Argh, swamped today with other things. But here's some information on the benefits of grass feeding animals. "Animals raised on pasture live very low-stress lives. As a result of their superb nutrition and lack of stress, they are superbly healthy."
Also, there are some interesting comments happening in the If we want to save the animals we must eat them post. When I get a moment, I'll share my thoughts. Feel free to pop in with yours.
OK, it was a short day looking at heritage and heirloom links, so maybe I'll keep this going tomorrow, since I didn't really have time to dive into veggies at all really, nor enough time to dig into the meat (ha ha ha) of this issue. For those wondering what the big deal is, or why diversity matters, I'll leave you with this information from Sustainable Table:
In the US, a few main breeds dominate the livestock industry:
- 83 percent of dairy cows are Holsteins, and five main breeds comprise almost all of the dairy herds in the US.
- 60 percent of beef cattle are of the Angus, Hereford or Simmental breeds.
- 75 percent of pigs in the US come from only 3 main breeds.
- Over 60 percent of sheep come from only four breeds, and 40 percent are Suffolk-breed sheep.
More sobering information: "Within the past 15 years, 190 breeds of farm animals have gone extinct worldwide, and there are currently 1,500 others at risk of becoming extinct. In the past five years alone, 60 breeds of cattle, goats, pigs, horses and poultry have become extinct."
Modern commercial turkey varieties have also lost much of their natural ability to forage for food, fly, walk normally, and to escape predators. Wikipedia has lots of information about domesticated turkeys.
If we want to save them, we must eat them! "Just as the Bald Eagle and Panda Bear are on the brink of extinction in the wild, so are numerous varieties of livestock like Bourbon Red turkeys, Red Wattle pigs, Tunis sheep, Barred-Plymouth Rock chickens and Iroquois corn flour...Heritage Foods USA exists to help accomplish this goal by selling foods from small farms to consumers and wholesale accounts." You can buy Six-Spotted Berkshire pork, heritage turkeys, French Dewlap Toulouse Geese, American Kobe Beef, and even bison. It's strange to think that in order to save nearly extinct species we need to eat them, but if there's no market for these varieties, no one will farm them.
Seed Savers Exchange is a nonprofit organization that saves and shares the heirloom seeds of our garden heritage, forming a living legacy that can be passed down through generations. It was started by a couple after the wife received seeds from her grandfather "that his parents brought from Bavaria when they immigrated to St. Lucas, Iowa in the 1870s." The seeds were for Grandpa Ott's Morning Glory and German Pink Tomato. You can learn more about their organization and order seeds for all kinds of stuff. Just check out the lists of eating beans they've got for sale. Wonderful. [thanks Jason!]
Today’s commercial turkey is selected to efficiently produce meat at the lowest possible cost. "It is an excellent converter of feed to breast meat, but the result of this improvement is a loss of the bird’s ability to successfully mate and produce fertile eggs without intervention. This means that turkeys marketed as 'heritage' must be the result of naturally mating pairs of both grandparent and parent stock." The definition of heritage turkey will help you understand what you're getting when you shell out the extra dough at Thanksgiving for your bird.
Heritage meats are like four-legged versions of the heirloom tomato -- old strains of rare breeds that are being cultivated anew by independent farmers using traditional methods, free of hormones and chemical pesticides. The Food Section's report from a heritage meats discussion back in 2003 at the French Culinary Institute has lots of information about breeds and tasting.
Me about to enjoy some roast suckling pig at Daisy May's BBQ in New York City
Today's going to be a kind of heirloom/heritage day here on Megnut. One thing I never thought much about until I got into food and doing this site was the effect of industrial farming on genetic diversity. From tomatoes to turkeys, agribusiness selects breeds based on qualities such as rate of growth, color, and suitability for shipment. Hence giant California strawberries, beautiful red apples with mealy faint apple flavor, and chickens and turkeys bursting with breast meat that's dull and dry.
Though such practices result in consistent products and less expensive food, we are losing our culinary heritage. If you frequent farmer's markets, you can see a resurgence of variety. Potatoes and tomatoes are two very common heirloom products on the scene right now, and you can usually find six or eight varieties of each in season, from Green Zebra tomatoes to Russian Banana potatoes.
And then there's the issue of taste. I never cared for pork much, I always found it bland and dry. Then I tasted pork from small farms, places like Flying Pigs Farm here in New York who raise Large Blacks, Gloucestershire Old Spots, and Tamworths. And now pork is probably my favorite meat. So look for links throughout the day about the "new" old way of farming and anything interesting I can turn up about the issues.
America is in the grips of a nefarious chicken-finger pandemic, in which a blandly tasty foodstuff has somehow become the de facto official nibble of our young. "Far from being an advance, I've concluded, the standard children’s menu is regressive, encouraging children (and their misguided parents) to believe that there is a rigidly delineated 'kids' cuisine' that exists entirely apart from grown-up cuisine."
I never understood this. When I was little, we all at the same thing for dinner. No one got a special meal. I don't remember having a different menu when we went out to dinner either. For those readers with kids out there: is it possible to get your children to order off the adult menu? Or do they resist?
Milk-fed chickens? But a bird’s not a mammal. Adding powdered milk to chicken feed produces a "richer flavor" and "softer, more tender flesh," depending on the breed of the bird.
How to close a bag of chips without a clip. Handy video and instructions to perform chip bag origami so your snacks stay fresh without one of those clips. [via Lifehacker]
What Makes a Perfect Lobster Roll? “It should be all about the lobster.” Whether that allows for mayo depends on who you ask. I'm ok with a little mayo, but not too much.
That's my Grandpa in a photo from April 1944, on or very close to his wedding day. He had just turned 24, and the photo was taken shortly before he left for sea during WWII.
