Go East, Brown Liquor

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:06:00 -0800

A recent visit to a normally well-stocked liquor emporium in Minneapolis in search of an excellent mid-range single-malt brought this writer nothing but frustration—the stuff wasn’t available at the distributor level, a clerk explained, thanks in part to a booming Asian market with a seemingly endless thirst for good brown liquor.

That anecdote connects nicely with a Telegraph story about obscenely expensive bottles of old Scotch being “snapped up” by super-rich customers in China and the Gulf States.

Whether the bottles (which, unlike fine wines, don’t age once bottled) are worth the asking price or we’re witnessing another Rockefeller Center-style fleecing of the East by the West is up for debate.

“Dave Broom, contributing editor to Whisky Magazine: ‘The whiskies don’t have to be this pricey. I get the feeling sometimes that it’s more about lovely boxes than lovely liquid. That’s not to say malt whisky can’t operate in the luxury category, but some distillers are pushing things too far in my view.’”

Distillers, of course, take a different stance:

“David Robertson, head of the Dalmore brand, which released twelve bottles of The Dalmore Sirius 1951 vintage last month, said all of them had been bought within a week. ‘These are very limited editions of very old whiskies. There just isn’t much 50-year-old whisky around any more. We are lucky enough to have some,’ he said.”

If availability of great whisky is a sign of civilizational power, the West may want to play some catch-up. And if it’s not, it’s still dashed annoying when Zipp’s is out of Highland Park 18.

Image source: Flickr member sashafatcat under Creative Commons

Who Doesn't Have a Food Show?

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:45:00 -0800

On November 12, Chef David Chang, who recently caught heat for dissing San Francisco chefs for only putting figs on a plate rather than manipulating food in interesting ways, is a featured speaker at the IdeaConference, sponsored by Advertising Age in New York. I’m intrigued to see what awkward badassery Chang will pull out next.

He was in fine form on Munchies, the new food show from VBS (see video clip below). Quick digression: I love VBS for three reasons. First, Spike Jonze is the creative director. And they have the rights to use any Black Lips song (and they make good use of it). Then there’s the cute show Special-Needs Pets, which is a real winner.

Munchies’ first episode profiles Chang. On the show, I enjoyed how candid he was, admitting he’s not the greatest chef and that he couldn’t keep up with the other cooks while working at Café Boulud. But the episode never followed through on how he actually got to where he is now, instead fast-forwarding to a night on the town with Chang and a New York Times writer who’s the coauthor of Chang’s new book. They didn’t seem to have enough to say to each other, and it looked like the producers off camera had to keep asking Chang more questions. When they arrived at Chang’s Ssam Bar, he got drunk and made some food for Chef José Andrés, who responded to a Chang condiment by saying, “Only a crazy mind would come up with a coffee-mayo bullshit.”

The whole thing felt a little uncomfortable and forced, and nothing actually happened in the unnecessarily long 12-minute video. So here’s my pitch to you VBS producers: Just get famous chefs into a tiny apartment, get them really, really drunk, and then have them cook something for you. Of course you’ll need five hot semicelebrities just hanging out at the shoot for no reason other than to try the chefs’ severely compromised dishes.

One Lemon Per Yob, Please

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:55:00 -0800

Here is a portrait of modern Britain in a tiny, terrifying gastronomic nutshell served up by the Telegraph:

“Chris Pether, 70, was told by his local Asda superstore in Aberdeen that health and safety rules prevented the sale of more than one loose lemon, orange or grapefruit. A supervisor explained the policy had been introduced to protect the public because local youths had been throwing the fruit at people.”

There you have it: Old men can no longer buy fruit because of a prevailing public opinion that fruit is most typically used as a missile hurled by thugs at passersby. It’s not exactly clear what dystopia this comes straight out of, but a number of British science-fiction writers are increasingly looking prophetic instead of merely grouchy.

Whither the Pawpaw

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:16:00 -0800

Ari Weinzweig, cofounder of Zingerman’s (home of great food affordable enough for kings and queens), shares some information on the marvelous pawpaw, a native American fruit that was recorded as George Washington’s favorite dessert. Passion fruit–esque in flavor and often puréed into custard or pie, the pawpaw has a profound novelty factor, and is worth a bit of meditation. And, hey! For a mere $75, you can have 12 ounces of your own Zingerman’s pawpaw gelato by mail, along with five other flavors of frozen Thanksgiving-compliant yumminess.

Image source: Flickr member sarahemcc under Creative Commons

When Cereal Boxes Are Full of It

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:00:00 -0800

If it irritates you that the Smart Choices food program claimed that Ritz Bits Peanut Butter Chocolatey Blast crackers are good for you, you’ll probably be stoked to read Dan Mitchell of Slate describe San Francisco’s assault on spurious cereal health claims.

