You are the manager of a Sheetz. You can only carry two canned foods. What would they be?

Last month a new Sheetz opened in Bridgeville, PA.On a whim, I wanted to see what grocery items they carried. While there I looked for the "canned food section." Amid about a thousand different bags of chips and related snacks there were exactly two canned products on the shelves: Chicken noodle soup and condensed milk!

How were these two products chosen? No idea! If it were up to me what would I pick...I don't know. Maybe chicken noodle soup. Possibly chicken broth or Spaghettios. But definitely not condensed milk!

I Googled the hell out of condensed milk. I was curious if it had some not-so-obvious use. In particular I tried to find if it was of some value in the drug community. But I  found nothing!

So there you have it. If I ever figure out the reason I'll add it to this post.

Making a Pizza Hut Thin 'n Crispy at Home

It's Go Time!

Many years ago I was in the Air Force stationed at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio. A few miles up the road at 1449 SW Military Highway Drive was an establishment named Colonna's Pizza owned by a man named Frank Colonna. Frank was the nephew of Frank Pepe, the owner of the famous Pepe's Pizza in New Haven, CT. Like myself, Frank was in the Air Force but about 15 years before me. He married a local girl, moved to New Haven, and then moved back to San Antonio (she didn't like being away from her family) and stayed in San Antonio. That's when he opened his own pizza restaurant.

I would frequent that restaurant with some guys from the base. It was a matter of time before Frank learned that, like himself, I was also from Connecticut. I made him nostalgic and he offered me a part time job.

Frank taught me that the dough is the secret to a great pizza. And his dough was awesome! Unfortunately I was too stupid to steal his dough recipe. And as great as his pizza was I was also nostalgic for the Pizza Hut Thin 'n Crispy that I discovered in my teens. And as years turned into decades I would strive to make a pizza that would make Frank Colonna proud of me. But a couple of years ago I decided that I wanted to make a pizza that replicated the taste of a Pizza Hut Thin 'n Crispy. So here we go...

Originally Pizza Hut only made the Thin 'n Crispy. While working at Colonna's Frank told me that Pizza Hut used baking powder instead of yeast. In the last few years I tried to verify this and could not. I even went so far as to email one of the founders of Pizza Hut. He never replied. Now there are some suggestions that pizza made with baking powder may exist in the central part of the US (Pizza Hut started in Wichita). On Cook's Country they featured a St. Louis style pizza made with baking powder. I followed the recipe, twice. It had some elements of Pizza Hut but I am all but convinced that Pizza Hut used yeast, not baking powder. This article, written by a guy who worked at Pizza Hut in 1980, is definitely worth reading.

These are the ingredients for the dough. A pizza dough can be made with as few as four ingredients (water, flour, salt, yeast) but I think that the original Pizza Hut Thin 'n Crispy also used an oil, perhaps shortening,

In this recipe I will use a food processor to mix the dough. You can also use a stand mixer (KitchenAid) or mix the dough by hand. For a batch this size a food processor works best. If using a stand mixer or mixing by hand I will leave it to you to adjust the technique, it's not hard.

The Dough: In the food processor bowl mix:
8.5 ounces flour
1 tablespoon butter, chopped
1 tablespoon oil (olive oil, grapeseed oil or a neutral oil such as sunflower or soybean)

Mix in the food processor until fully combined. Note that I use 2T of fat, one of oil and one of butter.
This is to give it a slightly pastry-like texture. Also there is something about the dairy in the butter that softens the dough and makes it easier to roll.

Then add:
5 ounces water
1/2 teaspoon table salt, or 3/4 teaspoon sea salt (sea salt is less dense, so you need more)
A "heavy" 1/2 teaspoon of yeast. That's what I use. Or, what the heck, just make it 3/4t. Or even 1 teaspoon. I don't care, the recipe doesn't much care either.

Mix all of the ingredients in the food processor for 20-30 seconds. It should all "pretty much" come together into a ball. If it's a little sloppy add a bit more flour, a little at a time.

This recipe provides dough for two 12" - 14" pizzas, each dough ball just under 7.5 ounces. The larger that you can roll the dough, the thinner and crispier the pizza will be.

The Sauce:
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 tablespoon turbinado sugar (Sugar in the Raw) or honey or even (ech) white sugar
2 tablespoons oil. You can use any vegetable oil. I use olive oil though I doubt that Pizza Hut's high-margin budget would have permitted that.
15 ounce can of Kirkland Organic Tomato Sauce or nearest substitute

I mix the sauce as soon as I am finished forming the dough balls. That gives the ingredients more time to meld.

