Mental Masala

Could rare earth elements prevent sharks from becoming even rarer?

2012-05-20T09:42:00.002-07:00

Schematic of a longline operation from U.S. patent application 2009/0038205 A1 by Eric Matthew Stroud. (view on Google Patents)

For a shark, a supremely evolved hunter that roams the vastness of the open ocean, hundreds of fish dangling in the water might look like an easy meal. But they might actually be the shark's last meal, because those fish aren't there through some natural process, but are bait set out by a fishing vessel.

The fishing method called "longlining" uses vast lengths of baited hooks that often stretch for miles to catch fish like tuna and swordfish. Although the fishing crew tries to set the lines in an area with a high population of the target fish, the hooks on the longlines are indiscriminate, and will grab any species that takes a bite.

Longlines are a major hazard for sharks (and also sea turtles and other creatures). The Pelagic Shark Research Foundation notes that shark "bycatch" could be as much as 50% of the reported catch (bycatch is a term used to describe non-targeted animals that are caught in fishing operations) . The Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch report on sharks (PDF) observes that "it is entirely possible to fish at maximum sustainable yield for the fast growing species such as tuna and swordfish while depleting the slower-growing species such as sharks" and that bycatch is generally unreported and unmanaged.

For the longliners, bycatch isn't only an ecological black eye — there are some financial implications too. For example, sharks can damage the fishing gear with their powerful jaws, a captured shark can be a hazard to the crew on deck, each captured shark is one less hook for target fish, and requires time to remove them from the line.

A repulsive solution
An accidental discovery from a decade ago could help reduce shark bycatch.

A piece by Ari Daniel Shapiro at the NOVA website has the story: in the early 2000s, Eric Stroud was doing some research on shark repellents — in a kiddie pool in his basement in New Jersey, of all places — and discovered that his sharks responded dramatically when a magnet accidentally fell into the pool: the shark immediately changed direction and swam the other way.

A NOVA special called Hunting the Elements also has coverage of the subject. As part of the chapter on rare earth elements (the lanthanides, scandium and yttrium), guest host David Pogue visits Patrick Brice in Florida to see some live demonstrations of the effect (starting at about 1:32:25). The results are stunning, with sharks drastically influenced by rare earth elements — in both magnetic and non-magnetic forms (e.g., a piece of samarium) — even when the magnet is outside of the tank. There are probably two effects. With magnets, an electric field is created in the sea water, which irritates the shark (magnetic fields create electric fields, and vice versa). With non-magnetic samples, the rare-earth metals lose atoms in sea water, which then shed electrons, creating positive ions. Shark skin has a slight negative charge, so an electric current is created between the two surfaces. (The video has a good demonstration of this.)

A 2008 press release from NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center (via Science Daily) includes two photos from laboratory work at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science using juvenile sandbar sharks. The left-hand image below shows the swim tracks for sharks in a tank that has lead weights dangling in the water: the sharks swim throughout the tanks, not leaving any area unexplored. The right-hand image shows what happens when the experimenters hang three bars of palladium neodymium in the tank in the position marked by the black circle: the sharks avoid the area. Commenting on the results, Richard Brill, a research scientist at NOAA, said

“Our results were very promising but need further study...The alloy we used, palladium neodymium, appears to be a good alternative to more expensive metals. It is also machinable and is reasonably resistant to corrosion in seawater. How long the metal will last before corroding and how long it will repel sharks in the field, however, needs to be determined.”

Left: three lead weights at approximately the 5 o’clock position. Right : three bars of palladium neodymium in the same place. (Photos by Leonie Smith, Bangor University, Wales, copied from a U.S. government website)

And so, it follows that if the magnets could be integrated into longline hooks, perhaps sharks would be repelled from the bait that would make them bycatch. Way back in 2006, WWF gave an International Fishing Gear Award (press release) to Michael M. Herrmann for his magnet plus hook design.

(Source: Patent app. 2009/0038205 A1)

Will the idea attract attention?
It's unclear if these hooks are being used at sea in any significant numbers — neither the NOVA article, television program, or other sources mentioned above hint at any wide use. In addition, a search of Monterey Bay Aquarium's website for "rare earth" comes up empty* (MBA sponsors Seafood Watch).

If a magnet or hunk of rare earth metal on a longline rig actually repels sharks, how can we get them into wider use? Two ideas come to mind: labeling and certification.

You've probably seen or heard of "dolphin safe" tuna, a certification given to tuna fishing operations that avoid capturing dolphins in their nets (the effectiveness of some of the programs, however, have been called into question by Earth Island Institute). You might have also heard of "turtle safe" shrimp, shrimp caught in trawls that have escape hatches for sea turtles. So wouldn't it also make sense to have "shark safe" fish from longline operations**?

Certification agencies, like the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) could also play a role by requiring that use of shark-repelling gear become a prerequisite for certifications of longline operations (e.g., the North West Atlantic Canada longline swordfish fishery). Principle 2 of the MSC certification requirements is "Minimising environmental impact", which requires that "Fishing operations should be managed to maintain the structure, productivity, function and diversity of the ecosystem on which the fishery depends." Quite a few pages in the document address bycatch (in rather technical language).

With the oceans under great stress, it's well past time to start trying new ideas in fishing fleets (and in our personal shopping and eating habits, too). Might the rare-earth enhanced hook be one of these new ideas?

* Somewhere in the Seafood Watch area, I found this success story about reducing bird kills by longline operations: "Seabirds often flock around longline vessels, and can become snared and drown as they try to feed on baited hooks thrown into the ocean. 'Streamer lines' have proven to be a cost-effective solution that has dramatically reduced seabird deaths in several longline fisheries. Brightly colored streamer lines made of polyester rope are positioned on each side of the longline. The colors and the flapping of the lines scare seabirds away from the baited hooks. From 1993 to 2001, roughly 16,000 seabirds died each year in Alaskan groundfish longline fisheries. In 2002, streamer lines became required gear; since then, the number of seabird deaths has decreased by approximately 70 percent."
** Note, however, that most sustainable seafood guides give lower ratings to fish from longline operations than from rod-and-reel operations, mainly because of the bycatch problem.

Dal in the slow cooker

2012-04-14T09:49:00.000-07:00

"Reduce heat and simmer, partially covered, for 4 1/2 - 5 hours," instructs Julie Sahni in her recipe for buttered black beans (kali dal). Even for the most dedicated home cook, it's an instruction that is asking for trouble, especially for something thick and viscous like Indian dal. When I made these beans in a saucepan on the stovetop a few years ago, it was a stressful experience, having the specter of scorched dal haunting me all afternoon. Nonetheless, the result was excellent: rich and nicely spiced, a superb example of North Indian cuisine, delicious with naan or basmati rice.

When I considered making them again recently, I immediately thought of my slow cooker, which is perfect for executing a gentle simmer for 5 hours with little risk of burning. Adapting the recipe was straightforward: follow Sahni’s instructions up until the 4 1/2 – 5 hour simmer, taking care to preheat the crock in the slow cooker before adding the hot beans. I have posted my adaptation of the recipe below.

My low-tech, thrift-store, single-setting Crock Pot has been getting quite a workout this year — going into action just about every week for a batch of beans, overnight porridge, or a stew*. Here are two of my favorite ways to use my slow cooker:

Beans: I follow Rancho Gordo’s simple instructions through the “boil for about five minutes” step, then I carefully pour everything into the cooking vessel, which has been preheated with some hot water. Add herbs and spices as desired (bay leaves, thyme, Mexican oregano, rosemary, etc.). Cook until tender for a few hours, then add salt to taste.

Overnight porridge: in the crock of a slow cooker, combine whole wheat berries, steel cut oats, a little bit of polenta, various other whole grains (like brown rice and wild rice), and chopped pieces of extra-hard dried fruit (like the leathery Blenheim apricots from Trader Joe’s). Add a good amount of water, then hook up the slow cooker to run for about 4 hours overnight between 3 AM and 7 AM with a timer (make sure the timer is rated for the wattage used by your slow cooker). The next morning I add chopped dried fruit, sweetener like brown sugar, a pinch of salt, and maybe some rolled grains (rolled oats, rolled rye, etc.), give it a stir, then let it sit for 20 minutes or so to soften the rolled grains and fruit. Serve topped with chopped walnuts, apple butter or other flavorings.

Buttered Black Beans (Kali Dal)
Adapted from Classic Indian Cooking by Julie Sahni

Ingredients

The beans:
1 cup (1/2 lb.) black whole gram beans (urad dal)
2 T. red kidney beans

For cooking beans:
1 cup finely chopped yellow onions
2 T. finely chopped or grated fresh ginger root
3/4 cup chopped fresh tomatoes, 1/2 cup canned drained tomatoes or 1/3 cup canned tomato puree
1 cup plain yogurt
1/2 t. ground cardamom
1 T. ground coriander seed
1/2 t. red pepper
2 t. Kosher salt
8 T. unsalted butter

To finish:
4 T. ghee or light vegetable oil
1 1/2 t. cumin seeds
1 cup minced or finely chopped onions
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup firmly packed chopped coriander leaves

(Unit Conversion Page)

Method

Clean and rinse the gram beans and kidney beans. Put into a saucepan and add 4 cups water. Bring to a boil over high heat. Turn off heat, let soak, covered, for 2 hours. Do not drain.
Add the “for cooking beans” ingredients to the soaked beans, stir to mix. Bring to a gentle boil over medium heat. Transfer to slow cooker with a preheated cooking vessel (alternatively, you can continue cooking on the stove over very low heat for about 5 hours, stirring occasionally being sure to not boil rapidly, which will make the beans slimy).
When beans are cooked through, remove 2-3 cups and finely puree them. Return to the slow cooker.
Finish the dish: heat ghee or oil over medium-high heat in a skillet. When fat is hot, add cumin seed, and stir until seeds turn dark brown (about 10 seconds). Add the onion and cook over medium heat until they are golden brown, 10 minutes or so. Pour over the cooked beans. Add the heavy cream and coriander leaves, stir well, and heat until everything is warm.
Add more salt if needed.

Note
* I've had good luck with The Gourmet Slow Cooker, by Lynn Alley (Ten Speed Press) and recipes from Food and Wine magazine.

Photo of black gram beans from Wikimedia Commons, used subject to a Creative Commons License.

Random link from the archive: Okra without the Slime

More abuse of the word "natural" on food packaging

2012-03-31T10:46:00.000-07:00

The word "natural" takes a lot of abuse in the food business. It's slapped on just about any product to as a lure to buyers, and yet, it doesn't have much meaning, except in narrow circumstances. Recently, I ran across a somewhat unconventional usage on the "Pita Bite Crackers" from Trader Joe's. These crackers — which, "at long last" bring pita to the realm of crackers — are "Naturally Baked with Sea Salt."

Huh?

Has Trader Joe's installed a bakery inside of a volcano, where they can use the Earth's heat to bake their crackers? Or are they innovating with solar ovens that can generate the necessary heat? If not, I don't know what "naturally baked" could mean, as the process of baking is pretty darn unnatural, involving all sorts of unnatural technologies like extracted and processed fossil fuels, metalworking, and so on. Perhaps the package designers were "naturally baked" when they made that choice of words, or — far more likely — their package designers sprinkle the word around like sea salt.

Natural Meanings
In the United States, the actual meaning of the word depends on whether the food is regulated by the Department of Agriculture (USDA) or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). A detailed examination of what the FDA and UDSA regulate might require a few posts, but here's a thumbnail sketch: in general, the USDA regulates raw meats and eggs, the FDA regulates everything else.

First, let's look at the FDA. On the FDA website, as one of the "FDA Basics" questions, you'll find one about the word "natural":

What is the meaning of 'natural' on the label of food?

From a food science perspective, it is difficult to define a food product that is 'natural' because the food has probably been processed and is no longer the product of the earth. That said, FDA has not developed a definition for use of the term natural or its derivatives. However, the agency has not objected to the use of the term if the food does not contain added color, artificial flavors, or synthetic substances.

In short: "whatever."

USDA has it's own view of natural, and it's also not very meaningful. In its guide on meat and dairy labels, the Environmental Working Group says this:

The USDA defines a natural product as one that contains “no artificial ingredient or added color and is only minimally processed.” Processing must not fundamentally alter the product. The label must include a specific explanation such as “no artificial ingredients; minimally processed.” All fresh meat qualifies as natural. This term does not include any requirements that animals be raised in sufficient open space or that it has no added hormones or antibiotic; it is not the same as organic. The term can mislead consumers to think that the product is healthier and more humane than it is.

Like FDA, USDA gives the word a lot of latitude, and allow some decidedly unnatural practices, such as dosing animals with hormones*, spiking their feed with antibiotics as a "growth enhancer," or including transgenic corn and soybeans in the feed. Consumer Reports' GreenerChoices website has a similar take, concluding that the label is not meaningful.

Given the weak regulations and years of degradation of the word's meaning, the food industry should completely stop using the word, recommends Michele Simon, president of Eat Drink Politics and author of Appetite for Profit. In an article for Functional Ingredients, she takes a look at some recent misuses of natural, noting that lawsuits over labeling GMO-containing products as natural are starting to get the industry's attention**.

I more or less ignore the word natural when shopping, opting instead to read ingredient labels and rely on labels that have some credible regulation behind them, like certified organic. But it's still fun to look for marketers that push the boundaries of reason, like the "naturally baked" label from Trader Joe's.

Notes
* Michael Pollan's groundbreaking article "Power Steer" in the March 31, 2002 New York Times Magazine included his deliberations about whether he should give his cow a hormone injection. It's available at michaelpollan.com, and probably covered in "The Omnivore's Dilemma" too.
** Speaking of GMOs and the word natural, a California ballot initiative proposed by the Committee for the Right to Know is currently gathering signatures around the state. The law, if approved by voters — and if it survives the inevitable legal challenges — will forbid manufacturers and retailers from stating or implying that "the food is 'natural' 'naturally made', 'naturally grown', 'all natural' or any words of similar import that would have any tendency to mislead any consumer." (Section 110809.1 of the proposed act, PDF)

Random link from the archive: Inspired by Nature or a Tube of Paint?

