By Michael Y. Park

 

Have you ever faked a dinner?

According to a new survey, more than a quarter of us wouldn't have a problem doing so.

The Hormel Foods/Harris Interactive poll found that 27 percent of American adults were OK with passing off take-out or prepared food as something they whipped up themselves.

The disparities were interesting, too.

People on the coasts were more likely to find food fibbing kosher:

-29 percent on the East Coast and 30 percent on the West Coast

-Versus 22 percent in the Central states and 26 percent in the South.

Men were more likely to fob off false victuals as their own:

-31 percent of men said it was reasonable,

-Against women's 23 percent.

And there was a weird age divide between two close age groups:

-A considerable 38 percent of people ages 18 to 24 agreed that counterfeit eats were legit,

-Compared to a low of 22 percent for those between 25 and 34.

(The study was conducted by telephone and included 1,011 U.S. adults; results were weighted by race, sex and geographic region.)

As for myself, as far as I can remember, I've never actually done something like that unless it was an obvious joke, but I've suspected others of committing food fraud a few times.

Let's hear your faking-it stories. When was it acceptable? And if you're a sinner, how did you succeed in pulling the wool over your family's or guests' eyes? If you succeeded at all, that is. Or were you the food detective who sleuthed out a phony feast?

Sliding Toward Perfect Pizza

By Julia Langbein

Photograph by Kevin Demaria

The day I picked up my pizza peel from the post office and carried it home, many people reacted to the oversized aluminum spatula sticking out of my backpack.

"That for spanking?" asked a tired mom on the bus, within earshot of her rowdy kids.

"It's for pizza," I said. She looked confused and probably pictured me using it to twack a pizza delivery man in the face. That's were pizza comes from, isn't it?

Not if you're an ambitious idiot, like me. Even though I live in Chicago, where great pizza can be found on practically every corner, I've been attempting to perfect my own pizza-making skills recently. I recognize that this seems like the work of a simpleton, as if my next act will be opening up an ice factory in Oslo. But messing around with pizza at home is surprisingly rewarding - it involves a lot of little jobs (mixing dough, grating cheese, chopping onion) that can (and should) be farmed out to friends and family. Best of all, the liberty to think outside the box when it comes to toppings is exhilarating (I'm partial to "breakfast pizza," with bacon and a fried egg, but go ahead - baked kale? Mackerel? Tomme de savoie? I'm not judging.)

The first step toward outstanding results is a pizza stone (or baking stone). I bought one for less than $20 at Sur La Table, and parked it in my oven (where it lives permanently, regulating and drying the heat). The stone, a porous slab formed in 2,000-degree heat, sucks moisture from the crust, making it extra toasted and crispy. It'll perform similarly on bread, cookies, etc.

But with a beautifully assembled raw pie ready to bake, one encounters a problem: how to get it into the oven and onto the stone, which is heavy, extremely hot, and impossible to move or manhandle? This is the moment when the pizza peel comes to the rescue, serving its one purpose of transporting your pie from prep surface to oven.

That's all it does.

Brief, targeted, and essential, the pizza peel is like the one guy on the set of the Mariah Carey music video whose only job is to spray her with 24-karat-gold-flecked bronzer between takes. And like spritzing Mariah's body with gold, using the pizza peel is certainly the most exciting part of the project. Someone else gets the oven door, I crouch low holding my absurd pie-laden oar, and I attempt the classic gesture of the pizzaiolo-that short, fast jab needed to hop the pizza, intact, off the peel and onto the stone before slamming the door shut again.

Even with the requisite dusting of cornmeal or semolina on the paddle to help the pie slide without sticking, this action sequence takes practice, and the learning curve can be messy. Mysteriously, the pie might end up on the stone with the toppings somehow jumping ship. Or you might shuffle a little too hard and whip the pie clear over the stone to the back of the oven. This is when a nice bottle of wine comes in handy.

I prefer a metal peel. Though not as handsome and rustic as a wooden peel, the metal version slides beneath pies more easily. A tiny niche of specialty peels veers toward the silly (such as a Fender Strat model made specifically for people who like to bake in leather pants), but overall it's such a primordial device that the farthest anyone has gone towards innovation might be Mario Batali, who ushers the paddle into the age of technology with a collapsible handle.

