Holiday (Or Anytime) Mashed Potatoes Done Right

The Best Mashed Potatoes Aren't Really “Mashed”

I have a confession to make: the first batch of mashed potatoes I ever made came from a box. They were “French's Mashed Potato Flakes,” as I recall, and I was about seven years old when I made them.

Things have changed, although I do still keep dried mashed potato flakes around. They come in handy for lots of other things in the kitchen. Potato bread, for instance. But when it comes to actual serve-'em-up-for dinner mashed potatoes, I rely on real, honest-to-goodness potatoes that you have to wash, cut up, cook, and mash. Is it more work? Sure it is. Is the end result better? Definitely.

That said, however, when it comes to the “wash, cut up, cook, and mash” part of the deal, there seem to be as many opinions on how to do it as there are grains of sand on a beach. Everybody's got a “recipe” that they learned at their granny's knee or something, but sometimes you can teach an old dog new tricks. I know I've certainly picked up some tips and tricks for better mashed potatoes over the years – besides not making them out of a box – and I'd like to take this opportunity to pass some of them along.

The first thing I learned about making better mashed potatoes is pretty straightforward: use better potatoes. You know that definition of insanity that says something about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? Yeah, that was once me with cheap, “bargain” potatoes from the grocery store. Those “bargain” potatoes you find “on sale” at the store aren't usually much of a bargain after you wind up throwing out about half of every other potato in the bag. There's a reason they're “on sale,” folks and it has nothing to do with your grocer's altruistic desire to improve your life. You get what you pay for, so pay for the better quality spuds.

Now you have to decide how you like your mashed potatoes: do you want them light and fluffy, rich and creamy, or just a little chunky with maybe some skin left on? Most people go for the light and fluffy option that is buttery and smooth. For you rich and creamy lovers, that's okay, too. But achieving that texture without turning your potatoes into a starchy glue can be a bit tricky. And as far as the chunky, skin on method, well, it's probably easiest to prepare, but I'm not so much into chewing my mashed potatoes and picking bits of skin out of my teeth. Sorry. Personal preference. So let's focus on the more popular method, light and fluffy.

First, mix 'em up a bit. Everybody and his or her mother uses stalwart old russet potatoes for their mash, right? Ah, but as Hamlet might have said had he been a decent cook, “There are more potatoes in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” More precisely, there are two types of potato: starchy and waxy. Within those parameters there are then dozens of different varieties, russets being just one variety of starchy potato. Make no mistake, there's a reason the russet – or “Russet Burbank” – is also called a “chef potato.” (Well, in the UK they call them “Maris Pipers” because they didn't have Luther Burbank.) They've always been the ones that are most popular with chefs. Until a few chefs started experimenting. And came up with some nifty – and tasty – results.

Starchy potatoes are always best for mashed potatoes. Waxy spuds – like red bliss or new potatoes – are great for roasting or for using in soups, stews, or potato salad. They are very flavorful, but they are also very dense and firm. That's why they're so good for long cooking preparations; they add great flavor but they hold their shape and texture well. Which is not really what you want in a light, fluffy mash. So stick with starchy potatoes that will fall apart easily. Russet's, of course, but also consider Yukon Gold.

Yukon Golds are a bit less starchy than Russets. Russets are a “high-starch” potato while Yukon Golds are more “medium starch.” The texture difference isn't going to be that discernible in a mashed preparation, but the flavor difference will be. Yukon Golds are quite flavorful. Some people like a straight up all Yukon Gold mash because the very buttery flavor and yellow color appeal to them. I'm not so much in that camp. I like Yukon Golds, but not as an “all in” thing. Russets, on the other hand, are, frankly, rather low in flavor, but their light, fluffy texture is superior. So, the best results for perfect light, fluffy, flavorful mashed potatoes will come from a mix of Russets and Yukon Golds. Half and half maybe? 60/40 perhaps? Make a couple of batches and play around until you get the balance the way you like it.

Next, we have to consider technique. Flavorwise, the mix of Russet and Yukon Gold potatoes will be great for either light and fluffy or rich and creamy, but the final outcome will be determined by the mashing technique. Basically, the best mashed potatoes aren't really “mashed” in the traditional sense.

Here's a quick look at some science behind mashed potatoes. Potatoes – like everything else – are made up of specific kinds of cells. Cells, of course, consist of molecules, which are made up of atoms and all the other stuff you should have paid more attention to in class. The important thing to remember here is that potato cells are made up primarily of starch molecules. These cells are a type of carbohydrate bound up as tight granules surrounded by pectin, a water soluble gelatinous polysaccharide, if you want to be excruciatingly correct. When potatoes start to cook, the pectin starts to break down. The starch molecules within act like little balloons and soak up all the water they can hold before bursting and releasing all that starchy goodness. And it's the concentration of this starch that will ultimately influence the consistency of the finished dish. Got me? Stick around. It gets easier. Bottom line: if you want light, fluffy mashed potatoes, you want there to be as little sticky, gluey starch in your finished dish as possible.

Now, when you beat the holy hell out of a potato, you wring out and release every atom of starch that potato has to hold. The result? Wallpaper paste. I'm serious: you actually can make wallpaper paste from potato starch. Do you want to eat it with a little butter and some salt? Not so much. So keep your little starch bombs as far away from things like food processors as possible. And if you simply must have that oh-so-French creamy texture that the Frenchies call pommes purée, okay. Do as the French do and whack 'em with an electric mixer until they practically pour out onto a plate. But be careful: the difference between pommes purées and wallpaper paste is a very fine line, indeed.

I'm getting ahead of myself a bit. Before we do all the processing, we have to do the cooking. There are two schools of potato cooking when it comes to making mashed potatoes. One school holds that you absolutely must cook your potatoes whole and skin on for optimal texture and flavor. Unpeeled potatoes, they say, absorb less water and hold in the starches better. And there's a good bit of flavor in the skins themselves that is infused into the potato as it cooks. All true.

The other school says peel' em, chunk 'em, and boil 'em. I'm sorry, potato purists, but I'm firmly in that “other school.” I've tried both ways and fail to detect significant difference. And cooking potatoes whole takes longer and peeling and cutting them while hot is a pain in the......hand. No, I'm a big believer in peeling, cutting into quarters or other workable chunks, and boiling. In salted water, by the way. The first step to seasoning your completed dish is adding flavor to the water. Just like pasta, when those little starch cells expand and take on water, they also take on flavor. And it's flavor you simply can't add later. You may not need as much salt as for pasta – i.e. a tablespoon per quart – but do be generous.

Oh, and another “by the way:” unlike pasta, you want to start your potatoes cooking from cold water. Dropping your spuds into already boiling water will usually lead to uneven cooking. You can wait until the water heats up a little to add your salt if you want it to dissolve more rapidly and efficiently and thus avoid damaging your cookware. The salt won't be absorbed into the flesh of the potato until the cooking process starts anyway. But put the cut up potatoes in the cold water first and then crank up the heat.

Like most people, I would rather have light and fluffy mashed potatoes that have a little body to them. Perhaps not so much body that you can use them to sculpt replicas of Devil's Tower (remember “First Encounters of the Third Kind?) but enough that maybe they'll hold up a fork, okay? And the way to achieve that quality is with a ricer or a food mill.

Huh? What about grandma's faithful old potato masher? Give it back to grandma. It's a potato torturing device left over from a less enlightened age in the treatment of tubers. To achieve ultimate lightness and fluffiness, you want to coax the starches out of the potatoes, not crush them out at the end of a blunt-force object. The old masher is just a slower, less effective way to make glue.

I feel your questions: what are food mills and ricers and what have they got to do with potatoes? We'll start with a food mill. It's a kitchen tool that no kitchen should be without, although most are. Basically, it's a mechanical means of hand-processing soft foods like tomatoes for sauces, cooked apples for applesauce and, of course, cooked potatoes. It's a three-piece gadget consisting of a bowl, a variety of different processing blades, and a crank handle. You fit the blade of your choice into the bowl, affix the handle, toss in whatever you're preparing, and crank. Within seconds, you've got soft mounds of, in this case, potatoes that are light and fluffy and ready to mix with the rest of the ingredients we'll get to in a minute.

