The Splendid Table Stories

You can eat a pea pod after all

Fri, 17 May 2013 21:08:16 +0000

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How far would you travel for the first perfect pea of summer? Would you take a day or two out of your life just for that first taste?

If you would, then you are in Elaine Sciolino’s league. Sciolino, author of La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life, is the former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times who writes the “Letter From Paris” column for the paper’s dining section. Her article “Spring Brings Caviar in a Pod,” chronicled the pea’s special place in French culture and cuisine.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: You did this article on the French and peas. What brought this about?

Elaine Sciolino: I was never really that much into peas, but one of my friends is sort of Rabelaisian in character -- his name is Jean-Claude Ribaut and he is a food critic for Le Monde. He said, “You know, I’m going to go down to Provence because I have to eat peas.” I thought, “I have to start this new gig with The New York Times, this 'Letter From Paris.' Can I come with you?” He said, “Sure.” It’s the best kind of journalism to have somebody lead you by the hand who really knows the turf and open doors for you.

LRK: So what happened? What did you learn?

ES: We went to a place -- it’s been there forever -- where they have a garden right outside the restaurant. We watched as they picked the peas from the garden, put them into the boiling water and transformed them into magic.

I didn’t know that you could make pea pods edible. I knew about snap peas and snow peas, but who knew that you can take a regular tough pea pod and a sharp knife, skin the inner plastic cellulose out, and the outer heavier skin can become a little boat? You can stuff it in with peas and decorate your plate. It looks like you’ve got pea passengers in your boat.

LRK: And the pods taste fabulous?

ES: The pods taste fabulous. I even went to the green grocer in my neighborhood in the middle of Paris and I said, “I bet I can teach you something.” He said, “You can’t teach me anything about vegetables.” I said, “Did you ever eat a pea pod in your life?” And he said, “You can’t eat pea pods.” I said, “Watch.” And I fed it to him. I felt like Julia Child.

LRK: Who were the chefs that you went to and what were they doing with the peas?

ES: It’s a very old place called L'Oustau de Baumanière. The chef is Pakistani-born and he came to France as a child because his father was in the French Foreign Legion. He was exposed to food in the military mess. He and his brother became chefs. It was wild asking this Pakistani-born guy, “How did you come to love peas?” We started talking about how in his back yard, when he was a kid, they grew okra and eggplant.

They showed me how you can skin a pea. Never in my life did I think about skinning a pea, but it is a very sensual experience. You take a pea that has been plunged into boiling water then plunged into ice water, it comes out, and you take the pea between your thumb and your index finger, and you roll it around slowly and the skin pops out and the pea splits in half. You have this beautiful, skinless, naked pea. It’s not something that you want to do if you have guests coming in a half-hour, but if you are watching “Mad Men” or something, it’s the perfect time to sit there with a bowl and skin peas.

LRK: Then do you just toss it with butter?

ES: Yes, it’s the easiest thing in the world. A little bit of onion, a little bit of carrot, a little bit of pork belly or bacon, a lot of butter -- the butter makes this emulsion with the pea -- and that’s it. You can’t ruin it unless you overcook it. It’s great.

LRK: You are living in the middle of Paris. What is happening now with food there?

ES: You wouldn’t believe what is happening with food in Paris. Paris has gotten brunchified: Every corner bistro seems to have a brunch on Sunday afternoons, so what you are seeing is lots of hamburgers, smoothies, bagel sandwiches, and cupcakes. Philadelphia cream cheese on frozen bagels that are flown in from London. Do you believe it?

LRK: Oh, my Lord. Is the baguette going to be dead?

ES: The baguette won’t be dead, but this is really an invasion of the round-breaded substance.

Monthly rice: Prioritize family with homemade meals delivered

lkaliebe — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:57:40 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

iStockphoto

There’s no question that as new immigrants come here, we are intrigued by their food. There is status in discovering the first Peruvian restaurant in town.

But often there is an assumption that newcomers want to learn about how to live from us instead of us learning from them. International journalist Claudia Kolker has another take -- she lays it out in her book, The Immigrant Advantage: What We Can Learn from Newcomers to America about Health, Happiness, and Hope.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: In your book, you talk about different aspects of immigrant life: saving money, courting, families socializing and living together. One of the most intriguing concepts is called monthly rice, which comes out of the Vietnamese community.

Claudia Kolker (Michael Stravato)

Claudia Kolker: The basic idea is subscribing to meals that traditionally are delivered to your house. You can subscribe on a monthly basis. They are cheap, homemade, and composed of the freshest, least-expensive things from the market that day. They are for working families who still intensely value eating together -- even if it’s 9 p.m. -- and eating real food.

LRK: What’s the difference between this and setting up something with a restaurant?

CK: Or take out?

LRK: Essentially.

CK: There are two big things. One of them is that it is not restaurant food. Some restaurants do monthly rice, but the cuisine is different. It’s not fancy, it’s not beautiful, it’s got less salt and less oil, and there are fewer crackly, crunchy deep-fried things that may be more expensive to make. It is home food. It is also food that does well if it’s heated for a long time. These are foods that are braised, not flash-fried, because they are for working people who might be eating them later in the evening.

The other big difference is the price. It’s extremely inexpensive. The price may have crept up over the years, but when I did it with my family, we got a meal for four people for $8 and that included delivery. The way it is so cheap is that it is simple food. You don’t have a lot of say. They have a great repertoire, the people who do this, but they are basically cooking what is the best deal and what is most economical for them that day. The only obligation is that it has to be so delicious that you keep on paying your subscription.

LRK: Is this something that comes out of Vietnam or is it something that evolved when people came to this country and started working?

The Immigrant Advantage

CK: It is something that came from Vietnam and it evolved in the U.S. too. What I was told is that it was offered for male scholars and people in the military who were raised with this ethic that you eat with your family at night. In fact, there is something unwholesome, unhealthy physically and perhaps even spiritually or psychologically, about eating alone. It is just bad practice. So in Vietnam these guys would get it delivered to them.

Even more intriguingly, they would pay a subscription to eat with a family in order to have the family experience along with a meal. I knew one person who did that in the U.S. -- he did that in the Midwest and his parents found him a Vietnamese family with whom he could have dinner. There is a little extra tradition attached to this that still lives on: If you are a homemaker and bringing in money, by bringing in a young student to eat a meal with your family every night, why not choose the best, most promising student who is most promising in his studies, just in case your daughter and he fall in love?

LRK: That’s an interesting way to case out a future son-in-law -- not a bad thought. Who does this?

CK: It happens in Houston, which is where I really studied it, and also California. It’s really exclusively Vietnamese and it was hard for me to break in, but so worth it. It’s people who work long hours. It’s inexpensive, so sometimes it’s people who don’t make a lot of money. But it’s also doctors, lawyers and women engineers who have this traditional expectation that they are going to provide food for the family even though they are working hours as long as everybody else.

How to make kombucha, the mother of fermented drinks

Thu, 16 May 2013 15:52:05 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

Billy Kaufman

Everything we eat is either raw, cooked or fermented. The really intriguing food begins with fermentation: bread, cheese, pickles, miso, salami, tempeh, prosciutto and kombucha.

Sandor Katz lives to ferment; it’s his life’s work. He has studied around the globe and has written a definitive book for laymen called The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World. [Ed note: Read an excerpt from Katz's book here.]

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: What is kombucha?

Sandor Katz (Sean Minteh)

Sandor Katz: Kombucha is sweet tea fermented by a very interesting community of microorganisms that are sometimes referred to as a kombucha mother and sometimes referred to as a SCOBY, which stands for a symbiotic community of bacteria and yeast. This produces a lovely, refreshing beverage. People have begun to incorporate all sorts of other flavorings and ingredients into it -- there is a huge spectrum of different kombuchas that one could create or purchase.

LRK: We can do it at home?

SK: Absolutely. Kombucha is extremely easy to make at home. When kombucha first began growing in popularity in the U.S. -- when I first became aware of it in the mid-’90s -- I don’t believe there was any commercially available kombucha. It was just spreading as a grassroots culture. Because the mother of kombucha grows with each batch that you make, all the people who make it regularly love to find other people who they can give kombucha mothers to. It’s incredibly simple.

LRK: It sounds like the mother is the zucchini of the fermentation world. How would we go about doing this, and where would we get a mother?

SK: There are all sorts of trading posts online where people who are kombucha-making enthusiasts and have more mothers than they know what to do with love to share them with other people. There are also lots of small commercial enterprises that are making kombucha mothers or kombucha kits available to people.

Then basically all you do is brew some tea, sweeten it with sugar to taste, cool it down, put it in a wide-mouth vessel that is not completely full -- you want to maximize surface in relation to volume -- and then just place that kombucha mother on top. Cover the whole thing with a thin cloth to keep flies and dust out, but allow for airflow. Depending on the temperature of your kitchen, wait anywhere from a week to 2 weeks.

Keep tasting it because it will become increasingly acidic as days pass. Most people like to catch it when it is somewhat acidified and still somewhat sweet, but that is really a matter of personal taste.

LRK: Do you remove the mother to stop the process?

The Art of Fermentation

SK: Removing the mother does not completely stop the process; basically the mother is populating the sweet tea solution with the community organisms that are doing the transformation. Really, if you remove the mother, another mother is going to grow in its place.

I neglected to talk about one ingredient that is also important, which is a little bit of mature kombucha solution in with your sweet tea. What that does is it acidifies the environment. What all ferments amount to at a certain level are creating selective environments to encourage the growth of the organisms that you want, and at the same time discourage the growth of other types of organisms.

LRK: So where do you get this kombucha solution? You just go out and buy a bottle of kombucha?

SK: For your very first batch, yes, you can go buy a bottle of kombucha. Once you are in regular production, you will always have some mature kombucha to add into your next batch. A culture like this that takes on a physical form, a SCOBY, ends up being like a pet in that it requires regular maintenance. You have to keep feeding it. Each time you harvest your mature kombucha, you start a new batch. So it can potentially perpetuate for the rest of your life or beyond.

LRK: There has been controversy over kombucha. What’s the controversy about?

SK: I don’t know which controversy to start with; there have been lots of controversies. The most recent controversy is that a federal regulatory agency tested some bottles a few years ago and found levels of alcohol in excess of 0.5 percent. Yeast is part of the community in kombucha and kombucha generally has some small percentage of alcohol. Typically it’s fleeting because as long as it’s exposed to the air, Acetobacter, which are also part of the community -- these are the bacteria that convert alcohol into acetic acid -- will convert any alcohol into vinegar. But once it’s bottled, there is no longer access to oxygen, so there is the potential for greater accumulation of alcohol.

Many commercial producers have had to alter production methods. Some producers are actually not even using the traditional kombucha SCOBY as a starter, so I would call some of the currently marketed kombuchas simulated kombuchas.

LRK: What are the options for flavoring kombucha?

SK: If you do what I have described as a primary fermentation, after you pour off your mature solution, mix it with some fruit juice, vegetable juice or herbal tea solution. Then you can have a short secondary fermentation that incorporates fruit, vegetable or herbal flavors. I’ve tasted some really exciting flavor combinations that were done in this manner. If you seal them in a bottle, you carbonate them and have a carbonated soft drink.

A Spanish roadtrip

akruse — Wed, 15 May 2013 20:50:29 +0000

The Perennial Plate

We spent 2 weeks traveling across Spain, from Basque Country to Galicia, Andalucia, and finally Barcelona. The food and travel adventure was condensed into 3 minutes. ... Enjoy!

Rediscovering the food of her mother’s homeland

lkaliebe — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:13:08 +0000

Sally Swift

iStockphoto

Ann Taylor Pittman, food editor at Cooking Light magazine, had never visited Korea, where her mother was born. At the age of 43 she traveled to Korea with her brother, where she learned more about the country -- and herself. She chronicled the trip in the article “Mississippi Chinese lady goes home to Korea,” which won the 2013 James Beard Foundation Journalism Award in the Food and Culture category.

Sally Swift: How much Korean culture did you have in your house when you were growing up?

Scallion Pancakes

Ann Taylor Pittman: We had a little, and it was usually through food. I lived in small towns in the Mississippi Delta. At that time my mother could not get ingredients to cook Korean food, so we would go to Memphis about once a month and go to a small Asian market there.

My knowledge of Korea, or what it meant to be Korean, was through these dishes like bulgogi, which I always loved. It’s thinly shaved meat that’s marinated in soy sauce and sugar so it’s sweet and salty. You cook it over really high heat so it’s charred -- it’s just delicious. She would cook these noodle dishes -- and I always loved those -- from glass noodles, cellophane noodles made from mung beans.

My mother just didn’t share much. I don’t think it was that she was trying to shut us out or anything, it was just for her, there was a lot of pain that she left behind. She had started a new life in the U.S. and didn’t want to dwell on the past.

SS: You write a little bit in the article about how she would cook some dishes, but there were a couple of dishes that she would only make for herself.

ATP: Right. My father admits to sort of leading the charge against kimchi -- he never liked it. As kids, my brother and I, we were terrified of kimchi; it was so strange, the smell was so strong. I since have come to love it, but we wouldn’t eat that.

My mother missed the flavors of home. She would make soups with tofu and kimchi and she would eat them by herself. When I think back on it now as an adult, I think how lonely that must have been for her to have this one lifeline that kept her connected to her culture, the one thing that she could do at home that we wouldn’t participate in with her.

SS: So you, in middle age, picked yourself up and made your first trip to Korea. You went from Seoul to Busan, which is where your mother was from. Tell me about the food scene in Korea.

ATP: It’s so fun. The food scene in Korea is very social, so a lot of restaurants are not set up to serve one or two people because it’s a communal way of eating. A lot of the food is prepared at the table. You order soup and they bring out this large communal bowl and the soup boils on the table. Or there are grills for the bulgogi and you cook the food right there on the table.

If you’re not cooking the food on the table, you’re at least all digging out of the same dishes. Sometimes you don’t even have your own personal plate. You’re just kind of chop-sticking little bites off the same plates.

It’s very social. It’s also incredibly intimate when you think about sharing a meal in that way. It’s kind of powerful. I think it’s a powerful way to connect to people. But it’s also incredibly fun, very lively -- there’s lots of conversation and lots of drinking too.

SS: What did your mom say about you making this trip?

ATP: I really wanted my mother to go on this trip. I decided I was going, my brother said he would meet me there, we asked our mother to go with us. I really thought it would be great. She’s so incredibly wonderful and wise -- what she said was no, she could not go on this trip because this was our discovery to make on our own. That still kind of floors me.

Chicken breast again? Sources of inspiration from Ted Allen

lkaliebe — Fri, 10 May 2013 20:21:46 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

iStockphoto

Culinary mind freeze stalks us all. One day you realize that for weeks you have had the same takeout salad with the same dressing for lunch, and the same boneless, skinless chicken breast with balsamic vinegar for supper. You're in a food rut. I know, I've been there.

I'll bet Ted Allen never has. He is in the cook's catbird seat. Allen is the host of “Chopped” on the Food Network, so he has a parade of new ideas marching past him every single day.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: You've got all of those chefs on "Chopped" who are inspiring you, but a lot of us get in a rut. What are some of the ways to get out of that rut?

Ted Allen

Ted Allen: I think that's a common problem. Every night I turn to my partner, Barry, and I say, "Hey, what do you want for dinner?" Of course he never has any ideas. I don't think anyone does when you put them on the spot. We all have to find inspiration somewhere.

Sometimes for me, it can be a tool in the kitchen. I can spy my melon baller and think, "Oh, yeah, let's do something with melon!" But you're right, the search for inspiration is a big part of the problem of the home cook.

LRK: Where are some of the specific places you like to go for inspiration? What are some of your favorite sites?

TA: There are so many. I love a blog by my friend Liza Shoenfein called Life, Death & Dinner. Liza is a home cook, but she used to be an editor at Saveur. She has been in the food world forever. It's very personal; she does the photography herself, she tells stories about her family, her sons and her husband.

I love Serious Eats, I love Food52, I love Grub Street, which is New York Magazine's website. For a little gossip I go to Eater and pray that I'm not in it.

I have a challenge that I want to throw down, if I may. You're in a rut -- you're cooking the same chicken breast every day, you're tired of broccoli. One thing that I like to do: I go to the grocery store, maybe go to a different store, particularly an ethnic market. I especially love Asian markets because I like to look for things I've never seen before. When you grow up in Indiana and you go to an Asian market in New York City, you're going to see things and not know what they are.

Here's the challenge: Pick a vegetable that you think you hate, or that you do hate, and try to conquer it. I did that with beets. I like the taste of red beets, but I find the color a little bit off-putting. Then I discovered golden beets. If you can find golden beets, I think you've overcome the thing that so many adults and children find off-putting about that wonderful, sweet vegetable.

Then do something different to them: pickle them, roast them. Sunset magazine gave me a recipe for roasting beets in a salt crust: You leave the skin on, you mix egg whites together with kosher salt and you pack that around the beets. It entombs the beets inside this crust and they just roast in the juices. It's a fabulous thing.

LRK: You say you look at restaurant menus online for ideas. I had never thought of that.

TA: I have the privilege of talking about food all day with people like Alex Guarnaschelli, Scott Conant, and Amanda Freitag, our judges on "Chopped." Their lives are about innovating in food. They need to come up with -- and people say there are no new ideas -- newish ideas for ways to dazzle their customers.

I was looking at the menu for the restaurant Prune in New York City, Gabrielle Hamilton's wonderful restaurant. She had a menu item that was a sandwich with fried chicken livers on it and bananas. And there was something else interesting on it: mustard. I thought, "That is something I have never seen." When you are in a rut, where better to turn than to the people who are innovating this way?

I had a barbecue for “Chopped” judges at my house, which is a brilliant thing to do because when you invite chefs over, they come with food in enormous quantities usually. One of the other judges, Geoffrey Zakarian, who is a wonderful chef, came over with a salad that is just mind-blowing to me. This was at the peak of summer, so we can't make it yet. It was white peaches and heirloom tomatoes topped with this luxurious Italian soft cheese called Stracciatella, which is like a very soft burrata that has cream added to it so it's impossibly decadent, drizzled with a balsamic vinegar. Peaches and tomatoes: they're both sweet, they're both juicy, they're strikingly more similar than you might think in their flavor profile. They go together in a way that's wonderful.

I came up with a bruschetta recipe that marries tomatoes and strawberries. I love to serve it to people without telling them what’s coming because you taste it, it's familiar, but it's unusual and it's surprising. I love little surprises like that in food.

Grilled Chile-Lime Shrimp with Israeli Couscous, Mango, and Zucchini

LRK: What about the workhorse: the boneless chicken breast. What do you do to add a little bit of variety? Because it can be very boring.

TA: It can. We all eat boneless, skinless chicken breast. The good thing about them is that they're a canvas for all kinds of flavor. There's a recipe in my new cookbook -- I can't claim to have authored it -- that’s a pretty familiar idea to people who are chefs, but to a home cook, maybe you haven't done this.

The first step -- and I'm talking about pan-frying a chicken breast -- I always pound my chicken breast to an even thickness. I put them under wax paper and pound them until they are a uniform thickness. I cut them to make sure they are all the same size, salt them, pepper them, and wrap them in a piece of prosciutto -- that wonderful, super thin-sliced, Italian-cured ham. It's salty, it's just packed with concentrated flavor from having been dried and cured. If you like, you could dress this up by placing a couple of sage leaves on the chicken breast and then wrap prosciutto around it. Then you just heat up a pan to medium-high, splash a little olive oil in there, cook that thing 5 minutes a side and you're done. It even looks pretty on a plate. You could serve that for a date and still only pay $5 for your ingredients for two people. Not too bad.

Yes, natural wines pack surprises. But would you prefer sawdust?

lkaliebe — Fri, 10 May 2013 17:51:17 +0000

Melissa Clark

iStockphoto

Natural wine is a controversial category that has set off disagreements around the world. There are winemakers who insist on using natural ambient yeasts, others who insist on banning the use of stabilizers that keep wines from spoiling, and still others who insist on letting nature take its course in the vineyard.

