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" Josh Ozersky is a James Beard Award-winning food writer, B-list food personality, and noted polymath and deviant. The founder of Meatopia, he will answer all your questions on meat, food, food writing, relationships, restaurants, or cooking. He is also available for private tutorials.  On your cheesesteak choices from last week\u2014I like provolone and can&amp;#039;t stand cheese whiz. American cheese isn&amp;#039;t cheese. It is, after all &amp;quot;cheese food,&amp;quot; which I suspect is what they feed real cheese when it gets hungry. Jeff Schwartz, Westlake Village, CA Jeff seems to be part of the growing chorus of critical voices with nothing good to say about American cheese\u2014cheese food, as the case may be. This last point is worth addressing though. American cheese is not a grossly artificial product by definition. In solid deli form, as produced by Land O&amp;#039;Lakes or Boar&amp;#039;s Head, it&amp;#039;s no more or less fake than the provolone you pretend to like. (Nobody likes provolone on cheesesteaks. It&amp;#039;s barely acceptable when melted in a bath of pork broth, as in Philadelphia&amp;#039;s equally hallowed roast pork sandwiches.) The cheese food of which you speak is really American singles\u2014not that there&amp;#039;s anything wrong with them, either. Where do you stand on brunch? This writer thinks it&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;for jerks.&amp;quot;Greg Valentine, New Orleans I agree. I&amp;#039;m starting a restaurant, and one thing I haven&amp;#039;t decided is what our bread should be like\u2014too doughy and it will fill up our customers and kill dessert orders. I also won&amp;#039;t do breadsticks. Thoughts?Bob Slaughter, Louisville I don&amp;#039;t think it matters one way or the other, Bob, as long as it&amp;#039;s served hot. A lifetime of eating out and knowing chefs, and I&amp;#039;m still unable to figure out why something that is so easy, and brings so much pleasure to diners, would appear so infrequently in restaurants. For what it&amp;#039;s worth, my all-time favorite bread is the flattened, crispy Cuban bread most often seen in Cuban sandwiches. And it goes without saying that butter is at all times and in all places superior to olive oil as a thing to serve with it. But even motor oil would be better than icy little bricks of butter as hard as drill bits.  What is your opinion of supermarket delivery services like FreshDirect and AmazonFresh?Don Katz, New York City I think they&amp;#039;re awesome. If anything has improved the quality of life for Americans as much as this, I can&amp;#039;t think of it offhand. (Not that I&amp;#039;ve tried.) Very few of us live near really good supermarkets, and even mediocre ones are impossible for many people to reach. Millions of disabled and elderly people, not to mention the nation&amp;#039;s ever-growing population of shut-ins, have become more independent and better fed as a result of them. My only complaint, if it can be called that, is the inevitable skew towards top-shelf items. There are hundreds of places to buy salumi online; but if you need a loaf of bread and some Crystal Light delivered, you&amp;#039;re in trouble. I can only get frozen briskets for BBQ. (I live overseas.) I&amp;#039;d prefer unfrozen, but it&amp;#039;s not a reality. Any way that I can make frozen meat be less watery for the BBQ smoke? Matt Jungplut, Hiroshima, Japan Great question. The brisket isn&amp;#039;t to blame for its wateriness. I&amp;#039;m betting that it&amp;#039;s either the freezing or, more likley, the defrosting, that&amp;#039;s causing the damage. Most of the beef we eat was frozen at some point, as was most of the fish. But both need to be flash frozen, partially as a way to keep big ice crystals from forming. Likewise, brisket should be defrosted over as long a period as is convenient. A refrigerator is ideal, but I&amp;#039;ve also used ice water baths in igloo coolers when necessary. You may also be cooking too hot. Brisket loses most of its water moisture by the time it comes out of the cooker, giving greater focus to the melted collagen and intramuscular fat. If I want to get a great turkey for Thanksgiving, how far ahead of time do I need to order it? Also, what is the best one in your opinion?Robert Heenan, New York City If it&amp;#039;s from a locally run CFA or farmer&amp;#039;s market, you better start now. Those kind of things never have enough turkeys to go around. The best commercially available turkey, at least the best I ever had, was Mary&amp;#039;s, a heritage bird available at some markets throughout the northeast. But year in and year out, I find myself using a Bell and Evans supermarket turkey. Bell and Evans is, to my mind, the best poultry in the country, both in terms of taste and also animal welfare standards. (Disclosure: they were a sponsor for Meatopia in years past.) No turkey is as good as even an OK chicken, though. That&amp;#039;s the nature of the beast. What kind of music would you recommend playing for an outdoor barbecue? Our volunteer firefighting organization is holding a last BBQ of the year, and I&amp;#039;m in charge of the playlist. James Duggan, Galveston, TX I mean, it depends. Not on your guests\u2014who cares what they like? No, what matters is the food you&amp;#039;re cooking. For instance, you wouldn&amp;#039;t play textured, spacy prog-rock albums by Yes or The Alan Parson Project when grilling steaks. For that, you want a high-energy soundtrack leaning heavily on classic metal, the likes of Iron Maiden, Danzig, and of course Manowar. In fact, let&amp;#039;s just lay this out in an easy-to-use, all-purpose grilling mix list. (For long-cooking barbecued meats, such as brisket or pork shoulder, it goes without saying that you want discordant, austere, symphonic post-rock acts like Explosions in the Sky or Godspeed You Black Emperor! to keep you awake. Hamburgers: Bouyant, uplifting, sunshine pop, e.g. The Free Design, Mercy, The Association.Hamburgers are a delicate and quickly cooked meat that require great lightness of touch. Hot Dogs: Vulgar, populist, lowest-common-denominator Nashville, e.g. Grandpa Jones, Wayne Cochran, Garth Brooks.Since hot dogs are tasteless and impossible to overcook, they&amp;#039;re the ideal dish for the mindless and the indifferent. Chicken (white meat): Journey.Vanilla and wishy-washy, white meat chicken is for guys who want to rock out while grilling but are afraid to offend their sister-in-law who doesn&amp;#039;t eat red meat. Chicken (dark meat): Blue Oyster Cult.See above, but edgier. Even likes the skin. Italian sausages: Stirring instrumental themes, such as those of &amp;quot;Anvil of Crom&amp;quot; from Conan the Barbarian, or &amp;quot;O Fortuna!&amp;quot; from Excalibur. The complete works of Jim Steinman also apply.Sausages and other fatty meats will frequently drop fat into the fire, causing explosive flare-ups that challenge the manhood of the cook to reach into a roaring inferno. Lamb chops or butterflied leg of lamb: Upper-middlebrow art rock, e.g. Sufjan Stevens, Neutral Milk Hotel, Wilco, Dirty Projectors.One person in fifty wants grilled lamb. It exists to establish classiness on the part of the griller. Shrimp, lobster, and other hard-shell seafoods: Yacht Rock.And be sure to wear the captain hat. Vegetables: Melancholy, introspective singer-songwriter, e.g. Iron and Wine, Elliott Smith, Sparklehorse, Bonnie Prince Billy.We get it. You have soul. Game: Unreconstructed rural electric blues, e.g. R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, T-Model Ford.Anybody that kills their own dinner is unlikely to be listening to overproduced commercial music. But since you&amp;#039;re cooking for volunteer firemen, you&amp;#039;re probably best off with explicitly political rap, like Immortal Technique, Black Star, or Sage Francis. All the above songs, and many others besides are available on &amp;quot;Esquire&amp;#039;s Grilling Grooves&amp;quot; Playlist on Spotify. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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