I was thinking about him today, Memorial Day, as I thought about veterans in general. His ship, the USS Wasatch (AGC-9), was the flagship of the 7th Fleet, stationed in the South Pacific. Being the flagship meant that admirals used the ship as their command post, as Admiral Kinkaid did to command the naval forces of the 7th Fleet during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle of all time. This log of movements chronicles the Wasatch from its departure at Norfolk, VA June 27, 1944 until its return to San Diego, CA November 28, 1945. I also found a more detailed description of the Wasatch's action in the South Pacific as I was looking for information.
I didn't know much about my grandfather's war experience -- he never talks about it, not when I was little, not now. But in less than an hour poking around online, I was able to uncover more than I ever knew about where he'd been and the battles in which his ship had been involved. And for the first Memorial Day in a long time, I actually did some good hard thinking and reading about the sacrifices men and women have made throughout history to ensure, "that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." To my grandpa, and veterans everywhere, thank you.
Originally published May 27, 2002
The Confetti Cakes Cookbook: Spectacular Cookies, Cakes, and Cupcakes from New York City's Famed Bakery by Elisa Strauss is one of those cookbooks that just astounds. I was not familiar with the bakery or this woman's cakes before, but color me impressed. As someone who's not only worked with fondant but actually made it from scratch (not recommended), my mind was blown by what this woman can do with cake!
The book features recipes for all kinds of cakes and cookies, including amazing stacked wedding cake cookies that look just like little cakes, and a sushi cake that looks just like the real thing. Strauss's ability to make cakes that look like baseball caps, sushi, and handbags is incredible. The book also contains basic information about techniques and ingredients that any baker will find useful, even if they don't undertake a week's worth of baking to create the "Sugar Stiletto and Shoebox Cake."
But perhaps what I like best about this book is the inspiration it provides. I'm not sure I'll ever make her exact cakes, but boy does it make me want to come up with my own crazy concoctions. With all the techniques and tips she provides, I have the confidence to do that. Now I just need a willing victim friend who's looking for a birthday or wedding cake.
The key to a good hamburger is to grind your own meat. Mark Bittman explains how you can control the quality of the meat this way, and its fat content, two critical factors in making a great burger. And of course he talks about the health concerns of buying ground beef as well. Makes me long for a grill!
Harold McGee will demonstrate the application of the scientific method to classical cooking techniques, ingredients and new technologies in a three-day class at the FCI. Drat! That sounds totally cool and right up my alley. Alas, the mid-July date is no good for me. And also it costs $1,200! I think I'll read McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen again instead.
Up to 10 small cups of green tea a day is fine but studies show that more than that can be harmful. This is important to note if you're taking green-tea-based supplements because they "can contain up to 50 times as much polyphenol as a single cup of tea." Polyphenols are helpful in small doses but in large doses can cause liver and kidney damage. Everything in moderation, as they say.
His cattle ration consists of about 17% "candy meal," a blend of chocolate bars and large chunks of chocolate. And that's not all, in this report about livestock producers feeding their animals human food because ethanol is driving up the price of corn. I'd love to read the whole article, but that damn Wall Street Journal is subscription-only.
After all that perfect chocolate chip cookie baking, what's the use when your batch goes stale in a matter of days? Cookies are great out of the oven, but biting into a hard crumbly mass later in the week is no fun. That's why you need to understand the science of cookie osmosis, or How to Keep Cookies Fresh.
The trick is simple: place a slice of fresh bread in with your cookies a day or two after you've baked them, or whenever you find their texture has deteriorated. The moisture from the fresh bread will migrate to your cookies (through cookie osmosis, see diagram above), rendering them soft and chewable again. It will literally unstaleify them!
Special thanks to my mother-in-law Dee, who passed on this technique to her son, who introduced it to me.
How We Almost Ate At Ye Waverly Inn. The Amateur Gourmet and his parents tried to have dinner at the Waverly Inn but there reservation was lost and the host was not accommodating, and well, you have to just read it. The whole tale of the "new" Waverly Inn just saddens me. I used to live down the block from the Inn and went there a few times for dinner. The food was so-so, but the building was fantastic, with cozy fireplaces and a great old bar. I always thought it could be something really special. Then a few years ago, I saw it was for lease, and for about one crazy moment, I fantasized about opening my own restaurant there.
Of course, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and some partners snapped up the lease and the rest is history. He opened an exclusive supper club for himself and his friends and those in the know. Their town cars block the narrow street. And what was once a nice neighborhood joint is now another "it" spot in Manhattan. And the food isn't even supposedly that good! I haven't been, though I might try at some point, just in the hopes that somehow, it's not as bad as everyone says. That somehow, it's become that neat little cozy local restaurant I always wanted it to be.
Donning a white smock and white paper hat as required by federal law, I followed [chef Adam Perry] Lang inside these hallowed halls of prime and choice beef. My friend Adam heads to the Bronx at 1:30 AM to visit Master Purveyors, a meat distributor at the Hunts Point Cooperative Market. A big burger fan, Adam wanted to see the beef being ground. I love his photos of the steaks being dry-aged. I only wish he talked more about Master Purveyors and what makes their steaks so good.
Asparagus is an excellent source of folic acid and vitamins, and is low in fat, calories and carbohydrates. Though this article from the BBC talks about the virtues of English asparagus, there's lots of information for those of us outside the UK. Includes some tasty recipes to prepare while this member of the lily family (yes!) is in season.
Shorpy, the 100-year-old photo blog has a great picture of the Blue Bell Diner in Washington DC in 1948. I love the counter bump outs. And you can also read the entire menu. [thanks Jason!]
When I won my three stars, I realized that I'd worked for something all my life that I'd never wanted. Marco Pierre White talks about why he left the kitchen, about the American food scene and molecular gastronomy, and what happens when chefs keep their name on the door but no longer work behind the stove.
Does the quality suffer?
It can't be the same, can it? ... I just think when you've got three stars, it's an issue of principle. Your name is above the door, you've got to be there. But that's me. We're all different.
I've never been a big Marco Pierre White fan but this interview was pretty interesting. I'm a sucker for tales of wisdom and experience and finding balance.
