Monday, July 31, 2006
At some point in time, I ordered Wine & War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure from Amazon. Then it languished on my bookshelf for ages, passed over for other, more glamorous titles. But after my wine experience at the Taste 3 Conference in mid-July, I've gotten really into wine, so I grabbed it for my plane ride to Blogher.
"Wine & War" tells the true story of French winemakers struggles to keep their cellars from being plundered by the occupying German forces, and also their struggles to keep up with the German's incessant demand for wine. From Champagne and Alsace to Burgundy and Bordeaux, husband and wife authors Don and Petie Kladstrup weave tales of hastily constructed wine cave walls with the more dangerous exploits of the Resistance.
It was a very enjoyable read and I learned a lot about the wine-making process and some of the famous French wine families. It also further piqued my interest in wine and now I'm determined to not only learn more, but drink more too. You'll enjoy this book if you're interested in wine or France. If the triumvirate of wine, France, and the Resistance is your thing (Hi Mom!), you'll definitely love "Wine & War".
How to decode wine labels. While new world wines are pretty easy to figure out, I still have a hard time with European labels. I've been trying to learn more about wine though, so I hope this isn't a problem for much longer.
If you read the guest review post about Heat but didn't follow up with the comments, you should check them out. There's some really thoughtful stuff in there and it makes me realize how great it can be to have comments turned on on the site.
New York City has many Ray's Pizzas, which was first? One of my favorite bits from the movie Elf has Santa telling Will Ferrell which Ray's is the original Ray's.
Girl goes to Whole Foods. Girl buys emu egg. Girl scrambles emu egg. Girl decides egg smells gross. Girl puts hot sauce on it. Egg still smells gross. Girl dumps scrambled emu egg in garbage disposal.
Friday, July 28, 2006
I'm 43 today and while I say this with neither joy nor sadness, more just a general sigh at the nature of time, or rather of the way we perceive it--an acceleration, a rush, like falling, rather than a metronomic procession of days--the day occasioned an unexpected delivery from Hudson Valley Foie Gras. Not a fresh foie gras, but rather two excellent cuts from the bird that gives us the foie gras and are every bit as excellent. Wonderful duck legs and duck breasts, called magret, from the moulard duck--it's not just about the foie gras. The card inside read happy birthday, from my mom. Is that a great mom, or what? I'll confit the legs and save them for fall; I'll dry cure two of the duck breasts with salt and thyme for duck prosciutto, and grill the other two (they're as fat and rich as strip steak and even more flavorful).
--In another package, also from my saintly mum, a can of Whitely's Peanuts. These peanuts I tell anyone who will listen are arguably the best in the United States. They're large, very crunchy, and the driest fried peanuts I've encountered. One of the company's owners told me why: they soak the peanuts in water before cooking them; when they're fried by hand in 130 pound batches, the steam they release apparently prevents them from absorbing tons of oil. They're fantastic.
--A final more somber note. Bourdain has written a complete account of his Lebanon trip at salon.com. You may have to watch a quick ad for the travel channel for the whole story, but the commercial is brief. I emailed Tony to ask if writing it had been cathartic. He replied "I wish that were true." And this is a guy who is not easily rattled.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Dissatisfied with the Coca-Cola Company's business and environmental practices, a pair of bar managers from the UK decided to whip up a Coke taste-alike for sale at their establishment. After some initial missteps, they ended up with something possessing "satisfying, complex flavour, subtly different from the brand leader, but easily as good." Scroll to the end for the recipe to make your own Coke at home.
A Full Belly has some photos of tattooed food fan: he's got a daikon radish and a woodcut-style pork diagram on his arms. Last year, the NY Times ran a photo slideshow of some chef tattoos, including Nino Mancari's huge tat of Alice Waters.
Nobody knows. But we DO know they have digestive systems. Meg's oyster posts over at epicurious.com got me thinking about Penn Cove oysters and that company's sensible practice of storing harvested oysters in the water. "Some distributors often treat shellfish like fish, and this is the problem," Ian Jeffords, gm of the company, once explained to me. "When you take them out of the water and hold them in a cooler, they're still alive. You think about it, all the things that make shellfish taste good, fats and sugars, theyre living off those in the cooler, they're metabolizing those fats and sugars, so by the time you eat them everything that makes them taste good is gone."
What do those tasty fats and sugars become in that oyster you're slurping down? I'm not sure I want to know.
"How long have these oysters been out of the water?" is a good question to ask the chef who purchases them at your favorite raw bar.
You can buy Penn Cove oysters via company called farm 2 market.
Frank Bruni explains that medium-rare pork is nothing to get worked up about these days. "If the pigs are raised properly, there’s no reason to be afraid."
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Amidst the righteous PETA bluster attending foie gras legislation and the earnest journalists trying their balanced best to cover the issue and the misslonelyhearts marching outside Union Square Café (a business that's an emblem of quality and excellence in the culture of American restaurants), indignant foodies railing, committed gourmands wailing, and the food terrorists harassing chefs--well, it's actually relatively quiet now, so I thought it a perfect opportunity to cut right to the core of the issue. The fat liver itself. Which no one seems to talk about anymore.
Foie gras is a marvel and a wonder. If I'd had some left over fresh a few moments ago, I'd have diced it and sprinkled it over my gently scrambling eggs (or should I call them unborn chickens?). That would be a treat on a Wednesday morning! Foie in farm fresh eggs. Almost reason enough to open a bottle of Schramsberg blanc de blanc to go with it (but that would kill the day, wouldn't it ((not necessarily a bad thing!))?).
What's the great fact about foie gras for American home cooks? It's this: that what's available to you is the exact same thing that's available to the country's best chefs. This is a rare circumstance. The caviar that Eric Ripert gets you and I can't get, don't even think about it (and he sends half his back at the delivery door, and you couldn't even get that). Not available to you and me, wouldn't be even if we were rich as Bloomberg. The truffles and fingerling potatoes Joel Robuchon can send to his Vegas outpost--you and I can't have it. Gotta head to Vegas and pay through the nose (entirely worth it, surely, but a nose is a nose). The lamb Grant Achatz lovingly heats sous vide, fragrant with the smells of the carefully grown alfalfa raised and cut and stored by Keith Martin in Pennsylvania--gotta go to Chicago for that.
But foie gras, here the playing field between the chef and the home cook is leveled. There are four growers in the United States, and you can buy from the same one most chefs do, Hudson Valley Foie Gras. Daniel Boulud's A foie is going to be of the same quality as the A foie you order. Yes, he's going to pay a little less because his volume is greater, but even so, and even though it's considered a luxury item at restaurants, it's not really more expensive for the home cook having a dinner party, say, than a beef tenderloin. An A foie, will serve ten healthy portions and it will cost about a hundred bucks with shipping. Ten bucks a head, which, if you're one to go all out for your guests or you're having a special party, is not out of control. And it's a very cool thing to offer your guests, if you run with that kind of crowd.