However defined, it’s a category gaining increased attention. Alice Feiring has been tracking the natural wine movement in her newsletter, “The Feiring Line: The Real Wine Newsletter.”

Melissa Clark: Define what a natural wine is.

Alice Feiring (Jeff Young)

Alice Feiring: To be utterly simplistic about it: nothing added and nothing taken away, except for a little bit of sulfur. It really is the way wine used to be made for centuries and centuries.

MC: What’s the controversy with natural wines? So many people are vocally against them. They have so many critics, but then they also have devotees, especially in France.

AF: Especially in France, especially in the U.K., especially in the U.S. now. The problem seems to be mostly with the critics. The drinkers seem to have absolutely no problem with them and they are embracing them. But the critics, the people who sling the mud, will say that they are fuzzy, that they are fizzy, they are brown, they are cloudy and sometimes they taste of apple cider vinegar.

MC: What do you think?

AF: I’ve had one or two that have tasted that way, and guess what: Those weren’t the good ones.

MC: For people who love them, what is it about natural wines that makes them so devoted?

AF: Usually it is the excitement, the element of surprise. One of the best examples that I have is when I was at a party, when Frank Bruni just came over to the states to be the dining critic at The New York Times. I said, “Hey, Frank, taste this.” He burst into laughter and he said, “Alice, what the hell is that? That is the most beautiful example I've ever had.” He went out and bought a case the next day. A conventional wine never can do that to you.

MC: Natural wines speak of the place.

AF: That is at the very heart and soul since they are not using chemical additives and they are not using process to change the way that wine tastes. They are usually from extremely good agriculture -- it really is about expressing that place.

MC: What do you mean by additives? What kinds of things are they putting in other types of wines that are unnatural?

AF: In this country, there are about 200 approved additives. Not all of them are horrible, but a lot of them change the way a wine is going to taste and is made. Some of them you might have allergic reactions to. They are shape- and texture-changing.

Yeast, enzymes, bacteria, added tannins from oak, chestnut, and grape, gelatin, gum arabic, oak chips, oak sawdust. Things like that.

MC: Gelatin. Is that for texture?

AF: It is, and so is gum arabic.

MC: Sawdust? What is that for?

AF: That’s like tea bags. Instead of using a barrel to ferment in, they use oak dust or chips for flavor.

MC: You mentioned wines that are grown in a really careful way. I think people get really confused about organic wines, biodynamic wines and natural wines. What’s the difference?

AF: People should be confused, because it is confusing. There are different laws in this country than in the EU. But organic and biodynamic really refer primarily to the agriculture. In this country, we take it a step further: Organics do no harm to the vineyard, but you can use yeast, enzymes and additives as long as they are organic.

In this country, no sulfur is allowed. In the EU: yes.

MC: What about biodynamic?

AF: That kind of farming is like homeopathic agriculture, so it is healing the earth. There are more laws about how you can make that wine. Natural wine is more of a philosophy. Jessica Gravner said, “To make a natural wine you must be a natural person.” There’s no faking it.

MC: Natural wine making is just the technique, not the growing?

AF: Right. Within that, you have some parameters with the grape and what you are going to ferment in.

MC: How do I know if I’m getting a natural wine? Where do I find them?

AF: That is really difficult. You’re not going to find anything on the label. If you look on the back label, you might get some clues. Some people are saying, "This wine is not made with any yeast, enzyme, additive; it’s just grapes." That’s a good sign. Go to a respectable wine seller who knows about these natural wines. They can help guide you to them.

MC: What about some good ones? What are your picks?

AF: The U.S. is starting to make some good ones finally. One of my favorite wine producers is Hank Beckmeyer, and his wine label is La Clarine Farm. That wine will cost you $22-26.

If you go to France, go to the Loir Valley. One of my favorite winemakers there is Thierry Puzelat and his wines will be between $12 and $30.

MC: His wines are pretty available?

AF: They are pretty available around the country. If you can’t find them, go to Wine-Searcher, punch in the name and it will lead you to a wine store in your neighborhood.

Exploiting the taste bud: The industrial science behind creating irresistible food

lkaliebe — Fri, 10 May 2013 16:05:17 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

iStockphoto

In 1999, Minneapolis was the site of a top-secret meeting. The people attending would normally not choose to be in the same room. They were the CEOs of major food companies: Kraft, General Mills, Cargill, Nestlé, Nabisco, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Mars and Kellogg’s. They had been called together because America was getting fatter, faster than ever. A crisis was looming and blame could end up on the foods they manufactured.

This is how Michael Moss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times, begins his book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. In it, Moss examined the industrial science behind creating irresistible food.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: All of these CEOs in the room were told what was evolving at that point: a health crisis of obesity in the U.S. How did they react?

Michael Moss (Tony Cenicola)

Michael Moss: One of the remarkable things about that meeting: It was one of their own who got up to give them this bad news. He was armed with 114 slides laying responsibility for the obesity crisis at their feet and urging, pleading with them really to collectively do the right thing. From his perspective, the meeting was an utter failure.

The CEOs acted defensively. They argued that, "Look, we're already conscious of nutrition as we are of convenience and low prices. We offer people choices. We have low-fat this, low-sugar that, and most of our food has to taste good." They left the meeting and they basically went back to what they do.

These companies, I don't view them as evil empires that intentionally set out to make this country obese or otherwise ill. The problem lies in their collective zeal to do what companies do, which is make more money by selling more products. If those products can be healthier, they will do that. They have nothing against that.

Over time, though, what's tended to happen is that companies will put out what they call line extensions -- a healthier version of their main line product. The issue that Michael Mudd, the executive from Kraft, was urging them to look at was the main line products and the overall amounts of salt, sugar, fat and calories that were going into the products that sold the most. That was the issue in 1999.

LRK: These companies are making money; that's what a company does. But the responsibility for deciding what's healthy for us or what isn't, that's in the hands of the consumer, right?

Salt Sugar Fat

MM: You're absolutely right. But you have to remember: Walking into a grocery store, the playing field is anything but level. The companies are doing everything they can to make you make a spontaneous decision. That's why you see soda coolers at the checkout counter.

So, yes, we have some responsibility, but we're up against a very smart, cunning formulation and marketing machinery of the process industry. It's not a fair fight. Salt, sugar and fat to them are the holy grail. They know that when they hit those amounts perfectly, they will send us over the moon.

I spent time with a legend in the industry, Howard Moskowitz, who walked me through his creation of a recent soda for Dr Pepper. He actually helped coin the term “the bliss point,” which is the perfect amount of sugar in any food that will appeal to us the most. He had to get to the perfect soda flavor that would be a hit. He had to concoct 61 different flavors of sweetness, each slightly different. He submitted them to 3,000 consumer taste tests, threw the data in his computer, and did his high math thing to come up with the very perfect one.

But one of the issues is not that soda is sweet, but that so many products in the grocery store are now sweet that didn't used to be. As one food industry scientist said to me, the companies are exploiting the biology of the child especially. Children are hard-wired for sugar, so now you see breads that are sweet, pasta sauces are sweet and low-fat yogurt can have as much sugar per serving as ice cream.

One of the smartest nutrition policy people I know is Marion Nestle at New York University. She said to me that she thinks one of the driving forces here was Silicon Valley. In the early ’80s, tech stocks became so hugely popular with Wall Street that Wall Street in turn looked to the blue chips, looked to the food industry, and said, “Hey, guys, you're lagging here. What can you do for us?” That's when food companies became much more attuned and under pressure on profits.

It's a really important point moving forward here because even when these companies do the right thing -- Campbell's soup has done it, trying to reduce salt; Kraft has done an amazing series of things to try to reduce the nutrient loads in its products -- Wall Street is there breathing down their neck, making sure that the companies understand the profits come first. These companies in many ways are more hooked on salt, sugar and fat than we are.

They are between a rock and a hard place because the ingredients are not just in there to make the foods tasty. They're there acting as preservatives so the food can stay on the shelves for weeks or months at a time and they're there to avoid the use of more costly ingredients like fresh herbs and spices. Salt especially is a miracle ingredient to these companies -- it masks some of the off flavors that will get into food processing. They've been adding so much salt, sugar and fat to their products that yes, they can dial back by 10, 15 percent. But when they start going deeper to really make some meaningful changes in the nutritional profile, they're finding that they drop off a cliff, both in technical terms and in taste.

LRK: How has writing this book changed the way you eat?

MM: I have two boys, 8 and 13, who are walking bliss points for sugar. My wife and I are basically trying to engage them in a discussion about nutrition so that they'll really want to do this. A cool example happened the other day. My wife said, “Look guys, why don't we try to limit our cereal to those brands with 5 grams of sugar or less per serving.” Now when we go in the store or shopping with the boys, they will pull the boxes off the shelf, look at the fine print and do the math. Interestingly, I find that when you engage them in the discussion, they're more apt to like those lower sugar cereals. They're part of the discussion and kids are smart.

Also challenge this notion of convenience, which I think is over-hyped. I think there are any number of products around the grocery store that we actually really don't need to be dependent on.

Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day. But here's how to celebrate anyway

Sun, 05 May 2013 06:15:38 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

iStockphoto

Do you want a great party, complete with music, dancing, piñatas and incredible food? Go to a Cinco de Mayo fiesta -- or throw one yourself. Pati Jinich, an expert in all things Mexican and host of “Pati's Mexican Table,” gives some guidance and inspiration.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: Cinco de Mayo is a big party day for Mexicans. What's the story behind it?

Pati Jinich: It's a big party for Mexicans, but mostly abroad, which is very funny because in Mexico it's celebrated mostly in the state of Puebla. Last year they had the 150th anniversary of the Cinco de Mayo celebration.

LRK: I always thought it was Mexican Independence Day.

PJ: That's what most people think, because we Mexicans have made it such a big deal outside of Mexico. But it is not Mexican Independence Day. Mexican Independence Day is September 16.

Cinco de Mayo commemorates the very unlikely victory of a small Mexican militia in the year of 1862, when they won against the huge French army. It was very unprecedented and it was short-lived, sadly, because a year later the French came back and took over. But they ruled only for 3 years and then Mexico became independent again.

What we celebrate -- and what's been translated abroad -- is Mexicans’ resilience, courageous nature and perseverance, and our positive and hardworking attitude. We just celebrate anything and everything that's Mexican on this day.

LRK: How do Mexicans celebrate Cinco de Mayo?

PJ: We celebrate from the moment the day starts. It starts with food and it ends with food. There are also some fabulous dishes that come from Puebla that are typically made on the day, such as chicken tinga. It's just a catchy name and it’s a catchy thing to make because it's super versatile. It's chicken that is cooked in a tomato base that's seasoned with onion, garlic and incredible-tasting chipotles in adobo.

Of course there are variations: Some people use tomatillos (I am one to mix it with the tomatoes because it gives it a nice punch) and some people also add crumbled, crispy chorizo in the mix. As you're seasoning the onion and the garlic, you add that layer of chorizo. You just make the chicken tinga a little bit more hefty, so you end up with a mix that's sort of like a sloppy joe.

You can make it ahead of time; then, on the day, you can make tostadas. You just grab those crispy tortillas, spread them with refried beans, and then people add as much chicken tinga and healthy stuff like lettuce, tomatoes and cheese as they want. Or you can also go with chicken tinga quesadillas, or chicken tinga tacos. It's like a chicken tinga craze; you can put it on top of everything.

Chicken Tinga

LRK: So you could just have that out on a table like a big buffet and everybody can do with it what they want?

PJ: Exactly.

Then you have aguas frescas. We put them in big glass barrels or big pitchers. Typically you have a lime water, a hibiscus-flavored water or a tamarind water. When people think about Mexicans’ drinks, it's not only the Corona beer or the tequila. It's all of these freshly flavored waters, different kinds of drink mixes and cafe de olla in the morning to start.

Then, of course, there are the piñatas and the sweets: the flan, the cookies and the candied fruits.

Usually for a Cinco de Mayo celebration, there will be something in a neighborhood that has music and the Mexican folkloric dancing. You will see people dressed in the traditional way, with the hats and the full-blown thing. It's just a full day's celebration.

What I find funny is that my American friends now get more excited about the Cinco de Mayo celebrations than even we do.

LRK: It's a great party. Why not?

PJ: It is contagious.

The future of agriculture: Frozen in a vault in Svalbard, Norway?

Sat, 04 May 2013 18:21:22 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

iStockphoto

The future of our food might be in the middle of a mountain on a remote island above the Arctic Circle. That’s where the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was built. There is more agricultural biodiversity in the vault’s one room than anywhere else in the world. Cary Fowler is a special advisor at the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: What is the seed vault about? What’s its purpose?

Cary Fowler

Cary Fowler: Its purpose is to secure the survival of the different seed collections of agricultural crops around the world. Those collections are very, very valuable. They’re used by plant breeders and researchers to develop new varieties of our agricultural crops, to keep current with pests and diseases, to produce higher yields, and they’re also used in basic biological research.

But the problem is that these seed banks, the seed collections in the real world, are just located in buildings and all kinds of things can happen. They can get in the way of war and civil strife, and there can be accidents, floods, hurricanes and all sorts of things. If you’re storing a seed sample there and that’s the only sample of that particular variety of crop, if something happens to the building that it’s in, it’s gone forever and it’s extinct like the dinosaurs. We needed a “Plan B,” and we went to rather far lengths to find it up in Svalbard, Norway.

LRK: It sounds pretty remote.

CF: It’s 78 degrees north, the farthest you can fly on a regularly scheduled airplane. But it’s still accessible; we can get seeds in and out if we need to. It’s also extremely cold, as you can imagine. If you want to conserve seeds for a long time, what you do is you dry them down to a low moisture content to reduce the biological activity, and then you freeze them at about minus 3 or minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit.

LRK: If the electricity fails, the natural environment is going to keep them at the desired temperature?

CF: That’s right. Inside the mountain, we built this tunnel about 130 yards into the solid stone. At that depth, the natural temperature is below freezing already. Even at that natural temperature, most of these seeds would be viable decades from now. We really think that we’d have a long time to get somebody up there to repair the machinery if it failed.

LRK: I understand you have something like 740,000 samples in the vault, but that recently a lot of fuss was made over an addition to your wheat collection. What’s the story behind that particular seed?

CF: That particular variety was called Norin 10. It’s actually an old Japanese variety documented to go back to the 1930s. It was collected by somebody on the staff of General MacArthur after 1945.

The interesting thing about that particular variety is it’s really short. At that time, normal wheat varieties were about 4 feet tall and this one is about half that height. The importance of that is with modern plant breeding, the plant breeders are able to produce wheat varieties that were much higher in their yield. They put a lot of grain at the top of the stalk and when the wind came up, it tended to blow the wheat over onto the ground and the farmer couldn’t harvest it. This Norin 10 variety, which is shorter and stockier, could hold the higher grain weight at the top and not tip over.

LRK: This was billed as the ultimate heirloom wheat in the vault. Do you agree with that?

CF: No, I wouldn’t say that. We’ve probably got about 140,000 unique varieties of wheat up there. One of the ones I really like is a variety that was collected by a friend of mine, my hero in this field, named Jack Harlan. He collected it in 1948 in Turkey and he described it as a miserable-looking kind of wheat. In fact when it entered the U.S., it didn’t even have a name, it had a number: 178383, I think. But a few years after that, a disease came through in the U.S. -- a disease named Stripe Rust. A lot of our wheats were susceptible to that disease. They tested this particular miserable-looking wheat and found out it was highly resistant to that and a bunch of other diseases.

Today it’s in the pedigree, in the genetic background, of virtually all the wheats grown in the U.S. The annual contribution to production is a couple of hundred million dollars at the farm level. The annual benefit of just saving that one miserable-looking wheat just to American farmers just for that one crop -- if we just made that investment one time, we’d probably be able to generate enough income to conserve all of agricultural diversity forever.

LRK: That’s stunning.

CF: It points out how valuable this resource is. It’s pretty cheap to conserve. You have to take precautions like having a back-up insurance plan near Svalbard, but it’s still really, really cheap. The insurance value is just absolutely tremendous, particularly when you see what kinds of challenges agriculture is going to face in the future.

How to feed 10,000 people from food grown on 3 acres in the city

Fri, 03 May 2013 22:43:31 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

Growing Power

Will Allen is proving that city farms work -- big time. He’s not conjuring up theories; everything that he is teaching in cities across the country he learned over the course of 20 years with his hands in the dirt, a little money in his pocket and a survivalist’s smarts for innovating.

He grows food in ways that few have seen before -- and he grows it sustainably. Allen’s 3-acre farm sits in the poorest part of Milwaukee and now feeds 10,000 people a year. It brought him a MacArthur grant and his neighbors good, healthy eating. The story is in Allen’s book The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People and Communities. [Ed. note: Read an excerpt from Allen's book here.]

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: It’s 1993, you’ve got a good job, you are driving through one of Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods, and you see a collection of broken-down greenhouses and a field of weeds. You decide to cash in your 401(k), buy them and become an urban farmer. Were you crazy?

The Good Food Revolution

Will Allen: I think my wife thought I was crazy and probably some other folks as well. But one of the things that I saw was a community that was densely populated: It was in a location that was halfway between two freeways, five blocks away was the largest housing project in Milwaukee, and the closest retail grocery store was about 4 miles away. I looked at this as a place where I could sell my farm produce.

LRK: You already had a farm and you decided to use this as the farm stand?

WA: Yes.

LRK: But instead you ended up producing 40 tons of food a year from those 3 acres.

WA: You could quantify it in a number of different ways. We grow enough food there to feed about 10,000 people in a very intense and integrated food system. We grow about 150 different crops in an unusual way.

We started out as a for-profit for the first 2 years. I was working with kids in the neighborhood, teaching them about where their food came from. Some of my friends said, “Why don’t you start a nonprofit?” I said, “No, I like working with kids. If we start doing this nonprofit piece, I would need help.” They volunteered to be the first board and do the administrative piece, because I said, “I don’t want to sit in the office and write grants.” That’s how we got started back in 1995.

LRK: What is the scope of Growing Power today?

WA: We’ve grown from those early years to where we are today. We have more than 20 farms and 110 employees, we have 15 regional centers around the U.S., and we farm about 200 acres. We’ll be hiring another 150 people in the next year or so and increasing our greenhouse year-round production to more than 100 acres in and around Milwaukee, Madison and Chicago.

LRK: This is all urban farming that serves what are known as food deserts of major cities?

WA: It’s really about serving everybody in a community because people are not eating very good food that is shipped in. During the shipping process, much of our food loses nutrient value -- a lot of times it is 7 or 8 days from the time it comes off the vine or the stalk before we get it into our bellies. What we are trying to promote is local agriculture, working with farms in the city. When I talk about urban agriculture, I’m also talking about farms that are right on the fringe of the city.

We are building hoop houses -- which are a cheap version of an A-frame greenhouse -- all over the place, wherever we can find land, whether it is asphalt, concrete or hard-pinned clay.

But the key to this whole piece is the fact that we grow soil -- we grow compost. So we collect food waste from a number of different places and we have a large-scale compost operation. We wouldn’t have been able to scale up like we have done without growing this soil.

LRK: There was something about worms as livestock?

WA: That’s what I consider them. I wasn’t the originator of that term, actually; it came from Heifer International. Having cows and pigs in the city isn’t very practical, so what they came up with were worms and fish. The worms are a catalyst for breaking down food waste into worm castings for fertilizer. Being able to grow fish allows families to have protein in these food-desert areas.

LRK: What do you see as the major issues in food today?

WA: I think the major issue is that, as citizens, we don’t know very much about the food we eat. We just take for granted that it’s healthy. Over the last 10 to 12 years we’ve had multiple food scares.