Confusion at the sushi bar

2012-02-12T10:26:00.000-08:00

As a follow up to my piece about seafood mislabeling, let's take a trip to the sushi bar, where things can be even more confusing. An already challenging language barrier is made more difficult by mangling of Japanese words as well as convenient translations made for the sake of non-Japanese clientele, or, in some cases, ignorance or lack of concern for fish biology.

Tai'd up in knots
In Part 2 of the Boston Globe report, the authors showed how tongues are twisted by red snapper at the sushi restaurant:

Many sushi restaurants use the word "tai" or "dai" to refer to red snapper. Employees from at least six restaurants said they were told by suppliers, including True World and Nishimoto, a California distributor, that red snapper translates in Japanese to "izumidai" or "izumi tai".

But Japanese language specialists told the Globe that "tai" refers to a different species, called sea bream [family Spiradae], and "izumidai" means tilapia. Adding to the confusion, True World, in its Boston catalog, uses a combination of these phrases by referring to tilapia as "izumi tai."

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch guide for sushi (download here) uses the word "tai" for red snapper (and "izumidai" for tilapia), so perhaps the Seafood Watch team is conforming to sushi menu conventions and hasn't consulted language specialists.

Casson Trenor's Sustainable Sushi website has an extended discussion about "snapper" on a page titled "Tai":

In Japan the preferred option is generally Pagrus major. This fish is in high demand and is known by a number of English names, most commonly red sea bream and Japanese sea perch. The technical Japanese term for this fish is madai, or “true tai.”
...

Sushi bars in the southern United States and along parts of the East Coast often use Pagrus pagrus, the red porgy, as tai. Red porgy is caught along the Atlantic coast of Florida and in the Gulf of Mexico. Historically the Atlantic fishery has been the more productive of the two, but stocks fell sharply during the late twentieth century. It was not until after fish populations had been significantly depleted that any management protocols were put in place.

If the tai at your local sushi restaurant isn’t Japanese sea perch or red porgy, it might be Lutjanus campechanus, the ubiquitous red snapper. This popular fish is also caught primarily in the Gulf of Mexico, and like the red porgy it is potentially in serious trouble. Stocks are known to be overfished, but they are still being exploited at levels beyond what the population can support.

White tuna or tummy trouble?

Escolar tissue protein patterns
determined by Isoelectric Focusing
(IEF) electrophoresis (from FDA)

Another morsel of linguistic confusion at the sushi bar relates to escolar (Lepidocybium flavobrunneum). Sushi bars in the U.S. sometimes call escolar "white tuna," even though the fish isn't closely related to the intended target of albacore tuna (Thunnus alalunga). The misnaming might occur because the flesh of the two fish look similar, or perhaps because of actual fraud in the supply chain -- it's hard to know. Beyond the clear violation of the FDA's Seafood List rules, escolar poses a potential health problem: the flesh has high levels of wax esters, which can cause serious side effects including "mild and rapid passage of oily yellow or orange droplets, to severe diarrhea with nausea and vomiting. The milder symptoms have been referred to as keriorrhea [i.e. flow of wax in Greek]."* Casson Trenor's page on escolar also notes that the fish are high in mercury and seriously overfished, so you might want to think twice before ordering "white tuna" when you next go out for sushi.

Ironically, it is illegal to sell escolar in Japan (most likely because of the near-term health impact, not because the fish is overfished or because of its high mercury content). In the U.S. there are no restrictions, but Annex 2 of the FDA's Hazard Analysis & Critical Control Point (HACCP) manual for operators recommends that "Escolar should not be marketed in interstate commerce" and the fish's effects on the body warrants a listing in the FDA's Bad Bug Book.

A few months after the Boston Globe’s series, the Globe reported on legislative initiatives to improve seafood traceability and ban the sale of escolar in Massachusetts. I haven't seen anything proposed in other states, nor have I ever seen any initiatives by sushi restaurants (is there even a trade association for sushi restaurants?) to clean up terminology on their menus, or at least to offer more information about what the fish is, where it came from, and how it was caught. The on-line nigiri menu from sustainable sushi pioneer Tataki in San Francisco (which names Casson Trenor as their "Sustainability Guru") notates each traditional term with details about the offering (e.g., "suzuki / closed-farmed striped bass, U.S."). Other leading sushi restaurants, like Miya’s in New Haven, Connecticut, Bamboo Sushi in Portland, Oregon, and Mashiko in Seattle are also showing how it should be done with better menus, sustainability promises, and creative use of ingredients (like Mashiko's famous faux-unagi made with barbequed farm-raised catfish called "namagi").

Photo credit
Photo of Sushi-sashimi combo from ulterior epicure's flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License.

Notes
* This quotation is from an editorial in "Editorial: Diarrhoea associated with consumption of escolar (rudderfish)" by Craig Shadbolt, Martyn Kirk and Paul Roche in Communicable Diseases Intelligence (Volume 26, Number 3, 2002). I found the full text using Google Scholar (this link might work), via a PLoS ONE article about DNA analysis of tuna from sushi bars.

As I was searching for images of escolar, I learned that a WWII-era U.S. submarine was named Escolar. This submarine, SS-294, was commissioned on June 2, 1944 and was sunk on its first patrol, probably by mines in the Yellow Sea in mid-October 1944, with the loss of the entire crew of 80. The Navy Department Library and NavSource.org have plenty of details and photographs of the submarine and its crew.

Random link from the archive: Farm Tour: Growing Mushrooms

Red Snapper’s comeback and the threat of mislabeling

2012-02-05T09:53:00.000-08:00

In a block of articles about sustainable seafood in Food and Wine magazine, Paul Greenberg (author of "Four Fish"*) has a bit of good news about red snapper (Lutjanus campechanus), a species that has seen a steep population declines in the last 50 years. Thanks in part to a National Marine Fisheries Service "catch share" program, populations are rebounding**.

This sounds like great news – we need all the success stories we can get – but the fish is not out of stormy waters just yet. One threat is mislabeling: imposters sold as red snapper, sometimes through ignorance, sometimes because of supply chain slip-ups, sometimes to intentionally swindle buyers (usually to sell a piece of inferior fish at a unreasonably high price, but not always, as we’ll see below).

"Isn't it a good thing," you might ask, "to be selling a plentiful fish in place of a threatened one?" For the fish, it’s not really a good thing, as eaters and buyers that see a particular fish on many menus and in many markets might get the false impression that it is thriving in the wild. Furthermore, if passing off a cheap piece of imported, farmed tilapia as red snapper allows a restaurant to sell their red snapper special at a relatively low price, diners might be misled by the price signal to think “if red snapper is so cheap, it must be plentiful.” For buyers and regulators, mislabeling erodes confidence in the seafood market and imposes costs. For diners, mislabeling creates potential health risks via allergic reactions and toxins.

Fake Out
Seafood fraud got a lot of attention in 2011, with major DNA-studies from Consumer Reports and the Boston Globe (part 1 and part 2), as well as a report from Oceana (PDF; hear their chief scientist talk to Evan Kleiman on KCRW’s Good Food).

Red snapper is a popular fish for DNA-sleuths to analyze. Both of the 2011 studies, as well as one from 2004, obtained samples of fish labeled “red snapper” from various sources and ended up with disturbing results:

Consumer Reports: “None of the 22 ‘red snappers’ we bought at 18 markets could be positively identified as such. Eight were deemed possible DNA matches, one was described incorrectly by a store employee, and the species of another could not be conclusively determined at all. The remaining 12 turned out to be ocean perch and other kinds of snapper.”
In the Boston Globe article by Jenn Abelson and Beth Daley: "The Globe-sponsored DNA testing found 24 of the 26 red snapper samples were in fact other, less prized species, including fish collected at Minado restaurant in Natick, Teriyaki House in South Boston, and the now closed Big Papi’s Grille in Framingham, owned in part by Red Sox slugger David Ortiz."
A 2004 brief communication in Nature (sub. req’d) from researchers at the University of North Carolina found that 17 of the 22 “red snapper” samples that they DNA tested were actually other species (often other types of snapper).


Red snapper? Or something else? (click photo for answer)

With fish being sold far from where it was caught and passing through many levels of distribution on the way to your table – often not as a whole fish, but as a processed fillet – it’s easy imagine intentional and unintentional mislabeling happening. When dealing with fillets, it’s especially difficult, as only a trained expert can differentiate among the species (page 6 of the Oceana report (pdf) has a collection of fillet pairs to test your identification skills).

Red snapper? Or something else? (click photo for answer)

One solution is well known to many sectors of the world economy: careful product tracking. Each fish (or batch of fish) would get a bar code that travels with it through the supply chain. A centralized database would provide “provenance” of the fish – where it was caught, what it was identified as, when it was bought and sold, and so forth. At least two projects are trying something like this on a local scale. Thisfish from EcoTrust Canada, and Gulf Wild (which was mentioned by Greenberg in his Food and Wine piece) assign codes to the fish in the project. Buyers can go to a website to find out who caught the fish, and where, when and how it was caught.

The Name Game
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has rules that specify how fish can be marketed (extensive details here). Basically, the FDA Seafood List defines which “acceptable market name” can be used for various species and groups of species. With a few exceptions, retailers can use the more specific “scientific common name” as a market name. Use of the vernacular name or the Latin scientific name, however, is not allowed (the ban on Latin names seems pretty stupid to me, as that name is the most definitive***). Take red snapper (L. campechanus) as an example: either its “acceptable market name” of “snapper” and its common scientific name of “red snapper” can be used to label the fish. Vernacular names like Caribbean Red Snapper and Mexican Snapper are prohibited.

And this is where we have a problem: the most basic acceptable market names cover a broad swath of fish. “Snapper” covers 46 species, so a retailer could sell any of the 46 with the label “snapper.” Thus, an imperiled fish like L. campechanus or Southern bluefin tuna (Thunnus maccoyii) could be sold under more generic names. An article published in PLoS ONE found this happening for bluefin tuna, where the sushi offering of “tuna” turned out to be an endangered species (I wrote a commentary on the article and related subjects at the Ethicurean). To remedy this, the FDA (and states if FDA is too slow) should update the market rules to carve out refined market names for fish considered to be threatened or endangered. Under this system, for example, L. campechanus could only be sold as “red snapper”, not as "snapper"; T. maccoyii could only be sold as "Southern bluefin tuna," not as "tuna."****

Yet another problem is the vernacular name, which is not legal for use as a market name but most likely is used in conversations between fish-mongers and shoppers, waiters and diners. Twenty-four species on the list have "red snapper" as part of their vernacular name, with 13 of these being “rockfish” and 11 being “snappers.”

What To Do
Navigating the waters of sustainable seafood can be challenging. One could easily write a few blog posts on that subject, but instead of that here are a few tips off the top of my head:

Try to follow the recommendations of organizations like Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch
Ask lots of questions when buying seafood at the store or a restaurant: What exactly is this fish? How do you know? Where was it caught? How was it caught?
Start exploring "green list" fish like sardines and farmed mussels, oysters and clams (for some sardine love and background, check out posts by Tom Philpott and me at the Ethicurean).
Consult Fish2fork, a program that develops restaurant ratings using questionnaires filled out by restaurants and through independent examination of restaurants’ online menus.
Get smart on the subject by reading books like Paul Greenberg's Four Fish, Taras Grescoe's Bottomfeeder, and Charles Clover's The End of Line.

Notes
* Four Fish is truly a “must read” if you have any interest in fish as a food source, or even if you just appreciate superb writing. You can also hear Paul Greenberg talk about his book on many radio programs via an internet download or stream, like WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show and Fresh Air from WHYY.
** It's worth noting that some groups like Food and Water Watch oppose catch share programs for many reasons, like their potential to privatize fishing resources. Their page called Fair Access to Fish has several reports on the subject.
*** Greenberg (or perhaps the F&W editors) missed an opportunity to educate the public about the REAL red snapper's biological designation. In an ideal world, scientific names would become part of the fish buying universe along with excellent tracking and frequent DNA analysis of product. Perhaps high-class restaurant menus won't spell out "Lutjanus campechanus", but the restaurant will have tracking software that can confirm the species in tonight’s special.
**** Of course, enforcement is an issue here, with FDA already failing to properly police the 75%+ seafood that is imported into the U.S. and Republicans in Congress being unwilling to increase funding for food safety and enforcement efforts.

Photo credits
First fillet photo (Lutjanus campechanus, red snapper) from Regulatory Fish Encyclopedia: U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 1993-2010, photo by B. Tenge. Second fillet photo (Sebastes aleutianus, rougheye rockfish) from Regulatory Fish Encyclopedia: U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 1993-2010, photo by W. Savary.

Random link from the archive: Recipe - Sourdough Pancakes

Balancing the scales with an adapted chocolate chunk recipe

2012-01-29T09:53:00.000-08:00

It makes me happy when a baking recipe has ingredient weights so I can use my scale* for accurate and neat measurement. It's so much easier to add ingredients by putting the mixing bowl onto the scale, pressing the tare button, and then adding what I need, instead of getting out (and dirtying) multiple measuring cups (especially when the ingredient is something gooey or messy items like oil, molasses and honey**). However, I haven't been good about making the recipes on this blog scale-compatible.

The recipe below is a first attempt to start balancing the scales of talk and action. It is an adaptation of one of my favorite recipes in the family of chocolate chunk cookies, one that has a bit of wheat germ and oats for heartiness and flavor. The display format is somewhat of a hybrid because of the futility of giving weights for quantities as small as a teaspoon and the quantum nature of eggs (note that the egg is specified as "1 large", not as a weight or volume).

For more scale love, visit items by David Lebovitz, Alice Medrich and Fahrad Manjoo at the New York Times.