The Cheese:
To be authentic it would need to be mozzarella. Not fresh mozzarella - that was way too upscale for Pizza Hut. But as you start personalizing your own recipe you will probably start experimenting. Or using whatever cheese you have on hand. Two things about fresh mozzarella I should mention: (1) It makes for a delicious pizza. (2) It makes for a messy pizza. The extra moisture may leak from the pizza onto the stone which may make removing the pizza challenging. 

Building the Pizza:
Sprinkle a small amount of corn meal onto a pizza peel. After forming your dough ball into a 12" to 14" shell place it onto the peel. Add sauce, cheese and toppings. Slide the peel back and forth to make sure that the pizza slides. If the pizza is stuck lift the part of the pizza that is stuck and place corn meal beneath.

Then using a motion that will only get better with practice, slide your pizza off of the peel and onto the stone.

So How Did My Thin 'n Crispy Replica Turn Out?
Well the good news is that it was thin and crispy. The bad news is that it wasn't as authentic as I had hoped for. It was actually too good. That special and loveable "Thin 'n Crispy and a little bit o' Crappy" 🌝 of the original formula hasn't been mastered yet. But this is definitely close. 

Misc Notes:
Generally the stones are placed on the rack at its lowest position in the oven. You can experiment with that. Ultimately the goal is to balance "top heat" and "bottom heat" so that both sides of the pizza are done at the same time.

An extremely common mistake is to preheat the oven (say to 525) and as soon as the oven clicks off - thus indicating the temperature has been reached - the pizza is placed in the oven. What then follows is a horrible pizza. When the oven indicates that it is "at temperature" it means that the air in the oven it at temperature. The surface of the stone will be about 300 degrees. How to know when the stone is heated? Best is to use an IR temperature gun (this is what I use). Next best is to preheat the oven for an hour which all but guarantees the stone is at temp.

When mixing the dough for the first time you will probably have trouble telling when the flour-water ratio is correct. This comes with practice. A few options that I can provide - (1) take my pizza making class or (2) buy a pizza dough from the store and copy the texture or (3) err on the side of "too wet" rather than "too dry" and go from there.

One way to increase the flavor of the dough is slow fermentation. So if you want to throw your pizza in the oven at 6pm on Saturday you will want to make your dough on Friday and immediately throw it in the fridge. Then on Saturday at about 3pm move the dough to the warmest place in the house.

In my dough recipes I always use weight for the flour and water. Flour can have different moisture content and "puffiness" factors that makes measuring in cups unreliable. All bakers measure by weight. A digital scale is inexpensive and highly recommended. If you insisted on using measuring cups look up the conversion factors - you're on your own at that point.

I didn't mention how to get the pizza out of the oven. Most people use their peel. If you employ my cardboard peel technology that isn't advised. I actually - with my bare hands - pull the pizza off of the stone and onto a cool oven rack. If you don't have "hot hands" as I do you may want to consider a "real" purchased peel.

Many people forget to add salt. Don't know why, they just do. Even I have. That's why I taste my raw dough when I'm done mixing it.

The pictures below show the steps involved in making your first Thin 'n Crispy clone:

Roll each dough ball out on a counter. I do it in such a way that the dough ball has a belly button.

Place the dough balls into two containers, "belly button" side down to allow them to rise. Either cover the container with a sheet of plastic or place a locking cover on it. Be aware that the gases from the rising dough may blow the cover off and the cover will need to be reseated.

The sauce could not be easier. Olive oil, oregano, sugar (shown above) + a 15oz can of tomato sauce. I use Costco's brand with great results! Sugar shown is turbinado. Not from Pizza Hut's original recipe but I have had no white sugar in the house for 10 years. Mix ingredients until sugar is dissolved. Sauce does not need to be cooked.

When the dough has doubled (+/-) in volume plop it onto the counter with flour. Work it into as large and thin a shell as you can create that will fit on your stone or steel.

I have tried all sorts of rollers. Tapered roller, roller with offset to emulate a dough sheeter and a flat roller. The flat roller works the best for me. The offset doesn't get the pizza thin enough and the tapered makes the center too thin and susceptible to rupture.

You will need a way to get your pizza into the oven. Many people buy a wooden or metal peel. Actually I use a sheet of cardboard that has moved close to 1,000 pizza over its 24 year life. 3-4 pizzas per month adds up! Also pictured is the tomato sauce that I use for my Thin 'n Crispy replica.

Top with mozzarella and your favorite ingredients. Here is pepperoni and sauteed portabella.

Place in oven using a pizza peel of your choosing. These stones were purchased from the garden department of Home Depot in the 1980's. About 35 years of continuous use. I also have a "pizza steel" not shown. You can Google "pizza steel" to learn more. I've gone back and forth, they work about the same for me.

After 4 to 7 minutes on a 525 degree pre-heated stone and this is what comes out! It is done when the edges begin to crisp.

