The Off Season Recipe Blog

When pain becomes a flavor

2012-02-01T19:31:00.000-08:00

I've tried. I really have. I can't manage much more than medium salsa; chile-wise, I'm a wimp. Needless to say, if I can barely handle jalapeños, and serranos are absolute torture to me, habaneros and their horrifying relatives are right out. I'm probably the last person who should be writing this. But who cares; it's food science.

Okay, capsaicin. The term itself is from the Capsicum genus, home of the numerous species of chile pepper, and a relative of the immense Solanum genus which includes tomatoes, nightshade, eggplant, potatoes, and quite a number of more exotic relatives, and the name is from the Greek καπτω (kaptw), meaning "bite". Oddly enough, capsaicin (best known outside culinary use as the active ingredient in pepper spray, as well as, ironically, a topical analgesic) is a vanillin analogue that triggers a receptor for vanilloid compounds in mammals; we'll get back to that.

So I was at Ring Bros. in Dennis last week; I don't go there often, but it's a high-end grocery store that provides space for several other businesses, including a wine shop, a pizzeria, a fishmonger, and an outpost of the legendary Montilio's Bakery from Brockton. Being the sort of place they are, they brought in a shipment of two of the world's hottest peppers, the Bhut Jolokia from India and Trinidad Scorpion Butch T from Australia. Words do not begin to do justice to these monsters; both are relatives of the previously mentioned habanero, but please understand that they are four to six times the average Scoville rating of habaneros, putting them in the same category as law-enforcement type pepper spray. That's right, these are literally weapons-grade chiles. (Here's some videos of insane people.) It is highly advised at the very least to wear gloves, a mask, and goggles while working with them.

So, let's say you're crazy enough to try to eat one of these things. (The Trinidads were about $15 for a rather small pouch; the Bhut Jolokias were $9.) What happens? Well, for starters, it triggers that vanillin receptor we mentioned above. And triggers it. And triggers it. And triggers it. And since capsaicin is not particularly given to dissolving in water, it will stay there until it's washed away somehow (milk and bread soaked in olive oil are generally recommended; beer and water might actually make it worse). Capsaicin doesn't actually cause chemical burns in the traditional sense; what it does is trick the body into creating an inflammation where there's no actual damage. This is mostly harmless, which is why it's used as a common ingredient in less-than-lethal weaponry, and has also largely replaced mace as a deterrent spray, but it can be a real issue for people with breathing problems; triggering inflammation in asthmatic lungs is usually a very bad idea. In fact, humans are a little unusual in that some of us seek to develop tolerance for extreme amounts of capsaicin; most mammals won't bother, and where the Bhut Jolokia and relatives are grown in India, they're frequently used as elephant repellent. The Ring Bros. circular describes the Bhut Jolokia as having something of a carrot-like favor before the searing pain sets in, and some hint of a mint-like flavor that may actually be your taste buds curling up and surrendering into a coma. It does not give tasting notes on the Scorpion.

This is all by way of explaining what exactly capsaicin is for to begin with. Like many plants, chiles developed to be eaten by animals and have the seeds spread in their droppings. However, chile seeds are generally crushed by grinding teeth in mammal mouths; birds, on the other hand, don't have teeth and pass them through undamaged. As a result, natural selection has selected out of early Capsicum specimens brightly colored fruit (which birds will see easily, but non-primate mammals, who generally have limited color perception, generally tend to have trouble picking out) and capsaicin fiercely concentrated in the area around the seeds so that even if a mammal takes a bite, it's likely to drop the fruit before finishing it. (That area -- the white placental material and the seeds -- is what you'd cut out to reduce the heat in a recipe.) In fact, you can even still find something very close to that primordial chile pepper that set the trap for the rest; it's called a chiltepin (Capsicum annuum v. glabriusculum), and it's the ancestor of the bell pepper, cayenne pepper, and jalapeño. There's four other species grown by humans -- C. chinense, C. frutescens, C. pubescens, and C. baccatum; the hottest single species is chinense but they can hybridize, and our thermonuclear friends mentioned above are among these... abominations.

I can't honestly understand the love some people have for excessive heat. I do know that the world centers for hot food are China (especially Hunan food), Southeast and South Asia, North America, the Caribbean, and the UK; as noted, the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T comes from Australia, so there's probably an English language connection as well. (I would also note that apparently some chimpanzees have developed a taste for fire ants, which means a desire for masochistic food might be in our genes.) But I'm not the sort of person who can understand the mentality that makes you want to want to chomp down on the botanical equivalent of nerve gas either. However, there are plenty of people who do, so I provide the following recipes:

Chicken Phaal: the name is from Bangladesh, but the "hottest curry in the world" is all Britain. This is the sort of thing you get to eat for free and have your picture on the wall of the restaurant if you can finish it.
Nuclear tacos: This looks like a Portuguese recipe, but you get the general idea. There's a place in Texas that serves them at SXSW every year, or at least used to.
Penne all'Arrabbiata: Okay, "angry penne" isn't supposed to be overwhelmingly spicy, but it is supposed to get you to sit up and take notice. If you're a hardcore chile-head, don't let mere moderation stop you.
Wolfgang Puck's Kung Pao Chicken: Rare indeed it is to find a Chinese recipe that made it into Chinese-American kitchens without getting beaten into something unrecognizable on its home turf, but Kung Pao chicken/shrimp/whatever is one of the very few. It's also arguably one of the most famous dishes ever to get that little chile pepper dingbat printed next to it on the menu.
Finally, although there's plenty of companies specializing in chile seeds out there, this one might have the most winceful name, and definitely some of the best tasting notes.

On Fire

2012-01-25T22:28:00.001-08:00

I got a Kindle Fire about a month after it came out and I've had some time to get used to it. My original Amazon review pointed out that the Fire suffered from a lot of the same issues that many 1.0 products do, and disappointingly, I haven't seen a whole lot of changes. The interface remains more flash than substance and still lacks features that the black and white Kindles take for granted, and there's still a hell of a lot of bugs in there. However, it's still a pretty decent bare-bones tablet, and I've had a chance to start coming up with a list of things I consider essential:

The Merriam-Webster dictionary app: The Oxford American Dictionary is a fine dictionary, but the Kindle interface to it is nearly unusable outside documents. The MW app is much faster to search and includes basic thesaurus material in each definition; the ad-supported base version is also free.
Adobe Reader for Android: The PDF rendering on the standard Kindle reader app seems to have serious issues with bitmapped pages, with a strange tendency to drop entire letters in the middle of words and a very poor antialiasing algorithm. Adobe Reader will handle those documents just fine.
FBReader: You won't need it much (the Fire seems to support epub documents reasonably well) but it helps to have around in case the Kindle app chokes on something it should be able to read.
Plucker and Calibre: the one-two punch of saving it for later. Although PalmOS is essentially dead but for those keeping old PalmPilots alive for the games, the Kindle Fire can sometimes manage web pages converted with Plucker, and for those it can't, Calibre (despite a truly horrific interface) will make short work of those and nearly any other imaginable file format.
Farproc Wifi Analyzer: So you know what's available around you. It's not Kismet, but it does enough.
PG Calculator: I have the free version, which comes with a handful of skins and basic scientific calculator functions. If you care to actually pay for it, you can create custom skins, though the Casio-like one it defaults to is fine. (I'll be playing with others as well, but since I recently got a TI Nspire-CX, my calculator needs are pretty well set for the foreseeable future, barring the sudden appearance of a killer app for the HP-50G.)
The B&N Nook app: Okay, you may not need this, but sometimes it's nice to be able to access Barnes and Noble's free samples when you're sitting in a store. You don't get the in-store full book access thing with the Android app, though.
FDroid and GetJar: From what I understand, you can run the Android App Store on the Fire, but you have to root it first. FDroid (free/open source only) and GetJar (free apps) can make up for that.

I have a notepad app, but it doesn't work very well; I haven't found a good PIM app either, but it's not essential to me because I take care of most of that with my iPod. And I can't really make any recommendations on books, since my tastes aren't everyone else's tastes. But this is a good start.

Food deserts

2012-01-20T13:07:00.001-08:00

Recently I read through a slightly stale thread on Pharyngula where a commenter got himself banned for doubling down on self-righteous outrage over someone who bought lobster with food stamps. Some people explained something that doesn't occur even to well-meaning people: lobster is food, and the way food stamps (well, strictly speaking, the Federal SNAP program) work is that the money is there on a debit card and rolls over if it isn't used every month. (This isn't to be confused with the WIC program, which is mainly for families with children and has different, stricter requirements.) That means that there's nothing preventing someone from saving up their SNAP funds to buy some special occasion food like lobster, nor should there be. It's the idea that Alice Waters and Jamie Oliver (among others) advocate -- everyone should have the right to a decent meal.

I do a fair amount of shopping at Target (slogan: "Slightly Less Evil Than Walmart") and Family Dollar ("Miss Woolworths? Tough."). The former one, at least in its larger stores, does a reasonably good impression of a small supermarket, but their selection of meats tends to be a little on the small side, and most if not all of their produce is frozen. The latter... well, it's a step up from a neighborhood bodega I guess, but that isn't saying much -- no refrigerated foods, salty canned vegetables, lots of soda and sweets. In some areas, stores like those are the best or only options; in some areas on the West Coast, Tesco's Fresh & Easy stores are attempting to make inroads, but they still aren't profitable, and don't show any signs of coming east any time soon. In the Boston area, we have a fairly large presence of Trader Joe's, but their coverage of the rest of New England is wildly inconsistent, from six in Connecticut and one in RI to none in Vermont, NH, and Maine.

The USDA tracks these sorts of things. Food deserts are areas where decent food is hard to come by; as a result, they're commonly associated with all the usual food problems associated with poverty -- obesity, heart problems, diabetes, and the like. The main determining factors include access to supermarkets and price of food; gouging is disturbingly common, and it seems for quite a while there were stores that charged as much as they could get away with to WIC subscribers, essentially shafting not only the customers but the government. In a few places, you occasionally find farmer's markets set up to help address this, but those are often only seasonal and not always where they need to be. It doesn't help that even with government assistance, fresh vegetables are still more expensive than prepackaged foods; while there's nothing wrong with mac and cheese or ramen, I'm pretty sure they were never intended as subsistence rations.

I'm not sure what's to be done about this. In some areas, local governments are providing incentives to supermarket operators to expand into those neighborhoods, but that's of limited use in rural areas where a big box store might be the only market in the area and people are reliant on cars (which, in poor areas, might not be very reliable or safe) to get around. In some areas, most notoriously Detroit, there's no market access at all, and the infrastructure is falling apart to the point that even if there was, no one would be able to get there. All I can really say is that it's a complex issue with no quick solutions, and one that should be a significant issue in the 2012 elections but probably won't. Maybe we can make it one.

Schadenfreude, y'all?

2012-01-18T16:41:00.000-08:00

Nah.

So the current news about Paula Deen's type 2 diabetes is generating gales of laughter. Well, all things considered, she probably should have come out with this a couple years ago after her diagnosis, especially given that she's a running joke of extreme cuisine just a rung below Sandra Lee and Epic Meal Time. Considering I've a long-held thing for laughing at stupid people, you'd think I'd be up on top of the pile with them.

Well... here's the thing. Paula Deen really doesn't bother me that much, because I've never taken her especially seriously. Yes, Paula's food is greasy, extreme comfort food, and way too much of it is deep fried. Yes, her iconic dish is fried butter. But seriously -- even Julia Child didn't eat like Julia Child all the time. Like the bulk of Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, Paula's stuff is obviously not that good for you. This should be (and to most people is) incredibly obvious; what she specializes in is tasty, not at all healthy, and more or less glorified fairground food, but most people know not to overdo food like that, and the few people dumb enough to treat her food as everyday cooking on some level know what they're getting into.

In fact, most of the blowback to her announcement is just simple fat-shaming. Truthfully, like I said, Julia Child didn't eat like Julia Child all the time, and I doubt Paula Deen eats like Paula Deen all the time. What connection her diabetes and her trademark cooking style have is really between her and her doctor, and it could just be that her pancreas is on the fritz for no reason other than the fact that it just isn't working right. There's a thing with a large swath of American culture that goes in deep for victim blaming, so the schadenfreude going around is loud, to say the least. But it doesn't really serve much purpose, does it?

So yeah, Paula Deen's got a problem. And she makes bizarre and unhealthy food. She's also a big ol' ham and knows it. Apart from the general message to watch what you eat, I just can't get too bothered about it. Paula Deen is a sometimes chef.

To the finish

2012-01-08T17:35:00.000-08:00

Jimmy's Steer House in Arlington, MA (and its sister restaurants in Lexington, Danvers, and Andover, all named Grassfield's) is a longtime institution in Arlington and the surrounding communities, and it's particularly known for its particular type of rice pilaf. Instead of the usual institutional-grade Near East rice dish, they've always served a pilaf with spinach in it. It's always been popular with my family, but I've never been able to replicate it, so I decided this time around to blow it off and just make a risotto inspired by it.

If you already know how to make risotto, you shouldn't need the whole recipe, since it's just a basic risotto with chicken broth and some chopped spinach added. For those who don't, recipe follows.

500g arborio rice
1L chicken broth, boiling
125mL white wine
1 medium yellow onion, chopped fine
1/2 c Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, grated
250g spinach, cooked, chopped, and drained
butter

Melt the butter in a pan and add the onion with a sprinkle of salt, and cook over medium heat until translucent, then add the rice and cook until the rice is toasted a bit. Add the wine and stir till the wine is absorbed, then turn down to medium low heat. Add the broth, a ladle at a time, and stir after each addition until the broth is absorbed; this will probably be about half a dozen additions or so over 25 minutes. Add the cheese and stir in, then add the spinach. Cook until any liquid from the spinach is absorbed, then serve.

Happy Holidays #1: Latkes

2011-12-21T18:26:00.000-08:00

I'm going to try to post one recipe a day at least through Boxing Day, hopefully through the New Year to make up for my lack of interesting content this whole month. Tonight, I'll start with one of Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine's less-lionized contributions to American cuisine: the latke. (Fitting for the second day of Hanukkah, I think.) From what I understand they originated in Ukraine and filtered throughout Eastern Europe's shtetls before coming to the US, and I know a few diners where they're pretty standard on the menu for breakfast. They aren't the same as hash browns or rösti; latkes usually have an egg binder and sometimes some matzo meal or similar to act as a binder.

I used russet potatoes in this recipe, though you don't have to; one recipe I've seen uses Yukon Gold, for example. As for grating the onion... I don't have any suggestions to help you. Either do it in the food processor or just tough it out with a box grater.

2 medium russet potatoes, grated
1 medium onion, grated (go for yellow or white)
2 eggs
matzo meal
salt and pepper
olive or canola oil

Combine the potatoes, onions, eggs, and a couple tablespoons of matzo meal (just eyeball it), then salt and pepper and mix together. Fry in oil over medium-medium high heat, turning as necessary to cook through, and brown on both sides. Serve with sour cream and applesauce.

Applesauce

Just a basic recipe, nothing fancy. I tend to like tart, firm apples like Granny Smith.

1.5kg apples, peeled and cut in 2cm chunks
sugar
cinnamon to taste

Place apples in a large, heavy saucepan or dutch oven. Add an inch or so of water to the bottom, then add sugar and bring to a boil. Lower heat to medium and cook until easily mashed, then mash to the consistency you want. This can be put in jars and refrigerated, or properly canned if you want.

On holiday charity

2011-11-22T12:56:00.001-08:00

This holiday season, the need for charity is even more visible than usual because of the difficulties of an economic climate that isn't getting any better. Rather than simply sending money to religious or political charities, consider donating to a few of the following:

Not every locality has a Greater Boston Food Bank to help make sure people have meals for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, etc. If you're in or near an area that has limited services, find a worthy charity that serves a more isolated population; I've done a fair bit of TV programming work for the Lower Cape Outreach Center in Orleans, MA, for example. There are poor people who need help everywhere, and they aren't always who you think they are.
As the recent flap over Bill O'Reilly's most recent fishwrapper shows, soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan need basics -- candy, blankets, flashlights, hot sauce, and the like.
Likewise, there might be a veteran's shelter near you. No doubt their residents are getting younger and more populous.
Toys for Tots. Of course.
If none of the above is practical, there are other ways to help out. I do community television to help get the word out to people who need help. You can volunteer at a soup kitchen or meals on wheels program, donate to a local free clinic, or just invite a friend over for dinner.

Nearly everyone who knows me knows that I'm an outspoken atheist. But I'm also a big admirer of the message of Jesus, for whom (despite his followers and his personal failings as a human being) social justice was a huge priority. At the end of the day, it's tangible results -- as in, people fed and having presents -- that we're after here. Even buying a beer for a recent veteran helps.

Mmmm, pie

2011-11-20T20:02:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of ways to make an apple pie. When I was a kid, the technique we usually used on Pie Night (the Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving) was to toss the apples in cinnamon sugar and bake. However, it never really managed to work out, usually putting out big sloppy puddles of apple juice in the bottom of the pie pan and making the crust soggy.

When the controversial 1997 edition of The Joy Of Cooking came out, I found an unusual recipe. Cooking the apples down to a compote solves the juicing problem to a very great extent. You won't get the same glossy gel that commercial pie fillings give -- more of a near-applesauce texture -- but the flavor will be excellent as long as you pick the right apple. I'm not going to give a pie crust recipe here, since it's a skill I've never bothered with; pick one you like, either made from scratch or commercial.

Pastry for a two-crust pie
1.5kg (3lb) apples (Granny Smith, Cortland, McIntosh, Northern Spy, or other pie apple)
3/4c white sugar
3 tbsp butter
1/2 tsp cinnamon (or 3/4 tsp Ceylon cinnamon)
1/8 tsp salt

Peel and cut the apples into slices 1cm or so thick.
Melt butter in the bottom of a pan; add apples and toss to coat. Cook until they start to exude juice.
Add sugar, cinnamon, and salt. Cook over high heat until the juices thicken and the apples are cooked through but not turning to sauce.
Preheat oven to 350F/180C. Place the bottom crust in a 9in/22cm pie plate and add the apples. Cover the pie with the top piece of pie crust and crimp and seal the edges (a milk wash should be fine). Garnish the top with a milk wash and a sprinkle of coarse sugar.
Bake 30-40 minutes until the contents are bubbling and the top crust is browned. Cool and serve.

Oven logic

2011-11-20T11:00:00.000-08:00

Heat transfer. It's what's for dinner. (Warning: TVTropes event horizon ahead)

The Sunday before Thanksgiving is probably the best time, at least in the United States, to be posting something like this -- for a lot of people, Turkey Day is amateur hour, and jumping into a big ugly mess of cooking relatively unfamiliar foods is a difficult endeavor, since even experts have to do a lot of planning. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that the single biggest issue when cooking Thanksgiving dinner (or indeed any large meal) is food safety. (If you're reading from outside the US, you might wish to save this for Christmas.)

Certain processes can't be effectively sped up by raising or lowering the temperature. This is why you don't, for example, do roast beef on the grill using direct high heat; it's virtually impossible to cook it through without carbonizing the outside of the meat that way, so you bank the heat to the side (a little like a rotisserie oven) and cook it slow, almost like barbecue. Similarly, you can't thaw a turkey on the counter -- the inside will still be frozen while the outside approaches room temperature and severe bacterial contamination. Among other things, that's why a turducken takes over a day to put together and cook properly -- the sheer mass of the thing, combined with the fact that it's essentially a solid pile of food means that it will not cook quickly no matter what you do to it. (Okay, you might be able to speed it up a bit with some pipes and blowtorches, but don't go trying to figure out how that'd work. You'll regret it.) So here are a few things you need to know.

In the media at least, I hear of four major sources of food poisoning: Salmonella, Listeria, botulism, and E. coli. When dealing with cooked meat, the first and last are the ones you'll have to worry about the most; although they aren't necessarily as dangerous as the other two, they're no picnic and can make your life hell for a few days. Proper temperature management is key here; the benchmark for food safety used in the United States is the FDA's 2-40-140 rule: if it sits out for longer than two hours between 40F (4C) and 140F (60C), toss it. (As any homebrewer, for whom bacterial contamination is a constant danger, can tell you, you want to go from cold to hot to cold as quickly as possible.)
"Oven logic" doesn't work. You won't make the turkey cook faster by jacking the temperature above 400F (200C); you'll wind up with burnt skin and raw internal meat.
Get a good instant-read thermometer; do not do not do NOT rely on the pop-up sensor. At best, it's a guide as to when to get out a real thermometer. To use the thermometer, stick it into the turkey in the thigh, away from any bone or air pockets. Your minimum safe internal temperature is 165F (75C); you may be able to cheat, but please don't try.
Don't stuff the turkey. It can be done safely, but it's not really worth trying unless you're very good at what you're doing. At most, stuff it with something like a mirepoix and toss or microwave the vegetables before carving the turkey.
Learn everything you can about food safety. When feeding a crowd, buying a copy of The Professional Chef or a similar cooking school textbook is not overkill.
If you're crazy enough to deep-fry a turkey (and the results are quite tasty, so the temptation will be strong), do it as safely as possible. Make sure the fryer is on a stable, fireproof surface like a level concrete patio. Have a large fire extinguisher on standby and a cell phone nearby to dial 911 in case something goes wrong. Make sure you have a safe way to load and unload the turkey into the pot and don't skimp on protective gear. Make sure the turkey is as dry as you can get it before putting it in so you don't have pockets of boiling water making oil geysers. Don't leave the turkey unattended, ever. Most importantly: do not wing it. Turkey frying is one of the most dangerous cooking procedures out there, probably second only to lava-baked chicken. Get reliable instructions and follow them.

Some extra resources:

The United States Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service. Seasonal information, including Thanksgiving advice, is here.
Butterball. Even if you don't use their turkey, their support line and website are perennial favorites. (Enjoy some stupid questions...)
The panic button (and some advice to go with it (mental health humor ahead)).

Some thoughts on lasagna

2011-11-18T10:54:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to give a recipe here; there's many, many recipes for (and styles of) lasagna and it's not really worth the effort to place one over the other. In fact, thanks to the people who came up with Hamburger Helper, even the layered aspect of lasagna is up for debate. Herein, then, a few thoughts, trivia, and random tips for lasagna research and development.

First and foremost: no-boil lasagna noodles do a fine job. (It took Cooks Illustrated to convince me of that, but they're right, like they usually are.) However, an important thing to note: in order to make sure they rehydrate quickly and thoroughly, they're usually very thin, closer to egg roll wrappers than regular dried lasagna noodles. If you don't like the thicker noodles but don't want to risk tearing an egg roll wrapper for a smaller pan, go with the no-boil ones.
You can use regular dried lasagna as no-boil, but you need to add quite a bit more liquid to the sauce or the final result will come out dry.
Matzo soaked in broth is a very workable substitute for pasta, and is used in scacchi, the Italian Jewish Passover meat pie. (If you need to keep kosher, though, you probably want to use vegetable broth or water instead of the chicken stock I used.)
As a general rule, Italian lasagna recipes (most notably lasagna bolognese) tend to use bechamel sauce, while American ones (based on Neapolitan and Sicilian influence) use ricotta cheese with an egg binder. You could probably also use Alfredo sauce like this recipe from Epicurious.
You can make white lasagna just like you can white pizza; for example, Stouffer's veggie lasagna (popularly bought by the case by many cafeterias) is a white lasagna. As a home cook, you can almost certainly make a better white lasagna than Stouffer's.

There's probably a lot more to be said, but that's it for now.

A real Greek salad

2011-11-13T16:17:00.001-08:00

The Greek salad is something of a tradition in American pizzerias and sandwich shops. A pile of iceberg lettuce, some tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, onions, olives, and feta cheese with a vinaigrette dressing, it's not a bad salad, but they can be a bit bland. They're apparently common in other countries, and maybe more authentic, but to be honest, there are times I go into a Greek restaurant and the most interesting thing about the salad is the pita bread it comes with.

Enter the classic Greek salad, the horiatiki salata. For reasons that I'm sure make sense to Greeks, the original name translates to "peasant-style salad", and unlike its American equivalent, the dominant vegetable is ripe tomatoes -- no lettuce, just some mint and oregano leaves to serve as greens. You can make a decent one any time of the year, but the ideal late-summer beefsteak or plum tomato is best for this. During the off-season, look for Camparis from Canada, or the increasingly rare tasty winter Roma (usually from Florida or Mexico). Also, for best results, slice everything but the tomatoes and cheese as thin as you can. And finally, I can't stress enough that it's about the tomatoes. If you can't get good tomatoes, go get the stuff from the pizza shop.

Salad ingredients

ripe tomatoes, diced or quartered

cucumber, sliced thin (peeled if necessary)

bell pepper, sliced thin

red or yellow onion (Spanish or sweet onions are fine), sliced thin

Kalamata olives

feta cheese, crumbled

Mint leaves, julienned, to taste

a large pinch of oregano

Vinaigrette

Three parts good extra virgin olive oil (in my experience, Spanish and Greek do well for this)

One part red wine vinegar

salt and pepper

A dash of prepared mustard

Mix the ingredients for the vinaigrette and shake in a cruet or cocktail shaker until emulsified. Combine the other ingredients in a salad bowl and add vinaigrette to taste, then toss together and serve with bread.

Two who made Steve Jobs look small

2011-10-26T22:29:00.000-07:00

Over the last couple of weeks, the computer world has lost three of its most influential people. You know Steve Jobs, of course; he's the man who saw ideas and put them together in ways no one had thought of. But we lost two others whose contributions are even greater than Jobs, but they'll never get the recognition they deserve because there's nothing sexy about backend stuff.

The first was Dennis Ritchie. You can visit his web page at Bell Labs here, but that doesn't tell the whole story. See, Dennis Ritchie (known far and wide as dmr, his traditional Unix login name) helped create the Unix operating system and the C programming language, two of the most important software designs in modern computing history. In the late 60s, Ritchie and his colleague Ken Thompson had been part of a project (including MIT, Bell Labs, and GE, and later Honeywell) to create one of the first computer operating systems designed to be portable between computers, the result being the Multics operating system. For various reasons, Bell Labs pulled out of the project (Multics was a great success for Honeywell but failed in its aim of non-proprietary portability), and around 1969, Thompson and Ritchie found themselves in need of a platform to run Thompson's Space Travel game on. Bell Labs had a Digital PDP-7 that the two did their work on, eventually naming it Unics as a pun on Multics (the x spelling came later). Unix, in its many forms (both licensed and unlicensed) is the core of many computing devices today; if you have a smartphone running Android or iOS, for example, the underlying system will be a Unix derivative, and Linux (the single most popular Unix-like kernel today) is the underlying OS for a large swath of the World Wide Web. Even Microsoft Windows, though not a Unix design by any means, is capable of running Unix programs compiled for it. But that's not Ritchie's only influence.