Moreover, foie gras is one of the easiest things in the world to cook, one of those the-less-done-to-it-the-better food items. Salt the whole thing, put it in a hot pan to give the top a beautiful golden brown, flip it, drop some thyme and garlic in the pan and pop it in a hot oven for ten minutes, basting once or twice with the copious fat that renders. Slice at the table. Or slice it an inch thick, pluck out any large dark veins, salt it, and briefly cook in a really hot pan on either side till you have a nice crust (you'll need a good exhaust system for saute, not a method for the unventilated fifth floor studio walk up).
Or for something truly amazing, the foie-iest foie of all, spread out the lobes, remove the veins, give it a healthy sprinkle of salt and some white pepper and some pink salt if you have some, pour some milk on it to help leach out any residual blood and refrigerate overnight. Then rinse it roll it into a cylinder in cheesecloth and poach it for a couple minutes, just so it all melts together inside. Chill, unroll, slice an inch thick and serve with something sweet and acidic and some good bread and Champagne. That is a luxury beyond luxuries, and available to you, home cook. (This preparation has the fancy name torchon with the unfancy translation dish towel--really all you need for this preparation: a dishtowel to roll it in.)
Foie gras can be roasted first, then pressed into a terrine mold and chilled, maybe layered somehow with a fruit that goes well with it, mango or quince. Slice and serve it cold. Poach it in wine. There are so many wonderful thing you can do with foie gras, so easily, there's so much fun to be done, so much pleasure to give to your closest friends, it saddens me that we've lost sight of the foie itself amidst all the noise.
There's nothing else like it in the culinary world. It's a gift. We need to protect it or we'll lose it.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Can a Recipe Be Stolen? from the Washington Post examines recipe copyright issues. I'd always wondered about this and now I have a better understanding of the issue.
Very cool Table of Condiments That Periodically Go Bad. If this is accurate, I need to clean out my cabinets!
I always look to Accidental Hedonist for information about mad cow and Kate's recent entry Wither Mad Cow and the USDA doesn't disappoint. She makes some excellent points regarding the USDA's recent decision to reduce the number of cows it's testing for the disease.
Monday, July 24, 2006
I received an email from a reader wondering about the ethics of my Grass-fed Montana beef from La Cense review I posted last week. I turned on comments so we could publicly discuss it, since I thought others might be interested in my response.
Over the weekend while I was cleaning out a closet in my apartment, I stumbled upon a copy of The Vegan Guide To New York City. Before you jump to conclusions, let me just say that it was left behind by previous tenants, hidden high up at the back of a shelf. Yesterday while we ate lunch, we thumbed through it and enjoyed the following passages:
On the chefs at Pure Food & Wine:
In previous incarnations, both had won fame as chefs de cuisine cooking animal flesh for carnivores.
On uptown Juice Bar's tonics to cure whatever ails you:
Of course, if you're a vegan of long-standing, you probably don't have any of these ailments, so toast your good health--and your good fortune in being a vegan--with a fruit smoothie instead.
On Why veganism?:
Olympic gold medalist Carl Lewis is a vegan--need we say more?
That's just a sample of the sanctimonious writing that fills this book, perfect for gratifying your ego if you're vegan, or making you laugh a lot if you're not. Also by the same author (I'm not kidding, it's advertised in the Guide): Hitler: Neither Vegetarian Nor Animal Lover.
Over at the Epi-log where I'm guest blogging, I've decided to spend the week doing some virtual traveling. Today we'll be visiting France's Brittany region, so check in for some information about amazing sea salt and oysters.
There's a new feature article up: The sweet (and bittersweet) taste of summer. Submitted by our roving correspondent Anonymous Drinker, it's a look at the less common (at least in the US) drinks of summer. I've been enjoying Lillet on the rocks lately. So refreshing, and not as bitter as some of the others he discusses.
During my presentation at Taste 3, one of the sites I talked about was Cork'd. Bruce Cole pointed out this interesting post on Vinography: Why Community Tasting Note Sites Will Fail. I don't agree with everything he says, but it's an interesting read and there's a lively discussion of his points at the end.
Friday, July 21, 2006
Watch Beau cut pineapple. An instructional video for those unsure how to cut up a whole pineapple. Also check out his choked-up knife grip.
About two months ago I received an email from La Cense Beef telling me about their grass-fed beef and asking if I'd be interested in writing about it for my site. I replied and asked for some "review steaks" (a la Michael Pollan) so I could try the product before writing about it. To my amazement, they said yes and sent me two steak burger patties, a ribeye, and a New York strip steak. And over the past six weeks, we've eaten it all and I am here to report: yum! First, a bit about the beef, which comes from Montana and is raised without added hormones or antibiotics:
La Cense Beef is natural and fed only grass. Unlike some other “grass-fed” brands, La Cense cattle are never fed grain to “finish” and produce rapid weight gain. The introduction of any amount of grain to the diet of cattle can diminish the quality of the beef, reducing both health benefits and the real beef flavor that makes this a truly epicurean ingredient for your finest meals.
La Cense Beef is produced exclusively from cattle born and raised on the La Cense ranch. La Cense Beef is not produced from cattle raised by a consortium of other ranchers. In this manner, La Cense is able to oversee quality production and adherence to its standards for humane care, as well as ensure that La Cense cattle never come into contact with other herds, which might lead to contamination or transmission of disease.
We started with the burgers, which I overcooked a bit but had a very nice heft and flavor to them. Next we ate the New York strip and I was very impressed with it. Some grass-fed beef I've had has been pretty lean, so even if it's undercooked a bit, it still may lack some moistness that makes a steak so good. But not this strip. It had a nice strip of fat along one side and it stayed juicy throughout cooking. It also had a great chewiness and tang, and what I can only describe as a real beef flavor. We ate the ribeye last and enjoyed that as well. And we had to cook all of them indoors on our cast-iron "grill." I can only imagine how good they would have tasted had they been done outdoors over fire!
We don't eat that much beef. When we do, I like it to be grass-fed and humanely raised but I also want it to taste delicious. La Cense beef makes that possible. Jason had a great steak frites at Bouchon last weekend. With the help of the Bouchon cookbook, we're going to attempt re-create it here at home with a flat iron steak I just ordered from La Cense.
Next week I'll be doing a guest blogging stint over at the Epicurious Epi-Log. Editor Tanya Wenman Steel is going on vacation and has graciously asked me to fill in for her. Updates will continue here as usual but I'll also be doing something a little different over there for the week, so be sure and check it out.
US to reduce voluntary mad cow testing, few infections reported. This reads like an Onion headline but sadly it's not. Though the Times reports that this year the Agriculture Department’s inspector general found serious flaws in the testing process--it's voluntary and the sampling is not random--the US will reduce testing for mad cow by 90% because a very low incidence of BSE has been found.
