Mental Masala

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

Chocolate Adventure 2010 is all about cupcakes

2010-11-17T19:33:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending an event* at Elizabeth Falkner's Orson in San Francisco to celebrate the launch of the fourth annual Chocolate Adventure, a contest sponsored and run by Scharffen Berger Chocolate and Tuttifoodie (with some help from the Tablehopper). The contest is all about experimentation and finding new flavor combinations for chocolate and/or cocoa. To participate, contestants submit a recipe before January 2, 2011 that contains Scharffen Berger chocolate or cocoa and one or more of the "adventure" ingredients. This year's list includes adzuki beans, coconut milk, saffron, Meyer lemon and ten others.

At the event, attendees enjoyed adventurous cupcakes from Orson's kitchen and some adventure-ingredient inspired cocktails from the bar (like the "English Breakfast," a concoction of tea-infused bourbon, molasses and oatmeal stout). In addition, there were blind tastings of current and previous adventure ingredients (like cocao nibs, bee pollen, and sumac), with the finalists going up against Chef Falkner.

In previous years, the contest was pretty much "anything goes" — desserts, main dishes, side dishes, cocktails — with subcategories for sweet, savory and beverage (but a different set of categories each year). This year, the contest focuses on cupcakes, a limitation that looks to me as a blessing and a curse for the contestants and judges. On the one hand, it focuses the mind and evens the playing field: instead of designing or judging two very different dishes — like roasted chicken with chocolately mole sauce and a peanut soup with cocao nibs and a dusting of cocoa powder — it's cupcake vs. cupcake. On the other hand, it will be challenging for contestants to break away from "one from column A, one from column B, one from column C" formula and create cupcakes that can get the attention of the panel of expert judges (or perhaps the cupcake craze in recent years has created an innovative spirit among home bakers that will lead to entries without too much trouble).

I don't know if I'll be organized enough or persistent enough to create and entry. So far, I've been experimenting a little bit, appreciating the idea of focus, taking the chance to improve my baking in one small area instead of the usual scattershot approach of a wildly different baking project every weekend (my results so far have been "interesting" at best). The contest is yielding additional benefits, such as the great basic cupcake recipes from baking guru Alice Medrich (author of some of my favorite dessert cookbooks, including "Pure Dessert") on the Chocolate Adventure site (there isn't really a link, you need to click through a few pages, starting with the "Explore Ingredients" area at the bottom). The Interactive Cupcake Builder also looks handy, with tips on how to incorporate this year's adventure ingredients into batters and topping — for example, if using almond flour in a batter, for each quantity of almond flour you want to add, subtract one-half that much regular flour. So even if you don't have any interest in contests but like to bake, the Chocolate Adventure site is worth a look.

* Disclosure: I attended the event at no charge and received various products from the event organizers.

Random link from the archive: Tempering Chocolate

Cutting through the slime around "okra leaves"

2010-10-17T09:42:00.000-07:00

During my series on unusual greens in 2006, one of the entries focused on what I had been told were "okra leaves." Two astute commenters, however, pointed out that the identification I have been given by the farmer was probably incorrect. In the first comment, Katie, noted that some farmers call leaves from the jute plant "okra leaves" because they produce okra-style slime when cooked. In the second comment, beautdogs, pointed out that the leaves in my post look nothing like okra leaves and so I had been misinformed (and a bit negligent in my research). I didn't think about the post for a long time until a plant-obsessed friend saw the post and decided that she had to figure out exactly what this plant was.

Her research confirmed Katie's comment: the plant was jute, specifically, Colichortus olitorius. Jute is well known as a source of fiber for cloth and rope making, but it also has culinary and medicinal uses. The Center for New Crops & Plant Products at Purdue University reviews the characteristics and uses of jute Colichortus olitorius; the University of Melbourne's plant name database contains a list of names for the plant in various languages.

A few weeks after she confirmed the identity of the plant, my friend send me the following report (quoted and slightly edited with permission):

The Vang Family stand [at the Berkeley Farmers Market] was very crowded when I walked into the market, so I didn't stop to check out what they had. On my way out, I stopped to pick out some okra from them and happened to be there just as Mr. Vang went into his van and took out a giant bag (garbage bag size) of Corchorus olitorius for a Middle Eastern woman (possibly Egyptian?). She bought every last bit of the stuff. Naturally, I wandered over with questions.

(a) She confirmed that this Corchorus olitorius is molokhiya. She uses some fresh and the rest is dried for later.

(b) They both agree that it is slimy/sticky when cooked.

(c) Mr. Vang also wrote down the Hmong name. He spelled out the words "npia nplaum" which he pronounced something close to "blia blau." Hmong pronunciation and spellings are pretty convoluted (more at Wikipedia). The word "nplaum" (pronounced "blau") means sticky. He said the two words translate to sticky leaf. I couldn't find the word npia or npla in various online dictionaries or discussions, but all clearly confirm that nplaum means sticky. (see, for example, FREELANG)

Since he grows both the Corchorus and okra he is perfectly aware that the two leaves and plants are very distinct. His theory about the "okra leaf" name was that that might be referring to the sliminess/stickiness of the leaf: not "leaf of the okra plant", but "slimy like okra" leaf.

(d) He also told me that a lot of his Filipino customers buy this green. He said the Filipino name is Saluyot. Interestingly enough, Filipino recipes online seem to recognize that it is jute. (see for example, Manong Ken’s Carinderia).

I hope that this clears up any lingering confusion. Thanks to my friend for her diligent research.

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Does the edible percentage of an avocado depend on its size?

2010-10-09T09:53:00.000-07:00

Berkeley Bowl Marketplace in Berkeley, California is justly famous for its vast array of produce, and their avocado selection is no exception. They sometimes sell five different sizes of the fruit: pee wee, small, medium, large and extra large (almost all Hass variety). Naturally, they are at different prices and always by the piece, never by weight.

For a while I've been wondering two things about them: 1) does the fraction of edible material depend on the size of the avocado? and 2) what are the relative costs of the different sizes? To answer these questions, I've been buying various sizes of Hass avocados from Berkeley Bowl and other places for the last few months and recording the weight of the whole fruit and the edible portion before eating.

To date, I have weighed 19 avocados: 6 large, 6 medium, 3 small, 2 pee wee, and 2 extra large. The results of my measurements are in the chart below. The x-axis is the weight of the whole avocado in grams; the y-axis is the percent of the avocado that is edible, by weight. The different symbols represent the different sizes. The edible percentage is consistent across the span of weights, centered around 70%*, meaning that the amount of flesh you get from a Hass avocado is relatively independent of the total weight. The 70% result is consistent with UC Riverside's Avocado Information site, which states that the seed, skin, and flesh percentages for Hass avocados are approximately 16%, 12% and 72%, respectively.

I don't know enough about avocados to say why the flesh percentage is so consistent across avocado weights. It might be the case that as avocados grow, the mass is added to the pit, skin and flesh at roughly the same rates. Or that when an avocado is ready to be harvested, the edible percentage happens to be around 70%. Whatever the case, what the graphs means for you is that choosing the heaviest avocado is likely to give you the most edible flesh, as opposed to a disproportionately large pit or thicker skin on a larger avocado.

I also recorded the cost of each avocado and calculated the cost per edible weight. Those results, however, are too messy and inconsistent to show here for a few reasons: prices varied during the experiment (it would have been better to buy, say, 10 of each size at one time), sometimes I bought organic avocados without recording that fact, some avocados were from the farmers market, and so forth. In any case, the results in the chart above can help you comparison shop. Here's how: given two avocados with different prices, weight each one, then calculate the ratios of the weights and the prices, with the larger avocado in the numerator. If the weight ratio is greater than the price ratio, the larger one is a better deal. For example, a $0.99 "large" avocado weighing 260 grams vs. a $0.89 "medium" avocado weighing 190 grams. The price ratio is 1.11, the weight ratio is 1.37, so the large avocado is the better deal (approximately $2.50 per pound of flesh for the large vs. $3.02 for the medium).

If you have any avocado data, want to send me some in the future, or know of already published sources, leave a comment or send me an email and I'll update the chart. What I need to know is the variety of avocado, the weight of the whole avocado, and the weight of avocado flesh (or the weight of the skin and pit). If you have a size grade (small, medium, large), that would also be useful.

As a final note for this post, here is an avocado mystery to ponder: Why are they sold by the piece and not by the pound? I personally have never seen avocados sold by the pound, and it doesn't make a lot of sense why not. Grocery stores already sell lots of different fruits and vegetables by weight. I asked the California Avocado Commission if there is a good reason for this, and they told me that it is completely up to the retailer to decide how to price their products.

* Except for the small avocados, which had a far lower edible percentage. Perhaps I wrote down the wrong weight in my notebook.

Photo of an avocado half from Andrea.Pacheco's flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License.

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Technorati tag: Food

Cooking with Avocado Leaves: Oaxacan Black Beans

2010-10-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

Photo from Kathy MacKey's Flickr collection (via CC)

In recent days, a generous friend served as a "forager" for the Mental Masala blog, obtaining some leaves from a Mexicola avocado tree, one of the varieties that has a distinct fragrance, as my previous post on avocado leaves explained. Since I had first seen the leaves used to flavor black beans — and had just purchased a new bag of Midnight Beans from Rancho Gordo's stand at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco — I decided to debut the fresh leaves in a black bean dish, using a recipe in Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen as an inspiration.*

I made a few changes to the Bayless's recipe, notably using Rancho Gordo's cooking method for the beans, frying the chorizo before adding it to the beans, not pureeing the beans at the end, and skipping the garnishes. The result was superb, with the anise-ish flavor of the avocado leaf complementing the rich sausage and earthy beans.

It seemed to me that the spices in the chorizo were a key factor in the dish's success, so if you don't eat pork, you might be able to craft a good approximation by incorporating some of the non-meat ingredients that go into chorizo. A recipe for red chorizo in Diana Kennedy's "From My Mexican Kitchen" is one example. In the recipe, ground pork is combined with a paste made from guajillo chiles, white vinegar, garlic, Mexican bay leaves (Litsea glaucescens, but the European Laurus nobilis make a suitable substitute), thyme, marjoram, Mexican oregano, cloves, allspice, and salt. To make the paste, the chiles are cleaned, deseeded, and soaked in warm water to soften. Once softened, they are drained and soaked in vinegar for an hour. Then the chiles and all of the other flavorings go into a blender, are pureed as smooth as possible and pressed through a sieve to remove seeds and other roughage (note that this is basically the procedure you'd use when making a mole or red chile enchilada sauce). To use in the beans, I would then cook the paste: heat oil in a sauce pan over medium-high heat, then add as much of the puree as I planned to use (a few tablespoons), stir well, and cook for a few minutes until it thickens slightly (again, like you'd do for a mole or enchilada sauce).

Ideally, my next project with avocado leaves would be a batch of tamales where I placed strips of avocado leaves between the tamale dough and the corn husk, but I probably won't have the energy for tamales in the near future, so I might instead try something simpler like the baked masa creation in Bayless's Mexican Kitchen (which is essentially a large batch of tamale batter stuffed with vegetables and baked in a loaf pan), placing a leaf or two between the batter and the pan so its magical flavors can infuse the masa and vegetables.

Recipe: Oaxacan Black Beans
Inspired by the Oaxacan black bean soup recipe in Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen

Ingredients

Cooking oil
12 ounces dry black beans, rinsed, soaked (optional) and drained
Water
About 18 inch² of avocado leaf (115 cm²), or 1 rib of fresh fennel, diced
4 ounces chorizo sausage, casing removed, or chorizo chile and spice mixture
1 small white onion, diced
Salt

(Unit conversion page)

If using a fresh avocado leaf, lightly toast it over gas burner on medium heat or on a hot griddle.

In a saucepan or Dutch oven, cook the onion in the oil over medium heat until tender. Add the beans, fresh water, and diced fennel or avocado leaf. Increase the heat, bring to a boil, and keep at a boil for five minutes. Turn down the heat, cover, and cook at a low simmer until the beans are tender (at this point, you could also transfer the mixture to a slow cooker or move the pot to a solar oven to complete the cooking).

In a small pan, cook the chorizo, breaking it up into small pieces, until it is lightly browned. Set aside.

Near the end of the bean cooking process, add the chorizo to the beans, stir, and add salt to taste. Remove the avocado leaf before serving.

* Leaves from the Hass variety, which is a hybrid Guatemalan-Mexican, do not have much flavor. Note also that while there have been reports that avocado leaves are toxic, this seems to apply only to leaves from Guatemalan and hybrid Guatemalan-Mexican varieties. Diana Kennedy, in her book "From My Mexican Kitchen," tries to clear up the confusion around the subject, noting that Mexican varieties were not found to be toxic, and in any case, "it seems unlikely that the small amounts used in cooking would cause any problems" (the full section is quoted at Gourmet Sleuth).

Photo of Avocado leaves from Kathy MacKey's flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License.

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Technorati tags: Mexico : Food

Barking up the wrong avocado tree in search of authentic Mexican flavors

2010-09-12T09:25:00.000-07:00

I've been a big fan of Rick Bayless's television program Mexico One Plate at a Time for years — it has intensely influenced my view of Mexican cuisine and my ability to cook it. Before Bayless, I associated Mexican food with the plates of dense food covered with a thick layer of brightly glowing cheese that I grew up with in the Midwest. Through the TV program, I learned how Mexico's cuisine is actually one of immense variety, freshness, complexity and often lightness. I also learned the basics of making roasted tomatillo salsa, how to make mole, different approaches to enchiladas, how to make corn tortillas, and much more. (Some of these lessons are in the archive of this blog.)

In several episodes, Bayless notes that avocado leaves are used like bay leaves in some regions of Mexico, sometimes are added to a pot of black beans or layered with meats to provide an anise-like background flavor and aroma. In "My Mexican Kitchen," Diana Kennedy writes that fresh leaves are used to cover meats in barbacoa in Oaxaca and in tamales as a direct flavoring or as part of the wrapper. These uses make perfect sense if you look at the avocado's place in the plant kingdom: they are in the laurel family, which includes the bay laurel.

For one reason or another, avocado leaves have become a minor obsession of mine lately as I have been thinking about and eating lots of Hass avocados for "the avocado project" (which I'll describe in another post). During this project, I would suspend each pit in a water bath, following instructions on from Instructables, so that someday I could have a source of fresh leaves in my garden and consequently experience a piece of authentic Mexican cooking.

But then I learned that I've been barking up the wrong tree, so to speak. I ran across a 1950 article about avocados in the journal Economic Botany that explaind the basics of avocado botany, noting that there are three different "Ecological Races" of the avocado (Persea americana): West Indian, Guatemalan, and Mexican (classified as Persea americana var. drymifolia). The Economic Botany article includes this about the races (my emphasis):

The Mexican race is native to the highlands of Mexico and the mountain,s of Central America, extending south along the Andes as far as Chile. It is characterized by anise odor in the leaves and young growth and fruits.
[...]
The Guatemalan race is native to the highlands of Central America, extending south to northern South America. The foliage and new growth are lacking, or nearly so, in anise odor, and usually, but not always, the latter is pink or red colored.
[...]
The West Indian race is native to the lowlands of Central America and north- ern South America. The foliage and new growth are free from anise odor, and the former exhibits a much lighter color than is found in the other groups. [ed. note: in the U.S., West Indian avocados primarily grow in Florida because they are far less tolerant to low temperatures than are the other races.]

Note that while the Mexican race has the anise aroma, the other two races (and many hybrids) generally do not. This is important because the Hass* avocado — the one I have been buying and trying to sprout — is a Guatemalan-Mexican hybrid.

To confirm the above statement first-hand, I went to two nurseries the other day to check out the leaves of the available varieties of avocados. It wasn't an ideal test — it's not reasonable to go into a plant store and start pulling leaves off of trees, so I had to look for leaves that were ready to fall off (the kind where a light breeze will separate the leaf from the branch) — but I managed to get an initial survey. The Hass's leaves had no aroma. The Mexicola and Zutano, two Mexican varieties, both had a reasonably strong fragrance (and the fragrance of the Mexicola has been confirmed by a friend of a friend who has with a tree in her yard in the San Francisco Bay Area). The Fuerte, a Guatemalan-Mexican hybrid with mostly Mexican parentage (99%, according to a DNA analysis in the Journal of Heredity), had a very subtle anise aroma in its leaves. The Bacon avocado's leaves,which I have seen at the farmers market (from Four Sisters farm), is also a hybrid, being mostly Guatemalan, and had a fragrance. In addition, I have a friend helping me with this investigation and hope to have some new information soon.