These days, a lot of computer programmers begin with Java, but Java's history goes back well before its introduction in the mid-1990s; in syntax and general design philosophy, it (as well as numerous other languages, including Apple's Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Microsoft's C#, and the ubiquitous C++) is based on the language Ritchie invented (based on another language of Thompson's called B). Although many computer geeks my age learned to program on BASIC-powered computers like the Commodore 64 and Apple II, by the 1990s C had become the lingua franca of programming; it's still widely used for programming embedded systems (control systems, sensors, robots and the like) and there's quite a lot of software out there still being written in it. In other words, Ritchie and Thompson (as well as a number of their colleagues at Bell Labs) did twice over what most people never even get to do once.

The other person I want to mention is John McCarthy, one of the last of the first of the digital computing era. Although he probably didn't invent the concept, McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence", as well as giving the world the Lisp programming language, one of the oldest programming languages still in use and the inspiration for a great number of other languages (most notably Javascript). Lisp was considered uniquely suited for AI development because, among other things, it's excellent at reshuffling data in interesting and arbitrary ways, and although most programmers never do more than a smattering of work in it, it's still used here and there, and from what I understand, being a Lisp expert is a sure route to job security -- if you can get the job in the first place. Although AI as a field has not quite panned out in the way its experts hoped (there's still no such thing as a sentient computer, a so-called "strong AI"), the side effects -- robotics, complex sensor devices, handwriting recognition, and many other results -- have insured that the AI world's efforts have not gone to waste.

I hear people complaining that Steve Jobs is receiving undue attention. I don't think he is; I think his gifts for product-centered thinking and idea synthesis are worth every bit of adulation he gets, despite his well-known personality flaws. But at the same time, Jobs, like anyone else in the scientific/technical/engineering fields, stood on the shoulders of giants, and Ritchie and McCarthy were two giants that deserve to tower over Jobs. And that's saying something.

Pasta quickie

2011-10-25T20:12:00.000-07:00

Cook 250g of fettucine. Reserve a couple of tablespoons of pasta water, then return the drained pasta to the pan with 4tbsp butter. When the butter melts, add some pasta water and a few big handfuls of grated parmigiano reggiano or grana padano (NOT domestic American parmesan—it doesn’t melt right). Toss until the cheese is melted and the fettucine is coated, seasoning to taste with pepper and nutmeg. Presto: fettucine alfredo, classical style.

Where's the cream, you ask? Well, fettucine Alfredo wasn't originally thought of as being sauced per se, just dressed up with butter and cheese. I don't know the whole story, but from what I understand, when people started making it with American ingredients, the domestic parmesan just wasn't up to it (as I said in the note above), and the cream managed to bring something to the party that the cheese simply couldn't provide, and probably helped it melt better besides (don't forget, butter can be used as an emulsifier because of certain milk proteins). That was the birth of what we now think of Alfredo sauce. It's pretty good stuff, but it's not quite authentic.

But this is closer to Alfredo Di Lelio's original. I originally learned the basics from John and Galina Mariani's The Italian-American Cookbook (which by the way is one of the better books I've seen for historical background of Italian-American food). The Marianis provide both versions for comparison. The key here, as is often the case with pasta dishes, is the pasta water; the cast-off starch can also act as an emulsifier (much like the roux in Mornay sauce or mac and cheese) and manages to not only help the cheese melt without clumping but also keeps the butter from separating and making the finished pasta greasy.

You can try it both ways; the classical version is definitely faster and easier, though its sharp flavor is not what most people in the US are used to, and there isn't a puddle of sauce at the bottom to sop up. But it's definitely worth it.

A few thoughts on Steve Jobs

2011-10-05T17:44:00.000-07:00

It may come as a shock, but I've always been a little ambivalent about Steve Jobs. I think over the years it's been proven that when it comes to user-centric issues, he's almost always right (even if he didn't think of the idea, he always seemed to go with the ones that worked the best), but there have been a few cases where it follows that when it went wrong, it went spectacularly wrong (the G4 Cube, for example, or Final Cut Pro X). He was always a very strong and frequently domineering personality, and that was certainly something that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way; it's not hard to think of him as a cross between Thomas Edison and Gordon Ramsay, for all that means, for better and for worse.

But it's easiest to see Jobs' influence on the computer world in the places it isn't really understood. Andy Hertzfeld's folklore.org, a website dedicated to the history of the Macintosh, paints a picture of an intense, sometimes obsessive, occasionally outright insane Jobs who still knew exactly what vision he had for the Macintosh, and who focused on issues as simple as the case bezel, constantly looking at things from the customer/user angle. You can argue back and forth over whether Jobs mistreated Jef Raskin (IMHO he did), whether micromanaging the Mac was a good thing for the company, whether his personality damaged the future of the company, but it's impossible to miss one thing: Steve Jobs, CEO, at Apple, NeXT, Pixar, and Apple again spent his time looking at his products from both customer and tech standpoints, and though people ridicule that perceived focus on style over substance, I can tell you that even running Ubuntu, my Acer netbook still feels like a kludge compared to my Macbook.

Can Apple keep on going? I hope so. I hope that Tim Cook understands what Steve Jobs did to make Apple a success again. I'm not crazy about OS X Lion, but the iPhone 4s is a very solid product and a major upgrade to the iOS platform. And although there are a lot of people who truly loathe the closed iOS system, it does have some fairly sound technical reasons behind it and I believe someone can make an informed decision to buy into it with no surprises about what awaits them. But at the end of the day, that's only a small microcosm of what Steve Jobs did; like a lot of visionaries, he wasn't necessarily the idea guy. Like Edison, like Linus Torvalds, and quite a few others in business, science, and computing, Jobs specialized in synthesis, and he did it very, very well.

Why Keurig won the single-serve coffee format war

2011-09-19T19:10:00.000-07:00

(First, arrr. Okay, now that I've got that out of the way...)

Format wars are interesting subjects a lot of the time -- frequently, they involve complex technical arguments, and sometimes they come down to one single point (think VHS and EP recording). There's been one ongoing for the last ten years or so between several different groups promoting various standards for single-cup coffee makers; while the ESE pod created an early and stable standard for home espresso machines, there are numerous other standards for everyday drip-style coffee. In the US, we've mostly seen four alongside ESE -- Kraft's Tassimo, Senseo, Nespresso, and Keurig. All are a distinct improvement over the usually-vile coffee bags, although except for Senseo (very similar to the teabag-like ESE pod) they're all packed in plastic or aluminum capsules, which does make for a bit of a waste issue.

I'm at a loss to explain why Nespresso is still in business; Nestle has always had a spotty reputation, and the ultra-proprietary Nespresso design is no exception. They've tried to sue competitive coffee providers out of their format (unsuccessfully, for the most part) and although they make some impressively elegant machines, you're locked into Nespresso's capsules, without even the option of using your own coffee. Why anyone gets suckered into buying into Nespresso is beyond me. Senseo and Tassimo suffer from a very similar problem to Nespresso -- although it's possible (at least for Senseo, which was rendered nonproprietary in the EU by a 2004 court decision) to get aftermarket parts to brew your own coffee, neither standard actively supports it. Senseo actually is fairly popular in Europe, since the Senseo coffee pods are mimicked by nearly every manufacturer there, but it's nearly vanished in the US. Tassimo hangs in there in the US, mainly because of the support of a few influential partners like Starbucks, but it's still marginal.

And now we turn to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters' Keurig, which seems to be the standard for single-serve coffee in the US today. When Keurig first came out, the creators mostly limited it to vending operations; if you have an office with the blocky, fridge-shaped first-generation coin-op machine and its familiar rack of boxed K-Cups, you know what I mean. Keurig didn't bring anything really new to the party except for its vendor focus, but that's probably what made it in such demand as a home coffee system -- people wanted the same coffee at home as they had at work and at the supermarket, fresh-brewed instead of sitting on a hot plate. That, in and of itself, was probably enough to assure a dominant position in the market, and including Keurig itself there are now four manufacturers of their design. The system's popularity has also gotten quite a few coffee roasters on board (including, as of the beginning of September, Starbucks), as well as teamakers like Twinings and Bigelow. K-cups are ubiquitous in supermarkets, and GMCR has gone on to acquire several of its partners.

The Keurig design is an interesting one, something of a hybrid between a drip machine and espresso machine. Each K-cup looks like a somewhat enlarged creamer cup with a textured foil lid; inside are coffee grounds and a paper filter. When the K-cup is placed in the cup holder, spikes puncture it in the middle of the lid and the edge of the bottom, and hot water is blasted through the cup under pressure, through the filter, and into a waiting mug below. The process does produce a remarkably good (if smallish) cup of coffee with some similarities to both drip and infused coffee; although most machines offer multiple cup sizes, the best serving size is no more than about 8oz (240mL), since the extra dilution makes weak and sour coffee. The K-cup construction probably isn't the best use of materials, but some enterprising Keurig fans have come up with special caps and the like allowing people to reuse the cups.

But Keurig also realized one thing that Nespresso and Senseo tried very hard to ignore: vendor lock-in is bad. Very bad. You will lose potential customers because of it. As a result, Keurig created the My K-Cup, a replacement filter holder that lets you use your own coffee, because, let's face it, your favorite coffee may not be available in a K-Cup, and even if it is, it gets expensive if you use it more than once or twice a day. Arguably, this is the strongest point about the Keurig system; although the MKC is somewhat expensive and the filters are proprietary, it still offers a vendor-supported way out, which is almost as good as an open standard. (A few roasters do make unlicensed K-Cups, but I don't know much about the quality to be expected from such designs.)

There's two lessons to be learned here; one is one that companies catering to geeks frequently have found out the hard way -- people will find their way around limitations you put on the things they buy, or they just won't buy them. Sescond, since coffee is arguably one of the most important beverages in world culture, forget mousetraps; the real money is in a better cup of java.

(For what it's worth, I own a Keurig B77 as well as a Krups espresso machine that supports ESE, so I may be a tad biased...)

The flavor of France: mirepoix

2011-08-20T20:57:00.000-07:00

Of course you've heard of things like Italian seasoning, curry powder, adobo, and that sort of thing -- seasonings that attempt to capture the flavor of a whole cuisine in a jar. Sometimes they work, sometimes... not so much. As a general rule, I tend to treat the newest blend at Penzeys as an excuse to have grilled chicken or pork chops -- on a relatively plain canvas like that, seasoning blends can really shine in a way that they couldn't if you just stirred them into a sauce or something like that. They can be nice and they're often an example of culinary creativity in the small, sometimes even going so far as to make a statement. But at the end of the day, you usually can't sum up an entire cuisine in just a few spices. Most cuisines have a flavor base that they identify strongly with, and in this blog we're going to look at one of the most common, learned by every culinary student, and intimately identified with French cuisine in particular: mirepoix.

In its most basic form, mirepoix is a mixture of onions, carrots, and celery, all vegetables traditionally thought of as "aromatics". (Yes, even celery. Try some really green celery, just by itself, and you'll see why.) Usually it's done in a 2:1:1 ratio and cooked slowly with butter or oil until softened, then used as a flavor base for any number of items, but particularly stocks, sauces, and braises; indeed, a well-browned mirepoix (perhaps with some mushrooms added for umami) can be a base all by itself for a very serviceable vegan brown gravy. I tend to start my beef stews and pot roasts off with it, but that's by no means the only thing you can do with it; a raw mirepoix, for example, can go into a chicken or turkey instead of a bread or rice stuffing, although you probably wouldn't want to bring it out of the bird and straight to the table without giving it a sanitizing zap in the microwave first. A raw mirepoix is also a basic ingredient in most western European recipes for chicken stock.

Escoffier (it all comes back to Escoffier in classic French cooking) treats mirepoix as a separate recipe, to be used as a building block for other dishes; although this isn't his recipe (more on that below), I'll follow his lead for this cooked basic mirepoix.

Take two parts (by weight) chopped yellow onions, one part chopped carrots, and one part chopped celery. Melt some butter or oil in a pan and add the vegetables along with a generous sprinkling of salt. Cook over medium heat until the onions are translucent and the carrots and celery are softening; if making the mirepoix for a gravy, keep cooking, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are browned to the degree you want, then proceed with roux, stock, etc. This mirepoix can be stored for a day or so in the refrigerator, but unless you're running a restaurant you probably won't want to do this.

Since very little of what I cook is meant to be strictly French or strictly classical, I usually add a couple of cloves of garlic to my mirepoix, either sliced (for stews) or crushed (for anything else), which is also the basis for some Italian soffritti (about which more in a future post). In addition, meat is often added; Escoffier's recipe called for ham or pork belly, and I seem to have this unhealthy compulsion to add applewood-smoked bacon to my beef stews. As mentioned above, the addition of mushrooms can perform a similar function in vegetarian cooking. Finally, a mirepoix that's chopped fine and used as a garnish is known as a matignon (absolutely nothing to do with the high school I graduated from).

So this is the first in what I hope will be a series of little vignettes on what makes a cuisine taste like it does. Hope it helps you...

Steak frites for Bastille Day

2011-07-14T16:44:00.000-07:00

So here's the deal: thanks to some car trouble, I somehow wound up at home on a Thursday, which happens to be Bastille Day. What to make? How about Steak frites...

Start with the fries. You can follow your own recipe, if you want, but I found this recipe from Whole Foods kicking around on my iPod. I made a few changes, baking them on top of parchment instead of directly on a greased pan and using only salt as a seasoning at the end. (I'd be remiss at this point if I didn't make mention of the best French fries in Boston at Saus near Quincy Market; if you ever want to try the platonic ideal of a French fry, go there.)

The steak was fairly simple, including a very nice pan sauce -- sirloin steaks, about six ounces each; sear them on both sides in butter or canola oil in an aluminum or stainless steel pan. Drain the excess fat, then add a tablespoon or so of butter and then some minced mushrooms and shallots. Cook briefly until both are softening, then deglaze with a cup or so of red wine. Whisk in a teaspoon or two of flour, then let it reduce until thickened. Serve the steak with a couple of spoonfuls of the sauce on the top, with the fries on the side. (The sauce is also nice on bread, if you're a gravy-soaker.)

And review number #300 is...

2011-07-11T20:16:00.000-07:00

The Food of Spain by Claudia Roden.

Just, you know, total coincidence that I was writing about it in the previous entry, right?

Nah...

The food porn revolution

2011-07-11T10:04:00.000-07:00

A few years back, Phaidon Press, known primarily as a publisher of art books, decided for some reason to get into the cookbook business, bringing a translation of the Italian kitchen bible Il cucchiaio d'argento to the US and UK. The Silver Spoon was impressively successful in English and was quickly translated into French, German, and Dutch as well, and became the first of a series of successful books, many of them translations of great national cookbooks from around Europe (and one from India), as well as original content from authors like Ferran Adrià and Stephane Reynaud. In retrospect, it's not hard to see art and food being obvious partners stylistically, and indeed The Silver Spoon itself, though light on non-recipe content, more than makes up for it with impeccable food photography, as well as five (and counting) additional books on Italian cuisine. I feel pretty safe in saying that Editoriale Domus, the architectural publisher that created Il cucchiaio, never expected this level of success outside Italy when they were putting the first edition together just after World War II.

Now we turn to one of my longtime favorite cookbook authors, Claudia Roden. Roden has a uniquely eclectic upbringing -- Egyptian Jewish, went to university in France, and has lived in the United Kingdom ever since. She's written a good number of books, but her masterpiece has to be The Book of Jewish Food, a worldwide, history- (and joke-) laden survey of the many forms Jewish food has taken around the world, and she is likely in the top five of English-language cookbook writers. Her most recent book, The Food of Spain, in many ways reads as an extension of her earlier work on Jewish and Middle Eastern food, exploring the many influences that have come to make Spanish cuisine the newest addition to the list of great Europen cuisines. This is a big change in one way though -- published through HarperCollins' Ecco Press label, The Food of Spain is heavily graphical. It's a big, beautiful book, with tons of pictures along with Roden's trademark sidebars describing friends and locations that she visited to create the book. And it's pretty clear that HarperCollins saw the writing on the wall with Phaidon's books, because this could easily be one of theirs.

As a general rule, I think that reviewers who complain about a cookbook not having pictures kind of don't get it. There's lots of cookbooks out there going back centuries having no pictures at all, and they don't suffer for it. But that doesn't mean I don't appreciate a nice piece of food porn -- food photography and illustration is an art in and of itself, and there's no shortage of demand for it. However, another publisher is taking the lessons of Phaidon in a different dimension; Rizzoli USA is publishing a few books (starting with La Cucina, a book of Italian regional dishes from the Italian Academy of Cuisine) that don't have many pictures, but provide exhaustive lists of sometimes-obscure recipes that aren't necessarily familiar to even the people of their home countries, thus doing their own interpretation of Phaidon's "foreign kitchen bible" works. That's at least as valuable a service for the foodie reader.

So there you have it -- three publishers, two related and very positive trends. The only downside is those books get expensive. A footnote: if you really enjoy graphics-heavy cookbooks, you should also check out Tessa Kiros' books, especially Falling Cloudberries, a culinary chronicle of an upbringing that's even more eclectic than Roden's.

Recipe quickies

2011-06-28T19:44:00.000-07:00

So here's a few random items from the last couple of weeks...

Spaghetti and Meatcubes

Take leftover meatloaf (mine uses 2 parts beef, 1 part turkey, 1 part Italian sausage, seasoned with paprika, garlic, oregano, garlic, and dill. And garlic.) and cut it into cubes, then brown them a little in some oil. Make a basic marinara sauce with chopped bell peppers added and heat the meatcubes in the sauce like regular meatballs. Serve with pasta.

Cheesy spinach

Cook and chop a pound of spinach, then wrap in cheesecloth or the like and squeeze out the excess liquid. Add a couple of handfuls of grana-type cheese (obviously I'm going to recommend Parmigiano Reggiano, but Pecorino Romano or Grana Padano wouldn't be bad either) and fold into the spinach and serve.

Farfalle or Penne alla Carnevale

Cut or break Italian sausage into chunks and cook with onions and bell peppers (red and green if you've got both). Add a couple of cloves of garlic and some oregano. Meanwhile, cook farfalle or penne and cut some grape or cherry tomatoes in half. Put the pasta in a serving bowl and add the onion-pepper-sausage mix along with the uncooked cherry tomatoes; optionally, add a drizzle of good olive oil. Toss and serve. (No, this has nothing to do with Fat Tuesday. Think a fairground sausage sub.)

That's all for this week, I think...

Announcing: Other People's Recipes

2011-06-27T12:54:00.000-07:00

So I got an Amazon Kindle recently. For the most part, I like it, but I honestly have yet to really work out the details on some of the content tools (Calibre in particular has, hands down, one of the most horrifically bad interface designs I've seen since the days of HyperCard). One of the consequences of that is that it's hard to download website recipes except as individual pages. It's true that there's no shortage of cookbooks available for free online, but most are either very old or very specialized, and not really conducive to just flipping through looking for inspiration.

What I've decided to do is create a collection similar to my Big Black Book of downloaded recipes that I keep at home. The title will be, obviously, Other People's Recipes, and I'll be making it available here for anyone who wants a copy. The recipes will be ones taken from publicly accessible repositories like foodnetwork.com, BBC food, and many other, often lower-profile archives. Essentially, I'll be putting all of this material in a PDF or text file for my personal use, and you'll just happen to be able to use it yourself. In addition, if you'd like to support the project, you can either hit my tip jar at Paypal (use the email below), or you can provide your own recipes for me to add to the book.

The finished product will be intentionally unfancy, but I have a few ideas on how to make it easier to search. Also, I expect to metricate any recipes I need to, but that should come as no surprise.

Adéu, elBulli, que ha fet el món més saborós.

2011-06-15T14:14:00.000-07:00

(If Google Translate didn't botch the Catalan, that says "Goodbye, El Bulli, who's made the world tastier.")

elBulli is closing.

Let me repeat that. elBulli is closing.

July 30th, the Barcelona restaurant run by Ferran Adrià, who is if not the greatest chef in the world certainly the most creative, elBulli serves its last quirky, laboratory-grown meals.

Now let's be realistic here -- it was nearly impossible to get into the place, which is why Adrià wrote several books of his recipes and about his restaurant. I certainly was never going to make it -- I just don't have those kind of connections. Or money. Or a passport. (And I don't speak Catalan, though Catalan cuisine is pretty cool -- try some pà amb tomàquet as a nosh at your next cookout.) And Adrià's work is sometimes controversial -- he first gained international fame as the foam guy, and to this day a lot of people still don't quite know what to make of it. But the more you look into food science, the more interesting molecular gastronomy as a cuisine becomes -- consider Heston Blumenthal's extraordinarily simple chocolate mousse, an affair with only two ingredients (bittersweet chocolate and water) and very little procedure, that would have been impossible without the work of people like Adrià and (in this particular case) Hervé This.

There's a feeling, especially among the slow food crowd, that science and good food are somehow incompatible. This could not be more unfortunate -- although food science does give us some truly bizarre results, a basic understanding is also necessary to be truly liberated in the kitchen. When taken to extremes like Adrià's the results can be weird but delicious, with food transformed in ways that would never have been discovered but for the work of dedicated kitchen geeks. Translated into actual food, this made elBulli the single most legendary restaurant the world over, a distinction that will probably carry for some time after it closes its doors. So if you have a chance, head out and grab Adrià's book, and/or This and Blumenthal's work, or even Nathan Myhrvold's monsterpiece Modernist Cuisine, if you've got the money and the shelf space. So long, elBulli.

"Uncured". Not.

2011-06-06T19:47:00.001-07:00

For the longest time I never quite understood what "uncured" means. I mean, if you go through the trouble of preserving a meat product, or at least capturing the flavor of a cured meat product, you're going to be salting it heavily. By definition, anything of the sort is cured. In many cases, especially bacon and sausages, nitrates and nitrites (usually saltpeter (KNO3) or sodium nitrite (NaNO2) are required to get the distinctive color and flavor that we associate with "cured" meat, and in sausages particularly, nitrate and nitrite salts perform a much more important function of inhibiting Clostridium botulinum infection. You can certainly have cured meat products without nitrites, but although it's fine for a dry ham like prosciutto or Smithfield, a nitrite-free salami should be considered unfit for human consumption unless it's too fresh to be recognized as salami.

I started an article on RationalWiki explaining the whole situation, but the short form is that the key ingredient is the nitrite (NO2-) ion, which is somewhat toxic for human consumption (LD50 approximately 22mg/kg; it's usually sold as a part of a mixture with regular NaCl as "pink salt" or "Insta-Cure" so the butcher doesn't accidentally overdose the meat), but which you don't need a whole lot of. Nitrites (or nitrates, which are reduced to nitrites in an acidic environment like a curing sausage) do have a tendency under certain circumstances to bond with amino acids to create nasty little substances called nitrosamines, which are known to be carcinogenic, and that's where the fear of nitrites come from. However, as with any toxin, the poison is in the dose, which makes "nitrite-free" meat products a classic example of risk management gone bonkers. (tl;dr The risk of nitrosamine-induced cancer is vastly outweighed by the risk of botulism.) So we get into the term "uncured". They all say no nitrates or nitrites added (it's actually a Federal labeling requirement), but they're for the most part nearly or completely indistinguishable from their regular counterparts. Now, as you can no doubt guess, that's a chemical impossibility, which means someone is sneaking in nitrites somewhere, somehow.

I think I first noticed it on a package of kosher hot dogs -- celery concentrate. At the time I didn't think much of it; celery salt is a pretty standard flavoring in Jewish deli food, so it stood to reason that they might have that in there as a flavoring component. But if you look around, it's in almost everything labeled "uncured", and seldom seems to be a strong flavor. Well, a lot of green vegetables happen to store significant amounts of nitrates, more so than are usually in the average sausage recipe, and celery is one of the champions. It's a sort of bait-and-switch -- going the roundabout way by using celery juice gets the meat processor more or less to what was wanted, while still being able to claim on the thinnest sliver of plausibility that no nitrates were added. (Of course, no nitrites were added at all -- remember that reduction reaction I told you above.) It's very similar to how juice producers use white grape or apple juices or concentrates thereof as sweeteners -- they can still claim 100% juice; they just aren't quite specifying what kind (except on the ingredients label).

The rather sneaky use of celery juice isn't really a bad thing, at least as long as you're making something that's meant to be refrigerated; I wouldn't be so sure about something that's supposed to be shelf-stable, since meat producers really prefer to work with something a bit more reliable, like the pink salt I mentioned above. However, it's telling the consumer something that the consumer probably doesn't know about; to be brutally honest, it might not be a lie, but it's definitely stretching the truth. Truthfully, as food writer Harold McGee has pointed out, it's really best to limit your intake of cured meats for salt and fat consumption reasons alone; the additional risk of nitrosamine-induced cancer is so insignificant that it's not really worth worrying about.

At this point, I could provide a recipe, but that would actually be rather irresponsible of me, since I'm not a trained charcutier (I made garlic sausage once out of ground pork, but that's about it). Instead, I'm going to refer you to the book I used to research the RW article and this post: Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polczyn. Ruhlman takes kitchen science very seriously, and Polczyn actually teaches sausage-making in Michigan, so this is likely one of the best possible books to buy if you're learning how to do the charcuterie thing.

Apple tries their hand at self-parody

2011-06-06T14:22:00.000-07:00

Nice work on iCloud, Apple. You've managed to take old technology, polish it up real shiny-like, and make it large and unwieldy at the same time as Sony's finishing up damage control on their Playstation Network security fail.

Cloud computing in various forms isn't exactly new; DEC was clustering VAXen circa 1980 to make old-style timesharing systems capable of sharing user environments and balance processing loads, and Bell Labs created the graphical version in the late 80s with Plan 9 from Bell Labs. And message-passing has been used to build supercomputers since the early 90s. Shoutcast uses clouds to serve their audio streams. People consume millions of hours of TV daily using BitTorrent. Peer-to-peer distributed computing platforms like Folding@home have greased the wheels for future data-intensive science. "The Cloud" may be a new buzzword, but it's built on technology that was mature before most of today's college students were born.

And Apple hasn't even brought anything new to the party -- they've created another iteration of what was originally called .Mac and released it for free, then wired apps (and your desktop preferences) into the octopus. Okay, yes, it's nice that they've spent big money on infrastructure for all this, but I don't like this feeling of being pushed towards relying on online services just to get my work done. Among other things, I have the same problem with Google Docs and any software-as-a-subscription service; my personal environment is too important to me to be forced to rely on an outside party. (I mean, what happens to my Roku box if Roku goes bankrupt?)

