Food Crusader

Genuine maraschino cherries at Cask

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 17:12:00 +0000

As I've discovered previously about Curaçao, there are often deep and fascinating stories behind ingredients that we could easily take for granted. And the modern world of food production has made it very easy to live and enjoy food without ever knowing that a complex, mysterious and often superior product, long forgotten by all but connoisseurs, is still being made someplace in the world.

I discovered the latest example of this phenomenon during a trip to Cask in San Francisco, where I found the original maraschino cherry. To call Cask a liquor store would be a great understatement, and would ignore the passion for mixology that compelled the owners to open the place. The owners also operate Bourbon and Branch, a mixological chapel just a few blocks away. Cask has an encyclopedic collection of booze, all displayed on rough-hewn wood shelves and dimly lit to give it a Jules Verne steampunk feel. Bourbon, gin, super-obscure liqueurs and amaro, antique cocktail recipe books behind glass, and all of the equipment needed to recreate Alembic or Bourbon and Branch in your own home. Somehow, in this place, a waxed mustache and a cocktail thickened with egg whites both seem like perfectly sensible ideas.

It was in the back, near the collection of strainers and mixing tools, that I spotted the jar. Luxardo Marasche candied cherries from Italy, with a little cloth covering on the lid and an antique-style label. These delicious and fragrant little gems were formerly only available in this form, and were treasured by cocktail and dessert aficionados around the world in the 19th century. Enterprising Americans in the 20th century figured out a way to approximate the flavor using Washington cherries and questionably bright red sugar syrup, and suddenly, the formerly expensive luxury was suitably affordable to adorn ice cream sundaes, Shirley Temples, and Jello-mold desserts.

I had never tasted the real deal until yesterday. The cherries are absolutely black, and without the thick fruit aroma to give away the secret, I'd have mistaken them for kalamata olives. Their syrup is purply-red, and almost opaque. It's immediately clear that my previous notions of maraschino cherries were based on a cartoon-colored facsimile of this original.

At $16 a jar, these will remain the luxury item that they were a couple of centuries ago. But it's fascinating to taste them, because they're so much more complex than the 'standard' variety. It's like switching from a tinny AM radio to a live concert - the soul of the thing is the same, but there's so much more complexity than I ever knew. I'll be sure to find an excuse to use them in a fancy-pants cocktail or an upgraded dessert. As silly as it sounds, I feel like I understand maraschino cherries a little more, and won't take them for granted any longer.

Curaçao Doesn't Have The Blues

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 22:52:00 +0000

Every bar has a bottle of it somewhere. This eerily cobalt liquid stands alone in the lineup of amber and caramel-colored liquors on the shelf above the cash register, and no one would likely notice if it disappeared.

It floats on the top of skinny shot glasses, served on plastic trays in the wee hours at sticky-floored sports bars, and stains the pineapple wedge on the rim of tacky tiki drinks.

Yet the most cocktail-savvy booze enthusiast would be challenged to discern a cheap brand from the top shelf variety, and few bargoers could tell you what this stuff is made from. Or why it so closely resembles window cleaner. Or what it would taste like on its own, as anything more than food coloring for a fruity rum drink.

But surprisingly, this ill-acknowledged little liqueur has an illustrious story, and has contributed to the success of another famous liqueur to which fame has been much more friendly.

Curaçao, or as it's known in its most common variety, Blue Curaçao, has fully avoided the recent passing limelight of interest that has seen revivals of rye whisky, pre-prohibition cocktail recipes, flavored bitters, and even more mundane ingredients like tonic water and ice. It's no wonder, though - the glowing blue hue that invoked warm Caribbean waters and gave it a marketing boost in the mid 20th century has severely limited its upward reputational mobility in this age of appreciation for authenticity, craft and heritage. We consumers would be just as likely to get excited about Sharkleberry Fin Kool-Aid.

A very old Curaçao label

But a couple of months ago, I visited Curaçao, about 30 miles north of Venezuela, and I tracked down the deeper story of this citrus liqueur. The tale of its descent from regional hand-crafted specialty into mass market commodity comes with a glimmer of hope for a future revival, as I discovered at a distillery in Chobolobo Mansion on the tiny island in the Netherlands Antilles.

A little background first - it's all the fault of the Dutch. More specifically, the Dutch company Bols, a respectable producer (at least in the European market) of genever gins and other specialty liqueurs, can be credited both for the worldwide popularity of the Curaçao liqueur and for its cheapened reputation. In the late 19th century, Dutch consumers became aware of a certain bitter orange liqueur being made on their colonial possession of Curaçao. Seizing upon the opportunity to leverage pre-existing consumer awareness, Bols decided to craft their own domestic Dutch version. The name Curaçao went on its label, the resources of a large distiller went into its production and distribution, and, in an attempt to recapture memories of the deep blue Leeward Antilles waters, the clear citrus copycat was given a dark bolt of blue food dye.

Their marketing acumen proved to be insightful, and popularity of Bols' version of Curaçao spread throughout the world. Dutch De Kuypers also got into the game, and in 1934 opened a licensed distillery in New Jersey to supply the American market with countless flavored liqueurs.

By the time of the 1950s obsession with all things Polynesian, Curaçao's vaguely island image was close enough, and a perfect candidate to add color to midcentury cocktail recipes. Trader Vic and countless trendsetting American socialites embraced the stuff, counting it among their shiny new Hamilton Beach blender, paper umbrellas and bamboo torches as an essential asset for a swingin' tiki bash.

All the while, though, on the island of Curaçao, the relatively hapless originators of the liqueur were still trickling out small quantities of the real stuff, in the same way since the mid 1800s. Behind the mustard-yellow stucco walls of Chobolobo Mansion, owned and operated by the Senior family, is a battered copper still and an entirely manual production line, where corks are hammered into bottles by hand, fifteen feet from the cashier in the gift shop. I visited on a hot August day, when the warm West Indies air permeated the old building, and a friendly grove of laraha trees shaded the courtyard.

Filling and corking by hand

It's no surprise that the Senior brand is little-known, because business is conducted without any of the vigorous marketing zeal so well known among other makers of distilled products. I was kindly informed a few minutes into my first visit, just before noon, that I would need to leave, and to return after 1pm after the staff had eaten their lunch. The heavy wooden doors were bolted shut after I left, and I had to return later to finish my tour of the grounds. This curious customer experience gave me a good indication of the laid-back priorities at Senior that have ensured their product has remained obscure.

But the product is legitimate. Those laraha trees are the essence of Curaçao, and two large plantations on the eastern side of the island supply the distillery with dried peels for making the extract from which Curaçao is made.

A bucket of larahas on Curaçao

In pre-Dutch days, when the Spanish ruled the island in the early 1500s, several prized Valencia orange trees were transported to the colony, in hopes that a New World citrus crop could be cultivated. The Spaniards were disappointed to discover that Curaçao's dry climate and unsuitable soil produced shriveled, bitter fruit, and the project was quickly abandoned. The trees, called laraha to distinguish them from their Valencia predecessors, remained on the island, and the trees grew wild, proving useless as food for anyone but the island's many goats.

By the 19th century, industrious residents of Curaçao had begun experimenting, as people have done with almost every sugar-bearing fruit on earth, with making an alcoholic beverage from these peculiar fruits. Eduoard Cointreau came to Curaçao during this time, and returned to France to experiment with the essential oils as he was perfecting a little thing called Cointreau.

The Senior family got into the Curaçao game in 1896, and retains the oldest existing claim on the true heritage of Curaçao liqueur. Today, in an uncharacteristic nod to public demand, they'll sell you genuine Senior Curaçao of Curaçao in a rainbow of colors, from blue to red, green and orange, although they're quick to assure that the colorings used are naturally-derived.

The island's other big industry is petroleum, which provides useful equipment for the distillation operation

The flavor is sweet and bright, with a faint twinge of bitterness. I saw several cocktails being served on Curaçao featuring the liqueur as the main ingredient, but its character is still best appreciated as an accompaniment to a rum base. Sadly, many of Curaçao's bars are staffed by itinerant Dutch teenagers, with far more passion for drinking Amstel Bright on the beach during their off-hours than for crafting a well-made cocktail. As a result, many bars on the island use cheap Bols Curaçao and American-market fruit mixers in aseptic boxes for their placeless mixed drinks, when just a few cobblestoned streets away in Willemstad, the real thing is being made.

A vintage advertisement for Curaçao in the on-site museum, with the Willemstad moving bridge in the background

Even in its birthplace, Curaçao of Curaçao is waiting, perhaps a little too patiently, for its comeuppance in the global consciousness. In the meantime, I'm happy to have my bottle, in the original clear variety, and am pleased to discover that just a couple of years ago, real Curaçao of Curaçao finally became available as an import to the United States. Personally, I find it works just as well as Cointreau in a top-shelf margarita, but the possibilities for showcasing this unique spirit are broad. With luck, we'll soon see the mixological limelight fall upon Curaçao, and enjoy a renewed appreciation for this authentic spirit.