A ricer works the same way and is even less complicated to use. It looks like a giant garlic press and functions in much the same manner. A ricer is a simple, two-handled unit joined by a hinge. It's got a plunger on one handle and a perforated receptacle or “hopper” on the other. The plunger fits into the hopper and when you squeeze the handles together, the plunger presses the chunks of cooked potato through a series of small holes in a cutting blade. As with the food mill, you first select the size of the blade based on your desired results. Some ricers have separate blades that you have to insert and some have a movable blade you can just dial around to achieve the texture you want. The results look like grains of rice, hence the name for the tool. And those grains are the secret to transforming your lumpy mashed potatoes into a thing of beauty.

The actions of the ricer or the food mill are much gentler on the potatoes than your old masher or a mixer of some sort. The devices provide a uniform size, an even texture, and they preserve more of the integrity of those little balloon-like starch cells. As a result, you don't need as much stirring and mixing of the final product as you do with other methods. The “riced” potatoes are ready to rock and roll with your other ingredients just the way they are.

And what about those other ingredients? All you need for great mashed potatoes are fat, dairy, and seasoning. You can go off on tangents with garlic and herbs and spices and whatever else makes your taste buds tingle, but for superior “plain” mashed potatoes, all you need are those three elements.

Let's start with fat. And that means butter. NOT MARGARINE!!! That horrible plasticized abomination has no place in any decent kitchen. Laws still on the books in Wisconsin even prohibit serving the vile stuff to prison inmates. No. I mean real, honest-to-goodness, direct from a cow and not a chemistry set butter. Preferably but not essentially unsalted. And in quantities more than you would think wise. One chef I know calls for “egregious amounts” of butter in his mashed potato recipes. By “egregious” he means more than a whole stick per pound of potatoes. If you're cooking up five pounds of spuds for your holiday table, you'd be using about a pound-and-a-half or more of butter. And that's probably excessive. But don't be cheap with it. The old saying “there's flavor in fat” is true. Use as much butter as you're comfortable with – and then throw in an extra tablespoon or two. Softened butter works best.

Now dairy. You need milk, cream, or a combination of both to add an extra layer of flavor and to achieve that final texture you're looking for. Ready made half-and-half is a good option. You don't need a lot. I was showing off my mashed potato skills to a client recently and overmilked the damn things, creating a nice warm potato soup. Way to impress. So add your dairy incrementally until you get the texture you're seeking. Oh, and make sure the liquid is warm. Pouring cold dairy into warm potatoes rapidly cools down the whole mix and increases the likelihood of lumps.

Personally, I tend to mix softened butter into my riced potatoes first and then add in my warmed dairy. There are a couple of reasons, one scientific and one not so much. Scientifically speaking, mixing in the fat with the starch will help coat the starch cells and keep them from absorbing as much of the water part of the dairy component, which is what makes the potatoes gluey. From a practical standpoint, if you do as a lot of folks do and melt your butter in with your milk or whatever and then pour it all in at once, you're losing out on the benefit of some of that butter if you don't wind up using all the liquid. You know, like if you find yourself on the edge of potato soup. But......whatever works for you.

And then you finalize your seasoning. If you adequately salted the cooking water, here's where it will pay off because you won't need as much salt in the final preparation. And if you used salted instead of unsalted butter, this is even more so. The only way to tell is to taste. Culinary school 101: taste, taste, taste! Once you've tasted, adjust your salt accordingly. Add freshly ground black pepper if desired, although white pepper is an option if you don't want little black specks in your fluffy white mash. That's it for me. Some people go on and on with chives and herbs and parsley and such, but for me salt and pepper completes the dish. That and a little garnish of butter to gild the lily.

As I said earlier, if you want to cream your potatoes into a pommes purée, that's your decision. One tip I will pass along to you French chef wannabes is to cook your potatoes in the dairy mix. It'll infuse extra flavor and almost guarantee maximum creaminess. And if you absolutely have to, have to, have to have that almost liquid consistency, DON'T use a food processor or a blender. Instant wallpaper paste. Get that texture in a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment or use a hand mixer. If you've got one of the nice ones that you can fit with just one whisk or beater, so much the better. Work at low speed and don't overwhip.

Oh, and by the way........one more confession/guilty secret: there is a down and dirty solution to the “potato soup” problem. Thicken 'em up with dried mashed potato flakes. See. I told you they had lots of uses.

Buon appetito!

Sold On Sous Vide

Darn Close To Foolproof

I've often said that my home kitchen is ridiculously over-equipped. I've got stuff at home a lot of restaurants don't have. But I am definitely not a “gadget guru.” I'm not prone to the useless geegaws you see on TV commercials. You won't find a stick butter cutter or a banana slicer or a twirling spaghetti fork taking up valuable space in my kitchen. For one thing, even if I wanted such things, my wife wouldn't let me have them. You know how some guys tell their wives if they want a new pair of shoes, they have to get rid of an old pair? That's kind of the way my wife is with me in the kitchen.

So my wife was rather dubious when I told her I wanted an immersion circulator. I had been hearing wonderful things about the sous vide method of cooking for a long time, but the necessary equipment was prohibitively expensive. However, in the last couple of years the prices have come down to the point where you can buy such stuff at Walmart. As a matter of fact, that's where I got mine.

“Wait a minute,” I hear you say. “Immersion which? Sous what? What language are you speaking? French?” Actually, yes. “Sous vide” is French for “under vacuum,” and a vacuum sealer one of the pieces of equipment it's handy to have in order to cook something sous vide. The other more essential piece of hardware is an immersion circulator. And whereas once such arcane and esoteric things were only available at specialty suppliers at costs approaching the ridiculous, nowadays you can buy them, as I said, at places like Walmart for a couple hundred bucks or less, thus moving a fancy French technique once reserved for expensive high-end kitchens into the home kitchen for an affordable price.

In a nutshell, “sous vide” refers to the process of vacuum-sealing food and cooking it in a temperature controlled water bath. Or a bain-marie, if you want to be painfully French about the whole thing. This allows food to be cooked to a very precise temperature while retaining maximum moisture and flavor and with almost no chance of over or under cooking. And no shrinkage either: if you start out with a 10 ounce steak, you'll wind up with a 10 ounce steak.

There are three characteristics of sous vide cooking: containerized cooking that separates the food from its heating environment, pressurized enclosure using full or partial vacuum, and low temperature slow cooking. Each of these techniques developed separately at different points in time. They were all brought together as a distinct cooking method by a combination of engineers and chefs in the late 1960s and early '70s.

Now, you need to understand that this is a low and slow method of cooking. If you've only got ten minutes to bust out a steak for dinner, forget sous vide and break out the old frying pan. A sous vide steak is going to take at least an hour. BUT, that said, it's going to be a perfect steak when it's done. The way the fancy restaurants work around this time issue is that they cook up a bunch of steaks via sous vide in advance and stick them in a refrigerator. Then when an order comes in, they take out a pre-cooked steak, slap the steak in a hot pan, sear it off for a couple of minutes, and viola!, they can deliver a perfect steak in no time. And you can do that at home, too.

And it's not just for steak. So far, besides steaks, I've sous vide cooked ribs, chicken breasts, potatoes, and asparagus. And they all turned out perfectly with no more effort than it took me to prep them. And cleanup was a breeze: I emptied the water out of the pot and threw away the plastic bags.

Here's how it works. You take a big pot, something tall like a stock pot, and you attached the immersion circulator to the side of the pot. My circulator has a big clamp for that purpose. Then you fill the pot with water to the appropriate level. There's a “MIN” and “MAX” line etched on mine. Using hot or warm tap water will speed up the process because the machine will take less time to bring the water to temperature.