Mitchell notes: “The suspension of Smart Choices didn’t stop insane label claims. Far from it.” Kellogg’s Cocoa Krispies are “still claiming, in giant letters emblazoned across the box, that the sugary cereal ‘[n]ow helps support your child’s immunity.’ In this worrisome time of virulent viruses, such a claim is likely to give some parents the wrong idea. But really, at any time, such a claim is at best amoral and at worst sinister.”

Whether San Francisco city attorney Dennis Herrera has the standing to take the company to the woodshed remains to be seen. But so long as every new product on the market (other than, perhaps, Drank) feels the need to sell itself as some kind of tasty parallel form of medicine, I’m grateful someone is working to make the marketeers back up their boasts.

The "Fresh" Chicken That Traveled the World

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:02:00 -0800

Reporting from Sao Paulo and Great Britain, the Telegraph puts together a great story on a Pret a Manger “fresh” chicken sandwich. Why the reporting from Sao Paulo, you might reasonably wonder? The fresh chicken is, as it turns out, frozen chicken from Brazil.

Here’s the gemstone at the core of this story:

“Pret a Manger, the sandwich chain which boasts of using only ‘fresh, natural ingredients,’ rears its chickens in small farms around Marau, in the south east of Brazil, and then sends them to Perdigao for processing and freezing. The frozen, raw meat is then shipped thousands of miles across the Atlantic to be defrosted, cooked and put in sandwiches. Until Pret changed its website this week, consumers were not told of the food’s origins.”

Also to the story’s credit, it investigates working and farming conditions in Brazil, and reports that they’re not a horror show: Workers make a small but not appalling wage, often suffer from repetitive stress injuries, and work in cold, wet processing plants that lead to ill health … well, maybe it’s a bit of a horror show. The piece is a good read for anyone who ever considers believing anything told to him by a large food company, under just about any circumstances.

Pumpkin Buying: The Science

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:32:00 -0700

Never in the history of humanity has there existed a Halloween pumpkin-purchasing flow chart as descriptively accurate and generally useful as this one, which ran in the excellent online comic Sheldon. Flow charts: If you’ve got a lot of information and little space, they’re the way to go. Even if the topic is squash.

Co-op or Salt Mine? Ask an MFA.

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:35:00 -0700

Thesis of a recent New York Times first-person story about the Park Slope Food Coop: It’s really, really difficult to work at a co-op for 2.75 hours every four weeks.

Actual point proven by the New York Times’ first-person story about the Park Slope Food Coop: You kind of get what you pay for when you ask an MFA in poetry to perform manual labor.

Of course, Park Slope Food Coop horror stories are hardly unknown to us here at CHOW.

Image source: Flickr member stevendamron under Creative Commons

It's Game On at the Food Network

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:13:00 -0700

On November 3, the Food Network’s new Wii game, Cook or Be Cooked, is scheduled for release. Though Eat Me Daily says the game appears to be a rejiggered version of Cooking Mama, Tracey John, a self-professed “terrible cook” at Wired, kinda got into it:

“Most of the motion gameplay involved a lot of shaking controllers to mimic the actions you’d do in actual cooking: Waggle the Wii remote to shake out the seasoning and cut vegetables; shake the Nunchuk to retrieve your saucepan or bowl; tilt the remote to oil the saucepan, pour liquids and turn the stove on and off.

“There’s also a timer for how long each item should be cooked, so you have to watch the clock. Thankfully, to speed things up you simply hit the C button. To earn extra points, try multitasking by beginning to cut and cook the potatoes for the potato salad while handling other food-prep chores.”

Hey! Sounds like my kitchen where I grind out a dinner every single night.

A (Nude) Coffee Break with Consequences

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:49:00 -0700

Apparently, drinking coffee in the nude—even in one’s own house—can have legal consequences. The CBS Crimesider blog covers the harrowing story of a dude in Springfield, Virginia, who woke up, happily noted that his roommates were gone, and had a cup of coffee without bothering to put on clothes.

“Things got complicated when a passer-by spotted the bare-skinned barista while taking her 7-year-old son to the local school bus stop.”

The onlooker alleges that the man exposed himself at his doorway and in his front window. Was the guy ignorantly stumbling around in the buff or a pervert? It’s now up to a court to decide. If found guilty of deliberately exposing himself, the man faces misdemeanor charges punishable by up to a year in jail.