High Fructose Propaganda

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:25:00 +0000

How is it possible that an artificial ingredient could itself be free of artificial ingredients? Take your time and think about it. It sounds like a riddle, doesn't it?

Or, if you're representing manufacturers of a subsidized chemical food additive, like the Corn Refiners Association does, this defiance of logic just sounds like the creative brief you send to your ad agency to polish up your tarnished reputation. The additive in question here is high fructose corn syrup, which has recently been given its own shiny new national television advertising campaign, along with supporting newspaper and magazine ads to tout that it's safe to eat.

Obviously, they're so proud of their syrup, they can't keep its wholesomeness to themselves. High fructose is high fun!

First, we see a clip eerily reminiscent of a political ad, where the only thing missing is a big American flag sticker on the fruit punch jug:

And then, my personal favorite, the Adam and Eve-esque temptation in the garden. I'll bet the popsicle is apple-flavored:

I'd like to step in on behalf of our befuddled heroine and hero with a response to the smarmy and condescending vituperation that stops their protests short. 'Like what?', say the Corn Refiners Association shills, to which I provide the following observations:

It isn't natural.
Simply being made from corn, or any natural substance, isn't enough to make something natural. Petroleum is ultimately made from decomposed plant matter, after all; could we expect kerosene-enhanced breakfast cereal to boast a 'no artificial ingredients' claim too?

Natural foods are minimally processed. Enzymatic conversion using an insoluble glucose isomerase enzyme preparation followed by liquid chromatography does not constitute minimal processing. If its production requires technologies that didn't exist until the 1970s, I don't consider it natural.

So what might our friends at the CRA be using as the basis for this 'no artificial ingredients' claim? Doesn't the government regulate claims like that?

Sadly, our underfunded FDA, in a long tradition of filling its payroll with staff from the industry it was designed to police, takes a loophole-ridden stance on words like natural and artificial, terms which, inanely, it does not consider to be mutually exclusive. Trawl through Title 21, section 101.22 of the Code of Federal Regulations yourself and you'll see how loose the rules actually are. Consider this ridiculous example of the semantic weightlessness on Planet FDA: Even though the FDA stated in April that high fructose corn syrup is not natural, it's perfectly permissible to claim that it's free of artificial ingredients, because the definition of natural has not been defined. Yeah, go ahead and read that sentence again; that's how clear this issue is.

It isn't used like sugar.
Let's assume the natural/artificial issue isn't important to us. Let's dig a little deeper with the level of skepticism appropriate when evaluating an argument put forth by the organization with the most to gain from its acceptance. The CRA says that HFCS isn't used by food makers because of its price - they use it because it's just so darned useful.

From their bright and cheery Sweet Surprise site, they say that HFCS "... offers numerous benefits. It keeps food fresh, enhances fruit and spice flavors, retains moisture in bran cereals, helps keep breakfast and energy bars moist, maintains consistent flavors in beverages and keeps ingredients evenly dispersed in condiments."

Well, as a consumer, I sure love me some pragmatic food. I mean, flavor and nutrition are nice and all, but let's be frank; shelf life is what's really important when I'm feeding my family. Whatever must food have been like before this miracle substance was invented? I mean, with HFCS, I get fresh, enhanced, moist, consistent and evenly-dispersed food, and all it costs is a few more calories.

So, from the CRA's own data, we see that HFCS is more than just a sweetener - it's also a preservative, but with as many calories as a sweetener. Food manufacturers might add a little salt to counteract any excessive sweetness created by using a sweetener as a preservative, but don't worry, consumers - salt's good for you too.

Take another look at the CRA's first ad. Now take a look back to the 1950s, for its predecessor. Just like today's ads, it was created when some executives, in response to growing public interest in some pesky scientific data that began linking their precious profit-yielding product to medical problems, decided to respond. And respond they did, with some claims of their own. I wonder how successful their campaign was.

Summer Can Can

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 20:14:00 +0000

It's already September. And even though summer weather may still be lingering for awhile longer, the plant world knows what time it is, and is in the throes of its final burst of color and energy before it retreats into the taupe expanse of autumn.

It was with this seasonal urgency in mind that I gathered an unusually large haul of late summer goodness at the farmers' market. In one hand was a bag of crimson dry-farmed Early Girl tomatoes, and in the other, a brimming bag of candy-sweet white peaches. My intent? To take an edible snapshot of this brief moment of the year when the long shadows and hazy heat of summer have just put their last energies into these two ephemeral fruits.

I'm putting them into glass, where they'll stay, preserved, until they can be unscrewed to brighten a dreary January next year.

The final purposes for these peaches and tomatoes might be entirely distinct, but the process of trapping them into jars is almost precisely the same.

Loosen up in the hot tub, little tomate.

With a bowl of ice water at the ready, and a large pot of boiling water rolling, gather up the fruit of choice. Load them up in batches onto a frying spider and allow them to descend gently into the spa. After about 45 seconds or so (or longer, in the case of any stubbornly taut-skinned peaches), scoop them again with the spider and plunge them into the ice water. This Finnish sauna-style trick shrinks the fruit back from their skins, and will make it easy to peel them cleanly off, although a paring knife could still be useful.

Shrinkage can be a good thing

Tomatoes can be peeled and left whole

Peaches will need splitting and pit removal

Now your fruit needs a sterilized vessel and a liquid in which to be suspended. The liquid can be almost anything, as long as your overall pH remains below 4.6. For tomatoes, I'm using water, with a bit of lemon juice for acidic insurance, and a few leaves of sage or oregano from the garden. For the peaches, a mildly-sweetened simple syrup (the kind you'd mix up for your fancy cocktails) will do just fine. If you're clamoring to reproduce childhood memories of Class A Insulin-Assault Heavy Syrup, then feel free to crank up the sugar/water ratio. Science says that the maximum saturation rate of sucrose in water at ambient temperature is 67%, so go as crazy as you like. I like the actual flavor of peaches themselves, so 1:2 worked just fine for me.

Into the jars

Cram your fruit into the hot jars, fill to near the brim with your packing liquid of choice, wipe the rims, secure the lids, and process the cans under boiling water as usual. At sea level, my tomatoes needed 50 minutes, and my peaches went for 25.

And there you have it - a bare minimum amount of effort, and you've bought yourself a lovely present to be opened when the weather has turned malevolent and the memories of dark red summer are faded and distant.

Suspended animation

Slow Food Nation - Of Course It's Political

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:03:00 +0000

After three solid days of listening, talking, watching, and tasting, I can declare that the inaugural Slow Food Nation celebration in San Francisco has been a resounding success.

Food is a connecting force between many different issues, from labor policies and immigration law to problems of healthcare, energy policy and climate change. Everyone is a participant in food, and whether the discussion at hand relates to the taste of a peach or the system of farm subsidies, everyone who eats has a stake in the debate. This weekend, Slow Food Nation united people by this shared interest in eating food that is good, clean and fair.

Gavin Newsom, San Francisco's mayor, at left, receives high praise, via translator, from Carlo Petrini, right.

Roast chicken at Civic Center

Teaching the compost gospel

Crowds downtown for Slow Food Nation

As Wendell Berry says, eating is an agricultural act.

Tasting at the Taste Pavilion in Fort Mason

Sharing the wonders of a good tomato

The conversations and foods shared this weekend have filled my notebook and my belly, and have strengthened my faith in the power to effect change that is inherent in the shared passion that people have for good food.

In the age of industrial nameless food, it can sometimes be easy to forget that food begat civilization itself - agri cannot be divested from culture. The move from hunter-gatherer to cultivation-based societies hinged upon the idea that by working together to fulfill our basic needs, each individual can have a better quality of life. So in this light, events like Slow Food Nation are not simply a celebration of food or gluttony or elitist culinarianism, but rather a celebration and reminder of our common humanity.

Such noble expectations of a food festival become more understandable when we consider that the International Slow Food movement began as a political organization with markedly socialist attitudes toward the symbiotic relationship between producers and consumers of food. Food is the original political issue, and in my view, the most important one, because it is embodied and affected by nearly all questions of social justice and responsibility. And as Carlo Petrini, Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, Wes Jackson, and countless others attested this weekend, it affects us all.

Carlo Petrini and a starstruck Food Crusader

Inspirational fruits

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:56:00 +0000

You'd be hard-pressed to notice it from looks alone, but there's something special about apricots. Piled up in the market alongside peaches and nectarines, they look like just another juicy tidbit of summery bounty, with blushing cheeks and soft flesh. But unlike their summertime brethren, these Armenian plums are special and far more versatile.