Recipe: Hearty Chocolate Chunk Cookies

Ingredients:

	Metric / weight	Non-metric / volume
Unsalted butter	110 g	1/2 c.
Light brown sugar	100 g	1/2 c.
White sugar	100 g	1/2 c.

Egg	1 large	1 large
Vanilla extract	5 mL	1 t.

Baking powder	5 mL	1 t.
Table salt	2.5 mL	1/2 t.
White flour	100 g	3/4 c.
Raw wheat germ	20 g	1/4 c.
Quick oats	100 g	1 c.
Rolled oats	40 g	1/2 c.

Dark chocolate, chopped	85 g	3 ounces
Milk chocolate, chopped	55 g	2 ounces

Optional additions: walnuts, almonds, raisins, dried cherries, coarse salt

(Unit conversion page)

Method:
Preheat the oven to 350 °F (175 °C).

Mix the dry ingredients (but not the chocolate) together in a bowl.

Chop the dark and milk chocolate into pieces that are slightly larger than standard chocolate chips. It is not easy to do this; don't worry if the pieces are randomly sized, that is one of the charms of these cookies (a.k.a. chocolatey randomness).

Combine the butter and sugars in a bowl. If using a stand mixer, use the paddle attachment. Beat together until the mixture is light and fluffy. Beat in the egg and vanilla.

Add the dry ingredients to the bowl, and mix together on low speed until the dough is mixed. Add the chocolate and optional ingredients. Mix on low speed for a short time to combine.

Bake for 10-15 minutes on greased or lined cookie sheets. After removing sheets from the oven, let the cookies cool for a few minutes, then transfer to a cooling rack.

* For what it's worth, I have used an Escali P115 for years and am quite happy with it.
** To adapt recipes on the fly, I keep a list of ingredient weights on scraps of paper on my refrigerator, adding items as needed.

Random link from the archive: Rise and Fall, Hit and Miss

Multi-grain mix jazzes up rice bowl

2012-01-21T10:16:00.000-08:00

One of the many useful things I learned from Elizabeth Andoh's outstanding "Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen", was the concept of enhancing a batch of white rice — nutrion-wise and taste-wise — by adding a variety of grains and seeds to the uncooked rice and water. You can easily customize your own blend by hunting and pecking in the bulk food section. Or, in some markets, you can buy a pre-made mix in large or small packets. Andoh favors one from Japanese markets that contains buckwheat groats, white poppy seeds, black rice, a type of millet (awa) and flat barley (hato mugi). In the early months of Washoku experimentation, I made my own blend with whatever was around the pantry. More recently, I have spotted packages at markets in San Francisco's Japan Center, but haven't purchased them, as the cost is somewhat high and they are imported from Japan.

I ran across a better alternative to either option while browsing in the Koreana Plaza in Oakland: the "Sukoyaka 8 Grain Mix", a blend of domestically-grown grains that includes sprouted brown rice, hulless barley, rye berries, whole oats, red rice, purple/black barley, wild rice and bamboo rice.

Following their recommendation of 1/2 cup of grain mix with 2 cups of well-washed short-grain white rice creates a hearty, interesting bowl of grain that makes an excellent accompaniment to Japanese dishes (a short video showing an efficient way to wash rice is at the Japanese Food Report).

Or, the hearty rice can be the base for a mixed-up rice bowl like bibimbap, the classic Korean mixture of rice, vegetables, a spicy sauce called gochujang, and various other items (like meats, pickles, or a fresh-cracked raw egg that cooks in the hot rice). With the rice mix, a tub of kim chi, a fresh bag of soybean sprouts (one of the fundamental flavors in a good bibimbap, in my opinion), and a bunch of vegetables, I got to work. First, start soaking the whole-grain mix and wash the short-grain rice (presoaking the whole grains will ensure they are cooked without overcooking the white rice). Then start sauteing the vegetables in batches in toasted sesame oil (another key Korean flavor for me). Cook the rice. Finally, fill a bowl with hot rice, make piles of the just-cooked item, garnish with toasted nori and mix well.

Students of bibimbap will notice a significant omission in those last few sentences: the hot sauce called gochujang. Although I love the savory sauce, I'm not very tolerant of chilies these days, so I had to omit it. Since the sauce is much more than just a chili infusion — it's a fermented paste made from soybean powder, glutinous rice powder, ground chilies and other ingredients, with the fermentation process bringing out plenty of umami — I wonder if it would be possible to make a mild version at home (if not, Japanese barley miso might be a decent substitute). Do any readers know of a recipe that might be amenable to a dialed down heat level?

Recipe Sketch: Ersatz Bibimbap

Ingredients:

Rice
Toasted sesame oil
Carrots, shredded in long strips
Soybean sprouts
Shiitake mushrooms (dried or fresh), sliced into strips
A leafy green vegetable like spinach or mustard greens, washed well and chopped
Tofu (the firmer the better), cut into bite-size pieces
Sake
Soy sauce
Toasted nori sheets
Korean hot chili-bean sauce (gochujang)

Preparation:

Start cooking the rice
If using dried shiitake mushrooms, rinse them and then cover with hot water to soften. After 15 minutes, remove mushrooms and strain the soaking liquid to use in another recipe.
In a non-stick pan, saute shredded carrots in some roasted sesame oil. Remove to a bowl.
If using fresh mushrooms, saute sliced shiitake mushrooms in sesame oil in the same non-stick pan, adding some sake when they are tender, letting it evaporate, then adding some soy sauce and turning off the heat. Remove to a bowl.
In the same pan, add some more oil and when hot, toss in some chopped greens, stir, add a little water, turn down the heat and cover. When tender, remove to another bowl.
Give the pan a quick rinse and wipe, then saute some drained tofu on all sides until golden brown.
In a pot of boiling water, blanch a handful of soybean sprouts for a minute then rinse under cold water. Chop into 1" lengths.

Garnishes:

Top with toasted nori sheets, broken into pieces
Korean hot chili-bean sauce (gochujang)

Serving:

Fill a warm bowl with hot rice
Add the prepared ingredients and garnishes, stir well

(For a more formal bibimbap recipe, visit the Korea Tourism Organization or consult just about any book about Korean cooking.)

Random link from the archive: Homemade crackers

Insects are a delectable topic for editors and bloggers

2012-01-07T07:38:00.001-08:00

Entomophagy — the practice of eating insects* — seems to be quite a delectable topic for bloggers and editors of magazines and newspapers, with numerous mainstream publications featuring articles on the subject in recent months. Typically the articles follow a pattern that includes profiling someone that raises or cooks insects for human consumption, talking about their potential as a protein source in a resource-limited world, and then some anxiety-filled prose about the author's first encounter with insects on their dinner plate.

Before I get to a collection of links, an article by Sarah Schmidt in Heifer International's World Ark that deserves a special shout out because it has a different focus. Although she has most of the elements of a standard entomophagy piece, Schmidt looks at some positive developments around insects as food in the developing world. She notes that although many cultures around the world traditionally eat insects (I would guess that more cultures eat insects than don't), the people who run food programs — bureaucrats in the United Nations from Europe and other industrialized countries — generally don't eat insects, and thus are potentially ignoring a source of affordable and culturally acceptable food. To change this, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has started including programs on insect raising in their portfolio**:

The FAO first became interested in edible insects about eight years ago when its researchers were studying the Central African bush meat crisis—steep declines in animals traditionally used for meat as a result of deforestation and unsustainable hunting practices. "One revelation was that up to 30 percent of the people's protein intake during the rainy season comes from insects," explained Paul Vantomme, a researcher for the UNFAO's Forestry Department. "Yet insects were, and still are, completely ignored in all of the international discussions of the bush-meat crisis." Vantomme began to look into the issue in depth and in 2004 published a study on the role of mopane worms as a food source in the Congo Basin.

The worms, the caterpillar of the Emperor moth, thrive in the forest during the region's three-month rainy season; women and children gather them by hand from trees or the ground. Gram for gram, they're higher in both protein and fat than meat or fish and are also rich in calcium, niacin and riboflavin. They can be stewed, fried or ground into nutrient-rich flour. In Central Africa, local people often make the flour into pulp to be given to children to combat malnutrition or to pregnant or breastfeeding women. They're also an important source of extra income for rural families. One study from Botswana found that the mopane worm generates about 13 percent of household income for rural families but accounts for only about 6 percent of the labor output. Rural people often sell them to traveling merchants, who then sell them at urban markets.

A potential issue with this program is that the above-mentioned worms are gathered from the forest – i.e., taking advantage of nature’s bounty – making them vulnerable to overharvesting just like fish or animals***. With this in mind, a significant challenge for a program like the FAO’s is to make the transition from gathering to farming. Initiatives in places like Laos – where the FAO is giving out "starter kits" for cricket farms that consist of insects or eggs, a supply of appropriate feed, and a 3-foot-wide concrete cylinder that serves as the 'farm.' If the programs in the Congo Basin and Laos are successful, how long will it be before Heifer’s gift catalog includes a kit for mopane worms, crickets, or another culturally appropriate and feasible insect crop?

Here are some of the articles I ran across recently along with short summaries:

SF Weekly: “Bug Me: San Francisco Helps Pioneer Insect Cuisine” was the cover story in the October 19 edition, and one of the better articles I've read. In the following weeks, the weekly printed thoughtful letter to the editor from a professor emeritus from UAB. (Warning: unstoppable animation on the web page.)
Business Week: a quick look at several entrepreneurs trying to build businesses that produce insects as a food source. There is plenty of room for scaling and innovation, as food-grade insects are surprisingly expensive (one company, World Entomophagy, sells its product for as much as $40 per pound). There is also plenty of room for adaptation and updating of regulations. How does one raise "organic" crickets for human consumption? How about if you want to feed the crickets to chickens that you want to certify as organic? Is any agency even able to certify an insect farm as organic?
Triple Pundit: the author recounts a first-hand experience with insects at Guelaguetza restaurant in Los Angeles, followed by a run-down of the potential and challenges related to entomophagy.
Los Angeles Times travel section: A review of some entomophagic practices in Cambodia that include crickets, locusts and spiders. Some spiders are so desirable that some worry whether they could be hunted to extinction.
Grist.org: 1) a video from The Perennial Plate with entomophagy expert David Gracer (who sounds a bit like a mellow Chris Traeger [brilliantly played by Rob Lowe] from the often hilarious Parks and Recreation. Consequently, I kept expecting him to say something Tragerian like “That fried walking stick is literally the greatest thing I have ever eaten, and your hospitality truly warms my heart.”) and 2) inclusion on the Grist 2011 trend report – insects as food joins such items as swapping, new kinds of CSAs, and fermenting on this year’s list.

Notes
* When applied to food for humans, the term “insect” generally breaks the biological boundaries placed on the term (i.e., six legs, a member of the Insecta class, etc.) and includes arachnids like spiders and scorpions, and myriapods like centipedes and millipedes.
** I haven’t seen a single-word term that describes the controlled raising of insects for human consumption. Plant raising is "agriculture”, fish farming is “aquaculture,” so should we call insect/spider/scorpion farming “arthro-culture”? Or have sub-groups for each category like "insectculture," "arachnid-culture" and so on?
*** Speaking of insect hunting, "My Life as a Turkey" from PBS Nature has some superb footage of the turkey family hunting grasshoppers. The whole program is a gem, with a compelling story and excellent camera work (the shot of a snake drinking water that collected in a leaf is magical).

Photo Credit
Grasshopper photo from Suneko's flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License.

Random link from the archive: Grapefruit vs. Gasoline: Elasticity Illustrated

Panel provides glimpses into the wonderful world of bees

2011-11-19T09:28:00.001-08:00

Honey bee (Apis melifera) visiting Pride of Madiera (Echium candicans)

Bees are amazing creatures, with their complex societies and unparalleled ability to pollinate plants*, so I like to learn about them when I can. One such opportunity recently was at a panel discussion about bees at Sonoma State University's Insectpalooza. Sitting on the panel were three experts on European and California native bees: Dr. Eric Mussen an extension apiculturist from UC Davis, Dr. Gretchen LeBuhn from San Francisco State University (professor of entomology, founder and director the Great Sunflower Project, a citizen-science project focused on native bees), and Marissa Ponder, a researcher in Professor Gordon Frankie's lab at UC Berkeley.

The bulk of the presentations were not about the European honey bee (Apis melifera), which is probably what most of us picture when we hear the word “bee” (I know that I do), but instead were on California’s native bees, which are found in about 1,500 different species. Beyond their role as pollinators, most native bees differ in many ways from honey bees, most notably that they live solitary lives and do not make honey**.

Large black bee (a female of a Xylocopa species?) visiting wisteria

Current Thinking on Collapsing Colonies
Mussen talked mostly about European honey bees and the history and current status of colony collapse disorder (CCD). He noted that the current CCD is not the first time we've seen this – there was one that lasted about a year in the late 1800s, and one that lasted for 3 years in the mid-1960s. So, he asked, why has this one has been going on for 7 years? Mussen theorized that today's beekeepers are better at nursing sick bees, thus the weak hives stick around longer instead of quickly dying off.

Among the interesting figures he presented included:

An average honeybee has a foraging range of 4 miles, which gives a colony a 50 square mile area to collect food – or to get into trouble with poisons and pests.
California has 780,000 acres of almond trees that require 1.5 million colonies of honeybees for pollination. But California has only about 0.5 million colonies, so 1 million are trucked in for the season (a 2006 article in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Update claimed that 60% of the nation's bee colonies are used to pollinate almonds in California during blossom season).

The “Professionals”
Dr. LeBuhn focused on the native bees, enhancing her presentation with beautiful illustrations by local illustrator Noel Pugh (examples of his work are at the Great Sunflower Project and will soon be seen in a book due to be published in 2012). She started with some numbers: there are about 30,000 bee species in the world, 4,000 in the U.S. and 1,500 in California.

