Throwdown! Bobby Flay jumps the shark

Maybe this critique is unfair. Maybe I should wait for all the episodes of the show to air but at this point I feel secure in making the following statement: Throwdown! is the biggest mistake of Bobby Flay's television career. Why, because in it he comes off as a smug, arrogant bully.


Let’s back up for a minute. The premise for the show is that someone who is a great cook with one specialty, say barbeque, is invited by the Food Network staff to audition for their own show, or to be profiled on an existing show, or some such rouse that allows for the presence of the Food TV camera people without arousing suspicion. The cook invites a large group of friends and prepares to serve his/her specialty when, from out of nowhere, Bobby Flay shows up in a black SUV and throws down the gauntlet. A cook-off ensues and some “judges” are brought out to determine the winner.

What’s wrong with this? After all, Bobby shows up on the other cook’s turf and prepares the other cook’s specialty to be tasted by a crowd that is biased towards the other cook. Plus, the other cook gets to be featured on national television. Sometimes, there is nothing wrong with it at all. Sometimes the other cook has enough moxie to stand up to the NY Times 3 star (Bollo) and 2 star (Mesa Grill) chef and talk enough trash to make the whole thing fun.

The problem comes when the other cook is intimidated by Bobby Flay. I have seen two episodes of the show where this was obviously the case. The first was chowder expert Ben Sargeant who hosted a party in Brooklyn. The panic that washed over his face when Bobby got out of the SUV was obvious. Then when “judge” Rebecca Charles of Pearl Oyster Bar picked Bobby’s chowder I just felt really bad for the guy.

Worse was when Bobby took on wedding cake designer Michelle Doll. At the beginning of the show Bobby admitted to having never baked a wedding cake. Yet, there he was at Tavern on the Green, wheeling in a cake that he predicted would taste so much better than his opponent’s that he could overcome his obvious lack of skill in the cake decorating department. Ms. Doll came off as meek and even though she won the contest I still felt bad that she’d been put through the process. Did the fact that Bobby was a wedding cake making novice make for a unique challenge or raise the question of what kind of a jerk would think he could out-do someone at their specialty with only one try?

Throw down comes on the heels of the popularity of Iron Chef and its little sister Iron Chef America but those shows have an element of fun to them. The sides are evenly matched and the show, at least the Japanese version, sometimes seems to have a predetermined outcome. Who cares who wins when one professional chef bests another, anyway? It’s the look on the face of these contestants and the cock-sure attitude of the star that make Throwdown such a turnoff.

Baird Farm, N. Chittenden Vermont

Vermont: the Green Mountain State. Vermont: land of Maple Syrup. Vermont: ah, the joy of being on a family vacation. Long car rides leading to factory tours of Teddy Bears and Ice Cream. Did we hit every tourist trap in western Vermont? You bet we did. Or if we didn’t I’d like to know the ones we missed.

On two of those car rides we noticed signs for the Baird Farm. I made a point of stopping there on our way out of town and I’m glad we did. The setting was right out of one of Christopher Kimball's letters from the editor pieces at the beginning of every Cook's Illustrated. We pulled up an unpaved driveway and came face to face with a German Shepard. Before there was time to wonder what to do, Mr. Baird came out of the farmhouse with a smile and a wave. The dog turned out to be very friendly, unless you were one of the cows in the barn which the dog delighted in barking at. We walked the grounds for a few minutes, showed the kids the cows and then went in to the farmhouse to buy some maple syrup.

Now we’d had ample opportunity to buy syrup before on the trip. Every tourist stop in Vermont sells syrup. The Calvin Coolidge Presidential homestead sells maple syrup. The Vermont Teddy Bear Factory sells maple syrup. Ben & Jerry, well I’m not sure if they sell maple syrup, I was in a tie-dye daze and riding a sugar buzz from too much ice cream at the time. The gas station sells maple syrup. The Maple Museum with their exhibition hall as excuse for a gift shop of course sells maple syrup. Maple syrup is to Vermont what slot machines are to Las Vegas.

I wanted to buy syrup from the source and the Baird Farm fit the bill to a T. Mrs. Baird thanked me for buying the syrup from them and I told her that we had sought out someone like them to spend our maple syrup dollars with. We took home a quart of Vermont Grade A medium amber syrup which was my favorite. Turns out its most people’s favorite too. We also bought a jar of the maple butter which isn’t butter at all just maple syrup whipped up into a spread. We talked with the Bairds, petted the dog, got back in the car and went on our way.