Next, you bring your vacuum sealer out. Prep and season whatever you're cooking and place it in a bag you can seal up with the sealer. You can buy premade bags or make them yourself from specially designed rolls of plastic material. You can even bypass the vacuum sealer altogether and use heavy-duty zip-top plastic bags. Since you're never going to heat anything to anywhere close to the boiling point, regular heavy-duty bags will work. Just make sure you get all the air out of them. There are a couple of ways to do this: you can leave a small opening at one corner, stick a straw in there, and suck out the air. Or you can use the water immersion method wherein you slowly submerge the bag in water until the outside water pressure forces all the inside air up and out the top of the bag. Either way works – but a vacuum sealer works better.

Once you've got your food seasoned and sealed, immerse the bag in the pot to which you have attached the circulator and turn the device on, setting the time and temperature required for whatever you're cooking. It's a good idea to secure the bag to the side of the pot so it doesn't go floating around as the water circulates. I use a binder clip. I've heard clothespins work, too. Or a small clamp. Anything that holds the bag in place. The circulator will heat the water until it reaches the desired temperature. Then the circulating motor will kick in and start moving the water. The combination of the heat and the circulation will cook your food in the preset time. Like I said, a steak takes about an hour at 135 degrees Farenheit and asparagus cooks in about twelve minutes at 175 degrees.

You simply cannot under or overcook your food because the machine keeps the water at a precise temperature for a precise length of time. You couldn't “burn” something if you tried. The temperature of the food cannot exceed the temperature of the water in which it's being cooked. And because it's vacuum sealed, there's no loss of moisture, flavor, color, texture, or aroma.

When the process is complete, you just take the bag out of the water, open the bag, remove the cooked contents, and do whatever you need to do to finish the dish. In the case of a steak, that might include tossing the steak in a hot pan for a couple of minutes to give it a nice sear. I have one of those “George Foreman” type electric grill things and it did a perfect job finishing the last steak I cooked sous vide, right down to giving it beautiful grill marks in about a minute. And no smoky kitchen full of dirty pans afterward. I emptied the water out of the stock pot and wiped down the grill surface and I was done. And there was a tender, moist, flavorful mid-rare steak with a gorgeous crust and grill marks sitting there on a plate looking delicious.

In case you couldn't tell, I'm sold on sous vide. I've always thought it was a great if somewhat expensive concept in theory, but now that it's economical enough to be practical......well, I may just go out and buy another one of the things.

There's an old aphorism that says “anything said to be 'foolproof' fails to account for the ingenuity of fools.” And I have found this to be generally true. Somebody could probably screw up a sous vide if they tried hard enough. But so far I haven't been ingenious – or foolish – enough to figure out how.

Vacuum sealers are everywhere these days and you can get a good one for a hundred dollars or less. However, even though they've become vastly more affordable, immersion circulators aren't falling out of trees. You'll have to hunt for one. Mine came from Walmart, but my local store had them on clearance. Largely because, I suspect, the average Walmart shopper didn't know what the hell the thing was and hence they didn't sell many. You can still get one at Walmart.com. Target has them, too. And you can find them at higher end stores like Williams-Sonoma, but expect to pay higher end prices: the same unit I bought at Wallyworld for sixty bucks sells for $160 at Williams-Sonoma. Bed, Bath & Beyond has one similar to mine for a hundred dollars. And, of course, there's always Amazon.

Have I piqued your interest? I hope so. Sous vide is a really great idea for both professional and home cooks. So go out and acquire the equipment and start cooking. Who knows? Your significant other may be so impressed by your new gadget that she or he will even let you keep your banana slicer or your twirling spaghetti fork.

Easy Recipe: Make Some Delicious Tomato Soup Tonight

Open Up A Different Can

It's officially “soup weather.” Now don't go by me; I like soup in July. But for most folks, when leaves start to turn, thoughts start to turn to warm, comforting soups. And nothing says “comfort” like a nice steaming bowl of tomato soup. Maybe float a few oyster crackers or some seasoned croutons in there and serve it up with a grilled cheese sandwich. How can a cool weather lunch or dinner get any better? Well, it can be a little better if you make the soup yourself.

When I was a kid, tomato soup meant the famous red and white can from Campbell's. That's what Mom made at home and even the diners and small-town restaurants of my youth proudly displayed those iconic containers. Ever since a Campbell's chemist named John T. Dorrance developed a commercially viable method for condensing soup around 1897, the time-honored method for making tomato soup has been to open a can, dump the concentrated contents into a pot, add water, stir, heat, and serve.

A hundred years or so later, “ready to eat” soups like Progresso began to make inroads into Campbell's territory by marketing themselves as being more “adult” in nature. And I'll admit that as I got older, I tended to “doctor” Campbell's soup with basil and perhaps a touch of cream. Or I'd just buy a can of Progresso's tomato and basil soup. But now I don't do either anymore. Not since I reconnected with a recipe I used to use in one of my restaurant kitchens several years ago. The results are delicious and the preparation is almost as easy as opening a can. In fact, you do open a can. It's just a different can, that's all.

I was watching an episode of one of those cooking competition shows not long ago and one of the contestant chefs – a self-taught Italian guy – made tomato soup from canned tomatoes. And all the other “cheffy chefs” got all up in arms, scoffing and turning up their oh-so-sophisticated culinary school noses at the very idea of using canned product. Well, lah-ti-dah. I'm here to tell them – and you – that there ain't the first thing wrong with using canned tomatoes for soups and sauces. Generations of Italian cooks, from little mamme and nonne at home up to the big name “celebrity” chefs on TV, all know that, even though there's a lot to be said for garden-fresh tomatoes, for the other forty-eight weeks of the year, good quality canned tomatoes are perfectly acceptable. So all those highfalutin culinary schoolers can just stick their fresh tomatoes where the sun don't shine – an image that will take me a long time to erase from my mind – and get over themselves.

And with all that said, here's how you make great tomato soup at home.

What you'll need:

1 tbsp olive oil

1 small to medium yellow onion, minced

2 or 3 cloves garlic, minced

1 tsp salt

½ tsp freshly ground black pepper

¼ cup tomato paste

1 can (28 oz) peeled whole tomatoes, San Marzano preferred

3 cups low-sodium chicken broth

2 or 3 tsp dried basil

And what you'll do:

In a Dutch oven or a large pot, working over medium heat, heat the olive oil. Add in the minced onion, with a pinch of salt to sweat, and saute until translucent, about five minutes. Add in the minced garlic and cook an additional minute or two. Add salt and pepper and tomato paste. Cook, stirring occasionally, another two or three minutes. Add the tomatoes, the chicken broth, and the basil; stir to combine.

Using an immersion blender, blend the soup to the desired consistency. Simmer, uncovered, for about twenty minutes. Serve.

Serves 6

A few notes on the recipe.

Some recipes you'll find use butter instead of olive oil. Go for it. Either one works. I just prefer the extra layer of flavor the olive oil imparts. 

Some recipes tell you to throw in your onions and garlic at the same time. Don't. Again, build layers of flavor. It's the Italian way. Besides, garlic burns very easily and will turn brown and bitter long before the onions are translucent. 

Watch your salt; you don't want salty soup, especially since you've already used a little salt to help sweat the onions. 

And if you prefer white pepper to black, that's okay by me. 

I like tomato paste in a tube, but you can use one of the little cans if you want. You'll just wind up with half a can of paste that you'll have to figure out how to store or use up. 

I like whole tomatoes in this recipe, but diced or crushed will work as well. After all, you're going to puree them in the end anyway. But please, please, please use San Marzano tomatoes if at all possible. Yeah, they're a little more expensive, but they're well worth it. 

Low-sodium chicken broth, please. Remember what I said about salty soup. 

And if you've got fresh basil that you want to use in place of dried, that's okay, but remember to add it later in the cooking process.

If you don't own an immersion blender – go get one! No, seriously, you can just dump the soup into a regular blender or a food processor to puree it. Then you can dump it back into the pot to finish it. See, wouldn't a stick blender be easier?