A local food system makes a lot of sense to me, because the money stays in that community and we can create thousands of jobs. We are losing rural farmland and rural farmers. So what we need to do is not only grow soil, but grow farmers, train farmers to be able to farm a different kind of way. Not like our fathers and grandfathers farmed, but this new kind of farming where you are thinking about square footage and growing in unusual places inside the city inside buildings and on rooftops.

What’s driven me is to be a part of ending world hunger. The United Nations stated in 2010 that the only way to end world hunger is through local food systems. It benefits everybody to have a local food system. My energy and the energy at Growing Power goes into creating and quantifying these things because people don’t believe that you can grow a significant amount of food inside a city. It is not the total answer. It’s going to take a renaissance of farmers as well as urban farmers to develop this sustainable food system.

Quark: It's easy to make this two-ingredient cheese at home

Fri, 03 May 2013 17:35:06 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

iStockphoto

Noelle Carter is a “Why not?” kind of cook. She writes for the Daily Dish column in the Los Angeles Times and runs the test kitchen there. She asks a lot of questions, including, “Why not make that myself?”

Her latest project is quark. Not the physicists’ neutron proton quark, but the dairy quark that's heading into its moment in the sun.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: I think we need a definition: What is quark?

Noelle Carter

Noelle Carter: It's a fresh, creamy-style cheese. There are variations of it that can be found throughout the world, but this type of cheese is mostly particular to the Scandinavian region, northern Europe, and parts of Russia.

LRK: Making it, do you need a culture? Do you need something beyond just a way to separate the curds and whey?

NC: You don't. You just need to make a quick trip to the grocery store. You can use all your own kitchen equipment and you can whip it up in 2 days.

LRK: OK, so how do you do it?

NC: Take a couple cups of milk. We were testing it with whole milk, but I've also tried it with lactose-free milk and nonfat milk. Make sure the pot is completely clean. Bring it to a simmer on the stove. Let it come to room temperature and then whisk in maybe 1/2 cup of buttermilk. Let that sit overnight at room temperature and you'll notice it will thicken to a yogurt-like consistency. Take that and strain it overnight in a cheesecloth-lined strainer. The next morning you've got cheese.

LRK: That's it?

NC: It doesn't get any simpler than that. Even I could do it and I'm so intimidated by the whole thought of making cheese.

Recipe: Quark

LRK: Is there harm that could come to it -- spoilage -- by leaving it out for a day?

NC: When it thickened overnight, it did have a fresh cheesy smell, but nothing off or negative whatsoever. When we strained it, we strained it in the refrigerator -- I specify that in the recipe. I think we had a batch in there for almost a week, but I'd recommend maybe 3 to 4 days.

It was totally simple and you get this wonderful creamy cheese that's kind of similar to a mascarpone meets a sour cream meets a yogurt. I'm testing all these different batches of quark and I'm wondering if what I'm making is really cheese. Is this really what I think it is?

So I took it to Norbert Wabnig, who owns The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills. He takes a bite, and then he takes another bite, and he's like, “This is the best quark I've had in a long time. What is your secret?”

He had quark in the store that he's selling and we tried them side by side. The homemade stuff was creamier, it was lighter, and it did have more of a personality and a depth of flavor than the store-bought stuff.

LRK: So it has a little tang to it but a lot of richness?

NC: It's wonderfully rich and it's got this nice bright, not too assertive tang that really gives a nice lift if you're spreading it on a bagel or a sandwich. There are German and Austrian recipes for using it in cheesecakes and strudels. I mean, it's just a wonderful cheese.

LRK: How do you like to use it?

NC: I'm really simple. I would throw some granola in there and some fresh berries and call it breakfast.

LRK: That's it?

NC: That's it.

You can bake with it. We did a tart that we ran with the story, an asparagus and bacon -- almost a quiche-like -- tart. The cheese just lent this amazing richness, but you got that nice bright tang; as heavy as the tart might have been, it still had this lightness to it because of the tang from the cheese. It was just wonderful.

Southern cooking, without that nagging 200 years of tradition

lkaliebe — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 00:40:00 +0000

Francis Lam

iStockphoto

Before chef Edward Lee moved to the South, he didn’t know what sorghum was. Now he incorporates it into everything from ham to ice cream. Lee is the author of Smoke and Pickles: Recipes and Stories from a New Southern Kitchen.

Francis Lam: I want to start with one of the first stories I read in the book -- it really struck me. It's a story you tell of your sister taking you out, sneaking around and getting lamb gyros for lunch. You weren’t supposed to do that. On some level it was because lamb wasn’t a cool food in your family, but really it was because your mom didn’t want you to go out there.

Doing stuff that you are not supposed to be doing seems to be a theme in the book, and maybe even a theme in your life. If your parents are anything like mine, you know they probably wanted you to grow up to be a doctor or a lawyer like so many immigrant parents wanted their children to be. What was it like when you decided, “You know, I want to be a cook”?

Edward Lee (Dan Dry)

Edward Lee: It was a very awkward day for me and my parents. At the time, I was going to NYU and I was a lit major. My lit advisor was grooming me to go to grad school for literature and I told him I was going to chuck it all and become a cook. The look on his face, the look on my parents’ faces -- there was a lot of disappointment all around me.

I guess with any new immigration wave, there is always that push and pull between the values of the old country and the fascination and the exposure that you have to all the different cultures in what we call America. I don’t know what it was, but I knew from very early on that I was fascinated by culture. I was fascinated by falafels; I was fascinated by Indian food.

We had Jamaican neighbors and I used to love the smells that came from their kitchen. It was so foreign from the smells that came from my kitchen, but I loved that.

FL: At some point you have this hot, sexy, celebrity-studded restaurant called Clay in downtown Manhattan, but then -- boom -- you move to Louisville, Ky., and now you’re a chef in Louisville. I imagine you didn’t have that many Southern neighbors, so you probably didn’t smell collard greens growing up. When you got to Louisville, what were the foods and smells that inspired you there? What ingredients or traditions drew you in?

EL: I moved to Louisville about nine or 10 years ago, and I started to discover indigenous ingredients like country ham and sorghum. I’d never had sorghum until I moved down to Kentucky -- I didn’t know what sorghum was.

FL: What is sorghum?

Smoke and Pickles

EL: Sorghum is a plant; it is very similar to sugar cane. It’s been grown here for generations. Much like sugar cane, you cut it down when it is ripe, you put it through rollers, and you press out the sorghum juice. Then you boil it very slowly over a number of hours at a very low temperature. Different sorghum producers will boil it to different grades of groundness, so you can get a light amber sorghum or a really dark sorghum, which is closer to molasses.

Once I tasted all the different variations of it, I was immediately hooked. The day I discovered sorghum, we basically stopped buying honey. We’d take country hams or city hams and we’d glaze the hams with sorghum.

The most obvious application would be dessert. We’d take cooked grits and we’d churn it into a sorghum-based cream ice cream, which is a really popular dish. I didn’t come to the South intending to be a Southern chef; I didn’t come here to put on a pair of dungarees and chew on some cornbread. But as a natural extension, if you are curious, you can’t help but be fascinated by these things that are happening around you and these traditions that you just walk into.

FL: You wrote something really interesting in the book too, which is that being in the South, you also rediscovered your own Koreanness and your own Korean traditions that you came from.

EL: Growing up in the big city, you don’t realize your ethnicity because everyone is ethnic. There is no ethnic because everyone is different and being different is what brings everyone together. I grew up knowing I was Korean, but I never grew up thinking I was “other” or different. It was just -- to use the cliche -- a big melting pot. Then you move to the South and it’s hard not to immediately recognize every time you walk out your door, that everyone looks the same except you. There is a homogenous culture here that is just different from the big city.

Recipe: Rice Bowl With Beef, Onions, Collards, Fried Egg, and Corn Rémoulade

FL: You also said something interesting: Being an outsider you can cook the Southern food in a different way and they’ll let you do it in a different way.

EL: Again, it’s to your advantage and your disadvantage. I can get into some very heated arguments about cornbread recipes because, "This is the way we’ve been doing it for generations and you just don’t stray from that, not when it’s part of your family recipe." Then in comes me and I’ve got all these ideas of how to make things differently. What I don’t have is the baggage of 200 years of tradition on my shoulders. They kind of look at me and say, “There’s that funny-looking Asian kid putting soy sauce in everything again.” I’m allowed to make mistakes. I’m allowed to venture beyond the traditional canon of Southern recipes.

FL: Right, doing stuff you’re not supposed to do once again.

The spoon: Used by every human culture in the world

lkaliebe — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 20:00:05 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

iStockphoto

Have you ever wondered about the history of cutlery? Bee Wilson, author of Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, discusses the past of the spoon, which is used by every human culture in the world.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: You cover all of the things that are in the kitchen and on the table in this book. You’ve got egg beaters, pots and pans, and kitchen design, but one of the things that intrigued me was the spoon. You say the spoon is the mirror of a culture. That’s a pretty big statement.

Bee Wilson (Jay Williams)

Bee Wilson: It is a pretty big statement, but the thing about spoons is that they belong to every human culture in the world. There are fork cultures, there are chopstick cultures, but everyone uses spoons. They go way, way back to the first ancient ancestors using shells latched onto sticks. I think they’re a very good mirror to their surrounding culture to look at the particular form that the spoon takes, and what that tells us about the kind of foods that a particular culture likes to eat.

LRK: For instance?

BW: If you look at Victorian times, the 19th century, whether in Britain or the United States, there’s this mad profusion of spoons -- everything from citrus spoons and gravy ladles to tomato spoons and sauce spoons. There are many different reasons for this. You could say it’s a product of the Industrial Revolution -- spoons could be mass-produced as never before. You could also say it’s part of the development from service a la francaise, where all the dishes were laid on the table at one time, to service a la russe, where there was this succession of courses that we would still expect to this day in fancy restaurants.

LRK: I think that’s such an interesting thing that a lot of us don’t realize -- that in the 19th century people started serving a meal in a completely different way.

BW: They did. They started eating courses for this first time. This notion of there being starters, main courses and desserts didn’t exist before. Everything would have been laid out all together and you needed far fewer individual items of flatware or cutlery. So that’s one thing.

But I think the big thing that happened in the 19th century was a new civilization of table manners -- a new anxiety at the table about touching food, handling food. These specialized spoons go along with that because it’s a way of never feeling you have to get too close to food with all of its stickiness and noise. It’s a way of being extremely polite. There were even special solid silver potato chip servers marketed by Tiffany’s, which I think is a very rarefied item. I’m not sure many households have those today.

LRK: You’re saying people were anxious, they wanted to distance themselves. What had happened that brought that about?

Consider the Fork

BW: I think it’s part of a whole culture of manners. If you look at the rules that come out about handling food in 19th-century etiquette books, there will be things like, "Soup must always be drunk from the edge of the soup spoon so you’re not getting too close to the soup." (Except for men with moustaches, they were allowed to drink the soup from the end of the spoon.) Or things like elaborate rules about things being eaten with forks: how to eat a peach with a fork or how to eat corn on the cob with a fork, which to me makes no sense at all. But it seems to go along with a general sense that you don’t want to pick things up and eat them with your fingers. You don’t want to get sticky; you want to remain dignified and graceful, and the flatware goes along with that.

As the food writer Darra Goldstein has said, it also creates a kind of nervousness. She described this condition as “fork anxiety.” It’s the sense that once you’ve got these tools like tomato spoons available, you really feel you ought to be using them and an ordinary spoon won’t do any more.

LRK: You also talk about a period of the political spoon.

BW: Yes. In 1660 in Britain, Charles II came back to the throne during the period known as the Restoration. There had been a brief 11-year period known as the Commonwealth, when we had no king at all, having executed our king in 1649. It was crucial for Charles II to really impose his will and make everyone forget the fact that we’d done without a king. One of the ways he did that was through spoons.

He’d been at the court in France where they had a particular type of spoon called the trefid. No one in Britain had ever eaten with one of these spoons before 1660; almost overnight this became the dominant shape. If people had one of the older spoons, the puritans, they disliked ornamentation in any form. Puritan spoons were very plain, solid pieces of silver with an egg-shaped bowl and a very plain flat handle. If you had a puritan spoon after the Restoration, you would be pretty sure to take it to a silversmith and get it melted down and remade as a trefid.

The trefid is really the spoon that lends its shape to all subsequent modern spoons, in that the bowl for the first time becomes the deep oval that we all recognize as a spoon shape. The distinctive thing about it was that the handle finished in this three-cleft shape. Hence the name.

We sometimes imagine that all changes in cutlery would be something very gradual, they’d happen over many generations. This happened straightaway: In 1660, no one had eaten with one of these spoons before. By 1680, the trefid had spread through the whole of Britain and it would be very rare to come across a puritan spoon at all.

LRK: A completely different way of looking at this thing we use every day.

Actor Wendell Pierce brings grocery stores to New Orleans

lkaliebe — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:21:53 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

iStockphoto

Wendell Pierce is an actor and Tony Award-winning producer. He is also the founder of a new grocery store chain, Sterling Farms, which he hopes will provide fresh food and produce to underserved New Orleans-area residents.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: Actors do restaurants and they do clubs, but actors don’t do grocery store chains.

Wendell Pierce: They do now.

LRK: How did you come to this?

Wendell Pierce

WP: I’m from New Orleans -- born and raised -- and when Katrina happened, my neighborhood was in some of the deepest part of the flooding, Pontchartrain Park. It was a neighborhood that was like Mayberry. Our parents fought long and hard during the ugly time of segregated New Orleans and there was one place separate-but-equal that African-Americans in the '50s could purchase homes. It turned out to be an incubator of talent. There’s a golf course, multi-denominational churches, Southern University of New Orleans. It was just idyllic, but it was destroyed.

Basically I put a call out to action to everybody in my generation to say we owe it to our parents to go back and rebuild. We did that. We started it and we’re in the middle of it now. We created our own development corporation. But then I looked around and I said, “Man, the commercial districts aren’t coming back.”

As I did more research, I started to realize that New Orleans was populated with food deserts and underserved communities where people didn’t have access to fresh produce and fresh foods. When I saw that, I talked to my partners and said, “Let’s start a grocery store. Let’s start a grocery store chain.” That’s how Sterling Farms, which is the name of my grocery store, was born.

LRK: You just opened the first one a short time ago.

WP: Yes, it’s the flagship. We opened several weeks ago and it’s been wonderful -- the response in the community of people saying, “I was waiting for something to come to the neighborhood.” It’s been great.

It’s in Marrero, which is just outside of New Orleans. It validated what I knew was there: pent-up demand. We hop in the car and go to the grocery store all the time. For a lot of people, that’s hopping on a bus, having to walk or having to go a little farther because they don’t have one in their neighborhood. That shouldn’t happen in America. So we see those neighborhoods as emerging markets instead of depressed areas. It’s proving to be true.

LRK: You once said that there were 16,000 customers for every grocery store in New Orleans. Does that guarantee that Sterling Farms is going to be viable?

WP: There is no guarantee when you are trying to build a business. But we have access to a large portion of people and we are willing to compete for their business. We know we have to earn their trust and earn their interest. We have to make our store their neighborhood grocery destination.

The one thing that I always remembered was shopping for groceries -- as we say in New Orleans, “making groceries” -- with my mother on a Friday night. It was a ritual to go there. It was like a wonderland for a kid, “Oh I want this, I want that, let’s get that.” Seeing the men and the women getting off work -- they had a little bar and restaurant in this place -- and knowing the fishmonger, knowing the butchers and having our favorite cashier. It was the equivalent of a town square. That neighborhood grocery is something that we take for granted; we don’t realize it until we lose it and until our culture is challenged the way New Orleans was challenged 7 years ago.

It is great to see the faces of people coming back. I literally had a woman cry. I mean, what businessman can say, “I had a woman come into my store and say, ‘Can I speak to you?’ She walked outside because she didn’t want to be seen and she welled up with emotion. ‘Thank you so much.’” That meant everything to me.

People in what are considered underserved communities have shown their loyalty to brands, stores and products through American industry by making an effort to get to their store, to get to their brand. It takes a little effort on their part to go there. All they ask is that we, as American industry, come to their communities. We stood on the sideline saying, “Uh, that’s a little too much risk.” Where other companies see risk, I see reward.

The greatest opportunity is not only to do well, but to do good; the two can co-exist.

Michael Pollan: Cooking for yourself is the real independence

lkaliebe — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 17:04:20 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

Virtual Media

Psychologically and socially, cooking is good for you and your family -- not to mention the health benefits. But it’s also a political act, according to food writer Michael Pollan, author of Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: One of the things you bring up in the book is that cooking doesn’t have the same respectability, the same regard, as literature, the arts or the sciences. Why do you think that is?

Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan: In other times, it has been held in higher regard. I think it has been denigrated in our own time for a couple of reasons. It was, it has been, women’s work for a very long time -- at least home cooking has -- and the arbiters of prestige are very often men in this culture. So they didn’t completely appreciate the wonders of cooking and the complexity of it.

But another reason is the agro-industrial food system has deliberately denigrated cooking because corporations very much wanted to take over this work. You see this concerted campaign that goes back 75 years, but really intensifies after World War II, with the food industry trying to persuade you that this is not a legitimate use of your time. That they would be very happy to do it for you and relieve you of the burden, long before anybody thought about cooking as a burden.

LRK: Laura Shapiro in her book Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America mentions that in those days, when women worked from home -- and many women did -- the one thing that they really enjoyed was cooking.

MP: Exactly. There was an effort to lump all housework together, but women said they liked cooking; cooking was a creative outlet. But I think that what happened as women got busier and more women went into the workplace, something had to give. We were at this very interesting post-Betty Friedan moment where there was a very uncomfortable conversation unfolding: Women were going back to work, women’s liberation was very much in the air and there was tension over who would do the housework. It had to be renegotiated.

Before that conversation could be completely played out and resolved, the food industry very self-consciously stepped in and said, “We’ll take care of it; we’ve got you covered.” They came forward with fast food and processed food, and it was a very deliberate effort on their part to hitch their agenda to that of feminism.

There’s a wonderful billboard that I can remember from the '70s. Kentucky Fried Chicken had this billboard all over the country -- a giant bucket of fried chicken with just two words above it: “Women’s Liberation.” So that if you went down the path of using fast food, that was the progressive thing to do. It was that kind of campaign that really undermined home cooking. It did it for very good capitalist reasons.

I’ve written about food for a long time, as you know, and I’ve gone back to the farm and forward to the food processors. There’s no money to be made in farming or in selling simple food. All of the money is in processing it. It’s no wonder now that of your food dollar, 92 percent of it does not go to the farmer. It goes to processors, packagers, shippers, advertisers and marketers. The way you make money is shrinking the amount that we spend on actual farm goods and getting us to let corporations cook for us.

LRK: One very striking thing that you wrote was about the senses that cooking appeals to. Can you explain?

Cooked

MP: One of the interesting things about Western culture is that over time it has tended to devalue the physical senses and elevate the eye and the ear to some extent. But the senses of taste, smell and touch have been considered in the whole tradition of Western philosophy and literature to be lower -- and more feminine, by the way. It’s definitely tied to a misogynistic streak. Cooking trafficked in those lower senses. It was stuff you could taste and smell, and that was more basic.

The other problem with cooking in Western culture is puritanism. We look down on those activities that both animals and we like to do; eating is one and sex is another. So puritanism had trouble with both those things because they were base and physical.

LRK: But the most fun.

MP: Yes, I know. Well, fun is a problem if you are a puritan.

LRK: I guess it is, isn’t it?

MP: So much of our culture is a sublimation of those senses, and cooking appeals very frankly to it. Although we sometimes pretend otherwise. One thing I talk about in the book is this wonderful euphemistic vocabulary around cheese. Cheese appeals to some of the basest sensory desires. It smells like human bodies -- I finally found a cheese maker who was willing to admit that, “Yeah, this is part of what a good stinky cheese is about.” Freud has written about the fact that we wanted to elevate ourselves above the animals. When we stood up -- when we were no longer on all fours sniffing the rear ends of things all over the world -- we privileged the eye and the ear at that point.

