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The Occasional Food Post – September 2, 2011

By Brian Filed in Food Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , September 2nd, 2011 @ 11:34 am

How many times have you watched a cooking show or read a recipe that involved adding some amount of alcohol to a dish where the assertion was made that “all the alcohol cooks out of the dish”? It’s one of those bits of cooking lore that has gone unquestioned forever (not unlike the “searing locks in the juices” wisdom that made our instructor at cooking school go mental), but apparently it hasn’t ever been tested very well. At least, that’s what the folks at O Chef.com discovered when they looked at the literature, so they decided to do a little empirical experimentation. What they found is just the opposite of conventional wisdom: MOST of the alcohol remains in cooked dishes unless they simmer for at least TWO HOURS. And that includes dishes that are flambeéd. Short cooking times will take the harsh taste out of the alcohol, but that’s about it.

And speaking of well-worn shibboleths (don’t you just LOVE the word “shibboleth”? I do.), we are all used to the “fact” that the total caloric intake for an adult is 2000 calories per day. This recent post on The Atlantic’s food blog looks at how the FDA came up with that 2000-calorie threshold in the first place. Turns out that 2000 calories really ISN’T the right threshold for most people; depending on body size and other variables, men should consume as much as 3000 calories per day and women as much as 2200 calories. The 2000 figure came from averaging out and rounding down the numbers. You can determine your own ideal caloric intake amount by visiting this page from the British medical journal The Lancet and using their simulator software (you’ll need to have the appropriate Java plug-in in your browser for it to work).

Okay, just one more bit of food science and lore. Scientists have only recently discovered that sugar does not melt when you heat it…it decomposes. They discovered this almost by accident. Scientists long knew that the melting point of sucrose was not consistently the same, but did not know why. So, when some researchers looked at it more closely, they discovered that the variable melting point was due to the sucrose decomposing into different component compounds depending on the rate of heating. What this means is that companies that make processed foods which contain sugar (which, frankly, is pretty much all of them) can change all sorts of characteristics in their products from flavor to texture to storage stability by altering the sugar.

Late summer in New England means it’s finally prime time for local tomatoes, and I’ve already got plans to make my annual batch of slow-roasted tomato sauce, but if you have a surplus of tomatoes (but seriously, can you EVER have a surplus of fresh tomatoes in the late summer?), TV chef Mary Ann Esposito had some suggestions at the Huffington Post recently. I’m also thinking about making a tomato tart — if you have a recipe for one that you like, please pass it along.

If you are a New Englander like me, I am reasonably sure you know what I mean when I say “Greek pizza”. It’s a style of pizza that is very common in this part of the country, where a lot of local pizza-sandwich shops are owned and operated by Greek families. New England Greek pizza is typified by a thicker crust made with a very “short” dough (a dough that has a lot of fat, usually olive oil, in it), very light sauce, and a thick layer of cheese that almost always includes cheddar. I have read that most of the Greek-owned pizza joints in this region use the name “House Of Pizza”, which is how you can figure out where to go to get one…I don’t know how generally true that is, but practically every place I know that has “House of Pizza” in the name from Maine to Massachusetts is Greek. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, resident expert at Serious Eats.com recently wrote about New England Greek pizza and using his best Cooks Illustrated training came up with a method for making it at home. Kenji is actually a little harsh on this style of pizza, I think, but it definitely isn’t the cracker-thin wood-oven artisanal pie that pizza purists love these days. I find that every once in a while I really want a Greek pizza, so I was tickled when we discovered a place right around the corner from our house that makes an especially good one; freshness is critical to this style of pizza, and the proximity of this pizza joint means I can get one home almost immediately after it comes out of the oven. MMmmm…

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The Occasional Food Post – June 29, 2011

By Brian Filed in Food, Infographics, Links Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , June 29th, 2011 @ 12:26 pm

Just a quick one this week:

Lapham’s Quarterly features this map which traces the paths taken by three now-ubiquitous, but once rare, foods as they were “discovered” and spread by European explorers in the 16th Century: tomatoes, coffee beans, and black pepper. Here’s the full-sized image, where you can actually read the blurbs. Actually, in the case of black pepper, traders have bought and sold it since Roman times, if not earlier, but it was a rare and expensive spice up until the modern era. There’s also some interesting factoids about ketchup; apparently it was invented by the Chinese, but did not include tomatoes until some colonial New Englanders devised their own recipe about 100 years later.