Later that morning, I was shopping in a nearby Mexican market and spotted a bag of dried avocado leaves on a rack of specialized dry ingredients. So I bought a bag and added a few leaves to a pot of beans that I was solar-cooking. When finished, the beans had an unusual hint of anise that resulted in a overall flavor that I hadn't before experienced. I look forward to finding a source of fresh avocado leaves so I can get a more intense, more complex flavor from this unusual flavoring ingredient.

Note
* The Hass wasn't the most dominant variety in California until recent decades. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Fuerte avocado was the main variety in California, comprising more than 2/3 of the California crop. Today, the Hass makes up vast majority of what is grown in California and sold in the U.S. (because of liberalization of trade policy, Hass avocados are imported from many places, as this map from the Hass Avocado Board shows). The Hass itself is a relatively recent cultivar, coming about through the luck and growing skills of Rudolph G. Hass in Southern California. He eventually obtained Plant Patent 139 on the avocado variety that came to bear his name. In his application, he wrote that "the original tree is a Guatemalian [sic] seedling of unknown parentage...[that] has been successfuly propogated on thin skinned Mexican seedlings as root stock," implying that it is a hybrid. A recent DNA analysis published in the Journal of Heredity found that the Hass is 42% Mexican, 58% Guatemalan.

Image Credits
Avocado photo from Wikimedia Commons user B. navez, used under a Creative Commons license. Plant patent image from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, via Google Patents.

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Technorati tags:Mexico : vegetarian : Food

Bulgur salad a slate for summer's bounty

2010-08-28T09:17:00.000-07:00

Summer is bulgur salad season for me. Although the most popular bulgur salad is probably tabouli — a salad made with something like two parts of parsley per part of wheat in classic versions — but since I'm not much of a parsley fan, I look for other ways of using the grain. One of my favorites is a recipe in Paula Wolfert's The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean (yes, that book again). It's so much a favorite and so adaptable that in July and August I made it on several consecutive weekends. Below I have sketched out a basic recipe that contains most of Wolfert's original flavoring elements — I find that two key flavors are pomegranate molasses and allspice, which bring a rich sweetness and brightness, respectively.

The grain in this salad is bulgur wheat, a grain that has been cooked, dried, cracked, and sorted by size. It is sold in a handful of sizes from extra-coarse to fine, often labeled with a number that also defines the size (#1 is fine, #4 is extra-coarse).

With most of the ingredients being pantry staples or not dependent on being grown locally, One week, I went locavore with the recipe, adding fresh local tomatoes and roasted local eggplant to the basic salad. Another week I threw in some French feta that was 'aging' in my refrigerator. There are many other possible flavors that I haven't tried yet: diced preserved lemon, a fresh Middle Eastern cheese (like that white farmers cheese sold in Middle Eastern shops, often labeled "Syrian cheese"), cooked chickpeas, large cranberry beans, slow roasted tomatoes, to name a few. Although this is usually a summer dish for me, there are probably some winter vegetables that would be enjoyable.

Bulgur Salad
Adapted from The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean by Paula Wolfert

Ingredients
1 1/2 cups fine-grain bulgur (grade #3)
1 cup finely chopped onions
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup finely chopped parsley
1/3 cup roughly chopped toasted walnuts
1 T. pomegranate molasses or more to taste
2 T. fresh lemon juice
1 1/2 t. ground cumin
1 1/2 t. ground coriander
1 t. Aleppo pepper* or other medium-heat dry red pepper
1/2 t. ground allspice
1 t. salt
1/2 t. ground black pepper
1-2 cups additional vegetables and/or cheese

Method
Place bulgur in a fine sieve and agitate to remove any wheat dust. Place in a bowl, cover with cold water and let soak for 15 to 30 minutes. Return to sieve and squeeze out excess liquid.

Saute the onions in the olive oil. Set aside to cool.

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix well. For ideal flavor, cover and refrigerate overnight to let the flavors meld before serving.

Serve at room temperature or chilled, garnished with chopped walnuts and minced parsley.

* Aleppo pepper is a mildly hot, aromatic ground red pepper from Syria or Turkey, occasionally sold under the name "Near East Pepper." It's available in specialty food stores or Middle Eastern markets.

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A rare sighting of cooked cucumbers

2010-08-08T09:11:00.000-07:00

Cucumbers are one of those vegetables — like lettuce — that are almost never heated. And so, when I ran across a recipe that calls for sauteing cucumbers in oil, I had to give it a try.

The recipe is in New Salads: Quick Healthy Recipes from Japan, a thin book that contains a wide variety of Japanese approaches to salad making. Although only 124 pages, it is packed with useful background information to go with the recipes, like diagrams of how to cut vegetables, explanations of the ingredients and techniques of Japanese cooking, and much more. Following chapters titled "Beautiful Salads" and "Healthy Salads," the author presents "Simple Salads" organized by the main vegetable ingredient.

The recipe was designed for Japanese cucumbers, which have thin, edible skins and minimal seediness, but I imagine that other varieties with similar characteristics could work also, like English cucumbers and perhaps even the pale green Armenian varieties. In my mind, the finished recipe is a side dish that serves the purpose of a small bowl of Japanese pickles as a meal enhancer rather than a full-fledged salad or side dish.

Recipe: Korean-style Marinated Cucumbers
Adapted from New Salads: Quick Healthy Recipes from Japan by Shinko Shimizu (Kodansha International, 1986)

Ingredients
4 Japanese cucumbers or other cucumbers with thin skins (1 lb / 400 g)
1/2 t. salt
2 green onions
1 T. sesame oil

Method
Slice cucumbers very thinly -- you want them to be so thin that you can almost see through the slices. Toss the cucumber slices with the salt, trying to get as much of the cucumber surface covered with salt as possible (this is not so easy because the slices stick together). Let stand for a few minutes.

When cucumber is soft and flexible, wrap in a cloth and squeeze out excess liquid.

Finely chop the green onions.

Heat the sesame oil in a pan, add the cucumbers and saute. Add half the green onions (reserving the other half for garnish), stir and remove from heat. Let cool to room temperature.

Sprinkle with remaining green onions and serve.

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Cooking outside the zone for National Farmers Market Week

2010-08-01T09:49:00.000-07:00

In honor of National Farmers Market week, August 1-7 (PDF), my friend Bonnie Powell is asking farmers market enthusiasts to cook outside of our comfort zones (Ethicurean and Grist). It's good to shake things up sometimes, so I thought I'd give it a few tries. This is part 1: tokyo turnips. Yeah, I know, turnips are pretty ho hum, a very common root vegetable. Plus: "Hey Marc, didn't you hear that it is summertime? You know, tomatoes, basil, and other good stuff?" Sure, I admit that turnips are hardly exotic, but it was one of those weeks at the Berkeley Farmers Market where nothing much was unusual, and since I rarely buy turnips and almost buy ones with greens attached, it was a little bit outside my comfort zone.

It was tempting to do what the people in Shelbyville do with their turnips — turnip juice — but I was in a Mediterranean mood last weekend so I first turned to a memory of restaurant meals and then got some ideas from a reliable guide to the Middle East.

Quick Turnip Pickles
One of the things I love about certain Middle Eastern restaurants is the pickled turnips that accompany a meal, so I decided to make quick pickled turnips and carrots, adapting a recipe originally published in Gourmet Magazine in 1993 and currently living on Epicurious. I took major liberties with the recipe, using ginger powder instead of ginger root (ginger powder appears in a few Middle Eastern recipes that I make, while fresh ginger rarely does), substituting dill weed for dill seed, and leaving out the celery seed and red bell peppers. Although the ginger powder flavor was a little unpleasant, the pickles were good overall and quite easy to make.

Turnip Greens and Potatoes with Garlic Paprika Sauce
I also wanted to use the greens, so I looked in a few books before finding a simple recipe in Mediterranean Grains and Greens by Paula Wolfert. It's a simple dish from Galicia, Spain: steamed potatoes and turnip greens topped with a garlic- and paprika-infused vinaigrette. With good potatoes and good paprika, it can be a simple pleasure. I used a smoked sweet paprika that I recently bought at The Spanish Table to use in a salad dressing recipe from Food and Wine magazine (it was OK, a little sweet). An adapted recipe is shown below.

Recipe: Turnip Tops and Potatoes with Garlic-Paprika Sauce
Adapted from Mediterranean Grains and Greens by Paula Wolfert

Ingredients
Boiling or roasting potatoes, such as Yukon Gold
Turnip greens
Salt
Oil, if you are roasting the potatoes
Adapted Galician Ajada Sauce (see below)

Method
Cut the potatoes in half if small, or quarters (or eighths) if large. You're aiming for pieces that are roughly 1 1/2" across.

Rinse the turnip greens, slice off tough stems, then broadly chop the greens.

Alternative Method 1: Roasted Potatoes
Cut the potatoes in half if small, or quarters (or eighths) if large, then toss with olive oil, salt and pepper. Place on a sheet pan and roast at 400 F until tender.

Steam the turnip greens until tender. Combine with the potatoes and toss with half of the sauce. Drizzle with the remaining sauce just before serving.

Alternative Method 2: Steamed Potatoes
Place the potatoes in a steamer basket and pile the turnip greens on top of the potatoes. Steam for 15 minutes, until the potatoes are done. Remove from the steamer and toss with half of the sauce. Drizzle with the remaining sauce just before serving.

Adapted Galician Ajada Sauce

Ingredients
3 T. extra virgin olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and thickly sliced
1 t. smoked paprika
1 t. red wine vinegar
Salt and black pepper to taste

Method
Heat the oil in a small pan over low heat, then fry the garlic until golden brown. Remove the garlic pieces. Turn off the heat and let the oil cool. Add the paprika, vinegar, salt and pepper and stir well.

Photo of baby turnip from In Praise of Sardines's flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License.

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Why Eucalyptus Trees Cover the East Bay Hills

2010-07-17T09:52:00.000-07:00

During the long summer days, the hills to the east of San Francisco Bay (Alameda and Contra Costa County) are wonderful places to walk — not too hot and with remarkable views to the east, west, and north (until the fog rolls in, and then it's grey in every direction). The land in the East Bay Hills was originally open grassland with occasional small stands of trees like live oak, madrone, and willow. Most of the year it was "golden", but after the winter rains the grasslands exploded with the colors of wildflowers among the green grass. Today, however, the hills are covered with eucalyptus trees imported from Australia. So how such a concentration one type of tree come to the hills Berkeley and Oakland? The July-September 2005 issue of Bay Nature had a fascinating story by Bill O'Brien about how it happened. It is a tale of optimism, hard work, greed, and how nature can wreck humanity's plans.

But first, why should anyone care? While many imported plants behave nicely and stay in the region they are planted, others rapidly expand their range and out compete the natives. The Nature Conservancy's Invasive Species Initiative says this about non-natives:

On their home turf, plant and animal populations are kept in check by natural controls, like predators and food supply. However, when a species is introduced—accidentally or intentionally—into a new landscape that is not used to its presence, the consequences can be devastating. Most of these “non-native” species do not misbehave. But some non-native species spread unchecked by the lack of natural competitors and predators. They push out native species and cause ecological chaos.

Eucalyptus trees are ecologically problematic and notoriously flammable (they tend to explode when they burn and flaming pieces of bark can be carried long distances by the wind). Stands of eucalyptus tend to be less diverse than native lands, but by no means devoid of natural life. O'Brien writes that " A recent study by biologist David Suddjian counted more than 90 bird species that make regular use of Monterey County eucalyptus habitats, including at least 59 species that nest in them. Eucalyptus trees on the shores of San Leandro's Lake Chabot host a large heron rookery. In Santa Cruz County, Suddjian found that great egrets, great blue herons, and double-crested cormorants nest exclusively in eucalyptus." And at Ardenwood Historic Farm in the southern East Bay, monarch butterflies use eucalyptus for shelter and sustenance as they over-winter in the Bay Area. The trees are remarkably resilient, so removal of the forests is not easy: chop one down, and the next season the stump be covered with vigorous new shoots.

Haven's Dream
Almost all of the eucalyptus in the East Bay Regional Park District can be traced to a company founded by Frank Havens (1848-1918). Havens was one of the early builders of Oakland and Berkeley, most notably public transportation and utilities. He was also a partner in the company that built the Claremont Hotel. At various times he worked with Francis "Borax" Smith, who originated the Twenty-mule-team borax product.

Havens founded the People's Water Company in 1906, with holdings that stretched from Richmond to San Leandro. In 1910, his Mahogany Eucalyptus and Land Company started planting seedlings. Since California had little native hardwood and the population was rapidly growing, Havens' goal was to create a local source of lumber (and revenue, of course). Eucalyptus was thought to be ideal because it was fast growing and the trees coppice readily (i.e., sprout shoots from a cut stump), thus reducing the need for replanting. Somewhere between one and three million seedlings were planted in the East Bay hills between 1910 and 1914. Havens' firm also built 9 plant nurseries, a sawmill, and arboretum. During the peak planting season the company employed as many as 200 people.

Havens' dream died quickly — he shut it down in 1914, just four years after starting the project. Although the trees grew rapidly, they were unsuitable for lumber because they were difficult to plane without chipping and the wood cracked while drying. The article does not give a definitive reason for the failure of the project, but some have theorized that the mild Bay Area climate and lack of natural pests caused the trees to grow too quickly, which led to wood characteristics that were different than those found in Australian trees.

Like many other get rich schemes in California (hydraulic mining, for example), a short burst of activity had long-lasting impacts on the ecosystem, ones that we are still dealing with many decades later.

Additional Resources

Dr. Jennifer Forman Orth's Invasive Species blog
Scientific American Frontiers Alien Invasion, which includes the full TV program on-line.
The Eucalyptus of California, by Robert L. Santos, with this section covering the timber boom.
Over in San Francisco, a forest of eucalyptus trees stretches on and around Mount Sutro was planted by agents of Adolph Sutro, one-time mayor of San Francisco and developer of the original Cliff House and builder of the Sutro Baths. Sutro didn't plant the trees as a source of lumber, but as a way of creating a forest quickly. Much of the forest is now owned by University of California. More information is in a San Francisco Chronicle article by Carl Nolte.

Photo of eucalyptus from Nothing's flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License.

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Eucalyptus

Pizza Pie Charts: Looking at Pizza Service

2010-07-11T09:57:00.000-07:00

Although pizza baking in the San Francisco Bay Area and other locations (e.g., Sunset's list) has undergone a renaissance in recent years with higher-quality ingredients, improved techniques, and better ovens, I think that the service side of the pizza scene needs some serious work. I'm not talking about the people who take your order or bring your food, but the way that carefully-made delicacy is delivered to the table.

Recently, I went to one of San Francisco's top pizza places and the pizza was served on a thin aluminum pan. And so, in the minutes between service and consumption, the crust gets soggy and the quality rapidly drops. One way of looking at this degradation is through charts -- a type of pie chart, I suppose -- which give a graphical interpretation of how my impression of the pizza's quality changes over time.

Pizza Pie Charts
To explain my pizza eating experience, I made three charts, using a photo from atduskgreg on Flickr as a background. On each photo of the pizza (from Delfina Pizzeria in San Francisco), there are four black and white bars. The black part of the bars indicates the quality of that section of the pizza at that moment in time, with a solid black bar being perfection for that particular pie. There are four bars on each pizza that correspond to the center, inner third, outer third, and edge of the slice.

The first figure shows my opinion of the pizza's quality at the moment of delivery (your sense of pizza quality might be totally different, of course). The black bars are as high as they will ever be because the crust is crispy across the entire slice.

A few minutes later, degradation occurs in the middle of the pizza, as moisture released by the hot crust and toppings lead to the first stages of sogginess in the crust. As you go to the outside edge, however, the quality remains fairly high because there are escape paths for the moisture.

As time goes on, the trend continues, with the center of the pizza degrading faster than the outside.