A handy cheat sheet to help you make sense of beef terms like Kobe and Wagyu. Because if you're going to pay the premium prices that accompany these labels, you should understand what you're getting, dontcha think?
Is human breast-milk vegan? I'm having a tough time swallowing this argument being made by some over at Serious Eats, since humans are animals, after all.
My last good idea was my worst idea; every time my ego comes into it, it hinders the restaurant. David Chang calls Ssäm Bar "bad fusion" and talks about how a chef's ego can get in the way of the food. Even though he just won the rising star award from the James Beard Foundation, I didn't taste any ego when I ate there last night. The menu's been changed a bit because of the season (no more brussels sprouts, sadly, but artichokes and asparagus are in play) but the food was as great as ever. And the Led Zeppelin cranked on the stereo keeps me coming back for more.
photo by Jesse Chan-Norris
We are living at a time when we just can’t leave bad enough alone. "Whole wheat pasta and whole grain Froot Loops. Lactose-free reduced-fat Swiss cheese. Sugar-free ice cream. Alcohol-free beer. Trans-fat-free French fries." An amusing piece about adding vitamins to Diet Coke to create the new Diet Coke Plus.
From February 2007 Food & Wine, Spain’s Next Food Mecca talks about El Poblet, Quique Dacosta's restaurant. And other sci-fi cooking outposts in Spain. I think Spain needs to be the next country I visit for a culinary travel adventure.
OMG OMG OMG! I found the recipe for Oysters Guggenheim Bilbao and this amazing photo (and also they have tons of other sci-fi cooking recipes too!). "What preparation does it undergo? It is simply warmed on the grill with a seasoning of juniper, and later dressed with four small cubes of lemon peel. It is placed over a gel made with the oyster itself, along with cockles, vegetables, and water, then gelatinized with aloe vera and lastly, to give it some color, the silver/titanium alloy is applied: a delicious gel that envelops the mollusk." Alas, it's way complicated and not something I'm likely to make at home.
Barely cooked but warm, the oyster was coated in a smooth juniper jelly that exaggerated its bulges and curves, made shiny by edible titanium and dubbed “Oysters Guggenheim Bilbao”. Gourmet contributing editor Francis Lam reflects on eating an oyster by the chef Quique Dacosta, and on some amazing meals ingested under the theme of "molecular gastronomy." I randomly stumbled upon this FT article today that turned out to be the source of the quote I posted yesterday. And so you may be aware Lam doesn't care for the term molecular gastronomy.
So I’ve just been calling it sci-fi cooking. I don’t know why I called it that at first, it just kind of sounded fun. But writing this, a thought occurred to me: science fiction, at its heart, does not aim to show us what might be made possible by technology, but what we might make technologically possible by our values.
The truly exciting thing about this cuisine is not what the techniques and the technology can do. It’s that it shows us what the mind can do, what new rules we can make, what new logic, what new possibilities.
I kinda like that, sci-fi cooking. Perhaps I will use that from now on as I continue to write and explore this new frontier of cooking. And it goes without saying, I would very much like to eat Oysters Guggenheim Bilbao!
Photo from The Land & Livestock Post
Chef David Burke spent a quarter-million dollars for a prize black Angus bull to produce offspring that become his restaurant's steaks. His goal is to produce consistent high-quality steaks. But (and here perhaps I'm showing my animal husbandry ignorance) the bull is only offering 50% of his genes. Doesn't the cow have to be high quality as well? In Thoroughbred racing, just siring by a big winner doesn't produce a new winner. So does this really produce great steaks every time? Maybe good steaks for eating aren't as hard to breed as good horses for racing. Anyone who actual does know about bull breeding care to enlighten me? [via Serious Eats]
After much experimentation, I have perfected Wylie Dufresne's, allegedly patented yoghurt noodles. You can make them too if you purchase some transglutaminase online. And then you can have the fun of squeezing noodles into hot broth and watching them form. This would be like the best birthday party dinner for a bunch of kids, wouldn't it? You know, assuming they enjoy eating "a ginger and spring onion broth, with a tian of spring greens, crab, and a chorizo foam." In Manhattan they very well might! [thanks Jason.]
"'Molecular gastronomy' seems more like a theory than a practice. No one is breaking out the microscopes and cooking molecule by molecule." - Francis Lam on Molecular Gastronomy
There are more great quotes over at Josh's newish Food Section Quotables.
A recipe for stuffed quahogs, which are large hard-shelled clams. I love clams in all preparations, and this recipe for stuffed ones sounds delicious. Nothing says summer to me more than clams! Well, clams and ice cream, and warm humid weather, and the smell of the ocean, and and and...let's just say clams and leave it at that.
Gridskipper's got an annotated offal dining list for NYC. Not many places I frequent though I enjoy offal, but handy nonetheless. [via The Food Section]
The baby carrot is a product of frugality and an abhorrence of waste. "Baby carrots are not young carrots, but rather small pieces of carrots that are chopped and whittled down to look like small carrots." A farmer came up with the idea after having to feed large amounts his crop to livestock because their shape wasn't uniform enough for supermarket sale. I prefer carrots from the greenmarket, but you can't beat baby carrots for their convenience. [via Dethroner]
The Food and Drug Administration came up with a plan earlier this year for tough regulations on handling fresh produce according to the Wall Street Journal (which I don't have an account for, so this link is to a CNN story). Apparently Officials of the Department of Health and Human Services "gave the proposal a cold reception." Not sure how this connects to the post below about the F.D.A. not wanting regulations. Anyone have access to the WSJ article?
After seven years of discussions about food safety advice on the farm, the F.D.A. has issued only voluntary guidelines; not even hand-washing is mandatory. "Dr. von Eschenbach, the F.D.A.’s current commissioner, said: 'Guidances are the most powerful because they give us the flexibility to update science. Regulations are more cumbersome.'” You know, just in case someday science shows that hand-washing isn't useful. After reading this, I'm more scared of our food supply than ever.