Here's the big problem: The Cloud doesn't scale. Plan 9 was designed around a common local data store and was mostly set up to be used within Bell Labs, managed and used by Bell Labs personnel. The interface was/is as consistent as possible across nearly every system in the group; although it wasn't the only thing that made Plan 9 too cool for its time, it was probably the most visible thing. You could do the same thing today, if you could find anyone to run such a setup, and as long as you keep it in the family (for whatever meaning you may attach to that), the system will be reasonably manageable from a security standpoint. But Apple's iCloud treats all of its users as one massive workgroup. Like Xbox Live, PSN, and the like, it's putting all its eggs in one basket and trusting a userbase of millions not to fuck with it. That's insane, even more so because unlike the other services, this is supposed to be the backbone of the system, not just a recreational activity. Okay, nice, I can go into any Lion box in the world that's hooked to the Internet and see my own desktop. But why the hell would I want this when I can work in a VNC sandbox and not worry about someone digging through business records or my porn folder because of a minor vulnerability?

I've been a Mac user since 1992, ever since learning to use one to edit my high school's literary magazine. For years I've been willing to defend my platform, even though at times the company that creates it annoys and/or scares me. And I'm not going to say nothing good came out of it; among other things, the ability to use iOS devices autonomously instead of being tethered to a computer is an excellent development. (OS X Lion? Don't ask.) But for a company that manages to innovate in some very surprising ways, this is a pointless and sloppy rehash of over 30 years of old tech that should have been done sometime in the 1990s, rather than now when there's finally a buzzword for it. Apple, I have an Ubuntu netbook and a whole slate of apps for it, and I'm not afraid to use it.

ps If you'd like to try Plan 9, the ISO image for a liveCD isn't all that big, about 80MB compressed. It's interesting, but a little lacking in the "now what do I do" department.

One for the out-of-towners

2011-05-14T23:02:00.001-07:00

When I say "Italian bread", I feel pretty safe in saying I know what you're going to think of -- a crusty, free-form loaf made from a fairly lean dough, sometimes with sesame seeds on it, usually sold for a buck or two at the supermarket. It's not bad stuff -- it's good for a sandwich, maybe a little soft and insubstantial on its own -- but it's just sort of there. If you're reading this from Massachusetts, you already know about this because it's kind of a native specialty, but if not... meet scali bread.

Scali (from the Italian scala, ladder; scali is traditionally braided) is a bread with Sicilian roots; you can find the original in Carol Field's The Italian Baker as pane siciliano, where it's made with fine durum flour and has a bit of a yellowish color to it. However, when it crossed the pond and became part of New England cuisine, the durum was replaced by American bread flour, creating the white scali we like to eat around here. Done right, it has a soft but solid interior (which can become unpleasantly cottony if it's not done right) and a simple, four-ingredient bread flavor that tastes great by itself with just a little butter (not olive oil; it would overwhelm it) and also makes some good sandwiches or -- if you're like me -- toast with butter and jam. The crust is usually on the thin side, but nice and crisp when it's fresh; it usually bears a coat of sesame seeds and frequently, though not universally, an egg glaze. Unfortunately, much like a baguette, good scali doesn't last long on the counter. However, it won't chew up the food processor blades when you grind it up into breadcrumbs. Try that with a ciabatta.

Scali is at its best with the classic Italian-American red sauce cuisine, though it's also nice with grilled meats or cold cuts. Make sure you find a good supplier though -- supermarket scali can often be overly chewy or cottony, with a rubbery, over-glazed crust. Of course, if you don't have a bakery nearby that makes it, you'll need a recipe. For that, I turn you over to the capable hands of the folks at King Arthur Flour; their recipe is pretty definitive (though I'm not quite sure about the dry milk addition). You'll also enjoy PJ Hamel's article on how she was introduced to the stuff by her Bay Stater husband.

Quick meal with an unusual veggie side

2011-05-14T10:58:00.000-07:00

So Odd Food week hit a few snags, but I did manage to get it back on track. In this particular case I had a bit of trouble -- the main course didn't need very much done to it.

Start with the flank steak. Now flank steak is of course the original cut for London Broil, a traditionally inexpensive (though not so much anymore) cut of steak with an odd geometry and a lengthwise grain that is usually marinated or spice-rubbed before grilling, or just cut up for a stirfry. I bought it on a whim and dug around for Italian recipes using it, only to find there just weren't that many. Easy solution: just salt, pepper, and grill, cut crosswise into strips, and serve.

Starch: garlic and oil spaghetti, one of my old standbys.

Vegetable: The Italian Academy of Cuisine's monsterpiece La Cucina provided a promising Roman recipe for fava beans with guanciale. Now guanciale -- pork jowl bacon -- isn't easy to find in the US -- you can get it in big northeastern cities like Boston, Providence, and New York, but here on Cape Cod, not so much. (Here's the recipe Mario Batali's restaurants use, if you want to try making your own.) However, pancetta -- the Italian version of regular pork belly bacon -- is easy enough to find at a supermarket deli, and usually of good if not great quality. However, fave were out of season too, so I used edamame instead.

Soia fresca con pancetta alla Lazio

Microwave or steam shelled edamame until starting to soften. Meanwhile, chop fine a small onion and a big handful of pancetta and cook the two together over medium heat (with a splash of olive oil if necessary); when the onion is transparent and the pancetta is cooked through and crisping a bit, add the edamame. Cook till the edamame are cooked through or to your taste, then serve.

This meal probably goes best with a medium-to-light red wine like a Nero d'Avola or Pinot Noir; alternately, try a brown ale like Newcastle.

A little New Haven, sans Yale and muggings

2011-04-29T15:29:00.000-07:00

Really, the classic white clam pizza speaks for itself. Originating at Frank Pepe's in New Haven, CT, it really isn't all that common outside Connecticut, but it's definitely one of the great classic pizzas nevertheless. According to the Pepe's website, the original was created in the 1960s, inspired by their Rhode Island littleneck clams on the halfshell.

Now I've never been to Pepe's, don't know if I ever will. But this take that I came up with after perusing a couple of recipes is a damn good pizza...

200-250g shucked whole clams, canned or fresh
4-6 cloves of garlic, crushed
olive oil
oregano
salt
Parmigiano Reggiano, Pecorino Romano, or a mixture of the two cheeses, grated
A ball of your favorite pizza dough

Preheat your oven to "infernal" (if it won't go that high, 500F/260C will probably be enough). Coat the pizza dough generously with olive oil and stretch out onto a piece of parchment or a cornmeal-covered pizza peel. Sprinkle with salt, and if it's a thick piece of dough, parbake it for ~5min or until it's starting to crust over. Meanwhile, mix garlic, oregano, and olive oil and set aside. When the parbake is finished, spread the oil/garlic mix over the pizza crust, pile on the clams, then cover the whole thing with cheese. Bake ~10 minutes or so, until done.

Breakfast fit for an eight year old

2011-04-27T17:57:00.000-07:00

Mmmm, fast food. Primary color, least-common-denominator flavors, cooked in pure grease, horribly bad for you. Years ago, Burger King was the first to come up with a rather dubious invention, the French toast stick. Essentially exactly what it sounds, it's breakfast for the shamelessly juvenile, an American bastardization of the churro that was probably invented by someone hiding in the bathroom at their local Chuck E. Cheese, doing rails off the counter while their kids dumped tokens into the arcade machines. Needless to say, if you're looking for guilty pleasures for breakfast, this is perfect.

There's two concerns here that you don't have to deal with when making normal French toast though. The number one concern is bread; although you can make pretty much any bread into French toast, a soft bread like American sandwich bread probably won't hold up very well in stick form unless it's fairly dense and cut like Texas Toast. I took a rather unusual step in choosing parbaked brown-and-serve baguettes for the bread here, though you could also use English muffins, San Francisco sourdough, or even a really good challah or brioche. Do NOT use raisin bread or anything swirled like that; it simply won't hold together.

The second concern is flavor. A proper French toast stick has a vaguely greasy, donut-like flavor; I used cinnamon, vanilla, and some brown sugar to get just the right amount of grease bomb flavor without making it overwhelming.

There's one third point: shame. Yes, you can go to the store and get these by the box; I believe Ore-Ida makes them. But if you actually want to enjoy the shame, make them like this instead.

A firm, soft-crusted bread (preferably a partially cooked one like a brown-and-serve French bread or some English muffins), cut into sticks about 10-15cm long and 2cm or so wide
4 eggs, beaten with
milk
a shot of vanilla extract
cinnamon (and/or nutmeg or allspice, if you wish)
1 tbsp brown or turbinado sugar

Heat a non-stick frying pan on the stove with about a quarter inch of canola oil over medium high heat. Dip the sticks of bread into the egg mixture and drop into the hot oil, cooking and turning as necessary till the egg is cooked and the sticks are brown. Serve with maple syrup, melted butter, and/or your choice of fruit syrup, Nutella, peanut butter, or custard and fish fingers. Ignore pangs of guilt.

Brazilian tri-tip

2011-04-26T16:06:00.001-07:00

With the big Open Source/geek fandom con Penguicon coming up, I thought I'd post my latest take on a former Penguicon classic, Brazilian beef. It was somewhat of a surprise choice actually -- I'd been saving up a tri-tip for Easter dinner but wound up making baked ziti with bolognese sauce instead.

True Brazilian beef, if you've never been to a churrasqueria, is usually grilled on a skewer over a charcoal fire and served with a vinegary, pico de gallo-like relish (along with rice and farofa, the latter being a mix of toasted manioc flour with ingredients like bacon, eggs, and olives). However, what makes it specifically Brazilian is the marinade, either a brine (American cuisine usually doesn't brine beef) or a slushy salt crust. The latter is what I'm presenting here.

The cut of meat I've chosen is a tri-tip, a special cut that isn't widely known outside California but is available at Trader Joe's around where I live, and might be special-orderable from a butcher; you can use a regular top or shell sirloin steak for this as well (preferably thick-cut), but the tri-tip has the advantage of being just the right combination of steak and roast for marinating and grill roasting, so if you can find it, grab it.

You don't really need measurements here. Take some salt and a handful of garlic cloves; crush the garlic and mix them together with enough lemon juice to make a slushy marinade. Cover your meat of choice with the marinade and let it sit there for ~20 minutes, then place it on the grill on high heat, scraping off the salt and discarding it as it sears. Cook, turning frequently, until seared well on the outside and no more than medium rare on the inside, then slice across the grain and serve with rice and vegetables of your choice.

If you'd like to try the original Penguicon recipe, read this Livejournal where the cooks responsible announced the end of the Brazilian beef cookout and passed the recipe on to anyone who missed it.

Easy shrimp scampi

2011-04-09T13:13:00.001-07:00

I don't claim that this is necessarily a great shrimp scampi, but it's pretty good. You'll definitely want to be heavy-handed with both the olive oil and the wine so you get enough sauce for the pasta too. A loaf of your favorite Italian bread or a baguette is nice with this too. (Needless to say, you can also make this with proper scampi (aka langoustines) as well.)

500g shrimp (21-25 or up) (preferably thawed and peeled IQF)
chopped parsley
white wine (preferably something unoaked like a Sauv Blanc or Pinot Grigio)
a handful of garlic cloves, crushed (say, six or so)
butter
extra virgin olive oil
salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes to taste

Heat a skillet to medium high to high and melt the butter and a splash of olive oil. Toss in the shrimp and crushed garlic, and saute till just cooked through. Add the parsley and white wine and simmer for a minute or so to infuse the wine into the shrimp, then finish with a little more olive oil and season to taste. Serve with long pasta like spaghetti or linguine.

Shepherd's pie 101

2011-04-02T18:23:00.000-07:00

This proved to be an interesting version of the classic, and I gave it its name reflecting that this is very much like the sort of dish a first-year culinary student would come up with, given a short description (say, "ground meat with vegetables, topped with mashed potatoes") and no prior knowledge of the dish. If you like your shepherd's pie sloppier with lots of gravy, this might not be your thing, but it went over pretty well.

I'm going to assume you have a favorite recipe for mashed potatoes; a quick description the one I used follows at the end.

1kg ground beef or lamb
1 medium yellow onion, with
2 ribs celery and
2 medium-sized carrots, all chopped fine for mirepoix
2 cloves garlic, crushed
half a bottle of dark beer (Newcastle Brown is fine)
mashed potatoes (recipe follows)
salt, pepper, and thyme to taste

Put the mirepoix vegetables and garlic in a pan with some butter and a bit of salt, and cook till they start to soften. Add the ground meat and brown, then add the beer and reduce, seasoning to taste. Preheat oven to 350F/180C. Spread the meat and vegetable mixture (using a spider or slotted spoon to drain excess fat) in the bottom of a roasting pan or casserole and cover with mashed potatoes. Bake for 20-30 minutes or until top starts to brown.

My signature mashed potatoes: Get some waxy potatoes (I generally use Red Bliss) and wash them thoroughly. Cut into chunks and put in a saucepan or dutch oven with just enough water to cover; salt generously and bring to a boil. Drain the potatoes, then add some softened or melted unsalted butter and a couple of dollops of sour cream. How much? However much you want. Add a couple of cloves of crushed raw garlic, then mix and mash thoroughly (the heat of the potato mass should cook it just enough). Serve.

Quick chicken fajita marinade

2011-03-21T19:44:00.000-07:00

First off, an unnecessary nitpick: fajita properly refers only to beef skirt steak; the backformation as the name for the sandwich itself is akin to the idea of "scampi sauce", i.e. a wine/oil/garlic sauce such as you'd use for shrimp scampi, which in and of itself is named for the Italian word for langoustine, scampo. Now that we've got that out of the way...

You can use this marinade in one of two ways. One is to marinate the whole, deboned chicken breasts or thighs, marinate them for an hour or so, grill them, and slice them. The other, if you're in a rush, is to cut the chicken into thin strips and toss them in the marinade for ten minutes or so, then saute them in a hot pan with some oil. Either way, this will be pretty good. I haven't tried it with beef, but it should work fine, if maybe a little sharp. For the chili powder, I used Penzey's Arizona Dreaming seasoning; you can use pretty much any Tex-Mex seasoning blend you like, though, or just add some ground chiles, cumin, oregano, and extra garlic.

Enough marinade for about half a kilo of boneless chicken breasts or thighs:

juice of two limes

extra virgin olive oil

1.5 tsp salt

1.5 tsp chili powder

2 cloves garlic

fresh ground pepper to taste

Whisk ingredients together and place in a bowl with chicken, making sure the chicken is coated. Let marinate in the refrigerator (15-30 minutes for slices, 30 min-2 hrs for whole pieces), then prepare. Serve with fajita fixings.

Strawberry syrup

2011-03-02T10:19:00.001-08:00

You've probably been to IHOP and seen their rack of four or five different flavored syrups (or up to six or eight in the old days). It's a nice gimmick, but let's be honest -- unless you're planning on loading up on hash browns, IHOP isn't much of a destination unless it's 1AM and nothing else is open and you absolutely must have a waffle. And those syrups are artificially flavored anyway.

So last night I decided to make my own strawberry syrup. Well, it was maybe more of a coulis, or a very liquid jam, or something, but the important thing was that it was meant to be poured over french toast and it was very good. The recipe specifies frozen strawberries, but you can also use almost-over-the-hill fresh strawberries if they're very ripe and decently sweet. You can also substitute other berries; I haven't tried but blueberries should be particularly good for this treatment.

1/lb/450g frozen strawberries
2-3 tbsp brown sugar or to taste
water
Lemon juice to taste (strictly optional)

Place the strawberries and sugar in a saucepan with water about halfway up. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and mash the strawberries with a potato masher (or a stick blender if you want a smoother texture). Simmer while preparing your pancakes/french toast/waffles, add lemon juice if the flavor is on the dull side, then bring to the table in a pourable container.

A little bit on ceramic knives

2011-02-18T16:23:00.000-08:00

I've been seeing an ASOTV product called the Yoshi Blade here and there -- it's an odd little knife which apparently has a handle longer than the blade. It also happens to be made out of zirconia ceramic, which at least has the advantage of not going dull that quickly (but on the other hand it needs a professional to sharpen -- zirconia is pretty damn hard). But what bugs me more than anything else is that being an ASOTV item, people might get the idea that it's something new, and if the quality isn't up to snuff, might decide that it just isn't worth it if they don't have a good experience with it.

Well, as anyone who's followed Ming Tsai's career knows, ceramic knives have actually been around for a while. I haven't been able to determine quite when they were invented, though Kyocera in Japan is the best known manufacturer, which is reasonably appropriate given that a) Kyocera started out as a ceramics company and b) the ceramic knife was first popularized in Japan as a way to avoid damaging the flavor of sushi. See, it seems that the carbon steel knives that are traditional for cutting fish in Japan tend to react with the fish and the acid in the sushi rice, and evidently some sushi aficionados are really picky about that. In fact, that nonreactivity is actually one of the benefits of ceramic knives for non-kitchen applications -- Wikipedia mentions that they're sometimes used by ocean divers to avoid seawater-driven rusting.

Typical metal knives are usually made in one of two ways -- drop-forging, in which a metal blank is hammered into shape using a mold, or stamping out the blade and sharpening it. (You could also hand-forge a knife, but that'd be one expensive kitchen knife.) Ceramic knives are made with a completely different method called sintering, which is a practice whereby a powdered raw material (in this case, usually zirconium dioxide, the same thing cubic zirconia is made of, sometimes mixed with yttrium oxide (Y2O3), which stabilizes and toughens the ceramic matrix) is placed into a mold and fused together by one of several methods, in this case ramming the ZrO2 powder into the shape of a knife and firing it in a manner similar to an ordinary clay pot. Once sharpened, ZrO2 knives, being made of a material approaching diamond and quartz for hardness, hold an edge for a very long time, which is quite fortunate given that it's rather difficult for an untrained person to sharpen them (something with diamond in it should be assumed to be required). According to a Kyocera FAQ, the black blades are even tougher than the white ones, due to being double-fired in a slightly different process.

Should you buy one? Well, I certainly wouldn't go for the Yoshi blade -- it seems awkwardly proportioned. If you're used to a larger knife (like I am), even the better knives on the market right now top out at around 20cm/8in and might feel awkwardly small, especially given the staggering expense -- even a small Japanese-made chef's blade goes for $50-$100, and their standard blade length is a mere 14cm. (They do have an 18cm blade, but that's where it starts to get really expensive.) The prices have come down to be competitive with metal knives, but for example Kyocera's top-of-the-line 21cm sashimi knife still goes for $300. (To say nothing of the $200 pocket knife.) Also, the common designs are largely based on Japanese cutlery -- if you don't regularly use a santoku, Kyocera's designs at least will take some getting used to.

Honestly, if I had one, I'd treat it more like a trophy than a tool -- they're tougher than they sound, but they can break if abused. Plus, my main knives are all stainless steel anyway, so I'm not so worried about chemical reactions. They are cool, though, and I can't blame you if you want one just for the bragging rights.

Guest recipe from dementiaradio.org's DJ Sinstress

2011-02-15T19:55:00.000-08:00

I haven't had much to say of late food-wise (though I'll probably have some food science stuff coming up soon), but my friend Jenye, aka DJ Sinstress from Dementia Radio made this for her and her boyfriend Ben this past Valentine's Day. With her permission, I'm passing it on.

Frozen chicken boobs. Put them in a pot with some water and boil them until they are cooked. I just leave mine in til the water bubbles and the meat is white.
Let them cool for a few min in a strainer, and grab some thick sliced maple bacon.
Arrange 2-3 strips side by side

Grab cooled chicken breast and lay at one end, roll the bacon around the chicken to the other end.
Dry rub the outside of the chicken with brown sugar, and sprinkle with cinnamon and cayanne to taste (depends on how spicy you like it)
Just back til the bacon crisps

The pasta is easy. Just break spaghetti or angel hair up into little bits and boil them til almost cooked but firm.
Add a splash of half and half (heavy cream if you don't care about fat content), a pat of butter or smart balance, and a handful of grated parmesan. Toss in some steamed broccoli or cauliflower, or any veggie of your choice and voila. Easy peasy.

If you want to try candied bacon alone, I usually line a cooke sheet with aluminum foil. Arrange the bacon into strips side by side, rub brown sugar, and sprinkle good quality cinnamon over it, and bake 375 - 400 til bacon is done to your liking. I don't like crisp bacon so I make mine about 10-15 min or less.
You can experiment with spices. I've made it with cinnamon, cayenne, paprika, garlic, curry, etc. Just use the brown sugar as a base.

Enjoy!

Brian here again. Listen to DJ Sinstress and her show, "The Retro House of Spork", on DementiaRadio.org on Wednesday nights, 6-8PM Eastern; also, visit her new blog, Jen Can Cook, specializing in recipes for diabetics and awesome food photography.

The food at 7-Eleven terrifies me

2011-01-17T20:20:00.000-08:00

A few years ago I reviewed a book called Mini-Mart a la Carte, a cookbook of sorts that featured food you could find in the average convenience store. Some of the recipes actually qualified as edible but most were just plain scary and possibly toxic. (The food photography was impeccable, though, in its own cockeyed, disgusting sort of way.)

So I find myself increasingly buying things at the 7-Eleven -- they seem to be everywhere these days, and their only real competition around here is Tedeschi's, which is strictly regional in New England, and Cumberland Farms. (And possibly ExxonMobil and Amerada Hess, both of whom rely heavily on convenience stores backing up their gas stations.) Now, 7-Eleven is not lacking for food options; in fact, I'm pretty sure they were a major part of the inspiration for the book above. But it's hard to imagine actually eating any of it, or at least anything that wasn't on the shelf in a wrapper. On prominent display in every one I've been in recently is the big rolling hot dog grill, which usually contains quite a bit more than hot dogs -- taquitos, breakfast burritos, and an abomination called the Cheeseburger Roller that can be most charitably be described as looking like a giant brown-and-serve sausage with bits of cheese (cheez?) in it. One near where I live used to be a White Hen Pantry, which had an incredible deli selection; however, White Hen was bought by a Japanese 7-Eleven franchiser (which now also owns the brand as a whole) and this place was converted a month or so ago. Deli: gone. It's been replaced by the same old same old -- minimal deli options, and the same greasy crap food. Well, at least the place has a clean, subtly Japanese look to it... that's more than most 7-11s I've been in can boast.

I'm not a huge fan of convenience stores in general; it's nice to have a reliable source for cheap milk and newspapers, but virtually everything else they sell tends to be horribly overpriced. And I know there are people who manage to subsist on convenience store food, but I really don't want to know what their gastroenterologists have to say. But it's still possible to find the odd neighborhood place that still has a decent deli counter (if you're going through Boston's inner suburbs, try D'Agostino's in Arlington Heights some time), that carries a few local brands and doesn't gouge on everything. If you find one, treasure it -- homogeneity sucks.

Ming Tsai would be proud: hoisin and maple syrup glazed pork

2011-01-09T17:29:00.001-08:00

So I had been saving a chunk of about two pounds of pork shoulder from Christmas to make carnitas, but someone suggested making a stirfry with it. I kind of didn't like that idea -- the same quality that makes pork shoulder top-notch for barbecue and the like (as well as a greasy guilty pleasure of a pork roast) didn't appeal to me as a possible stirfry ingredient -- it would be either greasy or would have just fallen apart in the pan.

I served this with rice and a big mess of stirfried veggies (carrots, celery, scallions, snow peas, and mushrooms). It's not exactly char siu -- it's faster, and it uses maple syrup instead of honey or sugar -- but it's more than close enough for the purpose I put it to.

It should go without saying that you use real maple syrup for this. Also, you could use a regular broiler pan for this, but my suspicion is that you'd wind up with soggy glaze on one side, which kind of takes the fun out of making this stuff to begin with.

1kg pork shoulder, sliced into 1cm thick strips

75mL each of hoisin sauce and maple syrup, mixed until combined

Kosher salt

Put a cooling rack in a rimmed cookie sheet or a broiler pan and start the broiler in your oven. Salt both sides of the pork and cover the top side of the pork with the hoisin/maple glaze, then place under the broiler. Once cooked on one side, brush with the glaze again on the cooked side, then on the uncooked side; cook until just cooked through. Glaze both sides again and broil just enough to caramelize the second layer onto the pork, then remove from the heat and slice into strips to serve.

Certain thoughts on food for the New Year

2010-12-26T16:01:00.000-08:00

Wine glasses are a consumable and should be bought as cheaply as possible. Nobody cares about your Riedel glasses except pretentious wine posers, and you're out at least $10 a pop (up to $90 for some designs) if one gets broken. (Same goes for champagne flutes -- save the expensive Waterford stuff for your SO and buy them by the case for parties. And champagne coupes are for posers.)

Boneless, skinless chicken breasts are the tofu of meat, and the same logic applies -- they're boring by themselves, but react nicely to some good marinade or seasoning.

@cookbook is a friggin' genius. But you already know that.

To quote Chris Rock: "Cornbread. Ain't nothing wrong with that."

A good seasoning blend is its own reward. Also a perpetually good excuse to make pork chops.

If your favorite comfort foods from your childhood were made with second-rate ingredients, two things will happen when you try to recreate them: 1. You will find there is a reason you haven't eaten them much since childhood and 2. trying to make them with top-shelf ingredients will ruin them.

Rule 34 has a (completely SFW) culinary application: If it exists, you can find a recipe for it on Google. No exceptions.

It is never a bad idea to have multiple recipes for the same dish.

Forget everything you've ever heard about learning to cook by rote. Learning a bit of kitchen science is the single most liberating thing any cook can do to make more creative food.

If a power outage is imminent, the number one thing that I can think of that you can make on the grill without opening the freezer is pancakes. (Aunt Jemima Complete is perfect for this.)

Stop giving me that look when I mention dutch ovens. It's a cooking pot!

There is never a bad time for pie.

Always remember: gourmet = "Look what I have." foodie = "You gotta try this!"

Lamb and rice thing

2010-12-22T15:40:00.000-08:00

So I had a quarter leg of lamb in the freezer and couldn't come up with a damn thing for dinner. I took three different culinary influences -- French mirepoix, Spanish paella, Central Asian pilaf -- and slapped this together. It looks like mud, but it tastes great.

500g boneless leg of lamb, cut in large dice
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
1 rib celery, chopped
1 large carrot, chopped
3-5 cloves of garlic, minced or crushed
300g rice (jasmine or basmati)
500mL water
salt, oregano, bay leaves to taste
canola oil and butter

Brown the lamb in canola oil and set aside. Add the onion, celery, and carrot with some salt and cook until softened, then add the garlic and butter. Cook, stirring, until the butter is melted, then add the water, rice, lamb, and seasonings. Bring to a boil, then drop to low and cook, uncovered, for ~30 minutes. (Some of the rice will still be a little crunchy.)

