Food Forms

Closin' Down

2011-03-03T14:46:00.001-08:00

The original project has proven too ambitious and I don't do enough food writing to justify maintaining a separate blog on the topic, so I'm officially closing down this here site. Future food-writing-related-program-activities will take place at Shiny Ideas.

A Couple Of Places You Might Not Have Been

2010-01-31T13:39:00.000-08:00

Several weekends ago the wife and I visited a couple of restaurants which we'd never heard of before, both of which turned out to be worthy of some positive press.

Creole Cafe

Our first stop was the Creole Cafe; if anybody needs some positive press it's these guys. While we were dining we overheard the (presumed) proprietress talking with some other customers about how slow business had been and I really wanted to tell her that she'd get more traffic if she'd put a little time into her web page. I found the place via Urban Spoon solely because I was looking for cajun/creole in the area. So yeah, these guys need to work on their PR.

The food was pretty good; it's certainly comparable to creole fare I've had elsewhere. And it's definitely the best I've found in the Tacoma area. The red beans and rice are well executed: good seasoning, the right amount of spice, good sausage. My wife got some sort of chicken (the exact name of the dish eludes me) which was OK but not great; though the topping was flavorful the chicken was a little on the tough side.

However, neither the chicken nor the beans and rice were what made our visit memorable. What really captured my attention were the hushpuppies and the crawfish boil. The hushpuppies were tiny little bits of fried delight possessed of a crispy, but not too oily, shell which breaks away to reveal a core of perfectly cooked dough. They've clearly taken some time to get their batter recipe right; it's not overly mealy or heavy and you can actually taste the onion and herbs.

The real highlight of the evening, however, was the crawfish boil. I do believe that, in all the traveling I've done hither and yon, this is the only place I've ever encountered a crawfish boil outside of Louisiana. This by itself merits a trip if you're the adventurous type.

Jake's Bar and Bistro

After the Creole Cafe we met some friends at Jake's Bar and Bistro for drinks and trivia. It has a bunch of beers on tap, which isn't the least bit unusual given that this is the Pacific Northwest and all. What makes Jake's stand out from the crowd is that it has beers I've never seen on any other menu. I had a glass of Lost Abbey Angel's Share and it was like drinking a tiny little slice of heaven. The only downside was that, at 12.5%, I had to limit myself to one glass 'cause I was the one driving home.

The food was fine, the ambiance on trivia night (every Monday!) was entertain, but go there for the beer.

St. Cloud's Restaurant

2010-01-11T11:25:00.000-08:00

I had dinner with my wife at St. Cloud's in Seattle's Madrona neighborhood this weekend. We'd never heard of it before but went on a friend's recommendation and found it to be a generally worthwhile experience. So I figured I'd give it a little bit of press.

When we arrived for an early dinner the place was full of thirty-something hipsters and their kids; add another item to the list of good, family friendly restaurants in the area. They were a bit understaffed and it looked like everyone was having to wait a bit to get their food. But apart from that both the food and the service were pretty good. The wifey got the curried, roasted yam and sweet potatoes with chickpea cakes, which was pretty very good. I got the steak special, a top sirloin (I believe, but don't quote me) with blue cheese butter accompanied by polenta and green beans. They could have improved the execution of my dinner; the butter garnish was ice cold and they hit the steak with way too much black pepper. Picky picky, I know, but if you're charging $27 for an entreé these things matter.

They redeemed themselves, however, by having a pinotage on their wine list. I'd never had this varietal, a cross between pinot noir and cinsaut, and so gravitated to it immediately. Their particular offering was the 2004 Backsberg Estate Cellars Pinotage, which had a rich mouth feel with pronounced fruit and a mild finish and was definitely worth the $8.50/glass they were charging.

Overall I think I'd visit again. Complaints about the execution of my steak aside the food was good, the waitstaff was friendly, and its about the nicest restaurant I've been to where a well-behaved one-year-old wouldn't be the least bit out of place. I put a lot of stock in all of the above these days.

Cook's Illustrated Beef Stew

2010-01-01T14:30:00.000-08:00

Beef stew is one of those things which I never seem to be able to get right on my own. It seems that no matter how much time and effort I expend to create something lovely the end result is usually ok, but not great. The meat's a little dry, the gravy is neither as thick nor as flavorful as I'd expect, and so on.

Cook's Illustrated to the rescue. They just published an excellent beef stew recipe which I was able to try out a little while ago. It was fantastic and took little more time than I would normally spend making stew on my own.

They've done a couple interesting things with the recipe, which I'll get to in a moment, but it seems like the real magic is their emphasis on using a good cut of meat. In the past I've always used "stew meat" which, according to the good folks at Cook's, is a bad idea. The scraps that go into the typical package of supermarket stew meat lack fat and are difficult to cook evenly, leading to tough chunks of meat in the final product. Rather, Cook's recommends going with a largish cut of something well marbled. Their recipe calls for boneless chuck-eye roast but I ended up using boneless short ribs instead since I had some on hand. In any case the meat in the stew ended up fork-tender rather than tough and had excellent flavor, supporting Cook's contention about the importance of meat selection.

Apart from picking the right cut of meat they also front-load the broth/gravy with high-glutamate ingredients including tomato paste and anchovies. Lacing anchovies I substituted fish sauce instead, which worked well. I've used tomato paste in stew before but never any fish product; the broth seems to have been much improved by the addition.

One of the things which I like about Cook's is that they're not purists. They're perfectly happy to use shortcuts when appropriate, in this case adding gelatin to the stew at the last minute to thicken it up. As they point out this is essentially the same effect that you get by preparing a real stock but takes no time at all. The gelatin thickened the gravy without any apparent ill effects, so no complaints there.

It's also a testament to the quality of the recipe that I could fumble the execution (too much meat in the pan so I couldn't properly brown the tomato paste and flour) and still get a quality product in the end. I think if I were to do this again I might use homemade stock rather than chicken base, but apart from that I've nothing but praise for this particular interpretation of beef stew.

Booze on Parade: Rogue Dead Guy Whiskey

2009-11-19T18:58:00.000-08:00

I've been waiting to get my hands on a bottle of Rogue's Dead Guy Whiskey since having the opportunity to sample their gin. Lucky for me the state has set up a temporary liquor store in Pacific Place Mall for the holidays which is carrying a respectable selection of local spirits. So off to the races, shall we?

The first thing you notice is that the copy on the bottle says that it's "Ocean Aged in Oak Barrels for 1 Month". This raises the following two questions:

What, pray tell, is "ocean aging"?
Is a single month sufficient to pick up a decent amount of character from the barrel?

As far as I can tell "ocean aging" is a bit of verbiage that Rogue has cooked up. Their distillery in Newport, OR is located on the coast; spirits aged near salt water have a distinctive character (see, for example, Islay scotch) so they're not wholly making shit up. However, the spirit is only aged for a month, so I suspect that any coastal influences will be negligible. Which brings us to question 2, which can only be answered by application of mouth to glass. Here's the rundown:

Color: Lighter than most of the aged spirits in my collection and, since Rogue claims that they don't use any additives, is presumably the result of either the base wort or time spent in the barrel. I don't know that color means all that much, at least in this case, because it looks an awful lot like a bottle of Clynelish 14 yr.
Boquet: Has that "good whiskey/bourbon" smell with a hint of woody-ness. Maybe a little bit of vanilla, a shade of butterscotch. It smells smooth; there's only a minor undertone of alcohol/heat.
Taste: Eh... not so much. A little bit sweet, a little alcohol. There's really not a whole lot of character.

Yeah, I feel bad saying this, but it doesn't taste like much of anything. So there's your answer: 1 month in the barrel isn't enough time for Dead Guy Whiskey to develop. Though, given my previous experience with whiskey's that have known the barrel for but a brief time, it's not surprising. At least it's not bad; at this stage of the game it still pretty close to a neutral spirit. My advice to Rogue is to let it age for awhile longer and see how it develops.

A Visit To The Herb Farm

2009-11-14T08:24:00.000-08:00

For those of you who might not have heard of it before, The Herb Farm is probably best characterized as Seattle's version of The French Laundry. It's one of the best restaurants in the area, perhaps the best, and specializes in high-end seasonal/regional cuisine. My better half and I went there this weekend for their "Makin' Bacon" dinner and I feel that a pilgrimage to such a culinary temple merits reflection. In gathering my thoughts, however, I've found it difficult to come up with a simple narrative on which to string my observations. An event at The Herb Farm is far more than just a meal; it crystallizes the essence of what it means to be a foodie in the Pacific Northwest at this particular moment in time. That's a lot of ground to cover, so bear with me if the following meanders a little bit.