It's the time of year for apricots. That time is fleeting, and in many areas by now, it's already gone. If we turn to a country more enlightened in the capricious ways of the apricot, like Egypt, we see that the bittersweet brevity of meshmesh's annual appearance has been codefied into a common phrase fel meshmesh, or when apricot season comes, used cynically to refer to something that will never happen. Deeper understanding of the apricot's significance requires further investigation into the Near and Middle East, where Western civilization first cultivated the relationship with this Indian stone fruit. The Turkish dote flattery on these 'eggs of the sun' with another quirky idiom, used to describe when something couldn't possibly get better, bundan iyisi Sam'da kayisi, or 'the only thing better than this would be an apricot from Damascus'. Contemporary marketers can only dream of a jingle so pervasive; some brilliant Damascan apricot farmer outdid them long ago.

But it's not all marketing hype. Any fruit can be tasty when it's fresh from the tree, but a better test comes after the journey to preserves. Ask a pastry chef. Pastry chefs love apricot jam. They'll smear it onto anything with sponge cake, and use it as the base for sugar glazes or for making fruit sauces. It's a single-fruit sweet answer to the savory world's ubiquitous mirepoix, and for good reason; the flavor plays well with other fruits without overpowering, and lends a warm fruit twinge to the bright sweetness of plain cane on its own. Oh, and amaretto liqueur? It wouldn't exist without the bitter almond goodness from apricot stones. As if we hadn't had enough from this overachieving little fruit, a compound in apricot kernels called laetrile is used in alternative cancer treatments. Take that, peaches!

On to the jam. I didn't go to Damascus for mine, but the Frog Hollow Farms stand at the San Francisco Ferry Building Farmer's Market was bounding with good specimens of apricot, all worthy of a batch of quality jam. I also brought home some obscenely sweet Candycots, addictive for out-of-hand eating but beyond the scope of my standard jam for today.

After picking up a bag of demerera sugar from Rainbow Grocery, I had everything needed to perform the magic. Follow me!

Ingredients
1.25 kg apricots, to yield approximately 1 kg pitted fruit
1 kg demerera sugar
First, quarter the apricots and set aside the stones.

Weigh your fruit. (I had a little more than my targeted kilo, so I adjusted my sugar to be accordingly equal.)
Place the fruit into a stockpot and pour the sugar on top.

Things will look dry.

Things may look so dry that you'll have fears that adding heat to this mess will result in burning both fruit and sugar in a fiery caramelized mess. Wait for these fears to subside, then turn on the heat to medium.

Stir until the sugar and fruit begin to combine and get melty. Everything will mesh into mush and start bubbling, and you'll see that your fears of sugary inferno were ill-founded. Let things bubble for a good half hour, and feel free to pulverize and mush along the way according to your tastes.

You'll have washed your jars and lids and placed them into simmering baths of water by now, and you'll have a nice clean towel laid on a nearby surface to host the meeting of newborn jam with hot glass. Turn off the heat on the fruity lava. Move the first jar to the toweled surface. Using a funnel or a ladle, or (if you're adventurous and not very safety-minded, a spoon), transport the jam into the jars. Go almost to the top, and wipe the outside rim with a clean moist towel before clamping on the jar lid. Repeat. For our one-kilo recipe, we should fill two standard-sized jars with just enough left over for immediate non-jar use.

I don't know what kind of jars you bought, or what kind of altitude issues you might have, so follow your canning jar instructions to finish your processing. This usually involves half an hour submerged in boiling water. (For your jars, that is. Not you).

And that's it! You now have instant credibility when glazing fruits, moistening cake layers, augmenting ice cream, or sweetening barbecue sauces. Feed that to the next person who tells you fel meshmesh.

Yolks worthy of champagne

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:46:00 +0000

The changes in the quality of our food brought on by industrialization can be hard to spot, especially when we consider that many of them happened before we were born. Our great-grandmothers may have known what a farm-raised egg yolk was supposed to look like, but consult anyone much farther down the family tree, and everyone’s using supermarket fare as the baseline for comparison.

If you pry open the Styrofoam on the cheapest carton of eggs at your local supermarket and crack the bleach-white shell to reveal the contents, you’ll see a jaundiced faded Post-It hue that would have shocked your great-grandmother.

It would also have shocked Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin.

If her name doesn’t ring a bell, walk down the aisle to the wine section. You might want to avoid eye contact with the staff after those egg-cracking shenanigans. Really, what were you thinking?

Okay, so walk over to the sparkling wines. See the one on the top shelf, with the orange label? Read the smaller type. Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, the namesake of the champagne brand, chose that orange label in a day long before corporate branding or color matching technology even existed.

In a precedent-setting move, Veuve Clicquot registered this trading color with the French government. And how did she indicate which shade of orange would mean Veuve Clicquot, in a day when Pantone swatches were still 150 years in the future? She turned to eggs.

The famous widow (veuve means widow) specified that her labels would match the brilliantly dense shade of orange unique to eggs from cornfed hens from Bresse. Bresse chickens are renowned to this day throughout France as an ideal specimen, prized for their flavorful and tender meat and clean fat. It certainly doesn’t hurt their reputation in the least that their crowns are red, their feathers white, and their feet blue, making them into little avian French flags as a bonus.

Veuve Clicquot is referred to in wine circles as ‘Yellow Label’, but this odd mismatch between orange and yellow can be attributed to a translation error. ‘Jaune’ means both yellow and yolk in French, and the aforementioned Bresse comparison caused some confusion that kept us from calling it ‘orange label’. Incidentally, there is no confusion among Veuve Clicquot’s lawyers, who pursue over 50 transgressions a year against their copyrighted shade.

These orange-yolked beauties are partially a result of breed, but primarily a function of the level of care and quality of feed given to the hens in question. Luckily, if you know where to look, you too can enjoy the same deeply orange hues that the Widow deemed worthy of adorning her bubbles.

I’ve drawn up this chart, with apologies to Rainbow Market’s identical data shown on their egg case, to outline the different factors that impact the quality of eggs in the Bay Area. Obviously, there are countless more farms that need to be added here; this is only the selection available at Rainbow. But it’s a start, and it brings to light more information than is made available at national supermarkets. Color coding here identifies good practices versus less desirable practices.

On this particular day, I chose a six-pack of ovaloid goodness from Clark Summit, one of the few farms to tick all the good boxes on the chart. Madame Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin would hopefully approve of their shade.

Unfancy food on the Other Coast

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:28:00 +0000

If I were in New York this weekend, I'd be going to the Unfancy Food Show, at the East River Bar, 97 South 6th Street, in Williamsburg. (tagline - "This year we will set something on fire, and it may be a can of PBR.")

Put on for lots of reasons, not most importantly of which is a cheerful contempt of the Fancy Food show, its organizer is the author of one of my favorite blogs, Grocery Guy. He's also known as Tom Mylan of Marlow and Sons in Williamsburg. Tom's blogged-about accomplishments include making prosciutto in his apartment, teaching classes on how to butcher lambs, and hating on the New York Times food section.

This little interview in New York magazine gives Tom a good chance to articulate his usual rant, and comes complete with comments from self-unaware readers who comicly misunderstand his disdain for the "precious, let’s-all-pat-ourselves-on-the-back-liberal-guilt" (Tom's words) side of the 'foodie' movement in favor of the unglossed appreciation of the rough and dirty things made and eaten by real local people.

Read his blog, and if you're lucky enough to be on the East Coast, go check out Unfancy Food this weekend. Huzzah!

One more thing - the chickens keep delivering

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:12:00 +0000

So you’ve just roasted a chicken. Or two of them, if you were following me on the earlier poultry adventure. And now you’ve got some remains. The chicken that made it to the plate was thoroughly nibbled down to bones, and the rest was fastidiously stripped from the carcass and stowed away in the fridge to be made into future incarnations as sandwiches, soups, or salads.

It's not pretty, but it's beautiful.

Now in the place of our picture-perfect bronzed birdies, we’re left with a horror movie’s worth of gruesome remains, an herb-infused scattering of bones, skin, neck and other unappetizing detritus, all embalmed under a glistening sheen of gelled translucence.

It’s wonderful.

For all its myriad uses and idiot-proof preparation, chicken stock remains a mysterious ingredient in most home kitchens. If we lived in the utopian culinary world where all food was good and honest and slow, then making stock wouldn’t be blog-worthy material; it would be about as informative and interesting as a treatise on how to load a washing machine. But in truth, most of us don’t make stock. Four-dollar 1-liter Tetrapaks are the closest that many of us get, and truth be told, those are usually an acceptable replacement.

But making the real thing is a joy in itself, and has the side benefit, also bequeathed by homemade bread and beer, of filling a house with a genuinely uplifting aroma for hours on end. It doesn’t hurt that it costs pennies to make copious quantities of this endlessly useful elixir, and that you can be fully assured of its quality and provenance.

