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From Chicago

Knockout Noodles: Cho Sun Ok

And thus a mystic link between chowhounds past and present is forged... Cho Sun Ok is, I think, the last place still around that Calvin Trillin wrote about being taken to by Jim McCauley, the proto-ethnic-food-explorer in whose footsteps we all follow....

From Chicago

Serious Streets: Western Avenue from Cortland to Belden

Have you ever read any of the stuff from the Westernathon, written about on Chowhound shortly before we all became LTHers? We actually did try to cover the entire span from 95th to Howard, though I can't use it to say "hey, how'd you miss THIS place" because so many of those places are gone (indeed, were gone in 2 or 3 years). And save for Margie's, I think almost everything on your list didn't exist yet...

http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/112355

From Chicago

The Billy Goat's Bun Problem: Would Another Bun Work Better Than the Kaiser Roll?

Can I have the kaiser bun you're not using? I'm sure I can find a better hamburger to put inside it.

From A Hamburger Today

The Burger Lab: Building A Better Big Mac

Admirable attempt, although if I really wanted a better Big Mac, I think I'd just go eat a Big Boy. What would really impress me, though, is if you could make a better Galley Boy.

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Watch Sky Full of Bacon's 'Farm to Barstool' Video Featuring Art Jackson

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Video: 'Sky Full of Bacon' Goes Behind the Scenes at Hoosier Mama in Chicago

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From Chicago

Knockout Noodles: Cho Sun Ok

And thus a mystic link between chowhounds past and present is forged... Cho Sun Ok is, I think, the last place still around that Calvin Trillin wrote about being taken to by Jim McCauley, the proto-ethnic-food-explorer in whose footsteps we all follow....

From Chicago

Serious Streets: Western Avenue from Cortland to Belden

Have you ever read any of the stuff from the Westernathon, written about on Chowhound shortly before we all became LTHers? We actually did try to cover the entire span from 95th to Howard, though I can't use it to say "hey, how'd you miss THIS place" because so many of those places are gone (indeed, were gone in 2 or 3 years). And save for Margie's, I think almost everything on your list didn't exist yet...

http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/112355

From Chicago

The Billy Goat's Bun Problem: Would Another Bun Work Better Than the Kaiser Roll?

Can I have the kaiser bun you're not using? I'm sure I can find a better hamburger to put inside it.

From A Hamburger Today

The Burger Lab: Building A Better Big Mac

Admirable attempt, although if I really wanted a better Big Mac, I think I'd just go eat a Big Boy. What would really impress me, though, is if you could make a better Galley Boy.

From Slice

The United States of Pizza: Indiana

So here's a subject for further study. There's Rocky Rococo Pizza... named for the Peter Lorre-esque character in Firesign Theater's How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All. And apparently there's Bazzbeaux's... named for National Lampoon Radio Hour's Flash Bazbo, I presume:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuVmemAXpUM

It's understandable how 70s counterculture comedy and pizza should have become linked... but are there other pizza chains with names inspired by the albums the founders were listening to? Is there a Sgt. Stedanko Pizza or a 2000-Year-Old Pizza somewhere?

From Chicago

The United States of Pizza: Illinois (Chicago Edition)

Also, if you actually look at the pies... you could call stuffed a casserole (actually it's inspired by an Italian savory pie called scarciedda). But there's nothing casserole-like at all about, say, a Malnati's pizza-- deep dish. It's just a tall pizza...

From Serious Eats

Anthony Bourdain On Culinary School

The most mordant comment I ever heard on cooking school, from a Chicago chef: "It taught me the French names of things I already knew how to do."

From Serious Eats

Michael Gebert on the High Price of 'Underground' Dining Events

Thanks for the plug, Adam!

I'm sure they're not making a fortune because they're not enjoying the economies of scale that a restaurant does from being open night after night. That said, I hardly think renting a place for a night is MORE expensive than launching a restaurant and getting all the legal permits and so on in a city like Chicago (and I was just listening to a major restaurant backer speaking rather cynically about THAT process yesterday; the aldermanic shakedown is alive and well).

The social aspect, well, maybe sometimes that's magical and cool and sometimes it isn't. But it's not as if you can't get that other ways-- obviously the whole shared table thing is about creating some of that serendipity, too.

I like the idea of the underground dinner. Cool that people try to find ways to connect in the big city; cool that chefs who don't have restaurants want to create interesting experiences. But you have to deliver... something. If the food isn't Blackbird, and the price is, then you better deliver something else, and that's what the underground dinner in Steve Dolinsky's review (which inspired my rant) did not do. It's emperor's clothes time to get mediocre food and then go out raving about it just because you're invested in the fact that you're in the in-crowd doing cool secret things. Ultimately, and I said this in my piece, I'd like to see underground dinners do stuff restaurants can't do, serve kinds of food that are commercially impossible, offer experiences totally outside the paradigm of restaurant dining.

