Gourmet Magazine's Laura Shapiro picked a strange time to bemoan the scarcity of female chefs. In yesterday's article "Where Are the Women," she writes, "I’m thinking in particular of a question that always bothers me when I read stories about chefs winning awards, chefs opening spectacular new restaurants, chefs starring in yet another new TV series—congratulations, but why are all of you male? Where are the women?" After the jump, why she's wrong—Top Chef spoiler alert!...
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If you want to talk about the importance of knowing where the ingredients you cook with come from, it turns out that at the restaurants owned by David Burke, all the steaks are from cows sired by a bull named Prime that he bought in 2005: "The purchase made perfect business sense, he said, because by breeding the same bull, the restaurant guarantees its steaks are of the highest quality. 'We bought his genes, basically,' said Burke, whose customers tell him his steaks are the best they've ever eaten."...
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The Guardian's Julie Bindel talks to Camellia Panjabi, the restaurateur responsible for popularizing both regional Indian cooking to the UK as well as Szechuan and Thai food in India, about her long career in the food industry. Her seminal cookbook 50 Great Curries of India, first published in 1995, has just sold its millionth copy: "The story of the book is a fascinating one," says Panjabi. "I had tried to introduce proper regional Indian food to the hotels, but I was told, 'No one will order them.' I was convinced they would, and put real Indian dishes on the menu rather than meat swamped in curry sauce. But they didn't order them. I decided that I had to educate...
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