Let's start off with some administrivia for anyone who might consider making a reservation. The dinner was a multi-course behemoth that lasted for about 4.5 hours. We went on Friday evening, so I was tired from work and not in an optimal mood for dining. I was also the designated driver which meant, que lastima, that I had to take it easy on the paired wines. We're I to attend to another such event I'd a) get a room at The Willows Lodge, the inn across the street and b) go on a Saturday when I'd be less wrung out. On the upside we chose to be seated at a communal table, which worked out very well. I don't know if it was diligence on the part of the restaurant staff or just sheer chance, but we ended up sitting with people who were close to us in age and general social milieu, which made for easy, if not particularly cerebral, conversation. One final note, which should also provide some context for the discussion which follows, is that The Herb Farm isn't cheap. All said and done I think we ended up paying ~$400 for the two of us after taxes and service charges.

Turning to the meal itself, there's immediately a question about the ground rules for evaluation. Under normal circumstances (e.g. a winemaker's dinner at some nice restaurant) I would simply write about the food, wine, and service: was the food good?, was it as good as I expected given the price of the meal?, etc. But these aren't ordinary circumstances; The Herb Farm has a flock of professionally-trained chefs working behind the scenes¹. These are not amateur actors stumbling through their lines; you can be assured that every dish which leaves the kitchen is exactly how they intend it to be. So if I find cause to question a particular it's not because they executed it poorly, but rather because I have a disagreement with the house over what constitutes "good food".

Who am I to be questioning what they deign to put in front of me? I should just shut up and be grateful that I'm in the presence of genius, right? Well... no. I eat out an awful lot, low-brow to high-brow, and if the conversation at my table was representative then the same is true for the rest of the attendees. This is what I mean when I say that The Herb Farm captures the zeitgeist of the moment. The people who go there are foodies, people for whom eating is serious business, and doubtless the staff is well aware of this. At this level dinner is a performance and the staff are no more immune from criticism than any other group of performers; surely no one would balk at opera-goers critiquing a new performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen merely because the director is very talented? The same principle holds true here. The ground rules are clear then: the food must not only be good, but it must be interesting as well; superior execution is taken for granted.

Now that we have an understanding I'll proceed with the food porn and analysis thereof. The menu was impressive, even a little bit daunting: 9 pig-themed courses with paired wines. I certainly wondered whether, come course 8 or 9, I would really be able to appreciate what I was being served. Which brings me to my first observation: if you're going to do 9 courses you better make all of them memorable. As will become clear I believe they fell down in that regard to some degree; a few of the courses felt pretty perfunctory.

Clockwise from top left: croque madam, chawan mushi, pork consommé jelly

They got the meal off to a fine start with a first course consisting of three amuse-bouche. The croque madam was tasty and featured a quail egg and some kind of pork product (ham I believe). The consommé, presented with wasabi cream and smoked salmon roe, was also good; serving it cold as a jelly was a creative presentation. The most interesting of the trio was the chawan mushi, which Chef de Cuisine Lisa Nakamura described as a "creamless custard". This was flavored with Mangalitsa cracklings and topped with roe and crispy pig skin. All of the above were both good and interesting.

Prosciutto bone soup and crostini

The second course was uneven. The soup was utterly unremarkable; some chard and beans in a mild, pork-flavored broth, definitely nothing to get excited about. The crostini, on the other hand, was excellent, spread with pork lardo (essentially whipped pig lard) and topped with some salt, a few brandy-soaked currants, and shreds of cooked pork. Whipped lard sounds kind of disgusting at first blush, but most closely resembles salty, pork-y butter. Pork-flavored butter... how can you possibly argue with that?

Head-and-leek terrine

Things really started to pick up during the third course. I had gone into the meal expecting some kind of charcuterie; you could hardly have a pig dinner without it. But rather than do paté or a sausage, either of which would have been classic presentations, they decided to get adventuresome. Yes, that's a slab of homemade head cheese and yes, it was good. If you've never had head cheese before it's really just braised pork in aspic. While I was tucking into this course I wondered why one would make head cheese to begin with rather than paté; the Wikipedia entry suggests to me that the form probably originated as a convenient way to deal with the flesh on the skull of the pig.

The Herb Farm's rendition was garnished with a slice of kohlrabi and a couple of pickled chantrelles; pickled mushrooms don't sound all that appealing, but they were actually pretty good. The dish could have done without the horseradish-mustard velouté; the sauce wasn't that interesting and was pretty much the same as the wasabi cream that had been used during the first course. But all in all this is an example of the type of food that I think The Herb Farm should be serving; it's something that you simply won't see anywhere else.

Hampshire pork belly

Compare with the course that followed, Hampshire pork belly served on a a bed of saffron-infused mussels and clams. This dish was disappointing for a number of reasons. You can do wonderful things with pork belly; I recently had some at Lark that was fork tender with a wonderfully unctuous layer of fat that dissolved in your mouth. None of that here; it was a little on the tough side. And really, what were they thinking to serve it with clams and mussels? Clams and mussels? Good. Clams and mussels with saffron? Even better. Served as a garnish for pork... huh? It could have been worse; at least the seafood didn't clash with the pork. But there wasn't any synergy either; it was like eating two separate entrees.

Mangalitsa Pig Loin

Moving on... course number 5. This was the highlight of the dinner, a lovely piece of woolly pig loin with spaetzle and roast veg in a red cabbage sauce. Mangalitsa is substantively different from typical pork. The flavor is much more pronounced, much more pork-y, and the flesh is marbled with fat. Mmmm... fat marbling... there's really something to be said for heritage breeds. And, to gild the lily, they finished it off with a few black truffle shavings.

Ham and cheese crêpe

And then the menu just lost steam.

A cheese course followed the pork loin which, like the pork belly, didn't quite work. They stuffed a couple of different kinds of ripened cheese into a crêpe with bits of pork and biscotti crumbs, resulting in a taste that was... odd. One of the people at my table remarked that it was strongly reminiscent of baked beans, which I think was a fair assessment. This course wasn't particularly inspired and certainly didn't showcase any of the ingredients well. So why'd they do it? Did they feel compelled to do something avant garde with cheese because all fancy meals have cheese courses?

Creme fraîche and coriander sorbet

The same holds true for the "Barbeque Intermezzo", a creme fraîche and coriander sorbet with smoked tomato chutney and smoked bourbon-caramel pig tails. Some questions for The Herb Farm staff:

Why include an intermezzo to being with?
Why make it so heavy? Palette cleanser my ass.
Has anyone ever told you that sorbet is, by definition, non dairy?

Really, as I was eating this course the thought that went through my head was that the smoked tomato chutney would have served as a dandy garnish for a bona fide cheese course.

Clockwise from the top: bacon-oatmeal ice cream, quince tarte tatin, house quince paste on zucchini bread, wild chanterelle tapioca pudding

At least the desserts weren't a flop. The bacon-oatmeal ice cream was genuinely interesting in its own right and was garnished with a wafer-thin piece of crispy, delicious bacon. "Bacon" was all over the menu, but it wasn't until dessert that it actually appeared in a recognizable form. I don't think it would have been at all out of place to feature it in one of the entrees... bacon, a little phylo, some ripe cheese... much better than that crêpe concoction.

I'm not at all fond of tapioca but found their version to be very good, though I couldn't for the life of me detect even a hint of wild chanterelle. The various quince confections, housemade membrillo and tarte tatin, were fine but undistinguished. Nothing made me jump out of my chair and say "Oh my god I've died and gone to heaven!". I consider that a lapse on their part; a place like The Herb Farm could certainly produce a superlative dessert were they to turn their minds to it.

left to right: bacon-pumpkin seed toffee, chocolate-pork-cherry cordials, pig's ears, pear jellies, shiso truffles

The plate of sweets that were served as the final course was much the same, a couple of interesting items but nothing extraordinary. The bacon-pumpkin toffee was good as was, in my opinion, the shiso truffles, though some of my dining companions didn't much care for the latter. I'm a sucker for herbs and chocolate, what can I say?

So that's the blow-by-blow as seen through the "Is this good?" lens. However, this was a theme dinner, so it's a worthwhile exercise to stop and consider how well they lived up to their promises in that regard. Specifically:

Makin' Bacon

Go whole hog! Join us as we explore the pig as he once was: proud, marbled, and flavorful. You’ll forget "the other white meat," as you taste a range of pork, both fresh and cured, from hand-tended Heritage breeds including the legendary Mangalitsa, or "Woolly Pig," which we raise on our own farm. Makin’ Bacon is a delightful nose to tail experience.