It doesn’t get simpler than this. Put your chickeny bits in a stock pot:

Plop.

Throw in some chunky vegetables (do bother to clean them though; it’ll make the stock clearer in the end). Onion, carrot, celery, bay leaves and peppercorns are standard. Thyme made it into mine too.

Pour in water to cover everything. It took me 2.5 liters plus another half liter top-off during the simmer.

Boil and bubble, ain't no trouble.

Bring up the heat, don’t let it boil, and scim the scum as it comes to the top. Keep the heat low and let it bubble gently for an afternoon. Two hours should be your minimum, but 5 or 6 would be ideal.

When the fun is over, turn off the stove and strain out the chunky parts with a colander. Those grey bits have finally seen the end of their tour of duty – send them to the compost for an honorable retirement.

Okay bai!

Hot, strained and lovely

Cool down the stock with the lid on, and do it as quickly as possible, using an ice bath for your stockpot if possible. Now put the cooled pot of goodness in the fridge, and come back in the morning to take the fat off the top.

That stuff on top is tasty tasty schmaltz. Sauté with it, spread it on toast, whatever – don’t throw it out!

One thing worth noticing here – if you made it right, your stock will be slightly thick at this point. That’s assurance that you’ve got plenty of flavorful gelatin suspended in your life-giving concoction, extracted correctly from the bones. Those oh-so-convenient Tetrapaks would clog at the very thought of such a substance. So which one’s better, the homemade or the prepacked? You decide. I’m just sayin…

Now portion out and freeze your stock, unless you have an immediate need for that much nourishment all at once, like a visiting sniffly circus troupe.

It will keep in the fridge for a few days without souring, but in the freezer, you’ll get weeks or months. Endlessly useful, and made from little more than otherwise worthless remains. Thanks, chicken!

Roasting the right chicken the right way

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 22:57:00 +0000

It seems like every authoritative all-encompassing cookbook, the kind with Basics or Principles or Everything in the title, has a wistful and solemn tribute to roast chicken tucked somewhere between its chapters. It's a barometer dish by which a cook's overall technique can be evaluated. And when asked what their last meal on earth would be, a fair number of famous chefs are likely to choose something simple and wholesome, like a good chicken, roasted with herbs and served without ornament.

Poultry, like all varieties of meat, used to be much more expensive, because it was primarily raised on family-owned farms, small scale operations with conditions more suited to Norman Rockwell paintings than to value supermarkets. Chickens ate bugs, and ran around outside, just like the South Asian junglefowl from which they descended thousands of years ago.

Things have certainly changed. My copy of the Gold Cook Book, written by Louis P. De Gouy and published in 1947, raves on about the technological 'advances' that were dramatically changing our relationship with Gallus domesticus. Seen now through the lens of hindsight, his enthusiasm is a bit unsettling:

About fifteen years ago, before man could control vitamin D, chickens had to have plenty of sunshine to soak up an abundance of the lifegiving vitamin. When confined to their coops and shut off from the sun, they would die. But, when we conquered vitamin D and could feed it to chickens in cod liver oil and other products mixed with their food, it opened up a vast new streamlined way of producing eggs, called the battery method...Their contentment can be measured by the fact that battery hens produce 15 per cent more eggs than their less civilized sisters who live on the range...Recently the chemical, Colchicine, was discovered to speed the growth of baby chicks, while still another scientific approach to better and speedier breeding of poultry has been artificial insemination. There is no telling where all these fantastic experiments will lead us, but the fact seems to be, as far as science is concerned, that a chicken makes a good guinea pig!

Yeah, and I've also heard great new things about this thing called asbestos. Three cheers for progress!

Today, over 60 years later, we eat more than 9 billion chickens a year in the United States, most of those raised in battery farms with clipped beaks, pumped with growth hormones to make them busty, and antibiotics to keep the germs of confinement at bay. Their lives are short, dark and cramped, and as a result, chicken is no longer a luxury, but rather the stuff of value menus, sold to be eaten with a level of conscientiousness and self-awareness commensurate with the battery farmer who used science to boost his bottom line. We've gone from chicken dinner to chicken fries.

Want to bring back the happy bug-eaters? Want chicken to be revered and special, to be enjoyed and savored, to satisfy both belly and conscience? So do I.

There are many arguments into which I won't delve right now regarding what free-range means and what it should mean. Regulations are only as good as their worst loopholes, and unfortunately, current laws regulating food labeling still have some large ones to close. But just because we still don't have federal laws that mandate humane treatment of chickens, that doesn't mean there aren't old-fashioned happy chickens out there to be found.

I know that when I look for chicken, I feel confident about a few particular producers. Hoffman Game Birds is top of the list, but hard to come by. Fulton Valley Farms, in Fulton, California, is another top-notch producer. So for today's slow Sunday meal, I picked up a couple of little Fulton Valley chickens, weighing in at just 2.3 kg total (that's 5 pounds for two whole birds), and with some very basic preparation, made them into a lovely little roast.

Ingredients
Two small chickens, 1 to 1.5 kg each
225 grams of butter (about 2 sticks)
Two large cloves of garlic, crushed and chopped
Assortment of fresh herbs (I grabbed some thyme, oregano and sage from the garden)
Two heavy pinches of salt (chunky grey sea salt works well here)
A few crunches of black pepper
A glug of white wine or white wine vinegar

Now there are many fancier ways to roast a bird, but I like to go the simple route, because I want to taste the chicken above all else. I'm also thinking forward a bit, and want my leftovers to be versatile; the remnants from these birds could go into soup, a curry, a taco, or a salad, and won't harbor twinges of spices that might not play well with others.

Bring the oven up to Blazing, aka 200C or 400F. Now take care of the prep.

Chop the herbs, then crush and chop the garlic. Take these smelly friends and introduce them to the butter. If your butter just came from the fridge, you'll need to get your hands involved to get things soft enough to make a roughly integrated herb butter.

Now you'll need to give your birds a very intimate massage. Rub half of the herb butter on the outside, and put the rest inside. If your chicken is big enough to accomodate, feel free to make a little cut in the skin and put the butter between the flesh and the skin; this will guarantee crispy skin in the end. Let's get the chickens ready for the heat. A roasting pan would be ideal, but anything flat with a little depth will do. Put your passengers onto the conveyance of your choice, and deliver them to the oven.

Twenty minutes later, interrupt them briefly to give them a little baste with a brush or a carefully wielded spoon. Pour the white wine in, taking care not to pour onto the chickens themselves. Drop the heat down to 175C or 350F, and let them enjoy the heat for another 30 minutes. Now, crack the oven door open just a bit for some slow ventilation, and leave it that way with the oven turned off, for another 20 minutes.

Bring them out, check to make sure the juices run clear, and allow to rest for awhile. Presto - you've got roast chicken. It wasn't hard to do, and didn't take very long!

The advantage of using small chickens? They cook before their skin burns.

In addition to the delicious peace of mind that comes from roasting an honestly-raised chicken, you've also got a bonus that you'll never find with a chicken fry - the bulk of ingredients needed to make world-class stock. Stay tuned..

The Zeitgeist of summer

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 16:15:00 +0000

The bedsheets are hot. The toilet seat is hot. Yesterday's bacon fat left in the frying pan to congeal is still viscous. Shampoo runs too freely from the bottle. And opening the windows only lets more tepid treacley blobs of hot air ooze through the house.

The Texan in me is quick to point out that it's only 85 degrees, but the fact is, San Francisco simply isn't built for this kind of weather. I own summer jackets, after all. But when a city without prevalent air conditioning gets a heat wave, staying indoors is only going to exacerbate the problem. So today, I'm taking a cue from the Germans, and spending this steamy sunny afternoon with friends in a beer garden.

Zeitgeist is an old friend, a tattered biker bar with a gravel-lined beer garden filled with dozens of picnic tables. Waitstaff are surly, the toilets will test squeamish stomachs, and just about the only thing you could do to offend your fellow customers would be to overdress.

The shadow of the freeway cools a few lucky corners near the fences, and the occasional breeze wafts cool air and bright green scents from the mobs of black-clad hipsters gathered around stacks of empty glasses. Dogs and people alike are drawn to the plumes of burger smoke from the kitchen window, and the beer selection is encyclopedic. And until the cool weather returns, this is where I'll be pleased to stay.

Mastering the art of brunch

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 21:48:00 +0000

I know I’m not the only one who’s had a hangover brunch in the city of New Orleans. But it stands to reason that a town so widely acknowledged as a bastion of bacchanalian bingeing would have also have mastered the creation of the greasy meal that serves as respite for so many bleary-eyed mornings after.

It's a tiny restaurant.