After my best chocolate chip cookie search post yielded 26 recipes in 24 hours, I knew I had too many cookie recipes to bake each and every one. So like any good geek, I averaged the recipes to make the best cookie recipe ever, or what I call a Mean Chocolate Chip Cookie. Get it? Mean? Ha ha ha.
To begin, I compared all the recipes, removing any duplicates. You'd be amazed how similar chocolate chip cookie recipes are. Then I further whittled down the list by removing those that called for non-traditional ingredients (New Hope Mills buckwheat pancake mix, almond butter) or appeared in books that I didn't own (The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion, Union Square Cafe Second Helpings). That left me with twelve distinct recipes, which I entered in an Excel spreadsheet (download the spreadsheet).
This experiment called for scientific precision.
Here's where it got hard and I had to use math. I converted all the measurements to base 10 so I could enter decimals into my spreadsheet, e.g. 6 tablespoons of butter equals .75 sticks of butter. But it wasn't enough to just average ingredients. I also needed to account for differences in the directions. Some recipes called for cold butter, others for melted. So I averaged technique as well, taking into account various oven temperatures and recommended dough chilling times.
If you've ever baked, you know how precise baking needs to be. The idea of averaging a recipe struck me as both amusing and insane, and I was pretty sure the resulting cookies would be terrible. After all my calculations, I baked a batch. I had to make a few tweaks, e.g. my oven didn't have a setting for 354.17°F so I used 355°F. But I stayed true to the math as much as possible. I didn't check on how the cookies were doing, but simply baked them for 13.04 minutes. (I got that .04 by hesitating just a moment before opening the door after my timer went off!) And what do you know?
Clockwise from top left: 1.33 eggs plus .33 egg yolk, mixing, cookie upskirt photo, dough ready to bake
These cookies were pretty damn good! I'd expected the worst. I'd expected they'd be inedible, or burnt, or floury and gooey at the same time. I had a hint they might not be too bad when I tasted the dough. But when I pulled them from the oven, I was amazed. The first bite revealed a cookie crispy around the rim, warm and chewy on the inside. A few hours later, they were firmer, but still tasty. The best chocolate chip cookies ever? I'm not sure, but I baked A Mean Chocolate Chip Cookie. And that's enough for me.
A Mean Chocolate Chip Cookie
INGREDIENTS
2.04 cups all-purpose flour
0.79 tsp. salt
0.79 tsp. baking soda
0.805 stick unsalted butter, softened to room temperature
0.2737 stick unsalted butter, cold
0.5313 stick unsalted butter, melted
(1 US stick = 8 tablespoons = 1/4 lb.)
0.84 cups light brown sugar
0.10 cups dark brown sugar
0.54 cups white sugar
1.33 eggs
0.33 egg yolk
1.46 tsp. vanilla extract
0.17 tbsp. water
0.25 tbsp. milk
1.53 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
DIRECTIONS
Pre-heat oven to 354.17°F, or as close as you can get.
Sift flour, salt, and baking soda together in medium bowl. Set aside.
Using a hand or stand mixer, cream butter and sugars until incorporated and smooth. Add vanilla, water, milk and eggs. Mix until all ingredients are combined. Add flour, salt, and baking soda and blend until fully incorporated. Stir in chocolate chips.
Cover and chill dough in the refrigerator for 25 minutes.
Place parchment paper on one-third of cookie sheet, drop dough by rounded tablespoons onto sheet. Some cookies will be on parchment, others off. Cook for 13.04 minutes.
A 1,323 pound wheel of Dutch cheese is on view at Grand Central today in New York. It's the world's biggest wheel of cheese! How can you not see that? There will also be cooking demos and other cheese activities.
No free cones in Midtown! Riese Snubs Midtown on Haagen Dazs Free Flavor Day Apparently Riese Restaurants owns three of the four midtown HG locations, and they're not honoring free cone day. So check the link before you make the trip. [via Eater]
Free sticky toffee pudding ice cream today at Häagen-Dazs stores! It's "new flavor day", so you can get a free scoop of Sticky Toffee Pudding or Cinnamon Dulce de Leche today only between 4 -8 PM. And here I was worried we'd never see STP again since it was no longer for sale at my Whole Foods. But maybe it's in the permanent rotation now. Yay! [thanks Erin!]
Photo from my visit to San Francisco's Bi-Rite Creamery, Jan 2007.
Cold Stone Creamery: Rich and empty, nauseatingly sweet and vaguely artificial, it's the Paris Hilton of ice cream. "Mix-ins are a great concept, in theory. Ice cream is delicious. Cake and candy are delicious. Simple digestive mathematics dictates that combining the two should double the delicious...Whereas a visit to Ben and Jerry's or Häagen-Dazs leaves me wanting more, a visit to Cold Stone leaves me wanting a salad and a shower." Salon takes a look at the mix-in ice cream trend and what that's doing to plain old ice cream.
It's funny, there's a Cold Stone near my parents' house and on a recent visit I stopped in because I was really craving a hot fudge sundae. I couldn't even tell if they sold hot fudge, I didn't see any signs of it and I couldn't find it on the giant menu board. But they had it, so I got a "small" (it must have been three scoops) of sweet cream ice cream and hot fudge. And I too couldn't finish it. It was OK, but nothing great, and a bit of a disappointment given my craving. The ice cream really had no flavor at all, it just tasted cold, if that makes sense.
I worked at Herrell's Ice Cream in Harvard Square, and so I've served my fair share of mix-ins. But at least there, the ice cream was also good quality, so if you opted not to mix, you could get a solid cone, or a great sundae (fresh homemade hot fudge, real whipped cream). Why are quality ice cream shops so hard to find? Lately I've been dreaming of opening a little ice cream store in my neighborhood in Manhattan, where you could get a decent scoop (not a huge size) in a tasty homemade cone, and you could also get sundaes and shakes and malteds. I guess in the meantime, I'll make my own, and hope a Cold Stone doesn't open in my area any time soon.