Given that description I expect that the pig, in some form or another, will be the centerpiece of each course. I don't want each dish to be a whopping great slab of pork, but they should highlight some preparation or aspect of the noble beast. The Herb Farm failed to live up to my expectations in this regard. It seems to me that they approached the dinner as though it were an episode of "Iron Chef" and their job was to work some pig into each dish one way or another.

Seen from this perspective the first five courses were a success and the final four were just pointless. Each member of the former let me sample and really appreciate the heritage pig; even the pork belly, while a little tough, had good flavor. As for the latter the use of pork was perfunctory and sometimes couldn't even be detected.

There's a natural division that falls out of the application of these two criteria, "Is it good?" and "Is it pig?", to the dinner as a whole. The first five courses met both of these goals for the most part while the final four courses didn't fare as well. Why that was the case, who knows? Maybe its an artifact of the way that they divided up the planning and execution amongst the kitchen staff. But I gladly would have traded the final four courses for one or two with better execution.

At this point I've said enough, and perhaps even too much, about the food... let's talk about the paired wines for a little bit. One of the reasons that The Herb Farm has achieved the fame it has is due to its epic wine cellar. I felt that they did a fine job with the wine, especially since this wasn't a wine-centric dinner. Here are the pairings:

First Course: Capitello Oregon Brut with flavor shot.
Second Course: 2007 Pacific Rim Riesling, Wallua Vineyard, Columbia Valley, Washington.
Third Course: 2008 Barnard-Griffin Rosé of Sangiovese, Yakima Valley, Washington.
Fourth Course: 2006 Boedecker Cellars Pinot Noir, Stewart, Willamette Valley, Oregon.
Fifth Course: 2006 Gramercy Cellars Tempranillo, Walla Walla, Washington.
Ninth Course: 2008 RoxyAnn "Night Harvest" Viognier, Rogue Valley, Oregon.

The brut was mostly just a stunt; I had mine with the "bourbon bacon" shot, but had a hard time detecting even a hint of bacon about it. Again, I think this speaks to the "Iron Chef" syndrome I mentioned earlier; there's little sense adding pork to something if it really doesn't contribute to the final product. The Riesling was fine, but doesn't really stand out in my mind as being particularly meritorious. I like the rosé; I'm not much of a rosé drinker but this one was nice and tart, not overly sweet, and had a sufficient does of "red" character to appeal to me. The Pinot was good, and the Tempranillo even better, though I don't think the latter merited the $99/bottle they were charging. Note that they didn't bother with wines for courses six through eight; I think this bolsters my thesis that these courses were something of an afterthought.

The real gem of the evening was the Viognier. It had all of the salutary characteristics that I would expect from what was essentially an ice wine without being the least bit syrupy. It may be the best dessert wine I've ever had; during the dinner I tried to recall where I might have had better and came up empty handed. The story they gave us is that it hasn't been released to the general public yet; they sampled it pre-relase during a tasting visit to RoxyAnn and like it so much that they pestered the vintner until ey relented and shipped them a couple of cases.

Before we leave the world of wine I'd like to meditate for a moment on one of the wines they were promoting for purchase during the meal. They have a small number of bottles of 1795 Madeira, available for the low, low price of $150 for a third of an ounce. Though, if you wanted to be cost conscious, they'd sell you a 5 oz. carafe for only $1795. Before dinner I had the chance to ask Ron Zimmerman how much such a bottle would cost and what it would taste like. The answers to those questions were, respectively, $10,000 and so good that people have been known to cry over the experience.

You wonder how much the crying is due to the quality of the wine and how much of it is just because of the mystique. I have to admit that I was torn during dinner; I was almost ready to pony up $150 for my taste. Not because I expected it to be a transcendent experience, mind you, but mostly just because I wanted to be able to say that I've had a 200-year-old wine.

Which leads me to reflect, finally, on the overall significance of The Herb Farm. What does it mean that this place exists, that people will shell out $200 a head (or more) to eat dinner there, and that they find it worthwhile to advertise wines that go for $450/oz.? The bulk of the conversation at our table revolved around food in one way or another: eating in Seattle, destination restaurants we've visited, the meal itself. I think its safe to assume our group was typical, representative of a class for whom the pursuit of eating experiences has become a central source of... not entertainment exactly, but something a little deeper than that. Perhaps "meaning", but that seems both overly dramatic and a little bit worn. Let's just say that it's important to them.

Where do you go to get your next fix after you've eaten at The Herb Farm? The Fat Duck? El Bulli? On some level the entire project seems a little bit dissolute. The constant search for novelty, for ever-more-refined fare, is symptomatic of something. Too much money, perhaps, coupled with too much free time and nothing more important to do with it. Maybe I'm being too hard, but in the end I came away feeling vaguely disappointed. Unless I make it to Europe it may be the best restaurant I'll ever eat it, but it wasn't the transcendent experience I'd hoped for.

1 Really, the amount of talent they had executing the dinner was remarkable. The proprietor, Ron Zimmerman, introduced them all briefly after the first course. The most junior staff member was an intern from the CIA; most of the kitchen staff had graduated from one or another of the well-known cooking schools. IIRC Ron said that Lisa Nakamura, the Chef de Cuisine, had spent a decade at either Chez Panisse or The French Laundry. These guys absolutely know what they're doing.

Booze On Parade: "G" Sake

2009-09-07T16:06:00.000-07:00

Some number of days ago I got into a discussion with an acquaintance of mine about Waji's practice of keeping all the good sake under lock and key that went something like this:

"Most of what they have out in the open is domestic. It's too much effort to track down one of their sales people and have them open up the cabinet and so on." he says.

"Yeah... you know", I counter, "I found a really good domestic there the other day. Wish I could remember what it was called. It was in this squared-off, black ceramic bottle".

"Oh yeah... "G" or something like that. It's Momokawa too."

"Orly? I felt like kind of a douche buying it... the bottle screams `I'm so hip I can't see my feet'."

"Yeah. But it really is pretty good."

"Yeah"

So there you have it... two out of two individuals polled in our extremely scientific lunchtime survey agreed that:

Tracking down Waji's staff is a pain in the butt.
It sucks that you can't find shochu anywhere convenient in downtown Seattle.
"G" is pretty good, but buying it makes you look like a dick.

"G" sake (aka Joy) is pretty fricking awesome; I'd go so far as to say it's the best domestic genshu I've had to date. It has a complex flavor that's way ahead of what other domestic breweries (Gekkeikan comes to mind) are offering these days. And, at 18% ABV, it's got a nice kick to it without being too crazy. That said, just look at their marketing and tell me that you wouldn't feel a little dirty buying a bottle.

I'm Going To Leave My Wife For A Bar(tender)

2009-08-01T09:07:00.000-07:00

Those of you who read my various blogs have probably got the sense that I'm a guy who likes booze. I'd go so far as to say that I'm an Insufferable Alcohol Snob; I take great pleasure in the esoteric minutia of the mixologists' craft and cry into my 25 year old sherry wood aged scotch when I contemplate the damage that Applebee's has inflicted to the American palate. Last night, however, I met a man next to whom I'm a mere poseur.

That man is Chris Langston, and he runs 1022 South (formerly the Monsoon Room). The man has a liquor collection like I've never seen. When I go out I'm usually happy to find a gin or bourbon on the menu that I've never had the opportunity to sample, but the offerings at 1022 go well beyond that. Chris has a tremendous number of liqueurs that I've never even heard of, much less tasted. Even his mixers are unusual... "falernum", what's that? When I saw that on the menu my first thought was that it was somehow related to falernian, an archaic type of wine once produced in Rome. But no, turns out that falernum is a type of sugar syrup. All good all around.

But having interesting ingredients is only half the battle... you've got to do something cool with them as well. 1022 has a cocktail menu far beyond the boundaries of what is found in your typical bar. There's a whole stable of champagne-and-something drinks under the heading "Salutary Companions"; I'm particularly fond of the absinthe and champagne ("Death in the Afternoon" IIRC). The menu also has a sense of humor; the "Desultory Companions" section features beer-and-shot combos such as "Hilltop Uber Alles" (Rainer w/ a shot of well whiskey).

So yeah, coolest bar I've been to in awhile.