All told, a good pizza stone and peel can easily be bought for less than $40, a small price to pay for feeling like a legitimate, coal-smeared Neapolitan. And if the crusty pie you shovel off your hot pizza stone isn't reward enough, wall-mount the peel in your kitchen and wait for your guests to ask, "Is that for spanking?"

Chasing Perfection

By Francis Lam

Photograph by Romulo Yanes

Hey, it's just an omelet. How hard can it be? Well, depending on what you're looking for, it can be super-easy or almost unattainable.

I hit it once, just once, but it was beautiful. It was exam time and I was nervous, waiting for my turn. I had the proper fire. The heat felt right. I made smooth, swirling passes with my spatula, and when I rolled my pan over the plate, I knew it. Chef took a look at my omelet and squinted at me. He poked at it, pinched it, and then he knew, too. He called out to the class, "When you show me yours, I want it to look like this." He set the plate in the window for the rest of the school to see, then turned around and gave me a quick wink.

Before Chef Skibitcky got ahold of my brain, I, like every other rational person, thought an omelet was something anyone can make. You throw eggs in a pan, stir them around, fold them in half, and put them on a plate. Done. No-brainer. It only gets interesting when you start tossing in other things - ham, some cheese, maybe a sautéed mushroom or two. Once, there was an omelet contest in my college cafeteria. The winner had it all wrapped up the minute he pulled an avocado and a wedge of Brie out of his bag. Young girls screamed and old men yelled. I stood and watched quietly, respecting him.

But there I was, years later, waking up at 2 a.m. for a class called a.m. Pantry. Still half asleep, I listened to Chef Skibitcky talk about French omelets, about how Escoffier himself used to test his prospective cooks by watching them make one. I perked up. I'd heard of roasting a chicken as a litmus test for cooks before, but an omelet? What did they put in it?

Three eggs, salt, pepper, and a little butter. That's all Chef had in front of him when he began his demonstration. I was skeptical. He started to swirl the liquid in the pan, his hands moving slowly at first, deliberately. He curled his wrist and snapped into a sweeping motion, gathering all the eggs back together with his spatula. He shook the handle gently, his movements getting gradually faster. There was something going on here. I saw how careful he was to watch and respond to the eggs, even if I didn't know exactly what he was watching. He gave the pan a good whack with his fist and rolled it over a plate. The omelet slid out, tucking itself into a tidy cigar shape.

We passed it around to taste, and I couldn't believe what I was eating. It was fantastically tender, almost slippery with creaminess. Not quite scrambled and not quite custard, it hit my mouth and dissolved in a cloud of butter and egg. I raised my fork for a third bite, but the other students started looking at me funny. Reluctantly, I passed the plate along.

I wanted more. It wasn't just that it was delicious; it was that I realized that at that moment I was seeing for the first time something I thought I'd known my whole life. Like how, if you grew up with tomato-shaped rocks from supermarkets, your first explosive bite into a tomato off the vine in August shows you what a tomato really is.

Chef made another one, talking us through what he was seeing. It's a precarious balancing act - you want the pan hot enough so the eggs don't stick, but not so hot that they cook unevenly. You want to beat the eggs so that they're fully blended, but not so much that they get foamy and dry out in the pan. You want to cook them gently so that they're smooth and creamy, but not so soft that they weep. We weren't even at the good part yet, and this was really starting to not seem like something anyone can make.

Quickly now, Chef shook and stirred until the very last drops of liquid egg hit the bottom of the pan at the exact same moment, cooking together to form a thin sheet that, when rolled, wrapped around the moist curd inside. "You want baby skin," he kept saying. "Not elephant skin." In other words, you have to set the skin just enough so that it can hold the omelet together, but not so much that it gets wrinkled and rubbery. And then you have to make sure that you cook it long enough so that it develops a little flavor, but not so long that it browns and loses its delicacy.

It was astounding how something so commonplace, so elemental, could have so many variables. You just have to learn to see all those variables, to recognize what effect every moment of heat, every motion of the hands has. To get back to that thing I tasted, I would have to know exactly what to look for and nail it every step of the way.