Thursday, July 20, 2006
The secret to a good old-fashioned pie crust? Lard. The pie shop where I worked for a summer used lard, and since one of my daily tasks was to make the crust, I worked extensively with a large 50 lb. tin of lard. It yielded a wonderful crust, so flaky and flavorful. Now I usually make a pâte brisée with butter for my pies and tarts but that's because I always have butter on hand.
In addition to Meg's two posts, I'm adding this essay by a supertaster, David Leite, who runs the excellent website, Leite's Culinaria, which won the Beard award this year for best food site.
Wine critics now claiming to be supertasters. What's funny about that: at Taste 3 we saw a presentation about (duh) tasting and learned that supertasters love white zinfandel. They like sweet flavors and tend to prefer sweet wines. Does that mean we'll see a supertaster wine critic give a nice ol' jug of white zin a 98? [via The Food Section]
A British company introduced a line of stainless steel "anti-terror" cutlery for use on airlines. Maybe now it will be possible to stick your fork into the unripe cantelope without it breaking off a tine.
Last weekend while in Napa we had a wonderful meal at Bouchon, Thomas Keller's French bistro in Yountville. I had the excellent truite a la grenobloise: trout with butter, capers and haricots verts. So yesterday when I saw Max Creek Hatchery at the Greenmarket, I went right up and bought a whole rainbow trout for dinner. Only when I got home and began to prepare it did I realize that it wasn't boned. After a bit of back and forth in the kitchen, it was decided the trout needed to be boned before we could proceed with dinner. I pulled out my trusty boning knife, looked inside the fish, and froze: how the heck do you bone a trout?
I never boned any fish when I worked at the restaurant. Never even got close to cutting them in any fashion. Only our chef handled the fish because it was so expensive. An idiot like me could easily cut off a portion or two just trying to remove a small fin. So I looked at my trout and knew what to do in theory: remove the spine and rib cage and the pin bones, but in practice it wasn't so simple.
First I consulted some trusty cookbooks. Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything would be more appropriately titled "How to Cook Everything, as long as Everything does not include unboned fish". Ah, this book is too contemporary, I thought, no home cook bones fish anymore. I need something from the time when home cooking was more complicated. So I turned to Madame Saint-Ange.
La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange was written for French housewives back when French housewives brought home fish still wriggling and knocked them senseless with a spare bottle of wine. Surely it would hold my hand through this first delicate boning procedure. Mais no! Madame tells you how to select a fish, how to dress it, how to gut it, how to scale it, but not how to bone it. I guess in those days women must have been so worn out by this point from all the labor they just cooked the damn things.
Finally the web came to our rescue with How to De-bone a Raw Trout (I chose method A) and I carefully and slowly removed the bones. I only made one small hole in the fish, towards the tail, and even managed to leave some of the meat on the fish. Though I cursed a lot, it turned out OK for my first attempt.
The bummer about this is that the next time I do it, it will be equally as difficult. I enjoy the repetitive nature of restaurant work, at least as a beginner. You do something so many times each day that after a week, you're boning trouts like a pro. But unless we start eating a whole lot more trout (which may happen) it will be a long time before I get proficient at boning trout. That Bouchon trout recipe is delicious--if I actually followed it more closely and used the proper amount of butter, it's really delicious--so we will be having it again soon. Then I will wield my trusty boning knife and try again.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
and the so called additive sodium nitrite. Just came across this and this suggesting the salt might be an effective vasodilator and have a role in helping to palliate some diseases.
I'm sensitive to the nitrite issue, not only because it's emblematic of our incorrect or misinformed convictions regarding food, but also because I write about what hot dogs really are and what I believe to be the best hot dog in the United States in the August issue of Gourmet. Condé Nast does not put this online and has forbidden me to talk about it further to anyone who hasn't paid their $3.99.
Melon's Potential Realized, including some yummy recipes. I've been a fan of melon in savory cuisine since last summer's meal at Bradley Ogden in Las Vegas. He served watermelon in several ways that surprised and refreshed. It inspired me to work with melons at home, these recipes should help.
Honestly, I tried to like
Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford. I determined to keep an open mind while reading, despite the differences I find between rustic and fine dining. [As a disclaimer, I am unabashedly a card-carrying member of the W.W.T.D. (What Would Thomas--as in Keller--Do) in all things food.] But the moral and ethical lapses Buford recounted in Heat revealed a kitchen out of control and left me disappointed not only in Mario Batali but also his food.
I’ve worked in a couple of kitchens in my life. I was not trained as a chef at the C. I. A., but trained as a cook by Uncle Sam at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. I know a little about heat myself. I know that working in a kitchen is arduous and I have the utmost respect for those who cook for my pleasure. But there is a choice people make when they decide to follow the kitchen path, and that choice is not an excuse for the dark, troubled, misogynistic brigade that I read about in the Babbo kitchen.
I found it difficult to resolve the perception I had from Mario Batali’s “Molto” television persona and the one painted by Buford’s book. That Batali’s a good time has historic precedent but that’s not where the books conundrum lies for me. The conundrum isn’t partying with Batali, it’s now eating Batali. And it’s Buford’s seemingly regrettable passive personal role in the face of these moral and ethical dilemmas that made me lose his voice early on in the telling. Was Buford a burgeoning Chef, who happened to be a journalist? Or was he a journalist that had the desire to learn how to cook? I’m sure that the answer lies in the book somewhere but I can only read so many pages of filler about the history of the first egg pasta before growing not to care.
In the book, Batali’s kitchen philosophy is clear: “We make money by buying food, fixing it up, and getting other people to pay for it.” Try as I might I wasn’t able to read a call for excellence into that philosophy. In fact Buford recounts several instances of Batali making what his staff considered “surprise visits” to dig through the garbage to ensure that nothing went to waste. That nothing goes to waste is certainly in line with the “whole hog-sustainable agriculture” concept, of which I’m a big fan. But garbage?
I’m one of those people who paid Batali for the food that they “fix up”, having eaten at both Babbo and Del Posto. My problem is that after Batali pulled out hundreds of celery tops (dripping in discarded grease) from the garbage, he then served them to the restaurant that night! In fact I’ve convinced myself that I was eating at Babbo the night they dug out those celery tops from a garbage bag. I've convinced myself they served them to me for my dinner.
The most disturbing aspect of reading about the workings of the Babbo kitchen was the unforgivably shameful treatment of women perpetuated by Batali. In an Oprah-like moment, you learn how much Batali reveres women chefs: he travels to Italy to stage early in his career with matriarchs of Italian cooking, he feels the best chef in his kitchen is his female prep-chef. A few paragraphs later however, Buford relates a story that pretty much sums up what appeared to be the more authentic Batali.