"Big Ideas for a Small Plant" is a new original documentary series from Sundance Channel "focused on environmental topics with interviews with forward-thinking designers and features on green products and alternative ideas that may transform our everyday lives." Tonight's thirty-minute episode (airing at 9 PM and again at 11:15 PM) is called Eat. It covers three green-related food topics: eating locally, fertilizing organic crops, and green fine dining. You can also download the episode via iTunes if you miss it tonight, or don't get the Sundance Channel.
I watched a screener of it and enjoyed it. I think it's especially good as an introduction to many of the issues I talk about on this site regularly, like sustainable and humane farming and food practices. Also, they profile this burger place in Lawrence, KS called Local Burger that uses all locally-sourced meats and their food looks amazing. Next time I'm in Kansas, I'm so going there!
My friend Chris is in Paris now and he's compiled a Google map of places to eat mainly carbs, some meat, and even some vegetarian. Looks like he's going to be busy while he's there! And that map will be useful for anyone else looking for some tasty spots to eat.
Cork’d has been acquired by a newly formed company with Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV at the helm. You may have played around with Cork'd, the wine social networking site that I love but never spent enough time on. Glad to hear it's found a new home and I look forward to seeing how it develops.
Researchers discovered that children who drank farm milk were much less likely to suffer from hayfever and asthma. ""The results of this study indicate that all children drinking farm milk have a lower chance of developing asthma and hayfever. However raw milk may contain pathogens such as salmonella or enterohaemorrhagic E coli and its consumption may have serious health risks. We need to develop a deeper understanding of why farm milk offers children this higher level or protection and investigate ways of making the product safer, while retaining these protective qualities."
A meal at L'Enclume in Cartmel, England. "This was 24 flawless brilliant courses by a chef who is not just 'at the top of his game', but somewhere out in front of his rivals. For me he's edging ahead of Heston and Ferran." That would be Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck and Ferran Adrià of El Bulli, in case you're not keeping up with the who's who in molecular gastronomy these days. While it looks amazing, I must admit to a bit high tech food fatigue. One of the courses featured tzatziki foam. The thought of eating tzatziki foam just doesn't appeal these days. [via Jason]
A list of New York's Top Lady Chefs shows there are many accomplished women working in the kitchens of this city. But it also confirms the point I made last week regarding the types of kitchens women helm in NY: these aren't the places that garner a lot of stars from the critics, no matter how delicious they are. The list is a good start towards raising awareness of the issue, and I'm glad it exists. It's just that, me being a real capital F Feminist, I'd rather they didn't say "Lady Chefs" and really, chefettes? Chefettes?! I know, I have no sense of humor. [via Eater]
Organic farmers need to consider a definable but rare use of an antibiotic within organics when it’s the humane thing to do. "Organic agriculture regulations in the United States explicitly reject all applications of antibiotics for livestock." No other country has an absolute ban like the US, and the limited use of antibiotics administered by a veterinarian may be the more humane course of treatment. As the author notes, "it is better to have a live cow than a dead organic one."
A national network of no-fishing zones could help us avoid the disappearance of popular commercial fish from our plates. "In precolonial Hawaii, a district headman could declare portions of fishing grounds off limits by means of a rule called a kapu." Paul Greenberg calls for kapus off the U.S. coast to save our fisheries.
I'd like to see if I can feed the two of us for one month on a "Thrifty Food Plan" budget using organic food. My friend Rebecca attempts a food "budget of 74.00/week or 320.80/month, the USDA "Thrifty" standard for a family of 2 adults, aged 20-50 years." She's two weeks into her month-long experiment and it seems to be going well. That food looks pretty tasty too. Well done, Rebecca!
Regina Schrambling over at Gastropoda:
Probably the most idiotic letter I have ever read in a newspaper came from the soft-headed woman whimpering about foie gras who said she would not want a feeding chute jammed down her throat, therefore ducks should be spared. By that logic, the fact that ducks would not want shoes rammed onto their webs means humans have to give up footwear. Aren’t there online forums where this kind of nincompoopery can go hide?
She has no permalinks so I've quoted the whole thing here. Of all the anti foie gras arguments, I too find the anthropomorphological one the least compelling.
After my friend had finished her meal, she was then presented with a $75 check. A mix-up at New York's BLT Burger results in the accidental ingestion of the $62 Japanese Kobe Burger rather than the $16 American Kobe Burger. Yikes!
I wish we could go back to the good old days when junk food looked like junk food, healthy food looked like healthy food, and there wasn't a whole lot of confusion. Coke is now offering Diet Coke Plus, fortified with vitamins and minerals, and further bluring the line between junk food and "healthy" food. [via The Ethicurian]
Mark Bittman contends that $200 can equip a basic kitchen that will be adequate for just about any task, and $300 can equip one quite well. For the most part, I agree. By shopping at restaurant supply stores, you can get solid equipment for reasonable prices. Good news if you're just starting out or need to replace a lot. At the end he lists some items you can do without, and he's again, probably right. But I love my KitchenAid stand mixer and wouldn't want to do without it. In fact, I own that and I don't own a food processor.
In a similar vein, last December I did a little test pitting a restaurant supply frying pan against an All-Clad pan. The results, Are Expensive Pans Necessarily Better? were posted to Serious Eats.
This is too cool: instructions on how to make a Han Solo in carbonite chocolate bar. Looks just like when Jabba dipped him at the end of Empire, but more delicious. [via BoingBoing]
The New York Times offers an editorial today about Chefs Topped With Debt and accuses school administrators of viewing students as "little more than dollar signs."
American regulators and scientists have also been aware for several weeks that cyanuric acid may have played a role in causing sickness or death in pets. It looks like it may be a combination of melamine and cyanuric acid (which also boosts protein levels* in food products, and is even cheaper than melamine) that caused the recent pet deaths. So I wonder if the pig and chicken and fish feed also has cyanuric acid or just melamine? I'm sure we'll find out soon enough.
