Category: Food

🎧 Whatever happened to British veal? | Eat This Podcast

Listened to Whatever happened to British veal? Too cute to eat, or the only ethical response? by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:38 — 18.6MB)

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Dairy cows unavoidably produce male calves that are of no use to the dairy industry. They used to end up as veal, and in 1960, Britons ate more than 600,000 calves worth of the stuff. By the 1980s, that had dropped to less than 35,000. Ten years ago, a UK trade magazine said that “public opinion … generally regards veal as ethically somewhere between dodo omelettes and panda fritters”.

And yet, today there’s no shortage of veal and no surplus of dairy bullocks.

Time was when veal calves were kept in the dark. These days, it may be the shoppers who have helped to solve the problem of surplus male dairy calves. Behind the shift is a complicated story of moral outrage, utterly unpredictable disease outbreaks and the willingness of some strange bedfellows to work together to solve a difficult problem for the food supply system.

Notes

  1. Gillian Hopkinson is a senior lecturer at Lancaster University School of Management.
  2. Clips from BBC Radio 4 – You and Yours and BBC World Service – Witness, Mad cow disease – CJD.
  3. Music by Podington Bear.
  4. Banner photo of two Dutch dairy calves by Peter Nijenhuis and cover by debstreasures.
The realities of milk and beef production may not always square with our societal morality. Things are more complicated than they may seem and require second and third level thought and problem solving to come up with worthwhile solutions. I remember outcry when I was younger and knew that things had shifted, but haven’t heard any follow up stories until now. Glad to know that things seem to have reached some sort of equilibrium that seems generally acceptable.

🎧 Hoptopia | Eat This Podcast

Listened to Hoptopia How the Willamette valley conquered the world of tasty beer by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:56 — 22.6MB)

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Brewers have long appreciated the value of hops from the Pacific northwest, but it was Cascade, a variety practically synonymous with craft brewing, that made the area more generally famous among beer drinkers. Cascade was named for the Cascade Range, which runs down the west coast of North America. The home of the Cascade hop is the Willamette valley, roughly halfway between the mountains and the coast. Cascade was released in 1972, but the history of hops in the Willamette valley goes back to the 1830s. The industry has seen more than its fair share of ups and downs, all examined by historian Peter Kopp in his book Hoptopia.

The whole question of changing tastes in beer, and how that affects the fortunes of different hops, is fascinating. If you’ve been a listener forever, you may remember a very early Eat This Podcast, about the rediscovery of an English hop known prosaically as OZ97a. Deemed too hoppy and abandoned when first tried, the vogue for craft beers resurrected its fortunes. It’s a fun story, though I say so myself.

Notes

  1. Peter Kopp’s book is Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
  2. Cover photo is Ezra Meeker, the early grower of hops in the Willamette valley who pioneered the global marketing of Oregon hops. The booming hop business made him the territory’s first millionnaire, and perhaps also its biggest bust. Hop King: Ezra Meeker’s Boom Years chronicles that part of his long, rich life.
  3. Banner photo of hops by Paul on Flickr.
I had a roommate in college from the Czech Republic who fondly remembered spending time on hops farms picking what he called the county’s “green gold”. It’s interesting to think about the economic and cultural differences and norms built up around such a product. I hadn’t known that the Pacific Northwest figured so prominently in production and find it amazing that the economic timing for the industry was so fortuitous.

What a fantastic episode on all fronts.

👓 Climate Change Is Messing With Your Dinner | Bloomberg

Read Climate Change Is Messing With Your Dinner by Agnieszka de Sousa and Hayley Warren (Bloomberg.com)
The future of food looks like lots of lobsters, Polish chardonnay and California coffee.
This is a difficult story to tell, though the timelapse imagery here is relatively useful. If one had some extra money lying around, it certainly indicates which crops one could be shorting in the markets over the next few decades.