The Unbearable Lameness of Regional Fairs

2009-07-01T19:41:00.000-07:00

We were looking for something to do this weekend, so on a whim my wife and I decided to visit the First Annual Pacific Northwest Mushroom Festival. Oh boy was it was lame. Lame lame lame lame lame. The had an antique fair, and an educational pavilion, and a bounce house and kettle korn and... hey... wait a minute... where's the mushrooms?

The mushrooms were almost an afterthought. They had a stage with a (lame) cooking demonstration, a place where you could buy (oh so exotic crimini and shitake) mushrooms, and a couple of booths in the educational pavilion dealing with mushrooms. And oh yeah... "The Humungous Mushroom Feast"... five booths serving up tastes of (ok to mediocre) mushroom-themed food. If you looked at a map of the grounds the actual mushroom-related space amounted to a small fraction of the whole. They keep that sort of quality up and they're not going to have a Second Annual fair.

Unfortunately, that's about what I've come to expect from regional fairs. When we were living in Rochester they had the Lilac Festival and the Park Ave. Festival and so on, all of which were primarily excuses to sell people gutter guards and magnetic bracelets. The ostensible reason for the fair is generally nowhere to be seen, which is just sad if the fair is free, and somewhat irritating if you have to pay for admission (as was the case with the mushroom festival).

Andaluca Winemaker Dinner Featuring McCrea Cellars

2009-06-29T13:19:00.000-07:00

Sorry that posting has been basically non-existent recently. I've been graduating, writing for my other blogs and, to my dismay, not doing a whole lot of anything interesting foodwise. S'alright... the wife and I went to a wine dinner on Friday that merits the telling of the tale.

The dinner was held at Andaluca, a really good, Basque(-ish) restaurant in downtown Seattle. If you find yourself in the area or, heaven forbid, live in there area and haven't ever been, I recommend that you hie yourself there at the earliest opportunity. Wayne Johnson, Andaluca's executive chef, really went all out for this event, serving four (yes, that's right, four) entrees plus a dessert. The meal was accompanied by the generally excellent wine of McCrea Cellars, a winery specializing in Rhone varietals. For whatever reason I generally think of white wines when I think of the Rhone region, but McCrea does very respectable reds as well. Here's the menu:

King Salmon Salad, 2005 Sirocco, 2007 Sirocco Blanc
Chef Johnson set the salmon salad up as a test of which pairing works best with fish, white wine or red wine? The wifey and I agreed that the Sirocco Blanc went better with the fish but the Sirocco, though it clashed with the fish, was a better wine overall.
Pork Medallion with Bacon Wrap, 2007 NV Rose, Ciel du Cheval Vineyards
The pork was especially well-executed. Any time I try to do bacon-wrapped anything the bacon ends up soggy, but the bacon around the filet was nicely crispy. It was also dressed inventively using rehydrated craisins (gotta remember that for home) and cranberry gastrique¹. Unfortunately, the accompanying rose was just plain boring.
Duck Confit, 2007 Grenache, Red Mountain
The presentation of the duck was interesting. Any time I've had confit in the past it's been served on the bone, but Chef Johnson pulled his confit off the bone and shredded it. To his credit the confit was not overly greasy and went well with the Grenache, but the accompanying potatoes were a little bit underdone.
Lamb Chops with Creamy Morel Sauce, 2005 Syrah, Ciel du Cheval Vineyard
There's not much to say about the lamb chops other than they were fine and morels are overrated. The syrah, on the other hand, was definitely a keeper.
Liquid Chocolate Cake, 2007 Roussanne
This was the only disappointing part of the meal. Chef Johnson had talked up the cake and the accompanying pear compote when he was making his pre-dinner round, but I wasn't terribly impressed. The pears were fine, but they weren't anything special; I've made better at home. The chocolate cake was mediocre; there wasn't much to distinguish it from other incarnations of the same I've had at various restaurants. The Roussanne didn't work well either; it was sweeter than the other wines we had during dinner, but really didn't seem appropriate for dessert.

If I were to make an overall critique of the dinner it would be that it was a little like drinking from a firehose. Four entree-sized portions plus a dessert, even over the space of three hours, bordered on overwhelming. And it was just meat... meat meat meat meat meat... there's nothing wrong with meat per se, but there's plenty of other things to eat as well. The dinner could have been improved by mixing things up a little, maybe tossing in a cheese plate or some amuse bouche instead of one of the entrees.

Also, I feel like the McCrea Cellars crew present at the dinner really missed a sales opportunity. My wife and I wanted to snag bottles of the 2005 Sirocco and the 2005 Syrah, but there wasn't any wine for sale. What's up with that? Did someone decree that selling wine at a wine dinner is declasse?

1 I had to look up "gastrique" in my copy of Larousse after the fact; it's a hot sauce made from a reduction of sugar and vineagar seasoned as appropriate for the subject matter.

Gari Of Sushi: Tacoma's Best Sushi Joint

2009-02-22T18:10:00.000-08:00

Tell me, where do you go when you want

High-quality, interesting sushi
Decent booze
A hip(-ish) atmosphere
Somewhere family friendly

Were you to have asked me a couple of days ago I would have told you that such a thing doesn't exist or that, if it did, it was in some crunchy, hippy nirvana like Eugene. Well, it turns out that such a place exists, and in Tacoma, no less.

The wifey and I had heard good things about Gari Of Sushi by word of mouth, but didn't know exactly what to expect. Thinking that a sushi restaurant on 38th couldn't be all that formal¹ we packaged up the wee one and went out to investigate. The parking lot was full when we got there, and with good reason. The sushi was superlative, the atmosphere was great, and they had a pretty good (though somewhat overpriced) booze selection.

Unless they want to continue being a "word of mouth" place these guys need to work on their exterior; you'd hardly have any idea of what's going on inside to look at the place. It looks like your basic, dumpy, not-too-interesting suchi/teriyaki restaurant. They also need a website with some pictures, but I'll try to do justice to the inside. It was bright, but not painfully so, and had lots of random glass art panels hanging on the walls. The booths are large, like they're used to accomodating groups of people out to have a good time, and when we were there they had the TVs tuned to some kind of Japanse obstacle course game show. Comfortable and interesting, but not formal; people hardly even noticed we had a kid with us

But the most important things about a sushi restaurant is, obviously, the food. The had some nice looking bento boxes and the people across the aisle from us got some pretty good looking tonkatsu; so even if you've got non-raw-fish type people with you there's a wide variety of items for them to choose from. I myself stuck with the sushi because they've got one of the most exciting selections I've seen in who knows how long.

They've got a comprehensive selection of sashimi and nigiri for those of you who are purists, but the real interesting bits are their selection of rolls and "speciality" sushi. For some reason or another what is otherwise a very respectable sushi restaurant has allowed many of their rolls to become infected with avocado; negative points for that. However, despite the avocado infestation, there are still plenty of good rolls to be had that show greater than average thought in terms of composition/flavor selection. Here's my assessment of the ones I tried:

Gari-sama Maki: The name literally means "Mr. Gari's Roll" and, given the restaurant's name, could be intended as an homage to a (possibly mythical) proprietor. But, given that this roll features gari, the name could also be taken as an homage to the ingredient itself. It contains gari, shiso, and some sort of a mild fish (I forget the exact type) and is really quite tasty.
Scorpion: Jalepeno and fish, well executed. I appreciate that they've this fairly spicy option on the menu.
Step Family: This is another worthy flavor combination, spicy tuna and ikura (salmon roe).
Volcano: Spicy scallop with mayonaise IIRC. Also good.

But the real prize is the specialty selection. I ordered two of them, one consisting of quail egg and lobster salad and the other with salmon, shiso, and a couple of other ingredients which escape me. Both were pretty tasty, but they totally could have played up the presentation. The specialty pieces are little works of art, but came on the same plate as the rolls and essentially got lost. If I were the gari folks I'd be serving the speciality pieces on their own little plate, before the rolls were presented, and maybe accompanied by a little palette cleanser of some kind.

Overall the meal was very well priced. My wife and I got booze, a bucket of sushi, some tempura and some fried tofu, for $72 or so. Not bad really though, as I alluded to earlier, their booze menu was a little pricey. They wanted $13 IIRC for a 300ml of Sho Chiku Bai; not horribly expensive, but no bargain either. Overall I definintely think its worth (multiple) repeat visits and highly recommend it to anyone who happens to be in the area.

1 For those of you not from around Tacoma 38th isn't exactly a high-rent district. The closest restaurants are a couple of (really good, but grungy) burger places.