Well, heaven forbid I miss out on this item going around: a New York Times blog post about the origin of the embossed design on Oreo cookies has been popping up on all my reads lately. Apparently the current design only dates back to the 1950s; the original design from 1912 is much plainer. That post inspired this post on The Atlantic’s food blog, which extends the idea to consider possible hidden meanings and mystical symbology in Oreos and other embossed cookies and crackers, and even gives a little “How It’s Made” lesson in the process used to make embossed cookies. Even showbiz blogger Mark Evanier weighed in on the Oreo posts and included his personal story about the Oreo-Hydrox rivalry. Now the latest twist is this link to an artist who lives in Somerville, MA and makes highly-detailed cameo portraits using Oreo cookie halves and the creme filling. Since NEXT year is the 100th anniversary of the Oreo cookie, I am wondering what PR flack from Nabisco got this ball rolling a year ahead of time and why.

These next two links speak volumes: This Mother Jones article (via MetaFilter) details a years-long struggle between processed-meat manufacturer Hormel and workers in the factory in Iowa where the company makes Spam. The workers claim that unsafe production processes exposed them to aerosolized pig brains which caused their bodies to develop an autoimmune disease that has left many of them crippled for life. The vivid descriptions of the carcass-processing floor are as evocative and unpalatable as “The Jungle”.

At the other end of the spectrum, our friend Chef Jo delights in telling us about a farm in Groton, MA that produces hand-raised, grass-fed beef and REAL free-range chickens. If you are in the Greater Boston area, here’s their schedule of farmer’s markets if you don’t want to drive all the way to Groton.

And I’ll leave you with a couple of infographics to help you in the kitchen:

This one illustrates the differences between the assorted knife cuts called for in preparing vegetables

And this one should help you understand the degrees of doneness when cooking steak:

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The Occasional Food Post: June 17, 2011

By Brian Filed in Food, Links Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , June 17th, 2011 @ 12:00 pm

In the wake of the release of this year’s report on pesticide use in fruit and vegetable farming, The Atlantic’s food blog featured a list of the “dirtiest” and “cleanest” types of produce based on the amount of pesticides used on those crops. As usual, apples remain the most pesticide-laden item in the supermarket, while the least-pesticide-laden items include onions, sweet corn, watermelons, and cabbage.

You can bet this doesn’t get Alton Brown’s vote of approval: Plow & Hearth’s corn kerneler ($12.95) removes all the kernels from an ear of corn in one go. Me, I use my big-ass chef’s knife.

Back in 2009, I posted about a story in Gourmet Magazine abouth the plight of migrant farm workers indentured to the tomato farms in Immokalee, Florida and the efforts of a group called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to unionize the labor and improve the working conditions. Earlier this week, NY Times food columnist Mark Bittman posted an article about the ups and downs of that movement and about Barry Estabrook’s new book “Tomatoland”, which documents how industrialized agriculture has ruined tomatoes and created this modern slavery for farm workers.

Speaking of Gourmet Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine’s food blogger Lisa Bramen decided that she wanted to make a special birthday dinner for her husband using recipes from the year that he was born, 1978 (the year I turned 15, BTW). She searched through some of Gourmet’s recipes from that year and came up with a menu of Chicken Veronique, curried rice, a garden salad, and grasshopper pie. She sounds a little disappointed that the menu didn’t include family dinner fare like Sloppy Joes and tacos, but that’s why they called it “Gourmet”, chica. If she wanted to make the sort of crap we really ate in the 1970s, she should have gone through the back issues of Good Housekeeping. Still, it’s kind of a cute idea, even if it is a little too close to “Julie and Julia” territory. A back issue of Gourmet from August, 1963 is only $4.59 on Amazon.

You probably know that McDonald’s restaurants in countries other than the U.S. often developed special menu items to cater to the tastes and/or dietary restrictions of those countries. India has been a particular challenge, given that Mickey D’s speciality is beef burgers and Hindus don’t eat beef, but they have developed a whole menu for the India market. The paneer-based “McCurry Pan” you see in the image above is now being replaced with a sandwich made with a paneer patty (called the “McSpicy Paneer”, of course), which is being hailed as a triumph in development and production in the global marketplace according to this Business Today article.

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Linkapalooza 2/23/09 – Food

By Brian Filed in Food, Links Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , February 23rd, 2009 @ 3:11 pm

(Ed. note: I’ll start including dates on these “linkapalooza”-style posts, because it makes it hard to find a specific one)


I guess there’s a bit of a Mario Battali backlash brewing among the foodies. Doug at BarfBlog has this rather unflattering post which is mostly directed at the thoughtlessness of R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe, but manages to throw in a couple of good slams at Mario, too. And Slashfood tattles on Mario’s molto vulgaro behavior in front of the King and Queen of Spain (cue Moxy Früvous here). Serious Eats failed to chime in, but that’s probably because Mario’s a contributor there, and you don’t want to aggravate your celebrity buddies.