This soup only takes twenty minutes or so to cook. If you want to simmer it a little longer, you can do so. It will reduce and concentrate the flavor a little more. Speaking of flavor, if you have a Parmesan rind saved in the freezer (you do, don't you?) this would be a good place to use it for an extra flavor element. And you might want to keep a pinch of sugar handy in case the tomatoes are a little too acid. A knob of unsalted butter would also tame the acid and add a nice smooth, silky finish. Totally optional. You can also make the soup creamy by adding – guess what? – a dab of cream. But do it very last thing or you risk curdling the cream.

If you find yourself with leftover soup, put it in a clean glass jar or container of your choice – remembering that plastic stains – and keep in the fridge for about a week. Or ladle it into a freezer-safe vessel – freezer bags work well – and freeze it for a couple of months.

Try it tonight. You might still keep a can of condensed or ready-to-eat in the pantry as a backup, but I can pretty much guarantee this will become your go to tomato soup of choice.

A Word About Opening A Restaurant – DON'T!

It Wasn't Hell's Kitchen, It Was Kitchen From Hell

Let me warn you from the outset that this is a long, long story. And it must be read in its entirety to really be appreciated. The telling of it is something of a catharsis for me and the reading of it should be a cautionary tale for you. So go get a cup of coffee or a glass of wine or a nice cold beer or something and prepare to kick back.

It was about two years ago that I turned the key for the last time in the door of a restaurant with which I was involved. It had been a frustrating experience. The struggling owner had finally agreed to my help, but too late to save the business. I had agreed to a ninety-day arrangement to try to turn the operation around but once I was fully involved, it only took me about ninety minutes to realize it was all too far down the rat hole to save. Ultimately, all I could do was slow down the bleeding as we shuttered the place once and for all. I hate failure and, despite my best efforts and some nominal short-term successes, I felt like I had failed. And as I locked that door I vowed never to do it again: no more restaurants. I'm old and retired and the restaurant business is for the young and vigorous. I've got my personal chef gig to keep my hand in the game and that's enough for me.

What is it they say? Never say never?

It started again when a friend told me he was opening a brand new restaurant. He's never run a restaurant before, but he's got this great concept. After seriously questioning his sanity, I said, “Well, when you get ready to open, give me a call and I'll come look the place over.” That was it. The extent of my commitment. “I'll come look the place over,” meaning I would make sure the “i”s were dotted and the “t”s crossed when it came to health codes and licenses and such. I'd just be lending a hand to friend, that's all.

See, I have more than average restaurant experience in my family. My grandparents ran restaurants, my uncles and aunts ran restaurants, my wife and I have run restaurants, and one of my sons is in the restaurant business. And that's just the ownership and/or management end. That doesn't factor in numerous family members who have been cooks, servers, bartenders, bussers, dishwashers and the like, my own service and my wife's experience in those areas included. So I do know a thing or two about the industry and it's this knowledge that keeps getting me in trouble. That and the fact that the words “no” and “never” don't seem to exist in my otherwise extensive vocabulary.

Anyway, a few weeks go by and my friend calls me. I get an address and meet him at his new place. And it's really beautiful – from the outside. It's a grand old building in the historic district that he has spent a year-and-a-half and nearly a million dollars buying and renovating.

I found out he had sacrificed more than a quarter-million dollars in tax assistance for which he was eligible as the owner of a historic structure because he had fundamentally altered the exterior of the building by knocking out a window and a door and replacing them with a modern electric roll-up garage-style bay door. Why? Because he thought it was cool and “upscale.” He's going to open the door on nice evenings, he says. And invite in every flying, crawling, and hopping bug in the county, I thought.

Inside, it's a nightmare of ladders, construction equipment, building materials, dirt, dust, and large empty spaces. No water, no lights, no tables, chairs, stools or restaurant equipment. I ask him when he's planning to open this “upscale” palace of his and he smiles proudly and says, “Next month.” Next month? This place isn't ready to open next year! I feel weeds beginning to grow.

You might not be familiar with the term “in the weeds.” It's an idiomatic expression in the restaurant business that basically means overwhelmed or in over your head. It happens, for instance, when your dining room is slap full on a Saturday night and two of your three line cooks, one of your two prep cooks, your dishwasher, your bus person, and half your servers all call in sick. Get the idea?

My friend is Vietnamese. And he has as little taste for Italian food as I have for Asian cuisine. “Sauce too sour,” is what he tells me. I fixed a nice baked ziti one day. He took his portion back to the kitchen, chopped up a bunch of lettuce and cabbage and I don't know what all and – as my Italian grandmothers whirled like turbines in their graves – tossed it all in with the pasta. “No good,” he said. “Must have vegetable.” Anyway, I asked him what his specialty was going to be. I figured it would be something Asian and I was half right. He did indeed plan to feature Vietnamese food and some Japanese, specifically sushi. But he was also going to have Mexican food and American food on his menu. What's more, he planned to import Vietnamese cooks from Vietnam to cook the Vietnamese food, Japanese cooks were coming to cook the Japanese food, he'd find Mexican cooks to cook the Mexican food, and local American cooks would cook the American food. The weeds were now up to my ankles.

Before we go any further, let me explain that this is a very small, very rural Southern town, crippled by the declines of the tobacco and textile industries upon which it once depended. There are a couple of mom & pop diner and cafe-style operations, a couple of chain fast casual places, the usual coterie of fast food joints, and, of course, a Waffle House. To say that the local tastes are plain and unsophisticated would be a vast understatement. One of my Italian friends found this out when he opened a place in a similar town nearby. He can sell pizza and spaghetti and meatballs to the locals all day, but even the simplest Italian dishes like spaghetti aglio e olio or cacio e pepe go sailing right over their heads. I tried to caution my Vietnamese friend that his menu was too ambitious, but he remained convinced that his Vietnamese noodles and his pho were going to revolutionize the local culinary world. And the weeds grew.

They shot up another couple of inches when he asked me to recommend the names of some good-quality kitchen equipment. I went through a list: Viking, Blodgett, Vulcan, Vollrath, Globe, Garland.....several others. “Which is best?” I told him they were all good and that a lot depended on what he was looking for. I told him there were several area restaurant supply places that could help him choose and that many of them could set him up with some good used pieces for a decent price. “Oh, no! All must be new! Top quality and new! Must match!”

I went back a couple of weeks later and saw, for the first time in my life, a whole row of gleaming, brand new, still wrapped in industrial plastic top-of-the-line matching Vulcan restaurant equipment. A six-ring range with a convection oven, not one but two double fryers, a three-burner flattop, and a big honkin' charbroiler. There was also a commercial wok range and a two-burner stock pot stove especially for his soup. Throw in sandwich units and a reach-in freezer and lowboys and prep tables and......the eye-glazing list went on. I had never seen well in excess of fifty-thousand dollars worth of matching stainless steel all still wrapped in plastic. It was amazing.

Still more amazing was the little piece of equipment I saw him fiddling with at the bar. Oh, did I forget to mention his plan for a full bar with top shelf liquor, dozens of local wines, imported and domestic beer in bottles and twelve beer taps? All surrounded by seven huge flat screen TVs? And live music nightly? Anyway, he was attaching this device to the bar. I asked him what it was for. “To chill glasses,” was the response. I pointed to the bank of refrigerators and freezers already in place under the bar. “You can chill glasses in those,” I said. “This more upscale,” he replied. I inquired, “How much?” The weeds sprang higher at the reply, “Two thousand dollars.”

Then there were the custom-made tables he ordered from California at a cost in excess of $12K. With matching chairs, of course. And the banquettes; the white leather banquettes. Not faux-leather or vinyl. No. These were real textured top grain white leather, at a cost of which I am blissfully ignorant. Doesn't he realize what's going to happen to that white leather after a few butts in blue jeans slide across it and a bunch of shoes and boots start kicking it and kids start bouncing on it and spilling stuff on it? But he doesn't care: it's “upscale.” And the weeds continued skyward.

This was quite a departure for me. The last guy with whom I had worked didn't have two pennies to rub together and we had to do everything on the cheap. This guy had to be tied down and handcuffed to keep him from throwing money at everything in sight.