Then she got into morphology and behavior, noting that other creatures besides bees pollinate plants – beetles, moths, hummingbirds are a few – but they are "amateurs", while bees are "professionals." Bees have characteristics that improve their efficiency: special hairs to collect pollen, an electrostatic charge on their body that attracts pollen, and specialized mouth parts to reach into flowers. Additionally, some plants need buzzing at a certain frequency to release the pollen, and bees can generate many frequencies. As an example, LeBuhn mentioned that tomatoes release their pollen when excited by tone of 261 Hz (middle C), so one can place an excited middle C tuning fork near a tomato blossom to cause a pollen drop.

While European honey bees are generalists, visiting any flowers they can find, many California natives are specialists, preferring one species of plants for pollen, but visiting others to get nectar. Another important difference between European honey bees and natives is that most native bees are solitary, building nests in tunnels underground, or in a hole in a tree, or inside of a stem. Inside the nest you would find several chambers, each with one or more balls of pollen inside and an egg placed on top of one of the balls of pollen. Carpenter bees, for example, make walls that are like particle board to separate the chambers.

Native bees spend most of their life underground as an egg or larva, perhaps 46-48 weeks underground and 2-6 weeks above ground.

Two small bees feeding on onion flower

Native Bees Live in the City
Marissa Ponder, a researcher in the Professor Gordon Frankie lab at UC Berkeley, talked about native bees in urban and suburban environments, and enhanced her presentation with stunning photos by Rollin Coville. One of Frankie’s projects has been a test garden on the UC Berkeley Oxford tract at the edge of downtown Berkeley to get a sense of native bee diversity in a highly urbanized environment. In a small garden, surrounded by concrete and buildings, his team counted 85 species of native bees. This result – which I find to be amazing – is not so unusual, as Ponder’s other examples illustrated, like a front yard in another city (the name of which was illegible in my notes), in which researchers counted 68 species.

But despite these examples of diversity, people with gardens and yards can give a helping hand to native bees by avoiding “mulch madness” and landscaping with native plants. Most native bees (about 70%) are ground nesters, desiring bare, uncovered earth for nesting. Mulch gets in their way, as do lawns.

Ponder talked about some research on native bee plant preference. The researchers found that plants from South Africa, Australia, Central and South America are largely ignored by native bees, while a native like the California poppy will be visited by native bumblebees, sweat bees, and also non-native honey bees. I don’t doubt that research, but will note that the non-native wisteria on the front and back of my house are swarming with several species of bumble bees (most likely natives) when the flowers are in bloom, and when I had a blooming onion flower it was popular with natives as well as European honey bees. The rosemary plants at my office, however, only seems to attract honey bees, but that might be because the landscape managers at office parks love to cover any non-grassy ground with mulch and so the native bee population is low.

Many more bee-helping tips can be found at the Urban Bee Gardens project website. In addition, the Yerba Buena Nursery has compiled a list of which bees visit which plants. If you want to help bees on a larger scale, check out Your Garden Show (warning: autostarting video), an on-line community that is helping to get supporters for the Highways Bee Act, H.R. 2381, a bill that would promote pollinator-friendly practices on highway rights-of-way while also saving states money through reduced mowing.

* An incredible fraction of fruit, nut and vegetable crops need assistance from bees. One study, “The Value of Honey Bees as Pollinators of U.S. Crops in 2000” from Cornell University (March 2000, PDF), estimated that almost $15 billion in crop value can be directly associated with honey bee pollination. A number of crops, including almonds, avocados, cranberries and onions are fully dependent on insect pollination (with the vast majority of those services provided by honey bees). Where bee populations have been wiped out, like in China's southern Sichuan province, some farmers are trying to pollinate fruit trees by hand, as a 2007 episode of Nature called Silence of the Bees showed (the human-pollinator segment starts at 38:51).

** Only one other bee makes honey, that's a stingless bee that is native to Central and Southern Mexico. Covered by Bayless in Episode 12 of Season 5 of Mexico—One Plate at a Time. The bees don't sting, but that doesn’t mean you can go mucking around their hives to take their honey (which is used in the Yucatan to make a liqueur called Xtabentún). If you do, you’ll discover that they defend the hive by swarming the attacker and going into eyes, ears, mouth, and nose.

Random link from the archive: Save the Basil! A Tip to Keep it Fresh

OPENeducation celebrates Chez Panisse's dedication to edible education

2011-11-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

Some birthday parties are enlivened by a clown, a magician, or a karaoke machine. But when an legendary restaurant like Chez Panisse hits 40 in a creative city like Berkeley, California, you can expect something out of the ordinary.

A group called OPENrestaurant provided plenty of surprise and wonder at a party called OPENeducation, where attendees could experience the unexpected, like eating an edible shoe, eating chapati made with flour from a bicycle-powered flour mill, learning about "pre-hippie" bread baking ("Digger Bread," loaves that were baked and distributed for free by the San Francisco Diggers in the late 1960s), and listening to activists delivering their words from the roof of a decomissioned police car. Small radios were scattered around the venue, often playing music, but now and then broadcasting an interview conducted by children (interview subjects included Alice Waters). The education sessions were often led by students from local schools, and so the students became the teachers, ideally giving them a confidence boost. Edible education is one of Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters' passions, and the Chez Panisse Foundation was instrumental in establishment and operation of the first Edible Schoolyard in at a middle school in Berkeley, and also a key supporter of the healthy lunch initiative in the Berkeley Public Schools (how they cook in Berkeley schools was comprehensively covered by The Slow Cook in 2010).

Police Car Stage Recalls Free Speech Movement
One of the more traditional educational approaches was at the "police car stage," where interviewers and subjects stood or sat on the car — an homage to the October 1, 1964 protests that kicked off Free Speech Movement of 1964-65 (photos from the day are at calisphere: Mario Savio, Jack Weinberg and more), a movement that had an influence on Alice Waters and others who were part of the early days of Chez Panisse and Berkeley's "Gourmet Ghetto" in the late 60s and early 70s.

Twilight Greenaway, Grist's new food editor, kicked off the program with interviews of three activists:

Enosh Baker is Northern California Regional Director of CoFed, an organization that seeks to create food cooperatives on university campuses. Among those already in operation, Baker recommended the coops at UC Berkeley and the University of Maryland as excellent examples to learn from. He expects to have a busy 2012, as the United Nations has declared 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives.
Mei Ling Hui is the urban agriculture coordinator and also works on urban forests at the San Francisco Department of the Environment (SF Environment). Her group is starting an urban orchard program in the city. Fittingly, since trees sequester carbon, the initiative is partially supported by the city's carbon fund, an account that is filled by internal levies on such activities as city employees flying for official business.
Temra Costa, author of the book "Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat" and operator of farmerjane.org, got into the Free Speech Movement spirit by figuring out how to use the bullhorn and still be heard by the crowd (she pointed the bullhorn at the interviewer's microphone). She told the crowd about some of the women featured in her book and website.

Next, Jen Maiser from Eat Local Challenge interviewed Kyle Cornforth, director of the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley. Kyle has been at the Edible Schoolyard for 11 years, and has seen how the program has evolved. For example, it took many years for the garden soil to recover from being covered with asphalt for many years. Additionally, the kids get to remake the garden each year, so the beds and planting areas have gone through many transformations. Kyle announced that the Chez Panisse Foundation will soon be changing its name to the Edible Schoolyard Project (it appears that the change has been made). They are also building a new website that will have lots of resources and "potential for sharing" for those who want to establish a school garden or improve one that is already running.

Foot in Mouth
Although only marginally related to the theme of education, a pair of edible shoes was the highlight for me. The shoes — handmade from untanned pig skin from a Chez Panisse pork supplier (Magruder Ranch, on Facebook) by San Francisco's Al's Attire— were at the event to pay homage to the 1980 film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. Herzog 'ordered' this unenviable entree by losing a bet with filmmaker Errol Morris: if Morris would quit procrastinating and complete his feature film, Herzog would eat his shoe in public. After Morris completed the film ("Gates of Heaven"), it was time for dinner. Fortunately for us, local filmmaker Les Blank captured the cooking, eating, and subsequent interview with Herzog on film, including footage of the shoe stewing at Chez Panisse, with Alice Waters helping Herzog give his shoe the proper treatment. ("Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe" is one of the extras on the DVD of Blank's "Burden of Dreams," a documentary about the making of Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo" in the jungles of South America.)

At OPENeducation at least one shoe was used as flavoring in a Provencal soup of zucchini, green beans, tomatoes and other vegetables topped with pounded basil, garlic and Parmesan cheese.

All in all, OPENeducation was a superbly organized celebration with plenty of variety — both culinary and intellectual — in a conveniently compartmentalized venue that allowed multiple classes to be in session at the same time without conflict. The breadth of educational approaches at the event and their focus on youth-led demonstrations should be an inspiration to anyone planning a food festival.

24/7 Chez Panisse
In the weeks leading up to the 40th birthday, the food media in the Bay Area was all Chez Panisse, all the time. You couldn't swing a bunch of heirloom cardoons on the internet or at the newspaper stand without hitting something related to the birthday. There were remembrances, commentaries about the restaurant's impacts, radio call-in shows and much more. The Berkeleyside blog has a roundup of some of the coverage and an extensive list of links.

Random link from the archive: Wild Mushroom Souffle

Random Updates and Notes

2011-10-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

Burdock ‘eviction’: After just over 3 months since I moved some burdock seedlings into their towers, it is time to start evicting them. In recent days, the leaves on one of them have faded away, so that was the one I pulled first. It wasn’t easy, as the root turned out to be 17 inches long. This particular root will be simmered in sake tonight and served as a side dish (recipe from Chez Panisse alumna Victoria Wise in The Vegetarian Table: Japan). I don’t have plans yet for the other six roots beyond a recipe in Elizabeth Andoh’s Kansha that pairs the root with shirataki noodles.

Insects as Food: One of my favorite posts in the Mental Masala archive is an exploration of why Americans and Europeans refuse to eat insects even though most of the rest of the world does. Although not favored for dining, it seems that insect eating (entomophagy) is an attractive subject for editors, journalists, and bloggers, so articles are fairly frequent. For example, an article in the August 15th New Yorker by Dana Goodyear was entertaining and informative, if a bit superficial – nothing, for example, about the logistics of raising insects as food or how they would be processed. Other recent insect news has been more event driven. SF Weekly reported that La Oaxaqueña Bakery & Restaurant in San Francisco that was serving chapulines (grasshoppers) received a demand from the health department demanding that they cease offering the food until they can find a domestic source or FDA-approved vendor in Mexico. Inside Scoop SF had an announcement about a chance to legally eat insects in the Bay Area, an upcoming dinner called “Edible Insects & Other Rare Delicacies: An Insect and Mezcal Pairing Dinner Presented by Monica Martinez of Don Bugito.” It takes place October 27 at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito.

Chez Panisse 40th Birthday: Over the last few weeks in the Bay Area, especially San Francisco and the East Bay, it was all Chez Panisse, all the time. You couldn't swing a bunch of heirloom cardoons on the internet or at the newspaper stand without hitting something related to the 40th birthday. There were remembrances, commentaries about the restaurant's impacts, new book releases, and much more. Someone with a lot of patience at the Berkeleyside blog posted a roundup of some of the coverage with an extensive list of links during the main buzz of activity. Forum on KQED radio had a program commemorating the event that began with an interview with Alice Waters (severely marred by a low-quality phone connection), and then went into a discussion with Charlie Hallowell (ex-Chez Panisse, now chef and owner of Pizzaiolo and Boot and Shoe Service in Oakland), Russell Moore (ex-Chez Panisse, now chef and owner of Camino in Oakland) and Michael Bauer (executive food and wine editor and restaurant critic for The San Francisco Chronicle). During the conversation, Hallowell raised a great point that bears sharing: although Alice Waters didn't set up multiple outposts of Chez Panisse around the country and world like many star chefs do, she has been indirectly franchising her vision. Many people have worked at Chez Panisse and then left to start other restaurants (this Family Tree from Eater SF gives a sense of the impact, as does an article by Tracey Taylor that was published in the Financial Times) or to write books (including Deborah Madison, Victoria Wise and David Lebovitz), thereby spreading the gospel of Chez Panisse far better than outposts in New York and Las Vegas could.

Okara sighting: Back in December, I wrote about okara, a fibrous by-product of the soy milk-making process. I mentioned that Hodo Soy Beanery gives or sells their okara to local livestock operations, but didn’t give any specifics. A recent newsletter from CUESA closes that loop with a note that a local operation called Magruder Ranch is using okara: "The pigs can’t survive on forage alone, and Magruder Ranch has found several sources for local feed. About half of their diet is okara, a byproduct of tofu making, which the ranch picks up from Hodo Soy Beanery in Oakland on the return trip from the slaughterhouse." Incidentally, Magruder Ranch raised the pig that provided the skin used to make edible shoes for one of the Chez Panisse celebrations (for the story behind the edible shoes, take a look at the same photo in my Flickr account).

Water works: A few years ago, after taking a trip to Singapore and Indonesia, I wrote a post about why I would not be buying any carbon offsets. Instead, I pledged to make donations to action groups like 350.org and a group that works on clean water issues (Indonesia has relatively poor clean water infrastructure). Since that post, I have made donations to the UNICEF Tap Project and charity: water, two organizations that work around the world to help people get access to clean and safe water. If there are other groups that are doing great work on clean water, please let me know in the comments.

Soy history: I recently finished Sam Fromartz's Organic, Inc., an engaging book that should be read by anyone who wants to understand where the organic foods industry came from. Fromartz digs into many important subjects like organic strawberry production (touched on by me at the Ethicurean), how salad mix went from Alice Waters' dream to take over the nation's salad bowls, and much more. In the middle of the book, he gives a thorough history of the natural foods industry's relationship with soy, including the rise of White Wave soy products, how Silk soy milk made it big, and much more.