A tale of two kitchen chains

2010-12-09T22:36:00.001-08:00

Sometimes I wonder how many serious cooks actually shop at Williams-Sonoma. Their prices are usually nosebleed-range, and a lot of the food products they sell are the sorts of things that seem to be invented primarily to convince foodie dilettantes that they can cook -- Hamburger Helper for the gourmet set. (Seriously? A premixed "roasting crust" rub for roast beef? Salt-crusted roasts are borderline idiot-proof.) They do sometimes have nice recipe cards, but half the time they expect one of WS' ludicrously expensive simmer sauces or baking mixes, rendering them sort of useless for anyone who doesn't know what they're doing.

The Williams-Sonoma in the Burlington Mall (northwest of Boston) is across the way from a recently-added Sur La Table store. Although I tend to doubt that Sur La Table is much cheaper than Williams-Sonoma, the presentation is completely different. WS is frankly kind of anal-retentive; SLT is pleasantly cluttered. WS looks very upper-class, very Barefoot Contessa; SLT is a little more Julia Child, and definitely funkier and more fun. Both of them have their book series, and I'd actually consider this one a wash, though SLT's definitely seem to be more aimed towards a giggly, Christmas morning attitude; their Baking Kids Love book, by Cindy Mushet and her daughter Bella, is one of the best cookbooks for older kids that I've seen, and their flagship title Things Cooks Love takes what could have been a redundant catalog slog and turns it into an unrestrained orgy of gadget lust. I don't get that kind of playfulness from Williams-Sonoma.

Now I'm not going to go off on an unrestrained hagiography of Sur La Table; it's a big company like any other, and its image is no doubt at least as carefully crafted as, say, Starbucks. But I think these two, more than anything else, illustrates the difference between foodie and gourmet. Just an interesting thought.

ps I do have a nice little paring knife from Sur La Table. I bought it, oh, seven or eight years ago, and since I don't do a lot of paring it winds up being my utility knife more often than not. Six bucks. Not a bad price at all.

The fix for a chewy waffle

2010-11-30T15:12:00.000-08:00

Waffles aren't supposed to be chewy.

I've had a problem with this for some time; I use King Arthur Flour for baking almost exclusively, which is a fairly high protein AP flour that makes a waffle that's somewhat of a tug of war to eat, so I tend to fall back on pancake mix nine times out of ten. However, with 2/3 of a quart of buttermilk left over after Thanksgiving's cornbread, this was about the best thing I could think of to do with it.

The thought process that I followed is the real story here. I had some specific things in mind -- I wanted a distinctly eggy interior, a somewhat thick batter, and a less tenaciously glutinous finished product. I also wanted a touch of sweetness and possibly a bit of surface caramelization. After ruling out cake flour as too exotic to be worth keeping around and cornmeal as not likely to cook properly in a waffle iron, I had the idea of using masa harina -- tortilla flour -- to cut the gluten development in the batter. I put an extra egg into the mix as well to create a bit of a crêpe-like texture, and kept the amount of liquid on the low side to create a somewhat doughier batter. (The tradeoff is that you do have to spread it across the waffle iron by hand.)

The end result is a distinct hint of corn flavor and a hint of a soft pebbly texture; it goes great with strawberries and whipped cream, but you might just like it on its own with only a bit of butter on it.

175g all purpose flour

75g masa harina

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp baking powder

3 large eggs

1-2 tsp organic or brown sugar (or to taste)

140mL buttermilk

140mL milk

1/4lb/115g melted unsalted butter

Whisk the flour, masa harina, leavenings, and salt together in a bowl. Beat the eggs with the sugar until combined, then add the milk and buttermilk. Mix together, then pour into the flour mixture and mix until just combined. Add the butter, mix till combined, then let rest for 10 minutes while you heat the waffle iron. Spread the batter in the waffle iron (the batter will not pour) and bake the waffles in the iron according to manufacturer's directions.

I... what is this i don't even... oh wait... This. Is. Awesome.

2010-11-29T19:22:00.001-08:00

The other day I saw a book called Eat Tweet. I was certainly intrigued but I couldn't decide -- was this a gimmick or absolute genius?

The author is Maureen Evans (aka @cookbook) and her partner is Blaine Cook, one of the original Twitter developers. Now I have an ambivalent relationship with Twitter; I've always seen it as sort of silly, but it does make for an interesting rethink of modes of expression, and it's one of the most popular forms of social media around. It is what it is, and it's not going anywhere any time soon. Shorter-URL services like bit.ly have benefitted greatly from the general inability to cram a URL into a tweet, but they don't really contain any real information, just a redirect.

Evans has solved one of the most interesting problems in conveying complex information in such a limited medium: by creating an extreme dialect of txt_spk that condenses the most common terms in cooking down to what are basically human-readable hash codes. In so doing, she managed to cram over a thousand relatively complex recipes in a small trade paperback. It might not work for, say, Chinese or Mexican food, but for most Western cuisines it's a very efficient way to cram complex instructions into a small space. Escoffier would be proud.

A few examples, copied from Evans' Twitter account with attributions attached, so you can practice reading the recipe notation:

Marcella Hazan’s Roast Chicken with Lemons: Bruise,stab2whl lem. Stuff in~4lb whlchicken,tie shut,s+p. h@350℉(turn1x); +20m breastup@400℉.

Fresh Noodles: China. Knead2c flr/egg/t salt/½c h2o. Quarter,roll12"x4"; cut4"x½". Cvr30m. Pinch,stretch from center to dbl. Boil6m. Yld~lb.

Tourtiere: Quebec. Bake,mash lrg tater; simmr~h+2lb grndpork/mincd onion&garlc/⅔c h2o/½t cinn&pep/¼t clove. Fill,vent dblpieshell; 50m@350F.

Spaghetti alle Vongole: heat 2garlc/chili/⅓c olvoil; +2lb clam/⅓c wtwine. Cvr5m@high to open(discard shut); cook2m+lb hotpasta/T parsly/s+p.

Review: Tasty Burger

2010-11-28T08:28:00.000-08:00

So... it's new, it's in the Fenway, and it's only a couple of months old. Tasty Burger (1301 Boylston St, Boston, MA) is a burger joint just behind Fenway Park and down the street from Guitar Center and (if you happen to swing that way) Machine, built in an old gas station. It's actually two sections -- the takeout side looks very much like the old-school clamshacks we have down here on the Cape, while the indoor side is sit-down service in a scrupulously clean, light-industrial hipster bar (complete with the beer list written on a chalkboard wall behind the bar) with a big ol' picture of Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction in full jheri curl on the wall.

Yep, it's Pulp Fiction inspired -- there's even a Big Kahuna burger on the menu (onion, pineapple, teriyaki sauce). I just went for the basics though -- bacon cheeseburger, fries, Coke. The cheeseburger was about as good as you could expect -- it's definitely competitive with the best the area has to offer (Bartley's, RF O'Sullivan's, B. Good, Wild Willy's, among others). The fries, on the other hand, were disappointing; the really good burger places have caught on that fresh-cut fries are always worth the effort, and these tasted frozen and soaked in salt water. Hopefully they'll change that eventually, but it did make me wish I'd gotten the half-and-half plate with onion rings and fries.

Soda's in bottles, so you don't get free refills, but the burger is just the right size that you don't need a quart of soda to wash it down. They have a few milkshakes on the menu, as well as a rather good beer list with around 20 entries total (draft and on tap). Service is casual but responsive, with the servers tag-teaming as necessary to make sure the customer's kept happy. A couple of reviews on Yelp have made note of the rather slippery floor (which is, after all, a gas station garage floor), so that might be a concern as we move into winter, but come spring it'll make an excellent pre-game spot for Red Sox fans.

Farmer's market malaise

2010-11-11T13:07:00.001-08:00

Farmer's markets are fun. There's no getting around that -- you find vegetables and fruit there that you never find in supermarkets, and you're also keeping small farmers with unusual products in business. But come November, the growing season is over, and so are the farmer's markets. I tried getting my fix last week at Whole Foods, but wound up leaving only with some bread and pastries; a supermarket is still a supermarket, no matter what the quality of the products.

So here I am, November 11 and mopey. I can't wait for May. Also I'm hoping for Ming Tsai to win Next Iron Chef, but I kind of want to see him stay on PBS as well rather than going back to the Food Network. Eh, who knows.

The perplexing case of "Company's Coming"

2010-11-10T20:39:00.001-08:00

Now as I understand it, Company's Coming is a huge name in Canadian cooking. A month or so ago, I managed to get my hands on a stack of their books at the Ocean State Job Lot and just brought them home to look at out of curiosity.

First off, I'm not sure there's anything quite like this in the US -- Betty Crocker seems to do something similar, and it also echos the old Time-Life books, but the fact is that the cookbooks with the biggest brand recognition in the US are doorstoppers like Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Joy of Cooking, and How To Cook Everything. Granted that you can't expect doorstoppers to come up with new content every few months, but you also wind up getting a ton of content for $30-50 and it's all in one centralized location. The Cook's Illustrated Best Recipe series may be a bit closer, but they also provide a lot more content in terms of recipe development notes and the like.

If you were to start on a collection of Company's Coming at cover price, you'd be up to $150 easy (US or Canadian) before you had the beginnings of a decent kitchen reference. The recipe content is fine, if a bit sparse with few notes. The forced homeyness of the books kind of grates, though (although not to anything like the degree of Taste of Home) and it seems odd that the series creator Jean Paré gets author credit on every one -- rather too Martha Stewart I should think, especially when, as near as I can determine, their test kitchen facility is quite large.

But what bothers me most of all is that they don't seem to have a big book. There's no "best of" book that can be used as a kitchen reference. If I hadn't gotten the books I have as cheap as I did, it's unlikely I would have bought any at all; there's not even an "essentials" set outlined on the website, something that strikes me as a bit odd after nearly thirty years in the business.

If you come across them in the US, they aren't bad books, for single-subject books. They're great for quick-and-dirty gap-filling in your repertoire. But I wouldn't recommend becoming a completist.

Something in the Air

2010-10-24T16:47:00.000-07:00

I've never made a secret of my dislike for the MacBook Air. Apart from the odd overpacked air traveler, I've always seen the computer as the quintessential poser machine -- a pointlessly crippled piece of flash-over-substance gear designed for the lucrative upper-middle-class Starbucks client market. To some extent I still feel that way, but the way Apple is marketing the Air as a revolutionary new design seems pretty on-target, and the 11-inch model is something I would actually buy.

See, I've always been one of those people who like small laptops; I've got a netbook on my long-term shopping list, I owned several Powerbook Duos, and I actually thought the Powerbook 2400 (aka Comet) was a great idea. The new Air has quite a bit of that going on -- the flash storage (formerly an option, now standard) should do wonders for battery life and cooling, and the 11-inch model in particular should be huge for air travelers when every gram in your carryon counts. Assuming Apple has managed to find a solution to the limited lifespan of traditional flash memory, I think this is a good preview of what people will be demanding in the future from their laptops. (Not to mention how small the next generation of Mac mini is likely to be...)

Looking in the Lion's mouth

2010-10-22T10:29:00.000-07:00

There's a perception that Apple really didn't change much between Leopard and Snow Leopard. Although the general appearance of Snow Leopard is very similar to Leopard (the Finder interface is changed in a few subtle ways), the real changes are all under the hood -- full 64-bit app support, 64-bit Quicktime, Grand Central Dispatch (a much-simplified approach to threaded applications and multicore processors) and a number of other things that don't usually get seen on the surface. So now, we've been introduced to Lion.

Well, we'll see what's under the hood on this one. Right now Apple doesn't seem to be saying a whole lot about the underpinnings of the new system, which is somewhat annoying from a developer standpoint. I've seen Xcode 4 and I honestly don't like it very much; it's clumsy and takes up far too much of the screen for someone who can't afford a 17" display (which is a particular shame, as the developer tools have always been the best thing about OS X, going far back into its NeXT roots). But, for better or for worse, that isn't what Apple is promoting; it's the carrying over of iOS features that they want you to take notice of.

Launchpad is uninteresting. I use something like it with the Applications folder stack's HUD that pops out of my Dock; it's nice that it's there, but it really just replicates functionality I could create on MacOS 8 with a folder drawer at the bottom of the screen. Launchpad is no more than a full-screen version of that, meant to look like the iOS equivalent. I might use it; I might not. I don't much care honestly, since it's not giving me anything I don't already have.

Mission Control is curious. As far as I can tell, it's just a second-order version of Exposé (and probably works out of the same framework). It's interesting in a quick and dirty sort of way, but nothing worth screaming from the hilltops over.

Fullscreen apps... well, all I can really say about that is that some people like that sort of thing, so it's a reasonable addition. I'm not sure why it requires any special implementation detail, though; it's more of an application issue than a system issue.

FaceTime is nice. I've always been something of a Skypephobe so I probably wouldn't use it much, but it's perfectly reasonable for Apple to do their own thing in order to bring Mac and iOS users to the same page. However, if they do want to be reasonable competitors to Skype, they need three things: an open protocol, Windows and Linux versions, and integration with iChat.

So... so far Lion looks kind of ho-hum. I'll be waiting to hear more about the innards before I decide whether to be impressed or not.

Apple brings us the Mac App Store. What do I think?

2010-10-21T13:42:00.000-07:00

So I've seen Apple's Mac App Store guidelines, and I have a few, rather non-food thoughts.

First off, the day Apple goes to an iOS-like model on the Mac OS is the day I shitcan everything I've ever done with a Mac and switch over to Ubuntu. That's non-negotiable. However, it doesn't look like they plan to do this, especially since it completely defies the logic of including Xcode with the OS to begin with. So there's that. And I still don't like the restriction on adult content; sooner or later Apple's going to have to give in on that one. Finally, I'm very curious as to what this means for Mac C++ programmers -- the last viable option on the market is Qt (MacApp and PowerPlant are essentially dead, WxWidgets isn't ready yet, and GTK+/Cocoa is made of fail), and Qt provides a full end-to-end development environment that's largely a full replacement for Xcode. Something tells me massive whacks of Nokia code will not be welcome in the App Store's QC procedures.

But I'll tell ya something -- the App Store holds the promise of two very useful things. One is a likely rise in simple, efficient, UNIXy programs that cut out the bloat of a quarter century of out-of-control desktop designs and stick to simple, do-it-right features; it could even be a resurrection of something like OpenDoc if developers play their cards right. The other is as a secure source for known-good software, like Steam or the Ubuntu Software Center. Granted, we already do have something of the sort; Steam came to the Mac earlier this year, and we've had MacPorts and Fink since almost the beginning, but MacPorts is... frustrating, and Fink has issues with Snow Leopard that don't look to be fixed any time soon.

So, Apple, bring it on. But we'll be watching you, so don't fuck this one up. Don't make us go Cydia on you.

(Apple also announced the expected feature list for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. That's for another post.)

Buena suerte, Chile (and a great Chilean sandwich)

2010-10-12T16:18:00.000-07:00

After dinner tonight, I realized that I had just made chacareros for dinner, on the day that the mine rescue operation in Chile is supposed to begin. Total coincidence; the chacareros weren't in honor of it, but this post is. But I can hear you asking: WTF is a chacarero?

There's a place in Boston called Chacarero, run by a guy named Juan Hurtado. It's been in a couple different places but is currently in a storefront on Arch Street, and it's a culinary legend in the area around the Financial District and Downtown Crossing. It started out in the early 90s as a pushcart before graduating to a literal hole in the wall on the Franklin St. side of the Filene's building. With that building gone and a hole in its place, it's moved to Arch St. If you're in Boston during a weekday lunch hour, check it out.

The sandwich itself is an impressive affair -- the small one is made on a bun the size of a paperback book, and I'm not sure how big the large one is. Thin slices of beef and/or chicken, stir-fried on a standard-issue short order griddle, stacked with a huge pile of dead ripe tomato slices, a slice of Munster cheese, and a handful of green beans, with mashed avocado and (optionally) a pasty green hot sauce spread on the bun. As I understand it, it's classic Chilean diner food, and it's very, very good.

The recipe? Well, pretty much what I said above. I used some thick-sliced Italian bread instead of making the buns, and I added some garlic and rosemary to the thin-sliced steak tips I used. That's about it :-)

As I write, the rescue should be getting underway in a few hours. Best of luck, Chile. The whole world waits with you.

Food as constructive protest, part 2

2010-10-03T11:24:00.000-07:00

To a US foodie, there's few brands more universally loved than Penzeys Spices. Though their prices are a bit on the high side, the quality and selection of their spices is spectacular and their selection of spice blends is wide-ranging and infinitely creative. They make a significant effort to cultivate a community feel to their brand, using customer recipes in their (sadly short-lived) magazine, Penzeys One and their in-store recipe cards, and doing it without the creepy Stepford vibe of Taste of Home magazine. So when I got a catalog in the mail advertising their new Arizona Dreaming spice blend... I kinda cringed.

I was glad to find out the cringe was unwarranted -- CEO Bill Penzey wrote this column in the catalog explaining the logic behind the spice blend. It was a response to the hate that drove Arizona's SB 1070 (the notorious "papers, please" immigration bill), in the form of a culinary reminder that American heritage is a mix of many culinary influences, including the native, Mexican, and Anglo influences that we know as Southwestern food. There perhaps isn't very much more to say -- it's a simple statement that goes to the importance of food as a marker of history and identity, and does a very pleasant job of it, producing a sort of hot/tart chili powder that actually reminds me of my own chili recipe. If you're a subscriber to the Penzeys catalog, you probably got a coupon for a free container of it (and a good-sized one too, double the size of their usual freebie); if you didn't, you should still try it.

Steak Tacos

...and this is what I did with it. You can substitute crisp taco shells if you prefer, but I've always found them messier than strictly necessary. I used a jarred salsa from Trader Joe's, but a fresh salsa is never a bad idea.

500g sirloin steak or steak tips, diced
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed, or to taste
salt
2 tsp (or to taste) Penzeys Arizona Dreaming spice mix (or substitute your own)
corn tortillas
shredded cheese (I used a Cheddar/Jack/Asadero mix)
shredded lettuce and chopped plum tomatoes
a salsa of your choice

Cook the onions with a bit of salt until soft and translucent, then add the beef, spice and garlic, and cook until it reaches your desired state of doneness. When it's ready, heat up the tortillas on a lightly greased or dry cast iron pan until they're lightly toasted and starting to puff (probably 30sec-1min on each side) and place a tablespoon or two of meat in the center of the tortilla on the plate. Serve with trimmings.

Food as constructive protest

2010-09-23T19:12:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, I took a trip by the Boston Food Not Bombs chapter's free meal in Central Square in Cambridge. I had not actually been very familiar with them until recently; someone had mentioned them in connection with a discussion I was involved in somewhere on vegetarian food (I think it was on one of Amanda Marcotte's CSA threads on Pandagon) and I thought I'd do a little research.

You can read more at the above page or at the umbrella organization's web page, but they essentially began in 1980 as part of a protest against the Seabrook nuclear power station in New Hampshire with the mission of serving free meals to all comers. Their food is, as a rule, vegan (among other things, because it avoids animal cruelty and is less prone to food poisoning, as well as being largely acceptable to pretty much everyone), and they generally cook off-site and bring it out and serve it cafeteria-style. The Cambridge police seemed to be pretty cool about it, if amused, and the crew -- three servers, two making posters -- were quite friendly. The food was simple -- a salad, a vegetable dish of bell peppers and bok choy (an unusual and very tasty combination), and pasta with a chunky tomato and bell pepper sauce.

The meal was quite good and drew in quite a lot of people, a good number being local homeless, and that I think gets to the (ahem) meat of the project. Protests sometimes fall on deaf ears, and direct action often implies the risk of violence. Food Not Bombs is a productive protest -- the message gets out, while people who don't usually get a chance to eat anything better than convenience store food get a decent meal for free.

An interesting postscript -- I'm not sure if any of the crew members were old enough to remember, but the location they picked for serving their meal was just about where the old Lucy Parsons/Red Corner anarcho-collectivist bookstore sat before that entire corner was torn down and rebuilt during the early 90s. A little extreme for my tastes, to be honest, but still interesting...

Learning a new espresso machine

2010-09-06T15:06:00.001-07:00

So after eight years of my Starbucks Barista espresso machine being missing in some box... somewhere... I finally broke down upon seeing a $40 reconditioned Krups XP4030 espresso machine at the Christmas Tree Shop in Hyannis. I've been running it with some Five-Country Espresso Blend from Trader Joe's and, well, it took me a while to get used to it, but so far I'm pretty happy. However, to someone used to a traditional boiler-based espresso machine, the thermoblock design that Krups prefers takes a bit of getting used to.

For one thing, it doesn't heat instantly -- I made the mistake of pulling a shot just after turning the machine on and was rewarded with half a demitasse of dishwater with pale crema. Also, the continuous feed steam is strange -- the pump constantly feeds drips of water into the block to create the steam, resulting in a steam flow that is constant, if a bit slow to heat milk; I wouldn't probably try to do more than 250mL of milk at once, and don't expect a lot of foam. (I'm not a big fan of aerating wands, but that's because I learned to make espresso on a big professional machine so I'm kind of a spoiled brat in that regard.) And you really have to be a bit more diligent than usual about tamping the grounds; the scoop/tamper they give you is pretty robust for something made out of cheap plastic, but you still might want to invest in something a bit more professional. (Incidentally, the XP4030 is no longer in production; their current top-of-the-line, the XP5240, seems to have a number of design tweaks, including an uprated heating element. The interface, however, is identical.)

Interestingly, if you look at the reviews on Amazon, they are, to put it mildly, mixed. I think that's to be expected; thermoblock machines in general tend to be a bit underpowered, and I don't think most people really understand how to handle an espresso machine without a fair bit of practice. For that, I can only say to approach a switch from a boiler machine to a thermoblock as if it's a completely different piece of equipment and relearn the whole thing from the ground up.

I kicked Olive Garden's ass

2010-09-04T09:57:00.000-07:00

I'm not exactly a fan of the Olive Garden; although they do have a few innovative items on the menu, I think they still trade excessively on a stereotypical view of Italian food. One thing I do like, however, is their Zuppa Toscana, a type of what we'd call "Italian wedding soup" (from the Italian minestre maritate, "married soups"), which generally implies a generous mixing of greens, meat, and starches. Unlike the usual American version which uses pastine and little meatballs, the Zuppa Toscana (which I don't think is actually Tuscan, more Neapolitan, but it's the friggin' Olive Garden) uses Italian sausage and potatoes.

The main difference here is that the Olive Garden uses some kind of dairy product (milk or cream, I'm not sure) and more baking-style potatoes; I think the red potatoes I use here tend to hold together better, and I don't think the dairy really adds anything at all to the soup that isn't already there except a slightly muddy, chowder-like appearance. You should be able to get around six servings out of this alongside some ciabatta or francese bread and a plate of insalata caprese. Also, don't feel too bound to the measurements; it's really a matter of personal preference as to how much of which item you want.

2L chicken broth
500g mild Italian sausage, broken into small bits
200g red potatoes (the waxy kind), in 1-1.5cm dice
a couple of handfuls of chopped soup greens (I used kale)
2 small yellow onions, rough chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
bay leaves, oregano, and red pepper to taste
kosher salt
olive oil

Cook the onions with some salt over medium heat in a light drizzle of olive oil (not too much, you'll be rendering a lot of fat from the sausage) until translucent, then add the garlic and sausage and cook until the sausage is cooked through and browning.
Add the soup greens (cook until just wilted if they're raw), potatoes, and seasonings.
Add the chicken broth and bring to a simmer. Cook until the potatoes are tender, about 20-30 minutes.
Serve with bread.

Two dinners

2010-08-25T16:17:00.000-07:00

Just a couple of interesting meals from the last week:

I made a frittata last night with tomatoes, shallots, Swiss cheese, and a generous dose of pork carnitas. It was pretty good, though quite dense -- I couldn't really finish mine. It would make a great appetizer or a sandwich filling, though.
A quick "café lunch" dinner, with pan-fried salmon fillets topped with a sauce made with melted butter, dill, garlic, and lemon juice. On the side: haricots verts, microwaved with a bit of salt, a baguette, and a bottle of French sparkling lemonade (sort of like Sprite but classier). (The green beans went rather nice with the butter sauce.)

I need to make a point of making more dishes like the latter. It's fairly light but satisfying eating, and offers more opportunities for creativity with quick cooking.

Seafood and sustainability

2010-07-23T16:16:00.000-07:00

Somewhat forgotten over the last month of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe has been early worries about spawning grounds for the critically endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna. We already know that many deepwater species have tried to move inshore to avoid polluted, anoxic water in their normal ranges, and the shrimp fisheries that the Gulf of Mexico is famous for may not recover for decades if ever. Of course, this isn't the first time a fishing stock has been endangered; the Atlantic cod (a major staple on both sides of the Atlantic for centuries) is on a severe downhill slide, and the Patagonian toothfish (aka the Chilean sea bass) is in rough shape in all but a few of its fisheries as well. The haddock population off the US and Canadian coast has just barely recovered from a similar low point in the 90s and is still vulnerable enough to make watchlists from Greenpeace and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch. Even the humble horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus, to be specific) is having conservation issues due to its value as bait and for medical research.

Fish farms aren't necessarily an answer either -- many of the most popular food fish (particularly tuna and salmon) are carnivores, meaning that they need to be fed wild-caught fish to thrive. In addition, fish farms also have many of the same problems as other livestock farming operations -- pollution from animal waste being a big one, but also risks of disease, inbreeding, and weak animals. And fishermen are caught in the middle -- it's hard to make a living from a depleted fish stock, and the only ways to prevent massive damage (from such things as gill nets and bottom-trawling) also tend to be less productive.

There isn't a whole lot to say here as far as solutions -- much like this commentary on the Deepwater Horizon spill, in a lot of parts of the world, for many species, this is pretty close to a worst-case scenario. I won't go as far as others and say to give up seafood entirely, but it's a good idea to keep these things in mind when you go to buy something for dinner. If you get a chance, print out one of the booklets from the Monterey Bay Aquarium site above; they also have an iPhone app (I do not know if they have one for Android), and it's free.

In which Brian reminds himself that he drinks too much soda

2010-07-07T17:13:00.000-07:00

Scienceblogs.com has a problem.

Pepsico, of all companies, now has a blog full of paid advertising, and although initial protests against a lack of obvious disclosure have led to some increased noting of the advertising aspect, a good number of bloggers are understandably furious about it (at least three are so disgusted as to be leaving permanently), many are suspending their blogs in protest, and although a couple (including Abbie Smith of ERV) are not bothered or are outright welcoming, and there are quite a few bloggers who are ticked off at the ethics implications but are deciding to wait and see. Scienceblogs frankly hasn't seen this much of a mess since Crackergate.