Here's a picture of the Baird Farm sugar house taken from their website:



One interesting thing about maple syrup is that it’s all made the same way. There are four grades: Grade A Fancy, Grade A Medium Amber, Grade A Dark Amber and Grade B. There is no effort made to distinguish the syrup beyond this point. No one ever says that their trees produce a superior sap or that one producer is more skilled than another. This isn’t like wine where someone is aging his syrup in a special oak barrel while someone else is aging his in a stainless steel tank. There are just a set of guidelines as to what qualifies each type of syrup and that’s that. I’m surprised that some marketing genius hasn’t come along and tried to carve out some niche beyond the real Vermont Maple Syrup tag that we see at any decent pancake house across the country but to my knowledge this hasn’t happened, yet.

Check out the Baird’s website. They ship syrup anywhere in the country and the prices are very reasonable for what you get. You also get the satisfaction of knowing your money is going directly to a farmer and that’s something you can’t get at any tourist trap that I know of.

Baird Farm
65 West Road
N. Chittenden, Vermont 05763
802-483-2963

Fresh Eggs

Have you ever had a fresh egg? A straight from the farm egg from a chicken not raised in a box and never allowed to realize that its legs were made for walking? I’m not sure that I ever had until recently. Even though I was buying organic eggs at Whole Foods I’m still not sure. I’d heard chef’s on TV talk about fresh eggs; had vendors at farmer’s markets try and sell me their “fresh” eggs but I’d always thought that an egg was, well, an egg.

Then I was reading Bill Buford’s Heat and came across the following passage on pages 182-83:

“Which was why I was in Porretta. It was also why I’d got so interested in the egg, because, on my first morning, watching Betta prepare the dough, I saw that an egg was a modern pasta’s most import ingredient, provided it was a very good egg, which was evident (or not) the moment you cracked it open. If the white was runny, you knew the egg had come from a battery-farmed animal, cooped up in a cage, and the pasta you made from it would be sticky and difficult to work with., exactly like the unhappy batch Betta produced one evening after Gianni fell asleep, having had too much wine at lunch, and failed to buy eggs from the good shop before it closed and had to drive to the next town to the cattivo alimentarii, the nasty store, and pick up a dozen of its mass-produced product. The yolk was also illuminating. The nasty store’s were pale yellow, like those most of us have been scrambling for our urban lives. But a proper yolk is a different color and, in Italian, is still called il rosso, the red bit, arising from a time when you ate eggs in the spring and summer, the egg season, and they came from grain-fed, half-wild, not just free-ranging but virtually proprietorial chickens that produced a yolk more red than yellow, a bright primary intensity that you can see today if you’re lucky enough to get your eggs not from a supermarket but a local mercato or a small farm.”

“A battery-farmed animal” boy, that phrase got me. I decided that I need to try and find out what all this fuss was about. I know a guy who raises chickens for their eggs and asked him if I could buy a dozen. He wouldn’t sell them to me, said he’d give them to me instead. I like to pay people for what I get but he insisted. I ended up splitting a dozen with another guy in my office.

I took the eggs home and it was like reading from that Buford passage verbatim. There was the white not too runny and the yolk, standing up straight and proud looking more like orange zest than orange juice. How did these eggs taste? Like nothing I’d had before. I had to have more. I called the guy up, no more eggs right now. The chickens were on strike. Actually, I think the chickens just weren’t producing enough for him to spare.

I became obsessed. I went to the Madison Farmer’s Market. I bought “fresh” eggs from a vendor there. I took home the eggs and cracked them open only to find a runny white and a lemon yellow yolk. What was going on? Had I just bought the same eggs I could have gotten at the A & P and paid twice as much for a dozen? I went back the next Thursday and asked the farmer. I didn’t want to accuse them of selling mislabeled eggs so instead I asked if their source for the eggs was reliable. I explained what had happened. The farmer looked at me, I looked back. “No one’s complained” she said. I wonder what she thought I was doing.