He began stocking his kitchen. He had more woks than I have ever seen. And he had ordered a butt-load of sizzle plates for fajitas. But there was not a single skillet or saucepan anywhere to be seen. I pointed out this obvious shortcoming and he responded by bringing in some stuff from somebody's home kitchen. He seemed genuinely surprised when I told him it all had to go. And so did the brand new Black and Decker non-commercial toaster oven he bought and set up on the line. And the dish sponges he was using to wash dishes. And about a dozen other health code violating elements I kept finding as I slogged through the growing weeds.

He began bringing in food. And the battles over properly arranging things in his walk-in cooler began. As did the constant fight to keep things off the floor. Every time I walked into the kitchen I found myself screaming, “You can't do that!” And the next day the raw food would be back above the cooked food in the walk-in and the bags of rice and sugar and what have you would be back on the floor. And the damn sponges would be back in the dish bay. And the mops would be leaned against the wall with their heads up so the dirty water could drip down the handles. And the waste baskets would be missing from the handwash sinks. And the ice scoops would be left in the ice bins. And there were always stacks of wet dishes everywhere I looked. “You have to let them dry,” I would plead. “It take too long,” was what I got in reply. I would shout, mi stai impazzire (you're driving me crazy) and he would say something in Vietnamese and the battle would rage on.

As he began to hire kitchen staff, he started listening to what everybody told him he needed to have. Some of it was stuff I had been hammering him about for weeks: pots and pans, tongs, spatulas, Cambro containers, hotel pans – basic stuff he should have had weeks ago. Now with everybody telling him to buy stuff, he went on another spending orgy and bought everything. But because his new staff had already figured out that their boss had more dollars than sense, they were convincing him to buy big ticket items like a $1,200 Robot Coupe. While those of you in the business are picking up your jaws, I'll explain to the uninitiated that this is a very expensive, very high-end commercial food processor. Did he need a food processor? Yeah. Did he need a frickin' Robot Coupe? No.

The tipping point was the menu. He had paid eight-thousand dollars to somebody who saw him coming for the design and printing of his menu. When the garish, poorly laid out but beautifully printed and spiral bound menus arrived, they were so riddled with errors that they had to be trashed and redesigned and reprinted. I handled that at a cost of less than a thousand dollars.

But it wasn't just the printed menu that was the problem. What was on that menu was the problem. Even the reps from the major food distributors were trying to tell him his eight-page menu was unsustainable. But he wouldn't listen. He plowed right ahead, buying tens of thousands of dollars worth of food that he predictably discovered overwhelmed his storage capacity.

But the best part of the debacle is yet to come. When he found – as I told him he would – that the local job pool was not neck-deep in ethnic cooks, he gave up on the idea of having a dozen chefs specializing in four specific cuisines and settled for hiring four or five local guys and gals who could cook a variety of things. But he insisted on doing the Vietnamese dishes himself. Which would have been fine had he ever spent even thirty seconds as a cook on the line and had he even known how to make the goddamn stuff himself! He hadn't a clue! He had put all this stuff on the menu based on what he liked and what he had seen in other restaurants, but he didn't know how to really make any of it!

His opening date of “next month” had long since gone by the wayside. For one thing, he had no tables or chairs: his California supplier had taken his money up front and then dragged out delivery for several weeks past the promised date. He hadn't hired any FOH staff, not the first server or host. Oh, he had a pile of applications, but no employees a week out from his new opening date. Which he planned to meet using old mismatched tables he dredged up from the basement and covered with white linen tablecloths. What he did have – besides a fractious and fractured skeleton of a kitchen staff – was his “management team.” This consisted of one semi-retired guy who had run his own country-style diner once and who had worked for a couple of chain places. And there were three young women who had been either waitresses or bartenders at local establishments. Mind you, they'd never managed a day in their young lives, but they had at least worked in restaurants. The fifth member of his team was my wife, whom he had prevailed upon at the last minute to join with and perhaps help balance out his merry band. But besides her involvement with our small personal chef business, she has a full-time job in the “big city” and had neither the time nor the interest in being anything more than a part-time “fill-in” wherever she might be needed. She made that clear at the outset.

The kicker was that none of these folks was “in charge.” There was no structure like a general manager with assistants to supervise various areas. Nope. Everybody was “equal.” Which meant everybody was running things the way they saw fit based on their own level of ineptitude and inexperience. Hiring and training staff, working out the seating, setting up the bar, learning how to operate the POS.......all this and a hundred other day-to-day details were left up to the “managers,” four of whom – including my wife – all had other full-time jobs and were only available at the restaurant on limited days and for limited hours. This left the bulk of the work to the older guy who quickly got snowed under. My wife tried to tell our friend from the get-go that this “management by committee” was doomed to failure, but he wasn't listening.

That's because he was busy back in the kitchen learning how to make the food he was advertising. As I told him, if I opened an Italian restaurant and featured bucatini al'Amatriciana or pasta puttanesca or even fettuccine Alfredo, I would damn sure know how to make the dishes before I put them on the menu! He just got pissed at me for pointing out yet another thing he didn't want to hear. And the weeds are now waist high.

Working with this guy was so maddening. There were times when even Jesus Christ would have thrown up his hands and shouted, “ME!”

There was a lot more. Like when several of us had to talk him down off the ledge because he wanted to call in the television stations for the grand opening which was to include a band and a full-fledged Chinese dragon parading around out in the street. But frankly, I'm as tired of writing about all the lunacy as you probably are of reading about it.

It all boils down to a dream. Here's a guy who has never owned, managed, or worked in a restaurant before. Hell, at this point, I'm not sure he's even been in a restaurant before. But he has a dream. And I found myself living in his dream, which – with a nod to Gordon Ramsay – was rapidly turning into my kitchen nightmare. But instead of “Hell's Kitchen,” this was kitchen from hell.

The problem with beautiful dreams is that they more often than not clash with harsh reality, and that's something I could never get my friend to see. Kenny Rogers and Kim Carnes had a big hit back in 1980 with a song called “Don't Fall In Love With A Dreamer.” Truer words were never spoken.....errr...sung. I might modify the lyric a bit; change it, perhaps, to “Don't go into the restaurant business with a dreamer.”

The beginning of the end of my ride on this treno pazzo actually came when I called out his dream. Fed up and fuming beyond the usual mi stai impazzire stage one day, I told him his dream was out of touch with reality. “I know you see yourself as the smiling, genial host, circulating among tables full of happy diners consuming your liquor while your staff glides smoothly around serving them plates of delicious food to rapt and effusive praise. I know you envision stepping through the kitchen doors, where your line of immaculate cooks will be singing songs as they effortlessly prepare your exotic dishes. Even the bussers and the dishwashers will be glad for the opportunity to work in such a wonderful place.” Then I hit him square between the eyes with reality. “After the initial grand opening blush, there will be days when you won't have enough customers to make it worth opening the doors. Your servers are going to quit because they can't make enough money.” I told him his kitchen staff would break down over stress and long hours and some of them would walk without notice. When they were slammed they would be hot, sweaty, dirty and short-tempered and when they were bored they would be worse. “And nobody will be singing.” “You wrong,” he shouted. “It not be that way ever! You go too far!” Yeah, well. The only far place I went was out the door.

Good friend and damn fool that I am, I came back and stayed on through the disastrously successful opening. As predicted, he made a ton of money in the first few days. He was slammed to the walls with a butt in nearly every seat. And I found myself making trips to Walmart on opening day to replenish stocks of food he kept running out of because he hadn't listened to anybody in advance. He had to 86 mashed potatoes because he ran out of spuds and he had to 86 french fries when the freezer ran out of those. And I was buying flour tortillas by the carload because he was selling the hell out of tacos.

Burgers and tacos were his biggest selling items. His sushi did okay but his Vietnamese dishes went nowhere. Can you say “I told you so?” He changed the menu three times in the first week. Of course, by then there were hundreds of take-out menus all over town with items that weren't on the actual menu anymore and the menus on the website and Facebook were in a constant state of flux. It became kind of a game to log in and see what the “menu of the day” was. My wife and I tried to tell him to introduce the community to the unfamiliar stuff by running dishes as specials to see what caught on. But......yeah, you guessed it. He wouldn't listen.