* Update: I didn't write this very well. The additives don't actually increase the amount of protein, rather they give higher protein level readings on common tests. So they give the appearance of more protein in the food.
Why must I turn this website into a house of lies1? You no doubt are wondering where the results of the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Search are, since I promised they'd appear yesterday. Well, will you accept the excuse that my mother's in town visiting and so I haven't had time to wrap everything up? I hope so. Because it's true. Results sometime after she heads home later this week.
How do you get toddlers to eat vegetables? Or babies, for that matter? Healthy parents want to know your secrets over at Serious Eats.
Coming soon to New York? Dill pickles brined in Kool-Aid. Though they started out as green dills, "they now have an arresting color that combines green and garnet, and a bracing sour-sweet taste that they owe to a long marinade in cherry or tropical fruit or strawberry Kool-Aid." Children are the biggest consumers and the trend seems to have started down in the Mississippi Delta. I'd like to try one. Just one.
According to a 2003 study, slightly more than half of the men and 70 percent of the women knew of the five-second rule, and many said they followed it. That is, if you drop something on the floor and pick it up within five seconds, it's "clean" and you can eat it. Harold McGee investigates and formulates the five-second rule, version 2.0: "If you drop a piece of food, pick it up quickly, take five seconds to recall that just a few bacteria can make you sick, then take a few more to think about where you dropped it and whether or not it’s worth eating."
Here's an easy headline for the next month: [INSERT ANIMAL FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION] were fed food contaminated with melamine, the chemical linked to the ongoing recall of pet foods, though the contamination level was probably too low to pose a danger to anyone who may have eaten the [INSERT ANIMAL FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION], federal health officials said.
This time the latest item is farmed fish. "It wasn't immediately clear if any of the farmed fish entered the food supply." Let's see: pet food, then pork, then chicken, now fish. What remains? Dairy cows, so our cheese and milk may be contaminated but probably "at levels too low to pose a danger to anyone." Beef. Turkey. I wonder about the possible cumulative effect of all these levels that are too low to pose any threat. At some point, depending on the spread of the contamination (which clearly doesn't seem to be known or under control), the levels cease to be low, don't they?
Today Eater posts a letter from New York restaurateur Keith McNally claiming Times dining critic Frank Bruni has an unremittingly sexist slant. The proof? His failure to issue anything more than one star to a restaurant helmed by a woman chef. The issue of women chefs in the kitchen, both their number and their comparative fame to their male counterparts, is important to me. Ed and I have discussed this issue a lot, especially the number of female chefs in New York City versus San Francisco. But I'm not sure McNally is correct here.
First you need to look at the types of places that get three and four stars in New York: they're high-end gastronomic temples, not cozy small restaurants like Prune and The Spotted Pig. The New York four stars are all French (Daniel, Le Bernardin, Jean George), Frenchish (Per Se), or Japanese (Masa). Neither French nor Japanese kitchens are known for their, um, let's call it open-mindedness. That's not to say a woman can't be head chef at any of these places, but if you look at the places women do run, they tend to be more in the school of Alice Waters California/New American places. And as long as four stars at the Times goes to places in the traditional fine-dining model, it's unlikely women will start getting four stars in New York anytime soon. After all, how many women were awarded four stars when Ruth Reichl was reviewing for the Times?
Of course, that doesn't address the question of whether the Times should be more open to what three and four star dining experiences should be. And it doesn't explain why San Francisco has women running large, fine dining establishments (Boulevard, Jardiniere) in greater numbers than New York, places that would garner two stars at least from Bruni if they were in New York. (Though to be fair, all the San Francisco four stars also have men as head chefs.)
What Keith McNally is calling the disease is really a symptom of a much larger problem. Frank Bruni may or may not be sexist, but when you look at what he's reviewing, it's hard to find a large number of restaurants chefed by women that's he's overlooking, or failing to properly credit. The real problem here is the real problem in the rest of the working world: women, for all their education and talent, don't rise as high as men. Whether you want to blame the glass ceiling, sexism, life choices like taking time off for children, the government for not providing maternity leave and child care, or plain old female "opting out," it's everywhere you look. Number of women partners in top law firms. Number of women deans at universities. Number of women CEOs of Fortune 500s. Or number of women chefs running nice restaurants. Frank Bruni hardly seems like the problem, but I admire Keith McNally for raising the issue because I think it's an important one. And I'll be interested to see if/how the Times and Mr. Bruni respond.
2006 might be remembered as the year in which the wine market went mad. "At these record levels, some wine is literally too expensive to drink. Advisers tell clients that the index of wine prices at auction performs better than stockmarket indices. Hoping for a windfall, a few individuals and some investment trusts move in. Cases of rare wine disappear into temperature-controlled cellars, only to return to the market when the speculators think a sufficient profit can be made." I remember being surprised when I learned lots of wines bought at auction are cellared and then resold, never drunk. Seems a shame, like those folks that own a beautiful sports car and never drive it.
Would-be top chefs face a challenge that most lawyers, engineers or nurses do not: few jobs in their chosen field pay enough for them to retire their student loans. Culinary school graduates are struggling to make their monthly loan payments in an industry where "the average hourly wage for a restaurant cook was $9.86." With two-year culinary school tuitions and supplies closing in on $50,000 "as many as 11 percent of graduates at some culinary schools are defaulting on federal student loans."
Yikes. Anyone considering culinary school should spend some time getting some real world restaurant experience (and don't count your high school fast food job). Not only will see if you really like it, you'll get a sense of how much you can learn on the job and how much you're likely to make. Then you can do the calculations and decide if attending the Culinary Institute of America for $90,000 makes sense.
