In honor of the news that a low-fat diet is unlikely to have any effect on cancer or cardiovascular disease, Iris and I had burgers and fries for lunch yesterday. Furthermore, the burgers were cooked medium.

I recently reviewed a burger place and castigated them for, among other things, overcooking the burger that I ordered medium. This happens to me all the time. I suspect it’s less a liability issue than a careless grill cook issue, because I’ve had it happen even at a high-end restaurant, where a friend and I each ordered a burger medium rare, and mine arrived medium rare while his was well done. Or maybe he found some way to offend the cook while I wasn’t looking.

Anyway, in response to my review I got email from a fan of the place, saying that she liked the burger there, and I was crazy for ordering a medium burger, and probably cooking me one would violate the health code.

Here she was wrong; menus in Washington do have to warn the customer that consuming “undercooked” meat can cause foodborne illness, but restaurants are free to serve a customer who requests a medium rare patty, or steak tartare, or raw oysters.

People (myself included, no doubt) have an amazing capacity to focus in on the risk associated with one particular course of action and ignore other risks. There’s a great essay by Jeffrey Steingarten, of Vogue magazine, in which he decides to give up skiing so he can eat more raw shellfish. (Later he admits that he’s never been skiing.)

Iris and I have a similar deal. We don’t have a car and rarely ride in one, and that’s the most dangerous thing the average non-extreme person does. (Car-riding and burger-eating are both pretty safe on the whole, but it still amazes me that some people put their kids into a car every day.) So we’ll stick with medium burgers, which taste better.

Here’s a burger-making tip. When you have a small mouth and sixteen teeth, it’s hard to bite through a thick patty, but it’s also hard to form a thin patty and have it stay thin while cooking. So I cooked two regular-sized patties, then filleted Iris’s into two patties of half the original thickness. She ate one of the thin patties and I ate the other.

We both put on plenty of HP Sauce. From the Wikipedia entry on HP Sauce, I learned that

> The Aston factory is bisected by the A38(M) motorway and has a pipeline, carrying vinegar over the motorway, from one side to the other.

Cold pizza for breakfast is nothing to apologize for, but I prefer hot pizza. What are you going to do when you roll out of bed, though? Preheat the oven?

Luckily, there’s a better way to reheat one or two slices. It’s not only faster, but you get crisper, fresher-tasting pizza, too. I can’t take an ounce of credit for this: I learned it from tommy on eGullet.

Put the pizza *topping-side down* in a cold cast-iron or nonstick skillet. Place over medium heat. When the pizza starts to sizzle, render some fat, and brown a bit, flip it over. Cook a couple minutes on the crust side, then eat immediately. I’m eating a slice of The Works Primo from Pagliacci right now and it’s like I’m *there.* Okay, *there* is only six blocks away, but still, try this.

One of the givens of the food world is that no matter what you’re eating, someone will come along and tell you there’s something better, and unfortunately they will be right. I eat pretty good chocolate–Valrhona Le Noir Amer is the bar I try to keep in my backpack at all times–but then I read Mort Rosenblum’s book Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Light and Dark, and he was talking about boutique chocolate makers I’d never even heard of, French and Italian geniuses who make my Valrhona look like 3 Musketeers.

Luckily, I had an excuse to get some of the good stuff (Christmas) and knew where to get it: [Chocosphere](http://www.chocosphere.com/), a mail order house conveniently located in Portland. I bought four bars, two from the Italian maker Amadei and two from the French maker Pralus. This was a total of ten ounces of chocolate for $40. I stuffed it in Laurie’s stocking and recalled the scene in Carol Ryrie Brink’s book Family Grandstand where George opens a birthday present from his sister and says, “It’s Susan’s favorite candy!”

We cracked open the Pralus bars today. They’re both single-origin criollo bars. I have no idea whether either of these qualities really means a better product, but you can’t argue with the results. The Madagascar bar is a smooth and well-rounded chocolate that, honestly, I don’t think I could distinguish from my favorite Valrhona in a blind tasting.

But the Indonésie bar is something else. It tastes like there might be a bit of roasted coffee in the mix, even though there is none, and there’s also a faint flavor of dried porcini mushrooms. I swear I was thinking this even before I noticed that it mentioned wild mushrooms in the tasting notes on the label. There is nothing fruity about this chocolate–it’s like a powerful aged red wine, when all of the youthful flavors are gone and all that’s left is weird, dark, and wonderful. This bar is currently out of stock at Chocosphere, so if you want to taste any, you’ll have to come over to my place. Bring offerings.

Rosenblum’s still way ahead of me, though, because the other thing I learned from his book is that when you crack open a cacao pod, this milky liquid oozes out, and he says it’s one of the greatest things you will ever taste, and you have to slurp it up right away because there’s no way to preserve it. Although, if I remember right you can ferment it and get a buzz. Some people want to climb Mount Everest; my life goal is to get high on chocolate juice.

I’ve long wanted to write an article about the importance of sour flavors in cooking. Nearly everything we eat has a pH of less than 7, so we’re all sour freaks to some extent. I’m more so than average, and Iris beats me handily: she will happily eat a slice of lemon. In fact, once, before I could stop her, she ate a slice of lemon including the peel.

Now I don’t have to write that article, because Dara Moskowitz already did, for the Minneapolis CityPages: Pucker Power:

> So why is it that restaurant chefs use so much more sour than home cooks do? Go to a Thai restaurant and you might find lemon juice, lime juice, and vinegar in a single sauce, and the resulting sauce doesn’t make you gag, it makes you smile and ask for more.

It was reprinted in Best Food Writing 2005.

The timing was perfect, because last night we had waffles for dinner, and our waffles are unabashedly sour, a result of letting the yeast batter ferment all day (or overnight) at room temperature. Cook’s Illustrated did a raised waffle recipe a while ago, and they recommended fermenting in the refrigerator. They rigged up a Consumer Reports-style test in which the gas from the fermenting batter inflated a balloon, and showed how the room temperature batter resulted in a sad, flaccid balloon. I took this personally.

The waffle recipe I make, which I’ve written about before, is a Fannie Farmer recipe that I found in the book A Real American Breakfast. The batter ferments until a creamy head forms on top, and then you stir in some beaten egg whites. This seems dumb: why did you go to all the trouble of making a yeast batter, only to leaven it with egg whites after it collapses? For a while, I felt guilty about this, like I was using dough conditioner or something similarly embarrassing.

Then I remembered something from Michael Ruhlman’s book, Charcuterie. In the intro, or maybe the flap copy, Ruhlman wonders why we still make cured meats, even though we no longer need them, now that everyone has a refrigerator. He puts the question to a chef, who answers with a single word: “Flavor.”

We made the rest of the waffles for breakfast (the batter keeps for a day in the fridge), and they were even more sour and delicious. While we were eating, Laurie noticed that waffles require far more syrup than French toast, partly because they’re drier and partly because of the waffle indentations.

This leads me to another shameful confession: I like “pancake syrup,” the stuff made from corn syrup and fenugreek, better than real maple syrup. I will choose $3 Kroger syrup over artisan-made Vermont maple of whatever grade. I’ve tried to acquire the taste of the real stuff, but it won’t take; I’m not just not Canadian enough, or something.

Does anyone else have a preference like this, where you honestly like the ersatz version of something better than the real one?