I can imagine Jeremy Cherfas doing something interesting and more personalizing with this type of story via his fantastic interviews on Eat This Podcast.

h/t Jorge Spinoza

🎧 A visit to Hummustown | Eat This Podcast

Listened to A visit to Hummustown: Doing good by eating well by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast
Refugees selling the food of their homeland to get a start in a new life is, by now, a cliché. Khaled (in the photo) joined their ranks a year ago. But cliché or not, selling food is an important way to give people work to do, wages, and hope. If it’s happening on your doorstep, which it is, and the food is good, which it is, what’s a hungry podcaster to do? Go there, obviously, and report back. Which is why, a couple of weeks ago, I found myself, microphone in hand, waiting patiently in line for a falafel wrap.



Truth be told, there aren’t that many Syrian refugees in Italy. The most recent official statistics put the total at around 5000 with a little over 600 in Rome. Hummustown is helping a few of them.

Notes

  1. The Hummustown website tells more of the story and has a link to the GoFundMe campaign.

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Somewhat different than the usual episode here, but in the best of ways. Still a wonderful look at food, culture, and humanity wrapped up in a fantastic story.

👓 Farm Girl Café, Chelsea: ‘We don’t stay for dessert, because we have suffered enough’ – restaurant review | The Guardian

Read Farm Girl Café, Chelsea: ‘We don't stay for dessert, because we have suffered enough’ – restaurant review by Jay Rayner (the Guardian)
The food was so bad, says Jay Rayner, a nearby Yorkshire terrier started to look more appetising
It’s got to be difficult to write a restaurant review that’s more scathing than this. Wow!

👓 The Silicon Valley elite’s latest status symbol: Chickens | The Washington Post

Chickened The Silicon Valley elite’s latest status symbol: Chickens by Peter Holley (Washington Post)
Their pampered birds wear diapers and have personal chefs — but lay the finest eggs tech money can buy
I’m so glad I’ve got the ability to make chicken posts on my website now! I love the irony of being able to add this to my chicken feed.

👓 You Say Tomato | Peter Hertzmann

Watched You Say Tomato by Peter Hertzmann from hertzmann.com
During my years of teaching, the tomato was the one ingredient I never wanted to appear in the mandated class recipes. Management refused to acknowledge that good tomatoes were seasonal, that fresh tomatoes were different than canned tomatoes, and that not all canned tomatoes were the same. This video is a partial response to those bosses that I should have forgotten about long ago.
I suspect he’s just scratching the surface of the topic of tomatoes. This is the first time I’ve seen or heard a reference about the origin of the fact that a tomato is both a fruit and a vegetable.

📺 The Three Aspects of Knife Skills | Peter Hertzmann

Watched The Three Aspects of Knife Skills by Peter Hertzmann from hertzmann.com
Having written more than 80,000 words about knife skills as well as having taught numerous classes on the subject, I have come to the belief that good knife skills can be defined by just three simple aspects: grip, holding hand, and knife motion. In other words, the essence of good knife skills can be summarized by how you hold your knife, how you hold your food, and how you move your knife.
A solid little video on something every cook should know something about.

👓 Sliced And Diced: The Inside Story Of How An Ivy League Food Scientist Turned Shoddy Data Into Viral Studies | Buzzfeed

Read Sliced And Diced: The Inside Story Of How An Ivy League Food Scientist Turned Shoddy Data Into Viral Studies by Stephanie M. Lee (BuzzFeed)
Brian Wansink won fame, funding, and influence for his science-backed advice on healthy eating. Now, emails show how the Cornell professor and his colleagues have hacked and massaged low-quality data into headline-friendly studies to “go virally big time.”
This article is painful to read and has some serious implications for both science in general and the issue of repeat-ability. I suspect that this is an easily caught flagrant case and that it probably only scratches the surface. The increased competition in research and the academy is sure to create more cases of this in the future.

We really need people to begin publishing their negative results and doing a better job on understanding and practicing statistics. Science is already not “believed” by far too many in the United States, we really don’t need bad actors like this eroding the solid foundations we’ve otherwise built.