No, that's not quite right. As the pressures and consequences of his incompetence began coming home to roost, he went from a stance of listening to nobody to one of listening to everybody. Somebody would tell him something in the morning, he would implement it in the afternoon and ditch it by nightfall after somebody else told him something different. It was quite pathetic to watch. His wife said she couldn't even talk to him about the restaurant anymore because he would just get angry.

The head cook – or at least the one who knew the most about what the hell he was doing and tried the hardest – took me aside at one point and said, “I've been doing this a long time and I've never seen anybody have to learn every fuckin' thing the hardest fuckin' way possible.” All I could say was, “Yep.”

The reviews started coming in. The food was great but the service sucked. Maybe because when I tried to tell him he needed to set up actual training sessions for the servers at least two weeks before he opened, he ignored me and let his “managers” handle it. Basically, the servers were given a crash course in how to operate the POS and then handed menus and told, “Go forth and serve.” The most consistent complaint in the reviews? “The servers don't seem to know the menu.” Well, duh! And when you change the damn thing three times in a week, what do you expect?

That's where my wife began to lose it. Not only did she wear a “manager” nametag, she also donned the hat of webmaster and menu designer, something she offered free of charge because she felt so bad for the way he had already been screwed over. She has a degree in graphic design and more than twenty-five years experience operating and managing sign shops, print shops, and the graphics department of a fairly large newspaper conglomerate. But she simply couldn't keep up. He was making changes by the hour. He was watching his menu disintegrate before his eyes and there were days when the menu that was posted when the doors opened was not the same menu that closed out the day. Because she had another job and a life outside the bedlam, my wife couldn't make the changes rapidly enough to keep pace. Well, there was a girl in the kitchen who had taken a class at a community college and who had Adobe software on her computer. When she volunteered to take over managing the hourly menu updates, our “friend,” without a moment's consultation with or consideration for my wife and all her hard work to that point, let her do it.

The hosts and the servers and the bartenders started quitting. And so did the cooks. And the bussers and the dishwashers. And, finally the “consultant” and one of the “managers” called it a day. Yep. My wife and I walked for good after one of the so-called “managers meetings” where nothing was ever really managed. Between that and the menu insult, we'd had enough. We simply got tired of being ignored and superfluous. Basta cazzate! Non me ne importa un cavolo! Non mi più essere il scemo, quindi vaffanculo! And that about says it all.

The day after I left, the health inspector dropped by: five critical violations and three non-critical ones. And every blessed one of them was for things I had stomped and shouted and fussed about day in and day out.

When my wife went down later that day to turn in her keys, it was a very contrite man who reluctantly accepted them. “I do things your way from now on. I listen to you. You see, I change. We talk soon.” Maybe. But next time he wants to talk, I'm not sure we'll listen.

Why You Really Don't Want Copper Cookware

Superior Performance and Pretty To Look At, But.....

I got to talking cookware with my kids the other day and my daughter-in-law said something about someday wanting to have a set of copper cookware. Ah-h-h-h......er-r-r-r-r.....how do I tell her? No, sweetie, you really don't.

Don't get me wrong. Copper cookware is great stuff. Julia Child swore by it. Me? I just swear at it.

Okay, let's be positive about the whole thing first. A nice set of gleaming, bright copper cookware looks absolutely stunning. You don't hide it in a cabinet; you display it like art.

And when it comes to performance, copper is a Cadillac among Volkswagens. There is nothing that conducts heat better and more evenly than copper. This means your copper pots and pans will heat up quickly, retain heat longer, and there is virtually no chance of hot spots that can result in uneven cooking. All that and it's relatively lightweight, too. At least when compared to iron and steel.

And don't stop at pots and pans. Generations of fancy French and French-inspired chefs have sung the praises of using copper bowls for whisking egg whites into creamy, fluffy mounds. Here's why: when you cradle that shiny copper bowl in your arm and start hammering away with a balloon whisk, the action actually causes microscopic bits of copper to break away and incorporate with the egg whites. Since copper acts as a binder with sulfur groups (like egg white proteins), it prevents them from forming the strong disulfide bonds that can lead to gritty, dry whites when whipped. So using a copper bowl for whipping almost guarantees firm, glossy egg whites that are not grainy or overwhipped.

So with all that going for it, why do I say you don't really want copper cookware?

Wel-l-l-l-l......first there's that whole taking out a loan to buy the stuff thing. Think I'm kidding? I can get you a nice twelve-piece set at Williams Sonoma for only $1,900 plus tax. There's just something wrong about paying more for a set of pots and pans than I paid for my first car.

Then there's the fact that copper is soft and malleable, making it prone to denting and scratching.

And you're going to spend your life polishing the stuff if you want it to stay nice looking. Left to its own devices, it will tarnish, turning a lovely grayish black over time. But not for long. Acids interacting with tarnish will eventually produce the minerals azurite, malachite, and brochantite, resulting in a nice blue-ish or grey-ish green patina. Think “old-statue-in-the-park” color.

Don't even think about putting copper cookware in the dishwasher. That's an expressway to ruined pots and pans. The harsh conditions inside your dishwasher will permanently alter the color of your cookware as well as possibly damaging the lining. Nope. You've gotta hand wash those rascals. And you've got to do it quickly. If you leave a copper pan sitting around with food particles in it for even a few hours, you'll run the risk of corrosion starting. And you'd better have a towel handy: you need to completely hand dry those babies because if you don't and you just let them drip dry......yep, you guessed it; you'll start them down the spotty, streaky path to tarnish and patina.

Now, tarnished copper or copper with a green patina will cook just as efficiently and as well as bright, shiny copper, but you do need to remove any green tinge from an interior surface before you try to cook anything, lest the aforementioned minerals interact with whatever you're cooking in a very untasty manner.

My kids cook a lot of Italian food. That means lots of tomatoes. That means lots of acidic reaction with copper that will make for a corroded pot and a nasty tasting sauce.

Of course, unless you find some really old antique stuff somewhere, chances are your copper cookware will be lined with either steel or tin. That's because without a non-reactive lining it's possible to get copperiedus. Huh? Don't worry. That's just a form of metal poisoning caused by an excess of copper in the body, which can happen if you cook acidic foods in unlined copper. And if through use or abuse your pan's tin or steel lining should become scratched or pitted......well, it's pretty much the same as being unlined.

And if you get past all that and still want copper cookware, just be aware that there is a really steep learning curve involved if all you've ever used before is aluminum, steel, or cast iron. Be prepared to burn a whole lot of stuff before you get the hang of it because copper heats up really quickly. Conversely, you might get slower than expected results with low heat cooking because copper is thicker than the non-stick aluminum you're probably accustomed to. Oh, and speaking of sticking, copper isn't really noted for being non-stick.

And if you're into induction cooking......well, don't expect copper to join the party. It's non-ferromagnetic.

Still want that pretty, shiny copper cookware? Go for it. It's still great stuff. To me, though, it's like an expensive sports car or a high-maintenance lover: nice to look at, fun to play around with, and great performance where it counts. But wait until the new wears off and the bills kick in. I'll stick with my 18/10 stainless steel, my seasoned carbon steel, and my cast iron, thank you. Whatever choice you make, just make sure it's an informed one.

How To Make Jarred Tomato Sauce Taste (Almost) Like Homemade

If You Can't Make It, Fake It

I've got bunch of recipes for salsa di pomodoro (tomato sauce) upon which I have come to rely over the years. They range from a quick “Five Minute” sauce I …..ahem....acquired from Canadian celebrity chef David Rocco to a good old traditional long-cooking sauce that requires hours to prepare. I've even got a raw sauce, or salsa cruda, I use on pizza. But every so often, in a move I'm sure sends shudders all the way back to my Italian second-great-grandmother, I have been known to grab a jar of Ragu out of the pantry. Calm down, nonna! I only said I grabbed a jar of sauce, not that I actually served it straight out of the jar.