Another way to look at the pizza trends is with an x-y chart. In the chart below, the y-axis is quality of the pizza at a particular location and the x-axis is time (in arbitrary units because I haven't timed my pizza. Each unit is probably a minute or so.). As noted above, the quality of the pizza drops more rapidly in the center than at the edge.

Maintaining Quality
So how can pizza quality be maintained at very high levels for more than a few minutes?

Many slice shops have developed a system that gives the diner high quality: upon receiving an order they take a slice from the display case and pop it into a hot pizza oven for a few minutes to crisp the crust and heat the toppings. But this approach is necessitated by a feature of the slice business: they need to have a lot of 'inventory' ready to sell at a moments notice, as not many slice customers want to wait for 10 or 15 minutes for their order. At a place like Delfina, Pizziaolo, or Flour+Water, in contrast, the pizza is made to order and delivered directly from the oven to the table.

Photo from Daniele Muscetta, subject to a Creative Commons License

One idea that comes to my mind is cooperative ordering: diners at different tables would stage their orders and share partial pizzas. Here's how it would work in theory: imagine that two couples at different tables are each going to order a pizza. Instead of getting one pie each at the same time, they could arrange for the server to bring the two pizzas to the two pairs in stages: half of the first pizza goes to each table, then each table gets half of the second pizza a little while later. This pizza sharing approach shrinks the time between pizza delivery and pizza consumption, thus hopefully increasing the enjoyment. How a restaurant would deal with this is another matter, as it isn't trivial to coordinate orders from multiple tables.

Other ideas address how the pizza is delivered. Instead of putting the pie on a basic, non-permeable pan, could a wire rack prevent sogginess? Or would it cause the pizza to cool down too fast? Or could a combination of hot bricks and a wire rack like the one pictured below be a solution? In theory, the heat from the bricks would keep the bottom of the pizza warm while the wire rack allows moisture to escape. Or would it be a too dangerous?

Or perhaps this is all much ado about nothing... In any case, do your favorite pizza places have any non-standard ways of serving pizza?

Photo Credits
The pizza charts were created using a background photo of pizza at Delfina Pizzeria in San Francisco from atduskgreg's flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License. The bottom photo, pizza a taglio, is from Daniele Muscetta's flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License.

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Recipe: Flourless chocolate-almond cake

2010-06-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

The classic "flourless cake" is a dense and decadent confection — often oozing with molten chocolate — made from dark chocolate, butter, egg yolks, sugar and beaten egg whites. But you can take the flourless cake in another direction, one that is light and airy, by relying on the magic of egg whites to stabilize the cake.

A perfect example of a light flourless chocolate cakes is the Italian Chocolate-Almond Torte in Alice Medrich's wonderful Pure Dessert. Whenever I have a few extra egg whites — after I've made a batch of pastry cream for a free-form fruit galette, for example — I bake one of these cakes. The batter comes together in a hurry and requires only a few ingredients: almonds, chocolate, egg whites, sugar, salt and cream of tartar.

The original recipe calls for 7 egg whites, but since I rarely have that many around, I weighed the ingredients and calculated the quantity necessary for between 1 and 6 egg whites. For the cream of tartar quantity, however, I used Rose Levy Beranbaum's recommendation of 1/8 t. cream of tartar per egg white (a short video on her website demonstrates the role of cream of tartar in egg white stabilization. If you are using a copper bowl, however, then you should leave out the cream of tartar, as it can cause a toxin to be produced, but Beranbaum isn't clear about the identity of that toxin.)

This basic recipe of wildly adaptable: you can add bits of orange zest or candied orange peel, use hazelnuts or walnuts instead of almonds, mix in some Mexican cinnamon (the "true" cinnamon, Cinnamomum verum, while cinnamon in most American jars is cassia, Cinnamomum aromaticum.), fold in a pinch or two of fleur de sel, and so on.

Recipe: Flourless Chocolate-Almond Cake
Adapted from Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich

Ingredients:

# of egg whites	1	2	3	4	5	6
Almonds (grams)	17.5	35	52.5	70	87.5	105
Chocolate (grams)	25	50	75	100	125	150
Sugar (grams), divided in half	35	70	105	140	175	210
Cream of tartar (t.)	1/8	1/4	3/8	1/2	5/8	3/4

Salt to taste - the original 7 egg white recipe calls for 1/8 t. salt. It's not practical fill out the table with parts of 1/8 t., so use between a pinch and 1/4 t. Or, if you like salt in your desserts, use more, possibly a coarse variety like fleur de sel.

(Unit conversion page)

Method:
Preheat the oven to 350 F (180 C).

Prepare the baking pan(s). With such a variety of quantities in the recipe, there are a number of options. For a six-white recipe, use an 8 or 9-inch pan. For two to four egg whites, try a 9-inch by 5-inch by 2 1/2-inch loaf pan. A cupcake or muffin tin might also work nicely. In any case, grease the sides of the pan and line the bottom with parchment paper (or use tin liners).

Place the almonds and one-half of the sugar into the bowl of a food processor and process until the almonds are chopped. Add the chocolate and process until the mixture is a coarse meal, but not so much to make a fine powder.

Place the egg whites in a very clean bowl. Using a hand-held mixer (works best for fewer than 3 egg whites) or a stand mixer (for 3 or more whites), beat the whites on medium speed until they are frothy, then add the cream of tartar (unless you are using a copper bowl). Increase the speed to high and beat until the whites hold soft peaks. With the mixer running on medium, sprinkle in the remaining sugar and beat on high until the whites hold stiff peaks.

Fold about one-third of the chocolate-almond mixture into the egg whites. Then fold the chocolate-almond mixture into the egg whites. Transfer the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top.

Bake for 25-30 minutes, until the cake has risen and has a golden brown top. Let the finished cake cool in the pan on a wire rack for 10 minutes before removal.

Wrapped well, it will be good for up to 3 days at room temperature.

Serve with whipped cream, ice cream, fruit sauce, or whatever you like with chocolate and almonds.

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Let this salad invade your kitchen: wakame, cucumber and radish sprouts with smoky vinaigrette

2010-06-15T21:52:00.000-07:00

When it comes to salads, I'm much more interested those made with vegetables, fruit, nuts and other ingredients than anything with lettuce or other leafy greens – creations like the Tosa sea salad in Washoku, Elizabeth Andoh's splendid book about Japanese home cooking. (An exciting aside: Elizabeth Andoh has a new book scheduled for release in October: Kansha: Celebrating Japan's Vegan and Vegetarian Traditions.)

It has three main ingredients – cucumber, wakame and radish sprouts – and a delicious slightly smoky dressing. The slight sweetness of the cucumber, the mellow oceanic nature of the wakame, and the sharp bite of the sprouts are an unlikely trio that goes great together and meshes with the smoky vinaigrette. The vinaigrette is where I make a major diversion from Andoh's recipe. In her recipe, the smoke flavor comes from katsuo-bushi (dried bonito flakes), a specialty of the recipe's namesake, the region of Tosa on Shikoku Island (not the dog; see map at the bottom of the post). To bring smoke into the dressing while keeping it vegetarian, I use lapsang souchong tea, a Chinese variety that has been dried over burning pinewood fires, thus imparting it with a smoky essence (so much so that I wonder how anyone could drink it straight.).

Before we get to the recipe, a side note about wakame (Undaria pinnatifida): this variety of kelp is native to Asia, but is an aggressive invader, earning a place on the IUCN's list of the 100 worst invasive species. In recent decades, it has become established in Europe, New Zealand, Australia and Southern California. Just last year, it was spotted in San Francisco Bay for the first time, a worrisome new development for an already highly damaged ecosystem, as an article in the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Even if we all regularly ate the Tosa sea salad we'd probably barely make a dent in the invader's population.

Tosa Sea Salad
Adapted from Washoku by Elizabeth Andoh
Serves 4
(Unit conversion page)

4 Japanese or other cucumbers with edible peel, about 3 ounces each
1 t. coarse salt
2 T. dried wakame (see note 1)
2 ounces radish sprouts, rinsed, trimmed and cut into 1/4-inch length (see note 2)
1/4 cup smoky vinaigrette (recipe below)

Cut the cucumbers in half lengthwise, then slice thinly on a diagonal to make half-ellipses. Transfer to a bowl, sprinkle with the salt, and toss. Allow to rest for 10 minutes. Rinse, drain and squeeze gently to remove any excess liquid.

Cover the wakame with cool water, soak for 5 minutes, and then drain, rinse and drain again. If necessary, chop the rehydrated wakame into bite-size pieces. Combine with the cucumbers.

Just before serving, divide the cucumber-wakame mixture into 4 portions, top with the radish sprouts and pour some vinaigrette over each portion.

Smoky vinaigrette
Adapted from Washoku by Elizabeth Andoh

1/4 cup brown rice vinegar (or plain rice vinegar)
1 T. sugar
1/4 t. salt
1 piece kombu, 2 inches square
1 t. lapsang souchong tea (see note 3)
Soy sauce
Mirin

Optional: To remove some of the caffeine from the tea without losing too much smoke flavor, pre-steep the tea by pouring a cup of boiling water over the leaves, letting it steep for 3 or 4 minutes, then draining. (for details about caffeine in tea, see my two posts on the subject.)

Combine the vinegar, sugar, salt, and kombu in a small non-reactive saucepan. Bring to a simmer over low heat, stirring occasionally to dissolve the sugar and salt. When the liquid has reached a simmer, add the lapsang souchong tea (pre-steeped or not), stir and turn off the heat. Allow to cool in the pan. Pour through a fine strainer to remove the solids.

Add a dash of soy sauce if the dressing is too sweet, a dash of mirin if it is too salty.

Notes:

1. Wakame can be found in stores that specialize in Asian products, especially those with a Japanese or Korean tilt. It usually comes in small plastic bags that don't seem to hold much, but as the picture above illustrates, the plant expand a lot when it rehydrates.

2. Radish sprouts are grown from daikon or radish seeds. Since they are sold by a sprout specialist at my local farmers market, I haven't looked for them elsewhere, but would guess that you could find them in natural food stores or Japanese groceries.

3. Lapsang souchong, a tea that has been dried over burning pinewood fires, is used to impart a smoky flavor to the viniagrette. Andoh's original recipe calls for 1/3 cup loosely packed katsuo-bushi, a variety of dried bonito that has a smoky flavor. The fish flakes are sprinkled over the simmering liquid and heated for 30 seconds before turning off the heat.

Photo of Dried and soaked wakame from fotoosvanrobin's flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License.

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A visit to Baia Nicchia Farm in Sunol

2010-06-03T20:21:00.000-07:00

I first learned about Baia Nicchia in 2006 when I read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about their tomato breeding efforts. What set them apart from other breeders was a focus on the S.F. Bay Area, a region with multiple microclimates — hot and dry in Walnut Creek, cool and sunny in the Mission, damp and foggy in the Sunset, and so on — that create challenges for backyard gardeners.

In the years since, I have bought produce and tomato seedlings* from them at the Berkeley Farmers Market; have been reading their blog; attended a tomato growing lecture at Magic Gardens in Berkeley; and most recently attended their open house.

The Sunol Ag Park
On a recent weekend, a friend and I went to an "open house" at Baia Nicchia's farm in Sunol. Baia Nicchia is run by Fred Hempel and Jill Shepard and has been on the Sunol land since 2006. They lease the land from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (which provides water to the City) and buy water from the Commission at rates somewhere between wholesale and retail. Their farm is part of the Sunol Water Temple Agricultural Park (a.k.a. the Sunol Ag Park), a project that came about because of efforts by the Berkeley nonprofit Sustainable Agriculture Education (SAGE) in 2006. At the time, San Francisco was developing a food policy that stressed food production within city limits. SAGE realized that it made sense for San Francisco to apply that to city-owned lands outside of city limits — like the Sunol plot — and convinced officials to launch a one-year pilot project in 2006 that eventually turned into a nine-year lease for agricultural uses. The San Francisco Chronicle had an article on the Ag Park in 2008. At that time, there were five groups working the land besides Baia Nicchia, including Oakland's People's Grocery and a group of refugees from Laos.

What and How They Grow
For a small, organic farm, Baia Nicchia has a relatively low number of crops. They have plenty of tomatoes, of course, most of them producing fruit for sale and some being used to breed new varieties. They also grow melons, peppers, squash, beans and microgreens in the summer, but no lettuce, chard or root vegetables. This makes their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program simultaneously somewhat more adventurous and more focused (or, perhaps, monotonous) than the average CSA. However, their on-line materials indicate that they are open to customizing the box, for example, replacing squash with more tomatoes.

To replenish soil fertility, they plant an off-season cover crop of bell beans, which is a nitrogen-fixing plant. Some time before the real planting season begins, they disk them into the earth. They also get rabbit manure from a nearby breeder and apply that to the fields, a stinky and messy job. Drip irrigation is installed throughout the farm to minimize water consumption.

Tomatoes are supported using techniques borrowed from grape vineyards: trellises that encourage the tomatoes to grow along a vertical plane instead of as cylindrical, sprawling bushes. The tomato seedlings are given a few weeks to get started before the first level of trellis is strung between the posts (pictured below). Periodically during the growing season, they hire vineyard workers to come in and install new trellis levels.

How They Make Money
Like other small farms, Baia Nicchia has multiple ways of making money. They have a CSA with various drop-off points around the Bay Area (and is open to adding more, so if you are interested in their CSA but aren't near a current drop-off point, send them a note). They also sell specialty crops to restaurants, caterers and retailers, like the edible chrysanthemum (pictured above), microgreens, and special varieties of tomatoes. The "Taste" tomato, for example, was developed specially for a catering company in San Francisco and was sold exclusively to them for a period of time. This year it is making its public debut as a seedling and I think it will eventually be at Seeds of Change. Although they used to sell produce and seedlings at several farmers markets, these days they only go to Menlo Park — apparently the return on their time investment was too low to continue with the others. The tomato breeding business is probably another source of revenue, with their seedlings being sold at the farm stand and in a local nursery (Magic Garden in Berkeley) and seeds sold through Seeds of Change (I'm unclear how this works, i.e., whether they provide the seeds or only the breeding services).

You can follow Baia Nicchia through their farm blog and CSA blog. On August 16 they are hosting a "Seeds of Change Field Day" that will include some of Seeds of Change's top new varieties of summer vegetables, produce sales and food prepared by local chefs.

* This year I have three of their seedlings in my tiny backyard garden: Blush, Black Cherry and Maglia Rossa (tomatoes from 2007 are pictured above).

Cross posted at La Vida Locavore

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A piece of the Gold Rush, fresh from the oven

2010-05-26T20:44:00.000-07:00

[Corrected Below, June 5, 2010]

When you bite into a piece of bread from San Francisco's Boudin Bakery, you're biting a piece of the Gold Rush. Founded in 1849 at the beginning of the Gold Rush, the San Francisco bakery has been baking bread since then using essentially the same sourdough starter (or "mother dough") that was first created in 1849. Through regular feedings, they have kept the mother dough alive. The starter almost perished in the 1906 earthquake and fire when the bakery at 815 Broadway caught on fire. But a heroic effort by Louise Boudin, who ran into the burning building to retrieve a piece of the original mother dough, maintained the starter's continuity.

I learned these bits of history and many others at a talk by Boudin's Master Baker Fernando Padilla, a 31 year veteran of the bakery, and docent Terry Hamburg at San Francisco's Old Mint as part of the Earth to 5-Star exhibition.

Along with gifts of bread for the audience, the presenters brought a tub of the "mother dough," the mixture that provides the leavening (yeast) and famous sour flavor (bacteria)*. Boudin's mother dough has been in continual use since 1849. [corrected 6/5/10] The mother dough is refreshed on a regular schedule by mixing a piece of the dough with water and flour. After a suitable waiting period to allow the yeast in the mother dough to activate, a portion of the refreshed mother dough is mixed with flour, salt and water to make bread dough. When Boudin makes a batch of bread, they add some of the mother dough along with flour, water and salt. Then, at sometime in the process, they save part of the dough — about 25 percent — to use as the mother dough in the next batch of bread.** During a visit to the Boudin Musuem and Bakery on Monday, I got a clarification from the docent, who explained that the mother dough and the bread dough follow parallel paths. The mother dough is refreshed on its own schedule, fed with water and flour periodically. Part the mother is mixed with flour, salt and water to make bread dough. Once mixed, none of the bread dough goes back into the mother dough. And thus, the mother dough stays alive, maintains is connection to the past. Padilla believes that the age of the mother dough is important for Boudin's flavor — when he has made new starters at one of the Boudin bakeries, the resulting bread isn't quite the same as bread made from the 1849 mother. The bread's classic "San Francisco flavor" is a result of yeast and bacteria that live in the mother dough and a long fermentation and proofing — from start to finish it takes 72 hours for Boudin to make a loaf of bread.