LRK: You talk about some of the imperatives of why to cook. We know about the family around the dinner table, and I don’t mean to shove that aside and say it’s not important, but some of the other things that you talk about really got to me.

MP: I think that there are a lot of very good reasons to cook well beyond the fact that -- and we should just stipulate this -- it’s really good for your health, your family’s psychological well-being and it’s very good for your social life to sit down with other people and conduct relationships over food. All this is kind of obvious, but forgotten anyway.

But I found that there were some other virtues to cooking. I think of cooking as a political act. I think we have fallen into this place where we are so dependent on others to do everything for us. All we do is we take the one thing that we do for a living, we sell that into the market, we take that money and use that to outsource everything in our lives. That leads to a dependence that is almost infantilizing. There is something very satisfying in providing for yourself -- even to some extent in a playful way -- and I would include gardening in that too. You feel so much more competent, self-reliant, and independent when you know, “Hey, I could make a loaf of bread if I wanted to, if I needed to.” That’s one thing that to me that is really important.

The other is our senses these days. We spend our lives in front of screens; that is where we work and that is where we also have our leisure time. We have five senses, not just two -- not just the eye and the ear. Cooking re-employs your senses. I think one of the reasons some people are rediscovering cooking now is that fact that it is enormously satisfying to once again use your hands, to once again use your sense of smell and taste. Cooking is one of those rare activities that engages all five senses.

Meat Sugo and Pasta

Raghavan Iyer: The Key 3

lkaliebe — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:15:16 +0000

Raghavan Iyer

Raghavan Iyer is a bestselling cookbook author, culinary educator, spokesperson and consultant who specializes in Indian cuisine. He takes pride in creating recipes from common ingredients, using combinations and flavor-extraction techniques to give his dishes unique flavors. In this installment of The Key 3, he shares with Lynne Rossetto Kasper the techniques behind three of his classic recipes: Smoky Yellow Split Peas, Sweet-scented Pilaf and Indian Slaw. His latest book is Indian Cooking Unfolded.

Here are Iyer's keys, as told to Lynne:

With Indian food, to me it's all about colors, it's textures, it's aromas, it's temperatures. You eat with all your senses. I've had people say, “Indian food -- it's all yellow, it's all the same.” First of all, curry powder ain’t Indian food. Second of all, to me the beauty of Indian food is creating complexity with not a bajillion spices, but maybe just one or two spices treated in such a way that you're going to end up with a complexity that just blows your mind.

1. Smoky Yellow Split Peas: Tamatar Chana Dal

Smoky Yellow Split Peas

The kind of dal we're doing today is done with yellow split peas. The variety of yellow split peas in India is slightly different, but look very similar to the variety that you find here. We call it Chana Dal in India, which is actually black garbanzo beans that have been split and the skins have been removed.

What I've done so far is wash the peas. I'm just adding water to it, no broth. Often people say, "Well, why are you doing that without broth?" Because if you think about it, the divas in Indian cooking really are the spices. You don't need broth because the spices really shine.

What I want to prove in this dish is first of all, the simplicity of it, 10 ingredients or fewer, and that it is about going to the main grocery store and just getting what we're familiar with -- potatoes, onions, chiles, cilantro, and so on.

You look at one spice, which is ground turmeric. Students in the past go, “Ew, curry.” I say, “Ew, not.” Ground turmeric gives commercial curry powders that notorious yellow color.

Four hundred years ago, when the English were in India, they fell in love with some of the sauces in the Southeast and the Northwest. They had their cooks put together a cornucopia of ingredients that they ground and put in a jar labeled “curry powder.” But as a concept, you do not have curry powders in India. To us, in a nutshell, if it doesn't have a sauce, it's not a curry. Not all curries have turmeric either. So in essence, a dal to us is a legume curry -- because it's saucy just like you and me.

In this dish we've got turmeric; that will continue to cook and add color and flavor to the peas. It will come to a boil and then we're going to get rid of some of the foam that sort of separates naturally as part of the cooking process. This creates a sauce that is a little bit clearer. One of the schools of thought is that it helps you digest it much better -- which, when talking to some of the food scientists, certainly could be debatable.

We're going to go ahead and add some potatoes, diced about half-an-inch. We're going to just let that continue to simmer and we're going to do that covered; that will cook the potatoes. While that is doing its thing, we're going to look at building the flavors in this pot. To this dish all we're going to do is add three spices, one is cumin seed.

I always say buy spices as much as possible in the entire seed form. If you give whole spices to a good Indian cook, he or she should be able to extract eight flavors from a given spice, depending on what you do with it.

We're going to add some coriander seeds, about a tablespoon. It's actually a distant member of the citrus family; when you grind it, it intensifies its citrus quality.

We're adding some chilies to this; these are whole chilies. We're going to go ahead and toast these. There's no oil. To this we're going to add the whole spices. When you're toasting spices, you're looking for the first color change and the first aroma change. You can hear that sizzle that is happening without the oil.

You can see what's happened very quickly: they're darkening, they have changed, this is all we're looking for right now. You can see the chilies have blackened. We're going to take this and we're going to add it right to a blender jar. Then to create a liquid base for that, we're going to add some tomatoes to it. Then we will puree all of that together.

There's a smokiness that comes through. This is what's going to flavor our legume curry. Once the potatoes are done, we are adding this.

It is a gorgeous dish -- this is what blankets rice. You're tasting the complexity that's coming through. It's a marriage that really works very well with this dish.

Ingredients

1 cup yellow split peas
1 pound potatoes (Yukon gold or russet), peeled, and cut into 1/2-inch cubes (soak them in cold water to prevent browning; drain before use)
1/4 teaspoon ground turmeric
2 to 4 dried red cayenne chiles (like chile de arbol), stems discarded
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 medium-size tomato, cored, and diced
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh cilantro leaves and tender stems
1 1/2 teaspoons coarse kosher or sea salt

Procedure

1. Measure the peas into a medium-size saucepan. Cover it up with water and rinse the grains by rubbing them in-between your fingertips (I just use the fingers of one hand to do it). The water will become cloudy and may have some debris like the odd skin from the peas (even though they are skinless) or dust from the packaging. Drain this water. Repeat three to four times until the water, upon rinsing the peas, remains clearer. Measure and pour 4 cups water into the pan and bring it to a boil over medium-high heat. You will see some foam arise; scoop it out and discard it.

2. Add the potatoes and turmeric to the peas, stirring once or twice. Lower the heat to medium-low and cover the pan. Stew the mélange, stirring occasionally, until the peas are tender but still firm-looking and the potatoes are cooked, 20 to 25 minutes.

3. While the peas and potatoes cook, preheat a small skillet over medium-high heat. Once the pan feels hot (a palm held close to the bottom will feel the heat), usually will take 2 to 4 minutes, sprinkle the chiles, coriander, and cumin into it. Toast the spices, shaking the pan very frequently, until the chiles blacken and smell smoky- hot and the seeds turn reddish brown and smell incredibly aromatic (nutty with citrus undertones), 1 to 2 minutes. Transfer this spice blend to a blender jar and plunk in the tomato. Puree, scraping the insides of the jar as needed, to make a smooth, reddish brown paste with a smoky aroma that is sure to knock your socks off.

4. Once the peas are cooked, scrape the spicy (as in well-seasoned) tomato paste into the pan. I usually pour some of the liquid from the pan into the blender jar and process it for a brief second to wash out all the goodness into the water. Pour the washings back into the pot. Stir in the cilantro and salt.

5. Crank up the heat to medium-high and vigorously boil the dal, uncovered, stirring occasionally, to allow the flavors to mingle and the sauce to slightly thicken, 12 to 15 minutes. If you wish for a thicker sauce, mash some of the peas and potatoes with the back of your spoon. Serve warm.

Tips

Even though dals are great draped over a bed of steamed rice, try them with wedges of flatbread dunked in it. Even when crusty baguette or other yeast breads are warmed, sliced, and served alongside, it makes a great appetizer.
Yellow split peas that are available here in the US in every supermarket but are slightly different than the variety that grows in India -- I find those grown here to be a bit nuttier and very much corn-like in texture. The ones in India are from a variety of garbanzo beans that have a dark brown to almost blackish colored skin. When the legume's skin is removed and the grain split in half, you get the variety of yellow split peas in India called chana dal. The green split peas (what you generally use for split pea soup with ham hock) are a perfect stand-in for the yellow variety should you wish to use them instead.
Puree any leftover dal in a blender or a food processor to yield an almost pate-like spread. Try and drain off a bit of the excess liquid before you do that. It reminds me of a Greek skordalia (potato puree with garlic) but with more texture and oomph.

2. Sweet-Scented Pilaf: Masala Pulao

Sweet-Scented Pilaf

Perfuming oils with whole spices has been classic to north Indian cuisine for thousands of years (no, I am not exaggerating). Western cultures call it blooming but we call it tadka. Whatever the nomenclature for this technique, the results play a pleasing game of how- much-can-you-eat-without-stopping with your palate. Give in and savor it as a side to any main dish, salad, soup, or even a starter.

Ingredients

1 cup white Indian or Pakistani basmati rice
2 tablespoons Ghee (homemade or store-purchased) or canola oil
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1/2 teaspoon whole cloves
6 green or white cardamom pods
2 fresh or dried bay leaves
2 cinnamon sticks (each 3-inches long)
1 small red onion, cut in half lengthwise and thinly sliced
1 teaspoon coarse kosher or sea salt

Procedure

1. Place the rice in a medium-size bowl. Fill the bowl halfway with water, to cover the rice. Gently rub the slender grains between the fingers of one hand, without breaking them, to wash off any dust or light foreign objects (like loose husks), which will float to the surface. The water will become cloudy. Drain this water (you don't need a colander for this. I just tip the bowl over the sink to pour off the water making sure the rice stays in the bowl.) Repeat three or four times, until the water, after you rinse the grains, remains relatively clear; drain. Now fill the bowl halfway with cold water and let it sit at room temperature until the kernels soften, 20 to 30 minutes; drain.

2. Heat the ghee in a medium-size saucepan over medium-high heat. Once it appears to shimmer, sprinkle in the cumin, cloves, cardamom, bay leaves, and cinnamon. The spices will sizzle, turn reddish brown, crackle, and scent the air with sweet aromas, 30 seconds to 1 minute. Add the onion and stir-fry the slices until they are lightly brown around the edges, 3 to 5 minutes.

3. Add the drained rice, and coat the grains with the onion and whole spices by tossing them together gently. Pour in 1½ cups cold tap water, and sprinkle in the salt. Stir the rice once or twice to incorporate the ingredients. Allow the water to boil, uncovered, still over medium-high heat, until it has evaporated from the surface and craters are starting to appear in the rice, 5 to 8 minutes. Now (and not until now) stir once or twice to bring the partially cooked layer from the bottom of the pan to the surface. Cover the pan with a tight-fitting lid and reduce the heat to the lowest possible setting. Steep for 8 to 10 minutes (8 for an electric burner, 10 for a gas burner). Then turn off the heat and let the pan stand on that burner, undisturbed, for an additional 10 minutes.

4. Uncover the pan, fluff the rice with a fork, and serve. You may choose to remove the cloves, bay leaves, cardamom, and cinnamon before you serve. I usually leave them in since they continue to perfume the rice and just instruct the folks eating the rice to watch for those whole spices and eat around them.

Tips

The whole spices used here are some of the most common spices used in some of the versions of Garam masala. Here they are left whole, gently infusing nutty clarified butter with subtle aromas and tastes. Great proof that not all garam masalas are ground in northern India.

3. Indian Slaw: Bund Gobhi Nu Shaak

Indian Slaw

Unless your mama is from western India, chances are this is not your mother's mayo- smothered, garlic powder-ridden coleslaw. Nutty, tart, with a citrus burst, these crunchy shreds of cabbage pack just the right amount of heat from the fairly benign Serrano chiles. Serve it, as is, for a salad course, or as an accompaniment to your traditional picnic fare. For an elegant presentation, I often serve it after the appetizer course mounded on top of romaine heart leaves with an edible flower as garnish, when seasonal.

Ingredients

1/2 small head of cabbage (about 1 pound) or 1 bag (14 ounces) coleslaw mix
1 to 2 fresh green Serrano chiles, stems discarded
1/4 cup dry-roasted peanuts
1/4 cup dry unsweetened coconut shreds (see tips)
1/4 cup finely chopped fresh cilantro leaves and tender stems
1 1/2 teaspoons coarse kosher or sea salt
Juice from 1 medium-size lime 2 tablespoons canola oil
1 teaspoon black or yellow mustard seeds 1/4 teaspoon ground turmeric

Procedure

1. Remove the tough rib from the lower center of the halved cabbage by slicing it through, ending up with a v-shaped opening at the base. Cut the cabbage in half lengthwise. Slice it into shreds, as thin as you can. Dump them into a large bowl. If using the pre-shredded coleslaw blend (which usually has a few shreds of carrots and purple cabbage in it for color), empty the bag's contents into a large bowl.

2. Slice the chiles lengthwise and then cut them into thin slices, crosswise, ending up with half-moons of chiles that still have the rib and seeds within. Do not discard the seeds. Add this to the cabbage.

3. Empty the peanuts into a spice grinder (like a coffee grinder), food processor's bowl, or mini chopper and pulse the nuts to a consistency of coarse bread crumbs. Letting the machine run incessantly may yield a gummy product that you know more commonly as peanut butter. Tip the contents of the grinder over the cabbage. Add the coconut, cilantro, salt, and lime juice.

4. Heat the oil in a small skillet over medium-high heat. Once the oil appears to shimmer, add the mustard seeds, cover the pan, and cook until the seeds have stopped popping (not unlike popcorn), about 30 seconds. Remove the pan from the heat and sprinkle in the turmeric which instantly bathes the oil with its yellow hue, the heat just right in cooking the spice without burning it. Pour this popcorn-smelling mélange over the cabbage. I often grab some of the cabbage from the bowl and add it to the skillet, wiping it clean with the shreds to make sure I get every last bit of spice and oil. Thoroughly combine the contents in the large bowl (tongs, spoons, or my favorite -- clean hand) to ensure every shred is evenly coated with everything. Serve either at room temperature (my preference) or chilled.

Tips

A decent-sized supermarket, worth its weight in gold, should stock dried unsweetened coconut either in the health foods aisle or the baking section. If they don't, grab that bag of highly sweetened coconut shreds in the baking shelf that is often a key ingredient in coconut cream pies and other coconut-based desserts like macaroons (my weakness.) To use it in this recipe, dump 1/2 cup of the sugary shreds into a medium-size bowl. Cover it with water and run your fingers through to wash some of the sugar. Empty this into a fine-meshed colander (think tea strainer). Dump the coconut back into the bowl and repeat with the rinsing, washing, and straining. You may need to do this cycle three to four times to make sure all that sugar is gone. An underlying sweetness is fine since freshly shredded coconut does have an inherent sweet taste.
I am a sucker for cooked cabbage. Oftentimes with the leftover salad I will add it to a skillet with a little water to cover the bottom of the pan and heat the cabbage until it warms through. A little extra kick from a liberal sprinkling of ground red pepper (cayenne) takes care of my addiction for nutty, hot, crisp-tender cabbage until the next fix.
Peanut allergy sufferers, if you are alright with any other nuts, use them as alternatives.

The Key 3 is a series of discussions with great cooks (not just professional chefs) about the three recipes or techniques they think everyone should know.

8 ways to extract unique flavors from whole spices

akruse — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:54:36 +0000

Micah Taylor

During a recent demonstration with Lynne Rossetto Kasper, author and Indian cooking teacher Raghavan Iyer preached the versatility of buying whole spices rather than their ground equivalents.

Iyer was in the process of flavoring his dal (a legume curry) with toasted whole cumin, coriander and chilies.

"If you give whole spices to a good Indian cook," he said, "he or she should be able to extract eight different flavors from a given spice."

He was challenged to name all eight. He had no problem.

If you didn't catch what Iyer rattled off, here's the list as it appears in his new book, Indian Cooking Unfolded. It uses cumin as an example.

1. When you use cumin seeds as is, you get their distinctive spice flavor.

2. When you grind the seeds and sprinkle them in a dish, the flavor is more pronounced and quite different: musky and earthy.

3. Take the whole seeds and toast them in a dry pan, with no oil, and you will experience a nutty aroma.

4. Take those toasted seeds and grind them, and they smell nothing like any of their previous incarnations.

5. Heat a little oil and roast the seeds, and you will discover yet another flavor -- almost sweet smelling and smoky.

6. Grind the cumin seeds after you roast them, and they will seem to lose their smoky bouquet.

7. Soak the whole seeds in a liquid, and their presence will be surprisingly subtle.

8. And when you grind cumin seeds after you soak them, they not only take on the liquid's taste but also impart the spice's eighth flavor: The strong nutlike aroma reappears, masked by the infused flavor of the liquid.

Iyer takes pride in creating recipes from common ingredients, and he uses nothing in his book that requires a trip to a specialty grocery store. It's the combinations and the flavor-extraction techniques that give his dishes unique flavors.

Whole spices can be kept in an airtight jar in a cool, dry area of a pantry. Once they're ground, they should be stored in a moisture-free container and used within 3 months.

Infuse umami into vegetables by steeping them in dashi

lkaliebe — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 19:27:31 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

iStockphoto

Do you want to make the most of your spring vegetables -- have them stand proud in all their natural wonder? Try some Japanese techniques.

This is the cuisine of meticulous attention to flavor and freshness -- and of specific techniques to tease them out. It's also the country and cuisine that Harris Salat fell in love with; he's been studying it for years. Harris co-authors Japanese cookbooks and created The Japanese Food Report.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: There's a dish on your site that practically screams spring -- it uses this technique called ohitashi.

Harris Salat: Ohitashi is incredibly simple but incredibly deep. You can find a lot of this in Japanese cuisine. It is a way of infusing umami and flavor into vegetables without overwhelming those vegetables. This process helps the intrinsic flavor of the vegetables really come out. It's quite amazing.

LRK: What you've got on the site is a bowl of pea pods, mushrooms and asparagus in this little pool of broth. Can you walk us through how its done?

HS: Sure. Let's take a step back and just talk about dashi for a quick second. “Dashi” means stock in Japanese cooking, but it's more than stock. It's really the foundation of the cuisine.

There are many different dashi. But when people just say dashi, there is a dashi that is made from kombu, which is a type of kelp, and katsuobushi, which is skipjack tuna that has undergone this really remarkable process of natural preservation. The kombu has also been dried. When the two of them come together in dashi, they create this amazing savoriness and this really incredible flavor. That's underlying the cuisine and underlying ohitashi.

LRK: I know you can make it from scratch, but there are packets of instant dashi that I see in stores. Are those any good?

HS: Those packets are fantastic. There's been this evolution of dashi packs and dashi powders that are all natural. In the past, powdered dashi was spiked with a lot of MSG and it tasted really fake. Now producers have figured out how to create really all-natural dashi by freeze-drying the ingredients. You could use this to make dashi instantly.

LRK: This is great. Now back to the dish.

Spring Vegetables Steeped in Dashi

HS: Ohitashi -- it could be extremely simple or extremely complex. I've had the good fortune of training in restaurants in Japan over the past few years; in some restaurants they had over a dozen different ohitashi combinations to match the flavor of each particular vegetable that they were doing this process to.

If you're at home, you can do something much simpler, what people at home in Japan do. The most basic thing is to take 1 cup of dashi and 1 1/2 tablespoons of usukuchi soy sauce -- I'll explain that in a second. You take these two ingredients, put them in a pot and bring them to a boil. Turn it off, cool in an ice bath, and then you're ready to use the dashi for steeping.