The New York Times reports that the brand management people at PepsiCo-owned Tropicana have decided to give up on the recent redesign of their packaging and go back to the older graphics due to lots of complaints from customers. Well, maybe not LOTS of customers, but some very loyal and (I presume) loud ones, anyway. Mutual Friend of Torrez, David Wertheimer may or may not have been one of those loud and loyal few, but he sums up the problem with the new packaging pretty accurately: the old cartons made it very easy to tell which sub-variety of Tropicana juice you were buying, but the new packaging makes it next to impossible, and that pisses off anyone who has to waste time searching for it in the grocery store.
I wish the people who redesigned the labeling for Pepsi itself would take a lesson from this. The redesign of the labels on the assorted Pepsi soda products sucks ass. The logo has been parodied all over the Internet for looking like everything from a fat guy to someone’s ass crack, and the typeface used for the actual content labels is unreadable. Not long ago, I bought what I thought was a 12-pack of Diet Pepsi, only to get home and find that I had bought caffeine-free Diet Pepsi because the words “caffeine-free” can’t be read on the package, and because they changed the label’s color from the industry-default “brown means decaf” to white. Bastiges! At the same time, I have also read that Pepsi plans to bring out a temporary promotion with “throwback” versions of regular Pepsi and Mountain Dew made with real cane sugar instead of HFCS, and I notice in that article that they also plan to use the older logos (in the case of Pepsi, a very old logo). Pepsi did very well with its “Pepsi Raw” promotion in international markets last year, and despite those stupid pro-HFCS ads all over television, there is a lot of well-founded opposition to the over-prevalence of HFCS.
Oh, and while the attention has been focused on PepsiCo, the Coca-Cola Company somewhat quietly announced that they will drop the word “Classic” from their Coke packaging. Considering that the reason they put it there in the first place, namely the ill-fated New Coke, died almost 20 years ago, I’d say they’re a little slow on the uptake.


Häagen-Dazs is trying to make a play for the “simple foods” crowd by marketing several flavors of ice cream under a label called “Five”, meant to stand for there only being five ingredients in those blends: milk, cream, sugar, egg, and whatever flavoring the ice cream has, That’s all you really need for any ice cream, but you’d be extremely hard pressed to find any national brand of ice cream that doesn’t contain things like carrageenan or guar gum to “enhance mouthfeel” and assorted other food additives to prolong shelf-life and retard ice crystal formation. But wait, you say…I remember those commercials for Breyers Ice Cream where they specifically said they didn’t have any of those other things. Well, yes you do, grasshopper, and so do I, but those commercials are from the distant past. You see, in 1993 Breyers was bought up by the conglomerate Unilever, and while they left things alone for a while, eventually their greedy little desires got the better of them and they started adding a substance called “tara gum” , and then finally gave up pretending and moved on to using guar (check the ingredients of, say, plain vanilla). But…but…but what about Ben & Jerry’s? Surely those aging hippies would NEVER use additives! Mais non, mon cher, Unilever also owns Ben & Jerry’s nowadays (though they keep Ben around for appearances’ sake) and that wholesome Vermont hippie shtick is just so much horsehockey. Now, for the big bucks, guess who owns Häagen-Dazs…I think you can see where this is going.


There is no food more uninspiring than the commercially-grown supermarket-grade tomato. All but flavorless, with a texture somewhere between gelatinous and rubbery, they are picked green, refrigerated for weeks, and sprayed with ethylene gas to turn red even though they are nowhere close to ripe. All in the name of looking perfect on a grocery store display. But as bland and blah as they are, the industry that produces them engages in the modern-day equivalent of legalized slavery to get them to market. This eye-opening story in the latest Gourmet magazine explains that 90% of the tomatoes sold in the U.S. during the winter months come from Immokalee, Florida and that practically all of the growers there systematically intimidate, abuse, and hold against their will tens of thousands of legal and illegal immigrant farm workers. A local action group called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is making slow headway against the abuses of the growers but is still trying to convince the Republican governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, to take enforceable legal action (fat chance).
I have enough links for another Food Linkapalooza post later in the week, so stay tuned for more!

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Vindicated!

By Brian Filed in Food Tagged with , , July 23rd, 2008 @ 5:53 pm

A-ha!

It was the jalapeños what dunnit!

