Journal

Your Lying (Clock) Face

Brian J. Geiger — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 16:51:24 +0000

This month at Fine Cooking, I look at why recipes often steer you wrong when giving advice on how long to cook something.

The Why of the Wooden Spoon

Brian J. Geiger — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:52:29 +0000

This week's Kitchen Mystery on FineCooking.com discusses why recipes often call for wooden spoons, when usually your choice of stirring device is up to you.

A "New Cut of Beef"?

Brian J. Geiger — Wed, 16 May 2012 17:59:56 +0000

On my Twitter feed yesterday, Paul H. Ting passed along a link to a Gizmodo report, "Steak Specialists Discover a New Cut of Beef." My initial reaction was that someone used some Tetris skills to see a new way of slicing a cow so that they could pull out some kind of steak that no butcher before had seen. That's the kind of thinking that I like to see from butchers in the 21st Century. No letting previous generations dictate what makes a tasty steak, no! Go forth and think of things in new and exciting ways. That's the way to do it.

On reading the article, I was disappointed to see that they got patents on this method, which disappointed me. I mean, yay on doing new things and all, but really, a patent on a new way of slicing things? I expressed disappointment and moved along, but Ben Ostrowsky did some digging and found a meat-related patent from Tony Mata, the person mentioned in the article who, well, you can read it:

The Vegas Strip is the brainchild of Tony Mata, of industry group Mata & Associates, who approached Nelson and the FAPC for help developing the cut. "Initially, the cut was labeled as undervalued," Mata told the Drovers Cattle Network. "Whenever we can take a muscle and turn it into a steak rather than grinding it or selling it as a roast, we are adding value to the carcass."

I completely breezed over this the first time, but after seeing the patent, I re-read and wondered, "If it were just a special cut, why would you need the help of a University's agriculture department do 'develop the cut'?" The patent in question is for:

Improved restructured meat products are provided which exhibit enhanced texture, tenderness, juiciness, and flavor. The meat products are formed by mixing together brine-treated, essentially gristle free raw meat strips (e.g., beef, poultry, pork or mixtures thereof) in the form of strips and ground beef containing naturally-occurring fat, followed by forming the mixture into steak-like bodies.

In other words, it might not be a cut of beef that was found, it was assembled from bits and pieces here and there. Which, to me, is disappointing. I mean, yay to making full use of the animal and all, but we could have already ground up the meat if we just wanted to use it. All they've done is found a way to make more steak out of it which, in this day and age, is really just an engineering effort than something truly clever. If the steak had some new properties, such as tenderness of a fillet with flavor of a ribeye, then maybe. But for something which, reportedly "The taste, tenderness, and flavor are reportedly akin to a New York Strip or Flat Iron cut," then it's just some more of what we have.

It's not like there's a steak shortage in the country. If we wanted, and I know I'm going to be unpopular in some camps with this statement, but if we wanted to have more New York Strip steaks, then we could just cut smaller strip steaks. We don't always have to have the plate dominated by beef to enjoy our steak. Have, and please excuse the crazy talk, a small steak, and eat some veggies or pasta or something if you're still hungry. Maybe I'm a steak grinch, but seriously, do we need to reconstruct steaks now because we don't have enough steak?

The answer is clearly, "no". The real reason this is of interest is for people who want to raise the worth of a cow carcass by a few more dollars. More steaks equals more money, so let's find some more steaks. To me, that's the wrong reason to try these experiments on food. Make something excellent, and money will come. Make something profitable, and you get a nation of people who don't know how to regulate what they eat in a balanced and healthy manner.

Mind you, we don't know for sure that the cut of beef and the patent are related; maybe I was right the first time. I would love to hear more from the people involved. If I were a better reporter, I'd call people up and ask Particular Questions. Perhaps tomorrow.

Olives as Ingredient

Brian J. Geiger — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:04:08 +0000

In the US, olives are often thought of as a snack food, to be eaten on their own. Of course, by most, olives in the US are thought to be either green with red centers or black, coming out of a can or a jar, mostly flavorless, and never having seen a pit. But even setting those aside, it's rare to see olives outside of a few dishes: a couple types of pasta sauce, the occasional bread, or a tapenade.