Booze On Parade: Rogue Spruce Gin

2009-01-19T13:14:00.000-08:00

Rogue has been one of my favorite brewers for about as long as I've been a drinker. Not so long ago the wife and I took a trip down the Oregon coast and ended up at Rogue headquarters in Newport. It was definitely like being a kid in a candy store. A lot of the supermarkets where I lieve carry a decent sammpling of Rogue's product line, but they've got the whole shebang at headquarters, including a bunch that I don't believe I've ever seen anywhere else. Did you know that Rogue makes a malt liquor called Dad's Little Helper? It's quite good.

But the real joy of the visit was finding out that Rogue makes distilled spirits as well. We tasted some of the offerings at the House of Spirits and I have to say that I was quite pleased with the quality of the product. We ended up taking home two bottles, the Hazelnut Spice Rum and the Rogue Spruce Gin.

I'm not much of a rum drinker; I like a good rum, but it doesn't get me excited. The hazelnut rum was really too much on the "dessert-y" side for my taste (a lot like Frangelico actually) but my wife, who is a rum drinker, was quite taken by it. The gin, however... I feel quite secure in saying that Rogue Spruce Gin is one of the best gins that I've ever tasted. So let's compare it to a common baseline; I'll use Bombay Sapphire 'cause that's what I have on hand.

Bombay Sapphire is an archetypal gin. You can definitely taste and smell the juniper, but the overall focus is on creating a crisp spirit that does not linger overlong on the palate. In this regard I tend to think of Bombay as vodka's slightly-more-flavorful cousin.

The crew at Rogue don't appear to have been particularly focused on creating a classic gin along the lines of Sapphire. Rogue gin shares a lot with Bombay in both nose and taste, but the Rogue spirit has a richer, more complex flavor. It evokes (presumably spruce) wood rather than juniper berries, but not in a bad way. The taste also lingers on the palette longer than does Sapphire. It's not a "sipping gin" (if such a thing exists), but it does make a mighty fine gin-and-tonic. Grab a bottle if you happen to be in Oregon, otherwise you can get it online from Booze Bros.

Back

2009-01-19T13:11:00.000-08:00

I decided that I'd much rather write about food than concentrate on my stupid waste of an MBA. So here I iz... the grand-unified-theory-of-ingredients may have to wait for awhile, since a lot of my free time is being sucked up by another project (and a new child). In the interim I will post about whatever suits my fancy, same as always.

On Indefinite Hiatus

2007-12-21T23:19:00.000-08:00

With regrets I'm putting all of my blogs in mothballs for the time being. Between a new job and school I really have no time for them anymore. My hope is that I'll be able to return to them at some point in the future, but I'm not holding my breath. Thank you all for your participation.

Pointless Excess

2007-10-23T20:09:00.000-07:00

Grand Lux Cafe now has, at it Garden City, NY location, Kobe beef hotdogs.

I tried some this evening... they taste like hot dogs. Of course that's sort of what I expected; you lose a lot of the benefits of using Kobe beef when you put it through a blender.

Which raises some questions:

How much Kobe beef do they have to put into the hot dogs before they can legally call them "Kobe hot dogs"?
Why bother?

The latter is really the kicker. I'm a firm supporter of excess, especially when it comes to food, but if you can't taste the difference why bother? If you're Grand Lux Cafe LLC you do it so you can justify charging $11 for 3 tiny little chili dogs.

What To Do With Okra?

2007-10-21T16:11:00.000-07:00

My co-conspirator and I have been invited to an "Iron Chef"-type challenge where everyone brings a dish featuring a particular ingredient; this time it happens to be okra. I've never really worked with the vegetable before, and the preparations I'm familiar with are limited to gumbo and fried okra. My co-conspirator, being the reasonable person that she is, immediately vetoed the gumbo idea on the grounds that "every else is going to do gumbo". I don't know that I necessarily believe that; real gumbo is a fairly challenging dish. But even if we were to execute an excellent gumbo we'd still run the risk of being lumped into the same category as a bunch of soupy, gumbo-ish preparations. As for fried okra it has a number of strikes against it, not the least of which is that its been done to death. I also have doubts about the ability of the dish to hold well. Since we're going to be making the dish in our own kitchen and transporting it elsewhere the ability to hold well is definitely a must. With the traditional preparations eliminated for one reason or another I needed to strike out into the unknown.

According to this article at About.com okra is a member of the same family as hibiscus and cotton. This immediately got me to thinking about using some other part of the plant besides the pod, since hibiscus flowers can be used to make a really good iced tea. It didn't take me long to find out that the plant is woody, similar to a grape vine or a maple seedling, and showing little promise as a whole. The stems don't look edible, and neither do the leaves, so I decided not to pursue either of those components further. The flowers, on the other hand, are pretty and do look a lot like hibiscus, raising the possibility that I could use okra flowers to good effect. According to The Lost Crops of Africa the flowers are edible, but the whole discussion turned out to be moot as I was unable to find any place to purchase them. Absent any other edible parts of the plant I was stuck using the pods, as predictable as that might be.

So what did I have to work with? Per the USDA okra is mostly fiber and water, with a little bit of protein and a little bit of carbohydrate. The protein is primarily locked up in the seeds, making it difficult to get at via normal cooking methods. What's left is a pod that exudes a sticky, slimy substance (appealingly called "okra mucilage") when cut. Okra mucilage has good thickening properties, which is a big reason why okra is often used in soups and stews, but outside that context its texture can be something of a negative. Since we had already decided against doing a soup/stew I needed to find a way to prepare the okra pod that minimizes the sliminess while highlighting the taste and texture of the pod itself.

The raw pod has a taste and texture that's a close match to haricots verts, so it seemed to be a good idea to treat the pods in a similar fashion. My first instinct was to try a light stir-fry in the hopes that this would allow the okra to express itself without getting unduly slimy. I split, seeded, and julienned some pods and gave them a quick once-over in my cheap-ass Ikea wok, but the result was pretty bad. The strips of pod were soggy and unappealing; I suspect that even brief stir-frying causes enough breakdown of the plant structure to release mucilage, sort of like okra Ebola. In an effort to minimize this effect I tried lightly coating the strips with flour or corn starch before stir-frying. Those turned out a little better, but still got limp and soggy rather quickly. I ever went so far as to coat the strips in tempura batter; this effectively countered the sogginess/limpness in the short run, but the tempura got in the way of the vegetable. It was essentially fried okra, the only difference being I'd substituted tempura batter for the traditional cornmeal. I came to the conclusion that there was no love to be had in the stir-fry department.

Next I tried blanching the okra on the grounds that green beans are often given that treatment. I put the okra strips in boiling water for 30 seconds and then transferred them to ice water. This worked very well; the strips turned a bright, appealing green and retained a bit of crunch, but lost their raw edge. Things went south after I drained them though; though they retained their crisp texture they began to exude mucilage as well. Any attempt to work with them in that condition would cause the resulting dish to have and undesirable texture and consistency. At that point I thought I was halfway to my goal: the okra was pleasant and holding up well, I just needed some way to cut the mucilage.

This turned out to be easier said than done. I tried water and white vinegar, neither of which had the slightest effect. Okra mucilage is a sugar polymer, similar in some respects to pectin, so I tried introducing some pectinase that I had left over from making prickly-pear mead. This, as well, had no discernible effect. I even asked an acquaintance with a chemistry background about the problem; ey said that I was SOL as far as breaking down okra mucilage was concerned. Eventually I found out that you can dissolve okra mucilage using sodium borohydride, the only problem being that sodium borohydride is toxic and corrosive and generally not suitable for human consumption. At that point I was at a loss; there didn't seem to be a good way to present okra on its own without running into the "mucilage problem".

Then my co-conspirator suggested that we might dodge the whole issue by incorporating the okra into a product that was naturally thick to begin with. That made a whole lot of sense; if the desired texture of the final product was thicker than that of the mucilage then the inclusion of okra in the recipe wouldn't cause problems. Suitable recipes immediately began to suggest themselves:

Savory pudding
Jook/congee
Cornbread

That's where things stand now. It remains to be seen whether any of the above will work in practice.

Classifying Raw Ingredients

2007-10-19T18:35:00.001-07:00

One of the biggest challenges of modern cuisine is the proliferation of ingredients available to the average cook. Between gourmet supermarkets and ethnic groceries the aspiring chef has access to products from around the world, often from cultures far removed from eir own. What are we to do in the face of all these interesting ingredients with which we have no personal experience? We could shy away, stick with the familiar ingredients that our parents used. But we're not cowards, are we? We want to sail the uncharted vastness of the unusual and exotic, to plunge boldly into the bounty that our flat little world has delivered to us. Why? Well, why not? There's nothing to lose and everything to gain by experimenting. But, to extend our metaphor, we need some sort of a plan so that we don't get lost in the sailing. To that end I propose the following principle: The treatment of an ingredient is largely determined by that ingredient's structure and composition.