Obviously, homemade is always your best bet. But I realize there are a lot of people out there who, for a lot of reasons, turn to the grocery store shelf for their pasta sauce. And that can be okay as long as you don't just dump, stir, and serve. In the spirit of “if you can't make it, fake it,” let me offer a few tips on how to make store-bought sauce taste sorta kinda almost like homemade.

First and foremost, buy decent sauce. I like Ragu but Prego is okay, too. They are a good middle-of-the-road balance between the “high end” sauces with the ridiculous price tags and the bottom of the barrel stuff you buy for ninety-nine cents a can. I generally avoid jars of super-cheap supermarket brands and I won't even touch anything in a can (lookin' at you, Hunt's.) The reason for this is that most of these products are made from low quality ingredients and contain lots of preservatives, salt, and sugar to make them taste like anything edible. You can usually hit a “2 for $5” sale or something on Ragu and make out pretty good in the cost department, so just stay away from the really cheap stuff.

Next, I buy the plain “traditional” version of Ragu/Prego. Whatever you do, don't buy anything “flavored” with “meat.” Same thing goes for mushrooms or vegetables or any other ingredient added for your convenience. Just buy the plain stuff and add your own extras, okay?

Now after you open the jar and pour the sauce in the pan, get ready to do some serious “doctoring.” In the great French tradition of mise en place – which the Italians probably invented – have all your ingredients stove-side and ready to go. They will include olive oil, red pepper flakes, garlic, tomato paste, dried oregano, and fresh basil. Also have some sugar, some salt, some lemon juice, and some butter handy as well as a little bit of the water in which you are cooking the pasta.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute” you say. “That's almost as much work as making the stuff from scratch.” Well......yeah.......sorta. But believe me, it's worth it in the end.

So, turn the heat on under your pan to low or medium low. You want to simmer the sauce, not boil it. Add in just a glug or two of olive oil. You're looking for a layer of flavor here, not a greasy sauce. In fact, this whole exercise is about building flavors, which is what Italian cooking is all about in the first place. When you make sauce from scratch, you build layers of flavor. This is kind of a shortcut. I know, nonna! Please stop crying!

Add some red pepper flakes, to taste. In Italian, that's quanto basta, abbreviated qb, and loosely translated as “just enough.” Remember, some people have a higher tolerance for heat and spice than others. Taste as you season so your sauce doesn't go arrabbiata on you and burn out somebody's taste buds. Qb is the key. Quanto basta.

All right. Now it's time for some tomato paste. In spite of what the name implies, tomato paste is not an adhesive used to glue tomatoes together. Tomato paste is concentrated tomatoes that have been skinned, seeded, strained and then cooked down until they become.....well, paste-like. Its principle purpose is to punch up the tomato flavor in sauces, soups, stews and the like. And that's what we're using it for here; to amp up the generally bland taste of jarred tomato sauce. Again, quality counts. Stay away from the cheap stuff and look for product made by Cento – my favorite – or Amore, another decent Italian brand. Both of these come in tubes, kind of like toothpaste. The great thing about tubes as opposed to cans is that you can use as little or as much as you need, screw the top back on the tube, and stick it in the fridge for later use. Can't do that with a can. And since all you'll generally need is a tablespoon or two, the advantage should be obvious. So, squeeze out that tablespoon or two and stir it into your simmering sauce.

Garlic is optional and depends on your choice of flavor profile. Sometimes I use it and sometimes I don't. When I do, I opt for fresh garlic over some form of dehydrated powder or granules. Watch “Clemenza” make sauce in “The Godfather” or watch “Paulie” slice garlic with a razor blade in “Goodfellas.” Then do what I do: grab a microplane grater and grate up a clove or two. It's a lot easier. Jarred sauces usually have some onion and garlic in them and if what's in there is okay for your taste, leave it at that. Otherwise, use some fresh garlic as an additional layer of flavor.

Again, there's usually some Italian seasonings in jarred sauces: just usually not enough. So stir in a bit of oregano. Just a pinch; a little goes a long way especially if you're using dried oregano, which can be pretty potent. When it comes to basil, I prefer fresh and I add it toward the end of the cooking process so that it retains its fullest flavor. Taste, taste, taste. Don't just toss stuff in the pot. Taste as you go.

Which brings me to the next point. I mentioned sugar, salt, lemon juice, and butter. You may need them and you may not depending on your taste. Sometimes the manufacturer will add sugar to counter the natural acidity of tomatoes. You don't want to add more or you'll make the sauce too sweet. Taste it first and if it's too acidic, add a pinch of sugar. Conversely, if it's already too sweet, add a little lemon juice. And salt can help balance both flavors. Once again, it's all about tasting as you go.

What about the butter? In chef-speak, it's called “finishing” the sauce. Or maybe you've watched one of those fancy cooking shows and heard the chef talked about “mounting” the sauce. Get the obvious image out of your mind. The French term for finishing a sauce with butter is “monte au beurre,” and it involves adding few pats of cold butter to the warm sauce in order to make it richer and shinier and just a little bit more flavorful. You don't have to do it, but you'll impress your family and friends with your knowledge of classic technique if you do.

Another little add in I'm fond of is one of those Italian “secrets:” Parmesan cheese rind. Now if the only way you ever buy your Parmesan cheese is pre-shredded in a package or (shudder) in that execrable green plastic or cardboard “can,” you've probably never even seen the rind from a hunk of real, authentic Parmigiano-Reggiano. And that's a pity that borders on a culinary criminal offense. But that's a rant for another day, so if you do actually use the real stuff, or even a reasonable domestic facsimile thereof, save the rind – you can collect a bunch of them in the freezer – and add it to jarred tomato sauce for yet another layer of real Italian flavor. Just let it sit and simmer in the sauce. But remember to remove what's left of the rind before you serve your sauce. I forgot once: explaining the misshapen, cheesy, sauce-covered lump to the person who got it on their plate was rather embarrassing.

Finally, I mentioned cooking water. This is the ultimate Italian “secret ingredient;” an ingredient known to generations of nonne. And it's just stupid simple. Before you throw away the salty, starchy water in which your pasta has been boiling for the last eight to ten minutes, dip a cup or ladle into the pot and reserve a little bit of it on the side. Not much. A half-cup or so is fine. Then, as you reach the final stages of preparing your sauce to receive the pasta, spoon in just a little of the reserved water. It's a trick that will almost magically finish developing the flavor and texture of your sauce.

There you have it. Is it more work than “dump and stir?” Yep. But it's also less work than scratch-made and when done right can be almost as good. Ouch! Nonna, stop that! I said “almost.” I know, nothing is as good as the sauce you spend hours lovingly preparing, but give people a break, okay? At least they're trying. Really, nonna, put down the wooden spoon! Please?

Ciao for now and buon appetito!

Like It Or Not, Plastic Straws Are Going Away

The World Is Suffering From A Plastic Hangover

Call me a mean old curmudgeonly boomer if you wish but I think if I read one more overwrought screed from one more hyperventilating millennial about the imminent demise of the plastic straw, I'm just going to flagellate myself with a plastic spoon until I lapse into blissful unconsciousness. Hear this, you coddled ninny-whiners who think all of recorded history began with your generation: we oldsters managed to live quite well without plastic straws – or plastic anything – decades before you were born, thank you very much. È vero! There was life before plastic!

The trendy among us are now touting the virtues of reusable stainless steel straws. They come in straight and angled varieties, often packaged together for your convenience. They are practically indestructible and are easy to clean and disinfect in your dishwasher and/or with the included little cleaning brush. And, of course, they are environmentally responsible. No sea turtle has had to have a metal straw removed from its nose yet.

My biggest question is where are all my contemporaries on this issue? Where are the folks like me who remember going down to the malt shop or the soda fountain and sipping our beverages through “old fashioned” paper straws? I don't recall even seeing a plastic straw until I was about ten years old. And yet I somehow managed to survive my childhood using plain old wax-coated paper straws.