The Boudin family didn't come to San Francisco in 1849 to strike it rich in the gold fields. They came to bake bread, to "mine the miners", so to speak. And they were successful, building a baking company that is the only one that survives from the Gold Rush era. These days, the company bakes approximately 20,000 loaves a day in San Francisco; has about 150 restaurant clients; operates a complex at Fisherman's Wharf that houses a museum, demonstration bakery, restaurant and retail shop (a place I need to visit someday soon); and run several bakeries throughout the City and the state of California.

The cool and damp climate of San Francisco has a strong influence on the mother dough and hence on the flavor of the finished loaf. The microorganisms that live in San Francisco's air and can colonize a mother dough naturally give bread a distinctive sourness (Padilla was very empathic about the difference between naturally sour bread like Boudin's and bread made sour through use of vinegar or other agents). The flavor profile is highly dependent on location: even going across a bridge to Marin or the East Bay, or down the Peninsula you'll have a different blend of microorganisms and a different flavor. Indeed, a few years ago a microbiologist identified one of specific bacteria that give San Francisco sourdough its flavor and named it lactobacillus sanfranciscensis.

Because of the effect of local conditions on the starter, Padilla said, if you bring the Boudin mother dough to another place, it would start to change as the local yeast and bacteria begin to colonize the mother dough and take over from the original inhabitants. After about four weeks, the transition would be complete and you will have lost the San Francisco sourdough character of the starter. So, to supply their satellite bakeries, Boudin ships new batches of mother dough every few weeks.

There was a lot more that I can't cover here. It was a superb event, one of the more interesting talks I've been to in a while — and in an amazing setting, the Old Mint, constructed in 1874, survived the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. I also came away from the talk with much more appreciation for the Boudin Bakery and its workers. Because of their attraction to tourists, their outpost at Fisherman's Wharf, the stores in the airport, I looked on the bread as a curiosity of sorts. But hearing Padilla and Hamburg tell the story of the company, I gained a new appreciation for the dedication to excellence and loyalty to the company's history at the Boudin Bakery. And the bread...it's quite good – a crisp blistered crust, excellent crumb, a sharp but pleasant tangy flavor.

The Earth to 5-Star event concludes this weekend, May 28-31, and includes presentations on Friday, Saturday and Sunday on such diverse topics as coffee roasting, backyard chickens, chocolate desserts and growing food. In addition, there will be tours of the Old Mint.

Portsmouth Square in 1851

Other Notes on Old Food and Sourdough Bread

Beyond the ability to have long rising times, a sourdough starter has other benefits. According to the sourdough bread entry in the "Encyclopedia of Food Sciences and Nutrition," the acids produced by the bacteria in the starter affect the proteins in the flour, giving the dough better elasticity and extensibility. (This is one reason why many breads made from rye — a grain with relatively low protein content — use sourdough starters.) The lactic and acetic acids produced by the starter might act as antimicrobial agents and inhibit the growth of mold. There is also the possibility that it takes longer for a sourdough loaf to go stale. A few years ago, I wrote a two-part series on sourdough baking over at the Ethicurean. Part 1 is about the starter and Part 2 is about the bread.

There are plenty of foods that have involved components that have been continuously refreshed or fed for decades. Two that I can think of off the top of my head are a Limburger cheese made in Wisconsin and a kettle of oden (a type of stew) in Osaka, Japan. The Limburger was the subject of an interview on the May 1 episode of the Splendid Table. Cheesemaker Myron Olson — one of the few Limburger makers left in the U.S. — gave credit to his cheese's excellent flavor to the culture that has been used for over 100 years. The oden was described in The Art of Japanese Vegetarian Cooking, by Max Jacobson:

In Osaka, there is a famous oden restaurant called Tako-Ume ("the octopus and the plum" would be a colorful translation). There, the water in the restaurant's enormous wooden kettle constantly steams off boiling stock that is replaced by wooden buckets filled with fresh water. At night, when the restaurant closes, the flame is turned down as low as it will go, but never off, so that the contents cook continuously. No one has emptied, or cleaned, the kettle since 1897, the year Tako-Ume opened.

* The mother dough in the tub pictured here is enough to leaven 300 loaves of bread (after addition of appropriate quantities of flour, water and salt).

** Correction (June 5, 2010): At the Old Mint talk, I thought I heard that Boudin saves a piece of mixed dough to use as leavening for the next batch of bread. Based on my experience with sourdough baking, that seemed unusual to me, but they were the experts, right? Well, it turns out that I heard wrong (the acoustics in the Old Mint are horrible). During a visit to the Boudin Musuem and Bakery on Monday, I got a clarification from the docent, who explained that the mother dough and the bread dough follow parallel paths. The mother dough is refreshed on its own schedule, fed with water and flour. To make a batch of bread, part the mother is mixed with flour, salt and water. Once the dough is mixed, none of the bread dough goes back into the mother dough.

Photo credits: Photo of Boudin bakery from aresauburn's flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License, photo of bread and container by the author, photo of Portsmouth Square in 1851 from Wikimedia Commons.

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A visit to Berkeley's Edible Schoolyard

2010-05-16T23:11:00.000-07:00

The Edible Schoolyard, an educational garden and kitchen at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California, has been my path, so to speak, twice recently. The first time was a cover story in the East Bay Express. The second was an actual visit to the garden, my first visit ever.

I wrote a commentary on the article over at the Ethicurean that covers how the garden works and what the teachers and principal think about the project. Basically, once a week, the students spend 1 ½ hours in the garden or the kitchen. A garden class usually starts with a lesson — like the life history of the mushroom — finish with the children doing some hands-on projects — like grafting branches onto fruit trees or replanting seedlings. In the kitchen classes, they learn about nutrition and cooking and prepare their own lunch. The time for this edible education is taken from science instruction, not from classes that are directly connected to the state assessment tests.

A few weeks later, I visited the garden during their annual plant sale (which was a big success, earning $18,000). I contributed in a small way through a purchase of Genovese basil and a dwarf lavender that will supposedly be excellent for cooking and baking (e.g., lavender tuiles from Alice Medrich's Pure Dessert). Below I have a few of my favorite photos from the afternoon.

First, the sign outside of the northern entrance that features a lovely image of greens underneath the letters (most likely by Patricia Curtan, who illustrated several of the Chez Panisse cookbooks). Oddly, it is surrounded by non-edible plants.

The garden has a dozen of so resident chickens that I was unable to successfully photograph. But I did get a good shot of what they call the "Chicken Tractor." Based on its design, I assume that they move the tractor to a recently harvested or tilled spot, put a chicken or two inside the cage, and let the chickens eat the insects, plant debris and whatever else they can find. The chickens will then leave droppings that will enrich the soil. Much larger systems like this are used at many farms, including Eatwell Farm near Davis, California (here is something I wrote for Eat Local Challenge about Eatwell's chicken operation).

Part of the eastern border of the garden has a "wall" of apple espaliers, a compact, almost two-dimensional way to grow some kinds of fruit.

The garden has some less popular vegetables, like cardoons. Unlike an artichoke, one doesn't eat the immature flower, but instead eats the lower stalks (after much preparatory work). I tried cardoons once a while ago and didn't like them very much.

Near the kitchen I ran across a display case that contained several drawings of prospective garden superheroes. There was Lemon Lady ("squirts lemon juice in villain's eyes"), Red Raspberry ("waves her magic dust and the raspberry goes back to ripeness"), and my favorite, Mulch Man, perhaps the invention of a student who just did some work in on the compost pile.

For a satellite view of the garden, go to Google Maps (or Google Earth, I suppose) and type 37.882486, -122.276075 into the search box and click the "Search Maps" button. It should bring up a map that is centered on the garden (or perhaps on the nearest address).

The Edible Schoolyard website also has plenty of information about their program, including resources for teachers and those hoping to start their own school garden. There is also a book by Alice Waters about the garden, Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea.

More photos are in a set at Flickr (and are available in higher resolution there).

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Spicing red beans the Georgian way

2010-05-12T08:33:00.000-07:00

Adding ginger, cinnamon and cloves to certain cookie doughs or cake batter can create culinary magic, as anyone who has tasted a good gingersnap knows. The combination can also do good things for savory dishes, as a simple bean and cheese dish from Paula Wolfert's The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean illustrates. Wolfert's book, one of a handful of volumes she has written about cooking near the Mediterranean, was a revelation for me, showing me the food of parts of the Mediterranean that don't get much attention: Syria, Georgia, Macedonia, southeastern Turkey, to name a few. Like other books by Wolfert, it is much more than a collection of recipes — it is an exploration of culinary culture.

One of my favorite recipes in the book comes from Georgia, a place where they know how to make beans interesting with additions like walnuts, leeks and coriander; raisins, honey and almonds; or eggs and butter, to name a few. Wolfert writes that "Georgians know more about blending spices and herbs than any other eastern Mediterranean people, and nowhere do they show off their knowledge to more glorious proof than with a pot of small red beans." And the recipe below that I have adapted from the book is a great example of Georgian skill. Although it appears to be simple — red beans and sliced cheese — it gives several layers of flavors in earthy beans, sweet and sharp spices, pungent feta cheese, and refreshing (or soapy) cilantro.

Red Beans, Spices, Pomegranate and Cheese
Adapted from The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean by Paula Wolfert

1 cup uncooked small red beans or 2 cups cooked beans
2 T. mild vegetable oil
1 cup chopped onion
1/2 t. ground dry ginger
1/4 t. ground cinnamon
1/4 t. ground cloves
1/2 t. salt, plus more to taste
Black pepper
Cayenne pepper to taste
1-2 T. pomegranate juice or pomegranate molasses
4 T. chopped cilantro
1/4 lb. sliced feta cheese

If using uncooked beans, cook the beans until tender using your favorite technique (here's how they do it at Rancho Gordo), then drain and save the cooking liquid (to be used later in the recipe). If using canned beans, drain and rinse them.

Heat a skillet over medium-low heat, then cook the onion in the oil, covered, stirring every few minutes. When the onion is tender (5 minutes or so), add the cooked beans. Cook uncovered for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, then mix in the spices, salt, and any reserved liquid (if using canned beans, add about 1/2 cup of water). Cook until the pan is almost dry, stirring occasionally. Turn off the heat and mix in the pomegranate juice or molasses and half of the chopped cilantro.

Ideally, the beans should go into the refrigerator to mellow for about 8 hours and brought back to room temperature before serving, but if you can't wait, you can eat them warm or after they have cooled to room temperature. If you are going to refrigerate the beans before serving, put them in a glass storage bowl. If serving immediately or soon, transfer the beans to a serving bowl.

Serve topped with the remaining chopped cilantro and the slices of feta cheese.

Map of Georgia from the CIA World Factbook, photo of spices by the author.

Random link from the archive: Tofu Squares with Miso

Technorati tags: Georgia : vegetarian : Food

Kasha crashes my chocolate chunk cookie dough

2010-04-24T09:09:00.000-07:00

Two years ago, I reported on a failed experiment: an unholy alliance between nutrition and cookies in which I added amaranth seeds (little nutritional powerhouses*) to chocolate chunk cookie batter before baking. The unpleasant results made me wary of such experimentation.

Many months later, I received Robin Aswell's "The New Whole Grains Cookbook" as a gift and found that it contained a chocolate chunk cookie recipe with a health boost in the form of toasted buckwheat groats (also called "kasha"). Whether or not these cookies are much healthier than a standard cookie is hard to say — and is probably irrelevant, they are cookies after all — but I gave them a try because I think that buckwheat and chocolate make an superb pair.

On one level they were a success: the flavor was excellent and the crunchy groats were an interesting change of pace. But on another level, the texture never turned out quite right — perhaps it is the recipe's specification of room temperature butter and baking soda instead of slightly chilled butter and baking powder, or perhaps I didn't adapt my baking habits to the batter's special needs.

I liked the combination of toasted buckwheat and chocolate so much that I brought flavor pair to my favorite chocolate-chunk cookie, pouring in about 1/2 cup of roasted buckwheat groats along with the chocolate chunks.

They were a great success — thanks in part, of course, to the underlying recipe — with the crunchy buckwheat pieces offering a foil to the soft cookie matrix and an interesting flavor contrast to the chocolate. In the end, it's clear that the reason they were a success while the amaranth experiment was my motivation: it was about flavor, not purely a nutritional boost.

If you like the taste of buckwheat, try adding a handful of kasha to your next batch of chocolate chunk cookies, cocoa cookies, or brownies.**

Notes

* A piece by Don Lotter at Rodale's New Farm looks at the potential of amaranth to improve the lives of poor Guatemalen peasants. Lotter summarizes the nutritional benefits of amaranth:

Amaranth enjoys a protein content of a remarkable 16 percent and is two to three times higher in lysine than most other grains. In fact, this important amino acid is low in most other grains and is perennially deficient in the diets of the rural poor in countries such as Guatemala. Amaranth is also 4 to 8 times higher in calcium and 3 to 5 times higher in iron-both critical elements for nutrition-than other common grains such as corn, wheat, and rice. In fact, when rated by nutritionists for general nutritional quality, amaranth scores significantly higher than other common foods such as milk, soy, wheat and corn. Amaranth's digestibility score is an impressive 90 percent, much higher than problematic foods such as soy, milk and wheat.

** Or try this recipe for “Buttery Buckwheat Nibby Cookies” from Alice Medrich’s remarkable Pure Dessert, posted on The Purple Foodie, which pairs buckwheat flour and cocao nibs.

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The fish stick as post-war food icon

2010-04-17T09:21:00.000-07:00

The humble fish stick — staple of school lunches and quick weeknight dinners — tells the story of American food since World War II. It tells us about technological innovation, the suburban explosion, America's love with "the new," and the major influence of government policy on what we eat.

That I learned all of these things about fish sticks is the result of one of those wonderful library coincidences: I was in looking for something or other and I ran across an article called "The Ocean’s Hot Dog: The Development of the Fish Stick" in the journal Technology and Culture (sub. req'd). Paul Josephson, a professor of history at Colby College, gives an overview of the development of the fish stick and how it became a success, giving special attention to Gorton’s company. I'm much more interested — and suspect that you are too — in the fish stick than in corporate history, so in this post, I’ll focus on the article's coverage of the fish stick as an example of the post-war food landscape (or, perhaps, seascape).

Born from Blocks

After World War II, the technological capability of fishing vessels greatly improved. Ships had stronger engines and longer range, more capacity, and more powerful winches. Nets were less costly and more durable. Military-developments like sonar helped find fish. And, perhaps most importantly, the new ships were able to process and freeze their catch at sea. So, the fleet of huge ships could catch vast quantities of fish, they could process the fish into fillets and freeze them into blocks at sea. Although the quick-freezing techniques were able to freeze fish without damaging it, when the blocks were thawed, the fillets were too damaged to sell as whole fillets. So what do you do with a huge block of frozen fish?

One of the first ideas was the "fishbrick":

quick-frozen filleted fish packaged like blocks of ice cream. The main selling point was that “the housewife can cut the fish into any shape and be confident that the shape will be retained even after cooking”; no defrosting was necessary. But the First National and Kroger’s grocery stores could hardly sell the product, and moreover, most stores lacked frozen-food display cases to accommodate the bricks.

Eventually, someone realized that the blocks of fish could be a valuable product if most of the cooking was done by the manufacturer, making it a convenience food. Although it took plenty of research and development to get the details right, the basic process for all fish stick was something like this:

solid blocks of clean, white, frozen-fresh fillets were cut into stick sizes with as little waste as possible, using modern band saws. ... After cutting, the fish sticks were covered with “just the right percentage of breading for maximum taste appeal.” Next, conveyors conducted the fish through automatic fryers where they acquired an “appetizing light golden-brown hue” in fat heated to between 375 and 400 degrees Fahrenheit. From there, it was on to packaging, labeling, freezing, and shipment.

