Biang Biang Maxwell's Silver Hammer

I'm not even going to continue the pun. I love Gene's Flatbread Cafe, but since they moved from Chelsmford to Woburn they've been out of range.  I found this recipe, which is pretty close to what Gene's makes. Since the recipe is quite vague on the proportions for putting together the final noodles, a few notes:

To make the dough: I ended up needing 3/4 cup water for 2 1/2 cups flour - maybe my math is wrong but 130 ml water seems insanely low. The dough was definitely "tough" to work with.

2 1/2 cups flour makes 12 small 2.5" rolls.  Each roll makes 2 noodles each, for 24 noodles total; an adult portion is about 6 noodles (3 rolls) so this recipe serves four adults if no one wants seconds.

For the prep: I added 1 cup cold water and that seemed to control the water boil rate nicely - the water did come back to a boil and the noodles were not overdone.  I used 3 bok-choy leaves.

For the sauce: an even ratio of 1 tbsp soy sauce, 1 tbsp black vinegar, 2 tbsp hot oil is well balanced, but more liquid than you need for 6 full noodles - I'm going to look at cutting that by 25%.  I don't have measurements yet for the garlic+scallions or chili powder, but the garlic never overpowered; I eyeballed it. For the chili powder, a nice dusting of the top noodles seems to produce a reasonable (but hot) temperature.  Pouring the hot oil over the dish really works.

No Haam Yu For You!

A follow-up on salt-fish fried rice: while I continue to not be able to find Haam Yu anywhere even remotely near me, I found an alternative that gets closer to what I could get in the DC area:

• Salted Mackerel for the fish.  Note that this isn't like Haam Yu - since it is a fresh fish (e.g. it has not been fermented) it doesn't pack the punch.
• A little bit of fish sauce instead of soy sauce as needed and...
• Anchovies, the kind you get in a tin.

Chop two anchovies into really really tiny pieces for one small mackerel.  The tiny bits of anchovy bring that pungent kick that the dish should have.

Mmm....Cheese

The CSA is back in session - real vegetables - what an improvement over the grocery. So we're making a lot of Kale soup. Trader Joe's spicy Jalapeno chicken sausages make a nice substitute for Chorizo. My recipe is something like:

• Sauté an onion, some carrot, celery, and maybe garlic on low heat.
• Throw in the chopped up sausage, brown it a little.
• Throw in the Kale, mix it around a bit.
• Cover with broth, throw in a few chunks of potatoes.
• Leave it on low and forget about it for a few hours due to a chain of phone calls from work.

We had leftover Parmesan rinds and threw them in the soup - it tasted good, so I'll call that a success.

We also just did a blind taste test between aged Parmigiano-Reggiano, younger Parmigiano-Reggiano, and Grana Pedano. The real parm was noticeably better - I liked the older, Lori liked the younger, but the Grana was not a real substitute. (It's also not much cheaper - only about $3/lb less.)

Glengoyne 17

Keeping with the "notepad of food and drink" theme, I figure I'll take note of the Scotch I finish...a bottle lasts a long time (despite X-Plane 9), so better to write it down.

People write some crazy stuff about Scotch - it's like wine tasting. "The nose had notes of hickory, burlap, and an old bicycle. Very good." I haven't taken a tasting class, so consider what follows to be totally uninformed.

Glengoyne 17 smells of caramel or honey - you'd think it smells good even if you don't like Scotch. It's fairly mellow; you can drink it neat and it doesn't burn at all. After drinking smokier whiskeys, it almost seems a little bit muted. Perhaps a good Scotch for drinkers who aren't quite prepared for more "challenging" whiskey.

Salt Fish Fried Rice

It was pointed out to me (by my mother) that I never update this blog anymore...a major release will do that to you. But...I need to write cooking notes down somewhere.

Salt fish fried rice is...freaking awesome. It's also an acquired taste. An epic discovery: Top Cafe is just down the street from Apple (should you be out there on business), open late, and does a mean salt fish fried rice.

Salt fish fried rice is one of those dishes that, like a gin and tonic, walks a fine line between culinary bliss and disaster. The salty fish should add a bit of tang to the whole dish and should come out and bite you when you get a piece, but it shouldn't be so overpowering that you can't taste anything afterward.