A ‘killer app recipe’: That’s what David Lebovitz calls his recipe for candied peanuts, and I agree. They are delicious, addictive, fairly easy to make, and travel well, which makes them a great office or urban wandering snack. I have been using Trader Joe’s roasted and unsalted peanuts, and adapting the recipe by heating the water/sugar alone until it starts to lightly color, then adding the peanuts. This, in theory, will keep the already roasted peanuts from getting too dark. I have been adding a tablespoon of honey near the end of the process, then cooking for a few minutes longer to let any water evaporate.

The Inside-Outside Game: Cooking Eggplant Flesh and Skin Separately

2011-09-12T07:00:00.000-07:00

Photo of eggplant at the farmers market by Jen Maiser, from her Flickr collection, used with permission.

People often say that the San Francisco Bay Area doesn't really have seasons. Weather-wise, they have a point – we have wet and dry, nothing nearly as dramatic as New England, for example. But for those who obsess about local food, there are scores of seasons, each one marking the appearance and disappearance of certain foods at the farmer’s market. Right now, for example, we are in the midst of eggplant season. Farms like Riverdog, Lucero or Vang have great piles of eggplant – not just the dark purple globe, but varieties that are thin and long, some that are Haas avocado-sized, some that are as tiny as a lime, with colors that include pale green, white, light purple, and white speckled with lavender. When their name is unknown, it’s easy to fall back on a geographical description: Japanese, Philippine, Italian, Thai. For one of my new favorite eggplant recipes, I choose the Japanese type, a slender fruit with an inky purple that is almost approaching black.

Elizabeth Andoh’s latest book, Kansha: Celebrating Japan's Vegan and Vegetarian Traditions contains a pair of recipes that knocked me over the first time I tried it. The underpinning is the Japanese philosophy of ichi motsu, zen shoku, which means one food, used entirely. An example of this philosophy is on the cover of the book and in the introductory text, where Andoh explores the daikon: the leafy tops can be cooked and tossed with rice; the root section can be divided into three parts, with each section being cooked a different way or made into a pickle; the peels can be used in soup or in a stir-fry.

The recipe I adapted below is for eggplant – separating the flesh from the skin, cooking each element in a different way, then serving them side by side. The flesh is simmered in some lemon juice, stock and saké; the skin quickly stir-fried in fragrant sesame oil with soy sauce and saké.

The end of eggplant season is not far away, so if you like eggplant and Japanese cuisine, make haste to give this interesting approach a try.

Recipe: Eggplant Duo
Adapted from Kansha, by Elizabeth Andoh

This recipe consists of four activities: preparing a pickled plum sauce, readying the eggplant by carefully separating the peel from the flesh, cooking the eggplant flesh, and cooking the eggplant skin.

Pickled Plum Sauce
Ingredients:
1 T. mashed pitted uméboshi or plum paste
1 t. white miso (preferably Saikyo)
1-2 t. mizu amé (see notes) or maple syrup
1 t. vegetarian stock (see notes) or cold water

Method:
Pit and mash the uméboshi. Mix with the other ingredients. Taste and adjust with more sweetener if needed (the saltiness or sourness of uméboshi can vary widely between brands). Cover and chill.

Eggplant Preparation
Ingredients:
3 or 4 thin eggplant, preferably Japanese variety, about 10 ounces

Method:
Wash the eggplant and cut off the stem end. With a sharp knife, peel each one from stem end to flower end, making strips of peel that are about 1/8 inch thick (and ideally 3/4 inch wide). Cut the peel strips into matchsticks that are about 1 to 1 1/2 inches long and set aside in a bowl.

Cut the flesh into 1/2-inch cubes and set aside.

The Inside
Ingredients:
The eggplant flesh
1 T. lemon juice
The squeezed lemon shell
1 T. saké
1 T. vegetarian stock or cold water
1 piece kombu, left over from stock making (optional)

Method:
Combine the lemon juice, squeezed lemon shell, stock, and saké in a skillet or sauce pan that is wide enough to hold the eggplant pieces in a single layer. Add the eggplant and toss with the liquid, then arrange in a single layer. If you are using kombu, place it on top of the eggplant as a lid. If not, cover with an otoshi-buta, a lid with a diameter less than the pan, or a circle of parchment paper.

Turn the heat to medium-high. When the liquid starts to bubble, lower the heat to medium-low and cover the pan with a regular lid. Let the eggplant steam for a few minutes until tender. Remove the pan from the heat and let the eggplant cool with the lid in place. If not using immediately after cooling, refrigerate.

The Outside
Ingredients:
The eggplant skin
1 t. toasted sesame oil
1 t. sugar
1 T. saké
1 T. soy sauce
1/8 t. kona-zansho (see notes)

Method:
Heat a skillet over medium heat. When hot, add the sesame oil, swirl to coat the pan, and add the peels. Stir fry for about a minute. Distribute the sugar over the peels and stir. Add the saké, stir well, and continue to stir fry until the saké has evaporated. Add the soy sauce and mix well. Remove from the heat. Let the peels cool in the skillet. When cool, sprinkle half of the kona-zansho on top and mix. If not using immediately, refrigerate.

Serving
Prepare individual servings by placing a small mound of the cooked flesh on one side of a small plate or shallow bowl next to a small mound of the cooked skin. Place a small dollop of the plum sauce on the flesh. Sprinkle the remaining 1/16 t. kona-zansho onto the peels. Serve at room temperature or chilled.

Ingredient Notes

Mizu amé – a thick syrup made from barley (with English language labels often reading “barley malt”).
Vegetarian stock – an infusion of kombu seaweed and shiitake mushroom stems (or pieces of mushroom cap). A simple method of making a stock is described at the bottom of this post.
Kona-zansho – A powder made from ground berries of the Japanese prickly ash shrub (Zanthoxylum piperitum)

Photo of eggplant at the farmers market by Jen Maiser, from her Flickr collection, used with permission. Photo of eggplant duo by the author.

Eggplant recipes from the Mental Masala archive

Liquid Burdock

2011-08-30T23:13:00.000-07:00

Back in June, I wrote about setting up garden infrastructure to grow burdock root (a.k.a. gobo, Arctium lappa) so that I could have a local source for recipes in Elizabeth Andoh's Kansha: Celebrating Japan's Vegan and Vegetarian Traditions (my review of the book is here.). My plants seem to be doing well, with each one sprouting out several large leaves (whether the roots are growing is, however, unknown). On the off chance that I'm not in a Japanese food mood when the burdock are ready to harvest — and if I'm feeling very ambitious — I could follow the centuries-old traditions of using burdock in liquid refreshments.

My introduction to burdock drinks occurred many months ago at Il Cane Rosso in San Francisco's Ferry Building. On their reasonably large menu of non-alcoholic drinks was a soda from the UK-based Fentiman's company called “Dandelion & Burdock.” With odd-ball headline ingredients like those, I couldn't pass it up. But that night I also didn’t really enjoy it, as the flavor was too weird. In recent months, however, I have come to like it quite a bit, enjoying its fruitiness (a good amount of cherry) and overall flavor profile — but not enjoying its price of over $10 for a four pack at Andronico’s.

Intrigued by this burdock and dandelion soda, I started rooting around on the internet to learn more.

Wikipedia was an early stop on the research journey, where I read that a dandelion and burdock drink was mentioned in documents written in the 13th century (the citation is Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae of 1274, but I haven’t seen the reference myself). A few months later, at the Expo West trade show in Anaheim*, I asked a representative at the Fentiman's booth about burdock soda. Burdock might seem odd at first because we usually think of it as a vegetable, he said, but if we think of it like other roots such as sasparilla and ginger that are used to make drinks, it's not so unusual.

Next up was Google Books, a massive information source that is the result of Google digitizing thousands of books, old and new, across a range of topics. Thanks to the highly usable search engine, I found some great information.

The Herbalist in the Kitchen by Gary Allen (2007), has this in the entry for "Common Dandelion: Taaraxacum officinale":

Dandelions have been used, in place of hops, in herbal beers. In Canada, dandelion stout was popular. In England, the roots of dandelion and burdock flavor a root-beer-like soft drink called, not surprisingly, Dandelion and Burdock.

Burdock and dandelion also make appearances in the medical literature of the late 19th century, as in the The Era Formulary. 5000 Formulas for Druggists (1893), where the ingredients appear in various recipes for “Blood Remedy” or “Blood Purifier.”

A much better find was the May 11, 1889 issue of Good Housekeeping, a periodical that is "Conducted in the Interests of the Higher Life of the Household." Like today's magazine of the same name, the pages are filled with tips for better living, as well as poetry and short fiction. What brought me to those pages was an article about summer beverages by Ada Marie Peck that included a few recipes using burdock and dandelion.

But before getting to recipes, I'd like to appreciate the first letter in the article, a delightful rendering of a W rising from a bowl like a wisp of steam (such creative initials appear all over the periodical):

Peck shares two recipes that use burdock and dandelion:

Hop Beer. 1.
For one barrel of beer, use one pound of hops and one-half pound each of ginger and allspice. Put in a keg and boil for half a day, then pour the liquid in a barrel or keg and add one gallon of molasses and a pint of good yeast. It is improved by adding sarsaparilla, dandelion and burdock roots. If these are used chop them and boil a long time to extract the strength, then add to the other ingredients. This beer requires a beer-keg or barrel to hold it and it should stand for about two days before it is ready for use. It is better to make a half barrel at a time.
…
Root Beer.
For one gallon – a handful of hops, some twigs of spruce, hemlock or cedar, a little sassafras; roots of various kinds – plantain [Ed. note: plantago major?], burdock, dock [sorrel?], dandelion and sarsaparilla. Boil and strain, add a spoonful of "ginger molasses" to make it pleasant, and a cupful of yeast.

These are way beyond my kitchen skills, and made even more difficult by the relative lack of detail. So, for now anyway, I'll be getting my liquid burdock exclusively from Fentiman's.

Peck's article concludes with some intriguing recipes for “Soda Water” that seem to be bases for other drinks, as the high ratio of sugar to liquid implies:

Soda Water. 1.
Five ounces of tartaric acid [cream of tartar], one-half ounce of epsom salts [magnesium sulfate], two quarts of water, two pounds of sugar, the whites of four eggs, and two lemons.

Soda Water. 2.
One ounce of tartaric acid, one pound of sugar, one pint of boiling water, the white of one egg, two tablespoons of lemon, vanilla or pineapple [Ed. note: extract? juice?]. Stir the ingredients briskly, and put in a bottle. Shake before using. Two tablespoons are required for one glass, and a quarter of a teaspoonful of soda. A teaspoonful of sweet cream to each glass is a great improvement.

The second one actually looks feasible, and might be worth a try someday.

* A write-up of my visit to the Expo West natural products trade show is over at the Ethicurean.

Random link from the archive: Komala's Vegetarian, Singapore

Chickens on the pasture - a tour of Marin Sun Farms, part 2

2011-08-22T21:32:00.000-07:00

This is part 2 of a series on my tour of Marin Sun Farms. Part 1 is here.

The Chickenfeed Chronicles
"If something is small or unimportant, especially money, it is chickenfeed," says the idiom collection at Using English. But at Marin Sun Farms – and many other chicken and egg operations, such as Nigel Walker’s EatWell Farm – chicken feed is anything but small or unimportant. Instead, it stresses the operator financially and intellectually, and is a hot button for eaters. While on my recent tour of the Marin Sun Farms’ Rogers Ranch in Point National Seashore, the tour group probably could have talked about chicken feed with Marin Sun Farms’ David Evans for hours.

Chicken feed is a complicated business because of genetically modified organisms (GMO), organic certification, the national commodity markets, and international trade. Soy and corn can be important components in chicken feed, but in the U.S. the vast majority of soy and corn are GMO varieties (USDA has a handy chart showing adoption of GMOs since 1996), a characteristic that is objectionable to many for multiple reasons. Consequently, the vast majority of the nation’s harvesting, storage, transportation and marketing resources are devoted to the GMO varieties, which makes organic or non-GMO products more expensive, as they don’t have economies of scale. Although relatively cheaper supplies of organic feed can be purchased from China, Evans thought that transoceanic feed just doesn’t fit into a local foods movement (of course, most corn and soy comes from the Midwest, hardly a local source, but closer on a conceptual basis). At EatWell Farm near Dixon, California, Nigel Walker has tried growing his own organically certified wheat as a source of ultra-local chicken feed (I wrote about this for Eat Local Challenge a while ago). Evans has weighed all of the factors for Marin Sun Farms – practical, ecological, economic – and has settled on conventional feed for his operation, but is not particularly happy about the situation. I don’t know if anti-trust rules would allow for this, but some kind of buying cooperative for organic feed that was made up of chicken farmers might seem to be a way to drive down the costs of organic feed by harnessing some economies of scale.

On the Pasture
Marin Sun Farms raises chickens as egg layers and as meat birds, with the two varieties receiving significantly different treatment. Evans credits Polyface Farm as the inspiration for his system of mobile chicken coops and broiler cages. (Polyface was made famous by Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma. Learn more about Polyface in a post from Fit for Life and a segment from Eric Ripert's TV show, via Slow Food LA.)

Let’s start with the egg layers. The laying hens (and a few roosters) live in coops out on the pasture, roaming around freely during the day and roosting inside at night. Guard dogs keep watch for coyotes and other threats (here’s a photo of the dogs as puppies from MissNatalie on Flickr). Once a day, the Marin Sun Farm workers drag the houses a few dozen yards to the next spot of pasture, giving the chickens new pasture to explore for bugs, seeds and other chicken treats. The hens end up getting about 15-20% of their nutrients from the pasture and their dropping fertilizes the pasture for future grazing. Importantly, for those who care about animal welfare, the chickens get to be chickens, to revel in their ‘chickenness’ by choosing their own food, taking dust baths, flocking as they like. These birds typically have a life span of about two years.