Three eggs, salt, pepper, and a little butter. That's all there is in a classic French omelet, but it's enough to keep re teaching me this vital lesson: Things are only simple when you've stopped asking the right questions of them, when you've stopped finding new ways to see them. Because what you find, when you learn how to find it, is that even simple things can be wonderfully, frustratingly, world-openingly complex.

It's been half a decade since Chef taught me that lesson, since that morning when I went home and rolled out omelet after awful omelet until my roommate woke up to find plates covering every level surface in our kitchen. Eventually, I let my obsession revert to a healthy level of interest, until a couple of months ago, when I went out to breakfast with a friend. She thought the place was sketchy but ordered anyway, saying to me, "I figured, 'How badly can you screw up an omelet?'"

It was time, I decided right then and there, to get back in touch with my inner egg philosopher. Not long after, I invited some friends over for brunch. Twenty of them.

My guests trickled in, some still groggy and wielding bottles of cheap sparkling wine because nothing cures a hangover like the thing that caused it. As they mingled and mixed Mimosas, I put together my station at the stove. I picked up my pan and held it to my face to check the heat, a weird little habit I picked up somewhere along the way. It was time.

I put a ladle into my clarified butter, grabbed hold of my spatula, took a meditative breath, and promptly mangled my first omelet. It was brutal. The pan was way too hot, the eggs fried instantly, and the skin wasn't elephant skin, it was geriatric-elephant skin. It flopped out like a pancake when I tried to roll it onto the plate.

I gave it to the drunkest guy in the house.

My next two were similarly disgraceful, and I was running out of drunk guests. But soon things began to pick up. The heat was getting intense in my little kitchen; I was sweating through a film of butter. I was starting to feel like a cook again, and somewhere around my 13th try, there were a few that were pretty good. If an omelet can be art, can teach me a new way to see the world, it's funny that I had to feel like a laborer before I could make it.

Still, by the end of the morning, perfection was a long way away. If the beauty of the omelet is its seeming simplicity, that simplicity is unforgiving. Either you nail it and it's transcendent, or it's, well, just eggs. I needed a brush-up on my technique, but Chef Skibitcky had moved across the country. I called in a ringer.

Daniel Boulud is perhaps the finest French chef in America. He is certainly one of the most classically trained, winning national recognition when he was an apprentice in Lyon, where he had to knock out 30 omelets in a row for a staff meal. Today, though, he is a restaurant magnate with a presidential smile, a refined air, a team of beautiful assistants - far removed from his days as a cook, even further from his days as an apprentice.

So, despite his credentials, I didn't expect him to come out firing when I visited him in his restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But he was on it before he even took his seat. "To understand the omelet, you have to understand what the omelet represents," he said as he walked in. "You have to understand what the omelet means." Wait a minute, I think we're on the same page.

He started talking about his technique, how he likes to stir finely diced butter into the raw egg so that it melts on the heat, insulating the eggs and controlling how they curdle. He talked about using forks to work the pan because they break up the curds as they form, keeping them tender and creamy, rather than a spatula that just lifts and slaps around big sheets of egg. He talked about finishing the omelet with a touch of butter and a tiny kiss of high heat. He referred to this as "toasting" the eggs but then took it back. He tried "sear" but decided against that, too. He used these words gingerly, knowing that he didn't really mean them. For a man so articulate with the language of food, it's interesting that he struggled for the exact words here. Maybe our high-heat, ass-kicking cooking culture is so invested in brawny terms for powerhouse techniques that we lack words for an effect as subtle as the one he was describing.

As he talked, he motioned with his hands, illustrating his points with miming gestures the way I see only cooks do. I noticed a few burns and scars on his knuckles. They looked fresh.

He asked me about the pan I use, the type and the size, then paused thoughtfully. A second later, he held his thumb and forefinger maybe a centimeter apart. "So you have this much egg in your pan?" I nodded yes, but to be honest, I had no idea. It could be that much, it could be twice that much - I had never noticed. And yet, with just the information I gave him, he thought through the ratios of diameter and volume and could visualize what the beginnings of my omelet looked like. (He was right, by the way.) "Your Teflon pan gives a little magic ease," he said. "Black steel is more capricious." My pan would do, but a well-seasoned black steel pan would be better; it would let me use metal forks, and its angled corners would give the omelet a lip to roll out more evenly.