I have made the recipe twice for myself and I'm getting closer, but have been held up by the principle ingredient: haam yu (咸鱼). The first time I made the recipe I used Portuguese salt cod. To put it bluntly, that's the wrong kind of fish. The results are quite edible, but the salt cod has no tang because it hasn't been fermented.

The second time I went to my local Chinese grocery and did my best to explain what I wanted. Unfortunately they were all out of salt fish and sent me home with...well, I'm not really sure what it was. It was a piece of carp labeled "Grandma's food products" in Chinese. I'm not sure what was done to it. It was a lot closer than the salt cod, but didn't have adequately awesome killing power.

The recipe I made is this one, and it seems to work pretty well; the results were close enough for me to know what I was going for and to know that I was only off by the type of fish.

Salt fish (咸鱼 - literally "salty fish") is xian yu in Mandarin and haam yu in Cantonese, unless Lori is punking me. One of the problems with Googling such ingredients is that there appear to be Chinese pop stars and kung fu masters with the same name. I suggest that we rename Justin Beber to Justin Hamburger in retaliation.

Synthetic CDOs: I Punch You In the Face

This is where my tortured analogy of spicy soup dies: the synthetic CDO. Let us recall:

• Tranched bonds (like mortgage backed securities): spicy soup that has been allowed to settle. Some people buy spicier soup for less money.
• CDOs: let the soup settle again so we can divide it up yet again - a way to try to recover a little more value from the spicy soup.

Now here's where we have to break from reality. In real life if you buy that really spicy bowl of soup and drink it, your mouth is going to be on fire. No one else's. You drink it, you burn. We can't get away from that.

But in the world of finance, pain comes in the form of losing money. This means...pain can be transferred. It's not impossible to set up a deal where you drink the spicy soup and someone else's mouth feels like an inferno.

(Hrm...that might be a really good deal. Remember, the spicier the soup, the cheaper. So you could get cheap soup and someone else hurts like hell...hrm...)

That is the synthetic CDO. You get paid a little bit, and your mouth hurts like hell when someone else drinks the soup. It's as if we have a side agreement that if I drink the soup and it is too spicy, I can punch you in the face.

To get more technical:

• Normally I get paid interest by taking a little bit of risk. I get more interest for more risk.*
  
• Normally the way I take this risk is by loaning someone money. The risk is I don't get paid back.
• For a CDO, the whole thing has been through a blender. (Hard to spot those Wall Street bankers taking fees with all of that blending!)
• For a synthetic CDO, you've got my back! I loan some money out, and you take the risk of me not getting paid back. If I don't get paid back, you pay me. I give you a bit of my interest to convince you that this isn't the worst idea ever.

For me, the synthetic CDO lowers my risk (I will get paid back no matter what) and it lowers my return (since some of my interest money has be used to pay you to take this insane gamble).

For you, you get paid a little bit now and you might have to pay me later. If this looks a lot like an insurance policy, that's because it is. You're insuring me against the loss of my loan. In real life, a synthetic CDO might be built out of Credit Default Swaps (CDS), which are just that - insurance on a loan or bond.

With a synthetic CDO, we've separated the party drinking the soup from the party getting burned. What are the implications of this?

1. I still get some interest, even though you took the risk of not getting repaid. Wha? Well, not getting repaid is not the only risk of a loan. I could make a loan at a low interest rate, then interest rates shoot up. I lose out on the chance to make a loan at a higher rate. This is "interest rate risk" and I still am exposed to it even though you insure me against a total loss. So by selling you this synthetic CDO, I got rid of some of my problems, but not all, and I got rid of some of my return (interest) but not all.
2. Since I get repaid no matter what, I can now loan money to just about anyone I want. Uncle Joe likes to place bets down at the track, but I don't care. If he can't repay, you've got my back.
3. I can only loan uncle Joe as much money as I have. But you, you've got a very different situation. If you have my back, you don't have to put up any money right now! You only owe me money if Uncle Joe doesn't make book. So you could insure me against a bunch of loans without actually having the money!** This would be profoundly stupid of you, because I'll have to break your knee caps (and me, because how are you going to make good on the loan if you have no money and no knee caps) but not impossible.

Of course, item 3 is precisely what AIG did - they told Goldman Sachs they'd make good on loans Goldman had made if the debtors went under. AIG didn't have enough money on hand to actually pay off all of the loans. How did this play out?