Babbo’s best chef comes to Batali and asks for his help in fixing a sexual harassment problem between her and someone referred to only as the Neanderthal. Batali tells her “that there was nothing that he could do about it, and for her to get over it.” Isolated case? Nope. Broccoli Rabe is referred to in the kitchen as “rape.” Serving sizes are argued over by bra size –- “cause all the guys know the size of a b-cup.”
A kitchen can be rough place to work. I know that. It is not for the faint of heart. I know that too. It’s that “kitchens are different from real life” crap that really gets to me, that attempts to justify Batali's statement that there was nothing he could do about sexual harassment in his kitchen. That’s wrong: kitchens aren’t different from real life - they are just real life in a kitchen. But Buford's book exposes deeper problems in that kitchen than just one’s rights in the work place. Buford tells us that Batali claims people’s emotions are reflected in the food they cook. It’s the one thing, maybe the only thing, which I heartily agreed with in the book. As I finished Heat, I was left with a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe it’s the taste of garbage mixed with a little fear.
Buon appetito!
Guest reviewer Patrick Guilfoyle is a maniacal Francophile, a husband, a friend, design junky, and kennel owner -- not necessarily in that order. He's his own food channel 24/7. He's got a bad magazine and cookbook addiction and an opinion about everything. He fancies himself a good cook, and will eat anything, except his own words.
So Bourdain is trapped in Lebanon. I learned about this via egullet which had this nypost page six item. I do regret he and his great zeropintzero crew are stranded and hope for their quick safe return (they all seemed to feel pretty safe—haven’t been able to reach Tony or Grillbitch by email or phone), but what stuck in my tooth a day after reading, was the “celebrity chef” tag. I’ve been thinking about this knee jerk response a lot recently. We’ve really got to get past this. It’s an embarrassment to the chefs and an unintentional embarrassment to anyone to whom it means something good.
What is a celebrity chef? They don’t cook anymore. They don’t expedite. They put on jackets for photo shoots. Their hands are soft and smooth, their wrists and forearms are unblemished. This is not a criticism (as for so many people it seems to be). Tony is the first to admit it. He worked hard in kitchens for half his life, managed also to write a really good book, and then he went on to a second career, lots more writing and good television shows.
Why do we have to use celebrity chef? We don’t call Wynton Marsalis the celebrity musician. We don’t refer to Annika Sorenstam as the celebrity golfer, we don’t say celebrity actor and we don’t say celebrity celebrity, though surely there are those, someone who’s famous only for being famous. As far as chefs go, are we calling them celebrity chefs to indicate they don’t cook anymore? We should consider this.
I write about chefs in the age of the “celebrity chef” in Reach of a Chef. And at the end of the book I sit down with Thomas Keller, a friend with whom I’ve collaborated on two cookbooks, and he said these surprising words: “I’m not a chef anymore, and it breaks my heart.”
This is one of America’s peculiar gifts: To embrace people so hard that they cease to be able to do the work that made them famous in the first place.
What exactly are the criteria for being a celebrity chef? Here’s the wikipedia definition (it’s heavily reliant on the work of Juliette Rossant, citing her--she even has her own wikipedia page; sadly I do not—as well as her book called Superchef and her blog of that name…interesting…I wonder why it doesn’t cite, say, the work of Page and Dornenberg who wrote Becoming a Chef, the first book that meaningfully addressed chefs as they moved into the realm of celebrity…hmmm, a bit of a marketing effort from the camp of Ms. Rossant?).
My favorite “celebrity chef” is Cat Cora who, when I was interviewing her for an article on chef branding told me point blank, and with refreshing candor, “It’s something I’ve wanted all my life. To have the fame. Without beating around the bush, that’s the bottom line.” And she’s succeeding—she’s never owned a restaurant or been its executive chef, I believe, though she did run a kitchen at one point and cooked in numerous high end places I’m sure (not a single restaurant is listed on her Wikipedia page)—but she’s famous, often on Regis, the only female iron chef, etc. Being a working chef was once a prerequisite for being a famous chef during the 1990s, but that’s changing. Now you don’t even need a restaurant. You need what they call in the branding biz “a platform.”
Of course, the most famous of the professional cooks got that way by being good on TV, which is the best kind of platform there is.
I think we, and especially the media, should make a clear distinction. A celebrity chef is a chef who no longer cooks (or maybe never did cook). If they’re still cooking, then their working title should be used. If they don’t cook anymore or are just famous for it, then they should be called a “celebrity chef”—that truly would mean something.
What's up with Gourmet's somber covers? Slate takes issue with the dark and moody covers of recent issues. I like them, they're so clean and simple. Sure, a little more color would be nice sometimes, but I like their air of sophisticated deliciousness.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
The ham is coming! The ham is coming! Andrew Knowlton reports that Jamon Ibérico has received USDA approval and will be available for purchase in the US. Whole legs can't be had until summer 2008, so that should give you time to get a proper Spanish tapas bar established in your home, complete with a hook to hang the leg in front of your guests. Delicious...
Thinking about picking up one of Thomas Keller's gorgeous cookbooks? You may want to hold off until September 30, 2006 when The Complete Keller: The French Laundry Cookbook & Bouchon will be released. 696 pages of "two of the most acclaimed, award-winning cookbooks ever published--now packaged together in a luxurious slipcased boxed set."
Wagyu beef is (often mistakenly called Kobe beef) is coming on strong in America. With marbling far superior to USDA Prime, Wagyu is finding fans among those content to spend $40+ a pound for their beef. But Wagyu is only partially grass-fed and not allowed to roam freely (lest it work off its lovely fat), so how will it play out in this strange new world of meat?
Are Supertasters Good Candidates for Being Humean Ideal Critics? A supertaster (also known as a hypertaster) is someone who has more taste buds than average. The five attributes of Hume's ideal critic: "strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice."
New York takes a look at 30 years of the Greenmarket. It includes profiles of some of the providers as well. Also there's a map of Union Square but it doesn't tell you which days farmers are in these locations.
Monday, July 17, 2006
In response to a meme tag a few chainlinks away from the original, I began looking back to moments that were truly revelatory in my food consciousness. There aren’t many. How many can there be? There are many times when you learn something. I learned a lot hanging out in Keller’s kitchens. “Chef, why are you seaming out the tuna?” I asked. He stared at me, scraped up some connective tissues on his knife, the stuff he was removing from the tuna; it hung from his knife like saliva. “Eat this.” I chuckled. Ok, got your point. He said “Eat it.” He wasn’t kidding--he looked pissed. So I did. I learned a couple things there, but that’s not a revelation.
When Parker Bosley in Cleveland told me how to make duck confit--the notion that you could poach a really rich fatty piece of meat in more fat, that was a kind of revelation, and one that would, 14 years later result in a book called Charcuterie. It gave me a course, but I don’t think it changed me. A true food revelation, in keeping with its theological implications, changes who you are in some way.