Soul Food for the Dearly Departed

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:44:00 -0700

As the Mexican Day of the Dead starts to pick up cultural steam north of the border, the Daily Beast digs into the holiday a bit, taking the casual reader past the colorful candy skulls that represent the outer limit of knowledge for a great many Americans. Here are three thumbnail insights from Beast contributor Ana Sofia Pelaez that merit reading in their majestic original form:

1. In the Yucatán, the holiday is called Hanal Pixán and can be translated as—and this is pretty cool—”the path of the soul through the essence of food.”

2. It’s not just food that gets served up as part of the offering process. “Vices as well as pleasures are remembered, and beer, tequila, mezcal, or even cigarettes can be included.”

3. The Day of the Dead is really the Days of the Dead: November 1, notes Pelaez, is dedicated to children who have passed on, while adults are remembered on November 2.

Image source: Flickr member Orin Zebest under Creative Commons

Slate's Rotten Apple

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:40:00 -0700

You won’t believe it, but guess what—Slate has published an article wherein a writer for the magazine is a total contrarian buzz-kill. While most of us celebrate autumn with Halloween costume parties and obligatory airings of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, Slate embraces the season by dusting off a three-year-old article with the following thesis: “Apple picking may be a satisfying ritual and pleasant day out with the kids, but it’s also a wasteful scam.”

In the story, Daniel Gross says of apple picking, “It’s the best use of child labor since Manchester’s early 19th-century textile mills,” and declares that it “sheds light on some unflattering truths about the American economy.”

We can only hope that the magazine spikes Gross’s upcoming piece about Christmas cookies, in which sprinkles are compared to “a rainbow of tiny thalidomide pellets,” and, while talking about linzertorte cookies, Gross invokes Stalin’s liquidation of the Soviet kulak class.

A Bull in a Box

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:00:00 -0700

Red Bull’s recent promotional freebie for its cola is probably the coolest thing it’s done since it sponsored extensive can-derived art. The promo, as shown on the Dieline package design blog, is a custom bag containing a custom box containing the 17 key ingredients that give Red Bull Cola its taste. Say whatever you like about energy drinks and mass-market colas—the ingredients that go into Red Bull Cola look damn near majestic when presented in raw form in a compartmentalized wooden box.

Coke's Threat Expands as the Can Contracts

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:45:00 -0700

William Saletan of Slate is entitled to his own opinion, and—in general—he tends to make good points. This week, he may have taken the basic Slate premise (whatever sensible-sounding thing that anyone, anywhere, has said or done is actually—surprise!—wrong) to its logical extreme.

He argues that the new smaller-sized 90-calorie Coca-Cola cans are worse for us health-wise because (and this is serious):

“... if you don’t get enough ‘sparkle’ from the smaller can, no problem. The mini containers ‘will be sold in eight-packs,’ says the company. Just open a second 7.5-ounce can, and you’ll get 20 percent more sparkle than you used to get from a 12-ounce hit. You’ll also get 20 percent more calories.”

In other words, introducing a new, smaller size of Coke is bad because we’re now going to drink two cans and consume even more calories than if we’d just had one regular-sized can.

And if they were 45-calorie cans would we consume five of them? God forbid Coke comes out with a zero-calorie option, because we’d all drink an infinite amount of soda and Coca-Cola would come shooting out of our pores.

Oh, wait—Coke Zero! Oh noooooooo!

Image source: Flickr member geishaboy500 under Creative Commons

The Fresser Fades Out

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:18:00 -0700

The mile-high pastrami, the overstuffed Reuben, the pile of rare roast beef on rye: They’re all on the way out, according to author David Sax, whose Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen sounds the death knell of the classic Jewish deli. The reasons for its demise, as listed in the Hungry Beast:

“[H]igh rents that many delis face in cities, low margins on items like pastrami and brisket, limited alcohol sales, a perception among regular eaters that delis should be cheap, dieting trends that have made anything high-fat or carb-loaded non-starters for decades at a time. The rush to the suburbs has allowed fewer delis to cater to larger numbers of people, and the deli owners who built these businesses would rather see their sons and grandsons in law school than in aprons behind the counter.”

Want to see what your kids will be missing? The Hungry Beast has a gallery of images from the best delis in North America. Mmm, meat mounds.

Wait, What Are Your Qualifications Again?

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 06:48:00 -0700

The Atlantic’s Everybody’s a Critic online feature goes a long way toward establishing why not everybody should be a critic. Read it if you must, but here’s how a recent post pretty much boiled down:

Noncritic: I went to this highly hyped New York restaurant, ordered the roasted chicken, and I didn’t think it was all that. Why does everybody go there, anyway?

Commenter: You total sack. Nobody orders the chicken there; it’s a steak and burger place. What the hell are your qualifications for being a critic, anyway?