As I see it, it’s no coincidence that beignets, po-boys and inky black chicory-laced coffee have become Crescent City hallmarks, alongside the crimson hurricane cocktails and streetfuls of plastic cups spilling over with foamy lager. Without each other to balance their respective sides of the night, these two excesses of food and drink could never be sustained.

Of course, San Francisco and New Orleans have entirely different civic personalities. But a night of revelry, whether on the bayou or the bay, demands redemption, in the form of serious food. So it was with a great sigh of relief that I was introduced to Brenda’s French Soul Food, a creole Louisianan embassy in the heart of the otherwise unwelcoming Tenderloin.

Good grits, good omelets, good pancakes, and ridiculous Last Meal-worthy biscuits

The coffee was so black it stained the cup as I sipped. The hollandaise has obviously entered the building as disparate ingredients, a rarity when powdered packets are so temptingly easy. The pancakes, grits, and omelets were textbook perfection. The biscuits – oh, the biscuits! I will categorically declare these to be the most authentic southern biscuits I’ve tasted in the state of California. I suspect voodoo. Or pork fat. I’m not entirely sure, but I want these biscuits at every meal.

Beautiful beignets

There’s a flight of beignets on the menu. A flight. Of beignets. Honestly, why haven’t we seen this brilliant winebar solution applied to fried pastry before? In addition to the gold standard fluffy pillow of plain sugared fried dough, there was one filled with apple and cinnamon honey butter, one filled with dark chocolate, and one filled with – and this one is sheer genius – crawfish, scallions and cheddar. Only after our group had discovered and devoured the sublime crawfish edition did I manage to take my photograph, so there’s understandably no sign of the final piece of artistry among the dabs of chocolate and bits of apple strewn across the plate.

Aieee.

San Francisco Groceries for Newcomers

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:57:00 +0000

I've had occasion over the last few months to meet several new residents of San Francisco, recently moved here from Britain and Australia. Foreign newcomers to San Francisco all seem to have received the message that this fair city offers a bountiful landscape of food and gourmet artistry, and as a result, they arrive at SFO with an expectation of ubiquitous freshness and local variety. But at first inspection of the nearest neighborhood market, new arrivals may be shocked to find that the most common grocery offerings in San Francisco are still the same chain-supermarket garbage as the rest of the States -- industrial, agenda-laden mediocrity.

Luckily, the blessings of the city aren't too far under the surface. For the recent newcomers I've met, I've written the following short list, and it's proven to be a helpful grocery orientation to buying food in SF. Geared towards the new resident with limited access to a car, it's brief and incomplete, and doesn't delve deeply into the food subcultures writhing throughout the Bay Area (ie, there's no nose-to-tail meat or black market raw milk cheese here), but as a quick start guide, it'll steer a newcomer away from Safeway and into the comforting arms of some simple stores selling simple and good food. For the sake of local authenticity, I've left off the venerable and indispensable Whole Foods, choosing instead to focus on more regional and local purveyors.

And now, the Quick Guide to San Francisco Groceries:

Rainbow Grocery

1745 Folsom Street

I buy almost all of my staples and bulk goods here. This a fully vegetarian grocery store; the only meat in the shop is in the pet food. The best thing about Rainbow is their bulk section. You can find herbs, spices, flours, salts, grains, cereals, coffees, etc, all in big bins. You get a small credit for using your own containers from home. They also have giant tanks of olive and nut oils, buckets of peanut butter, molasses, tahini, honey, dried fruit and countless other things. Massive selection of homeopathic and herbal stuff (some also in bulk containers, like shampoo, etc), and eco-friendly cleaning supplies. Produce can be a bit more expensive here, but it'll be meticulously identified with source, organic status, etc. If they can't find something in season, it simply won't be available. And the cheese...oh the cheese! In 2005, Saveur magazine said Rainbow is one of the top 20 places in the country to buy cheese, and they ain't lying. They also sell raw milk, biodynamic wine, and super-natural hippie chicken eggs. Huge selection amd a staff full of helpful little pierced anarchists.

Bryan's Quality Meats

3473 California Street

This is up in Laurel Heights, so a car is really the only practical way to get there, but it's the most competent and clean butcher shop I've found yet. They have an excellent selection of poultry, lots of fresh seafood, and well-sourced lamb and pork. My only disagreement with them is their staunch refusal to sell grass-fed beef, but otherwise, their name is completely appropriate. A picture-book butcher shop, white tiled walls and all. Surprisingly competitive prices. Good prepared food too - try a sandwich!

Andronicos

1200 Irving Street

This is in the Sunset District, so it's fairly accessible by Muni, but a car would be much easier. Andronicos also has locations all over the rest of the Bay Area, but just one in the city. A good all-round gourmet supermarket, where you could buy everything in one spot if you needed to. If American Safeway is Tesco, then Andronicos is Waitrose. Prices might be a little higher, but it's tough to find crappy food here. (Note for British expats - there's also a little British import section, if you're dying for a McVities or some Heinz Salad Cream)

Alemany Farmers Market

The Ferry Building Farmers Market is beautiful, and has boundless tourist appeal, but also has $4 artichokes. Alemany is the real deal, with actual farmers selling their produce out of trucks, driven into town from their farms early in the morning. Strictly car only, unless you really want to walk over Bernal Hill with armloads of groceries. Some things are organic, some things aren't, but everything is seasonal, and dirt cheap. I like to make a Saturday morning event out of it, and grab a tamale or some chilaquiles from one of the vendor stalls for breakfast while I gloat about scoring a huge bag of heirloom peppers for 75 cents. Artisanal olive oil and honey is usually available, as well as, depending on season, crabs, clams, oysters, and...if you walk down the street from the official market....live chickens. It's a fun place.

Trader Joe's

(at least three locations in SF)

Almost everything here is private-label Trader Joe's, but that's not a bad thing at all. It's all top quality and really good prices. I've never seen anything expensive here. If you want quick and natural convenience foods, this is the place to go. Also the home of the (in)famous Two Buck Chuck, a line of quite drinkable but completely unremarkable table wines that sell for $1.99 per 750ml bottle. Solid and reliable.

BevMo (aka Beverages and More)

(three locations in the city)

Not much to say here. Anywhere else you buy beer, wine or spirits will be more expensive (with the possible exception of Trader Joe's) and won't have nearly the selection (no exceptions at all). Good cheap glassware too.

Slow Food Nation approaching quickly

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:32:00 +0000

Those ardent arbiters of food policy behind Slow Food have put together a group to organize Slow Food Nation, a four-day festival stretching over Labor Day weekend throughout San Francisco to "showcase the best of American food and producers, and bring together chefs, farmers, scholars, authors and activists to discuss issues surrounding food production in today's world."

Their new site, slowfoodnation.org has launched today, and is full to the brim with details of the producers, the events, the speakers, and the ways that volunteers can get involved to engage the public in this monumental task. I daresay that this site is even more useful than the parent Slow Food USA site; this has plenty of action-oriented and educational material here to get everyone involved and aware of the food process. There will be brewers, farmers, bakers, chocolatiers, distillers, ranchers, and likely many more purveyors of tasty things.

Food is important for everyone who eats, so an event like this that enriches the connection between supplier and consumer is a huge boon for us all.

Tickets go on sale today. Show your support, buy a ticket, and attend. I'm making my Labor Day plans now!

Prohibition ends again in Chicago

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Wed, 28 May 2008 21:06:00 +0000

No longer limited to speakeasies in Chicago

Chicago has lifted its two-year old ban on fois gras, and the decision is a triumph of good sense. Bravo, Chicago, and bravo, Mayor Daley for seeing this as the ‘silliest ordinance we ever passed’.

It’s fitting, though, that this enlightened decision comes just a few months shy of the 75^th anniversary of America’s disastrous prohibition lesson, when we deemed the Volstead Act unconstitutional and brought the booze back. I thought we’d sorted this kind of legislation out already. California, are you listening? In 2012, we Californians are scheduled to have our right to support producers of this traditional and storied delicacy stripped away in the name of animal welfare, while the Smithfields of the world are allowed to continue torturing and overmedicating pork in far more obscene conditions.

In this country, it’s a tough task to gather support for a ban on CAFOs when the food in question is cheap KFC buckets, supermarket ham and eerily cheap beef. But fois gras? Expensive and ‘elitist’ food, made by small producers without any powerful corporate interests to pay lobbyists? PETA salivates at such an easy target. Ban away!

If we’re going to go around banning things in the name of public health and animal cruelty, we would gain more fitting historical inspiration by revisiting the original intentions of the Pure Food and Drug and the Meat Inspection Acts of 1906. This Act introduced regulation of meat processing and food production processes and ended horrendous sanitation transgressions made without conscience and thrust upon ignorant consumers. Are you enjoying your rot-free hotdogs, completely devoid of sawdust or chloroform? Thank the Meat Inspection Act!