It follows from there that we can impose some order on the chaos by classifying ingredients according to their structure and composition. What we're going to do is develop an ontologic inventory of raw ingredients, a taxonomy of foodstuffs if you will, with the idea being that once we've accounted for the categories of things that are we can go on to consider the treatment of each category in depth.

According to our friends at the USDA and the National Public Health Institute of Finland, all foods are made up of the following:

Alcohol
Carbohydrate
Fat
Fiber
Protein
Water
Vitamins and minerals

For the time being we're going to ignore alcohol, vitamins, and minerals; alcohol isn't present in raw ingredients, and vitamins and minerals don't generally have much effect on how ingredients are used. Using the USDA and Finnish databases I've put together a spreadsheet of some common ingredients; its not exhaustive, and I suspect that some interesting ingredients have undoubtedly gone unnoticed, but it should prove sufficient for the purposes of developing at least a rough set of categories.

Perusal of my spreadsheet immediately turns up one stark division: vegetable products have fiber, while animal products have none. Duh, right? I'll grant its pedantic, but allow me a little bit of pedantry; I'm laying the groundwork for more subtle distinctions later on. The presence/absence of fiber provides us with a justification for the traditional distinction between plant and animal products. "Animal products" and "plant products" will serve as our most basic categories; we'll proceed by looking at animal products first.

Are there any obvious distinctions among the various animal products in terms of structure or composition? Animals produce meat, a solid, but they also produce milk, a liquid. I think its uncontroversial to assert that solids and liquids should constitute separate categories in our taxonomy, since the difference in state requires different treatments.

In addition to milk animals also produce other liquids: cream, honey, eggs, and blood, some (or all) of which belong in separate categories. Cream is like milk, for the most part, except that is has much more fat. You can do things with cream that are diificult, if not impossible, to do with milk on account of its relatively high fat content. Honey is the only animal product which consists primarily of carbohydrates, so it belongs in a separate category. Eggs, in aggregate, are high in protein and fat, but when you break them down into their constituent parts (yolk and white) you end up with a slightly different story. The yolk of an egg is high in both fat and protein; it actually contains a higher percentage of protein than the white. Egg white, however, are most similar to blood; both are high in protein but have very little fat or carbohydrates, suggesting that they should be lumped together. It remains to be seen whether this division actually makes sense in practice, but we'll accept it for the time being. I believe that we've exhausted the animal-derived liquids at this point, leaving us with a partial taxonomy that looks like this:

Animal products

Liquids

Blood and egg white
Cream
Egg yolk
Honey
Milk
Whole eggs

Solids

Plant products

We're starting to make progress, but we still have a way to go. Next up, the animal-derived solids.

Muscle tissue is, by far, the most commonly used solid animal product. Everyday cooking, especially in the West, tends to concern itself with the preparation of muscle in a variety of forms: steak, pork chops, chicken breast, etc. But there's more to an arbitrary animal than just muscle; it will also have viscera (aka "offal" or "organ meats") and a skeleton, all of which can be profitably used in culinary endeavors. Muscles are, technically, just another organ, but their structure is so distinctive and their use so prevalent that they deserve a category of their own.

Let's now take a look, at some length, at the category of muscle, since it's the most important of the animal-derived products. In analyzing this category I am, of course, tempted to say "chicken, fish, beef, pork"; these traditional divisions are not, after all, without some basis in fact. But arguing against these traditional divisions is the fact that beef and pork aren't all that different when compared to chicken. The lot of them, chicken, beef, and pork, look similar when compared to fish. And where do more exotic meats like ostrich and alligator fit into the usual scheme?

Raw beef muscle, even tenderloin, is tough and hard to chew, but high-quality raw fish such as toro (fatty tuna, for all you non-sushi-eating folks) can be tender like butter. This is because, as outlined in an excellent article by L. E. Lampila, beef muscle and fish muscle have much different structures. At the macroscopic level beef muscle, in common with that of most terrestrial animals, forms elogated bundles that attach to the bone via tendon. Fish muscle, on the other hand, occurs not in elongated bundles but rather "W"-shaped units called myotomes stacked end-to-end along the length of the animal. The myotomes provide regular divisions which keep the average length of a muscle fiber relatively short (in the range of a few mm). Contrast this with the beef muscle, one long package without any natural division in which the muscle fibers can be centimeters long. Its easy to pull apart a fish filet at the junctions between the "W"s, contributing mightily to the relative tenderness of fish flesh, but you can't pull off that trick with beef. In addition to the presence/absence of these macroscopic divisions there are also differences in the overall amount of collagen present in beef and fish. Collagen, the connective tissue which holds muscle tissue together, is more prevalent in terrestrial animals than in fish, so a slice of fish is going to be (significantly) less chewy than a slice of beef of the same thickness.

All of which is an excellent justification for separating fish out from the terrestrial animals on the basis of muscle structure. But we're not done yet; we still need to figure out what to do with another popular animal category, shellfish. Should they be grouped with terrestrial animals, with fish, or should they be in a class by themselves?

The culinary category "shellfish" comprises two distinct groups of animals: members of phylum mollusca (clams, oysters, scallops, etc.) and members of phylum arthropoda, subphylum crustacea (shrimp, lobsters, and their ilk). For those of you who've been away from biology class for awhile recall that the phylae are second from the top on the taxonomic chart, right under the kingdoms. With such a distance between the two groups it could easily be the case that they have markedly different muscle structure, meriting different treatment.

I haven't had a whole lot of luck as far as finding information on the macroscopic structure of either crustaceans or molluscs, so I'm going to have to go on personal experience here. Shellfish muscle is sufficiently different from both fish and terrestrial animals to merit its own category in our grand hierarchy. As far as separating out crustaceans and mollusks goes we run into a bit of a dilemma. There's no doubt that oysters are different from shrimp, but both scallops and shrimp are amenable to the same treatment in many cases. That seems to be a distinction which arises from the chosen method of consumption: we eat whole oysters, but we generally only eat the adductor muscle of scallops. If oysters were bigger we might treat them like scallops, and if scallops were smaller we might treat them like oysters. So it seems that we should maintain shellfish as a category of its own and save further elaboration, if necessary, for later.

Ok, let's take a step back for a moment and see what our inventory looks like:

Animal products

Liquids

Blood and egg white
Cream
Egg yolk
Honey
Milk
Whole eggs

Solids

Muscle

Fish
Shellfish
Terrestrial animals

Viscera
Bones

Plant products

I think we've come to a good stopping point as far as muscles are concerned; go any further and the distinctions become more of degree than kind. Some muscles are fattier than others, some have more collagen, etc., all of which we can take into consideration when we talk about how the muscles are prepared.

I don't have much to say about bones or viscera. Bones are bones; the collagen they contain is useful for making stock. Chicken bones make your stock taste like chicken, beef bones make your stock taste like beef, etc. Since animals are all mostly the same on the inside there's a finite number of different types of viscera to think about; it'll be easier to solve that problem by exhaustion at a later date. And that, I believe, wraps up the animal products... on to the plants.

How are we going to tackle the plants? There's so many different kinds of plants exhibiting so much variation its hard to know where to start. With such a diversity in regards to form there aren't the same kinds of obvious natural divisions that helped us categorize the animals products. Without such natural divisions I think its appropriate to start imposing some of our own by examining the composition of various plant products.

Let's start by looking at water content. I sorted all the plant products in my spreadsheet by how much water they contain and then plotted the resulting, giving me the following:

Interesting, yes? Almost all of the plant products are either >70% or <30% water; the funny one hanging out in the middle is chestnuts. This bi-modal distribution gives us a natural division to work with.

With one exception (dates, which we'll deal with later) the low-water items are exclusively seeds in the botanical sense. From a culinary standpoint we commonly divide them up into "seeds", "nuts", and "grains", though it remains to be seen at this point whether those divisions are warranted. Looking at the fat content of items in this category there is again a bi-modal distribution, this time with respect to fat. Those items which we typically regard as "grains" are relatively low in fat content, while those items we regard as "nuts" and "seeds" are rather high in fat content. The distinction between "nut" and "seed" seems to be somewhat arbitrary though; for example, sunflower seeds and cashews have a similar composition. So it would seem that, at this point, we can justify two categories, "grains" and "nuts/seeds".