Kitchen Upgrade - Lessons Learned

My kitchen was completely functional - in a 1983 kind of way

I am wrapping up a kitchen upgrade. This is being called an upgrade, not a remodel. I didn't redo the flooring, didn't poke holes in the walls for new windows, didn't have to deal with terms such as "load-bearing wall." It was all pretty straightforward - cabinets, counter tops, sink, some new lighting, a new range, a tiled backsplash and paint.

I also converted my electric range to gas, which necessitated running a gas line to the stove. Even though the house was built with a natural gas furnace and water heater no consideration was made for future use of a gas range. It required running a pipe from the basement into the garage, then up through the ceiling of the garage and through the floor of the kitchen to the back of the range.

In the end not much is really different. I was always happy in the kitchen, now I'm happier. The lighting is better, the countertops are awesome and cooking with gas is great. But the food tastes the same. A lot of money spent for food that tastes the same. Would I do it again? Yes, and fortunately not much would be done differently. I'll go through some of my decisions and experiences here.

At this point in the project I asked myself, "What the hell have I done?"

Cabinets

For the cabinets I went to Andredas Cabinetry, LLC of Scenery Hill, PA. Owner Craig Andredas runs the business that was passed down from his father. It is a professionally run operation employing both family members and skilled craftsmen.

After hours of poring over the options we decided to go with hickory cabinets with a clear coat finish. Despite that Craig says that 75% of his customers go with a "painted" wood I like wood to look like wood and have no regrets about the choice. I should also point out that Craig would answer my questions and explain current trends but never tried to push us in a direction that would go against his understanding of what we were looking for.

My favorite cabinet? The island. Craig built 8 drawers into it and it freed up so much cabinet space that I almost have too much room.

Gas Range

I think this whole kitchen update thing started out because a friend of mine had just converted from electric to gas. I had been wanting to do that for 20 years. I stalled on doing that because although our house had natural gas, it was only plumbed for heat and hot water. A gas line did not run to the range.

Another reason that I hesitated is that the first two plumbers I talked to would have run that flexible gas tubing. Although that meets code I wouldn't have felt comfortable with that. So I called the town's building inspector and asked if he could recommend a plumber who prefers to use steel pipe instead of flex tubing for routing natural gas. He gave me a couple of names. As a point of reference, the plumber charged $300 to run the gas line, parts and labor. It was an additional $200 for the electrician to run a dedicated line and breaker.

When I started looking at ranges I liked the "slide in" look. If you're not sure what's meant by a slide-in range follow this link.

Well the slide-in led to a new backsplash which led to new cabinets which led to new countertops and a new sink. The second picture in this post shows what we ended up not changing.

Our gas stove is located above the garage. The yellow wire - per manufacturer's spec - is for a dedicated 20 amp line for the gas range. I have no idea why it needs to be 20 amps.

Countertops

Even before you pick a countertop you need to make a decision - 4" backsplash built into the countertop, or no backsplash. If you go the "no backslpash" route then you will likely want to install a tile backsplash. That's the direction I went. Usually a little more work, usually a little more money but a modern look. Going with the 4" built-in backsplash - IMO - can make your kitchen look older.

 The most common choices for countertops are granite, concrete and quartz. I chose quartz because it is stain resistant (but not heat resistant). Also because quartz is manufactured you can get almost any look that you want. Granite is heat resistant but not stain resistant. Granite is also more resistant to scratches. So choose your poison.

First thing that might surprise some is that quartz is not made from 100% quartz (as is granite and concrete). Quartz countertops are about 90% quartz and 10% resin. For that reason they are not as hard as granite.

I believe that countertops are like cars - some cars have a color that hides dirt. But IMO when those cars are clean they look, ehhh. But those cars that are hard to keep clean, well when they are clean they look awesome. So let me just say this - when our countertop is clean it looks awesome.

Get a Countertop Doggie Bag

When you talk to your countertop fabricator ask if you can have some scraps left over from the job. That way if you have questions such as "will this stain my countertop" or "will this scratch it" you can easily test it. Then you'll know.

Asking for scrap pieces of  countertop allow you to test, "what if I..." Quartz is often described as nearly indestructible. You can see on the lower-left of this scrap piece that I was able to scratch it with a knife. Always use a cutting board. (this outdoor photo makes the quartz look lighter than it does indoors).

Bucking the Trend

I made a few decisions that weren't popular with current trends.

1. Painted Cabinets
You can call it solid stain, but if it looks like paint I'll call it paint. As mentioned above most people today choose a painted look, often white. That may be a trend. As for me I like wood to look like wood and I can't see a natural look ever being out of style.