Now I've wanted to join Scienceblogs for some time, though my scientific content isn't far beyond what you get on Good Eats or America's Test Kitchen. But... I don't know. Although I wouldn't consider myself a Slow Fooder (there's a bit too much woo in the movement for my taste), I sympathize with their aims of bringing quality food to everyone, not just a comfortable middle-to-upper-class audience. Pepsico isn't the biggest nemesis on the block, but they're pretty big -- Yum Brands (KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut) was spun off from them, and Frito Lay is one of the big producers of fatass couch potato munchies. They've got a lot of nerve even thinking they have anything of value to contribute beyond the latest papers on mouthfeel and focus group organization. This new connection is especially shameful after adding group blogs from three prominent research institutions just a couple of weeks ago.

I guess I'm willing to wait and see, but the term "appearance of impropriety" applies here. Seed Media made a huge error giving this blog the go-ahead, and if they need the money that badly, Pepsico representatives should be writing with a peer-reviewed shotgun held to their heads. But they can't afford to piss off so many of their content providers like this.

So should I apply anyway, perhaps waiting until the situation is resolved? Or do I keep passing out business cards and advertising my posts on Facebook?

Muddy branding and network decay: thoughts on the Cooking Channel

2010-07-04T08:37:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm going to start out by saying that I actually like the Cooking Channel (Scripps' new companion channel to the Food Network); there's a lot of English-language cooking programming that we simply don't get to see much of in the US unless the fans are willing to torrent the shows. But that name... that name bothers me.

The Cooking Channel, obviously, is basically Food Network 2. Maybe "Food Network International" would have been a better choice; a large quantity of the Cooking Channel's programming comes from Food Network Canada, along with material from the UK and Australia. There's also old Food Network programming and some new material here and there from established hosts. Honestly, I think the setup is a winner -- at one time, people didn't think there could be enough programming to fill up the Food Network's schedule, and now it's overflowing onto a second channel. And there's the problem...

When the Cooking Channel was still Fine Living, they had a show a few years back with wine expert Andrea Immer Robinson called Pairings with Andrea. Food Network showed it on their HD channel, which at the time was being used as a showcase for newer HD programming. It was sort of inevitable that the channel would become a simulcast with the mothership, but Andrea didn't make the cut. It sucked, mainly because Pairings was not only a good show but a clinic in how to produce a cooking show in HD; since this was well before the digital transition, Fine Living was guaranteed to be a black hole for ratings, so the show never really had a chance, and Andrea doesn't seem to be producing it anymore.

Network decay is inevitable, and I doubt Cooking Channel will look much like it does now in even two or three years. That's a shame; eventually all this great international programming will have nowhere to go, and foodie fans will be kicked aside for the Sandra Lee crowd. Enjoy the Cooking Channel while you still have it; things like this don't last.

Brazilian beef: the choice of a GNU generation

2010-07-01T13:25:00.000-07:00

A regular feature at the geek convention Penguicon was, until a year or so ago, Brazilian beef -- steak, usually top sirloin (the Portuguese name is picanha), marinated in salt, then grilled. It's the centerpiece of most churrasquerias -- those Brazilian steakhouses where they set out a huge buffet, and then send waiters around carrying skewers full of grilled meats (chicken, quail, beef short ribs, and more) while you eat till you explode. Around where I am, the Brazilian Grill in Hyannis and the Midwest Grill in East Cambridge are probably the best of breed; South Americans in general know steak at least as well as we USians do, and Brazilian food, though heavily influenced by African cooking, is still just meat-and-potatoes, tropical style.

Alas, Brazilian beef at Penguicon is no longer; the originator couldn't keep up with it, and the last year they offered it, the quality wasn't up to spec. But there's no reason you can't do it at home; if you'd like to try the real geek stuff, you can hit the LiveJournal above, but I've had some great success with this steak recipe, based on the Minas Gerais and São Paulo styles of grilling for a crowd. (Measurements will be considered "to taste", for obvious reasons. If you wish to do it really right, serve it with white rice, farofa (a mix of toasted manioc flour, bacon, onions, and a few other goodies), and black beans (I'll post that recipe later).)

Sirloin steak (I use shell sirloin, but you can use New York strip; just make sure the fat hasn't been trimmed excessively)
Fresh-squeezed lemon juice
lots of crushed garlic
fresh-ground black pepper
lots of kosher salt

Mix the lemon juice, garlic, and pepper with enough salt to basically cover the meat; it should form a slushy paste (add more lemon juice if it's too dry). Smear it all over the meat, and let it sit for half an hour to an hour (no more), then scrape the salt paste off and grill till medium rare or medium. Serve with a favorite beer, preferably a lager or lighter ale, and a salsa made from vinegar, onions, and bell peppers.

You may, if you wish, use a thicker cut of top sirloin; if you do that, you'll want to sort of fold it up on a large flat skewer (the ones they use in Brazil almost look like swords) and grill-roast it, slicing it at the table (the slices will look a bit like palmiers) and returning to the grill in between servings. This treatment will work fine for other meats as well.

Cookbook fatigue

2010-06-27T14:42:00.000-07:00

There comes a time in every cookbook collector's life where it's very hard to find a cookbook that has something new and interesting to read. I hit that point a while ago, and it's really frustrating. I've seen a few pop up that interest me, though; here's a few I've reviewed in the last few years that go in some new directions I like.

Darina Allen's Forgotten Skills of Cooking is one. In many ways, Allen's book (written from her experiences running the Ballymaloe Cooking School in Ireland) is exactly what I was looking for -- a book that explores a side of the kitchen most people never experience, the side that creates things like cheeses and cured meats that are usually thought of as ingredients in their own right. Although Allen seems to buy into the excessive naturalism that gives us things like raw milk (very, VERY bad idea) and knee-jerk anti-science thinking, she is an excellent cook with a thorough grounding in the traditions of rural Irish cookery and related cuisines. The book is very similar in a lot of ways to Julia Child's The Way To Cook, and the graphic design of the book seems to be a direct homage.

Some time ago I had a conversation with someone who worked at an independent bookstore out on Nantucket, and it came about that we were both fans of Tessa Kiros' cookbooks. Tessa's work is highly unusual and I don't think I'd have paid attention to it but for my Amazon Vine account; her books are strange, ethereal books, heavy on photography and quirky typography, and seem to occupy a space well outside the normal genre of recipes and techniques. Where a lot of cookbook authors (Marlena De Blasi, I'm looking at you) tend to go for overly flowery prose, Kiros lets the design language do her talking for her. Her book Falling Cloudberries, the first one I got, seemed like a dubious choice but proved to be a highly personal exploration of her eclectic ethnic background and travels; the other one I have, Venezia: Food and Dreams, is (for lack of a better explanation) exactly what the title says, a strange and surreal collage of recipes (printed in, of all things, gold ink) and pictures providing odd, random vignettes of life in Venice. From a purely technical standpoint, Kiros' books offer an incredibly beautiful melding of form and function. She has three others; Twelve: A Tuscan Cook Book and Apples for Jam: A Colorful Cookbook are in print now, and Food From Many Greek Kitchens looks to ship in October.

Food is an inseparable part of a nation's history; you need only read Jared Diamond's classic Guns, Germs, and Steel to find out what effect it has on a civilization's development. This doesn't change even in modern advanced civilizations, and Christine Fair's Cuisines of the Axis of Evil (and Other Irritating States) combines cooking with a whirlwind tour of some of the biggest nuisances in international diplomacy, including the United States. There's not a whole lot to be said about this book that isn't better said by the book itself; I can only state that the book is based on a scrupulously realist take on international politics, so you'll probably find something to be offended by.

I will close out with a shout out to the underpopulated field of food humor and the spectacularly sick and twisted Eat Your Feelings by Heather Whaley. To put it in proper perspective, imagine if Sarah Silverman wrote a cookbook based on themes of stress and mental illness -- yeah, it's that warped, not to mention shamelessly tasteless and offensive. Those who know me personally know I've struggled with chronic depression for years, so the slash-and-burn sensibility of this book hits so close to home it would have to either offend me to the point of foaming rage or entertain me immensely; you can probably guess which. The book was based off a blog, and if you want to see what Whaley has done since publishing the book, the link is here. I wouldn't recommend buying it as a gift for anyone, obviously, but if you deal with these sorts of things on a daily basis, this book is about as good a way to blow off steam as I can imagine.

So that's my recommendations for people looking for more variety in their cooking and eating. There's obviously a lot more, but these are some of my favorites of the last year or so of reviewing. If you'd like to see all my Amazon reviews, follow this link.

What exactly is London broil?

2010-05-24T11:04:00.000-07:00

Nobody knows where the term came from; it certainly doesn't come from English cooking. London broil is, like many beef dishes, a convenient way to get the most out of a cheap, tough, but flavorful cut of meat, in this case using a creative method of serving rather than any big effort on the prep end of things.

Almost everyone likes a big plate of grilled stuff, whether meat, seafood, or vegetables; Steven Raichlen is particularly famous for having made a career out of grilling anything and everything that can productively be grilled, and barbecuing or grill-roasting it if it can't. For those of us who won't give up our carnivorous ways, a big, thick steak is pretty high on the list of ultimate grill experiences -- just a big primal old chowdown, ideally a rib eye, New York strip, or sirloin (or, for those of you who like to mix it up, a T-bone that combines the strip and tenderloin in a single serving). At the very most, most of these cuts of meat need only some salt, pepper, and maybe a squeeze of lemon or splash of olive oil (the Bistecca Fiorentina, the Tuscan T-bone specialty, is about the top of the pile for a good steak).

But when the absolute best you can do is $5.99/pound for an entire rib eye primal (usually around $100 total), a top-drawer cut of steak is rather prohibitive for regular consumption, and for a lot of history have been simply out of reach for the bulk of would-be meat-eaters. When all you can afford is cheap cuts like flank, chuck, or round, you get more flavor, but usually these cuts come from the more heavily-worked parts of the animal and tend to be much tougher than the relatively sedentary parts like the loin. For the most part there's two ways of dealing with this -- low and slow dry heat (i.e. barbecue or slow roasting) or braising; both of these techniques will attack the collagen in the connective tissue of the meat and cause the muscle fibers to separate and soften. But... you don't always have time for barbecue or braise. Thus we come to the (once) humble flank steak.

The flank is an odd-looking cut of meat -- a flat slab of muscle usually sold in one piece with the grain running horizontally rather than vertically (as a normal steak cross-cut from a primal would be), usually cut into a couple of pieces across the grain and sold individually cryovaced. Flank can be a tricky cut to prepare; this is where London broil came from. Instead of serving it as a whole like a regular steak, flank steak, when broiled, is usually cut across the grain to serve in thin, oblong slices, creating a rough approximation of the vertical grain of a regular steak. The result is that although there isn't much change in the overall toughness of the connective tissue between the muscle fibers, the fibers themselves are drastically shortened (somewhat in the same manner as hamburger) and tear apart much more readily when chewed. A marinade usually makes this a little easier, though in practice marinades are more effective for flavoring than tenderizing; you could just as easily use a spice rub (I like McCormick's Montreal Steak seasoning) and get more or less similar results.

Flank steak, however, has gotten a bit expensive -- the flank is not a big cut, and you might only get half a dozen servings out of the average steer. Chuck and round steaks are also generally cheap and tasty cuts of meat, but as they are traditionally cross-cut like other, more typical steaks, you can't quite treat them the same way. And yet, supermarkets persist in selling them as London broil... what gives? Well, you can in fact emulate the effects of London broil by slicing the meat at an angle -- the fibers resulting will be slightly longer, but the angle cut still goes across the grain and gets similar results of shortened and therefore more easily chewed fibers. Although what you wind up with isn't classic London broil, if you look at it as more of a technique than a recipe per se, this will certainly do the trick for either a plate of steak or a sandwich. You will want to use a fairly thick piece of steak -- 3cm or more -- so you don't risk drying it out much on the inside, and unless you like it dead rare you might want to cook it a little on the slow side, searing first and then dropping the heat like a roast. (Incidentally, from what I understand, London broil is something entirely different in Canada -- a type of roulade or braciole made with ground meat wrapped in a flank or round steak. I don't have a recipe for that one.)

As I write this, I made London broil (specifically chuck steak, which I usually keep a fair amount of on hand in case of a sudden need for beef stew) for dinner last night with some roasted potatoes and insalata caprese. I did marinate it, using the following ingredients:

Red wine
a fruity olive oil
fresh-ground pepper
salt
rosemary
lots of garlic
oregano

Rosemary and garlic are two of my favorite flavors for steak (I use them for steak tips all the time), and a red wine marinade goes rather nicely with a piece of steak to begin with. Put the steak in the marinade for about 3 hours, flipping it over halfway through, then grill as a whole steak and slice (remember, vertical for flank, diagonal for chuck or round) at the table. A 1.5-2 lb (700-1000g) steak will feed 3-4 people depending on appetites and side dishes.

All that Jazz

2010-05-07T20:29:00.001-07:00

So I tried my first Jazz apple today. To give you some background, Jazz is the brand name for a New Zealand-developed Gala/Braeburn cross also known as Scifresh, developed in 2004 and evidently heavily marketed by its breeder; even Trader Joe's carries it, which says something (though I'm not sure what). It looks like this year's new apple of choice, which is a bit odd since that's a phenomenon only a couple years old itself.

Anyway, I had one today. It was a rather inexpensive choice, with the low-contrast red/green skin of its Gala parent and a curiously Red Delicious shape. Mine was covered in a thick layer of wax that trapped any scent, but the flavor was pleasant enough, with muted acidity and a hint of peach. Nothing that will rock your world, but I support any apple with a decent shot at consigning the Red Delicious to the same oblivion as the Ben Davis.

Seed company reviews, part 3 (and final)

2010-05-01T11:11:00.000-07:00

So this is it... the last installment of the seed company reviews. I hope you've learned as much as I have writing it for you.

Buzzy Seeds

Buzzy is unusual for a seed provider, since they don't actually seem to grow their own seeds, but source them from other places. Instead, they specialize more in "grow kits" -- seed packages bundled with pots and seed starter mix for recreational gardeners. Around here, I find them mostly at places like Target and Christmas Tree Shops.

Variety: Minimal. Their point is to make growing green stuff easy; they stick to one or a couple of varieties of each thing they make and don't stretch out much beyond that.

Commitment to sustainability: They don't really seem to try. Many of their seeds come from Europe; their supplies come from China.

Value: Decent enough for what you get, but you're not going to be buying their products to fill up your garden; more like a grow lamp on your kitchen counter.

Lake Valley Seeds

I mentioned them above as the importers of Pagano seeds from Italy; they are also suppliers of a large selection of seed packets for discount retailers like Christmas Tree Shop. They don't have a consumer catalog, either online or in print, and don't sell through big box retailers, so they may be very hard to find. They also import Aimers flower seeds from Canada, and formerly were the US importers of the UK's Unwins brand.

Variety: Decent, though not huge. Although they don't mark their heirlooms as such, they do seem to have a slightly higher proportion than the bigger seed houses.

Commitment to sustainability: They seem to be pretty good on this front -- they have a decently large organic selection and sell their seeds untreated.

Value: Not too bad. You won't be blown away, but you won't feel ripped off either.

Plantation Products (also NK Seeds/Fredonia Seeds/American Seeds)

They're locally based for me (Norton, Massachusetts) but they sell nationwide through smaller retailers (like Lake Valley, they have a no-big-box policy). Fredonia was a bigger name at one time, but they've long since been subsumed by the NK and Plantation brands, at least in my area. Their prices are a little cheaper than most, with some of their packets selling for as little as 60 cents; you can also order custom seed packets by the thousand for promotional purposes. The Plantation brand includes a rather large selection of seed starter kits as well.

Variety: Decently large, but you're at the mercy of whatever your local retailer chooses to carry, which is usually less than impressive.

Commitment to sustainability: Hard to say, but they do have a decent selection of heirlooms... again, if you can track them down.

Value: Usually pretty good.

Chas. C. Hart Seed Co.

Yet another retail-oriented seed company that doesn't sell through big boxes, this one based in Connecticut, Hart is a company that I tend to associate largely with gardening centers with lots of bare-timber framed buildings and semi-rural settings. The graphic design of their seed packets is actually worse than T&M, but let's be honest, who cares about that?

Variety: Again, decently large, depending on how big a display your retailer invests in.

Commitment to sustainability: Average. They clearly mark all their hybrids, and their Heritage heirloom line has a bit more creativity than the biggies like Burpee and Ferry-morse.

My new iPod touch and the Flash fiasco

2010-04-30T12:38:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs writes an open letter on Flash

I finally got an iPod touch. (I would rather have had an iPad, but it was too expensive and doesn't fit into any of my current priorities, which at this point primarily involved retiring my Palm Zire 31 while it was still mostly functional.) I like it; the screen is unbelievably sharp and although the interface is very odd -- cut/copy/paste is clumsy, and IMHO they threw away far too much of the Newton -- it's quite workable. (I will probably get a stylus at some point though.)

So His Steveness has told Adobe, esentially, to give it up -- Flash on iPhone OS will not happen. The technical arguments are interesting -- the mouseover and multitouch issue, for example, while I won't say it's insurmountable, is the sort of problem that UI engineers build their careers on. The openness argument... hoo boy. It's hard not to look at that as ragingly hypocritical (especially in opposition to Android), but it actually is a valid point -- even the most locked-down platform (and outside the console world, the iPhone is indeed the most locked-down platform) has to interoperate with outside systems. To Apple, that means going with HTML 5 and related standards, and telling Adobe to go pound sand with its proprietary system. (And Flash, at least as it runs on my system, is indeed a power hog -- it approaches Second Life for CPU utilization, and that's really a no-no for something that should be a lightweight framework.

Well, there's still the issue of Apple wanting people to focus on the iPhone OS and not cross-platform development, and while that's a massive pain in the ass to developers, it's entirely understandable from Apple's business standpoint. And Objective-C is an ugly language, but the XCode environment makes it a lot easier to deal with. But let's look at the proprietary issue for a second: Adobe could easily call Apple's bluff on that front by doing one or both of two things: releasing the full Flash spec as they did with PostScript and PDF, or open source Flash Player. Either one would make interoperation easy, and still allow Adobe a reasonable revenue stream from the development tools (because, let's be honest, they aren't making money off the Player to begin with). It's an easy solution to the proprietary issue, the open source approach allows people to fix long-standing bugs, and it also ensures that Flash as a system will be legacy-proof.

And I have very little doubt that Apple will win this one otherwise. Apple after the Return of the Jobs has historically been a major standard-setter in the industry (starting with USB) and has had no problem whatsoever with telling developers who won't play by Apple's rules to take a hike (Avid, meet Final Cut Pro). And if Adobe can't work around Apple by donating Flash to the open source community, they will be screwed.

I still don't know why I bought the cocktail shaker

2010-04-20T23:34:00.000-07:00

There's something a bit odd with me -- I have always been interested in mixology, even though I cannot ever think of a time where I liked hard liquor or wanted a cocktail more complex than a Black Velvet. I'm funny like that.

Anyway, I picked up a Beefeater-branded cocktail shaker a couple of weeks ago, and oddly enough the only thing I've done with it so far was make marinade for... leg of lamb was it? I don't quite remember. It's a recipe shaker -- you know, the kind with seven or eight drink recipes printed on the glass for quick reference -- and although the recipes on it lean heavily towards gin for obvious reasons, it strikes me as being one of the best-designed I've seen. For three bucks, I'd say it was a good investment.

Although it doesn't have straight-up graduations on the side for ounces or milliliters on the side, what it does have is a series of fill lines for each recipe -- just pour each ingredient up to the line (presumably over ice, or that's going to be one hell of a huge martini there), then shake and serve. This is simple, and seemingly the most obvious damn design for a home shaker recipe glass I've ever seen. So how come the only time I've ever seen it is on a promo item from a gin maker? I need to find out how to make one of those bloody things...

Beer glasses and other thoughts

2010-04-16T09:31:00.001-07:00

I'm sitting here watching Giada after the noon news, and I'm a little worried -- my outdoor shoot tomorrow may have to be moved indoors, which means no Brazilian beef because they don't usually put industrial exhaust hoods in TV studios. And I've got a few thisses and thats on my mind.

The first: I found a rare treasure -- a copy of Beer Advocate, a magazine I don't see much in the wild -- at the British Beer Company in Hyannis and they had an article on one of the latest safety-related oddities being kicked around by the UK government: shatterproof pint glasses. (Link goes to CBC.ca, from February) The British government is somewhat notorious for their hypersensitivity to things that can be used as weapons (anyone remember the stab-proof knife?), but this actually isn't a bad idea -- it doesn't change the function or appearance of the glass at all, and it makes a lot less mess if dropped, even in places not prone to bar fights. (Of course, bars in the US tend to deal with this by using plastic or cornstarch cups during high-traffic times like weekend nights, but that can get a bit expensive.)

The second: insurance companies investing in fast food corporations. While I think it's a bit hyperbolic of ABC's Dr. Tim Johnson saying that it's almost as bad as investing in tobacco companies, it still has the air of Terry Jones or Graham Chapman as matter-of-fact, creepily mercenary undertakers on Monty Python. It may not be illegal -- hell, it may not even be unethical, in the strictest legal sense of the word -- but it is definitely ghoulish.

Finally, I'm a little disturbed at the number of people I know who not only anticipated but actually like the KFC Double Down "sandwich". (Here's a review of the Double Down from the test marketing period in Rhode Island last year.) I think the fast food world is getting a little bit ornery these days...

Seed company reviews, part 2

2010-04-13T15:25:00.000-07:00

This is the second part. Part 3 is as yet unfinished but will likely include Buzzy (suppliers of planting kits), Hart Seeds, and maybe one or two more.

Pagano

I get these Italian seeds at the Christmas Tree Shop, imported through Lake Valley Seed of Colorado (more on them later). Pretty much everything they sell is an Italian heirloom variety.

Variety: Minimal. Their total selection runs to probably fifty varieties all told (maybe more for flowers), though all are classic Italian varieties such as San Marzano tomatoes or red torpedo onions. If you want carciofi alla giudea, this is one of the very few suppliers of the right kind of Italian artichoke seed you need to grow them.

Commitment to sustainability: Most, though not all, varieties they sell are open-pollinated. Beyond that, I have no idea, since the US is not their primary market.

Value: Stupendous. For $3 a packet, you get a lot of seed -- enough tomatoes for a fairly large garden, or enough cardoons to take over your entire neighborhood with gigantic thistle triffids. And since I get them through Christmas Tree Shops, they cost half that.

Seeds of Change

One of the leading suppliers in the United States of organic seed to the consumer market.

Variety: Extensive. The vast majority of their seeds are open-pollinated, and they include things like dent corn that a home gardener wouldn't normally bother with; they've even provided obscure vegetables like crosne and yacón that are barely if at all known in the US.

Commitment to sustainability: This is their primary reason for existence. Every seed they sell is certified organic, and only a handful of their varieties are hybrids. The yellow plastic packets can be off-putting, but SoC claims they use less energy than paper.

Value: Mediocre. They do tend to be more generous than the bigger suppliers, but their products are seldom available at much of a discount where they're sold at retail. The fact that most of their seeds are open-pollinated is something of a mitigating factor though.

Franchi Sementi

Another Italian seed provider, Franchi is another somewhat hard to find brand.

Variety: Like Pagano, not great. They also tend to focus on Italian heirlooms, though they do occasionally mix in varieties from other countries. For some reason, they have a comparatively huge selection of sunflowers.

Commitment to sustainability: I honestly don't know. They're less averse to hybrids than Pagano.

Value: pretty good. Though not quite as heavy-handed as Pagano, you still get your money's worth in a $3 packet.

NESeed

A curious provider -- they seem to sell mostly to the retail and grower's markets rather than direct to consumers, and are one of the few seed houses that regularly buy new varieties from growers and horticulturists.

Variety: Staggering. NESeed's catalog is a playground for mad scientists of the garden. They also import a fair amount of foreign seeds. You wouldn't know it from looking at their lackluster retail displays though, which don't represent the product portfolio very well at all.

Commitment to sustainability: Hybrids are their business. Their catalog is all about unusual and new hybrids, some of which don't even have names yet. They do have a line of organics.

Value: All over the map. Their retail packages are reasonable, but some of their newer or high-demand varieties drift into outrageous.

Review: Bin Ends, Braintree, MA

2010-04-11T11:37:00.000-07:00

Bin Ends is one of a few rather unique wine stores I've found (sorry for those of you who were hoping for a restaurant review...). They specialize in discount-priced wines with stupendous variety, and although they've been around for about two years (and gotten quite famous thanks to local food press), I only got my first chance to go in yesterday.

If you're on Route 128, go south towards Braintree and get off at the MA-37 exit going north, the same one you'd get off to go to the South Shore Plaza mall, but towards Boston instead. The first left going north, Wood Road, takes you up towards the Bernie and Phyl's store that you see from the highway, and as you drive further back you go into a slightly grimy office/industrial park area. Keep an eye out for the sign for Bin Ends on the left; there's plenty of parking. Go in, and the place is a smallish, very clean warehouse-type store with stacks of boxes. There's broad categories, but it really doesn't begin to get into the variety of the place; thanks to a staff member's very helpful recommendation, I walked out with two bottles, one from Spain, one from Austria. Almost everything is a little off-the-beaten-path -- you don't go this far out of your way for a bottle of Yellow Tail. (They also have a decent selection of liqueurs and a few beers (particularly some unusual exotics, including some Belgian-style Sam Adams varieties I'd never heard of), but let's face it -- that really isn't the point.)

The average prices are between $10 and $20, though you do see $75 bottles for $45 -- you won't find any Three Buck Chucks here, but you'll find spectacular prices on stuff you wouldn't normally expect to be able to afford. In only two years, Bin Ends has earned its foodie fame, and if you're visiting from outside Massachusetts, it's definitely worth the trip for a few bottles to bring home.

Emergency cornbread

2010-04-05T20:12:00.000-07:00

Okay, got all the Easter dinner ingredients -- my lamb is in the fridge marinating, got the potatoes ready to go in the oven... shit. I forgot to buy bread. And I don't have buttermilk... huh. this might work.

This isn't a classic cornbread; proper American cornbread, whether northern or southern style, needs buttermilk and baking soda. But if you don't have buttermilk and you don't feel like futzing around with souring your own milk, this recipe will do the trick just fine; the proportions are loosely based on the Northern Cornbread from several Cook's Illustrated books, while the use of plain milk and baking powder is derived from a French recipe I got from somewhere. It may be a bit blander and sweeter than you're used to, but it's still a very quick and effective solution to forgetting to buy bread for a big meal.

(Apologies in advance for volumetric measurements with no metric.)

1 c AP flour
1 c cornmeal
2 tbsp raw sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
2 eggs
4 tsp butter, melted
1 1/4 c milk

Preheat the oven to 375F and place a piece of parchment on the bottom of a 9in cake pan or 10inch pie plate, then spray with nonstick spray or grease. Mix the flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, and salt together until fully combined, then add the eggs, milk, and butter, stirring after each addition. Pour into the prepared pan and bake for 30-40 minutes, or until the top is browned and a skewer or toothpick inserted in the bread comes out clean.