From Serious Eats

Congratulations and Thanks, Serious Eaters

Huge congrats to the whole SE team, entirely deserved for the best magazine-style food blog out there.

From Serious Eats

Gadgets: Ceramic Pot Minder and Brown Sugar Saver

"What can I do to reconstitute a full pound of brown sugar?!"

Actually, if you have one of these stone things and put it (properly wetted as per instructions) in a solid brick of brown sugar, it will soften it up in a couple of days. So yeah, put me in the indispensable-at-this-price camp.

From Serious Eats

'Slate' Forgets That Urban Hipsters Aren't the Only Ones Canning Food

Slate finds it impossible to just write about anything. Their whole point is to come up with the quirkily ironic take on something, so they can be hipper than you.

From Chicago

Schoop's in Munster, Indiana: Visit to Local Legend Ruined By Poor Cooking Technique

Too bad. I've had variable experiences at different Schoop's, but when they're good they're really good.

From Serious Eats

Video: Weird IHOP Commercial (1969)

I'm pretty sure my brain downloaded instructions to assassinate Senator Jebediah Slocum from that jingle.

From Serious Eats

Video: Making Illegal Cheese, from 'Sky Full of Bacon'

Thanks for the link! Right, DBCurrie, raw milk is common in aged cheeses like cheddars, at 60 days they're supposedly old and dry enough to be inhospitable to whatever bugs there might be, but the govt insists we can't have camembert that way and eat it at its point of best freshness (around 30-40 days).

Here's the link to the radio half of the story, though I can cut to the results of the tasting and tell you that we ALL guessed the non-pasteurized cheese instantly. It was like the difference between wine and Grapeade-- one had complexity and earthy Old World flavors, one was one-dimensionally cheesy (and a bit ammonia-y).

http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/content.aspx?audioID=40189

Oh, and none of us died, either.

From Slice

Poll: Would You Eat This Pizza?

England and Ireland make great breakfasts, when they stick to stuff Americans eat for breakfast. Just no beans, kippers, or blood sausage.

From Slice

Vintage Pizza Ads from 'Vintage Ad Browser'

Man, I can taste that canned pizza sauce and fake dough and cheese to this day. And probably haven't had it since Nixon was president.

From Slice

Buenos Aires Pizzeria: A Taste of Argentina in Denver

I ate at an Argentine-owned pizza place in Playa del Carmen and it was pretty much Neapolitan pizza. Of course, I also found the old sign saying "Argentine Pizza" laying on the balcony upstairs while a new sign declaring "Italian pizza" had recently been installed, so maybe they were really going for the Euro visitor crowd...

From A Hamburger Today

Dear AHT: Wyoming Burger Recommendation

Buffalo has a good little breakfast place right on the main street (maybe called Main Street Diner), across from the hotel of "The Virginian" fame. Wyoming's a magnificent place, but food isn't one of the reasons, on the whole.

From Serious Eats

The Secret to Adam Perry Lang's Amazing Sweet Potatoes: Bananas

As a longtime opponent of the brown sugar and marshmallow candy approach, I did the banana thing some years back and it just tasted like bananas to me. Maybe this recipe is better, but so far, the only things I've done to make sweet potatoes more grownup that I really liked were (no surprise) curry powder or, bake the potatoes with orange slices in between, then discard the orange slices and puree. The hint of burnt orange really works well.

From Chicago

Chicago BBQ is Better than Memphis BBQ

Dry rub is just weird. It's like dragging your barbecue through a litterbox. But I had several very good chopped pork sandwiches in Memphis. The thing is, it really IS a sandwich, I mean, the unit here is the sandwich, not the meat itself. You have to eat the meat, the cole slaw, and the sweetish bun together. That's different from other places like KC or Texas where it's about the meat, pure and simple.

From A Hamburger Today

Video: Behind the Scenes at Edzo's Burger Shop

Thanks for the link, guys. JJChampion-- yeah, sometimes details like that are hard to explain in a video without eating up a lot of time, and since that's the sort of thing you can find out elsewhere, I decided to focus on other parts of the process and how he arrived at doing things his particular way.

From Serious Eats

Alton Brown Says No to Stuffing the Turkey

"However remote the chance" is the death of every form of cooking.

You're in a lot more danger from the drive to where you're having T-day dinner than from the deadly stuffing in the center of your silent killer turkey. Get a grip!

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