I spent time working in a professional kitchen, trying to decide if I wanted to go to culinary school. Ultimately I decided not to, in part because I couldn't see how I'd get any kind of return on my educational investment. I knew I'd have to work at least ten years of insane hours to make any progress in a real kitchen, and at my age, that didn't make sense. Other goals (like marriage and a family) would have made the requisite commitment very difficult.
I know the culinary schools aren't going to like to hear this, but I think you're better off learning on the job. Even if you work for free (because you don't know what you're doing), you'll only be spending money on food and rent, and maybe after work booze -- don't think you'll have time for much other life. Within a few months, you should learn enough to get on the payroll in somebody's kitchen. It's hard to imagine you'd be even $25,000 in the hole by that time.
Full list of the 2007 James Beard Foundation Award Winners, if you're interested in that sort of thing. I'm happy to report that my new favorite David Chang (of Momofuku and Momofuku Ssäm Bar here in NYC) won Rising Star Chef of the Year. And my old favorite Thomas Keller was honored with the Outstanding Restaurateur Award. Congrats to both.
Remember that best chocolate chip cookie search back in March? Well I'm happy to tell you I'm close, very close, to having a follow-up post for you. Alas, I'm out of time today. So tomorrow I will have an update for you. I hate to tease like this, but I just wanted everyone to know that hope is not lost, and the end is in sight!
"It's the guy two chairs down who ordered the foie gras appetizer, Dover sole entree, side of truffled mashed potatoes and three martinis made with designer gin" that pisses people off when going out to a birthday dinner and splitting the check amongst a big party. Even if you make modest choices, you end of paying a lot at these gatherings because someone else takes advantage. Early in our relationship, my husband didn't drink. So we'd end up at these dinners where everyone would enjoy several bottles of wine and he'd have a Coke. It stunk when it came time to pay. I like to think the best way to handle this is that each person looks at the bill, calculates his/her share, and puts in. But that never seems to work out right. Are there any other options aside from skipping the group dinner or sucking it up?
Poor farmers who go back to traditional agricultural methods would not have to spend money on expensive chemicals and would grow more diverse and sustainable crops if they switched to organic farming. And "if their food is certified as organic, farmers could export any surpluses at premium prices." A new study shows that a switch to organic could help the world's poor, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
Turns out, the story about fake eggs in China is, well, fake. Jason's got the details. Phew, it was pretty scary to think it was real. On the other hand, after all the weird food stories coming out of China these days, it doesn't seem that far fetched. Let's hope it stays fake.
If you want to eat less, buy antique plates because plates from the 40s are way, way smaller than today's plates -- so you wind up eating less because your portions seem bigger. Portion control is the secret to weight control, and loss. [via Merlin]
Peruvian frog juice is a starchy, milkshake-like liquid that stings the throat. To make it "Carmen Gonzalez adds three ladles of hot, white bean broth, two generous spoonfuls of honey, raw aloe vera plant and several tablespoons of maca — an Andean root also believed to boost stamina and sex drive — into a household blender. Then she drops the frog in." I may be an adventurous eater, but a steaming beer mug of frog juice just sounds gross to me.
Foie gras may be losing popularity in the US, but in Quebec, the delicacy is more popular than ever. "The province is home to an industry that produces about 8,500 duck livers a week, up from a couple of hundred just a decade ago, when only a few traditional French restaurants served the delicacy. Now, foie gras is a standard menu item at upscale restaurants all over the province." [via del.icio.us/ethicurean]
Although the faked eggs looked practically the same as real ones, the consumer smelled chemicals when cooking the eggs. A look at faked egg practices in China, including the addition of dyes to make the yolks look richer and a totally "human-made" egg consisting entirely of chemicals. [via Jason]
Adam's got great photos of what to eat in San Francisco. I haven't been to all the places he visited, but I've eaten at many. Makes my tummy rumble just looking at those photos of Ad Hoc quail, the burrito, and the mere mention of Tartine.
A look at what pre-school children are eating for school lunch in Toulouse, France, compliments of Noodlepie Graham. Items include baby carrots with parsley, fresh fruit nearly every day, and hard boiled eggs with bechamel sauce. Also, yummy cheeses and fish. I'd be happy to eat like that every day, that's for sure.
Just a grouchy reminder from last year regarding tomorrow's Cinco de Mayo: What you're really celebrating with Cinco de Mayo. I don't know why this holiday bothers me more than so many fake other holidays. But it does. I'll be celebrating Kentucky Derby tomorrow instead.
Today is the eighth birthday of Megnut. I made the very first post back in 1999, which is hard to believe as that was ages and ages ago. Since that time this site has changed dramatically, and as you know, has spent the last year in its newest incarnation as a food site. I've really enjoyed writing about food and I've learned a ton. Alas that experience has also led me a bit astray. I got involved in helping Ed Levine get Serious Eats off the ground over the last eight months, and my postings here really suffered because of that. Now that Serious Eats is off and running, I'm turning my attention back to this site, and am looking forward to another year (or more!) of food postings and discussions. But before we take off into the future, for fun here's a look back at the year that was!
In April 2006 (ok, cheating a little bit, but in April I really started post about food in earnest) I looked at Further information about foie gras production from Jeffrey Steingarten's article for Men's Vogue.
In May I reflected on Four years since the French Laundry. Also I looked at War food and Memorial Day.
June saw the arrival of guest blogger Michael Ruhlman and a nice change from usual mumblings. All his posts can be found here.
In July I traveled a lot, so Ruhlman continued to pick up the slack. But I had time to have Fun with trout, when I tried to prepare Thomas Keller's truite a la grenobloise at home and boned my first trout. I have yet to try again, but was just talking about this experience today with folks. I must get some more trout.
August 3 should be a holy day around our house, as that's the day when I discovered I was Crazy for salt. After saving some fleur de sel in my pantry for more than a year after I purchased it in Paris, I opened it and my life was forever changed. There has been no going back. I am crazy for salt.
In September my husband and I went to Austria for vacation and we experienced garlic soup for the first time. I set about recreating it at home and wrote it up with A creamy taste of Innsbruck. There was also a good discussion about Getting too full during a great meal.