My reviews of some seed companies, part 1

2010-04-02T23:16:00.000-07:00

(This is part one of a two-part series. The article is quite long and I don't want it to eat the whole page all at once.)

Every year for the last four years I've started some tomatoes from seed, and the last three I've done so with the intention of selling seedlings. It worked out great for me in 2008; it was a major flop last year for various reasons (at least part of which had to do with the crap weather causing a lack of orders, causing apathy on my part). Over that time, i've discovered that the economics of seed sales can be... curious. I have sources for most of the seeds I want and gorge on seed catalogs at the beginning of the year, and over time I've developed something of an opinion of the various seed companies whose products I've used. Here's a few:

Burpee

If I had to guess, I'd say they were the number one consumer seed house in the United States, and possibly the most creative. Since the last couple of years, all of their packaging is bilingual English/Spanish, which really isn't a bad idea, though it sometimes leads to some humorous stiltedness when the variety names are translated.

Variety: Extensive. Their test farm seems to pump out unusual new varieties of almost everything every year, so many that the catalog literally can't fit everything. However, they come up very short in two important regards: They recycle the same heirlooms (some, like Mortgage Lifter and Brandywine tomatoes, pretty much mainstream these days) year after year, without making much effort to dig into growers' back catalogs. And for those who care about such things, their organic selection is, to put it politely, mailed in; they provide just enough to keep the sort of people who drive hybrid SUVs to the grocery store happy, and not much else. (Their seed-starting supplies are a bit pricey, but actually are pretty nice. My Costoluto Genovese seeds fell in instant love with my Burpee growing trays.)

Commitment to sustainability: Barely pro forma. Not only are their heirloom and organic selections a joke, but the majority of their most interesting varieties are hybrids, making reseeding of that interesting grape tomato you just picked impossible, or at least horribly unreliable. They do seem to be making a move towards replacing peat in their grow mediums though, since peat is technically a fossil fuel and is only theoretically renewable. They appear to mark all hybrid varieties as hybrid, so open-pollinated seeds are theoretically easy to pick out.

Value: Mediocre to extortionate. They provide some of the skimpiest seed packets of any company, and although their most popular varieties are available at steep discounts at places like Home Depot, the packets often have barely enough to fill a windowbox tray, and they have so many different variations on their marketing that price comparisons between different stores are often difficult. (Let's not even get into the full-price packets they place in stores that usually sell at a steep discount.) And their catalog prices sometimes head into insane.

Ferry-Morse

Second to Burpee, Ferry-Morse sells to similar markets at a slightly lower price. Also, owners of the Jiffy-7 pellet and its derivatives. They market a series of VeggieTales-branded seeds through KMart/Sears; this may provide a bit of an ethical quandary if you're not a supporter of the evangelical Christian community.

Variety: Difficult to categorize -- their marketing is even more fractured than Burpee's, to the point that displays in different stores don't even resemble each other. They've made some efforts in the past to use ethnic angles to market some of their seeds, but apart from their "taste of asia" series it doesn't seem to have been all that useful. Their Jiffy products are inexpensive and very easy to find, but in my experience the signature peat pellets are frustratingly mold-prone -- if you're using Jiffy pellets, strong sunlight or grow lamps should be considered mandatory.

Commitment to sustainability: Like Burpee, pro forma. Jiffy pellets are made of peat, and they have just as many hybrids in the catalog as Burpee, and their selection of organic seeds is even weaker.

Value: Slightly better than Burpee in most cases, but some seeds are only available in pelletized form. Apart from perhaps packing some fertilizer in with the pellet material, I don't see the benefit here -- it might make sowing easier, but it seems to serve more to bulk out the packet and clamp down on excessive quantities of expensive hybrids.

Botanical Interests

This is an interesting company -- among other things, they're one of the very few seed companies that caters to off-season growers. If you want to create a hanging tomato basket or a kitchen windowbox of basil in the dead of winter, in many cases they will literally be your only option. Since they're usually available only in spinner racks in upscale markets and small grocery stores, though, the selection will usually be limited.

Variety: In theory, not too bad. In practice, their store displays are seldom impressive. They do come up with some nice surprise heirlooms though.

Commitment to sustainability: If I had to guess I'd say about a third of their products are organic, and most though not all are open-pollinated.

Value: I'd feel a bit more comfortable with their prices if they were all organic; they do seem to put more in a packet than Burpee for the same general price, though they're seldom available at much of a discount.

Thompson and Morgan

A large British seed house, making major inroads into US markets in the last few years. Their graphic design is laughable, but their selection is remarkable.

Variety: Just by virtue of being from the UK, they have a substantial selection of varieties -- and even species (olive trees! who has olive trees?) -- that you just won't find coming from anyone else. They were, for a couple of years, the only supplier around of the Santa F1 grape tomato, and even after losing distribution rights they still have a focus on grape tomato varieties. They also have a marketing agreement with the Royal Horticultural Society to sell educationally-packaged seeds for kids -- sure beats Ferry-Morse's deal with VeggieTales. They also cater heavily to people who enjoy sprouts, providing a large selection of sprouting seeds as well as the equipment to germinate them.

Commitment to sustainability: Lots of hybrids, some but not a lot of organics. Sadly not much different from its American rivals in that regard. Hybrids are usually marked as "F-1".

Value: A matter of perspective. For many varieties they make Burpee look like a good deal, albeit with somewhat better package fills and sealed inner packets to keep the seed fresh. However, this has to be weighed against the fact that most of their seeds are imports of different varieties from what's usually available.

Part two will contain Pagano, Lake Valley Seed, Franchi Sementi, Seeds of Change, NESeed, and possibly one or two more I've only recently become aware of. Stay tuned.

Where'd March go?!

2010-03-22T09:44:00.000-07:00

I haven't done a post all month, which is weird. Right now I'm working on a review of seed companies (relating to my tomato seedling business).

So, uh, inspired by this Wapsi Square strip, a quick and dirty recipe for Aztec hot chocolate. Couple of teaspoons of cocoa powder, a pinch of salt, and powdered chile pepper to taste (strictly optional though). Put it in a coffee cup, add hot water, and stir furiously (preferably with a small whisk). Drink. (It's better than it sounds, but there are some pretty good reasons why the Spaniards started adding milk and sugar. It isn't to everyone's taste, so don't feel too bad if you think it's nasty, but I did enjoy it when I tried it.)

And I stand by what I said in the comments about turkey eggs in corn tortillas. I would be very surprised if turkey egg burritos weren't a fairly common snack food in pre-Columbian Mexico.

Oh.... that place (a restaurant review)

2010-02-27T23:36:00.001-08:00

My work as a videographer takes me off Cape a bit, and occasionally to Rhode Island (since I advertise my services in Providence as well as the Cape and Boston). Now one of Providence's more unique institutions is the Haven Bros. Diner, a glorified roach coach that parks next to City Hall every night and serves dinner and snacks till 3 in the morning. Now I've been to Providence probably a dozen times in my life so far, but tonight was the first time I actually ate there. Amazingly, the place (in numerous incarnations, all mobile) has been setting up shop there since the late 19th century

Calling it a "diner" is just barely correct -- the place seats four, with an additional counter outside next to the takeout window during good weather. And even during the dead of winter, the place is sweltering, heated entirely from the kitchen (and if the idea of an open kitchen in a diner doesn't do it for you... well...). Handicap accessibility? Not when the takeout window isn't open. I mean, I wouldn't drive all the way to Providence for it; there's far better food-related reasons (like, say, Venda Ravioli on Atwells Ave). But it is a mainstay of the city's downtown, and I think pretty much anyone important in Providence has eaten there at least a good handful of times.

I kept my meal simple -- a cheeseburger and a Coke, no fries. Prices are moderately high for diner food -- my burger was $5, which isn't outrageous but is definitely a bit on the high side for a quarter pounder with cheese (so to speak), but it's still reasonable for what you get. The burger itself was very similar to the kind of burger you get at home cookouts -- soft bun, thin patty -- though pleasantly greasy in comparison; interestingly, they apparently parcook their burgers so they heat through and serve quickly. I'm inclined to think that if you weren't actually in there while it was being prepared, you wouldn't notice. Their sodas are a bit pricey, but they make up for it by occasionally having deals on coffee and cocoa on cold days.

Parking is, well, whatever you can get on Dorrance St. nearby. (The meters aren't too expensive -- I think 50 cents for an hour.) For dessert, a Tim Horton's/Coldstone twin store is about a block away. The food is basic but tasty, and they have a decent selection of burgers, hot dogs, and other sandwiches,

How I make a frittata

2010-02-24T22:15:00.001-08:00

I am, as some know, not a big egg person. I've never really developed a taste for plain eggs in any form, and basically (as you may have surmised from Joe from New Bedford) eggs have to be majorly doctored up to be something I can really enjoy. Making matters worse is that I don't much like making omelets either -- they're finicky and require a bit of practice to make properly, and if you want to do it you can do no better than to get one of Julia Child's videos on the subject, where she demonstrates how to cook a French-style omelet in just about two minutes, from splashing the scrambled eggs in the pan to turning it out on a serving plate. No, you will not see me doing this on TV any time soon.

So I do frittate instead. Somewhere between an omelet and a scramble, the frittata is Italy's gift to the lazy egg chef -- the ingredients get mixed in with the eggs, somehow cooked on both sides like a crustless quiche, and served and cut like a cake. This isn't a recipe so much as my personal technique.

Start with 2n+1 eggs, where n is the number of people you expect to serve. Beat with a whisk, adding a splash of milk or cream and salt and pepper to taste. Set aside.

Cut up your fillings -- they can be pretty much anything, though try to go for drier things (like plum tomatoes instead of regular tomatoes, for example). Unless it's a particularly delicate vegetable or meat, you probably want to parcook (and in the case of greens like spinach, drain) them beforehand; easiest way to do this is to put some butter and/or oil in a nonstick skillet big enough to cook the whole thing and just cook things for a while to drive some of the water out. Start by adding any onions, bell peppers, or other aromatics you have; those will take the longest to cook. Give them a decent sprinkling of salt so they sweat instead of burn, then add some garlic (and, if you're so inclined, ginger or other wet/grated seasonings).

If you're going to add greens, parcook them until fully wilted (a bag of spinach, washed, will cook down fine in the microwave). This is also a good time to add any more delicate components like tomatoes or mushrooms. Once you've got everything parcooked, make sure it's all nice and muddled up in the pan, and then pour your egg mixture over the top. (At this point, I usually sprinkle cheese on the top -- shredded or crumbling cheeses are better for this, but slices torn into strips will work too. Make sure you push them down a bit into the egg mixture.) Now cook over medium high heat, using a silicone spatula or wooden spoon to pull back the edges of the frittata and let the still-uncooked egg run into the gap.

Once the whole thing is fairly well consolidated, you can do two things. One is the Spanish omelet approach -- slide or flip it out onto a plate and then put the uncooked side back in the pan. The other is the lazy way, the way I do it -- toss it under the broiler for a few minutes, until the top of the frittata is browned and set. (Do make sure your non-stick pan has a metal handle if you're going to do it that way.) Turn it out onto a platter and cut into wedges to feed everyone (9 eggs = 4 people for a main course).

See? Not so hard...

Crabcakes, or a reasonable facsimile thereof

2010-02-12T22:30:00.000-08:00

I think I have done it.

Here's the thing: I've been struggling with crabcakes for several years now, and I've never quite made them the same way twice. At first I was leaving out the mayo; that led to crabcakes of a pillow-like texture. Too dry. Add milk? Too wet. (Excess liquid from the packed crabmeat screwed me up a lot too.) There are dishes I just never seem to get, and crabcakes have always been one of them. Until today.

The tricky thing with crabcakes is that the dough they're made from is in some ways very similar to a cake batter -- though they couldn't look or taste more different, both are based around an egg matrix to hold them together. However, if you've ever compared an American-style butter cake with a European-style sponge cake, you'll note that the sponge cake tends to be rather lean, and therefore rather dry, which is why many European-style cakes (such as the rum logs we used to get in our house for special occasions) are soaked with syrups and liqueurs or served with huge dollops of whipped cream. This is where the mayonnaise comes in -- the mixture of vinegar and oil pre-stabilized with egg yolk serves the same function as fat in an American cake (in fact, if you look up emergency chocolate cake, you'll find a recipe that uses mayonnaise in exactly the same way). As best as I can tell, the lecithin in the eggs (both in the mayo and added) pulls the watery bits (mostly in the crab meat) and the greasy bits together while still leaving the fat room to add succulence to the finished product like a well-marbled piece of meat. Without that, you get a foam rubber coaster.

The mayo was only the beginning of my fix though; I still had problems with sloppy liquid crabcake dough that was tricky to handle until fully cooked. I think I made two big changes that worked. One was that instead of messing around with any old starch around the kitchen (usually a mixture of panko and flour), I used some white sandwich bread (Pepperidge Farm, if you're curious -- it's probably the best national brand). The other was that instead of using canned crabmeat (something I have not been able to get at an affordable price for a while anyway) I grabbed some packaged crabmeat from the seafood counter at BJs; the pasteurized and refrigerated stuff had far less water kicking around loose in the container and didn't need to be drained.

Measurements below are approximate; I pretty much eyeballed it. Serves roughly 4 people; serve with a favorite beer. (Alternately, make smaller ones to put on burger rolls and serve them to your kids as Krabby Patties.)

450g/1lb lump crab meat
5 slices/~200g white sandwich bread, pulsed to crumbs in a food processor
1 shallot, minced
1 clove garlic
1/2c/100g mayonnaise
2 eggs, beaten
crabcake seasoning (Old Bay or Penzeys Chesapeake Bay) to taste (start with about 1.5 tsp)
salt and pepper to taste
flour for dredging

Thoroughly mix the ingredients (except for the flour) together in a nonreactive mixing bowl and set aside for 20 minutes.
Shape into patties (you should get 6-8 8cm/3in patties) and dredge each one in the flour.
Frying: heat a non-stick pan on medium-high heat and add some fat (I like a mix of butter and olive or canola oil) to cover the bottom. Place the crabcake patties in the pan and cook roughly 5 minutes per side, until the crabcakes are golden to dark brown and firm.
Baking: Preheat the oven to 350F/180C. Spray a baking sheet generously with nonstick spray and place the dredged crabcakes on the baking sheet. Bake for 10-15 minutes; feel free to turn the patties over in the middle of the cooking process to crisp them on both sides.

Spare Me: "Artisan breads" books

2010-02-09T22:29:00.000-08:00

Lahey and Bittman have created a monster. And not the good Sesame Street/BFG/Avatar box office kind.

I'm not knocking the no-knead bread recipe itself; though some find it a tad bland, it's absolutely revolutionized home baking and made bread makers out of a lot of people who were always intimidated by the idea. What's bugging me about it is the flood of books with "artisan bread" in the title -- volume after volume of uninteresting shovelware in the same make-a-buck tradition as the crockpot boom of c. 2002. See, here's the deal. I've been collecting cookbooks well over half my life -- since eighth grade at least, making 22 years or so. It's become really difficult to find cookbooks that offer something new and different, and at least half of the ones I do want I can't reasonably afford (Larousse Gastronomique, 3d edition, anyone?). Even worse, with my reviewing work on Amazon, I feel compelled to buy books I know I'm not going to think much of simply because it seems like something that can't go unreviewed (Cook This, Not That was added to my slushpile yesterday -- my thoughts will be... interesting).

So here we are with a glut of books on artisan breads. Or at least that's what they want us to think. Honestly, I am more dubious about this crop than I normally would be, for one simple reason: there aren't that many bread books out there that are worth a damn to begin with. Baking is as much science as art; that's no secret. Well-written baking recipes, at least those that don't refer back to other parts of a book, are not concise -- a decent description of something as simple as a baguette can easily run to a page and a half single-spaced if you're writing for an inexperienced audience. The best general baking books -- in my collection, books like the King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion, Carol Field's The Italian Baker, Baking Illustrated -- do a decent job of covering bread, but they also have other aspects from cake to puff pastry to cover and can't focus on all the nitty-gritty of bread science. And even the better books sometimes have drawbacks -- the Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book was, until fairly recently, the go-to book on whole-grain breads, but with all the valuable information it includes also comes a torrent of fluffy-minded nutritional pseudoscience. Dedicated bread books of any quality are really only limited to a few authors -- Jeffrey Hamelman, Peter Reinhart, Rose Levy Beranbaum, Joe Ortiz, Nancy Silverton, Naomi Alford and Jeffrey Duguid, and to a lesser extent Beth Hensperger and Elizabeth David are among the few really top-notch writers. (Note I did not include Daniel Leader or Bernard Clayton -- Clayton's book is monotonous at best, and Leader is unbearably pretentious and, at least in his earlier work, horribly incurious to an inexcusable degree.)

This flood of books on "artisan" breads (even Reinhart wrote one -- guess which one I'd recommend if you were a rank beginner) really doesn't bode well for quality or development of expertise. Far too many books on bread have resembled the half-assery of early bread machine books -- long lists of recipes with very little understanding of the differences between them, poor explanation of ingredients, lots of me-too recipes whose only benefit is that it becomes a lot easier to photocopy a recipe for a friend. (I mean, seriously? That's what my recipe binder looks like, only because it's full of recipes I printed off the Internet. An actual edited cookbook should have more care to it.) Not to mention -- what exactly is an "artisan" bread anyway? I mean, certainly something in a European style coming from a smallish bakery like Pain D'Avignon here on Cape Cod would qualify, as would the world-famous rustic sourdough Apollonia Poilâne makes in the tradition of her father and grandfather. But "artisan" can also include a relatively everyday potato bread, or an obscure style like rye and indian, or even a perfectly made loaf of slightly sweet American sandwich bread. In other words, "artisan" bread is just being used as a marketing term to sell more of the same half-assery that has made looking for bread books a chore, just with an appealing label.

Do yourself a favor. Want to learn to make bread, or give a gift to someone who does? Take a look at any of the authors I mentioned above (Reinhart is probably the best out of all of them, but the King Arthur and Cook's Illustrated books are excellent as well). Check out the Sourdough FAQs, which despite the name are one of the best repositories of general bread knowledge on the Net. Get From Julia Child's Kitchen and learn to make bread with her baguette recipe like I did years ago, or get the Lahey/Bittman recipe and mess with it. Go back to the roots of the movement -- the Tassajara Bread Book is not nearly as good as many of the others I've recommended, but it shines as a historical document describing what people were experimenting with when they started caring about bread again. Try different styles; learn to make focaccia, pita bread, challah, rye Vollkornbrot, even pizza (though beware -- the situation with pizza books is even worse, but Reinhart again comes to the rescue with American Pie, my second favorite of all of them). If you want to kick it really old school, Daniel Wing and Allan Scott's The Bread Builders will tell you how to build and run your own brick oven. But please please please don't buy the first "artisan" book you see on the shelf -- you'll sell yourself short.

In praise of Hippocrene Books

2010-01-31T09:56:00.000-08:00

Hippocrene Books isn't the prettiest or most high-profile publisher; they publish a lot of foreign language books and have recently branched out into travel books as well, but they also have a spectacular cookbook sideline that is the subject of our post today.

Hippocrene was started in 1970 by a Polish immigrant named George Blagowidow with a focus on translated European literature, quickly branching into language guides and dictionaries as well. In 1983, their sideline in Poland-related materials led to the publication of their first cookbook, which further led to a series of reprints of older books such as Nika Standen Hazelton's Swiss Cookbook and Dolores Botafogo's The Art of Brazilian Cookery, and eventually into a wealth of material specifically written for Hippocrene.

What makes Hippocrene's material unusual is that they tend to go far, far away from the established, popular cuisines like Italian or Chinese -- these things are there, but Hippocrene at some point made a conscious decision to become the publisher of record for cuisines that almost no material exists in English. The above-mentioned Swiss and Brazilian books are two examples -- dribs and drabs exist on both in English, but finding actual full coverage of those two is often fiendishly difficult. Icelandic, Afghani, Gypsy, Sri Lanka... New Hampshire... the books they publish cover cuisines that almost no one thinks to pay attention to unless it's where they came from. In fact, some of these books are the only books available on their subjects. In addition, there are several multiethnic books that focus on regions such as the Rhine and Danube valleys and the Alps; for food historians, these can be very helpful to see similarities between nearby cuisines.

The books themselves can sometimes be a bit dry and minimalist, but they're usually still pretty browsable. Long story short, if you're looking for information on ethnic food, the Hippocrene cookbook collection is probably the best place to start.

Ah, the iPad. Uh, wait... the iPad?

2010-01-27T11:34:00.001-08:00

My Mac fandom is well-known to almost everyone who knows me. What I don't talk about as much is that while I'm a huge fan of the Mac OS as a platform, I'm rather wishy-washy towards Apple as a company, and I've never really warmed to the iPhone, largely because of its closed platform. (I will likely buy an iPod Touch at some point, but that's mainly because my PalmPilot is an orphan.) So today it's been announced... the long-awaited, much-speculated, highly secretive Apple tablet... the iPad. Yeah, the name sucks. I'm over it. If the product is a success, in a year or two no one will care. It is indeed what was speculated -- a scaled-up iPod Touch, some models of which have 3G data capability. In an explicit nod to Amazon, Apple's moving into the ebook market as well, so overall the iPad seems to be designed to bridge the ebook reader and netbook markets.

The interface seems workable enough -- basically the iPhone interface with elbow room -- and the addition of a keyboard dock was a very, very smart idea, since I certainly can't touch-type on a screen. And the larger screen should make for a rather improved gaming experience. I have mixed feelings about iWork -- I think it'll be a huge hit with the same crowd that made the TRaSh-80 Model 100 the first really successful portable computer, and the explosive success of the smartphone and netbook markets -- and, indeed, the fact that laptops now outsell desktops -- show that said crowd has only grown over the last quarter century. And Apple seems to have hit just about the right price point, since the base 16GB/Wifi model is only $10 more than the Amazon Kindle DX (it seems to be a fair enough tradeoff -- faster processor and color display instead of 3G, which will be $130 extra).

I'm going to predict it'll be a bit of a hard sell though. I don't think that when people go looking for ebook readers that the Kindle DX is going to be their first choice, and I strongly suspect that for those people, and for those used to lower netbook prices, Apple will inevitably have to ship a smaller iPad. What bothers me even more, though, is that it's not a Mac; it's essentially an iPod touch, with all the closed-platform issues that implies; I do not like being told what I can and can't run on my system, and I especially don't like being locked out of certain aspects of it. And an SD card connector is an extra -- this is fine for a laptop, but crippling for a Flash-based computer (and has always been a reason I've been uneasy with the iPod Touch).

If there's one thing Apple knows how to do, it's find a market, and I think it's highly likely I'm going to be wrong about what I'm about to say, but here goes anyway: I think the iPad will get off to a slow start. I think it will be a success but Apple hasn't quite found the right formula yet; the iPhone-plus interface will turn off people who want to use it for serious work, and the size and price of the current model is going to be a concern for a lot of users. On the other hand, the long battery life, low power consumption, and availability of iWork are huge selling points for road warriors. At the end of the day, there's going to be a lot of "we'll see" going on.

Show 301: Crêpeshow

2010-01-22T16:08:00.001-08:00

Watch the show at Vimeo.com

It's been a long time since I put some new video up, and here's the latest show. This was a particularly interesting show as it was one of my first experiences with an induction cooktop, specifically one I've worked around on previous shows that used it but never actually had to cook on myself. Thanks to Ruth, Jul3ia, Feleke, and of course Dan for their help in putting this together. And now, recipes:

Crêpes

There are numerous recipes out there for crêpes, but this one is based on Culinary Institute of America professor Uwe Hestnar's, as provided by Michael Ruhlman in his book Ratio. As usual I've metricated it, but the quick and dirty formula (by weight) is 2 parts milk, 2 parts egg, and 1 part flour. (I am giving only metric measurements on this one; if you prefer US measurements, just work the weight out in ounces instead, starting with 4 oz flour.) The finished product can be used as is (as with the strawberry and mascarpone filling) or toasted with a filling in it and served on wax paper (as I did with the Nutella).

250 mL milk
250 g eggs (approximately four extra large eggs)
125g all-purpose flour
pinch of salt
cooking spray

Combine the ingredients in a nonreactive bowl and whisk together until well-blended (for best results, blitz in a blender or food processor, but I didn't). Let sit in the refrigerator for at least a half hour.

Heat a crepe pan (either nonstick or seasoned cast iron) over medium-high heat. Spray very lightly with cooking spray and ladle a thin layer of batter onto the bottom of the pan, spreading it out as far as it will go either using gravity or a flat-edged plastic spatula. Cook for approximately a minute, then using a long thin spatula (like a cake decorator's frosting knife) flip the crepe over and cook on the other side another minute or so.

Cannelloni with ricotta, prosciutto, and parsley

Based, ultimately, on a recipe from Carlo Middione's The Food of Southern Italy, these cannelloni are a prime example of things you can do with crepes that aren't dessert. They're easier to make than similar dishes with manicotti shells, and much quicker than lasagna.

6 9"/24cm crêpes
1kg/1lb ricotta cheese
1 egg
1/4c chopped parsley
100g chopped or shredded prosciutto (domestic is fine)
shredded or grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, Asiago, or Pecorino Romano cheese to taste

Preheat oven to 350F/180C. Mix the ricotta, egg, parsley, prosciutto, and some of the grated cheese together. Spread the mixture on top of a crepe and roll up, then place in a greased roasting pan, loose edge down; repeat for the rest of the crepes. Sprinkle the rest of the grated cheese on top of the cannelloni and bake for 20-30 minutes.

Magic Hat Howl, and why I like it

2010-01-20T10:27:00.000-08:00

For a long time I've had a love-hate relationship with German-style lagers. A good pils or Oktoberfest is always a nice thing, but sometimes the darker beers tend to be overwhelmingly malty and way out of balance, and I don't think much of bocks or dunkels for that reason. So when I saw Magic Hat's new winter seasonal, Howl, I was a little apprehensive -- I had to try it but I honestly wasn't expecting to like it. It's nice to be wrong about that.

I'm not too sure how close Howl comes to the type specimen of the style, Köstritzer, mainly because I've never seen Köstritzer in stores and never had a chance to try it. I do like Howl a lot though -- a nicely balanced beer, moderately malty and hopped just enough to cut the heaviness. It's not quite as dark as you might expect from a "black" beer, and flavorwise it's not that close to Guinness, so if you're going to try it you need to throw out your expectations before trying it. It's worth it -- them Vermonters make some good beer.