2. Stick-Shift Faucets
I was urged to go with the trend of single handle faucets. I resisted and I'm glad I did. I looked at pictures of commercial kitchens and they are almost always two-handle, My kitchen is primarily about function and so I went with a bridge faucet where "left is hot, right is cold." Absolutely no regrets.



3. New Flooring
In a money-is-no-object world I would have got new floors. But they wouldn't have been that different from what I had. I would still have gone with ceramic tile.
The tile that I have in the kitchen - it extends into hallways and the bathroom and covers about 400 contiguous square feet. It is 20+ years old and is still perfect. Not a single crack, no wear and except for a little soil in the grout they are close to like-new. This is a 100 year floor and I chose not to change it.

4. Lighting
Once you're replacing cabinets, countertops and appliances the electrical work becomes cheap. Not really, but throwing in a thousand here and another thousand there doesn't seem to make the final cost change that much. It's already so big that it looks almost the same.

I added under-cabinet lighting. I had considered skipping on that but I'm so glad I didn't. The kitchen looks awesome at night with just the counter lighting on.

But where the electrician and I had religious differences was on my work light. In addition to the recessed lighting that you see in the bottom photo, I had a monster 5000 lumen,  4000K task light installed over the island. When prepping food it's the only way to fly. You can see it in the bottom photo, it is not turned on.

Incremental Design

If I had to pick out cabinets, hardware, countertops, wall colors, backsplash tile and grout on the same day I would have messed something up. I think it's almost impossible not to. On my first visit to the cabinet shop I picked out the wood (hickory) and made some hi-level design decisions. After a week of Interneting I revisited to refine the design, then chose the hardware. At that time I also selected the countertop.
Once the cabinets and countertops were installed I started shopping for the backsplash tile. I brought home several samples. I ended up with tile from "The Tile Shop" in Robinson, PA and it is actually 3" x 6" tumbled natural marble. "The Tile Shop" has a huge display, and you can purchase refundable samples to take home. Then once I decided on the tile I selected the grout. Yep, I said grout.

You Really, Really Don't Want To Screw Up The Grout

Why a separate section for grout? Can't grout just be lumped in with the backsplash? Not in my blog, it can't. Grout is a big deal. Grout is a huge deal! You can spend tens of thousands of dollars on a kitchen remodel and if the grout color is wrong the job is ruined. Eyes will be drawn to a bad color. Well that's simple, you think, pick out the right color.

There's at least two problems with that. First, holding up that little strip sample in the store next to the tile may look at lot different than the grout on the final install. Second, grout color can vary wildly. So the color on the sample can be quite a bit different than the color that you end up with.

To solve this problem I constructed a simple "tile and grout board" in a few minutes. I took a piece of plywood and glued on a few pieces of my chosen backsplash tile. I then bought and mixed colors to test. Yep, a small box of grout cost $10 - $15 and yep, you will likely be throwing some out. So you can choose to bypass this step. I would advise that you not do that.

Also you won't necessarily need to buy, for instance, several shades of gray. I bought a box of dark gray and a box of white and varied the mix ratios.




What I would have done different

Not much. I would have liked an outside vent for the gas range but it would have involved reworking and moving ductwork and plumbing. For that reason I should have probably got a gas range with an electric oven. Also IMO electric ovens make better pizza, which I make about twice a month. Having mentioned that, I'm struggling to come up with anything else that I would have done differently.

Last thing to get finished was the backsplash and that was two days before Thanksgiving. This picture was taken on Thanksgiving Eve, 2018. The bread on the counter was baked for the Thanksgiving holiday. Click on the picture for a bigger view.

Thin Crust Pizza - Part I

I miss Pizza Hut.

Now don't get me wrong. I am not saying that Pizza Hut is or was a great pizza. But in the early 1970's when there wasn't a pizza shop on every corner the Pizza Hut Thin 'n Crispy was my go-to pizza fix. But they still make a Thin 'n Crispy, so what is it that I'm missing?

It's not the same Pizza Hut that was started by two brothers in Wichita in 1958. In 1977 they sold the business to Pepsico and shortly after that is when I think the changes began.

I was such a regular that when the new menus came in the manager asked me if I'd like to keep an old one as a souvenir. Prices haven't changed much, have they? (circa 1972)

The non-pizza side of the menu. When I wasn't eating a Thin 'n Crispy I was lovin' the Cavatini Supreme. I was't a beer drinker in 1972. Too bad - 50 cents a glass.

Sometimes I feel that I don't know a thing about pizza. This is despite the fact that I have been to hundreds of pizza restaurants, own over 20 books on pizza, have made over a thousand pizzas at home and thousands more working in restaurants and have even attended pizza conventions in Las Vegas and New Orleans. And yet I'm always searching for the next pizza adventure, be it a nouveau twist or a nostalgic simplicity.