The broiler chickens have much less freedom than the laying hens, spending their first 5 weeks inside of different parts of a series of open-sided sheds and their last 3 weeks in large cages on pasture. Evans contended that the broiler breed (Cornish cross, a ‘modern’ fast-weight-gain variety) is less of an explorer and has more flocking tendencies than the laying hens, so that it wouldn’t make much sense to use the open-field laying hen system. Like the laying-hen coops, the cages are moved every day to allow the birds to choose food from the pasture, resulting in about 10-15% of their diet being the grass, bugs, seeds and so forth that they pick out of the pasture. Beyond giving the birds some choice in food and fresh pasture each day, Evans said that the practice greatly improves the flavor of the meat.

I still remember the excitement I felt when I read about Joel Salatin's farm in Omnivore's Dilemma – the "egg mobiles," running cattle and chicken in sequence on his pastures. It was a system that seemed to work with nature instead of against nature, as so many CAFOs do. And so, it was rewarding to see a similar system – one that needs to account for California's distinct wet and dry seasons instead of Virginia's winters – at work at Marin Sun Farms, and to hear someone as passionate and knowledgeable as David Evans explain how the many moving pieces fit together.

Marin Sun Farms has been extensively covered in the media and blogosphere, including a piece by Bonnie Azab Powell at the Ethicurean, one by Stephanie Rosenbaum at Bay Area Bites, an article in the Winter 2009 issue of Edible San Francisco by Wayne Garcia, and a few articles on the Marin Sun Farms’ press page.

Random link from the archive: Okra Greens

“Open-doorness is our certification” – a tour of Marin Sun Farms, part 1

2011-07-27T19:27:00.000-07:00

Cattle "in training" at Marin Sun Farms' Rogers Ranch

In early July I took a tour of the 'headquarters' of Marin Sun Farms, a company that is best known for grass-fed beef, superb eggs, and pastured chicken and is a regular fixture at the renowned Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco. The word headquarters is important here, because over the years Marin Sun Farms has adapted its business model so that the company sources meat from a handful of farms in Northern California that pledge to follow its stringent animal husbandry rules (summarized on MSF’s Who We Are page).

The Fifth Generation
Our tour guide was David Evans, the owner of Marin Sun Farms, who represents the fifth generation of farming and ranching in his family. His maternal great-grandparents came to the United States from Switzerland in 1889 and found their way to California. Sometime in the early 20th century, one of his relatives bought some land at the edge of Marin County and began ranching. In 1962, the land became part of the Point Reyes National Seashore (truly one of the most magnificent places in Northern California, a place that manages to astound in a new way each and every time I visit it), but the pre-existing farms were allowed to lease back their land from the Federal government and continue agricultural operations (the National Park Service website has a detailed history of agriculture in the park).

The tour is part of Marin Sun Farms' open door policy, something that Evans sees as superior to organic certification for his business – "open doorness is our certification," he said. Certification would give the company a recognizable label, but for a small, locally-based company like Marin Sun Farms, the certification process ends up being a lot of paperwork and expense. In addition, it can shut down the conversation between farmer and eater – in a post by Bonnie Azab Powell at the Ethicurean, Evans was quoted as saying "When people see a stamp that says 'Certified Organic,' they stop asking questions. It does have its function, because not everyone lives close enough to ask questions, but if you can, you should."

Cattle In Training
During our tour of the Rogers Ranch, no cattle roamed the grasslands even though the late rains had led to unseasonably lush pastures of native bunchgrasses and European grasses that stowed away with the Spanish centuries ago, many with full seedheads. However, the cattle-free pasture was just a temporary situation, as Marin Sun Farms had just received a new herd (Hereford and Angus breeds) and the animals were “in training."

In order to be compatible with Marin Sun Farm’s model of frequent movement of animals to fresh pasture, the cattle need to learn to come when called (as a herd, not individually), learn about electric fences, and slightly reduce their fear of humans. The last part is a tricky business, because a too tame animal is hard to move – it is content to stand there with you instead of heading to the next area or into a trailer. During our visit, the animals were definitely not used to humans, and would have mini-stampedes across their training area when our group of 15 came close. Training was expected to last about 3 weeks. Evans was disappointed by that reality, as they were currently "overwhelmed by grass" and every day that the cattle were training was one less day of gaining weight from the seeds and vegetation in the rolling hills of the ranch.

Once the herd is fully trained, the ranch hands set up enclosures using single-wire electric fence. Every day or two they move the fence to provide the cattle with new grass to eat, allowing the previous area to recover (and absorb the nutrients from the manure). In all, they will spend about 3 months on pasture, increasing their weight from 800 to 1,200 pounds. At slaughter time, the animals are about 24 months old. In contrast, a feedlot animal is only 15-16 months old at slaughter, having eaten grass in its early days at a "cow-calf operation" and then spending its later days on a feedlot eating corn, low doses of antibiotics, and all sorts of processed feed devised by meat production experts (who are generally most concerned with economic efficiency, not animal welfare or sustainability).

If you are interested in small-scale livestock operations and can get to the western edge of Point Reyes by 10 AM on a Wednesday (60-90 minutes from San Francisco or Berkeley with the possibility of traffic jams in southern Marin County), the tour is definitely worthwhile. The setting is magnificent – if you get there early or stay around afterwards, there are trails and beaches nearby (including one that goes through a field of lupine bushes with pale yellow flowers) and the lighthouse is just a few miles farther down the road. Dates and sign-ups are at Marin Sun Farms.
In part 2, I’ll cover Marin Sun Farms egg and meat chicken operations at Rogers Ranch.

Getting back to the subtle and in-your-face magnificence of Point Reyes, here are two photos taken within a few miles of the Rogers Ranch, the first near the Bull Point trail head while the marine layer was thick and cool, and the second from near the North Beach after the fog lifted (one of those classic Bay Area beaches where half of the visitors are wearing fleece and almost no one is in the water because of its frigid temperature and highly dangerous currents (and also Great White Sharks).

Lupine bushes near Bull Point trail, Point Reyes National Seashore

Dunes above North Beach, Point Reyes National Seashore

Random link from the archive: The Eat Local Challenge

Mid-Michigan Blogging

2011-07-09T09:40:00.000-07:00

I recently took a ten day trip to Michigan, so here's a random round-up of some highlights.

Old and New Buildings
Over the last few years, “Old Town” Lansing been greatly improved with spruced-up buildings, antique shops, art galleries, dining spots, a river trail and a truly amazing pet store. Although it is a tiny collection of old buildings compared to Chicago or other larger established cities, I found it cute and a good example of the turn of the 20th century architecture for the region.

Not far from Old Town, a pair of connected buildings near the capitol made a strong impression: the old and new buildings that make up the headquarters of the Accident Fund. The old building is the Ottawa Power Station, a power plant built in the 30s and 40s that operated for many decades. The engineering of the plant was done by the Burns and Roe firm and allowed the architects from the Bowd-Munson Company to create an office-like façade so it could blend into the commercial district. The Bowd-Munson Company had a significant impact on the built environment of the Lansing-area, as a press release (PDF) from the Accident Fund explains:

The firm was a partnership of Orlie Munson, well-known for his work at MSU (then Michigan Agricultural College) in East Lansing, including Agriculture Hall, Marshall Hall, Giltner Hall, and Spartan Stadium, and Edwin Bowd, a renowned Lansing area architect whose designs included the J.W. Knapp Building, Masonic Temple Building (now Cooley Law School), the Lewis Cass Building in Lansing, and the Ingham County Courthouse in Mason.

The new building was designed by the international architecture firm HOK and built by the Christman Company. It’s surprisingly modern for downtown Lansing, which is more of a brick and concrete area. More details about the project are on the media page for the Accident Fund and in an AP article.

I was struck by the soaring verticality of the old power station, the warm reflection of the summer sun on the tall windows that cover the sides of the building, and the subtle variations of the colored brick.

Food Trucks
The upscale food truck scene has reached Lansing. In late June, the Lansing State Journal had a profile of two operators, Trailer Park'd and the Purple Carrot. Although I didn’t manage to visit the Purple Carrot, a friend and I stopped by the Trailer Park'd trailer for dinner one night. Their motto is "Slow Fast Food" and they are committed to following the SOLE path, sourcing local grass-fed beef, for example. The shrimp taco was quite tasty, with had plump grilled locally-farmed shrimp (which I'll cover below), supremed lime, pieces of roasted tomatillo and some cilantro. While the weather is good, their trailer is definitely worth a visit (they post their weekly schedule on their website).

Inland Shrimp
Amazingly enough, the often cold, definitely not tropical, and far from salt water region of mid-Michigan has a shrimp farm. This farm, the Shrimp Farm Market in Meridian Township, is state of the art in small-scale recirculating aquaculture systems (it was profiled by Edible WOW, available as a PDF). They have a retail counter at the farm, sell at the Meridian farmers market (and perhaps others), and have some restaurant clients. I don't know of any certification standards for this type of aquaculture and the owner is secretive about his methods, so it's hard to say exactly what their impacts are, but I think the company is worth encouraging, as they are subject to pretty strict environmental laws – i.e., unlike an Asian shrimp farm, they can't just dump their effluent into a waterway. I ate some shrimp at the Trailer Park'd stand and we used some at home too. We cooked the Sri Lankan prawn curry on page 217 of Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's epic "Mangoes and Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels through the Great Subcontinent.” Although shrimp preparation took some time, the rest of the dish was quite simple and fast.

We cooked a few other dishes from the Mangoes book. It was my second experience with the book and the second great success. Especially good is the spicy banana pachadi on page 70, a mixture of fried spices, curry leaves, lightly cooked banana, green chilies, and yogurt that is delicious on its own or as a condiment.

Big Wheels on a Small Island
A highlight of the visit was a short trip to Mackinac Island, a bucolic island that is a 20 minute ferry ride from the foot of the Mackinac Bridge. Many decades ago, the islanders decided forbid the mass introduction of motorized vehicles, so the bulk of the traveling on the island is done on foot, on bicycle, or by horse-drawn carriage (the particular challenges of horse-drawn transportation was featured in an episode of Dirty Jobs called "Wild Goose Chase"). Our trip coincided with the 44th Annual Wheelmen Meet, a meeting of people who are "Dedicated To The Enjoyment And Preservation Of Our Bicycling Heritage". High-wheeled bicycles were all over the place, often ridden by people in period clothing.

Burdock towers

2011-06-14T23:29:00.000-07:00

One of my minor frustrations with Elizabeth Andoh's "Kansha" (my review is here) is that quite a few recipes feature burdock (a.k.a. great burdock, gobo, Arctium lappa), but all of the supply in local markets seems to be grown in Taiwan, even in Berkeley Bowl and Tokyo Fish Market, two markets that have many types of produce used in Japanese cooking.

So I'm trying to grow my own.

Seeds were not easy to find. Fortunately Kitazawa Seed Company, an Oakland-based company that specializes in vegetable varieties that are popular in Asia (e.g., many types of eggplants, special varieties of radish, various greens) carries several types of burdock and my favorite nursery (Berkeley Horticultural Garden) was happy to place a special order. Kitazawa is an old company (by California standards), founded in San Jose in 1917. During WWII, the company closed down while the Japanese-American Kitazawa family was imprisoned in a relocation camps. After the war, they restarted the business and today sell approximately 250 seed varieties, which can be ordered on-line and found in some retail shops. In Berkeley I have seen their seeds at Berkeley Bowl and Berkeley Horticultural Nursery.

The tricky thing about burdock is that it is long -- often several feet in length -- and so you need to be careful about where you plant it. The planting beds in my backyard are absurdly shallow and the soil underneath is dense, so I bought some cinder blocks and built mini-towers. Into the towers I placed a mixture of sand and potting soil (probably 25% sand by volume). (Note: I got the cinder block idea from a representative of Kitazawa Seeds at a dinner celebrating Andoh's "Kansha" book at Hodo Soy Beanery's factory.)

So far, the plants seem to be doing well, putting out new leaves and looking healthy.

"A Backup Voice"
Burdock isn't one of those superstar vegetable that tastes so much better when grown at home. Instead, it's subtle. Elizabeth Schneider's "Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini" has this background and a great description of its role:

Although the plant is naturalized throughout Europe and North America, it is probably Asian in origin, and it stakes its culinary claim in Japan." Used in European medical mixtures in Middle Ages or earlier. Seed company at the end of the 19th century, Vilmorin-Andrieux "The roots, which grow from 1 ft. to 16 inches long, are boiled and served up in various ways....If eaten when young, as it is by the Japanese, although it cannot be termed delicious, it is certainly not a bad vegetable."
...
Despite minimal international enthusiasm, I'd still say that the curious cylindrical yardstick has undeniable charm, if considered as a backup voice — not a lead singer.

If the vegetable grows successfully, I'll have a post about how to use the vegetable in a few months.

Image of Lappa vulgaris from Wikimedia Commons, from a book from 1892.

Random link from the archive: Ubuntu: a well-reviewed vegetarian restaurant in Napa, California

The incredible shrinking fava bean

2011-05-09T22:12:00.000-07:00

I bought some fava beans yesterday to use in a recipe from Elizabeth Andoh’s “Kansha” and decided to pull out my scale to document the tedious bean peeling routine. I started with 552 grams of whole fava bean pods. Pod removal netted me 192 grams of skin-on beans. I blanched the skin-on beans for 1 minute, dropped them in cold water, then one-by-one extracted the bean from its skin, yielding 116 grams of ready to eat beans. That’s a 21% yield by weight (and probably much less by volume, as a fava bean pod is spongy and light). Whole fava beans sell for $2-$3 per pound at the Berkeley Farmers Market, so for this batch the beans themselves cost between $9.50 and $14.25 per pound. The chart above and the photos below show the shrinkage of the beans. (Sunset's One Block Diet blog has a rumination on the pain of fava beans with some useful, but intensely color unbalanced, photos of how to shell and peel fava beans.)

The “Kansha” recipe I was trying for the first time had an appealing and fitting title: “Springtime in a Bowl.” The two main ingredients of fava beans and sugar snap peas are two signs of Spring in the supposedly season-free San Francisco Bay Area. As Andoh creations go, it was fairly simple: steam the fava beans, steam some sugar snap peas, puree with soy milk, add stock and white miso, puree again, then heat and pour over a block of silken tofu.