Joe from New Bedford

2010-01-13T18:34:00.001-08:00

At one time I posted a link to a recipe for a variation on a San Francisco breakfast scramble called the Joe's Special, which is hamburger, spinach, and onions scrambled with eggs. No one knows who Joe was, but it's a Bay Area classic, and I make it from time to time as a breakfast-for-dinner thing.

Anyway, it's been some time since the last time I made it, and today I came up with an idea of doing a bit of a Portuguese accented Joe, with linguiça and kale. Meet... Joe from New Bedford. Serves 4.

9 eggs
1/2 c/125mL milk
salt, pepper to taste
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
olive oil
1/2lb/250g chopped kale
1/2 lb/250g linguiça, chopped or diced
2 cloves garlic, crushed or minced

Parcook the kale (I put it in a covered bowl in the microwave with a dash of water for 4-5 minutes).
In a large nonstick skillet, heat just enough oil to cover the bottom and cook the onions until translucent, then add the linguiça and the garlic and cook till the linguiça is heated through.
Scramble the eggs with milk, salt, and pepper.
Add the eggs to the pan and cook as you would any other scramble until just about set, then serve with toast and hot beverages.

Ruhlman pegs it. Stop thinking cooking is hard.

2010-01-05T22:29:00.000-08:00

Read this. Just read it. Tell me what you think.

OK, done? Now I'll tell you what I think.

In my ten or so years of writing Amazon reviews, I've come across quite a few reviews where the person completely missed the point of the review (which I guess I've been guilty of myself a couple of times, but never mind that, I got better, I think). The arguments in these reviews invariably seem to be self-serving and a bit solipsistic -- someone criticizing King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking for not being locavore-friendly, or a Cook's Illustrated book for not being focused on speed and convenience (are they even familiar with the magazine?), Ruhlman's Ratio for being too mechanical (isn't that better than cooking stuff completely at random, or by rote with no real understanding of how it works?), or (my personal favorite) Alton Brown's Good Eats: The Early Years for eliminating volume measurements in the baking recipes on the grounds that they don't have a scale in the kitchen (so buy one already; they're cheap). The common theme here is a belief that every cookbook should be tailored to one specific lifestyle, though I bet you that none of those people will be able to come to complete agreement on exactly what that lifestyle consists of.

I've heard a few odd attitudes towards cooking from scratch over the years -- that it takes too long (Edouard de Pomiane, anyone?), that it's too complicated (an attitude that fuels Sandra Lee's grotesque mockery of cooking), that cooking from scratch is something poor people did (have you looked at what poor people eat these days?). I can't speak for all foodies, but when I see what passes for convenience cooking these days, I sometimes feel like keeping standards up is a losing battle. Now I'm no kitchen luddite -- if a food processor was good enough for Julia Child, it's good enough for me -- but progress doesn't need to mean leaving the old stuff behind completely. If you want top notch bread but don't have a decent artisanal bakery nearby, you can get a bread machine. You can use a day off to cook in bulk and freeze stuff, learn to can so you always have things like tomato sauce and applesauce, and perhaps even homemade canned soups, ready when you need them. Even if you're living on an absolute shoestring, you can still perk up a package of ramen with some scallions, maybe a dash of soy sauce. When all else fails, there's plenty of non-proselytizing, non-judgemental vegetarian cookbooks like The Moosewood Cookbook and How To Cook Everything Vegetarian that will save your butt when a serving of red meat is incompatible with your paycheck. (And you needn't buy them -- go to the library.)

But all of this is irrelevant when you come to Ruhlman's central point -- our culture has convinced us that we can't cook, and shouldn't really try. I know that a lot of people raised in the modern world never quite adapt to it, despite having been raised in it from birth, and the cheap, empty-calorie, processed food that makes lardasses of so many of us is so... there. It is so very, very there. Bright, monotonous flavors with too much salt or sugar and no subtlety, mashed together at absolute bottom dollar and put on the shelves for cheaper than scratch -- it's as if almost everything you eat is a Dorito. And I hate Doritos. In some ways it's like the Streetcar Conspiracy -- rather than trying to build your business by shoring up a good but fading product, you do a 180 and sell people a more glamorous but less effective solution.

And the sad thing is, after all is said and done, it really isn't that hard to cook from scratch -- cooking teachers for years have been working the "master one, master them all" angle for years, going at least as far back as Escoffier. Even then, you don't need to be a genius to slap together a decent pot of soup or cook a pork chop; you just have to practice enough to develop a feel for the food and how it interacts with other ingredients. Once you have a few good techniques and some master recipes down, you're good to go, and will only ever need to consult a cookbook for inspiration.

Okay, now that that's done... I'm currently collecting material for phase two of the Basics Project, which will deal in kitchen references like Joy of Cooking and the Betty Crocker Cookbook. I expect this will be up probably by the end of January, and I would very much like reader suggestions for their favorite old cookbook (better yet, can you send me a copy?) so I can evaluate it. My finances are limited; my scope immense. Do me a solid and I'll... give you a cookie. Or a cookie recipe. Or something.

Incidentally, a bit of recommended reading: The Foodie Handbook by Pim Techamuanvivit of ChezPim.com. I'm not a reader of her blog (though I have poked in on it a few times), but I loved the book -- a dizzying brew of rock solid basics and high-flying culinary fantasy. The Amazon.com reviews show it to be a rather polarizing book (and there is a bizarre pattern of down-rating positive reviews), but I find it does an excellent job of bringing even the most esoteric and expensive food experiences down to earth and encouraging a sense of adventure and whimsy in the average cooks. I passed this one by when it first showed up in my review queue and I'm glad there were still a few copies left when I got my next hack at the list.

Start the New Year with a Sachertorte trifle

2010-01-01T11:13:00.000-08:00

I got a somewhat unusual request when my sister invited us over her house for a post-Christmas dinner -- a trifle. My mother used to make them from time to time, usually with a store-bought cake mix and Cool Whip. Never having been much of a fan of cake (though I'm starting to be able to appreciate it), they seldom rocked my world, but it was there. So, asked for a trifle, I came up with an idea: a Sachertorte trifle.

If you don't know the Sachertorte, well, the story is a rather long one, but the basic description is a chocolate sponge cake, with apricot jam between the layers, with a ganache-like glaze on top. It's not especially hard to convert this into a trifle -- just tear the cake into chunks and then layer with apricot jam and glaze. So that's what we'll do.

Cake

I used the chocolate génoise recipe from the King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion; since that doesn't appear to be available online, Jacques Torres has a recipe on foodnetwork.com that should do the trick. You'll need the equivalent of two 9 inch/23cm cake layers, torn into approximately 2cm chunks.

Apricot Jam

A jar of apricot jam -- 20oz/565g or so -- should be enough; you might not be able to make a full layer out of half a jar, but the flavor will come screaming through so you really don't need much more than that. For a real Sachertorte, you might wish to thin the jam out with a bit of water over a low heat and put it through a blender, but for a trifle that's overkill.

Ganache

Although a more fudge-like ganache (such as Alton Brown's recipe) may be more reliable, it's not hard to make a very basic one as follows:

375g dark chocolate, broken into small chunks

375mL heavy cream

Over medium to medium-low heat, combine the chocolate and heavy cream and stir until the chocolate is fully melted, combined and smooth. Set aside to cool.

Assembly

Take half the cake crumbs and lay them in the bottom of a trifle bowl. Spread half the apricot jam on top of the cake crumbs, then cover in a layer of ganache. Repeat for a second layer, then refrigerate for twenty minutes to a half hour to cool it and firm the ganache. Serve with generous amounts of whipped cream.

Hm. I'm been slacking a bit, haven't I?

2009-12-18T10:42:00.000-08:00

Couple of pasta quickies for you today. Sorry about the lack of metric measurements; these were kind of improvised on the spot.

Penne with sausage, peppers, onions, and tomatoes: Take half a pound of Italian sausage out of the casings and break into small meatball-like chunks. Cook along with some sliced bell peppers and onions (season with red pepper flakes and oregano to taste) until everything is cooked through and the onions are wilted. Cook a pound of penne or other short pasta, then put the pasta in a large serving bowl and drizzle with some olive oil you like, then put the sausage-pepper-onion mixture in the bowl along with some halved cherry or grape tomatoes; toss the whole thing together and serve.
Spaghetti with shrimp and tomatoes: Get a pound or so of large (16-20 count) shrimp; defrost and peel. Saute the shrimp with a generous quantity of garlic with salt, red pepper flakes, and parsley to taste, then add half a can (14 oz or so) of diced tomatoes and a handful of chopped or chiffonaded basil. Place in a serving bowl with a pound or so of cooked spaghetti, drizzle with spaghetti, toss and serve.

I'm working on a little sciency something about mascarpone cheese which I'll probably have up before Christmas. Meantime I'm going to try to get another recipe post up.

Russian bread

2009-11-18T23:57:00.000-08:00

I've been putting this off a bit too long, haven't I?

It has been said by some that the one thing the Soviet government made sure never suffered in quality, no matter how many shortages they had of anything else, was bread. Now classic Russian bread is a rye bread, and it's available in a few different variants (Anya von Bremzen's "Riga Rye", from Latvia but eaten throughout Russia, is one of the more famous), but none of them have the coffee/caramel/cocoa coloring agents like American pumpernickel. In fact, real Russian black bread is not black at all, but medium to dark brown (depending on how it's baked) and is somewhat midway between the grainy German rye vollkornbrot and an American Jewish rye in texture. In fact, I've only found two authentic recipes for standard Russian bread; one came from the Usenet group rec.food.cooking (and you can probably find it on Google Groups), and the other came from Andrew Whitley's somewhat lackluster Bread Matters (why I thought it lackluster is a long story that I covered in an Amazon review, but the recipes are quite good). This recipe is more or less Whitley's, adapted to how I made it.

I'll leave the exact details to other books (particularly the Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book and the King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion), but the short form is that rye needs acid to lift properly in the oven, or the overactive amylases in rye flour will eat up all the starch and other complex carbohydrates and cause it to collapse before they can be cooked to death. That said, 100% rye bread still doesn't rise to anything like the same degree as wheat bread, which is why American rye breads are usually a mix of wheat and rye flours; in fact, to someone not used to 100% rye, this will come out rather brick-like. Slice it thin, and toast it if you want.

450g active rye flour sourdough starter (you can start with the one from carlsfriends.org and culture with rye flour instead of wheat)
350g whole rye flour
1.5 tsp kosher salt
200mL tepid water

Combine the starter with the flour, salt, and water and mix until fully combined. Let sit to hydrate for about 20 minutes, then place some parchment paper on the bottom of a loaf pan, bring the dough together into a single mass, and press into the loaf pan. Let rise, covered, for 2-5 hours. Preheat the oven to 475F/245C, then put the loaf pan in the oven. Bake for 15-20 minutes, then drop the temperature to 400F/205C and continue baking for 40 minutes or until the internal temperature is between 200-210F/95-100C. Remove from the oven and cool on a standard cooling rack. When cool, wrap in plastic wrap or waxed paper, sealed tightly, and let sit for a day or so to reach its final texture (it will be sticky inside fresh out of the oven). Slice thin and serve with butter or some Russian zakuski.

A couple of websites on genetic engineering

2009-11-06T10:53:00.000-08:00

As you may or may not know, I am a supporter of both sustainable agriculture and genetically engineered food plants. I actually don't see any real contradiction in this; I am firmly against the anticompetitive practices of companies like Monsanto and the patenting of genes (it's like software patents, except instead of patenting math they're patenting DNA). But the Green Revolution was only a start to solving the world's food problems and we need every tool we can to keep people fed in the future.

That in mind, I'd like to link to a couple of blogs worth checking out:

Tomorrow's Table at ScienceBlogs.com, written by Pamela Ronald
Biofortified.org, a group blog the winner of a recent contest to discuss GMO plants with food/agriculture writer Michael Pollan (Dr. Ronald is one of its contributors)

It's long past time for sustainability supporters to reevaluate our approach to genetically modified plants. While such plants may never be certified organic, they can certainly be used to try to find ways to move past the current paradigm of industrial farming into something less dependent on oil and noxious chemicals like anhydrous ammonia or glyphosate.

Return of the Coffeehouse Dictionary

2009-10-24T13:00:00.000-07:00

Eleven years ago, after leaving college, I went to work at Starbucks.

The Coffeehouse Dictionary was one of the results.

It's now one of the first things I've moved over from the old site other than the recipes I've been posting here. Enjoy and feel free to offer any updates or new slang I haven't heard.

In which I eat American history

2009-10-23T10:33:00.000-07:00

Depending on who you talk to, the oldest apple variety bred in the United States is either the Roxbury Russet or the Rhode Island Greening. I've not tried a Greening, but I first read about the Roxbury Russet in the book The Art of Cidermaking by Paul Correnty years ago when I was learning to make beer; Correnty seemed to be a huge fan of the Roxbury as a cider apple. The problem is that russeted apples are, to put it bluntly, ugly -- they have thick, scruffy brown skin that vaguely resembled a bald kiwifruit, and therefore are almost impossible to find as fruit or trees (Seeds of Change sold the trees a few years ago but no longer carries them). I'd never had a chance until last week to taste one.

My old hometown of Belmont, MA has a farmer's market on Thursdays, which also happens to be the one day of the week when I'm always off Cape and in the area. One of the regular vendors, an organic farm from Pepperell, always has very large selections of both apples and tomatoes (well, in season, of course), and last week they had Roxbury Russets, so naturally I had to try some. Although my parents weren't overly impressed with it, I did enjoy it and bought more this week (sadly, the last week of the Belmont market for the season).

For people who are used to prettier apples, either red streaked with green or green/gold, the Roxbury will come as a shock. The rough skin holds in what little aroma it has, which means that it isn't as sensual as, say, a Gala or Braeburn, and gives it a distinct tannic flavor that you simply don't expect from an eating apple. The flavor is also unusual, with a low-acid profile that reminds me very much of a slightly underripe pear. The fruit itself ranges from small to smaller, with the late-season apples I bought yesterday being little larger than crab apples. I could see how they'd make good cider apples, provided they were balanced with something with a bit more acid punch to it like a Granny Smith; I don't know that they'd make good pie apples, though, if for no other reason than the thick skin must be a pain to peel.

These will never be popular, sadly; I really don't think they have much commercial appeal, and it's probably a minor miracle that they're even still grown. But I think the heirloom aficionados will keep it alive for a long time to come.

On buying British cookbooks

2009-10-11T23:38:00.000-07:00

You've seen them if you go to big independent bookstores with large remainder sections -- familiar titles with odd cover art and sometimes unusual fonts. Perhaps an unfamiliar publisher, definitely unusual editing and punctuation, and the cover price denominated in pounds (or, occasionally, euros). These are the British (and occasionally Irish or even Australian) editions. In the bigger bookstores like Barnes and Noble or Borders, they're usually shovelware "bargain books" with hit-or-miss quality, but if you go to a place like the Harvard Bookstore or New England Mobile Book Fair (to take two examples of places with good remainder selections), you can find some popular titles for even cheaper than you'd pay for paperbacks.

This comes up in the context of an Amazon review I wrote recently on one of Peter Mayle's food-related books, Confessions of a French Baker (co-written with Gerard Auzet, a baker friend who had gained a fair amount of tourist business from being mentioned in one of Mayle's travelogue books). The book itself is slight, and of a genre I think of as "little cookbooks" -- small cookbooks, 125 pages or less, that make their point in a relatively small number of representative recipes -- usually well under a hundred, often 25-50, but in the case of Mayle and Auzet's book, a mere 16. (Mind, the little cookbook is an art form of itself and probably deserves another, entirely different column.) The interesting thing was that this was the UK edition, published by the UK subsidiary of TimeWarner Books (the US publisher is Knopf). The recipes all give metric measurements first (likely quite a bit closer to Auzet's original intent), which is nice, but above all, the book was only $7, compared to the US cover price of almost $17. Great deal, right?

Mostly. There's an important thing to remember with any kind of how-to literature from another country, and that's that the differences in vocabulary require extra diligence. Ingredients will be different -- a Maris Piper potato may be a good baking potato, but it's going to be different in appearance from a Russet -- and even where there's a close correspondence, it won't always be obvious that caster sugar in the UK is the same kind of superfine sugar that bartenders use for mixed drinks in the US. Being the foodie that I am, I can usually convert these things in my head, but it's critically important to make sure you have the necessary resources to back up what you think you know.

In the case of Confessions, you run into a few problems with flour, something that among others Peter Reinhart and Shirley Corriher have dealt with in some of their books. Many of the recipes demand French type 55 flour, and failing that "strong white bread flour". The problem, however, is that what passes for "strong" flour (i.e. high-protein flour) in the UK is more like what we in the US call all-purpose flour; if you use a US-style bread flour in these recipes but follow Auzet's notes to the letter, you will get an overly fine crumb and quite possibly a warped baguette. If you can get French flour (or French-style -- King Arthur sells a very expensive clone of Type 55 on their website) use that; otherwise, you have to be very careful to know the protein content of your flour. The same applies to any other ingredient -- what the average British cook can pick up in ten minutes at Tesco might take a week or an Internet order to find in the US if you don't have a good source for British or Irish groceries in your neighborhood.

None of this is to say that buying British cookbooks (or, for that matter, any other country's cookbooks) is a bad idea. A little extra care and research will be very helpful (especially for a beginner cook), but in an era where you might have to do that anyway to make some obscure recipe that you found on a website halfway across the world, it certainly can't hurt. And hey, you might even wind up with something unfamiliar but awesome, like, I don't know, this. (No, that was not a plug for another review. Not intentionally, anyway.)

Resources worth checking out:

The rec.food.cooking FAQ from the Usenet group of the same name is the closest thing to a culinary rosetta stone you'll find out there. It's been continuously maintained for damn close to 20 years now, and if you can't find the answer in there, it'll tell you where you can find it.
The BBC's Food website includes a huge recipe database from their extensive library of cooking shows, and is a good place to start with getting comfortable with converting British recipes. (Unfortunately, their random recipe shuffler is gone, and you can't watch any of the TV programming without some wacky proxy hijinks, but their recipe database is stellar.)
The Australian Broadcasting Company also has a food site, especially helpful if you're a little confused over those 20mL Australian tablespoons.
Not to leave anyone out, here's RTE's website on Irish food programs. (Anyone know the equivalent in New Zealand? India? The Philippines?)
The Metric Kitchen (which I've linked to in the past) gives you a few recipes to get comfortable with the measurements.

Bagels on the border

2009-10-09T22:49:00.000-07:00

There is a right way and a wrong way to make a proper bagel, and if you're really picky about such things, this is most definitely the wrong way -- the flour is wrong, the finished product is best described as "rustic", and the texture is not as chewy as you'd think and strangely moist, like bread machine Italian bread. The technique cuts corners here and there (the standard overnight retarding was ignored in the desire for immediate bagelage) and violates every damn thing the experts tell you about bagel making. But they came out really good, so I'm not inclined to care.

I call them "bagels on the border" because they're sort of a hybrid -- the stark simplicity of a New York bagel combined with the artisanal raggediness and faint sweetness of a Montreal bagel. The ones in this recipe were baked with no toppings at all, but don't let that stop you; all of the usual toppings (poppy, sesame, garlic, salt, onion flakes, rosemary, whatever you like) work just fine. Serve them however you wish and don't apologize to anyone; they may not be quite authentic, but you'll like them anyway. (For baking geeks, the baker's percentage here is approximately 55%; the dough is very rubbery and may actually bounce if you ball it up.)

500g unbleached bread flour
275mL tepid water
1 tbsp honey
2 tsp kosher salt
2 tsp (7g) instant yeast
1/4-1/3c (50-100mL) honey for the water bath

Mix the water, honey, and salt in the bowl of a stand mixer until the salt and honey dissolve. Add the flour and yeast and stir with the dough hook until a very stiff dough forms; add a little bit of extra water if the dough doesn't come together. Let sit for 10 minutes.
Knead the dough with the dough hook for 3-5 minutes (don't bother to hand-knead -- you have to be a glutton for punishment to pull it off). Cover and let rise for two hours; the dough may not quite double.
Divide the dough into eight equal pieces and shape into bagels. My preferred way is to shape into balls similar to a boule loaf, stretching the gluten envelope and sealing at the bottom, then punching a hole in the middle and carefully stretching the dough into a ring about four inches across; you can, however, also follow the old-school stretch-and-loop method. Cover the bagels on a piece of parchment or a Silpat and let rise for 1.5-2 hours.
Preheat a large pizza stone in your oven at 500F/260C. Fill an electric frying pan or deep saute pan with water about halfway up and add the water bath honey then bring to a boil. Poach the bagels about a minute per side, dip in toppings if you're using them, then transfer back to the parchment on a peel or cookie sheet.
Bake the bagels (still on the parchment, either on a cookie sheet or directly on the stone) for 10-15 minutes or until generously browned (the bagels will be somewhat mottled and maybe a bit soft on the edges; that's fine). Peel them off the parchment and put them on a cooling rack. Please try to let them cool at least a little bit before attacking with cream cheese.

Quick and dirty scallion pancakes

2009-10-05T18:09:00.000-07:00

Find me someone who doesn't like scallion pancakes and I'll show you someone who's never tried them. However, the whole rolling-and-folding thing you need to do for proper scallion pancakes is kind of a pain in the butt; this is a simple recipe based on Martin Yan's batter recipe from Chinese Cooking for Dummies, embellished with a bit of baking powder for lift. (If you want a more traditional recipe, try this one from Ming Tsai's Food Network days.)

1 egg
1.5c water
2 tbsp cooking oil
1 tsp sesame oil
3/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp Chinese 5-spice powder
2c all-purpose flour
1/2c sliced scallions
1 tsp baking powder

Combine the wet ingredients, then mix in the flour gradually. Fold in the scallions and let stand for 30 min to an hour.
Heat a nonstick frying pan over high heat and just cover the bottom with oil. Pour in enough batter to cover and spread out.
Cook until brown and crispy on one side (2-3 min) then flip and cook on the other side for the same amount of time; flatten with a spatula if necessary. Serve in wedges.

Chicago-style Deep Dish Pizza Dough

2009-09-22T09:04:00.000-07:00

Another one out of the archives. I will probably be making some of this later this week.

--

To those who haven't had deep dish pizza as it was made at the original Pizzeria Uno, this one may come as a bit of a surprise. The bolder flavors (and decadently greasy cheese crust) that mark the chain pizza are muted and the crust is more pastry-like than greasy, but it is still a remarkably nice pizza.

The crust is based on "Deep Dish Pizza No. 1" from Pasquale Bruno Jr.'s The Great Chicago-Style Pizza Cookbook (Contemporary Books, 1983, ISBN 0809257300), still one of the best pizza cookbooks ever written thanks to its use of extensive amounts of pictures and technique discussions for the beginning pizza chef. The crust has a noticeable cornmeal crunch and the cooking techniques give it a quasi-deep-fried exterior for a little extra crispness. Bruno's recipes, now a quarter century old, still work, but he didn't have instant yeast or the convenience of a bread machine to make it work. As a result, I've made a few changes.

3 1/2 c (450g) northern-style all-purpose flour (I like King Arthur)
1/2 c (30g) stone-ground cornmeal
1 1/2 c (300 mL) lukewarm water
1/4 c (60 mL) extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp kosher salt or 1.5 tsp sea salt
1 pkt (7g) instant yeast

Bread machine: Set 1/2 cup of the water aside. In the machine pan, place 1 c water, the olive oil, and the salt, then on top of that, the flour, the cornmeal, and the yeast. Set on a dough cycle, adding reserved water as necessary to make sure all the ingredients combine properly. Allow to rise for 1 to 1 1/2 hours before forming.

Stand Mixer: Place the ingredients in the bowl in the order given for the bread machine, then mix with a dough hook until the ingredients come together in a dough, adding water if necessary. Once the dough is formed, set aside for 20 minutes to allow the dough to hydrate properly (the autolyse step used in breadmaking), then knead for 5 minutes using the dough hook. Coat the dough with oil and set aside to rise for 1 to 2 hours.

By Hand: Sift flour, yeast, and salt together in a bowl, then add liquids and stir with a spoon or by hand as necessary to combine. Rest for 20 minutes, then knead by hand on a floured board for 10 minutes. Coat the dough with oil and allow to rise for 1 to 2 hours.

Pizza assembly

12 oz to 1 lb (350-450g) low-moisture mozarella cheese, sliced or shredded
1 28-oz (800g) can ground tomatoes
1 clove garlic
2 tbsp basil, chopped or chiffonaded
1/4 to 1/2 c (60-120 mL, or to taste) freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese
salt to taste

Preheat the oven to 240C/475F, using a large pizza stone if you have one. After the dough's initial rise, set it aside for another 30 minutes to relax the gluten. Using either a standard 14 inch (approx 36 cm) deep dish pizza pan or two 9 inch cake pans, grease the pans liberally with olive oil or shortening and pat the dough into the pan with your fingers, making sure to push the dough up the sides of the pan about an inch. Parbake the crust for five minutes.

Meanwhile, crush the garlic and mix into the tomatoes with the basil and set aside. Cover the crust with as much cheese as will fit, then layer any toppings (also parcooked, especially meat such as sausage and watery vegetables) on the cheese, then cover with the tomato mixture and sprinkle the parmesan cheese on top. Bake for 30-40 minutes until the crust is golden brown on the bottom (you can use a spatula to lift it out of the pan to check).

Variations

Sourdough: Replace the yeast, 1/2 c of the flour and 1/2 c of the water with a sourdough starter at 100% hydration (i.e. 1/2 flour, 1/2 water) and mix as normal. Make sure if possible to give the full 2-hour rise.

Pizza bread: If using a bread machine, simply set the machine on a full loaf cycle rather than a dough cycle and bake to completion. If working with a mixer or by hand, shape as you would a free-form loaf and bake on a preheated pizza stone in a 230C/450F oven until the internal temperature is between 200F and 210F or until the loaf sounds hollow when thumped. Try it with a stuffed pasta dish or as bruschetta.

A few thoughts on Norman Borlaug

2009-09-13T21:02:00.001-07:00

As anyone who knows me can tell you, my politics are extremely liberal, sometimes outspokenly so (I once had a political quiz peg me as a Kucinich voter, which I found vaguely amusing). But as you can also tell from reading this blog, I'm also very pro-science (never had much of a head for it, but always loved it), and as a result, there are certain liberal blogs I just avoid on general principle, especially the HuffPo. Well, I made the mistake of reading their comments thread on the death of Norman Borlaug, credited as founder of the Green Revolution. Now I am very much pro-organic agriculture, but I don't like the organic-for-its-own-sake luddism that surrounds organic production. It's overly simplistic, bordering on childish in its good-vs-bad thinking, and I think that although there are real villains in agribusiness (Monsanto, anyone?), kneejerk rejection of GMOs and conventional agriculture is both ignorant and long-term foolish.