1. AIG goes bankrupt.
2. We (the taxpayers) bail them out, giving them lots of cash.
3. They use the cash to pay back Goldman, whose original loans have not paid off.

Well, that worked out well, didn't it.

The astounding thing is that AIG wasn't required (and still isn't) required to record in their financials that "in the event of a bad day, we will owe Goldman Sachs a crap-load of money."

If it seems astounding stupid that you could possibly owe someone a gajillion dollars and go around pretending that you don't have a burden on you, well, it is. A good start to financial reform would be to require such obligations to be recorded on balance sheet.

* This is a little bit surprising to normal people because the most basic savings vehicle, the bank savings account, has no credit risk because the FDIC has your back if the bankgoes under. But then that savings account isn't paying much interest is it?

** To be clear: you can sell a credit default swap without having the full amount of money to cover the loss. That's the AIG case. When the insurance is packaged up in the form of a synthetic CDO, in theory the principle of the synthetic CDO should be equal to the amount we might lose. Thus the worst case is losing all of the synthetic CDO. That's why it's called a synthetic CDO - it looks just like a CDO in that it earns a little bit of "interest" and in the event of a bankruptcy loses all of its principle - just like a regular loan.

CDO Soup

We can understanding tranching via soup - it's the uneven distribution of risk and reward in a financial, um, mixture.

So what the hell is a CDO?

Well, recall in our soup example, we let the soup settle and ladle off the "really hot stuff". We can then sell spicy soup as not-so-spicy because we've put a disproportionate amount of the "hot stuff" into just a few bowls.

What do we do with the left-overs - those few bowls of soup so hot that no one can drink them?

Well, if you're Wall Street, this is what you come up with:

We'll just let the spicy soup settle for a day! Then we'll come back and it will have settled into: a really goddamn spicy bowl of soup at the top, and the rest will be drinkable. We can sell that.

That's a CDO*. We cut up and unevenly divide the remnants of what we already cut up and divided.

And if really want to push it to the limit, we'll take that settled soup and we'll let it settle again (no, really!) and try to ladle off some of that as a CDO-squared.

And if we really want to...oh wait, the whole financial system blew up. So much for the CDO-cubed.

* Technically a CDO is a tranched mixture of any pile of underlying stuff, but the ones that have gotten us in trouble are the ones that are a cut up mixture of mortgage backed securities.

Really Spicy Soup

In my previous post I tried to explain tranching via a soup analogy - you take the spicy soup and ladle it out unevenly so some get more spicy hot paste and some get less. This does leave a few questions unanswered.

Why the hell would I ever drink the bowl with all of the hot sauce?!?

The answer to that is: it's cheaper. If you and I were splitting the cost of take-out, maybe I pay for 2/3 of the soup and you pay for only 1/3rd. That's only fair, because you're going to take all the heat, so to speak.

Tranches are the same way - the tranches with an "unfair" share of the risk also return higher interest. So...do you feel lucky, punk?

Tranching is just dividing up the hot sauce - how does this affect the system?

One of the effects of tranching is to bring players into the market who might not normally buy in.

Let's consider my mother. My mother will not eat spicy food. Her spice tolerance is really, really low. If we have her over for dinner, we're not going to buy the spicy beef soup, even though it is very tasty.

But wait -- if we just tranche it, we can buy the beef soup! All Lori and I need to do is not stir it up and serve the first bowl to ourselves, taking all of the hot paste to ourselves. The remaining soup is quite mild, and my mother, who normally would not be able to drink it (if it were evenly mixed) will be able to drink the remaining tasty broth. She'd probably like the beef ribs too.

If you are the Korean restaurant, this is a hell of a discovery - you can sell a lot more soup now, because you can sell soup to everyone, not just customers with a taste for spicy food.

There's just one hitch: you have to convince a few people to drink that first bowl, the hot bowl, the one with most of the spicy paste. I have had that bowl, and let me tell you, it's an experience!

Motivation to Lie

Now before I continue, I must be clear: the Westborough Korean restaurant has never lied or misrepresented the spiceyness of their food. They have never suggested that we not mix the soup, and they have never suggested that drinking the first bowl of unmixed soup would be a smart thing to do. Our discovery that the soup will "tranche" itself happened by accident, and this whole post is just a (badly stretched) analogy.