But let me get back to the usukuchi. There are a lot of regional cooking traditions in Japan that we're not super aware of in the U.S. The two big ones are Tokyo-based and Osaka- and Kyoto-based, which are two different regions: Kanto and Kansai in Japan. Usukuchi is really the soy sauce of the Osaka-Kyoto region. It differs from the kind of Japanese soy sauce that you normally see in that it's lighter in color, saltier and has less body. It doesn't infuse as much of an overpowering soy sauce flavor into this dish and also doesn't overpower the natural color of the ingredients that you're going to steep in this ohitashi broth. In any case, it's a great product; you can find it at any Japanese market or even Asian markets. If you can't get that soy sauce, just use regular Japanese soy sauce.

LRK: It's not going to be a big deal?

HS: Kikkoman is brewed in California. It's a great product and it's widely available; that's fine too. What I like about Japanese cooking is that the gap between the finest expression of the cuisine and what we cook at home is not that wide. It's really a question of intent. So if you can get your hands on usukuchi, that’s great. If you can't, that's great too; it will still be delicious.

Once you have created this ohitashi broth and you've cooled it in the ice bath, you have to prepare the ingredients that you're going to steep in this liquid. In Japanese cooking, you really want to get a sense of the texture of an ingredient, the color, the seasonality. There's a word called shun, which is the expression of the perfect seasonal time for something -- it could be a few days or a week a certain ingredient is in shun.

You can find beautiful spring ingredients: new potatoes, mushrooms, asparagus, okra when it comes up is great, even cherry tomatoes, spinach, wax beans -- so many different vegetables. What you want to do is blanch and shock them. You want to cook them just enough so that they start to break down a little bit and then stop the cooking process.

You put them in boiling water with no salt, wait 30 seconds -- or where you get a sense that the color has come out of the vegetable and it's just starting to cook a little bit -- then you transfer it to an ice bath to stop the cooking. That's all you need to do. Then you put it into the ohitashi broth for six hours or overnight and you're ready.

LRK: Sounds so perfect for right now.

Stump your wine-geek friends bringing Greek bottles to the party

akruse — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 17:52:24 +0000

Sally Swift

My husband is a wine writer. I'm not sure people understand what that really means. It's an interesting, somewhat odd career that can threaten not only your liver but also your tooth enamel.

Michael tastes more than 9,000 wines a year. You do the math: It means multiple bottles opened every night -- tasted, spat and reviewed. It's lots and lots of bottles, which means we have to sneak the overflow empties into friendly neighbors' recycling bins. A new year brings 9,000 more bottles, because guess what? New vintage. He could not be happier.

When you have people in the wine business over for dinner, they show up with bottles tightly wrapped in paper bags. They place them on the table, still in the bag, because we must play the Guess the Wine.

Never played? Let me explain.

Each guest tries to bring something so obscure and unique that no one at the table can figure out what it is. Whomever can fool everyone else is the big winner. If a bottle is correctly identified, it's the equivalent of a gold medal in the Olympics. You can ask general questions: "Is it old world?" "New world?" "Southern hemisphere?" "French?" "Argentinian?" "Californian?" The pressure begins to build with the first sip and it sometimes continues throughout the meal.

It should be noted that there are some wine people who refuse to play -- so fearful are they of messing up.

Michael's secret weapons for this game are the wines from Greece. They are so rare that only the best make it in America, giving them a much higher "geek factor" (his words). He loves making opinionated wine people taste something they may normally dismiss. The years of retsina, that pine-pitch scented Greek wine from our near past, has tainted many tasters for life.

In an interview with Lynne Rossetto Kasper, Tara Q. Thomas, executive editor of Wine & Spirits Magazine, talked about Greek winemakers having to playing catchup since joining the EU in the 1980s. They've done it with unique grape varieties (Xynomavro and Agiorgitko) and a wide spectrum of growing regions. Have a listen to Tara's interview for more Greek wine insights and her picks for some of the best.

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wine

The ROY G BIV diet: Eating one color of food each day

lkaliebe — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 17:41:44 +0000

Amanda Thieroff

iStockphoto

My friend Sean Berman and I don't begin the ROY G BIV diet with any specific intention in mind. I even hesitate to call it a diet because I think the word implies weight loss or some kind of interest in nutrition. This diet, in which we will spend a week consuming only one color of food each day, is not a diet at all. This is art.

One week, seven days, one day for each color of the rainbow. Our first day would be red, our second orange, then yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet -- ROY G BIV.

Like any diet, ours would be limiting. But instead of cutting carbs or gluten, we'd cut color. Not this week would we feast on the diversity of hues found in most meals: the reds with the greens, the delicious rainbow. No, this week would be all about austerity -- the monochrome. We're not sure what we hope to discover, if we hope to discover anything at all.

“I'm slicing up some red peppers because today is red day,” Sean says.

We are in my kitchen in Brooklyn, N.Y. It's a Thursday afternoon. Red lunch.

“Right now I'm making a salad with peppers, pear, radish, and pomegranate which is -- you know, I'm no chef -- that's kind of a dicey combination,” he says. “I don't know how it's going to taste.”

I heat up a can of Campbell's tomato soup and we go over some ground rules. First and foremost, to the best of our ability, we'll eat only naturally colored foods. Red peppers: in. Spicy Cheetos: out. Beverages, alcohol included, are not to be exempted from the color challenge.

“I have a box of white wine,” Sean says. “You can only drink that on yellow day.”

The only liquids that are exempt are water (clear) and coffee (black) -- two things that we decide are necessary to sustain life. We will make no other exceptions.

“All right, let's put this in some bowls,” I say.

“Soup and salad,” Sean says. “Is it weird?”

“That's good -- it actually tastes red,” I say. “It's got a red flavor to it.”

“Well, it should,” Sean says. “You'll never, ever have a salad that's more red.”

Red day

Orange day is like a feast -- it's like Thanksgiving redux. We make mountains of squash and yams. We make Kraft macaroni and cheese, which is ostensibly both yellow and non-natural. Really, is there anything less natural than that packet of powdered cheese? This is, perhaps, the first fissure in our diet's solid bedrock.

Orange day

On yellow day I don't have time to cook before work. I pack myself potato bread and mustard sandwiches and cut the crust off.

Sean and I text each other photos of all of our meals. His photos are usually of some kind of dried fruit. Mine are usually potato chips or candy. Today he sends a photo of dried pineapple rings, like tiny golden buoys.

Yellow day

Green day, sweet green day. I eat kale. I eat broccoli. I eat Brussels sprouts and arugula. I swear I can feel these foods reviving me, lifting me from the depths of banana-and-cheese despair.

Green day

But no holiday lasts forever.

“So, what do we have here, Sean?” I ask.

“Blueberries and tons of blue chips,” he says.

Did you ever stop and consider the fact that there are almost no naturally blue foods? Even blueberries aren't really that blue. They're kind of purple.

“Why are there no blue foods in nature?” I ask Sean.

“I don't know,” he says. “I mean think about the things in nature that are blue -- fungus and poison. What else? There's not much.”

Sean and I text each other photos of blueberries -- dried blueberries, ripe blueberries, blueberry fruit leather. I begin to wonder if we're just not trying hard enough.

Blue day

On my last day, violet day, I decide I'm going to get creative. I buy an enormous red cabbage and an eggplant. I roast the eggplant with a bowl of garlic: baba ghanoush. I blend it in my roommate's Cuisinart.

Because it looks brownish, I cut up some cabbage, toss it in, hit the pulse button. It turns a sickening shade of violet. It looks like flowers in a meadow. It looks like lavender soap. It does not look like food.

Violet day

Sean texts me a photo of two different kinds of yogurt. “Purplish slop,” he writes. We've become disillusioned.

At 8 p.m., a mere 4 hours from the project’s completion, Sean texts me that his faith was gone, that he'd eaten a bowl of multicolored chili. “Stay strong in my wake,” he writes.

I ask him about his fall from grace.

“I don't want to speak about that,” Sean says. “I was upset. I wasn't necessarily upset about it because I felt so much better immediately afterward. I guess maybe that was something of a lesson: This is not a healthy experiment. It wasn't a healthy week.”

No, it wasn't. But that was never the intention, was it?

I do make it to midnight, at which point I eat a chocolate truffle (brown). Then another one.

The next morning I wake up early to make pizza dough. On my pizza will be every color of the rainbow: red sauce, orange pepper, yellow pepper, arugula, eggplant.

Rainbow pizza

No blueberries though. I hope not to see another blueberry for a long, long time.

Greece: A sommelier's dream

lkaliebe — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 16:52:26 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

iStockphoto

In the days of Socrates, pouring Greek wine for your pals was like flaunting a magnum of cult cabernet today. Then the reputation of Greek wines nose-dived for a very long time.

Today it’s making a comeback. Tara Q. Thomas, executive editor at Wine & Spirits Magazine and author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Wine Basics, says Greek wines are often of high quality, unique, and a good value.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: What is happening with Greek wines? You used to go to restaurants and drink the retsina -- that’s the white wine with the pine resin in it -- and some OK wines. But now there are some absolute stunners. What’s changed?

Tara Q. Thomas: What’s changed is that Greece joined the EU in the 1980s and the winemakers had to work really hard and really fast to catch up. They had lost a lot of time in the decades before that, but they had fabulous materials to work with: grapes that you don’t find anyplace else in the world and an incredible variety of different wine-growing regions. They’ve really had a lot of success in a really short period of time.

LRK: How are wine pros reacting to this? Are they turning up their noses?

TQT: They used to. I’ll tell you that the very first time I set up a Greek wine tasting at Wine & Spirits was 1997. I scrounged all over for Greek wines -- I came up with maybe 40 of them. Then I had to get down on my hands and knees to beg people to come and taste with me.

Now I have people lining up because Greece is a sommelier’s dream. They are really high-quality wines, made from little-known grapes and entirely unique grapes, and they are also made with food in mind. So it’s something that the sommeliers can offer their customers that no other country offers. They tend to be really great value as well.

LRK: This is a tough thing for consumers. We go into a wine shop and if we do find Greek wines, we know nothing about them, the names are confusing, we don’t know what to look for. How would you begin?

TQT: If there’s one iconic Greek wine, it would be Santorini. It’s very easy because Santorini wines are made from a Greek grape called assyrtiko, but you don’t have to pronounce the grape. They are labeled Santorini, which is easy to remember.

These are white wines and they’re as dramatic as that sun-bleached craggy rock that we call Santorini, which is actually the remnants of a volcano. It’s almost no soil that these vines grow in; they are just blasted by the sun and the sea, and they taste like the sun and stone and sea. They are beautiful, they are crisp, they are lemony, they have this mouthwatering salinity. They’re gorgeous.

But also I would say that they are no easy quaffers; these are wines that are built with food in mind. In fact Greek winemakers on Santorini really like to have their white wines with lamb. They have the structure and they have the acidity. You can have them with anything: a nice fish pulled directly from the sea with a little bowl of olive oil, feta and some bread to soak it up. But you need to have some food on the side, that’s one key thing with all Greek wines.

LRK: What’s the pricing like on Greek wines?

TQT: It depends on where you are, but for the most part you are looking at wines between $12 and $25. You can find some that are higher than that, but for a really great Santorini -- let’s say the Boutari, which is pretty widely found -- I think it is running about $17 right now. Some other names to look for would be Sigalas and Gaía; theirs might be a little bit higher.

LRK: What about a red?

TQT: For red wine I would go to a Nemea. (The wine is labeled by the region.) Nemea is easy to remember because you don’t have to deal with the grape. It’s a region of the Peloponnese, about two hours south of Athens. I often think of it -- and no offense to Merlot producers out there -- but as Merlot with personality. It’s got that lovely, round, plump, cherry-like fruit, but it also has this sort of foresty, herbal qualities to it. It’s got shape, it’s got lusty fruit, but it’s not just a big fruit bomb either. There are some wonderful ones out there from producers like Skouras, Gaía and Driopi. These are running about $15 to $20.

LRK: Going back to retsina, that famous Greek wine with the pine resin in it. Do you have any idea where that originally came from?

TQT: It was actually a pan-Mediterranean thing in ancient times. The ancients used pine resin to seal the clay amphorae they kept the wines in, and of course the pine resin did flavor the wines that were kept in these big containers. They came to like that flavor. For some reason the Greeks are the only ones who held onto the tradition.

A good retsina can be a really wonderful thing if you can imagine a very hot day, you’re sitting at a table with your feet in the sand, you have a table laid out with a little fried fish, some garlicky tzatziki, some salty feta and all these little plates with the really strong flavors. That retsina is really refreshing.

LRK: With the Greek economy, what’s happening with the winemakers?

TQT: It’s a really tough time for the winemakers right now, especially those who don’t export, who don’t produce enough wine to export, who aren’t big enough producers. As you can imagine, a lot of Greeks aren’t buying wine for personal consumption. So that leaves a lot of pressure on us in the U.S. to support the Greek market by buying their wines.

LRK: I don’t think that’s going to be any kind of a sacrifice for us.

Thomas' picks for Santorini and Nemea wines:

Santorini

Boutari 2010 Santorini (Terlato Wines Int'l., Lake Bluff, Ill.; $20)
Gaía 2010 Santorini Thalassitis (Athenee Importers & Distributors, Hemptead, N.Y.; $30)
Sigalas 2010 Santorini (Diamond Importers, Chicago; $24)

Nemea

Driopi 2007 Nemea (Cava Spiliades, N.Y.; $19)
Gaía 2010 Nemea Nótios (Athenee Importers & Distributors, Hemptead, N.Y.; $16)
Skouras 2008 Nemea St. George (Diamond Importers, Chicago; $14)

Meet the cookbook ghostwriter behind busy chefs' best sellers

lkaliebe — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 01:40:54 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

iStockphoto

There is one kind of food writer who gets stuffed in the closet when cookbook awards are given out. He or she is the ghost -- the person who does the actual writing for busy chefs and celebrities. Sounds like a dream job, right? Well, maybe. JJ Goode is one of the busiest ghosts in the business. He has ghostwritten several books, including Truly Mexican and A Girl and Her Pig.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: Your first gig was writing a book with Iron Chef Morimoto. What was that like?

JJ Goode (Sahara Marina Borja)

JJ Goode: Just the usual first gig -- went straight to the top, I guess.

LRK: You didn't fool around.

JG: But it was an accident, of course, because why would they hire a 25-year-old to write this book? They had hired a real writer, a really fancy writer, and he fell through. I'm not sure why. They were desperate. They asked my more successful friends; no one could do it because they only had 3 weeks to do this enormous project, something like 50,000 words.

LRK: Three weeks?

JG: Three weeks. It was terrifying. But, of course, I had to do it. You don't get a chance like that and turn it down.

Since the project was rushed, I only had the chance to interview Morimoto two times in person. His English is fine, but he's more comfortable speaking in Japanese. His assistant, who was acting as his translator, was supposed to translate; her English was not so great either. He would give me what sounded like really promising 15-minute meditations on rice or fish -- she would translate them and unfortunately boil them down to one or two sentences.

LRK: What did you do?

JG: Basically, he was a very funny guy. When he did say something in English and I thought it was funny, I would use that line or two or phrase as a starting point to get his voice in there and then spin a factual yarn. I would sit up all night with piles and piles of books. I do like Japanese food a lot, so I have all these books at home. I just pored over them.

LRK: The book is brilliant. It is really very well done.

JG: I can't take credit for the parts that are well done. Quentin Bacon, who is a famous food photographer, did these beautiful food photos. I think maybe people just look at the photos and ignore the rest -- I'm hoping. Of course I was so excited when this thing came out; it's so beautiful. My dad immediately opened it up and found that salmon roe somewhere in the book was spelled “row.” Leave it to your dad to do that.

LRK: You've done other books with other chefs. The key to this business of writing chefs’ books seems to be getting into the mind of a chef. How do you do that?

JG: The way you don't do it is what I did in the beginning, which was try to sit them down at a table and talk to them. These are people who haven't sat down in a chair since the early '90s. They are up on their feet all the time; they're cooking; they are dealing with disasters left and right. Cooks are arrested and oven doors are blown off and stoves are on fire. They don't want to sit down; it feels unnatural.

The best time to get them to open up -- when they're at their most comfortable and when they're most happy -- is when they're at the stove cooking. That's when the stories sort of bubble up. I work with a wonderful guy named Roberto Santibañez. When he's making a tamale, all of a sudden you're hearing about the tamale he made with his mom, the tamale his grandmother used to make from fresh sweet corn. So it really gets them thinking, it gets them happy, it gets them comfortable, it gets them talking.

LRK: This is where you get the meat of the books --these are the moments?

JG: Yes, and the process is funny. I spent almost a year with these chefs on and off talking, cooking and taking notes. Then you distill all that information, the best bits, the best stories, and those become the head notes, those become the introductions, those become the stories that I think really make a book great.

LRK: What are the trickiest parts for you?

JG: The trickiest part is probably convincing the chefs that they need to measure. There's nothing they hate more than measuring things. They refuse to stick thermometers in things. They hate stuffing herbs -- fresh delicate leaves of basil -- inside of a cup measure. So I push them in the direction of measuring, they push back, and usually the result is just right.

LRK: So you're actually developing the recipes with them?

JG: Sometimes. Ideally I will watch them cook and sort of take dictation. They say, “I'm going to add basil.” I say, “Can you measure how much basil you're going to add?” They say, “No, why would you measure basil?” I say, “Well, because they have to know how much basil to use.”

“Isn't it obvious when the chicken is done cooking?” I say, “Well, not for dummies like me, and those are the people who are going to be reading and trying to follow the recipes in your book.” They have a good sense of humor about it usually.

LRK: Why write books this way? Do you ever yearn to say what you want to say the way you want to say it?

JG: I used to. I started out writing articles more or less in my own voice. When I got the chance to work with these chefs, I realized I liked it so much more. I mean, I'm basically a kid. I grew up in New Jersey. I didn't go on a plane until I was 19. I've been out of the country a handful of times. Whose opinion would you rather hear? Would you rather hear my opinion, or would you rather hear the opinion of these chefs who have been doing this for decades, who have been studying the food and culture of Thailand or Mexico, or working in kitchens for their entire lives? I think they have so much more to say than I do.

LRK: I think you're too modest.

Conflict Kitchen serves cuisine, conversation from U.S. foes

lkaliebe — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:35:29 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

Great street food is to be had from a takeout window in Pittsburgh. You even get something unexpected thrown in: enlightenment about international conflicts. Conflict Kitchen is an experiment in public art and interaction by Jon Rubin, assistant professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University, and others.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: What is this all about?

Jon Rubin: Conflict Kitchen is a little takeout restaurant that we run in Pittsburgh that only sells food from countries that the U.S. is in conflict with. We rotate the countries every 6 months or when a different sort of conflict arises.

In our city, this is a chance to create an ethnic and cultural diversity that wasn’t there prior. Certainly the way in which many people are introduced to cultures that they might not be familiar with is when an immigrant community opens a restaurant in their town.

Besides that as the introduction to a culture, we are also interested in creating a space in the public where people can have a conversation about politics, which is something that Americans aren’t very comfortable doing. Food creates that space of comfort; we find that we attract people who might not ordinarily come to a political march, read leaflets or even go to a community meeting around the specific issue, but who would come out for food.

LRK: How does that work? Do I come up to the window and buy some food and somebody hands me a leaflet?

JR: Actually, what happens is you come up to our window, and our staff are all trained mostly as great conversationalists. That’s the type of people we hire -- people who are really interested in the topic at hand, who are willing to talk about politics with absolutely anyone and who are knowledgeable, though we don’t present ourselves as absolute experts.

We ask people: What do you know about Iran? What do you know about what is going on in Afghanistan? What do you know about Afghans? We tell them about the food that we are serving, which is usually somewhat of an anomaly to the Pittsburgh landscape. Then a relatively organic conversation starts about what do people in Afghanistan think about what is going on?

One of the ways that we address that is we present the food with a custom-designed wrapper that is covered with interviews that we have done with people in Afghanistan as well as local Afghans in Pittsburgh. Our hope is that this becomes an introduction to a much more complex and nuanced understanding of what is going on in Afghan culture and Afghan life.