Next I ended up at someone’s house in Basking Ridge with a sign out front advertising fresh eggs. By now I’d done some reading. I knew that you really shouldn’t wash a fresh egg too thoroughly until just before you crack it. There is a protective coating on an egg that when washed away causes eggs to spoil faster. Commercial operators wash their eggs and then spray them with a mineral oil to help prolong shelf life. I also found out that you can tell the color eggshell a chicken will lay by looking at the color of its ears.* Why I needed this information I’m still not sure but it is interesting.

The Basking Ridge eggs were better than the eggs from the farmers market. The white had a better consistency but the yolk was still yellow. I was looking for what Buford described as “il rosso” and I wasn’t finding it. The refrigerator was filling up with eggs. I thought about making egg salad.

I went back to the guy who gave me the first eggs and asked him what made his eggs so good. No real surprise that it’s a combination of feed and lifestyle. The chickens are free to roam his yard during the day. They return to the coop in the evening to sleep and to be protected from the neighborhood fox. The feed is a combination of marigold petals, sunflower seeds and ground oyster shells. The egg yolks get some of that orange color from those marigold petals to be sure and the oyster shell helps make the eggshell sturdier. The feed is all organic, he said. I wonder if there is such a thing as organic oyster shell.

The good news is that more eggs are on the way. He’s just acquired some more chickens and come September he promises the eggs will be plentiful. Now if I can just figure out how to get him to charge me.

Until then I’ll be on the lookout for another source. Once you’ve had a really good egg there’s no turning back. There are other people in my area selling eggs from their homes. I guess I’ll be ringing some more door bells. Egg salad anyone?

*The information on eggs came from Shirley Corriher’s Cookwise, pages 192-195.

Roots Steakhouse: first impressions

I went to Roots Steakhouse in Summit on Tuesday night with high expectations. There is no good steak-chop-seafood house in all of the Union/Morris/Somerset County area that I know of and with Roots being owned by Harvest Restaurant Group which manages four other terrific restaurants in the area I had high hopes.

Roots more than met my expectations, it exceeded them. It is hard to believe that this restaurant has only been open for a few days. The service was flawless. The food arrived quickly and was cooked exactly to order. I never had the feeling that they were still getting their act together.

More importantly, the food was outstanding. I started with the beefsteak tomato salad with caramelized onions, olive oil and sea salt, garnished with fresh basil. The tomato is cut up, dressed up and then stacked back up. I deconstructed it and ate it in slices. The mix of the sweet onion and the salt and that fresh basil helped the tomato which was just shy of its peak. Still this was a very good salad and a good way to start a dinner, especially on a hot night.

For my entrée I had the 16 oz. dry aged sirloin steak. I ordered it cooked rare and it came out cooked rare with a nice outer crust. It was also absolutely delicious. The same quality steak I’d expect to have at a top flight steakhouse in NYC like Sparks. The steak is $35.95 and comes a la carte. For a side dish I had creamed spinach which was also excellent. I have to admit, I was trying to recreate the meal I’d order if I was at Peter Luger in Brooklyn: tomato and onion salad, rare steak, creamed spinach. There are no hash browns on the menu but there are mashed potatoes and also a “colossal” baked potato. All side dishes are $5.95. After having a steak this good it will be hard to justify driving back to Brooklyn anytime soon.

If you’re planning on going I’d suggest calling for a reservation, (908)273-0027. The restaurant was crowded on Tuesday night. Very crowded when you consider it was their third night being open and that it had been 100 degrees on Tuesday. I got the last seat at the bar at 7:15 and I was among several diners who had their meal there. This had two distinct advantages: first, was the high quality of service I received from the bartenders who are a credit to the establishment. Second, the diner sitting next to me gave me one of his lamb chops, a thick loin chop cooked medium and, again, nicely seared on the outside. One of the best lamp chops I’ve every eaten in a restaurant and since you get three of these chops in the order the value is outstanding.

Roots Steakhouse is an expensive restaurant but I think it is a very good value. I don’t think you could serve food of this quality and charge low prices. This isn’t Arthur’s and it isn’t the Outback. Maybe the only hope of keeping the line from running around the block will be the pricing. With a menu with such great choices, steak, chops, 3-5 lb. lobsters, raw bar etc. its hard to imagine this place won’t be packed every night. The area certainly can afford it and the area certainly has been longing for this type of place. I plan on going back and soon. See you at the bar.