🎧 Mike Solomonov | The Atlantic Interview

Listened to Mike Solomonov by Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic Interview
Israeli chef Mike Solomonov recently won the James Beard Award for outstanding chef. He created the restaurant Zahav in Philadelphia, built a food empire, and expertly hid a drug addiction from everyone in his life. He talks with Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic's editor in chief, about what he felt when his brother was killed, and how the tragedy first fueled and then helped him fight his addiction. Now in a long recovery, he cooks Israeli food as a kind of cultural mission.

A very interesting human story hiding behind a food “celebrity”. We definitely need more people like this in our culture helping to diversify interesting things in our lives.

📖 Read pages i-39 of The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart

📖 Read pages i-39, Acknowledgements, Preface, Introduction, beginning of Chapter 1. What is it About Bread, of The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread by Peter Reinhart (Ten Speed Press, , ISBN: 978-1-60774-865-6)

The opening is perhaps overly romanticized, though still interesting. He does relatively quickly get into the good stuff though.

📖 Read pages 195-244 of Ratio by Michael Ruhlman

📖 Read pages 195-244, Part 5: The Custard Continuum, of Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking by Michael Ruhlman (Scribner, , ISBN: 978-1-4165-661-3)

The Custard Continuum may have been one of my favorite parts of the book. I particularly like that he includes a recipe for butterscotch, which he’s right in saying that there are so few.

📖 Read pages 163-194 of Ratio by Michael Ruhlman

📖 Read pages 163-194, Part 4: Fat-Based Sauces, of Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking by Michael Ruhlman (Scribner, , ISBN: 978-1-4165-661-3)

Mayonnaise: 20 parts oil: 1 part liquid: 1 part yolk
Hollandaise: 5 parts butter: 1 part liquid: 1 part yolk
Vinaigrette: 3 parts oil: 1 part vinegar

Rule of thumb: You probably don’t need as much yolk as you thought you did.

I like that he provides the simple ratios with some general advice up front and then includes some ideas about variations before throwing in a smattering of specific recipes that one could use. For my own part, most of these chapters could be cut down to two pages and then perhaps even then cut the book down to a single sheet for actual use in the kitchen.

Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia

Part 4: Fat-Based Sauces

But what greatly helps the oil and water to remain separate is, among other things, a molecule in the yolk called lecithin, which, McGee explains, is part water soluble and part fat soluble.

Highlight (yellow) – Mayonnaise > Page 168

Added on Sunday, February 4, 2018

The traditional ratio, not by weight, is excellent and works beautifully: Hollandaise = 1 pound butter: 6 yolks. This ratio seems to have originated with Escoffier. Some cookbooks call for considerably less butter per yok, as little as 3 and some even closer to 2 to 1, but then you’re creeping into sabayon territory; whats more, I believe it’s a cook’s moral obligation to add more butter given the chance.

Highlight (yellow) – Hollandaise> Page 185

more butter given the chance! Reminiscent of the Paula Deen phrase: “Mo’e butta is mo’e betta.”
Added on Sunday, February 4, 2018

 

Happy Fornicalia

As we coast toward the nones of February whence we’ll commence the celebration of the Fornacalia, by all accounts an Ancient Roman religious festival celebrated in honor of the goddess Fornax, a divine personification of the oven (fornax), and was related to the proper baking of bread, I thought it only appropriate to call some attention to what should be an international holiday for bakers.

While shamefully few, if any(?), now celebrate the Fornacalia, I’ve always looked at the word as a portmanteau of a festival along the lines of a bacchanalia for bread with tinges of seeming Latin cognates fornicati, fornicatus, fornicata, and fornicatae or the Greek equivalent porneia (πορνεία). Knead these all together and you’ve got the makings of a modern day besotted festival of bread immorality. And really, who wouldn’t want to celebrate such a thing?!

I’ll celebrate myself by doing some baking, listening to the bread related episodes of Eat This Podcast, while reading and looking at bread porn on Fornacalia.com. Special thanks to curio maximus Jeremy Cherfas for providing entertainment for the festival!

How will you celebrate?

 

Featured photo Bread is a flickr photo by Jeremy Keith aka adactio shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license.