To celebrate, I’ve purchased some nice hydroponic tomatoes, fresh basil, and some cherrywood-smoked buffala mozzarella to make a lovely plate of Calabrese Salad like this:

The local tomatoes are beginning to show up here and there, so let the feasting begin!

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Be Careful What You Eat

By Brian Filed in Food Tagged with , , , July 7th, 2008 @ 2:58 pm

You might not catch salmonella from these tomatoes, but who knows what you might catch instead…

Apparently the FDA has been beating the wrong bush, so to speak. Now there’s some credence to the idea that it wasn’t the tomatoes, it was the jalapeno peppers that people were eating, and the tomatoes were just guilty by association. Or maybe it was the cilantro. Sounds like all you really need to do is avoid salsa.

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Linkapalooza – Food

By Brian Filed in Food Tagged with , , , , , , , , , June 20th, 2008 @ 2:32 pm

I think I’ve settled on “Linkapalooza” as a generic name for these posts. Today, it’s food links.

  • Somewhere recently I read a post on some food blog about how to properly store cheese (though I didn’t save the link), and it kept talking about using “cheese paper” to wrap the leftovers. I had never heard of “cheese paper”, but apparently they knew what they were talking about because this morning bookofjoe had a link to this site, which sells it. Cheese paper, it turns out, is basically wax paper with a gas-permeable film on the inside that lets the cheese breathe, extending its shelf life better than plastic wrap or even conventional wax paper. Zabar’s sells it for less than Formaticum does, but there’s no indication if Zabar’s sells it in the same quantity/size, so I don’t know if it’s a better deal or not. Here’s a link to a cheese blog (hey, why not?) with some alternate storing suggestions. If any of you have personal experience using real cheese paper, do tell.
  • My friend Jo pointed me to a blog about food safety (charmingly, if aptly, named BarfBlog), which in turn pointed to this USA Today article about the latest on the tomato salmonella panic. Turns out more than 10% 4% of the cases tied to this particular outbreak are people who all ate at the same fast food outlet. Big surprise there…NOT. Both the BarfBlog guy and the USA Today article point out that due to the rural nature of the population where the first outbreak was found, investigators had to do a lot of pavement-pounding and personal interviews to find out the sort of things they want to know, like where people had been eating out, so it took longer than it might in an urban area to dig up the necessary clues. And what exactly causes these salmonella outbreaks, you ask? Well, the migrant farm workers who pick the tomatoes are very often not given bathroom breaks or adequate sanitation facilities, and so they shit in the field, don’t wash afterwards, and go right back to picking tomatoes (or whatever).
  • A couple of weeks ago I ran across this Village Voice article about an “anti-energy” drink called “Drank”. Energy drinks are the new killer category in the beverage business, and it seems like there’s a new one every other day. I’ve only tried a couple of them, but have found those to be nasty tasting, horrible things, but the appeal to the youngsters is to mix them with alcohol and get the dual effect of being buzzed from caffeine and hammered from booze at the same time. Well, at least they’re not mainlining heroin, so that’s something, I guess. Anyway, while energy drinks are loaded with such bizarre ingredients as guarana (a highly-caffeinated seed) and taurine (which apparently has no energy-giving properties at all but is in Red Bull, so all the energy drinks *have* to have it), this “Drank” beverage has melatonin, valerian root, and rose hips, all of which are traditional sleep-inducing or relaxation-inducing substances. The marketing tag for “Drank” is “slow your roll”, and it sounds like this would do just that. In the process of chasing links for “Drank”, I learned that it takes its name from a homemade intoxicant that is made with codeine-based cough syrup and is popular among the Houston, TX hip-hop scene (which, not surprisingly, is where the soft drink is primarily sold). I guess if they can sell an energy drink called “Cocaine”, why not one called “Drank”.
  • One of the highlights of our trip to Montral last weekend was having lunch at the famed Schwartz’s Deli on Rue St. Laurent. The deli is about as tightly packed a space as any you might encounter: there is a line of tables along one wall, each of which seats five or six people, there’s also a service counter with stools, and a take-out area, all of which leaves not quite enough room for the waiters to squeeze down the middle with the plates. Plus, there is usually a line out the door and down the block, and the place is never empty. While we were waiting for our lunch on Sunday, I read a couple of newspaper articles from 2004 that were posted on the wall. Apparently at that time the owners were considering opening a second location in a different part of downtown Montreal, but ultimately rejected the idea, much to the disappointment of many Montrealers. Now there’s news that they are going to acquire the empty storefront next door to them and expand the original store. (via) That’s probably a better plan anyway, and I will definitely look forward to having a little more elbow room the next time I visit.
  • This Mother Jones article talks about how market speculators are already swooping in for a big score by buying up food commodity futures and waiting for the inevitable global food shortage to set in hard. Caiptalism destroys everything, my friends, and cares not a whit for the consequences. Who cares if millions of people starve, as long as somebody made a buck on it. Fuckers.