A great idea to be sure, but it took much more than a band saw, some breading and a brightly colored package to make the fish stick a mass-market food.

Putting the Pieces in Place

As promising as the fish stick seemed, several things had to be in place before the product could really take off:

Grocery store display cases: Until the 1930s, grocery stores didn't the display cases that we are used to seeing, and so were unable to move much frozen merchandise. General Foods — owner of the Birds Eye brand, a pioneer of frozen food — was an innovator here, helping to design display cases and get them installed in grocery stores, thereby creating the frozen food market.
Distribution network: To get food from the factory to the store required a new network of refrigerated trucks and rail cars.
Kitchen appliances: The U.S. population in 1952 was 152 million, but only 4 million families had freezers. By 1960, the number of families with freezers had quadrupled. One reason for this is that the houses build during the post-war boom had kitchens that were large enough to hold a freezer or refrigerator–freezer unit.
Consumer acceptance: WWII was important here. The war sent many women into the workplace, and convenience foods allowed Rosie the Riveter to work in the shipyard all day, come home, and quickly have dinner on the table for her family. In addition, war rationing of canned goods drove consumers to frozen foods, laying the groundwork for the introduction of the fish stick after the war.

Government subsidies were also a major factor in the fish stick's development and success. Canada, the U.S. and other governments helped pay for new processing plants and new fishing vessels. The 1950s saw a major expansion of the federal highway system, enabling trucks to more easily deliver product across the country. Federally-funded research in such things as freezing technology led to product improvements. Eventually, the school lunch program became a major buyer of the product.

A Success Story

After years of development Birds Eye, Fulham Brothers, and Gorton’s introduced the fish stick in 1953*, emphasizing "their wholesomeness, modernity, and time-saving qualities: the 'harried housewife' could 'heat and eat' fish sticks, which were nutritious, based on scientific standards, and used only such wholesome ingredients as potatoes, salt cod, shortening, and meal." They were a big hit: within months of their launch, they had claimed 10% of non-canned fish sales. In 1953, 13 companies were making 7.5 million pounds of product. In the first quarter of 1954, 55 companies were making 9 million pounds of product.

To conclude this post, I'll let the article's author have the final remarks:

Like many processed foods, the fish stick occupies an important place in the American diet and the American marketplace. A visit to any neighborhood supermarket reveals no fewer than a half-dozen companies producing fish sticks. Still, it is not a staple of the diet. To most Americans, fast food means beef, not fish, and even when fish is chosen it is more likely to be breaded fillets than fish sticks. Among the factors that prevented the fish stick from becoming as celebrated as the hamburger were the American palate, which often suffers from landlubbers’ taste buds, and the declining quality of many fish stick products after their initial introduction. As more and more companies entered the market, many of them sought to cut costs by producing an inferior product, one with more breading and other nonfish substances. The fish stick became the “hot dog” of the ocean; many Americans continued to feel that fish sticks were a mediocre food, and companies that strove to keep quality (and fish) at the forefront of production suffered the consequences. This may have been because producers created demand for a product after fortuitous technological innovations and social pressures had combined to create the fish stick. Ultimately, the “piscatorial engineer”—part advertiser, part salesman, and part food-product innovator—could only put fish sticks on the table, but couldn’t make consumers fill their plates.

Reference: "The Ocean’s Hot Dog: The Development of the Fish Stick, by Paul Josephson (of Colby College), Technology and Culture 49 (1), 2008. doi 10.1353/tech.2008.0023

Note
* The article is not completely clear about when the first fish stick was actually introduced. In one place, the Josephson writes that "Birds Eye, Fulham Brothers, and Gorton’s — all Massachusetts companies — introduced fish sticks in the spring of 1953." In another place, he writes "Birds Eye ... introduced fish sticks to national fanfare on 2 October 1953." How did Birds Eye introduce the product in the spring and autumn of 1953? Or was the spring introduction a regional one (e.g., New England) and the autumn introduction a national one?

Photo of Gorton's box from zonalpony's flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License.

Random link from the archive: My visit to the Slow Food Nation Taste pavilions

Recipe: vegetable-cheese pies

2010-04-10T08:37:00.000-07:00

There are many wonderful things about savory pies: the contrast between a sharply flavored filling and a mellow crust, the crisp edges and soft middle, their portability, and their flexibility, to name a few.

One of my favorite pies is an adaptation from a recipe in Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant, the Moosewood Collective’s book about cuisines from around the world. On Sunday, it turns out, the restaurant’s menu focuses on a particular part of the world, like Armenia and the Middle East, China, or the British Isles. Although they might not be as anthropologically exciting as a recipe collected in the field by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid (Asia specialists), Diana Kennedy (Mexico) or Paula Wolfert (the Middle East), in my years of cooking from the book I have found it to produce delicious food.

To create my pies, I adapted the dough recipe for “Beurek with Parsley-Cheese Filling” and the filling recipe from the previously blogged-about torta verde: feta cheese, potato, and chard. The filling for the Beurek in the Moosewood book is certainly delicious – four kinds of cheese, basil and parsley – but I usually prefer a greener filling.

Most savory pies take a fair amount of work – making a crust, making a filling, and making the pies – but the work can be spread out over an afternoon or two days. In this recipe, the vegetables in the filling can be made ahead, with the cheese and egg added just before assembly. As I mentioned earlier, savory pies are flexible. You can replace the chard with spinach, dandelion greens, or other green; use a combination of cooked mushrooms and cheese; replace some of the potato and greens with grated winter squash that has been steamed; or try other cheeses, like a soft goat cheese.

Leftover filling can be used to make a frittata or fritter: just add a few more eggs to any extra filling, mix well, then cook in a skillet.

The pies are fabulous right out of the oven, of course. They also can be part of portable meals – on a hike or urban adventure, for example – because they are delicious when at room temperature. They also freeze well, so thoroughly wrap a few and put them in the freezer for a future meal.

Recipe: Vegetable-cheese pies
Adapted from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant and Saveur (May/June 1998)

Dough:
3/4 cup warm water (105-110 °F)
2 T. olive oil
2 1/2 t. instant yeast*
1 t. salt
2 c. all-purpose flour

Filling:
2 cloves of garlic, finely minced
8-10 large Swiss chard leaves, washed
Salt
1 medium potato, boiled, peeled and cut in 1/4" dice
2 T. minced fresh parsley or dill
1 1/4 c. crumbled feta cheese
1/2 c. grated mozzarella cheese
Pepper
2 eggs, lightly beaten, divided (see below)

Wash and garnish:
Part of divided egg mixture mixed with 1/2 T. water
Sesame seeds or poppy seeds

(Unit conversion page)

Make the dough: Place the flour, yeast and salt in a bowl of a stand mixer with the dough hook attached**. Operate on low speed until dry ingredients are combined. Pour in the water and olive oil. Mix on medium-low speed until the dough starts coming together (you might need to mix with a spoon or the detached dough hook to get all of the flour into a mass). Process at medium speed for 4 minutes. Remove dough hook and cover the bowl. Let rise in a warm place for 1-2 hours, or until doubled.

Make the filling: Remove the chard leaves from the stem. Chop the leaves roughly and place in a large bowl. Cut the stems through the middle towards the base. Chop the stems into thin slices (a few millimeters).

Heat some olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add garlic, stir and let it cook for 30 seconds. Add chard stems and sauté for a few minutes. Add the chard leaves, stir, reduce heat to medium-low, and cook covered for a few minutes until chard is tender. Turn off heat, remove cover and let cool. When it is cool, squeeze the chard to press out excess liquid.

Combine potatoes, parsley (or dill), cheeses, and drained chard in a large bowl. Reserve about 1/4 of the beaten eggs in a small bowl (this will be used to glaze the pies before baking). Stir in the remaining 3/4 of the beaten eggs and set aside.

Make the pies: Preheat the oven to 375 °F. Get out two baking sheets. Line one with a sheet of parchment paper or a non-stick sheet (like Silpat). Lightly dust the other with flour.

Punch down the dough. Divide it into 10 pieces. Roll each piece into a ball and place on the flour-dusted baking sheet. Cover them with a dry towel while you work.

Using flour as necessary (but not too much), roll each ball into a circle with an approximate diameter of 6 inches (it is also possible to stretch the dough by hand). If a piece resists your rolling, set the piece aside to rest for a few minutes and begin working on another piece (or re-rolling a piece that has been resting).

Spoon one-tenth of the filling into the lower half of a circle, leaving a border around the bottom. Fold the top half of the dough over, then seal the pie. You can use a folding technique or a crimping technique to seal. (A video from Greek Food TV shows how to roll a crust at the 4:30 time point. Proper crimping technique is shown by Alton Brown in a Good Eats episode posted on You Tube during the first minute of the video.) After each pie is finished, place on the Silpat/parchment-coated baking sheet. Gently bend into a half-moon shape if you like, or leave them as half-circles.

Just before baking, brush each pie with the egg wash, sprinkle with sesame seeds, poppy seeds (or nothing), then prick each pie with a fork in several places to allow steam to vent. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, turning the baking sheet 180 degrees once during baking. Serve hot or at room temperature.

Notes

* Instant yeast — also labeled "Bread Machine Yeast" — does not need to be dissolved in water before use and so can be combined directly with dry ingredients. If you only have regular yeast, pour it into 1/4 cup warm water (105-110 F), stir until well combined, and let rest for 5 minutes. It should be foamy and fragrant after that time. Pour into the flour along with the other 1/2 cup warm water and olive oil.

** To make the dough by hand, pour the water and oil into the dry ingredients. Stir until it becomes somewhat of a shaggy mass, then turn out onto a surface for kneading. Knead for 5 minutes, adding flour when necessary (but as little as possible).

Random link from the archive: Chocolate Chunk Cookies

Escarole is my "vegetable destiny" at the farmers market

2010-03-27T09:43:00.001-07:00

One of the challenges — and joys — of shopping at the farmers market is that it can shake up your plans: you might be a week too early or a week too late for a certain product, or the farmer might not have harvested it that week. And so, flexibility is needed. For last Sunday's dinner, I planned on making free-form lasagna filled with a fennel-mushroom sauté and ricotta cheese, topped with a tomato sauce made from Yes We Can! tomatoes. As a side dish, my initial idea was to go with a simple classic: braised rapini (broccoli rabe).

Alas, there was no rapini in the market that day. But escarole was on special at the Happy Boy stand, so I followed that morning's "vegetable destiny" and bought a head.

Elizabeth Schneider's "Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini" says that the two vegetables marketed as escarole (Cichorium endivia) — curly and broad-leaved — are in the endive family. But confusingly, curly endive is marketed as “chicory” or “curly chicory,” even though it is not a chicory. And then, it turns out, Belgian endive (Cichorium intybus)* is not a “true endive”, but is actually a chicory. Vegetable names can be so confusing sometimes.

Anyway, the curly endive plant, is actually the source of two marketable plants. One looks like a head of leaf lettuce with bright green leaves and a white base. The other is frisée, a pale vegetable with thin spidery leaves, which is made by “field blanching.” The word "blanch" here doesn't refer to the cooking process, but instead refers to pigment prevention: while still in the field, the plants are protected from light and weighted down, sometimes with boards, sometimes with cups, in order to maintain their pale pigmentation.

The escarole I bought was the broad-leaved variety. The outside leaves are somewhat tough, while the inside leaves are tender. For some reason, I had the phrase "escarole and beans" running through my head — perhaps I saw it on a Italian cooking show on TV (it seems that Lidia is always on public TV, and one of my channel surfs might have caught her talking about the combination). So I cooked some cannellini beans, sautéed some onion, and then braised most of the escarole. The result was a superb combination of hearty beans, warm rosemary, and the slight bitterness of the escarole.

Recipe: Escarole and cannellini beans

Cooking oil
1/2 medium onion, diced
1-2 cloves garlic, finely minced
3/4 head escarole, washed and coarsely chopped
2 cups cooked cannellini beans (see notes)
Fresh or dried rosemary to taste (a teaspoon or two)
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat some oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add the onion and sauté until tender (a few minutes), stirring frequently. Stir in the garlic and cook for 30 seconds, then pour in the escarole. Mix well, turn the heat to low, and cover. Cook for a few minutes until escarole is tender. Pour in the beans, and season with herbs, salt and pepper. Increase the heat to medium high and cook until heated through.

Notes

I'm partial to beans from Rancho Gordo and Phipps Country Store and Farm. I have had good luck using the following method:

Rinse, then cover with cool water. Soak for several hours, then drain and rinse
Heat oil in a saucepan over medium heat, add minced onion (and, optionally, diced carrot and celery), cook until tender
Add beans and water
Raise the heat to high and bring the mixture to a boil. Let boil for a minute or two.
Pour everything into a slow cooker.
Add herbs as desired (thyme, rosemary, bay leaf).
Cook until tender (a few hours), then add salt to taste.

The solar cooker is also a great way to cook beans if you have one, plus the sun and time.

If you eat pork, the addition of cooked Italian sausage or bacon can be an impressive flavor booster.

* The plant that produces Belgian endive also gives us the chicory root that is used as a coffee flavoring in New Orleans-style coffee.

Random link from the archive:In past centuries, ketchup wasn't all about tomatoes

Photo of Escarole in a colander from wickenden's flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License.

Making infused syrups

2010-03-14T12:00:00.001-07:00

To bring liquid interest to my meals, I’ve been experimenting with home-made sodas. Or, more precisely, I’ve been experimenting with flavored syrups, as my sodas are simply some syrup topped by chilled sparkling water and perhaps a dash of Angostura bitters.

The possibilities are almost endless: aromatic leaves and roots from Asian cuisine, spices (the cardamom soda at Saul’s Deli in Berkeley is splendid), citrus zest, vanilla beans, berries, lavender, and so on. For many infusions, it’s almost as simple as making a cup of tea: heat water, sugar and the flavoring ingredients together, then cool and strain. For infusions with fresh produce, like a strawberry syrup, a different approach is needed, macerating the fruit in sugar, then cooking the mixture to obtain a syrup – a process similar to jam making but with far less cooking (no need to get the “set”).

Here’s one of my favorite base flavors: ginger, makrut lime and lemongrass. I’m still working on the timing for the infusion, thinking that a better flavor might be obtained by adding the lime leaves after the liquid has come to a boil.

Thai-Inspired Syrup

10 grams peeled ginger root, sliced
3 paired makrut lime leaves* (i.e., 6 leaf segments total)
20 grams lemon grass, sliced
225 grams water (1 cup)
225 grams sugar (about 1 cup)

Combine all of the ingredients in a non-reactive saucepan, bring to a boil over medium heat. Let boil for about a minute, then turn off the heat and cover. Let steep for five to ten minutes. Pour into a heat-proof container through a fine strainer and allow to cool. Store in a glass jar in the refrigerator.

To serve, pour 15-30 mL (1-2 tablespoons) into a glass and top with 350 mL (12 fl. oz.) chilled sparkling water.

* Citrus hystrix, an Asian lime with double-segmented leaves. Most famously used in Thai curries, salads and soups, the leaves impart a magical aroma and subtle flavor. You can sometimes find them in Asian grocery stores, or in groceries that carry more exotic ingredients (like Berkeley Bowl, Monterey Market, and possibly some Whole Foods).

Random link from the archive:The grocery bag pannier makes shopping by bicycle easier

The Melody of the Stars

2010-02-27T15:34:00.001-08:00

Here's something off the normal path for this blog: music ratings. I frequently rate my digital music collection as I play it – click one of the five stars in Windows Media Player* to rate a song. For various reasons (mostly a combination of laziness and indecision), only about 20% of my collection is rated at this moment. Probably the best part of having a body of rated songs is the "five-star playlist" that is enables, which can be a really easy way to get a lot of variety and quality in a somewhat random (and always growing) playlist.

I did a survey of my ratings the other day and found this:

The trend is clear: the part of my collection that is rated is skewed towards songs that I like a lot. On one level this makes sense. Why should my music collection contain songs that I don't like? Or does it mean that my rating scheme is skewed towards high ratings? Or that I'm more likely to rate a song that is four- or five-star worthy?