October will be remembered as the month I made chicken wings with Daniel Boulud (resulting in this Serious Eats Basics: Braising video) and he whacked a wing so hard that blood splattered all over my sweater. Also I Did the Daisy May Pig Gig, which entailed eating suckling pig with a batch of friends. Highly recommended.
November may go down in history as one of my favorite months of Megnut ever. I discovered the best pie crust ever and made three pies for my family. I almost lost my mind doing an extensive Thanksgiving round-up I called the "Thanksgiving Spectacular of 2006" (best viewed by reading the November 2006 monthly archive). Though that was fun, I'm not sure I'll do it again this year. And most importantly, I received a free lobe of foie gras and proceeded to kick the Amateur Gourmet's ass in Battle Foie Gras.
December saw me do some good cooking, with my büche de Noël and Christmas dinner with goose. I also discovered Sticky Toffee Pudding from Häagen-Dazs and ate a ton of it. It seems to be gone from my store now. :(
January 2007 got off with a whimper rather than a bang, and the most interesting thing I seemed to have posted about was How natural is natural food?
In February I alerted readers to the new trend of chocolate cereal. This is when you can see the effect of spending so much time in Serious Eats. The site really started to go down hill.
March saw an annoucement from Wolfgang Puck stating he'd "use products only from animals raised under strict humane standards" and I wondered about Wolfgang Puck's humane decision. I also foolishly announced a Best chocolate chip cookie search and promised to make all the recipes readers submitted. I am still working on this. Really! Also I gave up on food due to the confusion of the current nutritional dictates.
And just this past April saw me posting about Poor man's sous vide and I got all crazed about plastic melting into sous vided food. I have still not gotten to the bottom of this issue, but that probably doesn't surprise you.
So what does that portend for the rest of the year? Hopefully more of the same: good links, funny weird food stuff, great reader interactions, and some in-depth informative writing about issues that are really important to me, like sustainable and humane food practices. I know for sure that I'll continue to enjoy being a food enthusiast, and sharing that enthusiasm with you. Thanks for reading, whether it's been for eight years, or just a few days.
Got an email from Michael Ruhlman this AM asking:
are you sure e coli doesn't grow in the guts of grass fed cows? i honestly don't know and would like to. i do know it grows in the guts of dogs, hogs, horses and deer (and the deer part is the scary part because they can spread it in spinach fields). Just curious.
That got me wondering, was I confused? Did I really recall everything I've read correctly? So I poked around in the Megnut archives for more information. Here are two articles that I'd linked to last fall that supported me.
From Michael Pollan's The Vegetable-Industrial Complex October 15, 2006 in the New York Times:
The lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for this latest outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 1982; it is believed to have evolved in the gut of feedlot cattle. These are animals that stand around in their manure all day long, eating a diet of grain that happens to turn a cow’s rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7. (The bug can’t survive long in cattle living on grass.)
From Nina Planck's Leafy Green Sewage September 21, 2006 in the New York Times:
In 2003, The Journal of Dairy Science noted that up to 80 percent of dairy cattle carry O157. (Fortunately, food safety measures prevent contaminated fecal matter from getting into most of our food most of the time.) Happily, the journal also provided a remedy based on a simple experiment. When cows were switched from a grain diet to hay for only five days, O157 declined 1,000-fold.
This is good news. In a week, we could choke O157 from its favorite home — even if beef cattle were switched to a forage diet just seven days before slaughter, it would greatly reduce cross-contamination by manure of, say, hamburger in meat-packing plants.
Phew! I'm not making things up. Which leads me back to what I said yesterday in Vaccinating against E Coli: why isn't anyone talking about moving cows off of corn feed, even if it's only for the last week of their lives?
Scientists Look to Vaccines in the War on E. Coli states "cows and their manure are considered the major sources of the pathogen" but in two pages of this New York Times article there isn't a single mention of the fact that E. Coli grows in the gut of corn-fed cows, but not in grass-fed cows. Instead of switching cows to a natural diet of grass, here are the solutions under consideration to protect us from E. Coli: feeding cows sodium chlorate, a chemical used in the pulp and paper industry; probiotics, which are good bacteria; phages, viruses that infect and kill bacteria; and E. Coli vaccines for people and for cattle.
The only sensible thing in the entire article was this quote from Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “What really is a concern to me about this issue is we always have a tendency to want high-tech responses to what in many cases are common-sense low-tech solutions.”
Now it turns out some chicken feed was tainted with melamine, the ingredient that's linked to the pet food poisonings and most recently turned up in some pork feed. The Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration "said they believed the likelihood of illness to people eating contaminated chicken was low because the contamination was most likely diluted. Without evidence of harm to humans, the agencies said they were not issuing recalls of any of the processed chicken products." Doesn't look like this mess is going to end anytime soon.
This entire page is filled with amazing Russian cake art, including cakes that look like mushrooms, delivery men, and military medals. [via BoingBoing]
The sweet aroma of maple syrup was mixed with a very different smell: the pungent odor of hot, used restaurant grease. A Vermont farmer converted his sugar house from regular fuel oil to used vegetable oil to do his part to prevent global warming. Maple sugaring in New England is one of the forecast losses connected to climate change. Some projections show a very large loss of sugar maples by 2100 as the forests move north (to colder climates) in Canada, and with that, the end of maple sugaring in Vermont as we know it.
Megnut is a site about food written by Meg Hourihan. She lives in NYC. More...
Summer drinks should be like summer evenings: long, light and cool. Guest writer A.D. introduces some less common ones to enliven our senses during these wonderful long hot days.
Food traditions bind my family; I'm reminded of that every year when I drive to north-central Massachusetts to pick strawberries with my grandparents.
My mother swears by frozen fish. I was unconvinced, and decided to put her statements to the test: could flash-frozen fish taste as good as fresh local fish from the Greenmarket or even fresh fish from a local supermarket?