So if I can sell more soup by letting it settle (so the less spicy part is palitable to a wider audience), I might find that the limiting factor is finding people to drink the first bowl. Sure the first bowl might be cheaper, but how else can I sell it?

• I could simply misrepresent how spicy it is. When someone asks me: "will I roll over and scream in pain if I chug the first bowl", I'll just answer "oh no - it's spicy but it's not that bad. You'll be fine." This isn't a very good idea - my customers might get angry at me for setting them up for pain, but that'll happen tomorrow, and I want to sell soup now.
  
• I could agree to drink the first bowl myself if no one else wants it. This is a damn stupid thing to do because I might have to drink the soup, but again, I want to sell soup now.

That is pretty much what Wall Street did: they got the ratings agencies to represent the more dangerous tranches as "not that bad". In some cases, they agreed to buy the tranches back, or they kept them for themselves, a move that has caused them to lose a lot of money.

Those stupid bankers...how could they be so dumb? Oh wait - they made bonus money when they sold the tranches. And...wait - we (the tax payers) are bailing the firms out now that they're in pain. Maybe we're the dumb ones.

Subprime Soup

I'm a huge Michael Lewis fan, and his interview on Fresh Air is a good one (as is his 60 minutes piece).

The Planet Money team recently bought their very own toxic asset. They look surprisingly cute in the animation for something that has completely destabilized our economy.

One barrier to getting real reform is that most people's eyes glaze over as soon as you say the word tranche - and yet tranching is fairly close to the heart of the shell game that was built on top of some really poor mortgages.*

If you want to understand most of structured finance in one delicious meal, just buy the spicy beef soup from the Westborough Korean Restaurant, our new go-to take-out place.

The soup is a delicious beef broth with noodles, beef ribs, bean sprouts, and this really spicy red paste - in small quantities the paste is delicious. But if you pick up takeout, then by the time you get the soup home, the paste has settled to the top. The first bowl of soup is going to have more of the red paste than its fair share, and is going to be really, really hot. You'd have to be a little crazy to drink it.

That is tranching, in a nut-shell. Given a pool of "stuff" with a little bit of danger mixed in, tranching just means the Wall Street firms who are dividing the soup up put more of the spicy sauce in some bowls and less in others.

This is generally good for those getting the less spicy bowls - it allows them to make a pool of "stuff" less dangerous.

What do you call those pools that have more than their fair share of hot sauce? Those pools are called 'toxic waste', and that's where our toxic assets come from.

* I believe the true heart of the crisis is not any one financial technique - it is asymmetric risk - that is, the ability of Wall Street bankers to make money when a bet wins and have someone else pay when a bet loses. But in order to get anyone to play a game like that with them, they need to make the game complicated, so that the absurdity of the rules is less obvious. If you slice and dice your securities into enough tranches, it becomes a lot harder to see what you actually own.

Of course, when you actually look, it's an eye opener!

Riffing On Tuna

As this post will reveal, my recipes aren't really recipes at all - I don't follow recipes well, and find the concept of baking to be absolutely petrifying. (What do you mean, I have to use an exact quantity of ingredients?) Rather I work with themes of inter-relating ingredients that play well together, screwing around with them for my own amusement, hopefully in a way that won't result in a trip to McDonalds at the end of the night.

With that in mind, what can you do with Tuna steaks?

• Cook them as little as you can stand. If you can get sushi-grade tuna, not cooking them at all would be perfectly acceptable. If you do have to cook them, coat each side with black pepper and maybe some salt or seseme seeds, then cook each side with a very small amount of peanut oil on a hot stainless steel pan. This is sort of a poor-man's tuna equivalent of pan-searing a steak. Cook time varies by how much you trust the tuna, but we're talking minutes, and a small number of them. If the fish is good, I want pink in the center!

• You can chop up and serve the tuna over vegetables - avocado and cucumber are what I usually go to. Anything that is good in Sushi will do here.

• For rice, you can simply prepare a small amount of rice, or make sushi rice (that is, pre-rinse the starch off short-grain rice and coat it in a rice-vinegar/sugar solution at the end). See also risotto below.

• For sauce, I usually make some spicy mayonnaise, which is just regular mayonnaise mixed with Sriracha hot sauce and a small amount of cayenne pepper. (You don't have Sriracha? We must never speak to each other again.) Here my inability to measure things is going to cripple the recipe. Basically you want to use a tiny amount of cayenne pepper - it adds a ton of heat and will make the sauce unmanageable very quickly. Add the Sriracha to taste - it brings spice but also a nice tomato flavor.