If there is one snooty clique that thinks they know everything about pizza, it is a society called the Vera Pizza Napoletana, or VPN. Here is a summary of their rules. They may seem strict, but they have actually loosened up over the years:

1. Only use 00 flour
2. Must use fresh cake yeast
3. No rolling pin may be used
4. Must use Italian grown San Marzano tomatoes
5. Must use buffalo mozzarella
6. Must take a somewhat pricey course to get certified
7. Must be cooked in a wood burning oven. Gas ovens were later allowed under separate rules so that (my guess) they could sell more pricey courses
8. No fats may be used in the dough
9. The peel used to deliver the pizza into the oven must be wood or aluminum
10. Oven must be at least 900 degrees and cook time may not exceed 90 seconds

Now many consider me a pizza snob. As such you might think that I would embrace these rules. I doubt that my Pizza Hut from the 70's followed many - if any - of these rules. And I - in my less snobby time - loved that pizza. I'm also sure that I could love it today. I will attempt to make a tasty - yet simple - thin crust pizza by breaking all ten of these rules. Here is my counter to these rules:

1. I will use King Arthur's Bread flour. This flour is awesome for pizza.
2. Will use Baker's Corner Fast Rising yeast which I purchased at Aldi for 79 cents for a 3-pack
3. Pizza Hut used to run their dough through a sheeter. I will use a rolling pin to ensure my thin crust pizza is indeed thin. 
4. Will use a can of canned tomato sauce - though not all canned sauces are the same.
5. Will use packaged whole milk mozzarella. While I normally use fresh mozzarella in my pizzas my goal today is to imitate a legacy Pizza Hut thin crust pizza.
6. My training exceeded the cost of getting certified if you consider all the restaurants I visited, all the books I read, the conferences I attended and the time I spent researching pizza. And after all that I'm not certified!
7. I wish I had a wood burning oven. Pizza Hut used gas, I owned an electric oven, now I have gas. Both work. If your pizza doesn't come out to your liking don't blame the oven.
8. I am sure that there was some fat in the Pizza Hut Thin 'n Crispy dough. I fear it was shortening. I never use shortening for anything, ever. My dough will contain a little fat, I'll talk about that in Part II.
9. I have a peel made of neither wood nor aluminum that I've been using for over 20 years. More on that later.
10. My oven will be set to 500 degrees. I'm giving it all she's got captain.

Flour, water, salt and yeast are all that's needed for a dough. I'm showing olive oil and I'll sneak in another fat in Part 2.

Four simple ingredients for the sauce - tomato sauce, oregano, olive oil and sugar

This post appeared with the help of Joe F. I had been spending my summer doing summer things. That did not make Joe F happy. He wanted another post, said it had been too long. So I tossed away a beautiful summer evening just so that I could get this out.

Parts of that previous paragraph are true.

In a few weeks (or sooner, depending on how much of a pain in the ass Joe F. is) in Part 2 of this article I will try to replicate the Thin 'n Crispy recipe.

Do Dried Beans Go Bad?

I have a philosophy: "Given that there is an easy way and a hard way to do something, if the easy way was better there wouldn't be a hard way." That's why people who know me know that I never do anything the easy way. And so it is with dried beans. Why open a can when you can soak them overnight and cook them for two hours?

A few months ago I made my famous Bean and Pasta Italian soup. The Italian name is "pasta fagioli" but the American pronunciation is so stupid (pasta fazool, I've even heard say, "fazoo") that I refuse to play that game.

Anyway, this has been a can't-miss recipe for me. But a few months ago it disappointed me when some of the beans were crunchy. Not tooth-breaking crunchy, but they definitely had bite. WTF?

Quick background: What are the best beans? The healthiest? The most fiber? The tastiest? The answer is that I have no idea. Online information has often differed from the package info. So for the past several years - whatever it is I'm making - I mix five types of beans in a container and those are my beans. Doesn't matter what I'm making, if it's beans (lentils are different) that's what I use.

My translucent container doesn't photograph well but this is my 5-bean collection - kidney, great northern, black, pinto and navy.

Back to my fazoo. So I played with my soup and identified the smaller beans as the ones that tasted under-cooked. Those would be the navy beans. I searched online to see if navy beans had a reputation for being hard. Not really. Most cooks had no problem with navy beans but in one case I saw that someone suggested that their beans might be old.

Old? Really? These are dried beans. They could be used as gravel. They're hard when they're new. But I needed to get to the bottom of this. A test was needed.

With a 2014 expiration date the beans on the left were probably bought in 2013. The beans on the right were bought on Tuesday. That's about a 5 year difference.

The plan was quite simple. Take new beans, take old beans. Soak them overnight. Cook them. See if they're different. Don't worry, I'll find some way to complicate this.