Upton Sinclair would find Smithfield’s processing plants in North Carolina and elsewhere disturbingly familiar today. A word of warning – if you’d prefer to steer away from mental imagery invoked by phrases like “rivers of pig shit”, then wait until later to read this Rolling Stone article about Smithfield, which produces the majority of industrial-raised pork in the United States. But find some time, and read it. It’s important to understand what we’re up against, and how much more effective than legislated bans our consumer choices can be.

Your dollar is much better than a ‘silly ordinance’ for punishing bad practices while rewarding conscientious natural producers.

Fantasy airline food

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:34:00 +0000

Not long ago, food served at ballparks was limited to boiled hot dogs, stale popcorn, and watery beer served in little waxy paper cups. Inside the sealed-off environment of the stadium, there were no culinary alternatives. No barbecue, no roast chicken, no garlic fries, and not even the little ice cream sundaes in the pygmy plastic helmets.

But sports fans didn't seem to mind, because they hadn’t driven out to the ballpark for the slimey hot dogs-- the game itself was obviously the draw, and they'd be there notwithstanding the Cracker Jacks. The vendors hawking their nachos and corn dogs were simply opportunists, taking advantage of a pre-assembled crowd of customers to sell them some basic, mostly mediocre food while they enjoyed some baseball.

Suffering the same plight as other hostage eaters in cinemas, theatres, and prisons, these early sports fans weren't accustomed to better choices, and never had their expectations of grotty food challenged. And so the squeeze cheese flowed on.

Looking up into the skies above those stadiums those many years ago, there were other people, as there are now, in a state of genuine captivity, who were locked into pressurized cabins, strapped into their chairs, and forced to breathe hours of recycled air while being hurtled over oceans. But strangely, these airborne cousins of the baseball fan did not eat hot dogs. They ate roast beef, shrimp cocktails, and lobster tails. They ate from real china with silverware and knives and with fresh flowers in vases on their tables. They drank coffee and cocktails, and had cloth napkins. Air travel was a classy affair, and food was designed to reflect the brass-button blazer occasion upon which so few passengers were lucky enough to embark. It was a rare and treasured privilege, and the food served onboard was prepared appropriately.

And somehow, it seemed appropriate, this dichotomy between the mass class and the airborne elite; it made sense that everyday events deserved less gastronomic attention than 30,000-foot flights of technological wonder.

Something changed.

Air travel hasn’t been glamorous for ages -- the days of dressing up for the stroll down the jetway are probably gone forever. This has increasingly been the case, and airline quality continues to ooze into a miserable cattle-class torment as airlines eliminate in-flight meals and start charging fifteen bucks for luxuries like being able to take luggage. Food has long since been a casualty.

It's driving me to desperation; I'm an inch away from pulling an Alice Waters and packing my own gourmet food whenever I travel, to prevent myself the indignity of succumbing to another fourteen-dollar musty sandwich crammed with overcooked battery chicken and wilted shreds of dry iceberg lettuce that haunted my recent trip through San Diego.

Meanwhile, though, ballpark food has undergone a renaissance - the sporting pauper has swapped places with the flying prince, and now stadiums are good places to find decent barbecue, legit bratwurst with good brown mustard, New England clam chowder, Cuban roast pork sandwiches, Texas chili, Quebecois poutine, Philly cheesesteaks and countless other real, properly-made, albeit deliciously unhealthy, ballpark foods.

Why can't airlines find a way to serve real food again? Fuel costs are strangling carriers large and small and competition is tighter than ever, of course, but there are some airlines managing to squeeze quality service into their business model. If your experience has been limited to US-based carriers and budget European ones, you might find that claim hard to believe.

But a quick browse through airlinemeals.net shows that glamor isn't dead. British Midland, Air France, Singapore Airlines - they all perform an ancient and long-forgotten practice.

They still serve food.

In coach.

On short-haul domestic flights.

Even more amazingly, these airlines are also paying through the nose for fuel like everyone else. But they've managed not to allow themselves to forget that passengers are living, breathing adults who require food, not the option to buy bags of juvenile snack food. What's to credit this? Some Eurocentric cultural superiority pitch? Governments willing to bail out their national airlines for the sake of their culinary reputation? I don't buy it.

British Midland served me real ice cream last year, and after growing accustomed to the tortuous heartless feed that American Airlines had served me on my eastward flight, I thought I was hallucinating.

I would gladly pay for basic, real, hot food if it were available, but even the option of genuine food has been budgeted away by American carriers. Am I alone?

Rock and rock oatmeal

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:33:00 +0000

I'll bet Keith Richards eats a lot of oatmeal. There has to be a balance in his life hiding somewhere, counteracting the hard-riding lifestyle, right?

I'd had five solid days and nights of corporate 'hospitality', rife with open bars staffed by polyester tuxedos, with boxed conference lunches designed to offend the fewest possible palates, and with an endless stream of fried this-and-thats served on paper napkins under the glow of projected corporate logos. The ubiquitous steamship round roast, more appropriate in the Flintstone's drive-in than under a heat lamp, the sterno-fueled quesadilla reheating stations, the pallid fry-tinted mountains of sliders, eggrolls, pasta salads and little thumb-sized pastry tarts filled with various salty meats or glazed fruit -- it was an overload. I'd steered well clear of the syrupy Crayola-hued cocktails served via ice-sculpture luge to the brays of delight by the herd of onlookers, but despite my attempts to derive a sane diet from the onslaught of decadence, my week had left me listless and fatigued.

On my last day in town, with the few hours left before I'd be boarding my flight home, I waddled across the street from my hotel in San Diego's squeaky-clean Gaslamp district to Mary Jane's Coffee Shop. Only after a few sips of my coffee did I make the connection between the Jim Morrison playing overhead, the edgy decor and the kitschy flatscreens playing episodes of The Brady Bunch in the cafe booths; I realized that this diner is actually attached to the Hard Rock Hotel. And as it turns out, this temple to debaucherous loud living gave me just what I needed - a simple bowl of oatmeal.

Sometimes a little bland nutritive comfort is exactly what an hors-d'oeuvre-addled body needs. Porridge is as simple as it gets, and is too humble to be reformulated, infused, or otherwise glamorized. It's plain and simple horsefeed, and even to call it 'vanilla' would be a moniker too ambitious. Oatmeal doesn't want to be craved. It just wants to provide nourishment. Quietly.

And so it did, with just a couple of raisins and some Paint It, Black to give me a wholesome start to my day, and to give me a culinary breath of fresh air. Keith would be proud.

An oasis of real food in Texas

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 19:09:00 +0000

The times are a changin' in Austin

After my first trip in three years to Austin, Texas, I can report that something exciting is happening to the culinary landscape. Now I should mention here that I grew up in Texas, and will never lose the soft spot in my heart for real barbecue brisket, breakfast tacos, and, yes..even Whataburger.

However, my personal food awakening only really took hold after I left. So admittedly, my food memories of this place, where gourmet food was always imported and everyday food was factory-made, pale in comparison to the kaleidoscopic food landscape in my backyard of Northern California, where sublime gastro-experiences are ubiquitous.

But this recent visit back to the central time zone showed me that there is a food revolution going on throughout the country, not just on the coasts, and that awareness is being raised in areas that have traditionally been challenging environments in which to find or even grow good honest real food.

If anyplace in Texas was going to embrace slow food first, it was going to be Austin, the 'hole in the doughnut' of a state otherwise suffering from a sociopolitical image problem. I'm proud to have lived in this fine city during the mayoral election in which Leslie Cochran, a transgender homeless activist, garnered almost 8% of the popular vote.

Needless to say, Austinites are comfortable with progressive thought. Austin is the home of Whole Foods, now expanding across the country (and goodness, even into the UK). It's the home to Central Market, another bastion of gourmet goodness, being kept as a Texan secret for the time being. But the list continues - Real Ale Brewing Company in Blanco, Texas is carrying the torch for handcrafted brewing, Tito's Vodka, made just outside Austin, is the first legal distilled spirit to come from the state, is made in small batches smooth enough to drink with just a splash of soda, and Sweet Leaf Tea is honest and simple and has a tirade against high fructose corn syrup on their website. Who would have expected it?
Cissi's Market on South Congress is a little cornucopia of gourmet goodness, with Jo's coffees, grass-fed beef from Bastrop Cattle Company, 'happy chicken' eggs, the full lineup of Real Ale Company's offerings, plus locally-sourced produce and prepared foods.

Just down the street at Farm to Market Grocery, more local produce abounds, from soaps and pickles and hot sauces. Their supplier list shows the zeitgeist of Texan natural foods in its full breadth.
The selection might be limited and the produce case might be small, but this is the kind of enthusiasm needed to get this movement off the ground. All just a little more proof that supporting the producers who support the cause is the only way to make changes in our food systems. Keep up the good work, y'all!