This happened to me for the first time, at age 33 after about 25 years as an aggressive home cook, in Skills class at the CIA with chef Michael Pardus, about whom I’ve written plenty. We were making brown veal stock most days and had used the brown stock to make a brown sauce (brown stock thickened with roux and with more aromats). It all smelled brown to me. That was it. Admittedly, I had a bit of an attitude about anything thickened with roux--where I got that notion I have no idea (I really thought béchamel had about as much flavor and usefulness in food as drywall joint compound). Brown sauce was then combined with more brown stock and reduced to make a seriously, ain't kidding around brown, brown sauce, which Pardus said was a classical demi-glace.
One of the groups prepared Pardus’s derivative, or a la minute, sauce demo, one item of which was this mud-Jello he called demi. I’d tasted it. It tasted brown.
Then he did the Sauce Robert demo. Sauce Robert is one of the oldest extant sauces still pretty much in its original form, dating to Careme I believe. Pardus sautéed some minced onion, added white wine, reduce it a little, thwapped in the congealed demi, added some mustard and mounted it with butter. Then the whole class tasted (something you can’t do when your watching a demo on TV, which is why food TV will always be more about entertainment than about cooking), tasting spoons diving for the pan.
It didn’t taste brown anymore, it taste light and clean and delicious, smooth on the palate, bright from the wine and mustard, sweet from the mirepoix used along the way and now the minced onion. That something could go from drab brown to deeply delicious in a few moments was the first part of the revelation; the second was confronting the fact of my own deep ignorance. That was the moment I realized how little I knew about food and cooking and how vast this new country that I’d just set out to explore was going to be.
I remain devoted to Sauce Robert and to brown veal stock, which is probably the one preparation that, more than any other, can transform a home cook’s dishes from home-cook-like to that approaching high-end restaurant food. I’m serious--the stuff is magical.
So, herewith my recipe for really good veal stock, which I did years ago for Gourmet. The recipe says the tomato paste and pepper is optional--why the editors did that I don’t know. Always use tomato paste in your veal stock.
You can make a brown sauce by thickening it with a brown roux and more caramelized mirepoix, and skimming skimming skimming, then for a demi-glace adding more veal stock and cooking it down skimming skimming skimming. And this is a good lesson, but it’s a project. Veal stock, shallot, mustard, white wine, served with pan-roasted pork or some kind of pork, it’s traditional partner, is fantastic, a revelation.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
I will be posting my talk online shortly and it will include links to the sites I mentioned. Stay tuned and come back again soon!
-megnut
Update: Here's a 5.4 MB .pdf of the talk and it includes the URLs of the sites I mentioned at the end. FYI for those who didn't attend and are thinking of downloading the file, it's only screenshots of websites, no text.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
I'm in California for a few days, speaking at and attending the inaugural Taste 3 conference in Napa. I'm not sure I'll have much opportunity for site updates, so I'll let you catch up on some good stuff you might have missed from the past few weeks. Here are some of my favorites:
Why are modern restaurants so noisy?
Guest blogger Michael Ruhlman's great rant on the ethics of eating
And Tony Bourdain's comment in the thread (wow!)
My thoughts about Veganism, foie gras and personal choice
A great tale about how to cure pig's jowl in a small New York apartment
And finally, Strawberry Fields Forever, my ode to my grandparents' strawberry patch and probably my favorite thing I've written for this site.
Enjoy! I'll catch up with you next week upon my return.
I made my appointment today for my second and third visits to an oral surgeon to finish the $3000 repair of my jaw. There's now a gaping whole where tooth number 19 used to be. I'm not complaining or naming names here but you tell me what's fair.
My long-suffering wife and I were dining at one of the higher-end, cutting edge restaurants in this fair city. I was eager to eat here, the chef was enormously welcoming and sent out three interesting small dishes in addition to all we were ordering. It was a lovely evening, a lively room, the LSW had cast off the stresses of her week and the kids and looked longingly at me across the table, I returning her limpid gaze as we savored the fine fare. We were practically cooing.
The server set down the fried oysters, four, each in a separate square dish, with a piquant sauce and some chiffonaded greenery. They were crisp on the outside and hot and organy inside, perfectly cooked and delicious. I bit down on the second one and drove a piece of shell like a chisel into a back molar, splitting it in two.
After a moment of waiting for any spine searing pain, I found the offending weapon (a circular piece of shell about a centimeter in diameter). When I eat a restaurant and am well-cared for, I feel like a guest. So I didn't want to be rude, but eating was now an impossibility and we'd need to be leaving. I told the server and showed her the shell, she showed the chef, who was profusely apologetic. On the way home, I called my dentist at home and he said he'd see me the following morning (a Sunday).
The tooth was a goner, Dentist said grimacing, and I was looking at a $3-4000 tab between him (above the gum) and the surgeon (below the gum). He then removed the loose half of the tooth, did something unspeakably awful-sounding to make sure I didn't wake in the night howling in pain (I think he called it a pulpectomy, using his drill to scramble the nerve like eggs), and sent me home, the left side of my face dragging on the parking lot blacktop.
The oral surgeon was no less fun ("Betty, I'm gonna need more bone graft in here!")
So, I called the chef, told him my little company of one didn't carry dental, could he ask his insurance to look into it. No problem, he said. Two weeks later his insurance lady called me back ("I've got bad new for you and bad news").
I was going to have to eat this one.
According an Ohio ruling, Mitchell v. TGIF, seventh district court of appeals, the restaurant would only be liable if it had been foreign matter in my juicy fried oyster, or if it was unreasonable to expect the substance. Glass, for instance. Shell is natural and expected, say the courts. As the ruling puts it: "under either foreign-natural test or reasonable expectation test, neither restaurant nor supplier had duty to protect patron from her injury." In Mitchell's case it was clam.
This really pisses me off. Maybe at a crap restaurant like Friday's you'd best take your life in your hands at every step--that may be a "reasonable expectation." But at a fine dining restaurant? My attorney friend, big Stu, said, "The law is not good on shells." Surely, I reasoned, the fine jurists of the seventh district could be persuaded that a fried oyster, golden brown on the outside and swooningly molten on the inside, when served at a fine-dining restaurant, cannot be reasonably expected to contain the very part of the oyster that would destroy the dish. The only reasonable expectation can be that it does NOT contain shell, otherwise it ceases to be a fried oyster that can be sold for $15. It would ruin the dish, not to mention the tooth. The cases big Stu cited for me (and there are several) are simply more reasons to be disenchanted with this country.
I've eaten at Masa in New York. This, though, will be at least five times what Masa cost, and will count as the most expensive of meal of my life.