We have a pretty good handle on plants products with low water content, but we obviously still need to work on those with relatively high water content. This is a large category containing, I would imagine, the majority of plant products. How best, then, to start slicing this huge, amorphous mass into something more manageable?

Is there anything to be gained by looking at relative carbohydrate content? Here's a graph of all of the products with high water content; note that I've included dates and chestnuts as well:

The divisions here are less obvious; carbohydrate content is more of a continuum than water content, but there is a dicontinuity around %14 which might be meaningful.

The cluster of high-carbohydrate products to the right of the discontinuity contains a lot of what are typically regarded as "starchy" vegetables, things like corn and potatoes. But the group also includes grapes, rose hips, bananas, garlic, and water chestnuts, a motley assortment if I've ever seen one. Potatoes and grapes may have the same sugar content, but they're little alike in texture or traditional treatment. What accounts for this difference?

An obvious distinction is the type of carbohydrate present in each plant. In a potato the carbohydrates are stored mostly in the form of starch, while in a grape the carbohydrates are divided roughly 50/50 between glucose and fructose. Starch is a very large, branching polymer which is responsible for the characteristic texture of plants like potato and yucca. Glucose and fructose, on the other hand, are dinky little, single-carbon-ring monomers. They don't really provide much in the way of structure. The culinary treatment of the two classes of foods is different as well: foods containing fructose/glucose are often eaten raw, while high-starch foods are more pleasant (and more digestible) when cooked. These considerations justify the creation of a category "starchy vegetables" to separate out those products which contain a high percentage of starch\. I'm going to lump one of our odd products, chestnuts, in with this group on this basis. We should also note at this point that starchy/sugary is not a strict dichotomy: a plantain is different from a banana because the former is mostly starch and the later is mostly simple sugars, but both products contain some of each.

Now, before we go any farther, I want to spend a moment talking about dates. They're hanging out at the far right of the carbohydrate graph, way up there at ~%63 by weight, annoying me with their refusal to fall into line. What we want to find out is whether dates are an anomaly or if they represent a class of super-sweet plant products.

The date palm (Phoenix dactylifera) is a member of Arecales, an order that contains just a single family, Palmae. So right away we know that we're potentially dealing with an aberration, since we've got a single plant family sitting out in taxonomic space all by its lonesome. Furthermore, when you look up the genus Pheonix you find out that its hanging out by itself as well, so its unlikely that there are closely-related genera which produce date-like fruits. Straying fslightly further afield we find that there are a number of palms producing such useful products as oil, betel, and coconuts, but none of these as is high in sugar content as the date. Additional confirmation that dates are unique is given by the USDA's list of food products ranked by carbohydrate content; the only item with more carbs than a raw date is sweetened, condensed milk. Looking down the list the next sweetest, raw plant product is mangos, coming is at about a quarter of the carb content of dates. So I think its justified to put dates into their own category.

Consideration of dates, however, leads us to another category of plant products worth considering: saps. Many palms, when tapped, yield a sweet (10-20% sugar) liquid often referred to as "date honey" or"palm syrup". But palms are not the only trees which produce a noteworthy sap; for example, the maple tree produces sap which is boiled down to produce maple syrup. There are also gums/resins such as pine and mastic which are used as flavorings. These products also deserve their own category since they're liquids rather than solids.

We're developing quite an interesting hierarchy; here's what it looks like so far:

Animal products

Liquids

Blood and egg white
Cream
Egg yolk
Honey
Milk
Whole eggs

Solids

Muscle

Fish
Shellfish
Terrestrial animals

Viscera
Bones

Plant products

Liquids

Saps/resins

Solids

Dates
Grains
High-starch vegetables
Nuts/seeds
Everything else

At this point we've considered water and carbohydrate content so, being the systematic folks that we are, we should consider protein content next.

There aren't any big surprises with respect to protein content. At the top of the list are a bunch of different types of beans though, interestingly enough, soybeans don't top the list despite their much-touted reputation. The humble lentil, of all things, has the highest protein content of them all. Once you put the beans into a separate category you are left, once again, with a big, undifferentiated stretch of vegetables.

Moving on, let's look at fat content. As a general rule vegetables are fairly low in fat barring, of course, some notable exceptions. We've already singled out nuts and seeds for their low water content and high fat content. But we've got another statistical outlier, the avocado, which needs to be dealt with. Avocados are ~19.5% fat, but what's most unusual is that the fat isn't locked up in a kernel but rather present in the flesh of the fruit, leading to such colloquial names as "vegetable butter" or "butter pear". We're going to play the same game we played with dates and see if the avocado is a freak of nature or if it's a representative of a larger class of plant products.

The avocado is a member of Lauraceae, which contains other culinarily useful plants such as sassafras and cinnamon. Most members of this genera seem to produce small fruits which don't look particularly appetizing, though apparently a "medicinal aromatic fat" can be obtained from the fruit of the bay laurel tree. This suggests that other members of the laurel family produce fruits with high fat content as well, though actually getting your hands on any might not be worth the effort.

As long as we're on the topic, are there any other high-fat plant products that might have escaped our notice? The only one which comes to mind which hasn't already been categorized is the olive; olive flesh has a high fat content. Its a toss-up whether olives should be included in the same category as avocados, since avocados are usually eaten raw (or with minimal processing) while olives are almost universally pickled prior to being eaten. After consideration, however, it seems reasonable to create a category called "high fat vegetables" to hold these and any other veg we might find with similar characteristics.

At this point we've looked at all of the major constituents, but we're still left with a large "everything else" category. After reviewing the remaining items in my spreadsheet the following categories have suggested themselves:

Alliums
Cruciferous vegetables
Fruits
Fungus
Leafy vegetables

Let's review each of these and see if they merit inclusion in the final hierarchy.

Alliums such as garlic and onions definitely deserve a category of their own. This family of plants produces the sulfoxide alliin which, when combined with the enzyme allinase, produces their characteristic odor. The various species produce different types of alliin and allinase, thus accounting for the subtle (and not-so-subtle) differences in terms of flavor and aroma.

"Cruciferous vegetables" is a botanical category that doesn't seem to mean much from a culinary point of view. It includes plants such as broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage, all of which are similar enough to possibly merit their own category. But, in addition to the examples which are usually cited, it also includes watercress and rutabagas. Watercress, broccoli, and rutabaga all merit markedly different treatments, so the cruciferous vegetables don't really make a good category

Fungus (mushrooms and the like) are in a kingdom all by themselves; they're significantly different from other vegetables in that regard. They're also a good source of glutamate, one of the reasons why everything tastes better with mushrooms. This suggests to me that "fungus" is a useful category.

Leafy vegetables seem self-justifying, since the leaf is a common natural structure that lends itself to a particular set of uses.

The distinction between "fruit" and "not fruit", in a culinary as opposed to botanical sense, seems to be somewhat arbitrary. It doesn't correlate well with sugar content; carrots have more carbohydrates than lemons or cranberries, but the former is a vegetable while the latter are fruits. Nor is "fruitness" analagous to "juicyness"; a bannana is a fruit, but it not particularly juicy. It doesn't necessarily even have anything to do with a particular class of tastes; cucumbers taste a lot like watermelons, but one is a vegetable and one is a fruit. The concept of "fruit" seems to correlate most closely with a sweet taste but, as in the case of the cranberry and lemon, even that seems to be negotiable. So the traditional category "fruit", while somewhat useful, doesn't hold up well to scrutiny.

We're almost there but, in thinking about the alliums, I realized that I'd excluded two other groups of plants with interesting chemical properties, capsicum and zingiberaceae. Capsicum is, of course, the hot peppers. Zingiberaceae includes all sorts of plants which are typically used as seasonings such as ginger, cardamom, and tumeric. More broadly, however, they represent a conceptual class of plants that is used to add flavor rather than substance. We'll call this category "herbs/spices" and leave it at that.

I think we're done. Here's our final inventory:

Animal products

Liquids

Blood and egg white
Cream
Egg yolk
Honey
Milk
Whole eggs

Solids

Muscle

Fish
Shellfish
Terrestrial animals

Viscera
Bones

Plant products

Liquids

Saps/resins

Solids

Alliums
Dates
Fungus
Grains
Herbs/spices
High-fat vegetables
High-starch vegetables
Leafy vegetables
Nuts/seeds
"What's Left"

"What's Left" is obviously a big category; if anyone can think of any substantial divisions which I've neglected please let me know. As a whole, however, I think that the list we've developed serves as a good starting point for further discussion. As I have time I'm going to write about each category in more depth. Stay tuned, same bat-time, same bat-channel.