So about the Green Revolution. There's certainly a good case to be made that it was, at best, a short-term solution to a long-term problem -- the large farms that the Green Revolution made possible are heavily dependent (for now at least) on petroleum, and many of the fertilizers and pesticides that were developed as part of the program are toxic and often non-biodegradable. But here's the thing -- nothing in science is ever completely finished. Every finished test is a gateway to another one, on that subject or a related one. And Borlaug's work wasn't finished either -- the Green Revolution didn't take into account integrated pest management, for example, and much of organic agriculture simply isn't as well understood as conventional agriculture (Jeff Gillman's book The Truth About Organic Gardening is an excellent rundown of where organic agriculture is right now and what is and isn't well-studied). And the effects of agribusiness consolidation have been pretty ugly overall, and very disruptive to family farm cultures around the world.

The simple fact, though, is that these are things that are problems to be solved, possibly ones that should have been avoidable, but still not insurmountable even now. The Green Revolution has fed a great many people and drastically reduced the impact of overpopulation. The solutions to the problems that it's created are complex, involving issues as far afield as politics and energy technology, but none of them involve throwing out the work of Borlaug and successors and starting over. We have reached a point where we've got large bodies of knowledge on both the organic and conventional sides, and it's about damn time we put some more effort into taking what we know from both sides and using them to create high-volume sustainable agriculture. It could take years, and as the Soviet Union's farmers under Lysenko found out the hard way, going for broke on one plan won't work.

People on the left side of the spectrum need to throw away our luddism and tell the New Agers, the alt-med hucksters, and the like to take a hike -- they're making us look stupid. People need to eat, and Borlaug more than anyone else knew this. We on the left stand for expanding our knowledge horizons and finding solutions that work for everyone, and throwing out what doesn't work.

Molasses Rye Bread

2009-09-11T09:24:00.001-07:00

While digging through for a copy of a recipe to send a friend, I noticed this particular item from the old site. Since the link to Geocities will eventually go away, I'm copying it over here.

Molasses Rye Bread

This is based on the Bread Machine Caraway-Rye Bread from the 2006 edition of the Weight Watchers cookbook. (If it is of interest to you, the original recipe has a Points value of 2.) I did make a few changes to the recipe -- less molasses (I didn't want it to be as dark), and no caraway (I hate caraway), but other than that it's mostly the same. This bread makes great toast.

The mixer method is something I haven't tested, so experiment a bit if it doesn't come out quite right. I invite corrections to the recipe.

1 1/4 cup warm water
2 tbsp molasses
2 tbsp canola oil or melted butter
1 1/2 tsp salt
2 1/4 c bread flour
1 c stone-ground rye flour
1 pkt instant yeast

Bread machine: Put the ingredients in the bread machine according to manufacturer's directions (usually liquids in first, or roughly the order the ingredients are given) and then set the machine to a whole grain cycle. Cool on a rack and serve with butter.

Mixer or by hand: Put the ingredients in the mixer bowl and mix with a dough hook until it comes together as a dough, then let it sit for 10-15 minutes to allow the water to soak into the flour (the autolyse, for bread junkies). Knead with dough hook for 3-5 minutes (or by hand for about 10), then place in a covered bowl in a warm place to rise for 90 minutes. Fold over to redistribute yeast, then place into a greased loaf pan and let rise again for 90 minutes. Preheat oven to 400F, then bake for 40-50 minutes or until the loaf sounds hollow when thumped. Cool on a rack and serve with butter.

Kofta (Middle Eastern meatballs)

2009-08-25T12:45:00.000-07:00

Yet another recipe from the archives. Whenever I see mint at the farmer's market, this is the first dish that comes to mind. I tend to make them in slider-sized patties (my dad is the grill man in the family and doesn't like dealing with ground meat on skewers), but you can also make them as meatballs or sausage shapes. I've tweaked the original text in a couple of places as well.

Incidentally, this style is known well beyond what you would traditionally consider the Middle East -- the Romanian mititei, for example, are a close relative, and I wouldn't put it past the Russians to have derived their kotleti (Russian hamburgers) from the same source.

Kofta My Way

A bit presumptuous, perhaps, since I have no Middle Eastern heritage at
all to speak of, but since I rather enjoy good Middle Eastern grill I
have no qualms whatsoever about making this. The flavors are fairly
authentic, but I suspect the combination of ingredients is naive at best
and probably wouldn't pass muster in Athens or Cairo.

Kofta is one of several pronunciations for a word that is essentially
Turkish-or-something for meatball; this recipe I think has a slight
Armenian/Greek accent. It's meant to be eaten as a sandwich on some
decent pita bread, but it's probably a lot more versatile than that; you
could, for example, serve it with couscous or a basmati pilaf.

Meat Mixture

2 lb ground lamb or beef
1/2 c chopped parsley
1/2 c chopped mint
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 finely chopped onion

Mix together by hand until thoroughly combined. Form into balls and
place on flat skewers or form into patties. Grill or broil until well
done. Serve with lettuce, tomatoes, sliced peppers, pita bread, and
blender tzatziki sauce.

Blender Tzatziki

This is a pretty shameless bastardization of the classic cacik sauce. I
suspect it's pretty heretical, but it has the great advantage of being
pourable and therefore impressively messy.

1/2 medium pickle cucumber, peeled and sliced
1/2 c plain yogurt, preferably drained
garlic and dill, to taste

Throw everything into the blender and liquefy.

Substitutions

You can add other flavors to the meat mixture -- garlic and allspice come most immediately to mind, as well as any specifically Middle Eastern flavor such as sumac or za'atar. Use your tastebuds or consult your Lebanese grandmother.
If you're serving this as a main course, couscous, bulgur wheat, or rice are all appropriate side dishes.
You don't have to use pita -- lavash is fine as well, and if you're making full-sized koftaburgers you could even use a regular old hamburger roll.
You can use other meats as well -- the Iraqis, for example, are said to favor ground chicken.
If you've got the patience to drain your yogurt to thicken it, make real tzatziki. Less mess, but more authentic.
Appropriate beverage: fruit juice or soda. Remember, most of the Middle East is Muslim. (That said, a nice red wine or Pilsner-style beer would go nicely as well.)

Guinness Beef Stew

2009-08-24T19:56:00.000-07:00

Another one from the old Geocities site -- just your basic stew, nothing fancy. But good.

Guinness Beef Stew

St. Patrick's Day 2004. This is really just a basic beef stew; the only difference is that where one might usually use stock or wine, Guinness is used. I would recommend going for the flavor complexity of bottled Guinness and save the draught Guinness in a can for drinking, but that's just my personal opinion.

2 1/2 lb (1.25 kg) beef chuck or round, cut in stew-sized pieces
1 medium yellow onion, quartered and sliced
2 ribs celery, sliced
2 medium carrots, peeled and sliced
2 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
1-2 potatoes, peeled and cut into 1" dice
1 bottle Guinness Extra Stout or 12 oz Draught Guinness
butter
olive oil
salt

Sprinkle salt over the meat. Preheat a dutch oven over medium high to high heat. Add some butter and brown the meat (in batches if necessary), then set aside. Add some more butter and oil and add the vegetables except for the potatoes. Cook until the onions are translucent (some may brown), then add the Guinness and deglaze the bottom of the pan. Return the meat to the pan, then bring to a simmer and turn down the heat to low. Cover and simmer for 1.5 to 2 hours, or until the meat is tender enough for your taste. Serve with crusty bread and more Guinness.

Variation:

Irish stew: Use lamb instead of beef, leave out the garlic, carrots and celery, and use water instead of Guinness. Double the amount of potato.
Regular beef stew: Substitute broth (beef or chicken) and, optionally, another beer or red wine for the Guinness.

The Basics Project: How To Cook

2009-08-23T15:47:00.000-07:00

I have had going for several years a project to collect and review basic and teaching cookbooks. As a result I've probably read more of them than is strictly necessary for someone who can actually cook fairly well, but so be it -- it's a project, and to me an interesting one. Now I'm bringing it to the blog in the form of the Basics Project, and thanks to a Facebook quote by an online friend, I'm starting with eight generally popular how-to-cook books.

How-to-cook books are a bit of an odd genre, when you think about it -- it's nice to have recipes go so in-depth, and you'll probably pick up a few favorites from any book you start out with, but once you're comfortable in the kitchen, they don't necessarily make good references once you're done learning. Unless you're a packrat like me with pretensions of being a writer, you really aren't going to spend much effort on looking for more of them. Granted this won't apply to all such books -- Mastering the Art of French Cooking is both tutorial and reference -- but this is a serious consideration when buying a book like this, especially when the prices can go well over $50 for a coffee table-type book like The Way to Cook or a professional textbook like The Professional Chef. Also a significant consideration is that not everyone has the same learning style; a perfectly good book for someone who learns by rote or just wants to get the dish right will be nearly useless for someone who learns analytically, which will in turn be too frustrating and wordy for a highly visual or reading-impaired learner. So let this (hopefully the first in an irregular series) be your guide to some of the books out there on the market.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking, vols 1 & 2
Authors: Julia Child, Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle
Cuisine: mid-20th century bourgeois French
Style: technique-focused with master recipes

This is the book I must begin with. It's in the midst of a renaissance because of the Julie & Julia movie, and it's damn near impossible to underestimate the importance of this book, not only for Child's (and Beck's) career, but to American cooking in general and English-language cookbook writing overall. Among other things, Mastering's greatest stroke was to teach its users to cook in terms of variations on master recipes, as well as breaking down recipes in excruciating detail so people can retrace their steps if something goes wrong. While the food in Mastering is neither healthy nor fashionable, the technique is classic and solid and translates effortlessly to any other Western cuisine.

It's a little weak for visual learners -- Sidonie Coryn's line drawings are sufficient but a little crude to someone used to television food shows and heavy use of photography -- and being so technique heavy might be off-putting to the just-get-it-done crowd. But it's a solid and widely admired book, and although the price for both volumes is rather high if you don't go bargain hunting, it remains one of the best available for someone wanting to be a serious cook.

Ratio
Author: Michael Ruhlman
Cuisine: Classical French/International
Style: Food science

Ratio is an interesting book -- a fairly recent entry with a limited problem domain. Ruhlman wrote it based on the work of Uwe Hestnar, one of the deans at the Culinary Institute of America, who felt that virtually everything that needed to be known about recipes could be summed up in a simple chart of ingredient ratios, freeing the student to not worry about recipes and cook instinctively. It's an excellent book for what it does, but it comes up a bit short in technique; it's great as an adjunct to a more technique-driven book, and will definitely make you a better cook, but it's best thought of as a follow-on to a more basic book.

I'm Just Here For The Food and I'm Just Here for More Food
Author: Alton Brown
Cuisine: American
Style: Food Science, technique-focused

Here's the thing -- most people seem to like Alton Brown and his nerdy approach to cooking, but there's a vocal minority who don't. I don't really understand the latter, but then not everyone is comfortable with an analytical approach to cooking to begin with. These books are Alton's approach on Good Eats distilled to simple, technique-driven books where he handles the chemistry and physics of food on a fairly basic and straightforward level; the first book deals with the stovetop and cooking methods like frying, steaming, and baking, while the second digs further into baking and breaks down recipes by mixing technique. Neither is comprehensive, but both are pretty straightforward and good for keeping around for troubleshooting and recipe development purposes. (The second is, however, notorious for errata, so make sure you get a recent printing.)

Incidentally, I think Alton's books are particularly good for middle schoolers and high schoolers learning to cook, as they mesh nicely with physical science and chemistry curricula. A younger child might get a lot out of them as well, but some of the more adult humor would be lost on them.

Martha Stewart's Cooking School
Author: Martha Stewart and, uh, someone
Cuisine: New American
Style: Master recipe

Yeah, Martha. Thoroughly unlikeable, but an insanely talented cook. That said, I don't think it's that fair for her to give only grudging credit to one other author considering that it was an obvious collaborative effort by MSLO staff. ("Someone", by the way, is Sarah Carey, the food editor for Martha Stewart Living, as well as one of the on-air talent for the Everyday Food TV show.)

This is a pretty good book though -- very much in the vein of Mastering, but with a lot of color photography and a heavy emphasis on New American. Similar as well to Mastering, it sacrifices comprehensiveness for an intensive focus on process and results. The food is definitely upscale compared to more typical cookbooks, but it's effective at presenting lessons alongside fashionable food. It's also explicitly structured as a textbook, making it a good book for the sort of adult ed cooking classes you'd take down at the local high school. If you can get past the essential Marthaness of it all, it's an excellent if expensive approach to the basics of cooking.

The Cooking from Above/Mon Cours de Cuisine series
Cuisine: French/International
Style: Visual, recipe-oriented

I really, really like this book series. I've always wondered what a cookbook designed for people with dyslexia or other language difficulties would look like, and this series, imported from France by Hamlyn US, an imprint of the UK publisher Octopus, is, if not an exact version, a great step in the right direction. The recipes are generally straightforward, but the real value of the book comes in the meticulously styled and elegant step-by-step photos, showing the ingredients, equipment, and process of the recipe so that the cook can get a clear idea of not only what's supposed to be done, but how it's supposed to look. It doesn't deal much with master recipes, but that might actually make things more difficult given what it's trying to do.

There's more available in French than English, though between exchange rates and shipping the French versions will cost substantially more; it's up to you whether this is worth it, since there will be four volumes available in English by the end of 2009, but the French versions might be worth seeking out for a language student or for someone who just wishes to get more comfortable with metric measurements.

Jacques Pépin's Complete Techniques
Author: Jacques Pépin
Cuisine: French
Style: Visual, technique-oriented

Long, long before the Cooking from Above series, there was this book, or to be more precise its antecedents La Technique and La Méthode. These two books, published separately in the 1970s and combined into one in 2001, placed a visual emphasis on much of the same material as Child, Beck, and Bertholle did in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, with the addition of some artisanal and haute cuisine twists (for example, this book contains instructions on how to make a dry-cured ham in the style of Italian prosciutto or Virginia country ham) and a generally professionally-based approach.

Some of the material in here is a bit cornball -- the aspics are largely a dead art form in the American kitchen, for example, and some things like bread sculptures are really only suitable for a catering business. And some people just aren't keen on black and white food photography, though Pépin went out of his way to tie the photographs closely to the text so that the reader could figure out what was going on at a quick glance. But a person who can work through this book will have much of the skill set of a classically trained chef and will find it fairly easy to build their own variations on the recipes and techniques Pépin provides.

Anyone Can Cook
Author: Better Homes and Gardens Test Kitchens
Cuisine: American
Style: recipe-oriented, semi-visual

This book is the epitome of "I don't care how to do it, just help me get it done". This isn't a bad thing -- some people need to cook but have no interest in the ins and outs of the process. This book, from the publishers of the BH&G New Cook Book, caters to that crowd. There are pictures, though they're underutilized and sometimes seem to be only decorations for critical parts of the process, but what this book does is simply lay out the basics and give the recipes in a simple, nonthreatening form for people who just want to get dinner on the table. Not, perhaps, to my personal taste, but it's a good book nonetheless, including skill levels for each recipe as well as "Ask Mom" footnotes that point the reader to similar and complementary recipes elsewhere in the book. Even better, though a bit loud, the visual presentation isn't anywhere near as eye-burningly awful as the master book itself.

How to Cook Without A Book
Author: Pam Anderson
Cuisine: New American
Style: Master recipe

The title drowns in its own irony, and the mnemonic rhymes Anderson (formerly of Cook's Illustrated, not Baywatch) comes up with are embarrassingly corny. But this is essentially Julia Child's approach of master/variation recipes in a smaller, cozier format. Technique-wise, it's sufficient, and although I'm not blown away by it, a lot of home cooks do swear by it. Ironically, it's just as recipe-driven as any other book on this list; you'll still want to keep it around as a reference when done, which makes it less of a guide to improvisational cooking than it claims.

I've got a few more of these sorts of books in my library, but this is already a pretty long list, and the next installment of the Basics Project will cover them along with anything else of interest I've found. If there's a book you'd like me to review for the Basics project, send me an email (you'll probably need to send me a copy as well, since my budget is limited). I'm actually particularly interested in some of the British authors' books, particularly Delia Smith and Jamie Oliver, but I'll be glad to take a look at anything in any language I can read reasonably well (which means English, French, Spanish, and to a lesser extent Italian and Portuguese).

Ragù Bolognese (an old recipe of mine)

2009-08-23T14:54:00.000-07:00

My new blog feature will be up around 8pm-ish (knowing me, probably closer to 9, but whatever). In the meantime, here's an old recipe pulled off the old GeoCities site in response to a request from someone who's not such a shellfish eater.

Ragù Bolognese (A bit rushed)

Got raves for this one, which was pretty cool considering I forgot to
add garlic (therefore marked optional here) and didn't give it more than
about an hour simmering time. This makes a very rich, tomatoey
Bolognese, excellent served over fettucine or another similar wide egg
pasta. You can, if you wish, serve it Italian-American style over
spaghetti, but I was shooting for authenticity over more-of-the-usual
when I made it so I went for some Barilla dried egg fettucine (couldn't
find the crank to my pasta maker :-( ).

The name of the game with a ragu bolognese is reduction; in that regard,
you can see some connections with French technique there, and the long
simmering process is very much like making chili. It's a sauce that's
built, more than anything else, starting with a mirepoix with everything
being added in stages. The end result is quite different from the
average American Chop Suey (a term that I never used to like, until I
found out what chop suey actually meant in Cantonese). Also, the
addition of dairy is pretty typical for an Italian bolognese as well,
but doesn't seem too common in foreign interpretations.

Don't feel too tied to the measurements, either. I eyeballed everything
(as most cooks would) and the amounts below are very approximate.

1 lb/450g ground chuck
1 lb/450g ground pork
1 28-oz can ground tomatoes
1 glass/6 oz/175mL red wine
6 oz/175mL milk
1 large carrot, peeled and minced
2 ribs celery, minced
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, crushed (optional)
basil, oregano, and thyme to taste
bay leaf
olive oil salt

In an electric frying pan on medium heat, add some olive oil and cook
the carrot, celery, and onion with a bit of salt until the vegetables
are softening and the onion is translucent (turn down the heat if it
starts to scorch). Add garlic and meats, and cook until meat is cooked
through; drain fat if necessary. Add wine and cook briefly until it
begins to reduce and permeate the meat, then add milk and do the same.
Add tomatoes and herbs, then reduce heat to a simmer and cover, allowing
it to simmer for at least an hour (like chili or stew, the longer the
better). Serve over a wide egg pasta such as fettucine or papardelle.

Variations: A similar sauce, ragu d'agnello, is made in other parts of
Italy with ground lamb; I've seen recipes from Abruzzo and Tuscany. To
make it, increase the garlic to three cloves, replace the beef and pork
with 1 lb/450g ground lamb, and eliminate the milk. Serve it over
spaghetti alla chitarra (a semolina-and-egg pasta traditionally cut on a
guitar-like wire frame) if you can find it.

That was fun

2009-08-09T23:38:00.001-07:00

I went to my first party in a long time that didn't wind up with me verging on a panic attack. It must have been my medication boost.

Anyway, I wish to comment that when having a cookout, it's a really good idea to have friends who can cook. It becomes almost like a pot luck as people throw their own ideas into what goes on the grill. Herewith my own idea for grilled shrimp, invented on the fly this evening:

1 lb/500g shrimp (30-45 count), thawed and optionally peeled
Juice of 1 lemon
3 cloves of garlic, crushed
salt, pepper, oregano, cayenne pepper to taste
1/4 c/125mL extra virgin olive oil

Whisk all the ingredients but the shrimp together in a small bowl until emulsified. Add the shrimp, toss, and marinate for 20-30 minutes. Skewer the shrimp and cook on the grill over direct heat until just cooked. Serve with everything else on the picnic table.

Well don't do that then

2009-07-21T22:48:00.000-07:00

A public service announcement from the producers of Off Season:

Do not be Martin Enger.

I am pretty sure I don't want to know how this guy managed to get his hands (so to speak) on a supply of liquid nitrogen without being run through at least a bit of basic cryogenic safety, and the fact that he might get to keep one hand notwithstanding, if he lives, he'll have a lifelong reminder not to keep liquefied gases under conditions where they could boil under pressure. There's plenty of fun to be had playing with liquid nitrogen, but it's the sort of fun that has to be had under carefully controlled conditions. You're not that likely to get off easy like this guy. Molecular gastronomy (as practiced by Heston Blumenthal, Ferran Adria, and Hervé This) is pretty awesome stuff, but you do have to remember that the closer you get to turning your kitchen into a lab, the more precautions you have to take.

New show coming soon, by the end of the month depending on how quick I can clear out the rest of my work queue. I'm pretty excited, as it's the first show of season 3.

Spare me: On metrication and paranoia

2009-07-02T23:46:00.000-07:00

Normally, this would go on my other blog, but if you've read this blog any length of time, you have probably figured out my feelings on metric measurements by now and can therefore see the relevance.

This link, which I found posted by a commenter on Sadly, No!, leads back to one of the more ridiculous commentaries I've seen on CNN, claiming that with a filibuster-proof majority, the Democrats can do scary things like oh, impose the metric system. Yeah, uh... I wish.

I have to say right off the top that I don't personally cook metric, which I guess makes me a bit of a hypocrite on the issue. But I have written on the subject before, and I'm a very strong supporter of metrication, to the point where I really try to write my recipes with both metric and US units because, let's be honest, on the Internet, not everyone who might see a recipe is going to have access to equipment to measure in US measurements. It's a matter of basic politeness to me, and something that a lot of recipe writers just don't pay any damn attention to at all.

No, the metric system isn't perfect; the story of how the original meter was based on a faulty calculation of the Earth's circumference (the history is in the book The Measure of All Things by Ken Adler (2002, Free Press, ISBN 978-0743216760)). But I have a very, very hard time buying any of the arguments against -- issues of factors, division, and whatnot are rather overrated and tend to assume a certain innumeracy on the parts of the measurers (perhaps not entirely ridiculous in the US, but let us not snark), and vague arguments about "human factors" come almost entirely down to laziness and unwillingness to use a different set of units. (I saw one person arguing that 237mL -- the metric value of one US cup/8 fl oz -- is hard to multiply or divide. The argument was so mindnumbingly stupid that I'm pretty convinced the response was a troll, especially given that I know I've seen the commenter's name somewhere else.) The fun part is that, except for temperatures on non-digital ovens, you don't have to convert for the most part -- use the metric scale on your measuring cups, and weigh out ingredients that you'd normally scoop. And write your recipes down in metric as well as US or Imperial measurements -- not only will that save your readers difficulty with ambiguities (like, say, the infamous Australian 20mL tablespoon), you'll reach a much wider audience if you're posting on the net.

So will the Democratic congress go metric? Probably not; there's virtually zero chance of anyone putting their neck on the line for something that's so seemingly obvious. But wouldn't it be nice if they did?

"Joylessness"? In cooking?

2009-06-23T21:31:00.000-07:00

So shortly after the #amazonfail scandal was resolved, I transferred my review of Michael Ruhlman's Ratio over to Amazon. I've been doing my reviewing thing on Amazon since 2000 (as those of you who follow me on Facebook know) and I didn't want to leave this one review out of my central list.

Now Ratio isn't perfect -- it doesn't cover all the territory it wants to. This is fine; what it does cover is pretty damn useful though, and I'm even using it as research material for my next show (expect to see it aired sometime mid to late July); the simple fact is that in order to cook improvisationally, you have to have a firm grounding in the fundamentals. Granted not everyone takes kitchen geekery to the extremes of, say, Ferran Adrià, but the idea of taking a fundamental concept and using it as a base for a more complex dish goes back some distance, to at least Escoffier; Uwe Hestnar didn't invent it, and Michael Ruhlman certainly wasn't the first to write a book about it (though he may have been the first to focus on it to quite this degree). In fact, most of the best how-to-cook cookbooks do this to some degree or another; Julia Child called it the "master recipe" technique, and it was the backbone of her best books. So it was rather startling for me to find another reviewer on Amazon describing Ratio as "joyless" and saying that a scientific approach to cooking is likely to lead to trouble. Buwha...?

Take a look at Hervé This' Molecular Gastronomy. This spends a lot of effort in that book describing things such as aïoli, the Franco-Spanish garlic sauce that is probably an ancestor to mayonnaise (as well as a likely relative of the Greek skordhalia). The chapter on aïoli goes off in some fascinating directions -- beginning with a study of the molecules in garlic that allow the sauce (with sufficient practice) to emulsify without the aid of eggs, and goes on to look at numerous progressively stranger riffs on the theme, at one point suggesting that the process can even be done with meat (the very curious "boeufoli") because many of the same binding molecules are in there. Strange and tradition-breaking as it sounds, kitchen science allows the cook to break through the lines of tradition and rote to do things that might never have even been thought of in the days of teenage scullery brats and long, tradition-bound apprenticeships. (Escoffier would certainly approve; he wholeheartedly supported the phasing out of roux in favor of pure starches like arrowroot and cornstarch, for example. The irony of his legacy being one of hidebound tradition would probably distress him no end.) And of course Julia Child's somewhat famous statement about cakemaking being mostly an assembly job once you've got a few recipes under your belt is highly relevant here.

So what was this reviewer talking about?

There is a belief in many artistic cultures that science and art are orthogonal, that fundamentals are stultifying and uncreative. (Oddly enough, in the discussion thread that followed, the reviewer in question made a strong case for fundamentals in art, cutting her own argument off at the knees.) And there is certainly a great distrust among many people for science in general -- the straw Vulcan concept that logic breeds a spartan, joyless aesthetic that sucks the life out of the finished product. There's certainly a market for that sort of thinking -- movies are filled with ManicPixieDreamGirls and people who get by on emotion and grit. But real life doesn't work like that -- one must still be competent before heart and/or pluck become part of the equation. (Especially if you're making anticuchos.)

So if you're going to have two people put together improvised meals Iron Chef-style, whose cuisine will reign supreme? Somehow I doubt the person who operates wholly on instinct is going to get as far as the person who spends time learning the foundations of whatever cuisine they're working in. This isn't "joyless", and you're not going to get in trouble by focusing on the geekier aspects of the kitchen; if anything, you'll find ways to avoid wrecking a dish, and be able to fix problems as they come along more efficiently. Along the way, you may learn some of Alton Brown's flashier tricks or even get as far as making spaghetti sauce over a bunsen burner the way Shirley Corriher used to. Even if you don't, though, you'll still be in very good shape when it comes to being able to invent your own recipes and cook off the cuff. (It's worth mentioning that reviewer was quite alone in her assessment; in fact, one commenter said, when she talked about donating the book, "I love joyless cooking! Donate it to me!")