On Twitter, I recently said that, "Olives, good olives, should be a much more common component in cooking." Because every time I run across an olive in a dish, I'm always pleasantly surprised, and it doesn't happen all that often. There's a place a few blocks from me that makes really good empanadas, and the La Traditional has olives. Even with all the use of extra-virigin olive oil for cooking, people don't think, "Hey, let's just add some olives in for even more of that great flavor."

So, here are some guidelines:

Only good olives;
Don't overuse kalamata; they are very salty;
It works really well with meat. You can work it into any sort of ground meat preparation such as hamburgers, meatloaf, meatballs, sausage, whatever;
Olives give a huge savory boost. It is loaded with umami;
Pastas work well with olives; Puttanesca and Puttanesca Bianca are the prime examples;
Speaking of, Puttanesca Bianca is amazing. Try that some time;
Stews;
Mixing the 'stews' and 'meat' recommendation, I think olives judiciously applied to a Chili would be very, very good
Savory pies.

And so on. I will work to incorporate olives into more of my cooking.

A new kind of coffee blend

Brian J. Geiger — Mon, 14 May 2012 10:42:37 +0000

I was chatting with my friend Dan at the Mudhouse, one of Charlottesville's coffee Institutions, the other day. A thought had occurred to me which seemed a bit obvious in retrospect, and as Dan is the person I know who is Most Serious About Coffee, I ask him about all my crazy coffee thoughts.

In this case, I was asking about hand-pour coffee. The question was whether people separate out the various parts of the brewing process and try them separately, so that, for example, you have three cups of coffee instead of one. The first cup represents the first 1/3 of the water that goes through the coffee grounds, the second the second 1/3, and the last the third 1/3. Dan told me that he hadn't done that with the hand pour, but it was part of his training program on espresso for new baristas. Then he gave me a sample.

The first part of the espresso shot tastes like every espresso you'll get in Italy, because italian espresso uses about 1/6 to 1/20 the water that you'll get from just about anywhere in the U.S. It's packed full of flavor, not really any bitterness. The second and third thirds don't have much flavor at all, but they do carry most of the body of the espresso, and I'm not entirely sure what makes up the body of espresso, so I'm going to have to do some research. Note to self. I'm pretty sure it's not collagen, though.

Right now, in artisanal coffee circles, hand-pour coffee is one of the darling techniques, because it allows for a lot of control and you can get a coffee cup full of flavor and nuance in a way that is different from all of the other techniques. It's not a replacement for other coffee brewing methods, naturally, it's just a way of tasting coffee very differently from what you'd get in, say, a French Press. It's especially good for single origin coffees, where you want to know all the nuances of a particular bean.

To hand-pour coffee, you essentially have a filter with ground coffee above a cup. You pour some hot water over the ground coffee, and coffee fills the cup. Very simple method, lots of things to do to get it right.

Here's what I can imagine: divide the hand-pour process into 10 equal pours. Call the resulting parts of the coffee "slices 1 to 10". If some were really, really serious about coffee experimentation, I could see that person saying "For this bean, you want to use slices 2-4, 7, and 9. For that blend, 1-3, 5-8" and so on. Take out the parts of the extraction that don't work for that bean to enhance or reduce whatever aspects aren't right. Of course, just like my explanation of the hand-pour process, if something like that would work it would be much more involved to get it right.

Even more so, a very fast, very meticulous, essentially crazy person might brew slices of different single-origin coffees and blend them together into a single super cup. Such a coffee would either be: a) indistinguishable from other coffees; or b) the most amazing coffee ever. Either way, it would be terribly expensive to do right. Still, fun to imagine.

Mother's Day

Brian J. Geiger — Sun, 13 May 2012 12:29:53 +0000

It's Mother's Day: the day when most Americans take their first step towards cooking for others. Traditionally, this is when a child decides that Mom, one of the two most important people in their life and probably the one most responsible for feeding you up until this point, is going to get breakfast in bed.