Commenter Number Two: Oh, wait, it says right there that he doesn’t have any.

Can All You Can

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 06:37:00 -0700

DailyFinance provides one of the best roundups available of coverage of the Great 2009 Canning Craze, and the various reactions to it. Primal? Practical? Precious? Is it possible that canning, something our grandparents and great-grandparents did to cope with all the extra cucumbers and tomatoes, has somehow become something insufferably twee?

Salon thinks so; the Wall Street Journal doesn’t. The DF roundup starts by putting its fingers on the craft’s pulse as trend of the moment, but swings quickly into deeper and more philosophical territory: canning as a personal revolt against Big Food, which is less and less perceived as the safe, delicious, affordable wave of the future.

A brief excerpt from the surprisingly stirring conclusion to the DF story:

“It’s not that I don’t trust corporations. It’s just that I don’t know the corporations. And I know Amy, who sells me tomatoes, and I know that I care whether or not my children are sickened by my food.”

Trendy or not, that makes sense.

San Francisco to David Chang: Go Momofuku Yourself

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:15:00 -0700

San Francisco chefs are pissed. One week after Momofuku’s David Chang said that in San Francisco, “There’s only a handful of restaurants that are manipulating food,” and that “every restaurant in San Francisco is serving figs on a plate with nothing on it,” the Asia Society center in San Francisco has canceled a forthcoming Chang book-signing.

Giving what Grub Street calls a “Larry David-style apology,” Chang said it was a misunderstanding yet affirmed, “I’m never gonna open a place in San Francisco.” OK, thanks for that.

By the way, the context for the “figs on a plate” comment was a panel at the New York Food & Wine Festival with Anthony Bourdain that actually sounded pretty amusing. Chang and Bourdain’s other targets included Guy Fieri (“Those dumb fucking sunglasses and that stupid fucking armband,” says Chang), food blogs (Chang copped to calling one blog “The Shitbag”), and Alice Waters (“I’m constantly having [my own internal] argument with Alice,” said Bourdain, as quoted in the New York Post. “I agree with the message, I just don’t think she’s the person to deliver that message … [like] when I see her cooking Leslie Stahl one egg over a roaring fire.”).

The Asia Society book signing was to be the first event in an upcoming book tour for Chang. Ouch.

Image source: Flickr member ∗clairity∗ under Creative Commons

Mayhem in the Kitchen

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:27:00 -0700

The New York City Wine & Food Festival went off last weekend, and the Hungry Beast took the opportunity to pry some hysterical stories of kitchen mishaps from the famous chefs at the party.

Ex-Top Chef-er Sam Talbot was in the midst of opening his Surf Lodge when the propane tanks ran out. He undertook a dangerous mission to borrow a tank from a friend of a friend: “we jumped in a 1967 Pinzgauer, which is a European, Humvee-like military vehicle, and sped over. Actually, we left one guy to make cold salads. Lots of cold salads. And the servers poured as much Champagne as they could. The nine of us loaded the propane tank into the back, and then lurched our way back to the restaurant across bumpy roads. Those things are highly explosive—it had to be the most dangerous thing I’d ever done.”

Matthew Weingarten of Inside Park at St. Bart’s had a tale from his younger days:

“When I was a young cook, Julia Child came in to eat at the restaurant that I was working at. She ordered roast chicken and I ended up cooking her nine roast chickens. The first was probably fine, but it wasn’t good enough to me, so I put it aside. The next three I burned, the second two were undercooked. So it ended being nine before one went out.”

Image source: Flickr member rubber bullets under Creative Commons

He Really Wanted Tacos

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:54:00 -0700

It’s well known that working in fast food is a thankless task. Between the hours, the pay, the sizzling-hot grease, and the often cranky attitudes of supervisors and customers alike, it’s not surprising that when the choice is between working at Burger King or an entry-level position with the Gangster Disciples, many opt for the latter.

But a pistol-packing would-be customer at a Taco Bell in Miami took “unpleasant workplace environment” to the next level last week. A local Fox affiliate reported:

“The gunman, who remains at large, ambushed several employees as they stepped out of the Taco Bell at 630 NE 79th St. at closing time, at about 3:30 a.m., Tuesday. He fired several shots, and Rebecca Bouie took a bullet to her leg, before he fled the scene. ... Bouie took the bullet, according to Miami Police, because some guy was upset the store had closed and he could not buy any food.”

Holy. Hell. We’re all sensitive to the importance of the Fourthmeal, but shooting a single mother who’s already working the graveyard shift at the Bell is absolutely beyond the pale.

Image source: Flickr member greenmelinda under Creative Commons

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