And you know what's really galling? The chef charged me for the meal. Yes, he did take off the oysters, and the fancy pizza my wife had to carry home in a box because I was being a spoilsport and insisted on leaving early, but really, had I been in the chef's position? I'd have sent the guest home in a manner becoming an Oriental potentate. Havent heard from the guy since.
Pictures of a hog slaughter at Iowa State University Meat Laboratories. If you click on the link, you will see blood and guts, so consider yourself warned. Though Chef Cosentino reports it was "done quickly and respectfully," seeing the picture of the floppy-eared pig walking into the stun pen saddened me more than I anticipated.
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
A foil cutter, used to remove the wrapper around the cork on a bottle of wine, is one of those things I feel like I could live without. But why would I want to? It makes opening a bottle of wine that much easier and its presentation is more elegant. I used to always try to slice the foil with the dull little knife on the end of my corkscrew, but that never worked. Sometimes I'd even cut myself trying to tear off the sharp foil. But no more! Now I use this simple foil cutter and in two seconds I've got foil off, the cork out, and am onto the best part: drinking my wine.
Previous gadget: Tomato Corer
In today's LATimes article on boutique gins Charles Perry makes the interesting suggestion that America's martini fiasco -- namely that a martini made with vodka is still considered a martini -- began because of James Bond. I'm glad to see this issue raised. Martinis are made with gin, not vodka. If it's made with vodka it's not a martini. There's nothing wrong with vodka or the people who would order such a drink (nothing catastrophic anyway), but there is something wrong with the name. A Manhattan is made with bourbon; if you make it with scotch, it has a different name, a Rob Roy. The same distinction ought to hold for replacing gin with vodka in a martini preparation. Perhaps call it a James Bond. Or a Charles Perry. Even a VM. Or in keeping with a contemporary food issue, a Sea Bug. It makes me sad when I order a martini and the bartender asks "Gin or Vodka" as if all were right with the world. I would welcome suggestions for a proper name and if there is any clear consensus, I will do my part to spread the word.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
I hope everyone saw Kim Severson's excellent article on organic hot dogs in last Wednesday's NYTimes. I'm all for anything that supports grass fed beef as these dogs do. And Ed Levine, one of the most knowledgeable writers on the food available in NYC, was moved to purchase and taste some of these dogs and reports the auspicious news.
I was especially interested by Severson's paragraph addressing an important change:
The key is that the curing code has recently been cracked. Instead of relying on sodium nitrates or the more common sodium nitrites for color, texture and shelf life, hot dog makers have found a magic solution of celery juice, lactic acid and sea salt that rescues the organic dog from its tough brown reputation and rockets it to pink juiciness. It also addresses the concern among some consumers and scientists that nitrites and nitrates might contribute to cancer.
Why would celery juice and lactic acid keep these dogs pink and juicy?
I don't know for sure but my guess is because the celery juice is loaded with nitrite. Nitrite is a chemical that is found in green leafy veg, such as spinach and celery. There's nothing wrong with celery juice in hot dogs--in fact it's probably important in addressing the botulism concern in any smoked sausage, the main reason for nitrites in hot dogs--but to claim that these hot dogs don't contain nitrites is likely misleading.
I am not an advocate for nitrites (or the different sodium nitrate which is used exclusively for long term dry-cured sausages), I don't think we should put it in our soups and stews and ice cream and coffee, but I am an advocate for accurate information. Information on nitrites and their effects on our health, how cancer-causing nitrosamines are formed in foods containing nitrites, and how dangerous they are is sketchy at best. I'd like to know more.
The food scientists I've spoken with say that companies promoting their food with "no nitrites" claims are doing so for one reason: marketing; once again, big business plays to an unwitting consumer.
In the meantime I will definitely be trying the organic dogs.
Looking to add more variety meats to your culinary repertoire? Here's a list of books dedicated to offal. I was thinking about this the other day as I read a recipe for tripe that sounded good. But then I thought, Do I really want the first tripe I ever eat to be prepared by me? Seems like something I should leave to an experienced offal chef, so as to ensure a not awful experience.
Comments Needed on USDA's Grass Fed Meat Label. "The Center for Rural Affairs along with the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and other organizations are urging the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) to approve the proposed rule requiring that animals certified as grass fed receive a minimum of 99% of their lifetime energy source from grass or forage." This is an increase to the current proposal of 80% energy from grass. [via Growers & Grocers]
Why are so many modern restaurants so noisy? The proximity of tables and the 'cocktail party effect'. And adding a lot of soft furnishings doesn't help to quiet things much.
Monday, July 10, 2006
A grill that combines the best of gas and charcoal. Seems ideal for those looking to balance the speed and ease of gas with the flavor of wood.
An LA chef is responding to the War on Food with an Outlaw Dinner. Diners will enjoy foie gras, absinthe, unpasteurized cheese, sous vide cooked items, and hemp seeds.
When the weather is hot, it's time to make a delicious Malted Milk Ball Sundae. This is about the best-sounding sundae I've ever seen. I think I'll make it for dinner, er, I mean dessert, tonight!
Sunday, July 9, 2006
Diane St. Clair left a career in the New York municipal health system for a farm in Vermont where she now raises cows to make and sell butter. Some folks think its among the best butter in the country. I've been corresponding by email with her for about a year now about food and writing matters. She's a good writer and a smart farmer. She came across my rant and wrote me the following email, which I'm reprinting in full, the perspective of someone who makes her living from and coexists with animals:
Michael
Saw your food rant today on the small farms blog, which I came upon by accident when googling 'critique of organic farming.' It was quite entertaining, along with Bourdain's counter-rave (talk about someone who needs to be on lithium...but that's part of the entertainment). I saw no farmer perspectives on this issue. I saw the NYTimes article, lobster in coffin, etc. My immediate response was, another Whole Foods consumer gimmick to make liberal foodies feel ok about their food choices, of course, seen within the context of having just finished Pollan's book and seeing Whole Foods in a completely jaded way.
Is there a difference between cats, cows, lobsters, geese? I think a lot has to do with culture--we don't eat horses, they are our pets. Is there any difference in terms of animal behavior between a horse and a cow or a pig--absolutely not. As a former horse owner and a current dairy farmer, I believe they are absolutely the same beast in terms of trainability, personality (cows are nicer), attachment to humans. It's just that culturally, we accept the ingestion of cows, not horses, and thus treat the former as food animals, with all the bad stuff that implies.
It is ironic to me that the animals we eat, we treat the worst--shouldn't we treat those animals with the utmost care--feeding them, as we do, to ourselves and our children? I love my baby calves--but if a bull is born, I raise him as humanely as I can--on green grass, in the sun, drinking lots of milk, I try to have him killed on farm (if I am eating him--if he is to be sold, he has to go to a slaughter house--makes no sense) and then I eat him for the next 6 months. The bottom line is that every species on the farm should have a chance to be what they are, do what they do--the cows to eat grass, the pigs to root around, the chickens to dig in the grass and run around, etc. Sure I'll milk the cows (PETA doesn't like this) and I'll eat the pigs and chickens. But they had a good life and did not suffer in the end. It's all any of us can ask for.