I scribbled furiously in my notebook, giddy with the sensation of having my mind blown and suppressing the urge to yell, "Yes! Yes! Of course!" When I sat down with Boulud, I thought that I had the theory of the omelet down, that I might just ask him for something like a little tip on how to shake the pan, or how to tell if the heat was right. Instead, our conversation revealed how much deeper he had thought about this than I ever had. The more you learn about something, the more you find out there's more to learn, and I was swimming in new questions.

We talked for almost an hour, causing one of his beautiful assistants to remind him that he was well late to his next meeting. He waved off the warning, pulling down an enormous book on the history of French cuisine to see what it had to say about omelets. In that moment, this Chef, this magnate talking about eggs, we knew what we were really talking about was perfection, about giving the idea of perfection a physical form.

I left and immediately got myself a black steel pan. I've been scouring it with salt and oil to season it ever since, understanding that I'm deeper in a hole, further away from making my ideal omelet than I realized. The other day, as I was scrubbing on my pan again, trying to make new metal old, a friend found me. Gently, but sort of pityingly, she asked, "What...are you doing?

Okay, so maybe it's a little much, this obsession of mine. But tell me: How many places in your life do you know, really know, what perfection looks like? How many ways do you know to chase after perfection?

For me, the first step is to figure out how to keep my pan from rusting.

Grilling Procedure

Charcoal Grilling Instructions For Direct-Heat Cooking:

Open vents on bottom of grill. Light a large chimney starter full of charcoal (preferably hardwood). When coals are lit, dump them out across bottom rack, leaving a space free of coals on one side of grill equal to the size of the food to be grilled where food can be moved in case of any flare-ups. When charcoal turns grayish white (start checking coals after 15 minutes), the grill will be at its hottest and will then begin to cool off. How long you can hold your hand 5 inches above the grill rack directly over the coals determines the heat of your grill, as follows:

Hot: 1 to 2 seconds

Medium-Hot: 3 to 4 seconds

Low: 5 to 6 seconds

Gas Grill Instructions:

Preheat burners on high, covered, 10 minutes, then, if necessary, reduce to heat specified in recipe.

Charcoal Grilling Instructions For Indirect-Heat Cooking:

Open vents on bottom and lid of grill. Light a large chimney starter full of charcoal (preferably hardwood). When coals are lit, dump them out along two opposite sides of bottom rack, leaving a space free of charcoal in middle of rack equal to the size of food to be grilled. When charcoal turns grayish white (start checking coals after 15 minutes), the grill will be at its hottest and will then begin to cool off. How long you can hold your hand 5 inches above the grill rack directly over the coals determines the heat of your grill (see above for times).

Gas Grill Instructions:

Preheat all burners on high, covered, 10 minutes, then adjust heat according to recipe. Just before grilling, turn off 1 burner (middle burner if there are 3).

Fine Living Top 10: Extravagant Dishes

By Michael Miller

In the fine-dining world it is rare to find a menu that includes simple meat and potato dishes. Likewise, the cocktail and dessert menus have become increasingly concentrated with items that favor the exotic. The trends are geared toward extravagance. The list that follows highlights some of the more extravagant items found in fine-dining establishments around the globe.

10. Sea urchin cappuccino

Chef: Daniel Humm, Campton Place, San Francisco, California

Description: This intriguing dish consists of a cauliflower puree topped with crab salad and a light sea urchin foam.

Extravagant feature: The sea urchin roe, cognac and lobster stock reduction is blended with cream to create a delightful foam topping.

9. Truffle pasta

Chef: Gregg Collier, Bacco, New Orleans, Louisiana

Description: The black truffle fettuccine dish, which is similar to many truffle-based pastas, is not the most expensive dish in the city, but the richness of flavors is divine. House-made fettuccine is tossed in black truffle sauce and olive oil and topped with parmigiano-reggiano cheese.

Extravagant feature: Put a truffle sauce on any dish and the flavors will soar.