LRK: So the wrapper is the message?

Conflict Kitchen's arepa wrapper

JR: The wrapper is the message and it’s talking about a lot of things. We interview people on topics -- say, in Iran -- from the Green Revolution to the Iranian Revolution to tea to women’s rights to music. We have Iranians telling us their viewpoints; we have a whole section on Israel and Iranians’ views on Israel or the U.S. Often these perspectives contradict each other, much like everyone’s perspectives do.

There is no party line from us or from the people who we are interviewing. It’s important to us that we are not presenting any specific ideology. Our hope is not to simplify the debate, but to complicate the discussion and in essence humanize the people who live under the policies of a regime that they might or might not agree with.

LRK: Just out of curiosity, what would my lunch be inside that wrap?

JR: For example, we served Venezuelan food and had quite a bit of discussion about Hugo Chavez. We served Venezuelan arepas, which are grilled corn cakes with different types of filling. We serve street food from different types of countries; we serve foods that are the most delicious and ubiquitous and end up in a variety of places.

Arepas are very common food throughout Venezuela and Columbia. We served it with four different types of filling: chicken salad, queso, caraotas, and dominó, which is a mixture of the caraotas and anything else. [Ed. note: Find Conflict Kitchen’s recipe for arepas here.]

There's more than one way to cook an egg. Dave Arnold has 11

lkaliebe — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 16:17:16 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

Most of us boil an egg for breakfast. Not Dave Arnold, director of culinary technology at The International Culinary Center in New York.

Arnold is cooking that egg in a circulating water bath at a specific temperature a couple of hundred times over and over to make magic for inventive chefs. His eggs may be elastic or creamy or melting. This inventor and culinary tech expert is the go-to man for the chefs on New York's innovators list. His egg-cooking chart appeared in Lucky Peach magazine.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: I saw your egg chart in Lucky Peach magazine, which has photos of a series of 11 cracked-open eggs, and each one has been cooked at a different temperature. Why did you do this?

Dave Arnold (Jeff Elkin Photography)

Dave Arnold: A number of years ago when I made that chart, there wasn't really a lot of information available yet on the Web about how eggs performed at different temperatures. One of the biggest movements in cooking over the past 10 years has been the use of precise temperature control, or as we call it low-temperature cooking. Many people think about sous vide -- it's all under the same umbrella.

We sought to figure out exactly how eggs behaved. The easiest way to do that is to just do them at every different temperature, repeat the test multiple times, document it, and then put it out there so that anyone who wants to know how to achieve a particular result can do so.

LRK: How exactly did you cook the eggs?

DA: I took three different immersion circulators -- an immersion circulator is a piece of equipment that can maintain very accurate water temperatures, typically within a tenth or a couple of tenths of a degree -- and cooked eggs for an hour at whatever temperature I wanted to investigate, pulled them out, lined them all up, and cracked them all out. That was it. We'd already determined with a bunch of experiments that an hour was a good place to start.

LRK: These eggs really take on very different characteristics than we're used to seeing in cooked eggs such as soft-boiled, medium-cooked or hard-cooked. What have you discovered? Give me some examples of the differences in how they looked, tasted and their textures.

DA: When you're using extremely precise temperatures, you can get the white of an egg to set up into a very nice, not at all rubbery, custardy white -- it's perfectly formed. You cook it in the shell, by the way, and then you crack it out and the white is preserved. If you have extremely accurate temperature control, you can produce a yolk that is uniformly creamy on the inside. It's something that you can't possibly achieve normally.

Normally in a nice soft-boiled egg, there will be a little bit of the yolk that's basically fully set and the center will be runny. But in these eggs, the yolk almost becomes a uniform sauce that can bleed out. That temperature is right around 146 degrees Fahrenheit. Two degrees lower than that, 144 degrees Fahrenheit, and your egg yolk is completely runny like you would use for a Benedict. A mere two degrees higher than that, up at 149 degrees Fahrenheit, the yolk is completely set. It's still very soft, but it's completely set. So the entire window for an egg yolk, between runny and completely set, is only in Fahrenheit 3 or so degrees.

LRK: There's a point where you can actually take the egg and roll it out like a sheet of pasta?

DA: Sure, in the range between 149 and 152 degrees Fahrenheit you have what we call the Play-Doh egg. In that range the egg is malleable and you can almost shape it like marzipan -- you can roll it out.

Dave Arnold's egg chart, which appeared in Lucky Peach

LRK: How are chefs using some of these eggs?

DA: When I first started doing this, I had an extremely well-respected by everyone (and by myself) old-school French chef who quipped that it takes me an hour to cook an egg, whereas it only took him 3 minutes to cook an egg by poaching. That's true.

However, I can cook 200 eggs in that same hour. Every single one is going to be exactly identical with every other single one. I can keep them hot for service, which means I don't have to reheat them when the time comes, so it's incredibly fast to serve them out. I will never ever serve an egg that is either cold in the center or has been over poached so that the yolk is set, which is a classic problem with poached eggs.

Ninety percent of the eggs that you're going to have in a circulator in restaurant, 90-95 percent of them are all going to be cooked at about 144 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a runny egg. Every single one will be hot and every single one will be safe because they've been pasteurized by the cooking procedure. You're dealing with a product that is uniform, consistent, delicious and safe. I don't really see any downsides in that. You just have these perfect-looking poached eggs. The first time you do it, you're like, “This is just a complete miracle.” You can't believe it -- it's just a miracle.

Barking up the right tree: Foraging from bark to blossom

lkaliebe — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:33:13 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

iStockphotos

Without practicing larceny, we could eat for free -- or close to it. Hank Shaw does this pretty much all the time. He's a former chef who is now a full-time writer and forager.

Follow his lead -- learn foraging -- and maybe have a new career. Some restaurants hire foragers; if nothing else, you're going to save money. Shaw put what he's learned between covers in Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: I'm just thinking about spring foraging. We always go after greens, but we need something more challenging. What do you have up your sleeve?

Spruce or Fir Tip Syrup

Hank Shaw: I am the Lorax: I speak for the trees.

LRK: What is out there at this point that we might not think of?

HS: Well, it depends on what you're looking for. If you look down, there's a whole bunch of spring mushrooms; if you look up, there are, in fact, a lot of interesting things that you can get from trees right now.

LRK: I never think of foraging from trees.

HS: I'm not talking about nuts and fruits in the spring because that's more of a later summer and fall thing. What I'm talking about more are leaves, blossoms and bark. You don't actually eat bark, but you use bark as a flavoring agent.

LRK: Let's start with blossoms -- what kind of blossoms?

HS: The general rule is if the thing that the blossom is going to turn into is edible, then the blossom itself is edible. I live in California so I've got almond trees all around. I will actually make a nice romantic liquor with almond blossoms.

LRK: You just put them in alcohol and let them sit?

HS: You do that. The thing about blossoms on any tree is they're very ephemeral. That's why everybody rushes down to D.C. for the cherry blossom festival.

When they're blooming and it’s a nice day, their aroma is going to be really powerful right in the morning, right after the dew is gone but before the weather gets warm. You pick as many as you can -- it takes a little while. You fill a mason jar full of the blossoms and then cover it with 100-proof vodka; I like the 100-proof because you get a little bit more extraction of flavor, color, and aroma that way. Then you just let it steep for two weeks in a dark place, strain it, and then put as much sugar as you want in there. It will dissolve and you have yourself a very nice, very aromatic, after-dinner drink. It smells like that spring morning.

LRK: That sounds wonderful. Would you ever infuse them? For instance, I'm thinking about the trick you do with herbs where you can put them in warm cream, let them sit, strain them and then you can make things with that cream and it will just be fabulous.

HS: You absolutely can. In fact, I do this with rose petals a lot -- you can have rose petal ice cream. It's not a tree so much, but it is the same basic idea. You can do a panna cotta, a pot de crème or something like that as well.

LRK: Do you ever eat leaves of trees?

HS: I don't know that I eat leaves per se. However, if you've ever had filé gumbo, that is the powdered dried leaf of the sassafras tree that grows everywhere east of the great plains. Not a lot of people know that magic powder that makes your gumbo thicker is actually the leaf of a common tree.

LRK: What I remember about sassafras is that it smells like root beer. Maybe I was playing with death, but when I was a kid I used to break off the twigs, we'd pound them and then we'd suck them.

HS: The roots are the root in root beer -- that's the root beer taste. But the twigs that you and I chewed as little kids, they had green bark, they're very distinctive. That bark on the twigs, that tastes like Froot Loops -- it's totally cool.

LRK: Isn't there something toxic about sassafras?

HS: Quasi -- if you were to eat it a lot over a long period of time, there's some research that suggests that maybe, it might kind of, sort of, be bad for you. But the one study that a lot of people will cite involved safrole, which is the element that they're looking at in the sassafras tree. Basically they fed rats about the equivalent of drinking 3 gallons of root beer every day for 6 months, and then lo and behold, they got sick. Provided your consumption is moderate, I see no problem with it. People have been making sassafras tea and drinking real honest-to-god root beer for centuries.

LRK: What else can you do with bark?

HS: One of my favorite things to do with bark is to use it kind of like a tea. If you've heard of birch beer, that's the bark of a grey birch tree. No matter where you are in this country, there's a bark that you can use. If you are in the East, there's hickory bark, the shagbark hickory. If you are in mountain areas, you've got ponderosa pine, which is a really special bark because that has a butterscotchy note to it. If you're in the West, you have a tree called a madrone. That bark will pop and curl exactly like a cinnamon curl -- it looks just like cinnamon except it's much more delicate -- and it actually has something of a cinnamon flavor to it. Just like we were talking about infusing rose petal ice cream, you get an amazing woodsy, butterscotchy, smokey or cinnamony flavor -- you get a lot of complex flavors from these barks. I will make ice creams with them.

Have you ever had a Chinese tea egg?

LRK: Where the egg has actually been cooked in the tea in the shell?

HS: Yes, and it has that beautiful spider-web pattern on it.

LRK: Yes, it's gorgeous.

HS: Do that with these infused barks. It will curl your hair -- it's a great, really cool, wild snack that I guarantee you nobody's ever had before.

Madrone Tea Bark Eggs

I don't know if you've ever heard about spruce tips or fir tips in cooking? They are a really special ingredient. It's the very tip of the growing tree, it’s a springtime deal, and it's super light green. You know how everything is normally pine green but the growing tips are very light -- they're full of vitamin C. In fact, they taste disturbingly like a lime. The problem is you have to kind of pick your way through, because Tree A may taste more like turpentine than lime, but Tree B might taste super, super citrusy and very, very sweet with no resiny aftertaste at all. Spruce trees and Douglas firs are two excellent trees to work with those tips. You can actually eat them straight.

LRK: Really? You just snack on them as you walk through the forest then?

HS: I do, actually, because that also helps me figure out which tree is the one I want to go back to.

Saliva the superhero: The science behind how we eat

lkaliebe — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 18:11:45 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

iStockphoto

Mary Roach, author of Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, shares what she discovered about the science of how we eat: saliva's superpowers, our second set of nostrils, and how we use our ears and nose to taste food.

Mary Roach (Chris Hardy)

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: I looked at this whole book, and I have to say, one of the things that really grabbed me was saliva. You make saliva sound like a superhero.

Mary Roach: It’s true, saliva is the most misunderstood substance; it’s the Rodney Dangerfield of bodily products -- I feel that it is. It really is fairly miraculous. People associate it with bacteria, but in fact it has these amazing antibacterial and antiviral properties. It protects your teeth. I don’t even know where to begin.

LRK: Why do we say that our mouths are this breeding place for all this harmful stuff? What’s the good side of saliva in this case?

MR: It’s a bizarre thing because in fact there is bacteria every time you eat something; when you put your finger in your mouth, you are introducing bacteria. Of course it is warm and moist, so it’s this perfect playground for bacteria.

But on the other hand, they have done these studies that have shown that if you don’t let an animal lick its wounds -- this was done with rodents -- the wound will heal more slowly. In other words, if they are allowed to rub this disgusting substance into the wound, it heals more quickly. It contains things like nerve growth factor and skin growth factor. Human saliva has something called histatins, which means wound closure. So someone needs to bottle this stuff.

Of course in humans, one of the main things that saliva does is start to break down some of the things like starch. In fact amylase, which is the enzyme that breaks down starch, is one of the same enzymes that you find in laundry detergent. Essentially laundry detergent is a digestive tract in a box, it’s got three different digestive enzymes.

I asked an expert: Is it then the case that if you dribble something in a restaurant -- where you get something on your clothes -- shouldn’t you just put a dab of saliva on it? Doesn’t that make more sense than soda water? I couldn’t get him to admit that he puts spit on his own clothes. He carries a Tide Stain pen, sadly, but I’m going to continue to do that.

LRK: Why is it when I think of something delicious, my mouth waters?

MR: Now this is one of the weirdest things. I came across not one but two studies that were done, looking into whether in fact the smell of food or the sight of food causes the mouth to water. One of them was done in the 1960s by someone named Alexander Kerr; it was a laboratory study where he had people come into the lab. First of all, they were hungry. They hadn’t eaten, and he started frying eggs in front of them. You had that sight, the smell, the sound. He had outfitted them with a salivary-detection device -- a type II outflow recorder I believe was the device -- and in fact there was not an increase in their outflow. The subjects themselves were like, “No, that’s wrong, I can feel it.” And, he said, “No, no, no, when you are thinking about food, you are suddenly aware of your mouth and you are thinking about the saliva that has been there all along.”

I have seen the study and I still don’t believe it. It's just your body preparing to begin the process of moistening food. The basic thing that saliva does is moisten -- when you chew it up, it forms a bolis, a long cylindrical blob that you can easily swallow. So it’s holding the pieces together. Saliva is helping you swallow; when you see food, you're just giving the heads up that food is coming, sort of getting the machinery working.

LRK: You mentioned smell -- there’s something else that you talked about in the book: two sets of nostrils?

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

MR: Yes, this was news to me. You have a set of internal nostrils. They’re called the posterior nares -- nares meaning nostrils in the back of the mouth. They are the opening between the mouth and the nasal cavity and the soft palate; you have this passageway such that when you are chewing food or you have wine in your mouth, a lot of the flavor components are olfactory. They come up through those nostrils into the top of the nasal cavity, which is where all of the smelling goes on -- the olfactory epithelium. So you have two kinds of smelling that you do with your external nostrils and internal nostrils.

LRK: Are those two different areas experiencing scent in different ways?

MR: Yes. The exterior nostrils, the ones that most people are familiar with, work on the inhale, and the internal nostrils are more on the exhale. If you’ve got wine in your mouth and you exhale, you are wafting wine in your lungs up out of your nose. You are carrying those volatiles, those lovely flavor components, up through the nose and out, so you are getting a second whammy on the olfactory components of whatever it is that is in your mouth. Once I learned that, I have now become this weird person who holds food in her mouth and exhales through the nose -- to me, most of the aroma happens when you do that.

LRK: At this moment, you have changed how at least a part of America is going to be eating in the future. You actually found a crunch expert?

MR: I did, in the Netherlands. He studied the physics of crispy-crunchy for going on 7 years. Oddly, the man told me, “I actually don’t like chips and such,” which I found fascinating.

It’s true that we eat to a certain extent with our ears. That loud, satisfying crunch of a potato chip: It's called a brittle fracture. What’s going on is that you are slowly destroying the structure. The energy is building up, then it breaks and suddenly gives way, and the energy is released very, very quickly and the crack forms so fast it actually travels at the speed of sound. What you are hearing is a tiny sonic boom in your mouth. Who knew?

If you break it down, it’s actually 100 tiny bubbles bursting. It signals to you that this is something fresh, so perhaps evolutionary-speaking this is something that told us, “Aha, this is fresh. It is not rotting. It’s got all its nutritional goodness.” So it’s something we like; we are drawn to it.

LRK: Can you set it up so that I can’t hear what I am eating, but I am still eating that same crunchy potato chip? Is there a different reaction?

MR: There’s a study -- I love food science, I love that someone did this study. But they either muted the sound as someone is eating the chips or they knocked out the higher registers and are playing back a false sound to the person. Then they ask them to rate the freshness of that chip. People will say, “No, this is staler.” It actually overrides the physical sensation in the mouth.

Are Google+ Hangouts the future of cooking demonstrations?

lkaliebe — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:07:47 +0000

David Leite

Some chefs are using Google+ Hangouts, which allow users to create their own virtual cooking demonstrations and broadcast them publicly. Ria Tobaccowala, a product marketing manager at Google, tells us about the future of the platform in the food community.

David Leite: A lot of people don’t know what Google+ Hangouts are. Can you explain?

Ria Tobaccowala: Google+ Hangouts are a feature of Google+, which is Google’s social platform. What Google+ Hangouts allows you to do is video chat with up to nine other people at once for free. You can also do public hangouts with up to nine people, which is actually broadcast publicly so others can watch on your Google+ profile or page and your YouTube channel.

DL: It does get recorded and then put on your YouTube channel?

RT: Yes, if you decide to do what we call a Hangout on air.

DL: So the entire world can see what you are doing?

RT: Yes.

DL: How did this move over to the food community? It’s very active there.

RT: Yes, it’s super active. In the early days, the summer of 2011, a lot of folks joined the platform and started experimenting -- that’s when the cooking community really started. A few early Google+ users were tinkering with Hangouts just because they loved to cook. Through them cooking with each other via Hangouts, it kind of created this new idea of a cooking demonstration.

Food bloggers and amateur chefs really took this Hangout technology and created this cooking show. What we’ve seen is that what a few early users did is now commonplace. Even better than that is major publications such as the The New York Times and Bon Appetit and well-known chefs such as Jamie Oliver started doing their own cooking demonstrations.

DL: They are doing them live and anyone in the world can ask Jamie Oliver a question?

RT: Anyone in the world.

DL: What is the impact of this? Suddenly we have thousands and thousands of people from Jamie Oliver all the way down to your next-door neighbor teaching each other how to cook.

RT: Right, the platform is elevating new voices that wouldn’t normally be heard in traditional media. In the music space, we saw someone like Justin Bieber, who was an Internet sensation before he went mainstream. We are coming pretty close to the point where the Justin Bieber in the cooking space might be discovered on Google+ and become the next great chef.

DL: Is there anyone out there that you think might be the new Justin Bieber of the food world?

RT: Sure, we’ve been noticing a few folks on Google+. One in particular is Larry Fournillier, who is from the Caribbean. He does a series of Caribbean cooking shows weekly. He has now over almost 1 million followers on the platform; it has been pretty amazing to see him grow his following and become a personality on the platform.

DL: I want you to jump 5 years into the future: Where do you think all of this will be -- Google+ Hangouts, teaching each other, communicating back-and-forth online?

RT: With the continued popularity and growth of web-based media, I think maybe in time Google+ may become the next Food Network. Instead of tuning into your TV to learn new recipes and techniques, you log onto your computer at any time and watch and join Hangouts and interact with others in real time. So we are really moving forward from sitting and watching something and just consuming regular content to being able to interact in real time with others around shared interests and passions.

DL: Do you think that there will be financial opportunities for people who are producing this content?

RT: Definitely. Similar to how you can monetize through advertising and subscription, the same will be true with Hangouts in the future. It will really take the imagination of those using the technology to make that happen.

DL: I think there will be a lot of producers out there thinking long and hard about how they can create their own Internet show.

Artisan varieties make plain table salt a four-letter word

lkaliebe — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 15:55:20 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

iStockphoto

Salt is a big deal now. That shaker of Morton’s is cowering in a corner overpowered by status salts with pedigrees and provenances. Mark Bitterman sells salts at his shop, The Meadow, in Portland, Ore., and New York.