But alas, I wasn’t happy with the springtime in a bowl. The fava flavor – the flavor that I had worked so hard to liberate from the pods – was buried and Hodo Soy Beanery’s silken tofu is far too soft for this recipe, so I wasn’t able to properly appreciate it.

Next time I work with fava beans, I’ll probably try something that keeps the beans whole, attempt the whole fava bean recipe by Sophie Brickman in the San Francisco Chronicle, or stick with fava bean greens.

Going for the Green
A few years ago, the San Francisco Chronicle's Michael Bauer noted a trend of fava bean leaves in local restaurants. I wrote a post about his article and my contemporary experience with fava leaves (including a recipe for a frittata with fava greens).

This year, Happy Boy Farms has been bringing bags of fava bean leaves (plastic bags, unfortunately) to the Berkeley Farmers Market (and, presumably, their other markets). The leaves offer an easy way to get some of the flavor of fava beans without all of the work. So far I've used them in a frittata, made a pesto for pasta, and put them in a few other dishes that I can't remember.

The on-line recipe aggregator MyRecipes.com has a handful of fava green recipes from Sunset Magazine, including Fava Green, Grapefruit, and Flower Salad, Fava Leaf and Parsley Quiche, and Linguine with Fava Greens, Shrimp, and Green Garlic. A recipe for Fava green, edible flower, and poached egg salad from Sunset's One Block Diet.

Random link from the archive: Learning to control my temper: making dipped chocolates, part 3

Fenugreek's Flavors

2011-04-03T11:37:00.000-07:00

Now and then, fresh fenugreek leaves appear at the farmers markets that I frequent (usually at the Vang Farms stand at Berkeley's Saturday market). When this happens, I buy a bunch and then get some potatoes from another stand to make my version of a recipe in Julie Sahni's "Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking."

In the past, when I cook the leaves or use the seeds, which are called methi in India, the lingering aroma (which infuses my body for hours after I eat the leaves) has reminded me of another food. However, I couldn't quite figure out what it was until recently.

The mystery flavor and aroma turns out to be maple syrup. The reason for this is that one of the flavor chemicals in fenugreek is sotolon (or sotolone or 3-hydroxy-4,5-dimethyl-2[5H]-furanone), which has a maple-like flavor and aroma, and consequently is part of the chemical mixture used in making imitation maple flavor. Perhaps I couldn't make the connection because the idea of maple syrup being part of my Indian cooking was too odd to consider.

The Dictionary of Flavors says this about artificial maple flavorings:

Although the maple syrup sold in the mass supermarket is somewhat different than the flavor of the real maple syrup, the general population has learned to identify it with the term "maple syrup" rather than the profile of real syrup. In fact some studies showed that the mass market prefers the synthesized maple syrup to the real substance. This is a true example of the power of mass marketing and learned association. Synthesized maple syrup is made from sugar syrups flavored with fenugreek, St. John's bread [ed. note: also known as carob or locust bean], glycerrhize, malt, celery, lovage, molasses and other brown extracts and chemicals (cyclotene, maltol, etc.).

The sotolon compound is also present elsewhere, like in the Lactarius helvus mushroom, according to an article in the journal Mycologia (first page and abstract here). The article notes that sotolon is an important flavor compound in French flor-sherry wine, old sake, soy sauce, sugar molasses, and barley malt (used in beer-making).

The Julie Sahni recipe mentioned previously combines the fenugreek leaves with butter, potatoes and a bit of garam masala. Sahni writes that it is a classic dish from New Dehli and is sometimes made using new potatoes that are “as tiny as cranberries.” I haven’t tried it with such tiny potatoes, but have had excellent results using normal boiling potatoes that are cut into bite-sized pieces. It's quite tasty, with the slight bitterness of the fenugreek leaves balanced by the solid earthiness of the potatoes.

Recipe: Potatoes and Fenugreek Leaves
Adapted from Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking, by Julie Sahni

Ingredients:
1 pound new potatoes or boiling potatoes, cut into bite size pieces, left unpeeled
1/4 – 1/2 pound fresh fenugreek leaves
4 T. butter
1/2 t. black pepper
1/2 t. garam masala
1/2 T. lemon juice
Salt to taste

Method:

Scrub the potatoes and cut them into bite-sized pieces.
Strip fenugreek leaves and branches from the thick stems (leaving leaves on some thin stems is fine). Thoroughly wash the leaves, drain, and finely chop.
Melt half of the butter in a skillet over medium-high heat (pick a skillet for which you have a cover). Add the potatoes and cook, turning occasionally, until they are lightly fried.
Mix in the fenugreek leaves and cook for a few minutes, until the greens have wilted. Stir in the black pepper and remaining butter.
Cover the skillet, lower the heat to low, and cook until the potatoes are tender (around 20 minutes or so). Stir every few minutes, checking to see if there is any burning. If the pan is dry, add a few tablespoons of water.
When the potatoes are tender, remove the cover. Increase the heat and cook until excess moisture has evaporated.
Sprinkle the mixture with garam masala, lemon juice and salt. Mix well and cook for several more minutes until the potatoes are coated with the spices and have a glazed appearance.

Image Credits
Drawing of fenugreek (Trigonella foenum-graecum) from Wikimedia Commons. Photo of Sugar maple leaf from tlindenbaum's flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License.

Random link from the archive: 2008 resolution review

Musical shell game

2011-02-19T14:22:00.000-08:00

And now for something completely different: yoga poses and musical instruments.

During a weekend intensive at Adeline Yoga in Berkeley last May, our teacher Heather Haxo-Phillips was taking us through some arm asanas and ended up at gomukhasana, also known as the cow-face pose (photos and background at Yoga Journal and Wikipedia). Heather mentioned that there is a musical instrument that had a similar name — gomoku, or something like that — but didn't know what it looked like.

For some reason, I needed to find out more about this mysterious instrument, and ideally find a photo or two.

The Gomukh glacier (Wikimedia Commons)

A search of the internet was problematic, mainly because there is a very famous glacier in India called Gomukh (also spelled Gaumokh and Gomukhi) that is the source of the Bhagirathi River, but also because of variations in spelling. (And, alas, I didn't spend enough time in Google Books, which has a number of old books in its collection that cover this subject, as I show below.)

My next destination was the Berkeley Public Library, where I stumped the reference librarian in the art and music department -- as well as the library's paper and electronic collections -- with my questions.

The last physical place I searched was the UC Berkeley Music Library, where I found a few books on the musical instruments of India that referenced the instrument in text, but none of which had a straightforward photo of the instrument with a caption.

Conch shell (Wikimedia Commons)

A book from the 19th century, “Art-manufactures of India: Specially Compiled for the Glasgow International Exhibition, 1888” by T.N. Mukharji (archived at Google Books and in UC Berkeley's collection) has a short definition of the gomukha:

Gomukha - another kind of conch, somewhat resembling the mouth of the cow, whence it derives its name.

One of the books I found, Musical Instruments, by Bigamudre Chaitanya Deva (National Book Trust, 1977, UC Berkeley record) has a more detailed commentary about shells as musical instruments and a note about how one converts a shell into a trumpet:

The shell trumpet is also an extremely primitive, signalling and musical tool found in almost the entire world and in the most ancient civilizations like those of Assyria, Mexico, Peru, China and India. With us, the sankh or conch shell as a musical instrument is known in the entire subcontinent, from Kanyakumari to the Himalayas and from Gujarat to Meghalaya. While it is not of any consequence as a sophisticate sushira vadya, it was used in war as a heraldic instrument and now-a-days in puja, folk music and dance. It always was a member of the pancha mahasabha and now has a prominent place in the pancha vadya. Historically the oldest evidence is from the Harappan civilizations, though one cannot be sure whether the conch found in the remains was a musical instrument at all. Vedic references to the bakura which was a conch is another pointer to the antiquity of the shell trumpet. Sootra literature also has the gomukha which might have been either a conch or some other form of bugle. Considering the fact that the sankh was pre-eminently suitable for outdoor purposes, it is no wonder that the epics and later literature which deal with the lives and struggles of royal dynasties contain profuse references to it. When wars were declared or their victories were announced and when happy occasions were celebrated, the conch was sounded as it was considered an auspicious instrument....The simplest way of converting a natural shell into a trumpet is to cut off the closed end thus creating an access into the spiral chamber within; sometimes a hole is bored at the side near the closed tip. In both cases the player blows directly into the conch. However, mouthpieces are often attached and these may be small brass discs or tubes of varying lengths.

The Wikipedia page on conches as musical instruments shows a modified conch being used by a Hindu priest. According to the entry, Jerry Goldsmith's score for Alien includes an Indian conch trumpet.

I’m somewhat satisfied with the answers I found, but I’m still unable to answer quite a few questions, like “Which particular kinds of conches are used to make a gomukha?” or “Is gomukha simply a regional name for the instrument, not a distinctive kind of instrument?” or "Is the priest on the Wikipedia page playing a gomukha?" or "How is a gomukha different from a shankha (also spelled shankh and sankha)?" (The shankha is very important instrument, as it is one of the main attributes of the Hindu deity Vishnu, with images and sculptures always showing one held in the upper left hand.)

Oh well, that's how research goes sometimes. I won't get bent out of shape about it, except, of course, when twisting myself into gomukhasana.

Photo of Gaumukh glacier from Wikimedia Commons, subject to a Creative Commons License. Drawing of a conch from Wikimedia Commons, released into the public domain by its creator, Pearson Scott Foresman.

Kansha, a superb book about vegetarian cooking in Japan

2011-02-14T23:25:00.000-08:00

Long-time readers of Mental Masala will know that I'm a big fan of Elizabeth Andoh's Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen, with almost a dozen posts related to my Washoku cooking experiences. In October 2010, Ten Speed Press released another book by Andoh, Kansha: Celebrating Japan's Vegan and Vegetarian Traditions. I got my copy the day it hit the stores and have been cooking from it a few times a month since then. And now, over at my other blogging location, the Ethicurean, I have a review of the book that includes links to several recipes from the book and other useful information. Check it out here.

Bay Area residents take note: 1) Andoh is in the area this week and has several events planned, with details at her site Kansha Cooking (she is also making one stop in Portland), 2) the West Berkeley-based Cultured Pickle Shop sells a collection of delicious tsukémono (pickles) made using traditional Japanese methods.

Random link from the archive: Ready for a Chocolate Adventure?

The Age of Shrimp

2011-01-23T10:12:00.000-08:00

During an interview on To the Best of Our Knowledge, Ellen Ruppel Shell, the author of "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture," dropped an amazing fact: we eat more shrimp today in the U.S. than tuna fish. It was one of those "wow" statistics that I had to check out for myself.

Fortunately, the U.S. Census Bureau released a new Statistical Abstract (via Marion Nestle's must-read Food Politics blog) a few weeks ago and I quickly found what I was looking for in Table 893, "Supply of Selected Fishery Items" (PDF, Excel) on the Fisheries, Aquaculture page.

The tuna and shrimp data are shown in the first figure below: while per capita canned tuna availability has remained relatively flat over the last few decades, shrimp availability has risen sharply, especially since the mid-1990s. (Note: "availability" is a USDA term that is an estimate of "food supplies moving from production through marketing channels for domestic consumption." This USDA page has a lot about the concept of availability)

U.S. Per Capita Availability of Canned Tuna and Shrimp. Data from Table 893 of The 2011 Statistical Abstract and U.S. Census Bureau (details at the bottom of the post).

So what happened? Globalization and aquaculture teamed up to make farmed shrimp far more plentiful, lowered their production cost significantly, and managed to bring the product to stores and restaurants in great quantity.

The last few decades have seen great advances in the art and science of moving large amounts of perishable goods around the world, thanks in part to refrigerated cargo containers, air freight, and improvements in logistics and distribution. At the same time, aquaculture experts have figured out how to grow shrimp in coastal and inland farms, while the rest of the supply chain — processing, transportation, distribution, marketing — has fallen into place.

Almost all of the increase in availability is because of imports, as the next figure indicates. The blue line at the top shows the total imports, while the dotted lines (orange, green, purple) show the imports by sector. The red line running from the year 2000 to 2009 is the domestic catch, and it's been steady during that time.

Per Capita Supply of Shrimp, Imports and Domestic Landings. U.S. landings data from Fisheries Statistics Division (NOAA), imports data from USDA Economic Research Service (details at the bottom of the post).

The next figure shows import totals for the countries that make up roughly the top two-thirds of the imports. Thailand really stands out with rapid growth from 50 million pounds in 1990 to over 400 million in 2009.

U.S. Shrimp Imports from the Top Six Countries. Data from USDA Economic Research Service (details at the bottom of the post).

Shrimp is a messy subject because there are several varieties and several ways of capturing or farming them. The Shrimp page from Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch has 13 entries for shrimp and prawns, with ratings of "best choice," "good alternative" and "avoid" scattered across the list. If you click on an individual entry, your browser will reveal Seafood Watch's explanation for its rating of that entry.

Most farmed shrimp are big trouble, as they are raised in "Aqua-CAFOs" that closely resemble cattle or hog "concentrated animal feeding operations" with all kinds of chemicals and antibiotics required to keep the creatures alive. In addition, the aquaculture areas are created by destroying mangrove forests, which are biologically rich coastal areas that providing habitat for a wide variety of creatures, including juvenile fish — hence, mangroves are often called "nurseries of the seas."

However, some farms are improving their practices. On the Seafood Watch page about shrimp, imported farmed shrimp raised in "fully recirculating systems" are given the "Good Alternative" rating because these farms — which comprise only about 25% of the total shrimp farms in Thailand — are fully-enclosed ponds that don't release pollutants to open water. Some retailers like Walmart are using third-party certification agencies like Aquaculture Certification Council to ensure that their suppliers are using good practices. However, there are concerns that these certifiers aren't independent enough. (My review of “Bottomfeeder” by Taras Grescoe at the Ethicurean has a bit more about how shrimp farming can be disaster for ecosystems and the people who live near shrimp farms.)