  For sauce you can also reduce rice vinegar and soy sauce (perhaps with some stock) into the pan after cooking the tuna. This doesn't quite work like a traditional fond in that the tuna isn't fatty enough to leave the rich drippings you get off of steak. Still, this can bring a salty flavor to the party that isn't as lethally hot as the spicy mayonnaise.

• I usually serve this mess by doing something silly, like piling the tuna on top of the rice with the vegetables all around, e.g. you can play "New york chef" in the comfort of your own kitchen. The taller you stack it, the more points you get. Duct tape is cheating. The sauce can be poured right on or left on the side or safety. (If I've had a few beers before I start cooking and have been liberal with the cayenne pepper I leave the spicy mayo on the side for safety.)

Sushi Risotto

One of the weirder experiments I have done with this recipe was to make sushi risotto - that is, a risotto flavored with sushi-rice flavors (rice vineger, saki, sugar, although I probably ignored the Saki due to it not being on hand). I'm going to have to make the recipe again to remember what went into it, but the trickiest part is to get the two sets of flavors to play nice together. It can be done. I use Alton Brown's recipe as a starting point for Risotto, but in this case I backed off the white wine a lot (perhaps half a cup at most) to avoid clashing with the sushi-related flavors.

(The recipe was quite dreadful mid-preparation, and I thought we'd be ordering take-out, but as the alcohol cooked off the white wine, the whole thing mellowed.)

Anyway, if you can get a "sushi risotto" going, it can serve as a nice base to the tuna, bringing in some contrary flavors and making the rice more interesting.

Pie in the Sky

There are two other ideas for this recipe that I haven't gotten around to cooking yet:

• Wasabi cream sauce. I'll have to figure out how to engineer this but the idea is to make a light cream sauce with a bit of wasabi flavor to pour over the rice. (This is a continuation of the whole "sush-like flavors" theme.) Probably this can't be done without using real cream.

• Tangy sauce. Hell, I don't even know what this is. Basically at the Elephant Walk over a decade ago I had a raw tuna and vegetable appetizer, with some kind of tangy salty sauce that was just astoundingly good. If I had to speculate, there was fish sauce or oyster sauce in there, but cut with something to make it not lethal.

Bob Vila Needs Shrimp!

Lori and I found a good Chinese restaurant, just in the nick of time for xmas: Red Pepper, on route 9 in Framingham.

Disclaimer: Lori and I have become Chinese food snots - we like food that is more like what you'd have in China, rather than Americanized recipes. With that in mind, Red Pepper totally delivers!

Bob Vila Would Not Spend This Much Time On Green Bean Casserole

My mother is a very systematic person - she keeps notes on how much food everyone eats during Thanksgiving. So when I called her to find out how many pounds of green beans we needed to serve ten people (1.5 pounds is on the safe side) she had historical data on the Supnik family green bean consumption dating back several years.

My original thought was to file this under "things that makes Mom unique"...that is, until I realized that I do the same thing. The Apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

I started logging my recipes several years ago when I was teaching myself to cook French sauces. The problem with French sauces is that if you make them frequently enough to really get good at them, you'll die of congestive heart failure before you finish your training period. So I started keeping notes on my recipes to avoid going back to square one every time.

So while normally the purpose of blogging is to rant about things I am unqualified to rant about (in an attempt to build a resume for Fox News), I'm going to start archiving my recipes^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hexperiments here for next year.

Green Bean Casserole the Hard Way

Lori and I were charged with Green Bean Casserole this Thanksgiving...you can find the "classic" recipe here. We made this recipe with two changes:

1. We used fresh green beans. We microwaved them for, um, a while, to soften them, as they won't cook fully in the casserole.
2. We made the condensed mushroom soup from scratch. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

(I did give serious thought to frying my own onions, but Thanksgiving involves cooking food, taking it in a car, having it sit, then it gets reheated. I'm not convinced home-fried food would be terribly appealing after such a long wait.)

So about the condensed cream of mushroom soup. Basically we used this recipe, but without any of the chicken stock. We started without the corn starch and water, but when it became clear that we needed thickening power, we added it. We also added some cheese to the casserole because, well, we could.