If I was being honest with myself, setting three stars as the true average rating, the rating distribution should be bell-shaped, with the peak at three stars. It’s too late to change now, but if Media Player ever loses my library, perhaps I’ll try the bell curve approach.

On my home PC, where there is tons of storage space, I keep the one-star songs around. But on my portable player (the highly flawed but usable Cowon D2 with 16 GB of storage), I've deleted them even though it can mess up the flow of an album (which I think is important, as the artists had a reason for putting the songs in that order). So songs that horrify me, like Aimee Mann's "She Really Wants You" on the uneven but often superb The Forgotten Arm, or “Matrimony” on Whiskeytown’s frequently amazing Faithless Street**, get the boot from my portable player.

* Of the three big music programs for the PC (Media Player, Real Player and iTunes), Media Player is by far my favorite and iTunes by far my least favorite. IMHO, iTunes has a horrible design and I find it almost unusable, which is surprising, given Apple's reputation for simple, intuitive design.

** One of my favorite songs from the album is the rollicking "Hard Luck Story," which includes lyrics that are hard not to love:

Well, I was thinking about a heading to Mobile, Alabama
And that was just last Saturday night.
I can leave you if I wanna, little baby and I'm gonna tonight.
Cause I got a bucket full of tears and a hard luck story
There's a bad moon rising behind
And I swore it to your daddy that I loved you, but I changed my mind.
Well, I'm a fast talking, hell-raising, son of a bitch
And I'm a sinner and I know how to fight
Well, I can leave you if I wanna, little baby and I'm gonna tonight.

(source: the very busy and animated website of musicsonglyrics.com)

Random link from the archive: Buckwheat Noodles Baked with Savoy Cabbage, Potatoes, Cheese and Brown Butter

The no-knead bread recipe saved my complicated sourdough bread

2010-02-17T23:01:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, my complicated, high-maintenance bread baking project was saved by the ultra-simple no-knead recipe.

After a week of messy twice-daily sourdough starter refreshing, I was ready to bake some naturally-leavened bread. Although my past loaves have been lackluster – dense and a bit too sticky – I hoped that this time it would be different.

My starter seemed strong — resilient, lacy webs of gluten and a wonderful aroma — and I possibly had a breakthrough idea to improve the fermentation and proofing. This breakthrough was inspired by a post from Sam Fromartz at Chews Wise, which gave me the idea that my previous bread failures were caused by too-low temperatures during the rise and proof. The weather in Berkeley, my apartment's layout, and my attitude towards using the heater means that my apartment is generally in the low to mid 60s (Fahrenheit), while the best temperature for rising is in the mid 70s. So I rigged up a better rising place by putting some towel-wrapped warm bricks into a cooler, adding the container full of dough, then shutting the lid to obtain a cooler temperature in the mid 70s.

Alas, this good idea was hampered by mistake I made in the dough-making process. I chose to try a recipe from Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking ("Thom Leonard’s Country French Bread") that involves giving the starter a final feeding the night before the dough mixing and kneading. Something went wrong, and the starter was too watery and seemed almost lifeless the day before. But since it had some bubbles and a good aroma (and since I wouldn’t get another chance to bake for another week), I kept going. Then, when I mixed and kneaded the dough, it was very soft, which was somewhat indicated by the recipe ("This should be a soft, sticky, and extensible dough"), and a previous experience with a soft dough where the dough seemed hopelessly soft yet the bread turned out fine (this was the ciabatta recipe in the same book, which I posted about previously and included a link to the recipe published by the L.A. Times).

But after hours of rising and several “turns",” the dough was still to soft to hold a shape. Should I give up?

Fortunately, the answer was "no," because when I was turning on the oven, I had an idea: use the baking technique in the famous no-knead bread recipe,* baking the loaf inside of a heavy, preheated pot, as the soft dough would be held in place by the wall of the pot.

When the oven and preheated pot were ready, I carefully slid out the rack and poured the dough into the hot pot. I put the cover on, slid the rack in again, and closed the oven door. About 20 minutes later I took off the lid and let it bake for 25 more minutes. In the end, it was a stunning loaf: perfectly shaped and with a deep golden-brown hue. Inside the loaf, however, although there was a good variation in bubble size, the bread was somewhat gummy (but still tasty when toasted).

I’m starting to think that I should always bake my bread in a pot. The method gives the loaf a gorgeous color, excellent crust and near-perfect shape. And I think I "owe it one," as it prevented my week of effort from going into the city green-waste bin.

* The no-knead recipe was created by Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street Bakery in New York and became a major trend when Mark Bittman wrote about it in the New York Times. Eventually Lahey used the technique as the basis of a book called My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method.

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Cooking by the bible -- "The Flavor Bible,” that is

2010-02-09T20:48:00.000-08:00

Over the last few weekends, I've been trying something new to help me experience the flavors of the season or to use up extra produce: consulting a bible. This particular bible is The Flavor Bible , by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg*.

After a short introduction into how we taste and how chefs create successful flavor combination, the book lists ingredients alphabetically, with each ingredient followed by notes about its season, taste, "flavor weight," volume, typical preparation techniques, and by a list of compatible flavors. For example, the flavor list for bell peppers begins with “anchovies, anise, arugula, bacon, BASIL, bay leaf, …” (ingredients in bold or caps are especially recommended). In info boxes near some ingredient headings you’ll find comments from great chefs about the item and example dishes using the item.

It’s proving to be a useful tool for kitchen improvisations. The other night, for example, I had a leek and some pieces of winter squash that I wanted to use up. For the sake of simplicity, I settled on a soup. I sweated the leek in some oil for a few minutes, then added the squash, thyme and water. When the squash was tender, I blended it until smooth. That’s an OK soup, but a little dull, so I consulted the winter squash entry in the Flavor Bible and chose apple and gruyere as flavor boosts, cutting them into 5-10 mm dice and dropping the cubes into the hot soup just before serving. The Gruyere was a great success, holding its shape** in the thick orange soup and bringing its rich, sometimes pungent flavor in bursts. The apple was less successful, as the flavor didn’t come through as much as I’d like (perhaps a different variety would have been better). A recipe that approximates what I made is at the bottom of the post.

Another Flavor Bible experiment was less successful, in which I combined roasted rutabaga and cooked white beans with an herb-mustard vinaigrette (mustard and rutabaga were a recommended pairing). The flavors were too muted and I couldn't decide whether it should be a hot dish or room temperature one.

If you enjoy experimenting in the kitchen or need new ideas about what to do with the farmers market seasonal bounty, it's a great book to have around.

Recipe: Squash Soup with Gruyere and Apple

Cooking oil or butter
1 leek, washed thoroughly, quartered, and sliced
2 cups roughly chopped winter squash (like butternut or kabocha)
Thyme
A few cups of water or stock
Salt and pepper to taste
Diced Gruyere cheese, 5 mm on a side
Diced apple, 1 cm on a side

Heat the oil over medium heat. Add the sliced leek, stir and cook for a few minutes, covered. Add the squash pieces and thyme and cook uncovered for a few minutes, stirring frequently. Pour in the water (or stock), raise the heat, bring to a boil, then cook, covered, over medium-low heat until the squash is tender. Puree with an immersion blender or in a blender (being careful about blending a hot liquid). Add salt and pepper to taste.

To serve, ladle the soup into a bowl and top with a spoonful each of diced cheese and apple.

* I’ve often wondered whether someone has written – or is working on – “The Bible Bible,” a tome that catalogs the myriad "bibles" that are in print. My cookbook shelf now has three bibles: The Flavor Bible and Rose Levy Beranbaum's Pie and Pastry Bible and Cake Bible (she is also the author of The Bread Bible).

** The cheese near the rind of most aged cheeses is drier and ‘heartier’ than the center, so for this garnish it might make sense to used edge pieces instead of middle pieces.

Random link from the archive:Treehugger 100-Mile Thanksgiving Challenge

Technorati tags: Food : vegetarian

Recipe: Straw Potato Cake

2010-01-31T09:04:00.000-08:00

While planning a somewhat elaborate breakfast on a recent visit to my parents' house, I remembered a once-favorite potato dish, the “straw potato cake.” The cake, which has few ingredients but requires care in preparation, gets its name from the similarity between the potato pieces and straw, and offers crispiness and softness in a golden disc.

Although it is somewhat like a big hash brown, Paul Bertolli takes great pains in Chez Panisse Cooking to explain how to make it. There’s the issue of the potatoes: Bertolli recommends using large Russet potatoes because of their high starch content. Then there is issue of cutting: he says they should be cut using a mandoline into 1/8" julienne, or by hand. A grater is no good, he argues, because then cake will be too compact (my results with a grater, however, have been pretty good, so you might give the grater a try if you don’t have a mandoline). And it is important to rinse the cut potatoes thoroughly to remove surface starch – which would cause the cake to be gummy – and then dry them completely in a salad spinner or with towels. Finally, Bertolli recommends using a 10 inch or smaller pan because larger pans are hard to heat evenly on stoves at home. It’s also important to cook this in a non-stick pan, like a well-seasoned cast iron skillet or coated pan, so the potato cake can keep its form.

Serve on its own as a side dish or topped with grated cheese, sauteed mushrooms, or anything else that goes with potato.

Straw Potato Cake

Adapted from Chez Panisse Cooking by Paul Bertolli

20 ounces russet potatoes (567 grams)
3 1/2 T. butter or oil (52 mL) *
Salt and pepper

Prepare the potatoes by peeling, then cutting into 1/8" julienne on a mandoline or by hand (or, less preferably, with a box grater). Rinse the cut potatoes in several changes of water, then drain and dry with a towel of in a salad spinner.

Preheat the skillet over low heat for several minutes, then add 2 1/2 T. of the butter or oil and increase the heat to medium. Place one-half of the potato into the hot oil, sprinkle in some salt and pepper, then add the rest of the potato. Use a wooden spoon or mini-spatula to shape the potatoes into a cake, trying to leave some space around the edge of the pan. Press down gently to help the cake form and to create even contact with the pan.

Let it cook, shaking the pan now and then to prevent sticking, until underside is golden brown (about 10 minutes). Slide onto a plate. Add the remaining tablespoon of butter or oil to the pan, and then return the potato cake to the pan, uncooked side down. Cook for a few minutes more until second side is golden, again shaking the pan periodically.

When the second side is golden brown, slide onto a plate and serve.

Variations: Add some chopped herbs (rosemary, thyme, etc.), cooked bacon, or spices (Indian spices might be interesting, served with a yogurt sauce) to the raw potato.

* Bertolli’s recipe calls for clarified butter because of its higher smoke point and excellent flavor. I’ve had good luck with regular butter and cooking oil.

Hummingbirds!

2010-01-16T08:37:00.000-08:00

In mid-January, PBS's Nature series had a remarkable program about my favorite animal, the hummingbird. The lives of these incredible birds is explored in several "chapters," each one punctuated by outstanding footage and insightful commentary.

Among the many interesting parts are segments on why the black-chinned hummingbird builds their nests close to the nests of Cooper's hawks, how the male Anna's hummingbird makes the "chirp" during its dramatic dive (which I covered here in late 2008), and how the birds are changing their migration habits to spend more time on the Gulf Coast, and much more. Nature's web site has the entire episode on-line for viewing, along with many web-only extras and a link to a collection of hummingbird photos by viewers. (During the week after the January 10, 2010 premiere, the program will be repeated in HD or standard definition on PBS stations. Check Nature's schedule page for your local listings.)

Hummingbirds are found only in the Americas, with the most extravagant hummingbirds residing in Central and South America. This limited range is unfortunately not explored by the Nature program. Was it something about the Americas that led to their evolution, or something else? Every other continent has flowers that need pollination and times of day when insects aren’t active, so why don’t they have hummingbirds?

Most of North America has just a few species – the eastern part of the continent has only the ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris), California is dominated by the Anna's (Calypte anna), with appearances by the rufous, Allen's, and a few others. Southeast Arizona, however, is a North American treasury for the winged jewels.

In March 2004, I made a trip to see the hummingbirds and other bird life of Southeast Arizona, flying to Tucson, Arizona and then spending time in Sierra Vista (to hike along the San Pedro River, an oasis in the desert), Patagonia (home to a Nature Conservancy preserve), around Tucson’s various parks, and the Whitewater Draw (a small lake about 60 miles east of Tucson). With my limited birding skills, I ended up seeing almost 100 different species during the trip, including six different species of hummingbird*. Four of the species I hadn't seen before (and probably would never see in California). My guide to finding the birds was "Finding Birds in Southeast Arizona," a publication of the Tucson Audubon Society, which I picked up at the chapter's store in central Tucson.

* I saw these six species: Anna's (Calypte anna), Rufous (Selasphorus rufus), Broad-billed (Cynanthus latirostris), Black Chinned (Archilochus alexandri), Violet-crowned (Amazilia violiceps), and Costa's (Calypte costae). A chart in the hummingbird section of the book shows that 13 species of hummers can be seen in the region, with a few of them being rare, seasonal or accidental, so I did OK by spotting six.

Photo credit: Photo of a hovering Anna's Hummingbird (Calypte anna) from ingridtaylar's flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License.

Random link from the archive:Red Chile Enchiladas

Technorati tags: Nature : Hummingbirds : Arizona : Birds

Can Motown become Growtown?

2010-01-03T14:50:00.000-08:00

Over the last several years, the urban farming movement in Detroit has received coverage from a variety of publications, from large newspapers to niche publications. I’ve been collecting them in the hope of putting together a digest of articles. Finally, the list has reached critical mass.

Earlier in the week, the Los Angeles Times (via Matthew Yglesias) looked at Hantz Farms, which aims to use farming to bring Detroit back from the dead: "Farming is how Detroit started and farming is how Detroit can be saved," said Michael Score, president of Hantz Farms. While there are scores of abandoned lots in Detroit, the company has so far not been obtain large contiguous tracts of land, so they are starting with a “pod” approach, where smaller sections of land will grow crops appropriate for the area. The crop decision is informed by the type and condition of soil – soil with accumulated toxins might be appropriate for apples but not lettuce – and what buildings are on the land – instead of tearing down abandoned houses, they can be used as mushroom-growing buildings, suggests Score.

The city is approaching large-scale farming with care, as many issues need to be addressed, like city zoning laws, taxation of agricultural lands, and various infrastructure items. Detroit’s mayor, Dave Bing (a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame) said in a statement that "Urban farming will be part of Detroit's long-term redevelopment plan."

Assignment Detroit (at CNN Money) has profile of John Hantz, the successful money manager (net worth of more than $100 million) who is bankrolling the Hantz Farm project. The community gardeners and other non-profit agricultural activists are wary of the Hantz project, with concerns about “corporate takeovers” and the like. Based on the situation in Detroit – thousands of acres of vacant land, little hope of an industrial revival – these fears are probably misplaced, as it’s unlikely that the city will run out of land in the near future. However, it is conceivable that if Hantz Farms is successful, they could use their accumulated political muscle to rewrite city regulations such that small producers are cut out.

“Food Among the Ruins”

In “Food Among the Ruins” in Guernica Magazine, Mark Dowie makes a bold proposal: Detroit should face the facts and give up on its fantasy of becoming an industrial powerhouse again. It’s the best article I’ve seen about Detroit – the most comprehensive, the one with the deepest and widest view. Dowie writes about the visionaries of Detroit:

There are more visionaries in Detroit than in most Rust-Belt cities, and thus more visions of a community rising from the ashes of a moribund industry to become, if not an urban paradise, something close to it. The most intriguing visionaries in Detroit, at least the ones who drew me to the city, were those who imagine growing food among the ruins—chard and tomatoes on vacant lots (there are over 103,000 in the city, sixty thousand owned by the city), orchards on former school grounds, mushrooms in open basements, fish in abandoned factories, hydroponics in bankrupt department stores, livestock grazing on former golf courses, high-rise farms in old hotels, vermiculture, permaculture, hydroponics, aquaponics, waving wheat where cars were once test-driven, and winter greens sprouting inside the frames of single-story bungalows stripped of their skin and re-sided with Plexiglas—a homemade greenhouse. Those are just a few of the agricultural technologies envisioned for the urban prairie Detroit has become.