I put the beans in cups to prepare for overnight soaking. Whoa - the 2014 beans on the left look darker and old. Maybe age does make a difference.

One if the issues I struggled with was how to cook them identically? Cooked on the stove I would need two identical pans on two identical burners adjusted to exactly the same temperature to get the exact same slow boil. No, I wasn't willing to baby sits beans for two hours.

Then I thought about ways to cook the beans in the same pot, but being able to keep them separate. To do this I would make a cheesecloth "sack" for old and new beans and throw the sacks in the same pot. So I tried making one and decided against it. The beans in the center of the sack were surrounded by other beans instead of freely-moving water.

Finally I looked in the pantry and noticed that I had two nearly identical loaf pans, the only difference being a strip of high-temp automotive gasket sealer on one of the pans.

After soaking, the suggested cook time varies by source from 30 minutes to two hours. I went for two hours to give them every chance to cook through. The gasket sealer is from a bread-baking experiment that I'm not sure I want to share.

The cooking went off without a hitch. Once the beans had cooled a bit I tasted them. I went back and forth to make sure that I wasn't chewing on an "outlier bean" that was especially hard or soft. No doubt about it. The 2014 beans were harder. The 2019 beans were very soft, arguably overcooked. But no complaints from me. When cooking beans I will always err on the side of overcooking. There is nothing desirable about beans al dente.

The 2014 beans (left) and 2019 beans after cooking. The beans on the right look more tender, don't they? Not sure? More to come.

So I could end it there. Beans do get old, expiration date does matter, we can all go home now. But I wanted to create a visual. So I gathered up the apparatus shown below: A yardstick, a can of tuna, a heavy 28-ounce meat pounder, a cutting board and our beans.

To demonstrate the difference between the old beans and the new I dropped a meat pounder from a height of 1 3/8" on a cluster of the 2014 navy beans and the 2019 beans See below. The tuna can, standing 1 3/8" tall, was my height gauge.

When the meat pounder was dropped on the 2014 beans it nearly bounced off. But when dropped onto the fresh dried beans it mashed most of them.

So now I am a believer. This weekend I will toss any beans more than one-year old and will replace them. Then I will make sure that I rotate my stock. Nothing lasts forever, not even rock-hard navy beans.

"You Gonna Brush With That?" - A Look at Tomato Paste in a Tube

I started collecting cookbooks in the mid-1980's. Back then I bought mostly Italian cookbooks. That was before the Internet, Food TV, Whole Foods (as it exists today) and all of the easy accessibility to information and products that we now take for granted. And many of the recipes called for "double concentrated tomato paste" in a tube. Never heard of it except in those cookbooks, never saw it in Shop Rite or Stop & Shop and so I used tomato paste from a 6 ounce can. And my recipes came out fine. But I always wondered if I was missing something.

Well 30 years have passed and I saw this tube of Cento Tomato Paste in Costco. I thought it was a bit pricey but I sprung for it. I needed to try it. I studied the label. I compared it with the labels of other brands of canned tomato pastes. I tried it in recipes. I ate it out of the tube. I did not brush with it. Here's what I learned.

It is not double concentrated. It is more like 1.33x concentrated. I tried and tested the five cans of tomato paste shown below. They are all nearly identical in ingredients and nutritional content. I will compare the Cento to the Kirkland. Kirkland is the Costco brand. Since I bought them together in Costco I will test them together.

I purchased 5 cans to test. They ranged from 57 cents a can for Costco's Kirkland brand to 99 cents for Whole Foods 365 brand.

First question is how much "tomato product" is in the tube vs. the can? Is it double as the name suggests? This can be calculated by looking at the calories on the package. The Kirkland can has 30 calories per 33 grams. The Cento tube has 40 calories per 33 grams. Since the only caloric ingredient in either product is tomatoes, that tells us that there is about 1.33x more tomato for equal mass of tube vs paste.

Next look at the package size. The can is 6 ounces, the tube is 4.56 ounces. Interesting, take the 4.56 ounce tube and multiply it by 1.33 and you get almost exactly 6 ounces. That's right - the amount of "tomato product" in a tube is virtually identical to the can. One tube = one can!

How about the relative price. Cento was packaged as two tubes for $4.89, or $2.45 per tube. Kirkland cans were 12 for $6.79, or $0.57 per can. Since we've established that a can of paste and a tube of paste contain the same amount of tomato product, that makes the tube 2.45/0.57 or 4.3 times more expensive per tomato unit.

How about the taste? They both taste like tomato paste to me. The Cento may have been a tiny bit sweeter but that could have been because of the higher concentration. I doubt that I would be able to tell any difference in a recipe.

