an appetizer called “Dee’s Nuts.”  This is a very clever (in my opinion) reference to the intro skit to The Chronic’s NSFW “Deeez Nutz:”

That routine, starring a fresh-on-the-scene Snoop Doggy Dogg, became the basis for a party game, in which anyone who responds to a question with “What?” or “Who?” gets hit with a “DEEEZ NUTZ!” exclaimed right up in his or her face.  According to Urban Dictionary, the game “works best when done loudly in quiet public places such as a lecture hall, church, or a line at the bank.”

That’s good enough for me. At the moment, we have a winner.