Well-dressed preserves

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:18:00 +0000

In my own preserving, I've used Kerr jars, the kind that are available at supermarkets and hardware stores. Unlike most products, preserving jars, at least in the United States, appear to have no 'bargain' version and 'luxury' version; there's just the standard utilitarian Kerr/Ball jar, unchanged for decades.

But on a recent trip to Sur La Table, I spotted a curious little cardboard flat of jars that I didn't recognize. I bent over to inspect them, and found that yes, someone had come up with a cleverly designed and fashionable alternative. No metal rings, no razor-sharp metal discs, just a glass jar, a glass lid, and a rubber gasket. I looked up this company, called Weck, and kept their name in my mind, intending to call upon them when my current stash of glass runs out, or when I decide my preserves have become gift-worthy.

Now I see that Pim, of the venerable Chez Pim blog, has also discovered these photogenic cute little German jars. She's filled them with candied kumquats, and they look positively charming.

Ramos, Please Rid Us Of Your Fizz

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:14:00 +0000

It's called a Ramos Fizz. This little relic of a cocktail reared its ugly Victorian head during a otherwise pleasant sunny brunch this weekend at The Ramp in San Francisco, where a friend of mine spotted it on the menu and made the ill-advised decision to summon one from the bar.

It's gin, lemon and lime juice, sugar, orange flower water, cream and egg white, all together in filthy blended foamy matrimony, a grisly, tart, sweet and eggy marriage made in cocktail hell.

Everyone at the table had a brief sip, then my friend choked through a couple more sips, before it was finally relegated to the far end of the table. It sat alone scowling and festering in the sun and, in a fleeting bit of disgusting protest, curdled and separated into a two distinct foamy white and greenish clear layers. Ugh.

Breakfast sausage in High Definition

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 17:35:00 +0000

"Ignorance is like a delicate fruit; touch it, and the bloom is gone." - Oscar Wilde

Flavor is a lot like TV. In isolation and in the warm glow of ignorance, a normal CRT television portrays an acceptably faithful depiction of the world. Greens look green, reds look red, and everything is perfectly unremarkably nice. But take a journey out into the world and glimpse an HD television, and suddenly the universe is a different place. After you've witnessed the raw,visceral screamingly bright pore-level detail oozing from a wall-sized HD demi-god, your rounded glass simulacrum will never elicit anything but ennui.

I have tasted HD breakfast sausage, and until I took it out of the package, I didn't realize the depth of my own ignorance of this morning staple.

The packaging was already promising. I'm a sucker for compelling typography, so the blood red block characters on plain straw-colored background betold authentic meaty goodness before I grabbed it eagerly from the cooler case. Those big letters spelled Boccalone, which means 'big mouth' in colloquial Italian. It's the most recent project of Chris Cosentino (of my neighborhood's Incanto and Iron Chef America fame) and his business partner Mark Pastore. Boccalone first came to my attention a few months ago when, walking past Incanto, I saw a little sign touting something about a CSA for meat. Meat, delivered on a weekly basis - it's a brilliant triumph of civilization, and I'm amazed it hadn't been thought of earlier.

The Boccalone project has now expanded past the signup list of initial members into a full-on brand of delicious meat products, both fresh and cured, available from grocery stores and markets like Avedano's Holly Park Market in Bernal Heights here in San Francisco, where I got my mitts on some. It's all done correctly, using natural methods, humanely-sourced meat, and the flavors are so real that it makes Jimmy Dean taste like a sage-flavored sponge.

I could tell of the tales of pancetta or guanciale or salted pork liver, but this particular morning's foray into Boccalone's world came from their Easton Breakfast Sausage. Why Easton? Apparently it was famous for a time on the east coast between the Civil and Second World Wars, when Cosentino's English-descended kin produced Easton's Newport Sausage in Rhode Island. The inclusion of adventurous and fashionable bitter orange zest among the other potent herbs makes me wonder whether the original recipe has been updated since those early days, but regardless, this is a sausage that makes its presence known in the kitchen. I opened the package and immediately encountered an earthy and tart aroma, a more powerfully..well, meaty note than accompanies most grocery-standard meat products.

After a visit to the cast-iron frying pan in a little oil, the little Eastons joined the plate with a couple of slices of toast and another citrus diva, my own homemade marmalade, to bring me breakfast in breathtaking high fidelity.

Indulging curiosity at Scharffen Berger

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:09:00 +0000

I've now boldly walked in the footsteps of Curious George.

And whereas the images we remember from children's books are typically met with jarring contrast to their real-world equivalents, Berkeley's Scharffen Berger lives up to the expectation, long reinforced by childhood stories, that chocolate factories are quirky and fantastical places. Instead of a massive faceless production line hidden out in a low-rent Nowheresville, the Scharffen Berger factory is tucked into a small old brick building in a tree-lined neighborhood, and it's jammed full of antique European machines, plodding along noisily in their decadently inefficient and low-yield ways to produce the good stuff. And they let people in for tours.

One of the few real ~~chocolatiers~~ chocolate makers in the country, Scharffen Berger has only recently passed their ten-year mark, but early in their history, established themselves as something special. A 'best in the country' endorsement from the late Julia Child, followed by a more recent acquisition by Hershey (shhh!), and Scharffen Berger has taken the title as American chocolate bellwether.

Apparently, the secret has to do with sourcing properly fermented cacao, being very picky about it, and tailoring each tiny batch carefully, eschewing the more efficient quick-to-market methods employed by brands with larger market share to preserve. Oh, and ensuring that even their milk chocolate, long a boo-hooed lowbrow cousin style to the revered dark chocolate, has a higher percentage of cocoa solids than several of their dark chocolates - that doesn't hurt.

Having sat through several How It's Made tours and demonstrations for countless other foods, I was pleased to see that the Scharffen Berger tour is designed to enlighten even the most obsessed foodie. I had heard faint murmurs about this fermentation of cacao, but didn't know much about the process. To my delight, our Scharffen Berger guide provided a well-informed description, followed by photos, followed by actual beans to touch, and was able to answer questions intelligently!

He led us on a hairnetted walkthrough, reportedly the only one in the country that allows photos, then left us free to indulge our whims in the shop. No quick slick video and a high-pressure cattle prod into the gift shop here...although the siren song of chocolate pretty much does the job itself.

This is a passion-driven example of real food, well-deserving of its accolades, and with a factory as fun as its product. Other food manufacturers, take note!

Joy in a mundane onion

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 06:08:00 +0000

Sometimes super-fresh produce surprises me.

Since moving to Northern California, I've been gradually expanding the breadth of my culinary knowledge, and learning more about what peaks of perfection food can attain when it's brought from earth to table in the shortest and most seasonal time possible. This continues, as it did during a recent Saturday morning trip to the Alemany Farmers' Market, where I rediscovered onions.

From my earliest encounters with onions, I remember their papery skin as a flaky nuisance. Left in the bottom of plastic bags that brought onions home from any childhood grocery run was a little crumbly mess of onion dandruff, dusty shards of crispy detritus that were just part of the onion deal. I never considered this to be a flaw, or even something I would wish away; this was simply a feature of onion-ness.

But look at this bombshell! Tight, taut and brightly colored, with a wispy ribbon of coiled skin wrapped seductively at the end. Red onions elsewhere - even here in this fertile land - are the most likely to be flaky and discolored, much moreso than their well-behaved white and yellow siblings. But here, harvested the evening before in Fresno and rushed to Alemany in the morning, was proof that even humble onions can outperform expectations when they're given proper attention, instead of neglectful decay and time spent in a withered pile in the supermarket.

Little onion, it's a pleasure to meet you.

Drip coffee gets sexy

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:13:00 +0000

I might cry.

This morning, completely without warning, my most beautiful favorite coffee company in the whole wide world opened their first permanent shop, less than a block from my office.

James Freeman runs his baby, Blue Bottle Coffee, with a refreshingly apparent passion that, unlike other food ventures powered solely by money and market opportunities, shows in the final product. And now, he’s opened a shop that lets us see a little more of the personality behind this previously reclusive little venture. No longer confined to temporary stands at the Ferry Building Marketplace or the oft-closed garage in Hayes Valley, they now have a sparkling new space in the new development in Mint Plaza here in San Francisco. And the world is a better place because of it.

I rushed over as soon as I heard the news this morning. I expected their fine coffee. What I didn’t expect was for my design and technology nerd interest to be piqued as well. But wow. The space looks as if Steve Jobs and Jony Ive decided to open a coffee shop. Apple references continually came to my mind, from the clean lines of the white ceramic to the black shirted and friendly staff. There’s a pleasant and subtle attention to detail throughout, from the slate-colored cabinetry to the shiny brass couplings on the incredible Japanese siphon brewer. Admittedly, this polished impression may partially be a result of the shop having opened just yesterday, so a few months of typical foodservice grime may soften it, but the effect today was completely unlike the typical pseudo-bohemian-mismatched-coffee-mug kitsch that so dominates the independent coffee shop world.