Some are making advances with smaller-scale recirculating aquaculture systems, like the operator of the Shrimp Farm Market in mid-Michigan. Michigan, with it's cold winters, isn't exactly the best habitat for shrimp, but this shrimp farmer is getting around the bad weather by creating his own through use of an enclosed system (Edible WOW magazine had a short story about his farm, available as a PDF).

Wild shrimp aren't without issues, the biggest being "bycatch". The Seafood Watch page on wild-caught imported shrimp notes that "Shrimp trawling has the highest bycatch of any commercial fishery – for every pound of shrimp hauled in, three to 15 pounds of unwanted animals die in the process" (click on the link for wild-caught imported shrimp on the Seafood Watch page for details). More recently, the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig brought worries about chemical contamination of shrimp caught in the Gulf of Mexico.

Notes on sources:

First figure: Availability = domestic supply minus exports plus imports. The shrimp weight is for heads-off creatures, the tuna weight is canned weight. Per capita results were obtained using U.S. population figures from an Excel spreadsheet in the documentation on food availability at the USDA, which covers U.S. residents plus Armed Forces overseas.

Second and third figures: import data by country and form of import are from USDA's Economic Research Service. U.S. landings are from NOAA's Fisheries Statistics Division,(PDF).

The figures were created using the Calc application in the free software suite Open Office. It's a pretty good replacement for Excel, but I'm still learning to deal with its quirks.

Random link from the archive: It's time for a political do-not-mail list

The Yogurt Routine

2011-01-09T10:14:00.000-08:00

Of all the things I tried in my kitchen in 2010, learning to make yogurt was by far the most valuable. I had tried once or twice in previous years, with rather poor results, but then in early 2010 I figured it out. Euclidarms* wrote a long piece about his yogurt technique at La Vida Locavore that really opened my eyes, and soon thereafter Cherie Picked helped me a bit more. By the middle of 2010 I had developed a system that worked for me and settled into a loose routine of home yogurt making.

I'm probably saving a good deal of money (perhaps $1 per quart), but what's more important to me is that I'm avoiding a good deal of plastic (like the tubs in the manipulated photo above). Instead of bringing home a new plastic container of yogurt every week, I buy milk in a reusable glass bottle or a compostable paper carton, thus making a big dent in plastic use (and of the piles of plastic in my container cupboard). In addition, it's one more thing I'm doing myself, which is often a good feeling.

Heat, Cool, Mix, Wait
Making yogurt at home is surprisingly easy: heat, cool, mix and wait. In more detail:

Heat: heat milk in a saucepan over gentle heat to about 190 °F (88 °C), stirring frequently. Heating the milk modifies the whey proteins, which will give you a finer, more compact curd. (For more on yogurt science, see a column by Harold McGee in the New York Times.)
Cool: let the milk cool to 120 °F (49 °C)
Mix: mix in some yogurt and pour the mixture into a clean pre-warmed container. Wrap the container with towels.
Wait: Let the container sit in a warm place for a few hours until it sets.

That's the basic outline, and here are many more of the details woven into the system that I settled on. Note that what works for me might not work for you and that there are many ways of making yogurt at home, so another approach might be ideal for you.

A few hours before heating the milk, I put a few tablespoons of yogurt from the previous batch into a room-temperature glass bowl and let it sit so that the cultures can reactivate and be ready for their big cultural event
When it is time to start the heating process. I save about a half-cup of milk for the week's tea, and pour the rest into a saucepan that is set on top of a heat diffuser (something like this). I turn the heat to medium.
Stirring frequently, I let the milk get to about 190 °F (88 °C), then turn off the heat.
After turning off the heat, I put some hot water into a very clean one-quart canning jar so the jar will be warm when it receives the milk-yogurt mixture (I only use jars that have gone through an automatic dishwasher cycle, but if I didn't have one available, I'd rinse the jar with boiling water to thoroughly disinfect the jar).
I let the milk cool to about 120 °F (49 °C).
I add a small amount of warm milk to the yogurt to temper it (thus avoiding thermal shock), then add the rest of the warm milk and whisk everything together. Next, I pour the warm water out of the jar, pour the milk-yogurt mixture into the warm jar, give it one last stir, and screw on a lid.
Working quickly, I wrap the jar in two or three layers of kitchen towel, using rubber bands to hold each layer in place.
I put the wrapped jar in a warm place — my oven (which has a pilot light) and prop the door partially open to avoid overheating (thanks to an absurdly large pilot light, the temperature of the oven with the door closed is far too hot to yogurt making, perhaps 140-150 °F).
Four hours later (more or less), I remove the wrapped jar, unwrap it, and put the jar into the refrigerator.

Fitting it into the Rat Race
The process I just listed works great on weekends when I have a 4 1/2 hour block, but on weekdays it can be hard to get everything done between the time I get home and go to sleep. So I've devised a slightly different process for reactivating the culture. I bring the last batch of yogurt and a glass bowl to work, putting the yogurt in the refrigerator and leaving the bowl at room temperature. In the mid-afternoon, I put a few tablespoons of yogurt into the bowl and leave it at room temperature. This way, the culture has a chance to get reactivated during the end of the workday and is ready when I start the process at 6:30 or 7 PM at home.

Additional Notes and a Question
Many months after getting into a routine, I noticed that Paula Wolfert's "The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean" has an appendix about yogurt and a recipe for making it at home. Wolfert writes that the most prized yogurt in the Eastern Mediterranean is made from buffalo's or sheep's milk because of the high butterfat content. With regard to home culturing, she relates an old saying about the culturing process: "the quicker the sweeter." In other words, the faster you can make the yogurt set, the sweeter it will taste, so some yogurt makers pour the warm milk-yogurt mixture into small jars for culturing. At 100 F, a batch of yogurt will jell in about 6 hours. At a lower temperature, it could take as long as 24 hours and give you a much tarter result.

Writer and editor Jennifer Jeffrey wrote about a clever way of managing yogurt culturing temperature with a hacked slow-cooker. By installing a dimmer switch in the power cord, she could control the amount of energy reaching the cooker's heating elements, thus controlling the temperature of the water bath. (If you are going to hack commercial appliances, be sure you know what you are doing and follow good safety practices!)

Finally, a question for those who make yogurt at home: wouldn't it make a lot of sense to use the microwave to heat the milk? Microwave heating is even and gentle, therefore seeming less likely to scorch the milk than a pot on the stove.

*euclidarms is the La Vida Locavore username of Ed Bruske, a.k.a. "the slow cook." Bruske is a writer who has written some amazing pieces on school lunch in Washington, D.C., Berkeley, and Boulder. To research his articles, he doesn't just look around and talk to people, he actually works in the kitchen. You can find his multi-part articles at the Slow Cook (look to the right column).

Random link from the archive: Tempura at Ten-Ichi in Tokyo

Cross posted at La Vida Locavore

Okara, tofu's humble relative, lends its name to high-end hair-care products

2010-12-23T11:34:00.000-08:00

During my last haircut, the conversation turned to chocolate (a regular topic), and so I told my sad story of scheduling stupidity, chocolate and soy. As part of their "Taste Project," Recchuiti Confections' collaborated with Hodo Soy Beanery to explore the pairing of chocolate with the many incarnations of the soybean. I bought a ticket soon after the announcement, marked it in my Outlook calendar and made a mental note. But somehow, I foolishly convinced myself that it was on Sunday, despite several pieces of information telling me that it was on Saturday, and so I completely missed the event. A few days later, after much of the disappointment had worn off, I was able to see what I had missed in a report by Anita at Dessert First. I recounted some of her report to my stylist and when I mentioned that one of the offerings was chocolate paired with "okara," my stylist jumped at the word “okara.” "Okara? Really?,” he asked, “We sell a line of hair-care products called okara and everyone in the salon has been wondering what it was."

After my haircut, I took a look at the shelves and there it was: the Okara line of shampoos, conditioners and treatments from the French company Rene Furterer. On their website, the company claims that their products are "proven to protect and enhance color-treated hair" thanks in part to "okara extract, a protein from the soybean, [that] repairs and rebuilds damaged hair." .

Honorable Husk
So what exactly is okara? Okara is a Japanese word for the by-product of the soymilk and tofu making process; it is the fibrous material that remains after cooked soybeans are pressed through screens to separate the liquid from the solids (in Korean is biji). Since it is mostly considered a by-product, it is rarely seen or spoken of — I have been eating tofu and drinking soymilk for decades, yet I rarely see it mentioned, and the first time I saw okara "in the flesh" was on a tour of Hodo Soy Beanery in Oakland just a few months ago (I wrote a summary of my visit for the Ethicurean).

Although okara is generally considered a by-product, it's interesting to note that the Japanese word begins with the letter "o", a term of honor in Japanese. Thus, with kara meaning shell, hull or husk, o-kara means "honorable kara." The honorific "o" indicates its importance to the Japanese during their long history with soybeans (note also that the Japanese word for tofu is often prefixed with "o."). One prominent example of the importance of okara is in Donald Ritchie's "A Taste of Japan", where he mentions Arai Hakuseki, a famous scholar during the Edo period, who claimed to have survived almost entirely on okara donated by a tofu maker while a student. When later rich and famous, he gave large gifts to the tofu maker who helped him get through his education. For a long time (and perhaps even today), apprentices in tofu-making shops were given the daily batch of okara as part of their compensation and allowed to sell it wherever they could.

Okara goes by another name in Japan, according to the the SoyInfo Center's "Book of Tofu": unohana, a name that comes from a poem by Basho that referred to the tiny white blossoms of the Deutzia scabra flower.

Okara is edible and nutritious — it has 3.5% protein by weight (about the same as milk on a weight basis) and is high in fiber — but also bland. Because of the blandness and other textural issues, Hodo Soybeanery (and most other tofu makers) sell their okara to livestock producers as animal feed (however, it's worth noting that Hodo has experimented with prepared dishes like a hummus analogue made with okara instead of chickpeas, and use it in their vegetable patties. They also will bring it to their Farmers Market stand with prior arrangement).
The Book of Tofu has a chart showing the protein content of each stream of the process which I have adapted below. Each box lists an element in the tofu-making process with the percentage of original soy protein listed below. Tofu contains about 73% of the original protein of the raw soybeans, with 17% ending up in the okara and almost 10% in the whey and storage water.

Okara is also useful as a green cleaning agent: "Tofu Cookery" by Fusako Holthaus notes that okara can be used to polish floors and woodwork. The book recommends wrapping okara in a cloth and applying vigorously to a surface, but is short on details (should the okara be dry or moist? What kind of cloth is recommended?).

Okara in Japan Today
I asked the "Tokyo correspondent" for Mental Masala about his experience with okara in today's Japan and received the following report:

Okara has always been around (my wife said that growing up in Japan she would sometimes have it), but over the past few year's it's kind of become popular again because it's relatively inexpensive and healthy. A few years ago, when I first saw a cooking show with them making Tofu/Okara hamburgers, I tried to find it in the supermarket but couldn't. Some people told me that if you ask at a Tofu store they often give it to you for free, or relatively cheap. But lately I've been seeing bags of it in the supermarket - sometimes pre-packaged as an actual product. The Tofu truck that comes around every day at about 4:00 p.m. through the neighborhood also sells bags of it (or fresh soybeans that you can boil and marinate in soy sauce and mirin and vinegar or whatever) along with Tofu.

Additional Information

For more about okara, Mother Earth News had a feature article in 1983 with production instructions and a handful of recipes.
If you want to make your own soy milk (and thus get a pile of okara), at Just Hungry has detailed instructions.
The SoyInfo Center's The Book of Tofu has a chapter on okara with many recipes.

Image credits: Photo of okara product from the Rene Furterer website. Photo of Deutzia scabra by Wouter Hagens, downloaded from Wikimedia Commons. Image

Random link from the archive: Kingfisher World Curry Week - Eggplant Curry

The Temper-Spoon, a device for temperature measurement while stirring

2010-11-21T18:58:00.000-08:00

Buying a Thermapen to handle temperature measurement in the kitchen was a bit of an extravagance, but since I've spent much of my professional career concerned with accurate temperature measurement (e.g., combustion products above a glowing ceramic tile, diesel engine exhaust), I'm very picky about temperature measurement. Particularly, I like to know where the sensor is reading and like to get the answer quickly. The lower-priced devices that I have tried, such as a digital sensor from Taylor, fail on both counts. The Thermapen, however, is fast and has its temperature sensing device at the tip of the probe, so it has passed most of my tests (though not always with A's).

But when it comes to liquids — like heating or cooling milk for home-made yogurt — I've been wanting an add-on device so that I can measure liquid temperature while stirring. My hypothetical solution: a clip-on spoon accessory, the "Temper-Spoon," which I have sketched below in a multi-view drawing (front, top and side views). It is basically a spoon that has been modified to have a hole in its scoop and can attach to the thermometer. The hole in the scoop allows liquids to flow across the temperature probe while stirring a liquid; its dimension should be large enough to let a good amount of fluid pass across the probe, while still having enough material remaining to stir the liquid.

Soon after I bought my Thermapen, I tried to make a Temper-spoon by drilling a hole in an old wooden spoon and using block of wood to attach the two. Since I was dealing with two cylinders, I drilled two holes into the block of wood: one was the diameter of the spoon and the other was the diameter of the Thermapen probe. It was a minor success for a time, until the attachment block split apart. The choice of a wooden spoon was sub-optimal, as I worried about the somewhat rough wood harboring bacteria (a stainless steel or silicone model would be preferable). ThermoWorks, the manufacturer of the Thermapen and other temperature measurement devices makes a stationary probe holder, but no spoon accessory. If you are enthusiastic about temperature measurement in the kitchen, have you tried building a spoon-thermometer hybrid? Or seen any other good ideas?

Random link from the archive: Sweet Potato Leaves