Naturally, breakfast will be a disaster. You've never cooked before, or possibly not unsupervised. Perhaps not since you tried this last year. Maybe it'll be an easy goal of cereal and milk, which may get all soggy while the flowers are plucked from the neighbor's garden and arranged just so. Or maybe you'll have gone with toast, blackened, or possibly something like eggs and bacon, depending on how daring you are and whether you can reach the stove. Presuming the fire alarm doesn't go off, you surprise mom in bed with what is probably high on the worst-tasting meal she's ever eaten, and it's still one of the best things you could have done.

Remember this impulse. Remember that the most important thing you can do for someone you love is to cook them a meal. Keep this urge. Don't only develop the skills to cook well, but use food and cooking as a means of conveying caring and not just as a method of transporting flavor and calories. if you do that, then you will understand the most important thing to know about food.

Cook for someone you love.

Happy Mother's Day.

Hospital Food

Brian J. Geiger — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:20:18 +0000

Imagine scrambled eggs. Now imagine them in the shape of a hockey puck. As near as you can tell, they may be reconstituted, and they may be microwaved. They definitely did not have any fat or salt added to them for the cooking process. This is the image that I have of hospital food, because it was what I had to eat while recovering from surgery many years ago.

Hospital food, by and large, is terrible. In the US and Canada definitely, and I suspect in many other places as well. There's a video below about hospital food in Canada, and it goes into the whys and how that particular hospital is changing things. (Thanks Jodi for the link)

There is, I suspect, a deeper reason for the lack of attention (and money) paid to hospital food, and that's because there's a belief that, from a healing perspective, food is less important than medicine. Food, to many, is about avoiding bad things, and is about nutritional content and calorie count and the like. If you can keep those quantifiable things vaguely in line, then whatever you eat is just as good as anything else.

Personally, I don't believe that's the case. Aside from our inability to really understand what's happening with the interaction between food and our bodies except in the case of a few small factors (cholesterol, fat, vitamins, fiber, etc), we really don't know how food works. Even ignoring that, there's a bigger issue, which is how we feel.

When you're home and you get the flu, what do you want? Comfort food. Most likely, you want chicken soup, especially if you're raised in certain cultures. Maybe the details of the kind of food differ, but when you are feeling poorly, one of the things that makes you feel better is good food. It's not just fuel, it sets the tone for the day. It gives you motivation and energy. In cognitive terms, if you can use the sense memories around food to bring back memories of comforting times, then your brain will be primed more for comfort than for pain. You might, might, even heal faster. At the very least, you won't suffer as much while you are recovering.

If the best the food can offer is bringing up memories of either other trips to the hospital or maybe an airline trip in coach class, then neither of those associations are going to help.

Another issue, one that honestly I'm surprised to hear is a thing, is that hospitals aren't paying attention to food allergies. If someone is gluten intolerant, and you feed them something wheat-y, then we're not talking about psychological effects, but genuine physiological harm. That's beyond the realm of misguided and into the range of seriously negligent.

Incidentally, there are some hospitals, I'm told, that have really good food. Not just "Good for hospital food" food, but honest-to-goodness good food. Here is a short list of hospitals with good food that my Twitter followers sent me:

Candler Memorial Hospital in Savannah GA apparently had fantastic hamburgers (via Michael)
Hopital in York, ME (via Matt)
Hospitals, mostly in NYC, that have Bikur Cholim Services (via Sarah)

Let them eat cake

Brian J. Geiger — Wed, 09 May 2012 20:53:46 +0000

The story (mostly false) goes that Marie Antoinette, shortly before becoming a foot shorter, was talking with an advisor. The advisor told her that the peasants had no bread, and she responded, "Let them eat cake!" Ignoring the historical accuracy of the quote or the players, the language and its relation to food is what I'm interested in. (History? Pah!)