The foie gras thing--it's a tough one. Should crating veal be illegal? I think it should because you can raise veal that tastes better uncrated. How about chickens--shouldn't there be industry standards (laws?) about how many hens can be crammed in a cage? I think there should be because you can raise better chickens that way. You can't get foie gras any other way than it is currently done--that's the tough part. I guess the day that you eat foie gras you have to balance your karma out by sending a donation to Heifer International or something.
The good thing is that people are talking about food in a new way--thinking about where our food comes from; the fact that cheap food costs us down the line, in terms of the environment and our health; that just because something is labeled organic doesn't necessarily mean it's sustainably produced; and what do we do when our modern sense of ethics--all living things, including grass, have feelings--clashes with age old cultural traditions, ie. eating foie gras.
What did you have for dinner? I had a grass fed lamb chops, grilled, with a curry emulsion, over couscous and a salad from the garden. Couldn't be better--absolutely no guilt.
Diane
Friday, July 7, 2006
CBS News Sunday Morning will have an episode this Sunday about blogging, and I'm in it. I don't know how much, as I haven't seen it, but David Pogue interviewed me a while ago and now it's finally airing. You can check program times here. For those in NYC it's on at 9 AM. I guess I'll be sure to set my alarm.
Over at Augieland, a great set of tips to become a regular at a restaurant. Steven Shaw talks about this in Turning the Tables but it's something I've yet to successfully put into practice. Maybe with this list from Augie, I'll have better luck.
Yesterday I attended an Italian cooking demonstration by Arthur Schwartz. The demonstration was part of the three-day celebration of the cuisine of Campania, the region of Italy that includes Naples, Capri, and Mt. Vesuvius, among other things. I learned a ton and have lots of notes to write-up, but before I do I wanted to let you know it's still going on. It continues today and tomorrow, and more details on the Regione Campania Workshops are available here.
Thursday, July 6, 2006
I always thought visiting a 3 star Guide Michelin restaurant would be some upscale snob kind of show off thing...The Fat Duck was none of that. Lovely review of a meal at the Fat Duck, including a few pictures and some information about how the food is colder than expected. Makes me want to go more than ever.
It's that time of year: tomato time! That means I'll be eating sliced tomatoes (lightly salted and covered in basil, sometimes accompanied by mozzarella di bufala) nearly every day. The easiest way to core tomatoes before slicing is this little gadget. I was introduced to it at the restaurant where I worked in 2004 and now I can't live without it. Normally I frown on such a specialized single-use item in my kitchen, but it's so useful (and small and inexpensive) that I've made an exception. I [heart] you tomato corer!
Previous gadget: Kwik Kut
This continual talk about the ethics of eating creatures that were once living is starting to get on my nerves. It’s not enough that those knuckleheads in Chicago and those sensitivos in California want to waste their time on the foie issue and the Whole Foods people figured out a cool marketing tool in playing to our arrogant anthropomorphist inclinations—giving lobsters spa treatment so we feel better about driving a knife through their skull? Brilliant.
What’s next, no oysters? No sir—they’re alive! No more salmon roe—think of all those unborn salmon you're smearing on your toast and dotting on your blini! All the good salmon deeds that will remain undone! All that emotional life of the unborn chickens! Gone! Delicately poached and nestled on frissée! Clarence the Angel where are you?
What is going on here? Lobsters are insects! Ducks are not harmed by gavage! The real victims are the agribusiness chickens, cows and hogs, but the animal rights activists can’t touch the culprits responsible, true goliaths. So instead The People try to save the little animals. But I say such people are either motivated by self-interest or ignorance.
Beyond the fact that our current hand-wringing foreshadows an America that increasingly regulates how we live our lives (with a government attempting, via warfare, to regulate how other countries run their lives), which is scary enough, the more insidious danger to me is that we think clams and ducks and lobsters are people too. They’re not. But the flip side to this is that, in a way, we’re not all that far off when we believe such things. This is the height of human arrogance, to think that we’re somehow above the animal kingdom. We have one trait beyond our handy opposable thumb: we know we're conscious. Ducks are conscious, yes but do they know it? No. Perhaps some very advanced French duck is right now fitting a Gauloise into its cork-tipped filter and adjusting its existentialist beret, but not in America. They’re animals.
And so are we, but in our self-consciousness have become hubristic, and therefore harmful. Make no mistake: we are animals. I am no different from a salmon. Why else would I return to Cleveland!? Cleveland! I had to return. I returned by smell. I returned to spawn. I’m not kidding. There is no other logical justification for the apparently ludicrous decision to live in Cleveland when I don’t have to. I think if we acknowledged our place in the animal kingdom—happily at the top of the food chain—and stopped thinking we were so damned superior to animals, it would be a better earth all around. We are animals who eat other animals. There is nothing wrong with this. Has this country gone insane? Even the restaurant critic for the New York Times, former Italy bureau chief, a thoughtful and reasonable man with a powerful pen, he’s having a moral dilemma over his shrimp! This is crazy!
Where is Bourdain? Tony, you’re an evil motherfucker, but I know you’re with me on this one. Help me. Where are you? Iran? Turkey? Put down that opium pipe and get your skinny ass back to your own country and do your show here, before we lose it. We need a full and clear view of how far off the track we’ve gone with our most common and basic pursuit, to nourish ourselves and our families. We need smart voices to get us out of these woods. Where is Steingarten? Jeffrey, you scaly curmudgeon, speak up! We can’t lay it all on Pollan—he did his part. What about someone with real power to sway the American masses. Rachael Ray! How about it? She affects the cutesy Suzie next door but I know for a fact she’s got a pair of brass knuckles in the pocket of those fat pants of hers. Emeril! Millions listen nightly to you! Put down that tube of Crest and teach people about the food we eat! Wake up! It’s not about the ducks and the lobsters. It’s about the corn and the oil. About big business and powerful lobbying in DC. They want your money and that’s all they want. They want your money and you can give it to them or withhold it. Make good choices about what you buy and what you eat and what you feed your kids.
All right, I’m done, I haven’t even started my work this morning and I’ve gone and shot 700 words on a rant. I’m going to go eat a hot dog, that’s always a good morning restorative…
Last November when I was traveling in Asia I fell in love with mangoes. So far I haven't indulged back here in the US but this video of how to properly cut a mango makes me want to run out and buy some right now.