The results were reasonable I think. The main change I would consider for next time is making the soup even thicker, which could reduce casserole cooking time, either via longer cooking, more corn starch, or both.

Essence of Mushroomy Goodness

As a side note, the creamed mushrooms (that is, mushrooms sauteed with shallots in cream) is astoundingly tasty, and not unrelated to a number of other mushroom, wine and cream potions. I have a strange compulsion to make ice cubes out of anything that is concentrated and tasty, e.g. home made chicken stock, pesto, leftover pizza (you do have to put it in the blender first) and concentrated creamed mushrooms falls in that category.

Poking at the recipe:

• Don't be lazy about the shallots - they bring a lot of flavor to the party.
• If making a sauce, you might be able to get away with less cream - judge by consistency. I am definitely of a mind-set that while "mouth feel" can be luxurious and delicious, it's useful to know what recipes are using extra fat for feel and not for flavor. This is one of them.
• You can probably deglaze in white wine, also a mix of white wine and vinegar (preferably a white wine vinegar - if you only have distilled, be careful) would be good.
• Extra credit if you use tarragon with the shallots - it plays well with mushrooms.

If you have left-over tarragon and shallots, you can reduce a saute of tarragon and shallots in vinegar and white wine, then combine it with (a relatively unflavored/unspiced ) hollandaise sauce and you end up with Béarnaise sauce, which is absurdly good and can be dumped on, well, pretty much anything. (Allegedly you need chervil to make a Béarnaise correctly, but I have used up leftover tarragon and shallots and it's still very good.)

Wicked Good Eggs

I read The Omnivore's Dilemma and strongly recommend it. Even if you don't agree with Pollen's opinions on food culture (I do, but that's just my opinion, not something I would argue about) I believe the book is a good for its treatment of farm economics, something that city slickers like myself might not be aware of.

The factor that I think is now so relevant (with both high food and high oil prices) is the chain of subsidies and non-renewable inputs that goes into our food.

• It starts with oil, something we can't make more of, and something we don't really have (to the scale that we require) in the US. I'll blog about oil some other time, but for now let's just say that starting the chain with oil gets us off on the wrong foot.
• The oil is used to make fertilizers...basically you couldn't grow corn to the quantity we do without adding a lot of fertilizer, and that process requires energy, which in the US means fossil fuels. (I suppose that we could move some of our energy dependence to nuclear power - I am for this, and not just because I could then blog that the beginning link in a bag of Dorritos is Uranium!)
• The farmers grow a pretty huge amount of corn - the Government pays them to do so, allowing them to spend more on production costs than the corn is worth.
• That makes corn so cheap that we go feed it to cows who aren't even supposed to be eating corn (and get really sick from it).*
• This ends with a Quizznos add telling us that for $5 we should get more meat!
• Actually, it ends with us all getting really fat.

When I look back at the entire chain of events, it strikes me as completely absurd, and more importantly really inefficient! A lot of expenditure for something (in this case fast food) that isn't even that great. I'd like my taxes back, I can live without fast food, thank you.*

But it turns out that Polyface Farms, which is featured in Pollen's book, delivers to the DC metro area via buying clubs. So Lori and I signed up.

Now I do have to admit that while signing up makes my liberal conscience feel good, the amount of food we ordered is a drop in the bucket of our total callorie consumption - we're going to have to find sustainable sources for a wide range of other types of food.

But the point of this blog post is not that Polyface is sustainable, with almost no outside non-renewable inputs. It is that their eggs are magical.

Lori and I try to buy the freshest eggs we can, but Polyface eggs are in a different dimension. I found this out last night when making meringues and zabaglione; the meringues whipped in perhaps half the time normal eggs would and became so thick as to lower the RPM of the mixer. The initial beating of the yolks takes significantly more effort than with your regular store-bought yolks-break-by-looking-at-them variety.

Forget sustainability and the planet, I would like all my food to be farmed the Polyface way because the quality is unreal!

* There is now a fork in the road - we could go down a different path and use our cheap subsidized corn to make fuel...sort of like the fuel we used to make the fertilizer to grow the corn. I've read that the output-input energy ratio for Ethanol is 1.2 (that is, it's a slight win, prodcuing 20% more energy than it took to make) but 1.2 is still totally lame.