Drinking straws have been around for thousands of years. The oldest known straw was found in a Sumerian tomb dating back to 3000 B.C.E. It was a gold tube inlaid with lapis lazuli. For ensuing centuries, people sucked up liquids through whatever hollow device was available to them. Actual pieces of dried straw worked for some folks, although such had an unfortunate tendency to fall apart when they got wet and also to make everything one drank through them taste kinda like.....straw.

And then along came a guy named Marvin C. Stone. Legend has it that he was sipping on a rye grass straw stuck into his favorite beverage – a mint julep – on a hot Washington, D.C. day in 1888 and was somewhat unsatisfied with the grassy taste thereof. So he set about doing something about it. Stone wrapped a piece of paper around a pencil, slid the pencil out of the resulting tube, and glued the overlapping edges together. History was made! Stone later refined his design by inventing a machine that would coat the paper straw with a light layer of wax to hold it together instead of glue. And that, my friends, was the state of the straw-making art for the next seventy years or so. Oh, there were occasional innovations: a Cleveland, Ohio-based inventor named Joseph B. Friedman came up with the idea of inserting a screw into a standard drinking straw and, using dental floss, forcing the paper into the screw threads, thus creating corrugations. After he removed the floss and the screw, the now articulated paper straw would conveniently bend over the edge of a glass. This paper “bendy straw” was patented in 1937, long before its plastic descendant was ever thought of.

As I said, paper straws – straight or bendy – were the only straws I ever knew as a child growing up in the '50s and '60s. And then the entire frickin' world turned to plastic.

Plastics had been around in some form for a long time. Beginning with natural bio-derived materials and progressing through chemically modified natural substances like vulcanized rubber, plastic-like products were known as early as around 1600 B.C.E. It wasn't until 1856 that a British inventor, Alexander Parkes, patented what is considered to be the first entirely man-made plastic. Development continued over the course of the next hundred years until the “plastic age” really took off in the booming post-World War II years. And once plastic started taking over, there was no stopping it.

Now, obviously the great advances we've seen in science, engineering, medicine and other important fields would not have been possible without plastics. But I think Dante would have reserved another level of hell for the people responsible for making plastic packaging for every blessed product known to man, especially whoever came up with the accursed so-called “blister pack.” Right along with them would be the folks who developed those little plastic rings that hold six-packs together – and that choke and fatally bind wildlife who become entangled in them. And the people who make all the “disposable” plastic and Styrofoam food packaging, cups, and bottles that litter our landscape and clog our oceans. Add in the manufacturers of the now ubiquitous plastic grocery bag, without which, it seems, everyday life would not be possible. And not to be left out, of course, are those who made plastic straws a modern-day “necessity.” Of all of these miscreants I would ask one simple question: “What was so wrong with paper?”

Part of the answer, at least as far as straws are concerned, would be durability. And here's where the monster begins to feed on itself. When I was a kid, beverages were served in glass; either drinking glasses or glass bottles. Some “ultra-modern” places used paper cups. All of these vessels were compatible with simple paper straws. But then plastic and Styrofoam cups hit the market and with them came plastic lids. Now, if you've ever tried to shove a paper straw through that sharp-edged little “X” cut in a plastic lid, you'll understand why something more durable was needed. Enter the plastic drinking straw, the perfect companion to the plastic cup and plastic lid. Not only was plastic more durable than paper, thanks to advances in technology, it was becoming cheaper to produce. And since “cheap” and “durable” were among the buzzwords of the '60s, plastic had nowhere to go but up. How far up? Try this figure on: 1.5 million tons of plastic were produced in 1950. By 2015, that figure had risen to 322 million tons. And after a giddy half-century-long plastic party, the world was beginning to suffer a plastic hangover.

My generation, the “baby boomer” generation, was the first to “benefit” from plastic. My parents and grandparents and all those who came before them somehow had to muddle through life with natural materials. We booomers were kind of the transitional generation. I had plastic toys when I was growing up, things my parents would never have dreamed of. But, like them, I also had a lot of stuff made of metal, wood, fabric, and paper or cardboard. By the time my kids came along in the early 1980s, there was nothing left that wasn't made of plastic. And it's that plastic mindset, that plastic dependency, that plastic addiction that causes today's generation to weep over the loss of their precious plastic straws. In typical fashion, they believe that because they've know nothing else, nothing else has ever existed.

But it did exist. I was one of an estimated seventy-six million Americans born during the “baby boom” years between 1946 and 1964. In total there were slightly fewer than two-hundred million people in this country when the “baby boom” ended and the “plastic boom” began, events that were fairly overlapping in nature, give or take ten years. And we all made do without plastic straws stuck into plastic cups through holes in plastic lids. All of us; kids and adults, young and old, healthy and infirm.

I am not completely without empathy for those with disabilities who claim they “need” plastic straws to maintain their quality of life. I read the impassioned plea of a young woman suffering from a condition that limits her ability to drink without the use of a straw. “I have used plastic straws my entire life because I cannot pick up a cup,” she writes. “Without straws, I am unable to drink anything independently. Straws may be a luxury for some people, but for me, they are a necessity. How will I drink if straws are no longer available?”

Wow. I don't remember anyone saying anything about completely banning straws, just plastic ones. But I still have to wonder what similarly disabled people did prior to, say, 1965 or so. In fact, some of the first customers for those paper “bendy straws” to which I alluded earlier were hospitals and medical facilities because bedridden patients found them so much easier to use than conventional straws.

And I hear a lot about paper straws not being practical because they allegedly get soggy after awhile. Some folks even cite this as a safety issue, claiming that people can choke on wet paper straws. All I can say is I lived with paper straws the first ten or fifteen years of my life and I don't recall that ever being a problem. I slurped many a soda through a paper straw and I simply can't remember ever having one get soggy or fall apart before I was finished drinking. Maybe my memory is faulty or maybe they just made better paper straws in those days, I don't know. But I do have a solution: don't leave your straw in your drink for too long. Conservative estimates from straw manufacturers indicate that a common paper straw submersed in liquid will hold up for about three or four hours. And you know, if it takes you more than four hours to finish your drink, you might just have to get another straw.

Look, I've been in the restaurant business. I know how this works. In fact, even as I write I'm consulting on a new venture set to open soon. And my advice to to the owner I'm working with is this: Buy a couple of boxes of plastic straws and keep 'em in the back in case somebody really “needs” one. Otherwise, paper is the default offering.

We can go back. Natural materials are still out there and we can still use them. We just have to want to. We just have to step away from worshiping the plastic god at the altar of cheap convenience. Yes, it's probably going to cost a little more at first until our technology can be sufficiently retooled, but it will be worth it in the long run. The savings to the planet will outweigh the cost to the consumer. It's just going to require a paradigm shift and perhaps that shift begins with eliminating plastic straws. Maybe plastic bags and bottles will be next and who knows where it will go from there?

Voluntary efforts from companies like McDonald’s, Starbucks, American Airlines, SeaWorld, Disney and dozens more are spearheading the movement to eliminate plastic straws. Bon Appétit Management, a food service company with a thousand U.S. locations, says it will phase out plastic straws and hospitality giants Marriott and Hyatt are ditching plastic straws as well. Even out on the high seas, Royal Caribbean plans to get rid of plastic straws aboard its fifty ships by the end of 2018. And where a spirit of volunteerism isn't enough, bans are being enacted. Seattle, for instance, has banned plastic straws. So have Malibu and Miami Beach.

Millennial moaning aside, the shift has begun and plastic straws are going away. Maybe if we're lucky they'll take some of the other “essential” plastic products with them; the things we find strewn along our highways and beaches and filling out landfills. Things that will be there for the next fifty to a thousand years as a testament to our shortsightedness back when we all let slick marketing encase our world in plastic.

Hey, maybe I can make a few bucks on this. I'd be willing to set up classes to teach members of the current generation how to drink from a paper straw. Maybe I could throw in lessons on how to wrap sandwiches in wax paper and how to carry stuff in paper or fabric bags. I might even turn them on to the virtues of drinking soda from glass bottles. I mean, everybody knows it tastes better that way, right? Any takers?