A more accurate quote is closer to, "The peasants don't have baguettes*," and, "So let them eat brioche!" The thing is, back when the phrase was popularly introduced in the English Language, there wasn't really an appreciation of the many kinds of french breads that exist as there are today. And, truth be told, I suspect a great many people still don't have a full enough appreciation of the different bread types, so it's not like a more accurate translation is going to work its way into the mainstream.

Still, a guy can dream.

*- Okay, okay. Baguette is a shape, and the actual type of bread is the lean bread known as "le pain." However, "pain" being a very distinct word in English that nobody uses for bread, it would completely confuse people. Frankly, I'm very close to banning this phrase in English or maybe altogether. There are just too many problems with it.

Rainy Day BBQ

Brian J. Geiger — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:06:15 +0000

Original Recipe By: Fort Worth Star-Telegram 1968. We make this probably once or so per year, and it's great for parties as long as you don't think doubling the amount of meat won't significantly affect cooking time (whoops!). The secret is in the plum/prune baby food. Totally not proper barbecue, but still awfully tasty.

Ingredients

4-5 lbs. beef brisket

Marinade:

1 T. celery seed
1 t. garlic powder
1 t. onion salt
1 ½ t. salt
2 T. Worcestershire sauce
2 t. ground pepper
2 T. liquid smoke
1 t. lemon juice

Barbecue Sauce:

½ C. catsup
¼ C. wine vinegar
1 small jar plum baby food
½ C. brown sugar
½ medium onion, finely chopped
2 T. lemon juice
1 t. freshly ground black pepper

Directions

Mix marinade ingredients together and marinate brisket in tightly covered glass casserole for 12 hours in the refrigerator.
Combine the barbecue sauce ingredients and bring to a boil in saucepan, stirring constantly. After mixture boils, continue to simmer for 7 min.
Cook brisket in 275 degree oven in a pan tightly covered with aluminum foil for 3 hours. Remove pan for oven and pour off liquid. Cover brisket with ½ of the barbecue sauce and recover.
Return to oven for 30 min.
To serve: Slice brisket with sharp knife on the bias. Serve with extra sauce.

Breeding for convenience

Brian J. Geiger — Tue, 08 May 2012 15:12:15 +0000

When we changed from being strictly hunter/gatherers to becoming farmers, we decided that the natural world was not enough to support our needs, and we decided to focusing on making food more convenient for us. At first, it was probably mostly being more conveniently located, and ensuring that those items in the convenient location have the best chance for survival and growth. As time went on, though, we gained the skills and knowledge to modify what we grew to have different traits. Some of this was from selecting the seeds of various plants that we liked the best, and continuing to select seeds from later generations that more accurately matched our desires. In other cases, we would take a natural process of cross breeding, as happens with grasses, and diversify grains into things like corn and wheat. Both useful, both grasses, both very different.

When the advent of high-speed trucking, shipping, and freight-hauling hit its peak, food growers realized that they could expand their market by selecting some traits, such as ability to withstand damage, over others, such as flavor. The big example in this case is the tomato, which went from a delicious fruit/vegetable thing to becoming a tasteless bit of watery ornamentation that goes on top of a sandwich. When convenience is chosen over flavor, the food suffers.

This is not to say that convenience and flavor are mutually exclusive, or that with enough work, we can't create a series of tomatoes that can survive shipping *and* have all sorts of different, and good, flavors. However, each additional variable adds a lot of extra complexity, and it becomes less profitable to bundle it all into one. This is why year-long, grocery store tomatoes are not likely to be as good as locally-grown, farm fresh tomatoes without being much more expensive. Worse, that's likely to remain the case for many, many years, if it ever changes at all.

I also think of this whenever I eat a fresh concord grape. They are packed with all the flavor in the world, but their seeds and skin leave a little to be desired. Seedless grapes, on the other hand, are really easy to eat, but have a flavor best described as, "insipid".

So be cautious of the compromise you make when choosing your food. Putting forth a little extra effort, or waiting until the right time, will almost always give you significantly better flavor than choosing the convenience route. Which is not to say that you can never choose convenience, just know what you are giving up.