Wednesday, July 5, 2006
Today two of my favorite subjects were combined by one of my favorite writers about food, Judy Rodgers Salt and Russ Parsons. Rodgers, chef and an owner of SF's Zuni Cafe, is one of the most observant cooks I’ve ever met. Repetition and paying attention: that’s the essence of becoming a good cook. Judy knows the how a leg of lamb that reaches an internal temp of 100 degrees an hour after it went into the oven will be different from one that took two hours to reach that temperature. The kind of deep lamb knowledge you only get from roasting a thousand legs. Here she discusses salt, not to season food before it goes into the pan, but to transform the food well before it’s cooked. We tend to take salt for granted but in fact the ability to use salt is THE most important skill a cook has. (Is full-disclosure necessary here? Judy blurbed my charcuterie book with uncommon generosity and eloquence. And for this reason I’ll never be able to write about her for a newspaper or magazine, which is a shame, because she’s one of the most interesting cooks in the country. And she really does cook in Zuni’s open kitchen, in corduroy skirts and vivid stockings, number 2 pencils holding her long hair in a bun!)
From the big daily on the other coast, I can’t resist trumpeting a fellow Cleveland boy’s two-star triumph. Way to go, Michael (and Jonathan Sawyer and the Parea staff). You do this beleagured town proud. Stay focused.
Reminder: deadline for Have you ever wanted to write for this site "contest" is this Friday. If you live in New York and want to review the talk at the Y with Ruth Reichl, drop me an email.
Taking Manhattan, savoring one street-food delicacy at a time is a good look at the various on-the-go food options that fill the city. I love our street food, but it's nothing compared with the tasty stuff that lined the roads of Bangkok when I visited.
I go offline for a long weekend and HFCS rears its head! While I catch up, have a look at Kate's response to the New York Times article Michael linked to on Sunday.
Monday, July 3, 2006
Apropos of knowing whats what on your processed-food ingredients list in addition to high fructose cs, dont forget MSG. I'm reminded of this as I perused the just arrived Art of Eating, Edward Behr's excellent and elegant quarterly in which Rowan Jacobsen discusses the issue of Umami, also the subject of a recent book called The Fifth Taste by Anna and David Kasabian. Umami can be described as a kind of deep savoryness that you get from tomatoes and fish sauce and mushrooms, and Jacobsen's article is the most lucid and concise discussion of umami I've read. (One great source of umami, Jacobsen tells us, is breast milk: add a little breast milk to your bechamel sauce for a je ne sais quoi that will have your guests clamoring for more!)
About MSG, the effective part of which is an amino acid called glutamate, he correctly writes: MSG has taken a bad rap. It's effective as a taste enhancer but by the 1970s many second-rate restaurants had a heavy hand with the MSG, and it was blamed for Chinese Restaurant Syndrome: symptoms of headaches, dizziness, and nausea after eating food to which large quantities of MSG have been added. Chinese Restaurant Syndrome has been debunked, and MSG now has a fairly clean bill of health, but it is still virtually synonymous with artificial food additive.
All true. Even in large quantities, MSG isn't apparently harmful and few people actually have an uncomfortable sensitivity to it. It was originally derived from seaweed, that is, it's natural. But in my opinion umami is best enlisted in your dishes via foods rather than MSG. Try adding a few drops of good fish sauce, nam pla or nouc mam, to your macaroni and cheese and see for yourself.
Sunday, July 2, 2006
I loved Melanie Warner’s smart article on High Fructose Corn Syrup in today’s NYTimes business section not only because it explains a subject that is not very well understood by the public (what HFCS is and how it’s derived from corn), and suggests that HFCS, which has for several years been demonized as a cause of this country’s obesity crisis (and has recently obsessed the beloved megnut), is no worse for you than regular table sugar, which can be derived from sugar cane or beets. What the article points up for me is how badly we base our eating decisions, we who are trying to eat as well as we can.
The article leads with a woman-on-the-street comment—a Rhode Islander says she avoids foods containing HFCS because it’s been linked to obesity. But that’s as far as she goes. We have to stop to think if this makes sense, and if it does, why?
From a physical standpoint, I can’t imagine HFCS is worse than sugar for its being processed (enzymes break carbohydrates down into glucose then into fructose). It’s not bad for you pre se. But does that mean you should embrace it?
No: 1) If you’re eating something with HFCS this means likely that it’s got a lot of other crap in it that’s worse. 2) The cheapness of it has allowed soft drink companies, for instance, to produce bigger quantities of it, which we, like lab rats, consume in whatever quantities they give it to us in. 3) It perpetuates our reliance on agribusiness corn, which is just a couple steps away from perpetuating our reliance on oil. (As Pollan shows in his excellent book, Omnivore’s Dilemma—I’m halfway through, and so far it’s his best book.) These are the kinds of things we must know in order to make decent decisions about what we consume and why.
Same with nitrites. People avoid them without knowing why, having only some vague notion that because it sounds like a harmful chemical additive it must be. The notion that nitrites are bad for you is underscored by bacon companies who have introduced non-nitrite bacon (both commercial companies and good companies such as Niman). In reporting a story on bacon and corned beef for The NYTimes last fall, I asked a food scientist if there were something I was missing here. He said, "No, it’s a marketing device." I wonder if the companies themselves even know why they’re doing it. Perhaps even they think they’re doing the consumer a great service.
The fact is nitrite, which I write about in Charcuterie, are naturally occurring chemicals (they’re in spinach and celery and other vegetables, for instance), and aren’t apparently harmful in and of themselves. They have been shown in certain situations (under very high heat for example) to produce nitrosamines which have been shown to cause cancer. So some caution is advisable. But there’s little evidence that shows nitrites (usually in the form of sodium nitrite, a curing salt used in bacon and sausages and corned beef) are harmful in the quantities that we eat them today. (For a definitive statement on cautions and facts, see Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking.) But how many know this?
I was grilling sausages and bacon yesterday at one of our growers markets here in Cleveland and a woman asked if the stuff on the grill had nitrites. I said the bacon did but the sausage didn’t. I tried to explain to her what I knew about nitrites, but she wrinkled her nose. Though she couldn’t explain why she thought it prudent to avoid nitrite, she wasn’t buying what I had to say. And I wasn’t even selling the bacon or wursts.
Even the most fundamental aspects of eating are misuderstood, and yet are acted upon. We think eating fat makes us fat. It doesn’t—eating more calories than we expend makes us fat. Eating cholesterol doesn’t raise our cholesterol; the food cholesterol in eggs doesn’t translate into blood cholesertol, but saturated animal fats can. This is the information that’s important.
When you avoid eating something, I hope you know why you are avoiding it. As a rule I avoid eating chemically processed food (though I have a weakness for Pringles); I avoid eating anything that comes out of a box or a cellophane or waxed-paper bag. But I adore good processed food, preferably food I’ve precessed myself, like pork belly, either cured into bacon, or poached in fat. That’s the best kind of processed food there is and should be consumed with gusto.