He sells 120 different salts to be specific, but trend wasn’t his motivation. When he was a student backpacking in France, he saw that cooks travelled with their own salts. As he traveled the world, he collected the local sodium chlorides, he studied and his opinions evolved. The result is a book: Salted: A Manifesto on the World’s Most Essential Mineral.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: You’ve killed a culinary icon. Could you please read from the kosher salt entry in your book?

Mark Bitterman: I’d be glad to.

Kosher salt is a processed food, with all mineral and moisture qualities intrinsic to real salt stripped away, and with a crystal structure fabricated by automated processes. The flavor is antiseptic, like the bright fluorescence of a laboratory on a spaceship drifting aimlessly away from earth. The texture crackles and bounces on your tongue like an undead pet, a battery-operated puppy with no hair, trying to comfort you with its soulless antics. When we cook with kosher salt we sanctify the artificial, we embrace emptiness, we become unfit for our posts -- a nakedness far worse than embarrassment.

LRK: You do not mince words. How did you come to have these strong opinions about salt?

Preserved Lemons

MB: Honestly, I didn’t know I had strong opinions until I was speaking more publicly about it. Because to me, I feel passionately about all food and I think that salt is something that has this amazing natural diversity -- this natural authenticity to it -- that we connect to and you can see it and you can taste it. When you find the right salt on the right food and it just explodes in your mouth, you get this incredibly new, more vital and exciting flavor. It’s sort of like an affirmation of this quest for something more authentic and exciting in food.

LRK: This is one of those things that you never think about.

MB: I think that’s just it. We take salt for granted. It’s a four-letter word for this white, homogenous, industrialized, standardized product at the bottom of the supermarket shelves. There is nowhere historically that we have been eating this. This is something that was invented about 150 years ago with the advent of the modern chemical industry. Iodized salt, a lot of these cheap sea salts, kosher salt, rock salts, they are all pure, refined sodium chloride and have nothing to do with the natural food that salt has been for thousands of years.

LRK: What are examples that really make salt exciting?

MB: I think whenever you find a salt that was made with such deliberation, with such intensity of purpose, that’s very exciting. This happens more often than you might think. Where I see it happening most often, sort of on a cultural level, is in Japan. There are a number of Japanese salts that are just truly spectacular in what they put into the salt to make them come out the way they have.

A good example would be Shinkai Deep Sea Salt from Japan, which is harvested with seawater that is 3,000 feet under the ocean. They pull the seawater up; they bring it into a greenhouse; they spray that water onto bamboo mats that are suspended from the ceiling of the greenhouse; and that water slowly trickles down and evaporates as it trickles down. They repeat that process for days until they have a concentrated brine. They then take that concentrated brine, put it in a big caldron over a wood fire and stir it continuously without cease, day and night with a wooden paddle, until slowly the crystals form. All the deep-water minerals of magnesium and other minerals get bound up in the lattice of the crystals and you have this super, super fine -- almost frond-like flakes -- that form. It’s this paralyzing, bright, white with a bittersweet taste. That salt sprinkled on top of something fresh and simple is one of the most incredible experiences there is.

LRK: At 3,000 feet you have minerals that you wouldn’t have at another level?

MB: What’s interesting is that in the ocean there is something called the halocline. As the ocean gets deeper, the water gets saltier and different salts pervade. There are many different kinds of salts in the ocean, not just sodium chloride -- the balance and concentration of the salts changes as you get deeper. The Japanese have a real fascination with this. There are even salts that they have made where they combine water from shallow currents and deep currents to make a salt. They are very, very sensitive to these nuances.

LRK: What does a salt like that cost?

MB: It is not inexpensive by comparison to what we are used to paying for salt. A little jar like that might cost you $10-15 for a few ounces, but you only use a pinch at a time. So the per-serving cost is a couple pennies.

LRK: Most of the salts that you talk about that have distinctive flavors, you would be using these at the end of cooking where their flavors would really make a difference in a dish?

MB: That is something that we generally preach in our store: to skew the use of salt toward the end of the food preparation. This is not to say that you shouldn’t cook with salt, but there are many times when you can use less salt or no salt at all while you are cooking. That gives you the option to put salt on at the end where the salt has autonomy, where it can show its colors, where it can interact and play with the food a little bit more vibrantly.

LRK: I realize this is like asking you to pick your favorite child, but do you have a salt that you like as your “everyday” salt?

MB: We have a sel gris. Sel gris is a type of sea salt that is evaporated in open crystallizing pans under the sun. The crystals form on the bottom of the pan and they are then raked up everyday. They have this beautiful coarse texture -- they have a lot of moisture, like 13 percent residual moisture inside of the crystal -- so it has this very pliant, yielding, crystal crunch to it. It also has this beautiful resiliency on food: You can use it as a finishing salt on hearty foods like steak, lamb or root vegetables, but it’s also inexpensive. It’s readily available everywhere; it’s mineral-rich, all-natural and harvested by hand. You can use it in your pasta water, in blanching your veggie water; you can grind it up a little with a mortar and pestle for your baking -- it’s very versatile.

LRK: It could replace kosher salt.

MB: Absolutely. It takes some adjustment to use it.

Tags:

salt

Listen, don't look, to your artichoke: The squeak says it all

lkaliebe — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 14:46:22 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

iStockphoto

Russ Parsons is what you might call a food writer’s food writer. He’s been a food and wine journalist for the Los Angeles Times for more than two decades, has garnered an armload of awards and has written How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table. Parsons shares the ABCs of artichokes -- from how to “squeak” them to test for freshness to how to harness the compound that makes them taste so sweet.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: Is it true that artichokes only come from one town in California?

Artichokes Stuffed with Ham and Pine Nuts

Russ Parsons: There is one town in California named Castroville. It’s a little, little burg just north of Monterey, right on the Pacific Ocean. From within 10 miles of that town come something like 85 percent of all the artichokes that are grown in the U.S. It’s a relic of an old kind of agriculture from when people didn’t really eat artichokes that much.

LRK: When are they in season?

RP: Artichokes have two prime seasons, and there’s a slump in the middle where they slow down. It’s early in the spring and then late in the summer, like late summer-early fall. In between, they’re available, but they don’t bear as heavily, so there aren’t quite as many of them and they’re likely to be more expensive.

LRK: When you’re buying artichokes what should you look for?

RP: The first thing that you look for with an artichoke isn’t something that you actually look for. Pick it up, hold it next to your ear and give it a good squeeze. If you hear a squeak, that’s a good sign. What happens with artichokes is the leaves lose their crispness. When they’re squeaking like that and they offer some resistance, that’s a really good sign. Don’t worry about black spots on the outside or on the cut end of the stem. Artichokes have an enzyme in them that starts to blacken immediately when it’s in contact with the air.

When you’re peeling artichokes and you’re cutting them up, you want to minimize their contact with the air as much as possible because it will show up in the dish. When you’ve cut up an artichoke, put it in water into which you’ve squeezed a lemon. The water will keep the oxygen away; the acidity from the lemon will delay the bad enzymatic reaction.

LRK: How long will an artichoke keep? How should you store it?

RP: They’ll keep probably a week in the refrigerator. You want to keep them in a bag but you don’t want to wash them first. There’s a tendency sometimes to wash them first, but if there’s any moisture on the surface, that will start to break down the peel and it’ll let in infection.

LRK: You say something in the book that’s interesting: If you cook them for a brief amount of time, they have one flavor, and if you cook them for a long time, they have another flavor.

RP: Artichokes contain a compound called cynarin and it has this weird capacity of turning everything you taste afterward sweet. But it’s also heat-volatile, so if you cook artichokes very briefly, you get that artichoke reaction where you drink a glass of water and the water tastes sweet. In those cases, I think it’s great to pair it with as many big flavors as you can. Pair them with black olives and lots of garlic and lemon; really build it up.

If you cook it for longer at a low heat, what happens is it simmers and that cynarin starts to vaporize and go away. What’s left behind is sweet, but not that kind of metallic sweetness. It’s a much more subtle flavor that you need to pair with more subdued flavors: prosciutto, cream and things like that.

LRK: Do you ever eat them raw?

RP: They’re great raw. What you need to do is peel it down to the heart and then shave it very, very thinly on a mandoline or one of those little Japanese mandolines. Then toss them with some lemon juice and olive oil, and shave some Parmigiano-Reggiano over it. That’s a really great salad.

Tags:

artichokes

Tea for two

akruse — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:22:32 +0000

The Perennial Plate

Our first love story from the road: We came to Sri Lanka with every intention of filming a video about an organic, fair trade tea farmer. That is exactly what we were planning when we set foot on the small tea farm of Piyasena and his wife Ariyawatha. What we didnt expect was to be so taken with the relationship between the two of them. What started as a farm story quickly turned into a story about love and dedication amongst the Ceylon tea fields. ps. Mirra and I are getting Married!

Tea for Two from The Perennial Plate on Vimeo.

Why don't we say 'bon appetit' (or anything at all) in America?

lkaliebe — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:43:37 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

iStockphoto

Bethanne Patrick has attempted to lasso together a huge subject: how man has civilized himself through manners, aka rules of engagement, at the table and elsewhere. She is author of An Uncommon History of Common Courtesy.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: You’ve been studying courtesy. Most of us think we know what it means, but what did you find?

Bethanne Patrick (Mark Thiessen/National Geographic)

Bethanne Patrick: The thing that I found about courtesy is that we have different rules about it and we call those rules “manners.” But basic courtesy is really the same almost everywhere: It’s about how you treat others. It’s about thinking about other people before you think of yourself, thinking of their comfort before you consider your own comfort. I’m not an anthropologist, I’m not a sociologist, but in everything that I researched, that’s what I found. The Golden Rule is not something that is only Judeo-Christian; there have been versions of it all around the world for thousands of years.

LRK: You write in your book that many different parts of the world have something they traditionally say when they sit down to a meal -- and we don’t.

BP: I don’t know why we simply do not say “good appetite,” because that’s what the other cultures say. Of course, we all know from our beloved Julia Child here in the U.S. that the French say “bon appetit.” In Germany they say “guten appetit” and people say “gleichfalls,” meaning “likewise.” “Buen provecho” is something that’s often spoken in Latin American and Spanish-speaking countries. All over the world, people will say at the beginning of a meal, “Eat well; have a good appetite.”

Maybe we’re a little bit shy about saying that as English-speakers. It could be because England and France have been in a rivalry, both formal and informal, for hundreds of years. It could be because we just found it to be a little old-fashioned. But it’s a shame, because I think it’s wonderful to say to your fellow companions and diners that you want them to eat well and heartily.

LRK: It is odd that we don’t do that. What are some of the most striking food customs that you found?

An Uncommon History of Common Courtesy

BP: There's a Burmese custom that has to do with saying “you’re welcome.” I’m really interested in this because we say “you’re welcome” -- it’s simply a phrase. But in certain parts of Burma, when you send an invitation to, say, the celebration of a baby’s birth or to a wedding, the houses in the village that accept the invitation will then receive a delivery from the person who invited them: a pickled tea leaf salad, known as “lahpet,” though the spelling varies. It’s something that the person doing the invite sends out to say, “Thank you so much for accepting my invitation.” It’s a sort of “you’re welcome” gift. That was one that I absolutely loved.

Another one that I think is really fun is why our bread knives are blunt. That actually has a couple of different interpretations. It’s the same time period -- 17th-century France. Some people say that was because the king didn’t want fighting with pointed objects at the table, and of course that makes a certain amount of sense. But there’s also another story: Cardinal Richelieu, who is quite well known in history, decided too many of the people at the court were picking their teeth with their knives. He decided that the blunt ends would make people look a little less savage while they were at the table. He was trying to make things a little bit more refined.

LRK: What about gifts?

BP: Japan has etiquette that is really very formalized. Now I use “etiquette” rather than “manners” because etiquette, which is a word from the French from the 17th century, is how you treat people in a hierarchy. In Japan, you have different rules for the kind of gift you would give to your boss than to the kind of gift you would give to a family member.

Let’s say you’re invited to a business dinner in Japan. An American might say, “I’m going to go out and buy one of those funny little packs of cocktail napkins with a joke on them and that’ll be a lovely gift.” Not so if you’re going to a dinner party in Kyoto. You really are probably best off going to a department store where they have a section for gifts for hostesses. In Japan, the presentation is far more important than the gift. You can give something very lovely, a good bottle of Scotch or a set of lovely linen dinner napkins, but the way it’s wrapped and the way that the wrapping is presented is more important than whatever is inside.

One of the things that I like about this is that they also have a tradition -- although the wrapping may seem very elaborate and you’re thinking, “Why bother?” -- often that elaborate wrapping is reusable. The Japanese have one kind of wrapping called “furoshiki” and those are oblongs of cloth; they can be really beautiful, anything from a humble print to a gorgeous piece of silk. The way that the furoshiki is tied often has messages and symbolism. You can say congratulations with one kind of knot and condolences with another.

China's dark tea: Ancient yet largely unknown to Americans

lkaliebe — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 18:32:19 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

Bill Waddington

Even after thousands of years being brewed by a major portion of the world, there are still new things to discover about tea. Tea merchant Bill Waddington recently discovered one of Western China’s hidden secrets: dark tea.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: Where have you been and is there a new revelation for you?

Bill Waddington next to a log of dark tea

Bill Waddington: I’ve been in Western China, which doesn’t get many visitors, especially tea merchants, even though they’ve been making tea there for about 2,000 years. One thing I discovered when I was there was that I have led you astray over the last couple of years. I’ve always told you there are five categories of tea: black, oolong, green, white and pu-erh. Pu-erh is that real earthy tea. I was wrong, and I just learned it over the last few years.

LRK: It’s not just that you’ve been leading me astray; this is what most books tell you are the categories of tea.

BW: Absolutely -- and they’re wrong. There are five categories of tea: black, oolong, green and white, but not pu-erh. The fifth category of tea is something called dark tea, and I just stumbled across it about 4 or 5 years ago in Western China while looking for strange teas. Boy did I find an unusual tea.

LRK: What is dark tea?

BW: Dark tea -- the Chinese name is “hei cha,” literally dark tea -- is any tea that goes through a secondary fermentation process, sometimes called a post-production process. In other words, they make a tea, typically a basic green tea, and then they go through a secondary manufacturing process.

LRK: You’re going to have to walk me through this. Green tea is made how?

BW: Green tea is made through a little bit of withering, a little bit of drying and a little bit of shaping of the leaf; that’s about it.

LRK: So there’s no fermentation? It’s just dried and then it’s sort of heated?

BW: It’s fired at the end to kill any enzymes in the plant so the leaf doesn’t break down.

LRK: Then what happens to make it dark tea?

BW: Then they’ll take that tea and they’ll put it through a secondary fermentation process; a slight fermentation occurs in the beginning, but they’ll go through a post-production fermentation process. Two interesting things happen during this secondary process. Number one, a microbe, a living organism or a microorganism, naturally comes into the tea leaves during this secondary post-production process, so it becomes a probiotic product. Also, aging is involved, so it’s done over a period of time. You have this microorganism working on the tea leaf over a period of time from a couple months to years sometimes, and it changes the very nature and the chemistry of the leaf and the liquor itself. It’s pretty astounding.

Pu-erh at a tea shop in Beijing

I should mention pu-erh is a sub-, sub-category of dark tea, but what I discovered on my recent journeys is the world of dark tea is much, much larger than just pu-erh. There are all these other dark teas that are in China, almost all made in Western China, that the West, Europe, the Americas, have never seen before. There are two or three gigantic mountain ranges and 2,000 miles between where these teas come from and the sea coasts where Europeans and Americans have always bought their teas. They’ve made these teas forever, but they always shipped them west to Tibet, Mongolia, and eastern Russia. They’ve been around forever, but it’s a long way to get these teas to the sea coast, so they always shipped them the other direction. Americans and Europeans just know the teas from the coastal regions.

LRK: Are they very rare?

BW: These were originally produced by the government 1,400 years ago, and they’re an everyman tea. They wanted the common people of China to have a really nice tea so these are not expensive teas, which I love, and they’re definitely geared toward everyday consumption. But they’re wonderful flavors.

LRK: How are they drunk? Do you have these with food?

BW: They’re drunk all day long. They’re often drunk after meals as almost a digestive. I wouldn’t make any health claims on that, but the Chinese swear it and it does taste and feel wonderful.

The dark tea “hei cha” is a great all-day drinking tea. The first steeping of the little cube of tea barely breaks apart the tea leaves. You can re-steep this tea literally five, six, seven, eight times. Just re-steep the same leaves.

LRK: You have brought into the studio a log of dark tea that is 2-and-a-half feet long and it’s in a cloth sack and a bamboo holder. It is about 5 inches across; it looks about the size of a rolled-up yoga mat.

BW: This is compressed tea. It weighs about 20 pounds, but they’ll even make an 80-pound log of tea and you just cut off a disc or break off a piece. It’s made to travel over the Himalayas -- this was the first tea over the Tea Horse Road and the Silk Road. It was used as currency; they would cut off a chunk and buy a horse with it or whatever they needed. And it’s still made and enjoyed throughout Western China in particular today.

L.A. hot dog vendors go beyond New York, Chicago styles

lkaliebe — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 17:12:10 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

iStockphoto

The dog has come to Tinseltown: In the land of the Real Housewives, Brad and Angelina, and the Kardashians, the hot dog is putting on the Ritz in Los Angeles. Jessica Gelt’s story about the hot dog renaissance, “It’s a dog town,” appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: Hot dogs are coming to Los Angeles. What is this about?

Jessica Gelt: There has been this hot dog renaissance in the city in the past couple of years. Prior to that it was gourmet burgers, often with grass-fed beef and fancy toppings, and everybody was going for them. It is hot dogs now. That seemed to be coming a bit out of the recession -- the street food renaissance here in Los Angeles, and the food carts -- so it kind of makes sense. There have been a lot of openings of new hot dog restaurants in the city, especially over the past year.

LRK: What are the manifestations? There’s so much imagination in L.A., I don’t picture that this is going to be the usual “some mustard, some sauerkraut” and that kind of thing. There has to be some really great, loopy stuff going on.

JG: One of the places I wrote about in the article was a place called Dog Haus, which is doing all kinds of crazy things: chili con carne and Fritos on Hawaiian bread, tater tots on hot dogs, and eggs and bacon -- very elaborate creations. Then there are places that are just doing traditional, New York-, Chicago- and Detroit-style hot dogs too, because L.A. is the melting pot of not only cultures, but cities from across America. You’ve got Coney Dog opening up, specializing in strictly Detroit-style hot dogs. But even the owner of Coney Dog actually ended up putting an L.A. dog on his Coney Dog menu. An L.A. dog is a hot dog wrapped in bacon and served with jalapenos, mayonnaise and mustard. We call it a danger dog -- that’s the dog we serve here in L.A. that you’ll find on every street corner and outside of every Dodgers game.

LRK: This is a real education. What’s a Detroit dog?

JG: A Detroit dog is typically a beef dog, although a Coney dog is 80 percent beef, 20 percent pork with a little bit of milk. It’s generally served with a beanless chili -- very, very creamy -- and a little bit of mustard and diced onions. We’ve got that.

We had Papaya King open here this past year -- a chain that opened in 1932 in New York City -- which came to Hollywood for the first time. A New York dog will be mustard and sauerkraut. Papaya King has all kinds of creations as well.

LRK: I think of California and L.A. as health-conscious, so is there a super healthy dog?

JG: There’s a place called The Federal Bar in North Hollywood that does something called the Vegan Weena, which is a meatless dog. I think a few places will offer that option. You won’t find that on a street corner, of course.

LRK: Has the hot dog made the white tablecloth scene? The burger did.

JG: You’ll find them, but right now they haven’t gone five-star yet. I think that’s coming; I don’t think that’s far down the road considering the way that it’s looking for us.

LRK: How about celebrity sightings?