CORRECTION: I’ve corrected the figure of the number of people who caught salmonella from one particular fast food chain. I misremembered the figure, but have since found the NYT citation. Thanks for the heads-up, Shelley! — BK

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I Want My Damn Tomatoes!

By Brian Filed in Food, News, Rants Tagged with , , June 12th, 2008 @ 2:08 pm

So yesterday I went to the newest sandwich shop in Our Fair Town, a newly-opened D’Angelo’s (a regional chain that should be recognizable to anyone from New England), and found myself face-to-face with The Killer Tomatoes. No tomato on your sandwich, pal. Some guy Texas died from a bad tomato, so we’re not using ANY tomatoes.

Sheesh.

Look, check out this list of how many states DO NOT have a problem with salmonella in their tomato production stream. Now, granted, the mechanism of distribution for food products in this country means that quite often the produce you are eating came from some place very far away from where you live, but would it really be THAT hard for fast food operators and restaurants to find out where their produce was coming from? ‘Cause, if they came from any of these 28 states or the several foreign countries on the list, there’s no reason to pull them from the shelves except SCAREMONGERING.

Except, of course, the opportunity for all of these guys to save a couple of bucks for a month or so by not buying tomatoes. You see, tomatoes are among the most expensive produce items commonly purchased by food sellers. They’re difficult to ship long distances because of their relative fragility and are more prone to price fluctuations due to weather concerns than hardier produce. You might remember a couple of years ago when the price of tomatoes went through the roof because of bad weather, and a lot of restaurants either stopped buying tomatoes or raised their prices for items that included tomatoes. So here they have the perfect excuse to not buy them, even though the vast majority of commercial buyers of produce are not getting their tomatoes from the affected areas.

Now, I know full well that there aren’t a whole lot of locallay grown tomatoes available in New England any time before mid-July, but I know from buying tomatoes at the greengrocer that our produce comes predominantly from California or Florida, neither of which are associated with this problem. So I would like to respectfully ask all the cheapskate restaurant bean counters and fearmongering PR people to STFU and bring back my tomatoes.

Thank you.

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Tomatoes In January

By Brian Filed in Food, Links Tagged with , , , , , , , December 26th, 2007 @ 2:55 pm

Yes, you can buy tomatoes in the supermarket in January, or any other month of the year, but what you get isn’t much of a tomato. That’s because it comes from who-knows-where, having been picked while green and hard as a rock, then sprayed with ethylene gas to make it turn red in color, even though it’s nowhere near ripe. Then it’s shipped half-way around the world to food wholesalers, who sell the produce to your supermarkets, having first sold all the better-quality stuff to high-end greengrocers and restaurants.

That’s all going to come to an end within the next twenty years or so, as Al Gore’s inconvenient truths come home to roost. The spectacle of the supermarket produce section will simply evaporate as it becomes prohibitively expensive to manage perishable foods the way we have for the last 60-75 years or so. We’ll be back to buying tomatoes only in season, in vastly reduced quantities, and probably only from very local sources. Which, quite honestly, is not entirely a bad thing when you think about it. The unfortunate part is that those of us who have learned to enjoy fresh foods that simply can’t be produced in a given geography will have to unlearn those tastes or else secure significant fortunes to be able to buy them.

Of course, most of us already have access to farm stands and other local growers, and anyone who knows better already takes advantage of those opportunities to enjoy locally-grown fresh foods. As we are forced to shift back to relying on those providers, though, they won’t be entirely able to meet the demand. Nor is everyone likely to chuck their jobs and go back to being farmers themselves. So this is a good time to be finding a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program near you. CSAs range in scope from community gardens to whole farms and produce all sorts of food, keeping some for personal use and selling some in the marketplace. Many urban dwellers in the Boston area already take advantage of CSAs to get fresh local produce, but the time has come for public awareness about CSAs to grown exponentially and for people to begin thinking about where their food is going to come from a few years down the line. The Local Harvest website linked previously has this locator page that can help you find a CSA in your area. Many CSAs are already popular and you sometimes have to sign up well before spring if you want to be able to get the produce, so this is a good time to have a look if you’re at all interested.

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