Some of this is already being done in other places – Will Allen’s Growing Power in Milwaukee, for example, has plants, fish, and animals growing on its grounds – and so Detroit will be able to build on other's experiences. With the vast amount of land available, Detroit could become an experimental hub, a place where urban agricultural thinkers can get land and resources to try new ideas that are too risky for their own small spaces and budgets, an analogue of sorts to the NIH and university research in the health care system.

At the end of his article, Dowie looks at Detroit’s past and potential future:

Contemporary Detroit gave new meaning to the word “wasteland.” It still stands as a monument to a form of land abuse that became endemic to industrial America—once-productive farmland, teaming with wildlife, was paved and poisoned for corporate imperatives. Now the city offers itself as an opportunity to restore some of its agrarian tradition, not fifty miles from downtown in the countryside where most of us believe that tradition was originally established, but a short bicycle ride away. American cities once grew much of their food within walking distance of most of their residents. In fact, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most early American cities, Detroit included, looked more like the English countryside, with a cluster of small villages interspersed with green open space. Eventually, farmers of the open space sold their land to developers and either retired or moved their farms out of cities, which were cut into grids and plastered with factories, shopping malls, and identical row houses.

Detroit now offers America a perfect place to redefine urban economics, moving away from the totally paved, heavy-industrial factory-town model to a resilient, holistic, economically diverse, self-sufficient, intensely green, rural/urban community—and in doing so become the first modern American city where agriculture, while perhaps not the largest, is the most vital industry.

More Detroit Coverage

Here are the other articles and blog posts on Detroit that I have collected:

A La Vida Locavore Diary by Eddie C looked at John Hantz’s attempt to create a large farm in Detroit, as well as land taxation.
“Quiet Revolution,” in the September 21 issue of The Nation (the food issue), profiled long-time activist Grace Lee Boggs and her work on the food system.
In a 2007 piece in Harper's, Rebecca Solnit muses on the deindustrialization of Detroit and whether it can become a “post-industrial green city,” where the city’s unsettling can “may bring a complex new human and natural ecology into being.”
Plenty Magazine looked at the Garden Resource Project Collaborative in Detroit, as did Edible WOW (PDF).
“With enough abandoned lots to fill the city of San Francisco,” gardens are about the only thing blooming in Detroit, a city with high foreclosure rates and its top businesses in crisis, write Michael McKee and Alex Ortolani in a December 2008 article for Bloomberg
Phil Lempert, Supermarket Guru writes about a produce truck (“Peaches and Greens”) that is helping to improve the diets of residents of the food desert that is Detroit.
Not strictly about farming, but worth a look: a haunting series of photos of the "Ruins of Detroit" by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

Photo of Earth Works Garden from jessicareeder's flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License. Photo of Detroit landscape from lessismoreorless's flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License.

Cross posted at La Vida Locavore.

Cookstoves are a hot topic

2009-12-27T09:38:00.000-08:00

If you were to list the top causes of death and sickness in the developing world, cooking would probably be in the top tier (I'd guess that lack of clean water is at the top). In villages and cities across the world, millions cook their food while engulfed in plumes of toxic gases and particulate matter (smoke and soot) from the fire underneath their cooking pots or in their cookstove. With women most often do the cooking and children often nearby, they bear the brunt of the toxic cloud. Gathering the fuel can also be risky, exposing the gatherer to bandits and other nefarious people. One study (PDF) estimates that there are 1.6 million premature deaths and 3.6% of the global burden of disease due to indoor air pollution caused by the use of solid fuels. (Inefficient cooking fires also leading to deforestation, erosion and other harm.)

This toxic burden has been receiving a lot of attention recently, including a long article in the December 21 & 28 issue of The New Yorker. When the issue arrived a few days ago, I made my usual scan of the table of contents to see what was inside. "A stove to transform the developing world"— the subtitle of an article called “Hearth Surgery” by Burkhard Bilger — caught my eye because I've long had an interest in domestic combustion devices.* So excited was I to see such an august publication covering something as humble as the cookstove that I immediately turned to the article and started reading.

In the first paragraph, I saw the name "Dale Andreatta" and just about fell over. Dale, it turns out, was one of my research colleagues during graduate school in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Even back then Dale had an interest in using engineering to solve difficult problems of the developing world. One project that I remember was solar water pasteurization with low-cost materials — some black trash bags, some sand, a hose, and a temperature switch.** I helped out on a few occasions, but at that time in my life I hadn't yet picked up experimental skills (I was into numerical modeling, the serious experimental work would come a few years later).

The Engineering Challenge

The New Yorker article (abstract only, subscription required for full text) picks up the story of cookstoves at "Stove Camp," an annual event in Cottage Grove, Oregon at the Aprovecho Research Center. There, dozens of engineers, designers and others get together to tackle the technical problems of stove design and manufacturing. For example, how can a stove be designed so that Ethiopians can reliably cook their staple injera (a flat-bread/crepe made with fermented teff batter)? Cooking regional cuisines right is critical because if a stove doesn’t work for the end user, it will probably be discarded.

"The world is absolutely littered with failed stoves," says Dean Still, the head of Aprovecho. And for good reason: "Building a stove is simple. Building a good stove is hard. Building a good cheap stove can drive an engineer crazy," writes Bilger. The designer has to contend with a variety of inputs (small twigs, big sticks, wood chips, paper scraps, all with varying levels of moisture), a variety of conditions, and much more. And then, a perfect design can be foiled by slight adjustments. Bilger comments on this: "Too many stoves start out as marvels of efficiency, they said, and are gradually modified into obsolescence. Once the engineer is gone, the local builder may widen the stove's mouth so it can burn larger sticks, only to draw in too much cold air. Or he'll make the stove out of denser bricks, not realizing that the air pockets in the clay are its best insulation. The better the stove, the tighter its tolerances, the easier it is to ruin."

With many past stove projects foiled by poor manufacturing quality or local stove builders who take liberties with the design, Aprovecho has decided to do what many other manufacturers do: go to China. Aprovecho has been collaborating with a manufacturing company in China to mass-produce stoves on a huge scale and with extremely high quality. This page as Aprovecho’s website has a short video about their new mass-produced cookstoves.

And, of course, cost is a major concern. In the article, Dean Still cites a retail price of $10 per stove as a target (this cost also assumes a lifetime for the stove, which wasn’t given in the article. A stove that lasts two years should cost much less than one that lasts five years.)

The Global Impact

Although the human damage caused by cookstoves has been getting attention for decades from the public health community, non-profits and international development organizations, cookstoves’ role in climate change has brought them out of the haze and into the news. Although stove fires emit the main greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide, CO₂), their smoke is the concern. Solid fuel fires emit a complicated mixture of particulate matter (PM). The darkest portion of this PM (the part known as “black carbon,” a sooty material that is nearly pure carbon) can cause warming in several ways, including these two: 1) when suspended in the atmosphere, it absorbs sunlight and causes local atmospheric heating; 2) when it settles on snow or ice, it increases the melting rate of the snow or ice (by reducing its reflectivity). Researchers are finding that black carbon’s climate influence had been underestimated previously. Many have suggested that control of black carbon and other agents with short atmospheric lifetimes (like methane) can slow climate change in the near term while we figure out what to do about CO₂(a commentary in the Sacramento Bee explains, as does an article in the L.A. Times).

The second effect is especially important to Asia because glaciers in the Himalayas are the source of fresh water for millions on the continent. Slow-melting glaciers act as storage units, keeping the winter’s precipitation ‘on ice’ and slowly releasing it during the warm season. Already, we are seeing changes in the glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau, as new research from NASA shows.

It is unfortunate that the cookstove health crisis has festered for so long, killing and injuring millions, but perhaps the global focus on climate change will finally bring the resources and know-how to clear out the smoke that damages the world’s poorest and most vulnerable.

Additional Coverage of Cookstoves

A collection of links to information about cookstoves can be found at Professor Tami Bond's website at the University of Illinois or on Professor Kirk Smith's website at UC Berkeley.
Professor Veerabhadran Ramanathan from UC San Diego is leading Project Surya, which aims to reduce black carbon emissions in rural India, partially through introduction of more efficient stoves. Sustainable Futures has coverage of Ramanathan's talk at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco a few weeks ago.
The Australian: “India’s killer cookers a recipe for disaster”
Worldwatch Institute has news about a new program in India
PBS Newshour has a story (transcript and video) about black carbon and cooking fires in India
Wired Science talks with Professor Ramanathan about his black carbon work
A video from KQED’s Quest program examines a project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to build a better stove for the Darfur refugee camps, a place where gathering wood can be very dangerous.
The Lancet has a technical article examining how much mortality and disease could be avoided through distribution of 15 million improved stoves a year around India for 10 years. The authors estimate that the program would reduce premature deaths by more than 17%, while also reducing emission of climate-change-inducing black carbon.

Photo of woman and stoves in Soavinarivo, Madagascar from glowingz's flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License.

* Water heaters, industrial gas burners, radiant burners, and so on.

** The method of killing pathogens in water involved the following steps: In a sunny location, build a mesa-like platform using the sand, then hollow out the middle to make a well. Lay one sheet of plastic over the well and fill with water. Attach temperature switch to the hose, place hose in water. Cover water with another sheet of plastic. Given enough sun, the water will eventually reach temperatures that kill pathogens (given enough time – the hotter the water, the less time is required. Somewhere there is a table that shows the relationship but I don’t know where that is).

Random link from the archive: Recipe - Roasted Eggplant with Tomato and Basil, or "Basil Ghanouj"

Cross posted at La Vida Locavore.

Panoramic dining in the Hakone region of Japan

2009-12-08T19:50:00.000-08:00

Dinner at the Mount View Hotel in Japan was one of the few times I’ll need to use the panoramic feature on my camera to capture a meal (photo above). At this hotel, a fixed menu dinner and breakfast were included in our room price, with meals taken in shifts in a large dining room that had seats for about 50 people in a reconfigurable group of low tables. Perhaps for logistical purposes, they serve almost everything at once, so when we arrived in the dining hall, our table for nine was covered with scores of dishes (the next photo below).

To the best of my memory, the meal consisted of a hot pot of dashi in which we cooked sweet potato, burdock root, konnyaku, meat, tofu, green onion; maki-sushi filled with cucumber, egg and fish; an apple stuffed with a scallop-studded tofu custard; cooked fish topped with daikon and mushroom; daikon-wrapped crab rolls; a few pieces of sashimi and nigari-sushi; salmon eggs and daikon; vegetable and prawn tempura; some kind of vegetable-tofu-rice cake in broth. At the end of the savory portion of the meal, we had a bowl of miso soup, rice and pickles (tsukemono). Dessert was a small cube of lightly-flavored chocolate custard and pieces of persimmon. The number of dishes was a bit over the top, in my opinion, but the overall quantity of food was not outrageous. I was full, but not overly stuffed. For the most part, the quality was good, the flavors interesting.

Breakfast was a similarly lavish affair (pictured in the photos below). Again, the table was loaded with food when we arrived, and there was also an area for rice, congee, pickles, and grilled fish on one end of the room. The pre-set portion of the meal had a variety of warm, cold and room temperature items, both savory and sweet. For good or bad, our table was not graced with the ultra-healthy and polarizing delicacy of natto, which I have somehow never tried despite almost ten visits to Japan (I'll try it next time! Unless the local soy specialists at Hodo Soy Beanery start making it...).

The black eggs of Owakudani in Japan

2009-12-04T23:30:00.001-08:00

Two of the highlights of the Hakone region of Japan — an area about 1 1/2 hours south of Tokyo by train with beautiful mountains, lakes, and all sorts of attractions — are black eggs and a wooden handicraft technique called Yosegi-zaiku.

The black eggs are chicken eggs that have been hard-boiled in the natural hot springs of the Owakudani section of Hakone (the upper station of the cable cars). The sulfur and dissolved minerals in the hot water react with the egg to turn the shell a deep black, supposedly creating life-enhancing properties — Japanese folklore says that eating a black egg adds seven years to your life. Not being much of a fan of hard-boiled eggs, I wasn't excited by the black eggs. And the sulfurous hot springs give the eggs a bit of a rotten aroma, making them even less palatable to me.

The gift shops and restaurants outside of the cable-car stations sell the eggs for about $1 each, aided by Hello Kitty, as the photo below shows. The shirt worn by the left-hand kitty says "black eggs" and the sign that she's holding up says "Owakudani." The characters on the black egg between the kitties also says "Owakudani."

Preparing the eggs is quite an ordeal. Eggs are loaded into specially designed carriers at the base of the hill, then carried up to the thermal pool via a gondola. The staff unloads the eggs, cooks them in a pool, and sends them down the hill on the same gondola, where they are snapped up by eager tourists (500 yen for 5 eggs).

This photo shows the upper terminus of the egg gondola, with an empty carrier near the middle of the photo. Wires to the base of the hill are on the right side of the photo.

Here they are being cooked in the thermal pools, which were sending up photography-challenging clouds of steam. Note the woman on the right who is covering her nose. The gases emitted by the geothermal features include hydrogen sulfide (H₂S), a gas that smells like rotten eggs. H₂S is also toxic, so there were warning signs all over the place telling visitors to avoid spending too much time at the site.

Hello Kitty also advertises the yosegi-zaiku handicrafts by wearing a kimono that has a pattern similar to the parqueted wooden crafts.

Random link from the archive:The End of the Bees

Technorati tags: Japan

Getting an engineering degree in the Peace Corps

2009-11-27T10:45:00.001-08:00

The annual report from Michigan Technological University's (MTU) Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics (ME-EM) department ended up on my desk the other day. Since I know a few alums from that department, I took a look inside. No news about my acquaintances, but I found an interesting story about a collaboration between MTU and the Peace Corps and one of the projects undertaken as part of the program.

MTU has the first and only collaboration like this, where a student takes classes on campus (including classes on field engineering and rural development), works a standard Peace Corps tour of duty (training + two years), and then returns to MTU to write a report and give a oral presentation. Upon completion of the requirements, he or she receives a master's degree from the ME-EM department. Although MTU is unique in its offer of a degree, the school is not alone in its interest in the developing world: dozens of engineering schools have students who are using their education to help solve problems in the developing world. Engineers Without Borders, for example, has chapters at almost 200 colleges and universities; they also have chapters for working engineers.

For a senior design project, a group of Michigan Tech students built a human-powered machine that could be helpful to a grain farmer in a developing nations. According to an article in the annual report (pp. 8-9 in this PDF), in certain African countries, subsistence farmers harvest their crops by hand and need to walk over 10 miles to get the grain processed. And then – to make matters worse – the grain mill fees can eat up more than 30% of their annual income.

Knowing of the need for a small-scale grain mill – and subject to many constraints, such as lack of electricity, low costs, a need for simplicity, and a high degree of ruggedness – the students tried to find an appropriate solution. With many rural villages lacking reliable supplies of electricity and with small internal combustion engines prone to failure in harsh tropical conditions, the students designed their grain mill around human power — more specifically, a bicycle. As the video below shows, while someone pedals, grain goes into the feed tube and comes out as flour. If the device can be deployed in villages that need it, the villagers will reduce their dependence on outside vendors, while also having more time and money to spend farming or educating their children.

(If the embedded video doesn’t work, here is the YouTube link)

Although Big Ag, many NGOs and other groups (e.g., the Gates Foundation and segments of the U.S. government) continually stress that the top three solutions to Africa's hunger problem are 1) more yield, 2) more yield, and 3) more yield (with additional U.S. food aid running a close fourth), Africa’s farmers have a lot more to worry about than yield. To be sure, increasing yield can be helpful, but the typical metric of the kilograms of crop per square kilometer isn't enough. If a bumper crop can't be processed economically, or if rats eat much of it (see this article in the S.F. Chronicle about the winner of a rat killing contest in Bangladesh, a place where rodents destroy 1.5 million to 2 million tons of food each year, while the country imports 3 million tons per year), or the farmer can't get it to market because the roads are washed out, a 20% higher yield is not much help. Designing and building appropriate technology – where the users’ many needs are taken into account before design begins – isn’t going to do much for corporate bottom lines, but elegant designs like the bicycle-powered grain mill might be a better place to direct development aid, instead of on GMOs and other projects that do more for corporate profits than for Africa.

Cross posted at La Vida Locavore.

Dining in a tofu restaurant in Tokyo, Japan

2009-11-22T09:17:00.000-08:00

Most Americans have one of two opinions about tofu: 1) it's an abomination, 2) it's a convenient source of protein for vegetarians but not much more.