Espresso was created as a time saver, in the age of progress and rapid industrialization roughly a hundred years ago, to keep Italian factory workers from idling during their coffee breaks. Its allure to connoisseurs came from the artfulness required to tame the steamy hissing contraption required to bring it to life, and there is a decidedly geeky cool factor that comes with mastering the gadget.

But all the while, normal brewed coffee lingered in the shadows, with no sexy procedure attracting attention to it. Even the name sounds dull. Drip coffee. Yaawwwwwn. But the truth has remained that brewed coffee is a better way to experience a coffee’s depth and complexity. Hence the rows of single-cup paper filters lined up at coffee-conscious coffee counters, including Blue Bottle. But now, as Blue Bottle is showing us, technology is adding some glitz to boring old drip. Siphons! Whirlpools! Halogen lamps!

The New York Times article by Oliver Schwaner-Albright does a great job of summing up the state of the technology advances in brewed coffee, but spends most of its time on the Clover, which isn’t the machine being used at Blue Bottle. Theirs is a Ueshima siphon machine, and it is truly a steampunk-inspired marvel. With its wood, rope, steel and glass components, it looks decadently expensive and complicated, like a Rube Goldberg excuse to rack up the list price. But the proof is in the cup, and I’m pleased to say that mine was balanced and well-extracted.

The siphon machine at Blue Bottle will never appear at a Starbucks; it’s a quirky piece of laboratory equipment blended with an art exhibit, and wouldn’t make sense for any mass-market coffee purveyor. But for the happy horde that I joined this morning waiting patiently for a few drops of its elixir, simply watching it work is entertainment worthy of a visit.

Hot sticky marmalade-making action

noreply@blogger.com (Food Crusader) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 23:21:00 +0000

Going on a marmalade-making adventure is not an activity suited for a weekday evening. It’s a laborious effort, requiring work on two consecutive days, and involves leaving the stove on for hours on end. But it’s great fun. And sometimes, making a food from scratch is the only way to get inside of it, to understand what gives it its character, and how its ingredients transform and combine into something new and unique.

Marmalade could easily be dismissed. It isn’t very popular anymore, and has been declining in use even in its British homeland. It’s bitter, strongly flavored, and arguably, an acquired taste. But when it’s done right, done rustically, and done by hand, even humble little marmalade can teach us something about how industrialized food has lowered our standards, blurred our collective food memories, and turned our palettes toward bland substitutes.

In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, staple foods that had previously been made at home were slowly replaced by more “hygienic” and “pure” versions made in factories with accounting departments. Homemade bread was demonized as provincial and dirty, and replaced with blisteringly white uniform loaves of air. And gradually, everything from beer to marshmallows to lettuce got marched upon by the inexorable progress, and the production processes for all of our food got streamlined, rendering a homogenous, reliably mediocre simulacrum of the original.

Now, over a century later, most of us have grown up never having tasted the originals that were supplanted by factory food. And now, with a few generations insulating us from our culinary heritage, even the foods that tug our nostalgic heartstrings probably came in a brightly-colored box with a catchy brand name.

What we call marmalade today has been around since the 17^th century, although the roots of the word go back to 16^th century Portuguese. The myth of how marmalade became associated with Britain and oranges and Paddington Bear goes like this - a Spanish merchant ship offloaded a cargo of Sevilles while delayed unexpectedly in Dundee, and the crafty Scot bargain hunter who picked them up devised a way to make these otherwise inedible fruits into something of value. The rest is history, and marmalade eventually joined red phone boxes and bulldogs as quintessential British icons.

Today, any supermarket will reveal a few pallid renditions of this classic, and thankfully, in the last few years, there’ve been a few imported or organic varieties that resemble the real thing, albeit with hefty price tags. But as with many foods, the most common offerings are like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, and the high-resolution original is nowhere to be seen. High-fructose corn syrup in a carrot-orange gel suspending some microscopic flecks of orange peel do not a marmalade make. Ahem, I'm talking to you, Mr. Smucker. Seriously, what the hell is this, and where do you get off calling it "All Natural"? Bastards.

So let’s make it ourselves, shall we? It’s January, and the requisite Seville oranges are in their fleetingly brief season. A pedantic note for eager marmaladiers, by the way - Sevilles are absolutely required. They’re difficult to come by, and even in California, people have been known to resort to pilfering from decorative Seville trees on private property to get their mitts on them, but they’re the only way to go. Navel oranges are bumper cars to these bittersweet Ferraris, so don’t even bother.

It’s a lot like making jam, but the fruit part of the fruit is used only to extract pectin and juice. The juice, sugar and lovely bitter orange peel are combined, and succumb to several hours of deliciously inefficient time simmering and bubbling and darkening. Finally, here emerges a sticky, fragrant and incredibly flavorful and caramelized mélange, more complex than anything on offer in the store. It’s a time machine to the days when food was food, and it’s well worth the effort. Take a look.

The Recipe

Ingredients:

1.5 kg Seville oranges (make sure they’re Sevilles!)

A Meyer lemon for flavor (optional)

2.5 kg sugar (I like unrefined organic, but bright white will do)

3 liters of water

One grain bag, from a homebrew supply story (Gauze or muslin made into a bag will do in a pinch)

Makes about 9 half-pint jars

Put your oranges and lemons into a stock pot and add 3 liters of water. Bring up the heat and simmer, tightly covered, for about 3 hours. Kill the heat and let it cool.

Remove the fruit, which will now be soft and pliable, and save half a liter of the cooking liquid for later. Cut the oranges and lemons in half and scoop out all of the insides back into the pot. Pith, seeds, fruit, juice, everything! Save the orange peels for later and discard the lemon peel. Pour in the half liter of cooking liquid and simmer the mixture for 15 minutes.

Place the grain bag into a large bowl, and wrap the end around the lip of the bowl, so that the bag acts as a filter for anything being poured in. If you’re using muslin, just be careful to hold the cloth completely over the bowl.

Pour the mixture of citrus gunk and cooking liquid into the bowl, using the grain bag as a filter to hold the solid bits. Let it cool, and when it’s cool enough to touch, squeeze the bajeebus out of the bag to get all of the pectin and juice into the bowl. This gross gooey mess is critical to getting your marm to set, so don’t be shy with it, even if it does look like a bag of snot.

Now go do something else. Seriously, you’ve been in the kitchen forever. You have friends, right? Go wash the orange snot off your hands and go out for some drinks or something. Come back the next day for the next step:

Remember those orange peels from before? It’s time to chop them up. Look deep within your soul and ask, ‘How chunky do I like my marmalade?’. These chunks won’t get much smaller when they cook, so bear that in mind as you chop. Make little ribbons or big postage-stamp sized hunks; I won’t judge you.

Take the bowl of juicy squeezins and plop everything into your stock pot again. Add your precious peel bits to the pot. Now it’s time for sugar. Weigh out your 2.5 kg of sweet stuff and add it to your pot. No, I won’t give you a conversion for cups or ounces. Volume is inaccurate and I like metric, so stop whining.

This is going to look ridiculous, by the way. Your carefully-produced orange concoction is going to be drowned in a deluge of sugar, and you’ll think you screwed up the measuring. But you didn’t; the truth is that marmalade just has a lot of sugar in it. Diabetics beware. Incidentally, some crafty souls, like June Taylor here in the San Francisco Bay Area, have been able to pull off preserves with much less sugar, but I’m sticking to a traditional recipe here. By all means, experiment!

Get out your trusty wooden marmalade-stirring spoon and stir it up over low heat. Keep it moving until it no longer looks like a big pile of sand, but rather a bright orange goopy blob. Got your orange goopy blob? Good. Put the lid on and keep the heat low. This is going to take awhile.

Four freaking hours later, you’ll have something mighty fine. If you’re the time management wizard I am, it will be the middle of the night by this point, but that’s alright. Your pot will be full of something much darker and menacing-looking, and will be so fragrant that your neighbors will think you’ve built a lab for orange-flavored meth.

You’ll need to test your handiwork for correct stickiness – put a dish in the freezer for a few minutes, then dollop a bit of marmalade onto the dish. Poke at it. Has it formed a skin? Well then you’re in the marmalade business, my friend. If not, then just keep the stove bubbling until you can pass the marmy skin test.

Whew! Now turn off the stove and set up your canning equipment, and fill up those jars in just the same way you’d do a normal jam. Be sanitary and follow the instructions for your jars, of course. Now presto – you’ve got more jars of genuine actual bullshit-free marmalade than you could ever dream of eating. Enjoy.