8. Shark's fin soup

Chef: Tsang Chiu King, Ming Court, Langham Place Hotel, Mongkok, Hong Kong

Description: An increasingly rare dish to find, the shark fin soup is found on the set lunch and dinner menus. On the lunch menu it is braised shark's fin soup with crab roe and at dinner it is braised shark's fin soup in brown sauce.

Extravagant feature: Though once a popular dish in Asian cuisine, shark's fin soup is coming off many menus because of outside pressures to curb the shark fishing industry.

7. Martini on the rock

Served at: The Blue Bar, Algonquin Hotel, Manhattan, New York

Description: Starting at $10,000, this drink includes the diamond of the patron's choice.

Extravagant feature: Well, it is a $10,000 martini with a diamond in it. None have been purchased yet, which means you could be the first.

6. Shrimp noodles

Chef: Wylie Dufresne, W-D 50, New York, New York

Description: These "carb-less" noodles are made almost completely of shrimp and without any flour or grain, and are served on a smear of smoked yogurt. Dufresne uses a meat glue called Activa, developed and marketed by Ajinomoto Co. Inc., a Japanese food ingredient company, to bind the proteins. The noodles can be found on the nine-course tasting menu for $95.

Extravagant feature: Transglutaminase is the glue used to bind proteins. it was originally formulated to create solid meat products and improve the texture of sausage. It is now used to fuse meats together to create new food concepts. Dufresne currently has a patent application out on the shrimp noodles.

5. Foie gras tasting menu

Chef: Graham Elliot Bowles, Avenues, Peninsula Hotel, Chicago, Illinois

Description: This foie gras tasting menu includes kangaroo carpaccio with lime shavings and eucalyptus, melon strips, caramel smears, and foie gras crumbles; prime beef with seared lobes of foie, greenhouse spinach and a garnet Merlot reduction. For dessert there is foie gras and a raspberry milkshake.

Extravagant feature: The meal includes 12 courses of foie gras offerings.

4. Grand Opulence Sundae

Served at: Serendipity, New York, New York

Description: First created to celebrate Serendipity's 50th anniversary, the sundae is made with five scoops of Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream infused with Madagascar vanilla, covered in edible 23-karat gold leaf, drizzled with chocolate and covered with chunks of Chuao chocolate. It is suffused with candied fruits from Paris, gold dragnets, truffles, and marzipan cherries. On top you will find a glass bowl of Grand Passion Caviar, infused with passion fruit, orange and Armagnac.

Extravagant feature: Amedei Porcelana, the world's most expensive chocolate, is used as the chocolate drizzle.

3. Ritz Sidecar Cocktail

Served at: The Hemingway Bar, Hotel Ritz, Paris, France

Description: At $489, this is one fine cocktail. The libation consists of half-lemon juice and Cointreau, and half 1865 Ritz Fine Champagne Cognac.

Extravagant feature: 1865 Ritz Fine Champagne Cognac is over 100 years old, and was nearly seized by the Nazis during WWII and valued at more than $10,000 a bottle.

2. McDonald Sandwich

Chef: Scott McDonald, Selfridges, London, England

Description: At a cost of $159, this sandwich contains Wagyu beef, fresh lobe foie gras, black truffle mayonnaise, brie de meaux, rocket, red pepper and mustard confit, and English plum tomatoes sitting between 24-hour fermented sourdough bread.

Extravagant feature: Wagyu cattle is raised in Japan on a diet that includes grain and beer. The cows are regularly massaged with sake to tenderize their flesh.

1. FleurBurger 5000

Chef: Hubert Keller, Fleur de Lys, in the Mandalay Bay Hotel, Las Vegas

Description: For $5,000, diners are treated to a Kobe beef burger topped with foie gras and black truffles, served on a brioche truffle bun with truffle sauce. The dish is accompanied by a bottle of 1990 Chateau Pétrus. A dining companion receives an additional burger at no extra cost.

Extravagant feature: Guests keep the Ichendorf Brunello stemware, which is shipped to their home.

honorable mention

Dinner in the Sky

Based in Europe, it can be set up anywhere.

Description: The concept is just so strange that it is extravagant. Diners sit at a table of up to 22 people. In the center is a space that holds a chef, a waiter and an entertainer. Diners are strapped into their seats and the table is lifted 50 meters in the air by a giant crane. The whole deal costs about $10,000.