How about the convenience? Now we're getting somewhere. If you need only a 1/4 can of tomato paste you can just squirt out 1/4 of a tube (remember that a can and a tube have the same amount of tomato solids) and refrigerate what you don't use. The problem with that is that although you only used 1/4 of a tube, the tube costs 4.3x the price of a can. So you could have used 1/4 of a can and thrown out the rest and saved a few cents.

Once you open a can of tomato paste you are generally committed to using the whole can. Even covered with wrap my paste starts crusting after about a week in the refrigerator. Of course freezing what you don't use is always an option.

Or... you can freeze a can of paste overnight. Then the next day run the can under hot tap water for about 15 seconds. Then remove both lids and while using one of the lids as a pusher, push out the frozen mass of tomato paste. You can the slice what you need and save the rest in a zip-type plastic bag back in the freezer.

You can freeze a can of paste and extrude it out as a single piece to slice as needed.

I will tell you what is cool about the tube paste. It come in a soft metal tube - mostly tin, I think - just like toothpaste came back until the early 60's, I believe. It's not only nostalgic but once you squeeze the tube it stays squeezed.

I found that Whole Foods sells "(not) double concentrated" tomato paste. It is actually less expensive than the Cento that I bought in Costco. The Cento was $4.89 for two 4.56 ounce tubes. The 365 brand was $1.99 for a single 5.3 ounce tube. But the tube is 25 calories per 33 grams, the same as the 365 paste in a can. In other words, Whole foods is just squeezing 88% of a can of their tomato paste into a tube and charging twice as much. The "per tomato unit" price for the 365 is about the same as Cento.

So there you have it. For me, I'll use my tubes but I'm not planning to buy them again. I never saw Bobby Flay or Alton Brown use tomato paste in a tube. Also with freezing as an option I don't see a need to justify the expense. And although the Cento that I bought had a "best before" date that was almost two years away, I don't know if that date is equally valid if I open the tube today versus if I open it 18 months from today. I just don't know. I don't like not knowing!

Did you see that they now sell sour cream in a tube? To be continued.

Authentic Italian Bread, My Ass!

It's Thanksgiving, and that means that I make my own bread for stuffing. I make the stuffing for a very large group, so I baked four loaves. But I still wasn't comfortable that would be enough. So because I was rushed and it was close I dashed down to Giant Eagle to pick up one more loaf of bread. It was a grab and run purchase. It was just bread - Italian bread - what could possibly go wrong?

Giant Eagle is a supermarket chain that, to me, seems to be popular with the Pittsburgh shoppers who are more concerned with convenience than quality. Every time I decide to give them another chance, they burn me. This time they got me on a loaf of bread. Intended for my stuffing, it ended up as bird food. Though the birds deserve better.

Is it just me? No. In this survey by Consumer Reports 68 supermarkets were rated based on criteria such as quality of meats and produce, price, courtesy and cleanliness. Giant Eagle ended up at #54 of 68. Of the stores available to Pittsburgh shoppers Trader Joe's was #3. Other top finishers were Costco (#6), Fresh Market (#9), Aldi (#14) and Whole Foods (#15).

When I saw "Authentic Italian Bread" I imagined a loaf being pounded out on a bakers table with "authentic" ingredients flying everywhere. But this is Giant Eagle. What was I thinking?

When I took the bread out of the bag, it had a very "unauthentic" feel. The loaf was anything but crusty. When I broke an end off of the loaf it had a "foam-like" appearance. Then I looked at the ingredients. Just a loaf of crap. Not in my cooking.

Check out that laundry list of authentic ingredients. "Artificial Flavor" - it must be authentic artificial flavor.
  

A second trip, this time to Whole Foods - and yes, for $1.30 more - I got an authentic loaf of bakery bread. Worth every penny

Pizza On The Rocks

You gotta try stuff. The pictures go back 11 years (2006) to a project that I had all but forgotten about. It's not that it didn't work - in fact, it worked well. But like so many kitchen experiments the energy put in isn't always worth it.

A bag of River Rocks purchased at Home Depot were washed and placed in a 15-inch pizza pan

The pan and its rocks were heated to 500 degrees for an hour

I then built up a standard pizza on my pizza peel. Attention pizza snobs - that cardboard peel was created in 1995 and was in use for 11 years when this picture was taken. 11 more years have passed and it's still in use. At about 25 pizzas/year that peel has seen 500+ pizzas on it!

I slid the pizza onto the rocks. I don't remember how long it was on there but my guess is 6 or 7 minutes.

The 'za is looking pretty good. How does the bottom look?

Interesting, eh?