In Japan, however, tofu is appreciated as a special delicacy. Across the nation, you'll find entire restaurants that are devoted to the many incarnations of bean curd and soy: its soft, velvety form as a custard; as firm chunks that have been grilled and slathered with a savory paste; in a slightly elastic, delicate material known as "yuba" (a.k.a. tofu skin). On my most recent trip to Japan, my family had a meal in one of these tofu restaurants.*

But first, a few words about tofu in Japan. Donald Richie, in his evocative and informative "A Taste of Japan," says that Japanese envoys brought tofu back from China in the tenth century (where it had been invented many centuries before). The earliest document that contains reference to the food (1183), shows that it had become a normal part of Japanese food culture. A few hundred years later (1782), a book was published in Osaka called "One Hundred Rare Tofu Recipes." It was a huge seller. Just one year later, "One Hundred More Rare Tofu Recipes" came out. One reason for these two hundred recipes is that although China generally considered tofu to be just an additive or an enhancement, Japan considered tofu to be a delicacy in its own right, leading to much experimentation**.

The meal began with a small bowl of yuba strips that had been cooked (steamed?) and lightly seasoned. To make yuba, a shallow container of soymilk is heated to nearly its boiling point, whereupon a skin forms on the surface. The skin is carefully removed with a skewer and hung to dry (here is a picture of yuba being made at the new Hodo Soy Beanery facility in Oakland). The duration of drying depends on whether the yuba will be sold fresh (as Hodo does at Bay Area farmers markets) or dried (as you'll find in Asian grocery stores). Apparently, the meals at some tofu restaurants in Japan include table-top yuba making, as this advertising photo at the Modi Center in Machida, Tokyo illustrates. (A detailed history about yuba can be found at the SOYINFO CENTER.)

Next came two "fu pops"*** — pieces of fu, a paste made from wheat gluten and rice flour, that had been grilled and topped with a sauce. One sauce was probably made from green tea and miso, the other was white miso; both were garnished with white poppy seeds. Since this fu contained rice flour, it had the chewiness and elasticity similar to mochi, but not so much as to be unpalatable. (Much more on fu at the Washoku Food blog.)

A tofu-egg custard followed the fu. This was cooked in a ceramic bowl, a delicately-flavored custard hiding pieces of vegetables and scallop. My memory is hazy about the temperature of the custard, but I think it was room temperature.

The 'main course,' if such a term can be used, was a hot pot where meat and vegetables were cooked in soy milk on the table-top. The staff brought plates of vegetables — shavings of burdock root (gobo), daikon, carrot — a special type of pork, and two dipping sauces (a superb sesame-vinegar sauce and a basic bonito-kelp dashi). Diners would drop a few pieces into the pot, wait until they were cooked, and then dip them in one of the sauces before eating.

When we were done with the vegetables and meat, the staff came back with rice, pickles and miso soup (miso soup is typically served at the end of the meal in Japan, not the beginning, to give the diner a sense of fullness). Instead of simply giving us each a bowl of rice, the staff put the rice into the hot — and meat and vegetable infused — soy milk, making a porridge.

Finally, there was a small dessert. Some were very Japanese, not terribly sweet, with subtle flavors and seasonal ingredients (chestnuts, for examples). Others were Japanese influences on imported ingredients, like green tea ice cream.

Overall, it was a splendid tour through a small part of the world of tofu and soy-based foods, increasing my appreciation for this much maligned ingredients.

Notes

I haven't done much research on this, but in my food-media wanderings I have come across only restaurant in the U.S. that could call itself a "tofu restaurant, " Umenohana in Beverly Hills. On KCRW's Good Food in 2005, regular guest Jonathon Gold (restaurant critic for the L.A. Weekly ) talked about the restaurant, which he reviewed in the L.A. Weekly. However, the restaurant has since closed, according to Slashfood. Apparently, Umenohana is a Japanese chain with over 70 restaurants in Japan; the Beverly Hills location was their first foray into the U.S. market.

* Unfortunately, I forgot the name and exact location. What I remember is that it was attached to a hotel that occupied the upper floors of an office building near the Machida train station.

** The New Yorker's 2005 Food Issue contained a fascinating article about the old ways of making tofu in modern Japan (only the abstract is free, sub. req'd for the full article).

*** Variations of these "pops" are made from tofu and called dengaku (according to Richie's book); I'm not sure what they are called when they are made of fu and other non-tofu ingredients.

Random link from the archive: Noodles in Indian Cuisine
Technorati tags: Japan : history : Food

Gyoza and tabletop show cooking: a bit of Japanese food history

2009-11-12T22:04:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, I went to a series of talks about Japanese food and culture at UC Berkeley. The forum was held to celebrate the 50th annivesary of the Center for Japanese Studies at the University, with five distinguished scholars from around the world touching on various topics in Japanese food culture and history. Academic talks can easily veer into the obscure corners of a specialist, be full of impenetrable jargon, and require a significant foundation. These were not like that, but were clear, understandable, and fascinating.

Professor Katarzayna Cwiertka of Leiden University (in the Netherlands) talked about restaurants in Japan before, during and after World War II. In 1944 there was a ban on most restaurants, and so, like speakeasies during the prohibition era, some restaurants went underground, drawing their curtains shut and hanging a closed sign on the front door, while preserving another entrance. Some underground restaurateurs suspected that their phones were bugged and used codes to indicate whether they would be serving on that day.

Cwiertka's talk included this surprising item: gyoza (dumplings) — which are one of the most popular foods in Japan today — were virtually unknown in Japan before WWII. Until then, most of the Chinese culinary influence on Japan came from the southern China, where dumplings are not so prevalent. After the war, according to Cwiertka, three factors helped make gyoza part of the Japanese diet. First, repatriation of Japanese from the dumpling-eating areas of northern China brought dumpling making skills. Second, a shortage of rice made foods that used other grains — gyoza have wrappers made of wheat — more important. And third, all sorts of outside markets opened up, with most having food stalls that served simple food like gyoza.

Another interesting post-war creation was the "show" style of cooking popularized in the U.S. by the Benihana chain. Although Japanese restaurants were theoretically off-limits to the occupying American soldiers, the rules were frequently ignored. Apparently, there was this place in Kobe called Misono where cooking was done on large griddles, the kind of place where such things as okonomiyaki (a pancake containing some combination of vegetables, meat and seafood, pictured to the left) and yakisoba (noodles cooked with various vegetables, meat and seafood) are made. American servicemen didn't much care for okonomiyaki, yakisoba and other the standard offerings, but the owner of Misono created some recipes that they did like, recipes involving lots of beef cooked on the griddle. Soon, he had a hit.

Eventually the "show" part of the experience was added and the Benihana restaurant took off with the idea in the U.S. (These adapted restaurants were so strongly associated with Westerners that they were listed in the "Western food" section of Tokyo restaurant guidebooks in the 1950s and 1960s.) I think that Professor Cwiertka has written some of this history into papers or books, and I'll need to look them up someday to get the full story.

The top photo is from my family's visit to the Gyoza Center (written up in most guidebooks) in the Hakone region of Japan, a short walk from the outdoor museum. The second photo is from a teppanyaki restaurant called Botejyu, which has dozens of locations in Japan, one in China, and several in Singapore.

Random link from the archive: Bitter Melon Greens
Technorati tags: Japan : history : Food

Snapshots from Japan: Seasonality and urban farming

2009-11-08T08:30:00.000-08:00

Continuing post-Japan-trip blogging, a few photos and comments about seasonality and urban farming in Japan.

Seasonality
Although the Japanese can get any food at any time, seasonality still plays an important part in their food culture. I was there in October, which is apparently chestnut season, as advertisements for chestnut ice cream and other chestnut delicacies. This first photo is an advertisement for chestnut ice cream at the dock for the boat across Lake Ashi in the Hakone region (1.5 hours south of Tokyo). I didn't get a chance to try this version, but later had a scoop from a place in the Machida Odakyu line train station. It had subtle chestnut flavor and the right amount of sweetness, making it the best chestnut item I had while in Japan.

Chestnuts also make appearances in the fancy foods that are sold in specialty shops and in the food floors of shopping centers. This photo shows examples from the Nanjuya Nanohana store (that name might not be correct, it's my best recollection) on the main shopping street of Hakone-Yumoto (the terminus of the Odakyu "Romancecar" line from Tokyo). I'm not completely sure what these sweets are — probably chestnuts or chestnut paste in a rice-flour based wrapper, and probably a dose of sweet bean paste for good measure. As much as I love Japanese food, I haven't taken a liking to many of the sweets.

Urban Farming
Japan is a relatively small island with a large population and mountainous terrain. Therefore, to help the nation increase its food self-sufficiency, agriculture must go wherever it can.

Th next photo is from the city of Kawasaki, which is directly south of Tokyo. It shows two lots dedicated to growing vegetables in the middle of a dense single-family housing development. There were several of these between my brother's house and the train station, most growing row crops and one having a small persimmon orchard. My brother didn't know the status of these lots, whether they were being farmed because the developer couldn't make a profit building on the land, or whether something else was going on, like a legally required set-aside for agriculture.

Alongside the train tracks in the regions south of Tokyo (the Japan Rail Yokohama line, the Odakyu line to Hakone), numerous farms dot the landscape, many of them visible from inside the train. The two photos below were taken inside the train on the JR Yokohama line, a line that connects Hachiōji (a western Tokyo suburb) with Yokohama (and the train that goes to the Shinyokohama Ramen Museum), and an area completely surrounded by the Tokyo-area megolopolis. I don't know the history behind the sites, but I suspect that some of the land is devoted to farming because it is in the flood plains of the nearby rivers. Flood plains, of course, make a risky site for offices, factories or housing, while potentially having rich soil. There were a variety of configurations, with some land (like the first photo below) devoted to row crops, and others (like the second photo below) also having greenhouses and orchards.

Unfortunately, there is a lot that I don't know about these urban and suburban farms. How are the lands farmed? How much food is produced? Do shoppers prefer to buy locally grown? Perhaps someday I'll find the answers to these questions and more.

Cross-posted at La Vida Locavore

Random link from the archive: Bitter Melon Greens

Technorati tags: Japan : vegetarian : Food

Two simple snacks from the 100 yen shop in Japan

2009-11-05T22:53:00.000-08:00

When looking for souvenirs in Japan, the 100 yen shop is a great place to visit (100 yen is about $1, so these are the equivalent of the "99 cent shop" or "dollar store"). They have all sorts of interesting pieces of Japanese culture, like cute glassware, notebooks with interesting inscriptions, and a fun variety of snack foods.

We happened to find a five-story version (called "Daiso" and apparently one of the largest 100 yen shops around) near the Machida train station on the outskirts of Tokyo. I was feeling a bit hungry, so I started looking in the food sections for something interesting. I found two items, but wished I had looked at the labels more carefully.

Much of the food at the 100 yen shop is snacky stuff — candy, nuts or cookies* — and so when I saw the item in the photograph below, I hoped that it might be some kind of chestnut candy, perhaps a chestnut caramel or some other interesting variation. Alas, it was not. The photo in the lower right corner of the package is an accurate representation of the contents: steamed and unseasoned chestnuts. They were reasonably tasty and in tune with the season — we saw special chestnut items wherever we traveled (ice cream, distinctive sweets, and even a chestnut cake at McDonald's).

The next item is similarly clear about what it contains — especially after my experience with the chestnuts. The attractively designed package holds pieces of cooked sweet potato — not the sweet potato candy I was hoping for when I saw the package and somehow ignored the clear photos of sliced sweet potato. Next time I will study the packages more carefully before making the 100 yen splurge.

* Or the ever popular "Almond Fish," which consists of roasted almonds and dried anchovies.

Random link from the archive: Olallieberries, goat cheese and beans in Pescadero, California

Technorati tags: Japan : vegetarian : Food

A visit to the Ramen Museum in Yokohama, Japan

2009-11-01T10:26:00.000-08:00

Real ramen — not the factory-produced product with instant noodles and a powdered flavoring packet, but fresh noodles and painstakingly prepared, flavorful broth — inspires strong feelings. It's inspired two movies, the delightful Tampopo (1985) and the poorly written and overacted The Ramen Girl (2008), and at least one museum, the Shinyokohama Raumen Museum in Yokohama, Japan.

While in the southern part of the Tokyo area last month (Kawasaki), my family had one day that could be devoted to tourism, and because of our curiosity about a noodle-focused museum and the museum's geographical convenience, we picked the ramen museum as our destination.

Getting there was the first challenge. It was simple enough — only two train transfers, one within the Odakyu system and one to the Japan Rail (JR) Yokohama line, and then a short ride to the Shin-Yokohama station. Fortunately, enough train station signs are in English that it's possible to find your way through the train station mazes without knowing Japanese (but writing down the Kanji — the complicated Chinese characters that make up part of the Japanese writing system — for Yokohama and Shin-Yoohama might be a good idea because some of the maps that show fares — like this one at the Kita-Kamakura station — are only in Kanji).

The next step — finding the museum — could have been quite difficult, as most cities in Japan don't number their buildings or streets with a system that is familiar to Westerners, but the museum's website has some of the most incredibly detailed directions that I have ever seen, with nearly each turn or choice illustrated by a small photo. Frequently consulting the photo instructions (steps 2 and 3 were the trickiest), we made our way through the maze of passageways beneath the streets of Shin-Yokohama to find the proper exit and then went a few short blocks to the museum.

After paying a small admission fee (¥300 or so, less if you use the on-line coupon), we entered the exhibit and gift-shop area of the museum. Alas, the exhibit area was quite small, and (understandably) all in Japanese. There was a display of the various kinds of bowls used to serve ramen, something that was probably about the varieties of salt used in raman recipes, a video showing the production process, and a mock-up of a ramen preparation area. The gift shop had a collection of Ramen-related merchandise, including some unique noodle bowls, sample packs for home preparation, and the displays of one the instant noodle industry's latest creations: New Orleans Style "Gumbo" instant noodles. (I'm not an expert on gumbo but have a strong feeling that adding noodles to gumbo would be close to blasphemy in New Orleans.)

The highlight for us was the basement, where the museum has created a 1958 Tokyo streetscape — 1958 marking the year of the introduction of instant noodles in Japan — complete with architectural details and movie advertisements from the era. Around the two-story recontruction are nine small ramen shops, a smoking room, a few more gift shops, and a drink stall or two.

The nine shops were chosen by the museum because of their quality and also to provide geographical diversity — ramen from Hokkaido differs from Tokyo-area ramen, which differs from Kyushu, and so on (a page at the ramen museum's website explains the offerings).

After making our decisions — my sister and I went to the Hokkaido shop on someone's recommendation and my parents went to another shop — and re-reading the directive that "each person must order at least one bowl of noodles," we placed our order at a vending machine outside the restaurant, and waited in line for a few minutes. (Using vending machines for food ordering is fairly common in Japan, as it eliminates the need for restaurant staff to handle money. For the non-Japanese-speaking tourist, it offers the additional benefit of reducing the language barrier.) When we were seated, we gave the ticket from the vending machine to our server and within a few minutes, our two bowls of steaming noodles had arrived. We tried their soy-laced and miso-laced versions of the basic noodles, and agreed that the miso broth was much more interesting. Both were delicious, with wonderful noodles, if a bit salty*.

The "each person must order a bowl of noodles" rule is understandable, but makes it difficult to do much sampling. In recent years, therefore, the ramen shops have been offering half portions (priced at ¥550 vs. ¥800-1000 for the full size). A good idea, but we found that even the half size was more than half a meal, and didn't end up visiting another restaurant. It would be nice if they had even smaller bowls to allow more tasting.

Despite the flaws, the ramen museum is definitely worth a visit if you're in the Tokyo/Yokohama area. The detailed recreation of 1950s Tokyo, the unusual merchandise in the gift shop, and the distinctive ramen offerings make for a fun afternoon or evening (the museum is open until 11 PM, with last orders around 10 PM).

* The soup broths in all of the shops are made using various meat products (pork, chicken, and/or fish), so strict vegetarians are left out of ramen sampling here.

Random link from the archive: Torta verde: a savory pie from Italy

Technorati tags: travel : noodles : Japan : ramen : Food