JG: A good sighting was Drew Barrymore sitting on a curb eating a Papaya King dog, and then the Coney Dog was opened by Mike Binder, the actor/comedian/producer, so a lot of his celebrity friends love to go. I believe Adam Sandler is a silent partner in that. Todd Phillips, who was the director of The Hangover, came in and told Mike Binder, “I love your food, but why can’t I get this dog with sauerkraut?” So Binder introduced a sauerkraut dog on his menu. Everything gets mixed up here in L.A., especially when it comes to what the hotshots want to eat.

Sell you on sardines? They're cheap, healthy and sustainable

lkaliebe — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 16:32:47 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

iStockphoto

Former chef Barton Seaver has been cooking from the sea since he was a little kid. Now he’s a National Geographic explorer working to re-establish healthy oceans and author of For Cod and Country: Simple, Delicious, Sustainable Cooking.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: What does it mean to buy fish in season?

Barton Seaver

Barton Seaver: Most of the fish that we eat are available to us year-round. However, just like vegetables, each fish has a season in which it is the most plump, flavorful, juicy, and available, and is the cheapest. That’s something we’ve largely forgotten about seafood, but it’s something that is worth celebrating; just as much as the first strawberry of spring or asparagus, so too is that first plump, rich salmon coming back up into the streams.

LRK: Which fish are best in the spring?

BS: Many of our favorites really become available. It’s halibut and sablefish season in Alaska; the beginning of the legendary salmon runs on the West Coast; blue crabs, both hard-shell and soft-shell, over on my coast, the East Coast; the shad runs of the Connecticut River in New England; and squid are really available year-round as well. When those fish are delivered as fresh as they can be in the spring, the flesh is just pristine and pure with all the flavors and the aromas. It takes so little to cook them; it’s so easy, it’s so much fun and cheap.

LRK: I would imagine herring and sardines have the same kind of treatment?

BS: Absolutely -- and mackerel, one of my favorites, especially Spanish mackerel. There are a couple of different kinds of mackerel from Boston: chub and Spanish. But Spanish has the most dense flesh and it stands up well to a nice sauté or being made into a taco, something like that. It’s just a wonderful rich flavorful fish that takes on the flavors of lime and pico de gallo well and stands up to the fatty richness of guacamole. It’s a marvellously malleable flavor and something really worth eating. These are some of the very best fish for us in terms of omega-3 content, they can be low in toxicity and environmental toxins -- which is methylmercury -- and really all around good eating.

LRK: These are small fish too, so these little fish tend to be much less likely to have problems with toxicity?

Mackerel Melt

BS: Yes. Biotoxins such as methylmercury and PCBs [polychlorinated biphenyl] are aggregated through simply eating. A small fish eats less than a big fish over the course of its lifetime, and it’s just as simple an equation as that. It also depends on where they’re caught and the life cycle of each fish. There’s no steady, fast rule to this, but by and large, the smaller the fish the better. I don’t mean baby fish; let them grow up. But the fish that are naturally smaller are usually better for us.

LRK: Let’s go to the flipside of fresh: How about canned?

BS: I love thinking inside the can. Canned fish really represents not only some of the most economically viable meals, some of the best-for-us meals that we can find with seafood, but also some of the most sustainable as well. This is often a surprise to people.

Certainly tuna has its battles to fight, and there are sides to that, but canned tuna can be a really wonderful, sustainable, healthy product, especially when you start talking about pole-caught albacore or skipjack tunas -- the chunk light varieties usually include those two species. These are some of the wonderful, perfectly sustainable options that we have that are low in methylmercury.

Then look at some of the other canned products: sardines, mackerel, herring, pink salmon, clams, mussels, oysters, and my favorite, anchovies. I mean these are nearly across the board some of the very best things we should be eating. And talk about ease of Tuesday night, when you’re coming home from ballet and soccer and you’ve got a report due. Pull out two 7-ounce cans of pink salmon; drain it off; add a little bit of mayonnaise, fresh dill, bread crumbs, and lemon juice; throw it in the oven under a broiler; and in 10 minutes you’ve got a beautiful, pink, salmon cake, crisp and crunchy on one side, soft and moist all the way throughout, perfectly cooked. You’ve got your protein portion for four people for $4 or $5, you’re ready to roll with your broccoli and there you go.

LRK: Salmon is an easy sell. But sardines? Not easy. Sell me on canned sardines.

BS: Funny enough, our tastes are so subjugated to generational preference. Sardines were one of the most popular fish that we had in America; older generations just loved them. There’s nothing better than a sardine, especially to me, with those lightly smoked varieties packed in olive oil where the oil inside of the can takes on those luscious hues, the aroma of the smoke and the slight acid of the fish.

Use that oil in the vinaigrette itself: Mix it maybe with just a little bit of red wine vinegar and a spritz of lemon juice to really freshen it up, and whisk it with a little bit of mustard so you have this nice emulsified dressing with all of those flavors. Take some light spring greens with a little bit of spice to them, such as young mustard kale and arugula, and you mix it lightly with this vinaigrette. Maybe add some dried figs over the top and just a few of these filets of the sardine. Talk about an easy lunchtime meal -- just throw that together. It’s the Midwest nicoise.

What is the best way to hard boil an egg?

akruse — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 21:17:42 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

Hemera

Dear Lynne,

Why is it so difficult to hard boil an egg? I get a green ring around the yolk, or I peel the egg and take half the white with it.

–Susan in Teaneck

Dear Susan,

Eggs are not easy. Those innocent looking little ovoids are seething with complexes.

Peeling is tricky when the egg’s very fresh because it has a high acid content. Eggs closer to their expiration dates contain less acid, so they’re less likely to have those sticky shells. How you cook and cool them down makes a difference, too. Cook them in salted water to help firm the white. Once they’re done, cool them fast in cold running water.

Green rings come from the blending of iron and sulfur. That happens with overcooking, cooking at too high heat, or not cooling the eggs quickly enough.

Hard-cook eggs this way: Put cold eggs in a saucepan, in a single layer. Cover in cold water by about 1-1/2 inches. Add 1 teaspoon salt for every 4 eggs. Bring the water to a boil over medium high heat and then immediately lower heat so that the water bubbles very gently. Cook 3 minutes. Cover the pot, remove it from heat and let stand 15 minutes. Cool the eggs under cold running water. When they’re cold, peel or refrigerate up to 4 days.

-Lynne

Use your coconut: Working with the whole tree in Sri Lanka

lkaliebe — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 22:33:42 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

The Perennial Plate

The Perennial Plate could give you wanderlust really quickly … at least if you're curious about food. The weekly, online documentary series follows two people who travel the world learning -- and filming -- how people really eat in their home countries.

The duo, chef Daniel Klein and camerawoman Mirra Fine, find their way into home kitchens, onto farms and fishing boats. And they have a goal: 12 countries, in-depth, in 18 months. They've just returned from Sri Lanka.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: I was looking at some of the notes on your site, and you talk about a family in Sri Lanka that has a coconut plantation.

A coconut delivery wagon in Sri Lanka (The Perennial Plate)

Mirra Fine: Yes. For the people of Sri Lanka, the coconut is really a source of life. Not only because it is an ingredient that is found in most Sri Lankan foods, but also because the coconut tree itself, from the trunk to the leaves to the actual nut, is used in non-food elements of their life. So when we landed in Sri Lanka, we wanted to set out to discover all the uses of the coconut. We found a family who lived on and owned a coconut plantation.

LRK: Coconut palms are huge -- they are like skyscrapers. How did they work these trees?

MF: It's crazy: They free-climb up this 100-foot coconut tree.

Daniel Klein: I tried to climb up a coconut tree, by the way. I got about 3 feet.

MF: There are two ways that we saw how to climb a coconut tree. One is that they cut chunks of the coconut and tie it around the tree with rope made from fibers from the coconut. They tie these at intervals up the trunk.

LRK: Like a ladder.

MF: Yes, like a man-made ladder -- a very scary ladder. This guy will climb up using no nets or safety rope to the top of the tree to tap for toddy, which is a type of alcohol that comes from the sap of a coconut tree.

DK: It's like a coconut wine.

LRK: It's at the top of the tree where it has to be done?

MF: Yes. It's at the top of the tree where a shoot comes out that eventually turns into a flower that will eventually produce the nut. Before that flower comes out, they cut the bud. Then they will tie it off with a strap that's made from the actual coconut so that it can collect the sap. After 3 weeks, they go back up again and collect all the sap in a pot. They tightrope walk from the top of one coconut tree to the next.

LRK: How tall are these trees?

MF: These were at least 100 feet.

DK: They were really tall -- it's crazy. We put a camera on the guy's head for our videos, so you can see him scaling this tree and walking across.

MF: They pray to the tree before they climb up because they realize how dangerous it is. They know that they are lucky to be safe on each of these trees. They go from one tree to the next to collect all the sap, and they finally come down with what is known as sweet toddy, because it has not yet been fermented.

DK: Or it's fermented -- it's at about 1 percent alcohol at that point. So just overnight with the heat, it's already started to gain that fermentation. By that evening it will have gone up to 3 or 4 percent alcohol.

MF: But not fermented enough to be called toddy. The sweet toddy is amazing; we got to try it. It looks like lemonade in color and it tastes like sweet kombucha mixed with coconut.

DK: Coconut kombucha -- a little bit effervescent. I was shocked. It was alive with crazy flavor and coconut sweetness; it's really delicious. But also it had a lot of bees in it and different things.

LRK: So you want to filter it. Are they marketing this?

DK: They are selling really every part of the coconut. They are selling the toddy to a toddy producer, they are selling their husks to a rope producer, they are selling the oil to an oil producer, and then they use the coconuts for their own cooking and also to build huts and things like that.

LRK: Every part of that plant figures into their lives in some way.

MF: Every part. Their kitchen is outside of their house; it's in the back yard. It's a makeshift hut that is made almost entirely from the coconut tree. The structure is made out of beams that were made out of the trunk; the roof is made from the coconut tree leaves that were woven and dried. And in the open fire, the firewood came from the coconut trees.

LRK: As far as the food goes, we know about coconut milk and shredded coconut. What other ways are they used?

DK: Those are the primary uses, but they use them in many different ways. Coconut milk is used in just about every single dish. It’s one of the staples of Sri Lanka's sambal, which is shredded coconut -- they grind it over mortar and pestle, onions, chile, and sometimes dried fish or shrimp. They served it to us for breakfast with coconut rice; they cook rice and they pour in a little coconut milk at the end, let it sit, and then serve it.

Cooking with coconut in Sri Lanka (The Perennial Plate)

MF: In true island style, they made a coconut roti, which is like naan bread but a little more dense and round. And they made that by mixing flour with shaved coconut, making it into a patty, and then placing it on a huge leaf that they put on top of a hot plate, and then cooking it that way.

DK: And then of course there's the coconut water, which has become popular here. But there everywhere along the road, everyone is selling king coconuts just to crack open and drink. So I made it a point to have at least a coconut every day in Sri Lanka. They crack it open, they cut off a little piece, and they make a spoon out of the side of the coconut; then you scoop out the inside and you have this pudding.

Beer for people who hate beer

akruse — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 20:15:42 +0000

David Leite

Hemera

The flavor profiling system developed by Greg Engert separates beer into seven categories: crisp, hop, malt, roast, smoke, fruit and spice, and tart and funky. He has described each flavor, identified its notable styles and paired just the right foods.

But what about people who ... [gasp] ... don't like beer?

David Leite: I have to be upfront right here: I hate beer. I really do. I find it very bitter.

Greg Engert

Greg Engert: Well, that's a challenge, because beer’s calling card for most of our history has been bitterness. Hops is what gives beer its bitterness, and the roasted flavors you find in stouts and porters will give you an intense bitter quality. There's no way around that. I think you’re going to have trouble with most beers, but there are a couple different flavor categories we might be able to sneak in under your radar. We call these transitional categories.

The one that’s probably most approachable is the fruit and spice category, dominated by Belgian-style ales, which are now made all over the globe. These beers tend to be on the sweeter side. I would recommend Cellar Door from Stillwater Artisanal Ales.

For the wine drinker, I would go with a beer called Madame Rose from Goose Island in Chicago. It tastes more like a Burgundy red wine than it does your typical beer. That’s in the tart and funky category.

DL: What food would you pair with this?

GE: A number of things. I love lamb chops with this, because it’s got that red wine quality balancing against the gamey intensity of the lamb. Rib eye steaks, rich steaks, do well. This almost sauces the dish.

DL: Is it important to drink these out of glasses?

GE: Do not drink beer directly from the can or bottle, because flavor is 99 percent aroma. You should be swirling it like you would a fine wine. You should get your nose right in there.

Tags:

beer

Farming as a business: It's as much about marketing as growing

lkaliebe — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 19:37:23 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

Digital Vision

Everywhere I go, I meet people who see something broken in their local food system and decide to change it. For instance, many wannabe farmers are spending their savings on farms because they really believe in the local, sustainable, and organic movements. But many lose their shirts because beliefs don't pay the bills.

The Intervale Center set out to change that. Founded 25 years ago, Intervale is a school for potential farmers -- and far more. It's based within the city limits of Burlington, Vt., and Travis Marcotte is the center’s executive director.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: You train farmers. How do you do this?

Travis Marcotte

Travis Marcotte: We actually do a little bit of farmer training and we do a lot of other things to strengthen our food system. We manage about 350 acres here in the city limits of Burlington, and we use that landscape as a farm-based incubator where beginning farmers can come and actually test out their business model here on our property.

LRK: So, they're actually going to be growing on those acres?

TM: They get access to equipment, from greenhouses to tractors. Most importantly, I think, they gain access to what we call mentor farmers -- farmers who have great experience and knowledge that they can share with beginning farmers. What we're looking for are folks who have some farm experience, have a business plan for their concept, and really have demonstrated a lot of passion and an understanding of how hard this undertaking is going to be.

Farmers can leave here much better prepared to go to the bank, borrow that money and own that farm.

LRK: What's the hardest thing to teach?

TM: I think it's like any business or career: You can't really teach the passion piece, and so you've really got to make sure this is what people want to do. If they decide that the realities of it are not what they dreamed it would be, it's a great way to take a different path in life and not feel like you've risked it all on buying a farm.

LRK: Does it happen fairly often that people say, "You know, I've just found out it's not for me"?

TM: Not so much in our program, because there's a lot of work that we do on the front end. But in farming, in general, there's some real business aspects that you need to be really engaged in; there's marketing that you have to do. I think some folks do approach farming with this passion for growing things, but you also need to have that skill set around marketing and business management.

LRK: What else do you do at Intervale?

TM: We manage the 350 acres, and we do that in service to the community, so you have a place that's available for people to recreate and engage in farming. From there, we've really built a set of programs that helps farmers get in business, so that's the incubator program. We do business planning statewide with all different kinds of farms; that's the stay-in-business kind of program.

For example, the von Trapp Farmstead in Waitsfield, Vt., came to us. They've been milking cows. Mom, dad, and the two sons wanted to come back to the farm. In order for that farm to sustain the two sons, mom and dad, they thought if they added value to the milk in the form of cheese, then they could build a business that would really be successful for all of them.

We helped them build a plan that allowed them to launch the von Trapp Farmstead cheese line. In 2007, we started some work with them, and now they're very successful making cheese. It's those kinds of examples of business planning that we do around the state of Vermont that really help people stay in business and thrive.

Mario Batali guest-edits Food & Wine, ends up in bathtub

lkaliebe — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:36:14 +0000

Lynne Rossetto Kasper

Michael Turek

Mario Batali served as Food & Wine’s first-ever guest editor for the April 2013 issue. Batali and Dana Cowin, editor in chief of Food & Wine, reveal what goes on behind the scenes at the magazine.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: Dana, give us the lowdown. You've never had anyone as a guest editor on the magazine in all the years in print. So what happened with this guy?

Coppa and Gorgonzola Piadine

Dana Cowin: I hate to share the spotlight, but there's one guy with whom I’m willing to do that, and that is Mario Batali. Our readers love Italian food; they have an endless fascination for Italian every which way, and we've given it to them every which way except the all-Mario way. And let me tell you, this was the most fun I’ve had as a co-editor.

LRK: What's the scope of what an editor does? I don’t think most of us realize what goes on behind the scenes.

DC: In the case of asking Mario to be the guest editor, I had a few things on my wishlist. I wanted Mario to teach someone to cook because he's such an amazing teacher. He said, “Jimmy Fallon.” I said, “That will be good.”

We also wanted Mario to do an interview, because often editors will do interviews. Mario said, “What about Jim Harrison?” The amazing thing about having Mario do the Q-and-A, we didn’t give him any guidelines. We just said we want you to have an interesting conversation. It has to have something to do with food, and you take it from there. And Mario’s interview -- which we have the full transcript of -- it was masterful.

LRK: Mario, what was it like for you? You’ve never done this before.

Mario Batali: I’ve written, and I like to write, so I was excited about the prospect of writing, participating or seeing what happens in the world of editing. I had always assumed that there was this kind of grinding urgency as you approached the deadline. And maybe they put on airs for me -- this seemed like the most natural, flawless and fun way to put together a project that I’ve ever seen. It was just a blast. I’m always fascinated by how other people who do things really well do what they do. I got to see a pretty inside scope on this and it was great.

LRK: I have to know about the cooking lesson with Jimmy Fallon.

MB: Well, let’s just put it this way: It started in a swanky, rented apartment in New York City and we started cooking. By the end of the entire episode, me, Dana, and Jimmy are in the bathtub with a lot of strawberries. That’s all I have to say.

LRK: You are joking.

DC: He actually is not. It’s documented: It’s in the issue and it was very unexpected.

LRK: Should I ask, were you clothed or unclothed?

MB: You should ask. You know what? You should get the issue and check it out.

LRK: Now, Jim Harrison. You two have known each other forever. I personally find it difficult at times to interview people I really know; it’s hard to step back. So how did you treat this?

MB: I treated it like a conversation with Jim. It invariably -- very much like his books -- weaves a lot of wide textures together at the same time. We always talk about food, but we always talk about the outdoors, we talk about hunting, we talk about birds, we talk about dogs, we talk about places we like to sit, we talk about the way the wind smells on a Thursday afternoon when you’re in Livingston, Mont. He is exactly how he reads in real life; one of the greatest things about knowing him and then reading his books is that you hear him so clearly in every sentence.

LRK: What ended up, for you, being the thing that either gave you pause or you felt was really challenging?

Spring Pasta with Blistered Cherry Tomatoes

MB: There was one moment when we were discussing a particular pasta that I had given to one of the editors and they decided that they were going to put cherry tomatoes in it. And I’m like, “But this is in the April issue, right? You know there aren't cherry tomatoes in the northern hemisphere.” We dealt with it and it worked out well. That was the bumpiest of the bumps, though.

DC: To be fair, though, Mario was incredibly gracious. What he said was, “You know, this is not how I would do the pasta, but I understand covers,” because it was the cover pasta that we were talking about. And as we are cooking this together -- because I was not going to let this issue happen without getting a lesson from Mario, which is what I did accomplish with this cover recipe, so I wrote about it in my editor’s page -- in the middle of the lesson, Mario turns to me and goes, “You know, if we call this a Southern pasta, you would have cherry tomatoes in April, so I’m good with that.”

He came around, so it was OK. The other thing is that the cherry tomatoes that are on the cover still have their skins, whereas the first thing Mario taught me was you get the tomatoes on the vine, you pop them in a really hot oven, and then basically you just pluck the little skins off of them. So Mario probably would never have a skin on his tomato -- ever. He doesn’t like the way it feels on your teeth.

MB: That said, this cover looks beautiful.

DC: Thank you.

LRK: So Dana, are we going to see some other names on the masthead in the future? Are you thinking about doing this again?

DC: I hate to say it, but I think Mario sort of broke the mold. He was perfect; he can interview, he can write, he can teach, he was a pleasure. I don’t have a burning desire to do it again. You know, it was my first time in 18 years and it was a perfect experience. Sometimes you eat the perfect peach, you don’t have to have more dessert. I think I’ve got the perfect guest editor, so I’m not sure I need to have another one.