So here's the problem with all this. I was hoping for something special. You know, you try something different and see what happens. What happened in the case was that the pizza tasted exactly the same as if I cooked it on my standard pizza stone. OK, that's not bad, so why not keep doing it this way if only as a novelty? The problem was smoke. After each use a little cornmeal and maybe even a little cheese would fall onto the rocks. With no way to get it out short of a complete cleaning of the stones each session resulted in more "Crud on the rocks." Pleasant pizza aromas were displaced by a smell like something was burning - which it was! And so ended the great "Pizza on the Rocks, 2006" adventure.

46 Connecticut Restaurants - How Many Surviving After 40 years?

On Oct 3, 1975 the (Meriden, CT) Record & Journal ran an insert in which they gave short descriptions of 46 restaurants. The link to that insert is here. 

So when I found this insert online in 2015 - 40 years after it was printed - my first question was, "How many of these places are still open?" Spoiler alert - only three.

In the insert each restaurant appeared twice. First there was a short, descriptive write-up such as this:

And then, presumably, each blurb required the restaurant to take out an ad, and that looked like this:

So I did a little research. I spent a few cold and gray weekends in the late winter of 2014/2015 researching these 46 restaurants. Beyond the fact that 43 were gone, why were they gone? Unfortunately the answers to that are hard to find. Some burned - at least one by arson. Some owners retired but most of the restaurants just quietly went away. And for a small number of them I found absolutely no online trace that they ever existed!

In my full-blown research I had links of interest such as Google Maps Street View of what a drive-by the restaurant would look like today. In this abbreviated version I left much of that out but I am trying to accomplish just two things, (1) show how few restaurants survive for four decades and (2) provide memories for those reading this that may be from Connecticut.

The three restaurants in bold font are still in business. The eight that are in italics are the only ones that I personally visited while residing in CT. I moved out of CT in 1994. Of the eight restaurants that I visited my three favorite were The Market Place, Millpond Taverne and Pumpernickel Pub - all long gone. Unfortunately of the three restaurants that still exist today, I never visited any of them. But on my next visit to CT I do plan to visit the Griswold Inn, which has been in business since 1776.

Here are the restaurants and by my best research the address at which they were (or are) located:

Anderson's Angus Corral	Rt 1, Westbrook
Antonio's	672 Main Street, East Haven
Basel's	933 State Street, New Haven
Beechwood Manor	111 Scrub Oak Road, North Haven
Beefsteak Tavern	377 E Main St, Branford, CT 06405
Bernice's	446 Whitfield St, Guilford
John Brown's	Wintonbury Mall, Bloomfield
Cabin Restaurant	106 Colony Street, Meriden
Café Lafayette	721 Boston Post Road, Madison
Captain's Table	Guilford
Chello's	741 Boston Post Road, Guilford
China Wheel	2380 Dixwell Ave, Hamden
China Yum	Meriden Mall
The Clark's	North Street, Willimantic
Countryside Corral	Chamberlain Hwy,Meriden
Dennis	906 North Colony Road, Wallingford
Debbie Wong	852 Washington St, Middletown
Edelweiss	980 Farmington Ave, West Hartford
El Torero	1698 Boston Post Rd, Milford
Gaetano's Restaurant	30 Quinnipiac Street, Wallingford
Griswold Inn	47 Main Street, Essex
Hawthorne Inn	2421 Wilber Cross Pky, Berlin
Hob-Nob Restaurant	44 Boston Post Road, Madison
Holiday Inn of Meriden	900 East Main Street, Meriden
The Inn at Cornfield Point	Cornfield Point, Old Saybrook
Inn at Lake Waramaug	107 North Shore Road, New Preston
Idra Restaurant	1720 Dixwell Ave, Hamden
Jimmies of Savin Rock	5 Rock St, West Haven
Jimmies..in Hamden	2100 Dixwell Ave, Hamden
Last National Bank	752 Main Street, Hartford
Manor Inn	1636 Meriden-Waterbury Turnpike, Milldale
The Market Place	Glen Lochen Mall, Glastonbury
Millpond Taverne	1565 Middletown Ave, Northford
New Top Hill	663 East Main Street, Meriden
Peking Inn	1052 South Colony Road, Wallingford
Phyllis'	12 Rock Street
Pine Valley Country Club	300 Welch Street, Southington
Poor Lads	204 Crown Street, New Haven
Pumpernickel Pub	53 Welles Street, Glastonbury (+other locations)
Rustic Oak	165 Washington Ave, North Haven
Seamen's Inn	75 Greenmanville Ave., Mystic
Silvertown Restaurant	S. Broad Street, Meriden
South Meriden House	1076 Hanover Road, Meriden
Three Bears Restaurant	79 Newtown Turnpike, Westport
Verdolini's	126 Hanover Street, Meriden
Wonder Bar	1726 Berlin Tpk, Berlin