Hyperbole And Colonialism At Chowhound

2007-10-09T17:54:00.000-07:00

So a couple of days ago my co-conspirator and I were looking for grub in the Tacoma area. I found a thread on Chowhound singing the praises of (among other things) a Mexican restaurant called El Compadrè:

Finally, if you're a true Chowhound, El Compadrè (40th & McKinley) for authentic (non-Azteca) Mexican that would thrill Anthony Bourdain. (Be careful in this neighborhood, lunch is a safer time.)

Let me just say that I now have significantly less faith in Chowhound as a source of good restaurant info.

Let's deal with the "be careful" admonition first. Sweet jebus, people in Tacoma are so white; whoever posted the initial comment probably puts on eir pith helmet before venturing South of I-5. The neighborhood around El Compadrè isn't dangerous, unless by "dangerous" you mean "Spanish speaking". God damn... shit like this makes me think that Chowhound is full of culinary colonialists.

Now on to the "thrill Anthony Bourdain" comment: no, it wouldn't. The food isn't bad, I'll grant you that. The salsa was a little watery but had a nice, smoky flavor to it. I had a good molè; my co-conspirator had some decent tamales. The rice and beans were uninspired; my (Scots-Irish) mother cooked similar when I was a teenager. As a whole everything could have used a bit more flavor.

El Compadrè may even been some of the best Mexican in Tacoma; I don't know, I haven't eaten at enough Mexican restaurants around here yet. If it is that's more an indictment of Tacoma than anything else. But I've had much better Mexican both in California and Texas. Off the top of my head the honey-basted quail at Pappasito's is far more interesting, as are a number of the dishes available at any El Torito.

So let that be a lesson to all y'all. Chowhound is full of people who think that they're all that just because they ate someplace where the primary language isn't English.

Messing Around With S'Mores

2007-09-09T16:40:00.000-07:00

My co-conspirator and I are faced with a challenge: we promised people s'mores for a party but, due to conditions beyond our control, we can't have an open fire. No fire, no roasted marshmallow-y goodness, no s'mores. What are we to do? Well, we could always cook the marshmallows over some other radiant heat source, melt the chocolate in a toaster over, etc. etc., but that's not really the same thing is it? So let's see if we can capture the spirit of the dessert without resorting to one of those silly s'more cooking kits, shall we?

S'mores are really a ceremonial food in the same vein as corned beef. The form and composition reflects the context (sitting around the campfire) in which s'mores are typically cooked. The graham cracker provides a mildly sweet, structural element which makes them a convenient camping finger food, while the chocolate and marshmallow combine to form a warm, gooey filling.

But, as is often the case with ceremonial food, the execution could be better. There's a mismatch between the graham cracker and the marshmallow/chocolate filling; the graham cracker is too firm, so when you bite down all the filling squishes out the sides. That might be fine for the Boy Scouts, but it's a composition flaw in my book. Also, The filling is typically executed with cheap chocolate and marshmallows, resulting in a mass so sweet it makes your teeth ache while suffering from synthetic candy bar aftertaste. We have the technology... we can rebuild it, make it better.

Let's work on a replacement for the graham cracker. We want something sweet and crunchy, but with a little more give to it. The first thing that comes to mind is the cookie portion of a Pepperidge Farms Milano; it's mildly sweet and has a texture which would complement a thickish filling. Of course, it would be unduly labor intensive, not to mention expensive, to pry apart actual Milanos, so we're going to have to fake it.

Google provides a number of recipes:

	Source
Ingredient	Food Network	Uncle Phaedrus	cdkitchen	Suite 101
Almonds	Ø	Ø	1 c	Ø
Almond Extract	Ø	Ø	1/4 tsp	Ø
Baking powder	Ø	Ø	1tsp	Ø
Brown sugar	Ø	3/4 c.	Ø	3/4 c.
Butter	12 tbsp	1 c.	1 c.	1 c.
Eggs	Ø	Ø	1	Ø
Egg whites	7/8 c.	Ø	Ø	Ø
Flour	1.5 c.	2 c.	3/4 c.	2 c.
Lemon extract	2 tbsp	Ø	Ø	Ø
Powdered sugar	2.5 c.	Ø	Ø	Ø
Salt	Ø	Ø	1/8 tsp	Ø
Sugar	Ø	Ø	3/4 c.	Ø
Vanilla extract	2 tbsp	2 tsp	Ø	2 tsp

I've scratched out the flavoring components since we're not concerned with the flavor of the Milano so much as the texture.

So what do we have here? These are all essentially butter cookies, which is about what we should expect given that a Milano looks a lot like a butter cookie, but has a different texture. That's where these recipes part ways: the Uncle Phaedrus and Suite 101 recipes have no additional ingredients beyond sugar, butter, and flower while the Food Network and cdkitchen recipes introduce eggs in one form or another. So, which recipe should we use?

Consider the roles that eggs play in cookie recipes. The whites, being a protein, provide structure while the yolks, mostly fat, provide richness and help tenderize the final product. So, thinking about the butter cookies that you've had in your life; how do they compare to a Milano? In general I expect that they're softer. So we're going to want something with a little more structure, indicating that we should favor recipes containing eggs, which leaves us with the recipes from cdkitchen and Food Network. I'm inclined to go with the Food Network recipe; the use of egg whites (as opposed to whole eggs) and slightly less butter will give a crisper product in comparison to the cdkitchen recipe.

So now we have, if the Food Network is to be believed, a cookie that will approximate the Milano's texture. But it bears absolutely no relation to a graham cracker; if we're trying to stay true to the spirit of the s'more then the product we use for our base should be strongly evocative of the real thing. So what can we do to our base recipe to make it seem more like a graham cracker? Well, let's look at a recipe and see what flavors make it distinctive. The three ingredients which, in my opinion, contribute most strongly to the graham cracker's taste are honey, brown sugar, and graham flour, all of which can be incorporated into the faux-Milano dough.

Focusing on the sweeteners first we have to ask ourselves how to substitute brown sugar/honey for the powdered sugar? I wasn't able to find anything about converting from powdered/confectioners' sugar directly to brown sugar/honey directly, so we're going to have to do it in steps. First, powdered sugar can be converted to granulated sugar at a ratio of 1.13 by weight or 0.57 by volume. So, our 2.5c of powdered sugar becomes ~1.4c granulated sugar; let's just round that to 1.5c for the sake of convenience. Brown sugar swaps 1 for 1 with white sugar apart from the change in taste, but since its the brown sugar taste we're after that's not an issue. Honey swaps for white sugar at 7/8 by volume; we're going to ignore the moisture change which this introduces on the grounds that there's no convenient way to suck water out of this receipe without sucking other things out as well. Let's further assume that we just want a little honey flavor... say... 1/6 the total sweeteners. So, doing the math, we've got 1.25c brown sugar and a little bit less than 1/4c honey.

That takes care of the brown sugar and honey, how about the "graham"? As best as I've been able to determine you can substitute graham flour for white flour 1:1. The big thing you have to worry about when substituting one flour for another is gluten content, but since we're working with hard-ish wheat flours in both cases I think we can safely ignore the minor differences between the two. Since we're looking for flavor and a little bit of rustic texture, but not too much of either, I'm going to suggest that 1/4 of the all purpose flour be swapped for graham flour.

So, for the time being, let's go with the following recipe:

A Milano/graham cracker hybrid
Ingredient	Amount
Brown sugar	1.25 c.
Butter	12 tbsp
Egg whites	7/8 c.
Flour	1&1/8 c.
Graham flour	3/8 c.
Honey	0.25 c.

At this point the hardest part, engineering a cookie recipe, is complete.

Having (hopefully) put together a suitable cookie base for our improve s'more its time to turn our attention to fillings. I've no objection to marshmallow per se; mostly I object to stale, store-bought, not quite as tasty as they should be marshmallows. Fortunatley, its easy to make marshmallows at home, which seems like a reasonable way to go. I intend to cut mine to approximately cookie size and brown them with a kitchen torch before assembling.

Lastly, we've got to think about what to substitute for the cheap chocolate bar. There's a lot of suitable replacements; your selection will undoubtedly vary according to personal taste. I'm thinking either ganache or Nutella, depending upon the whim of the moment and what seems most convenient.

Well, there you have it; we've gone and updated the s'more. I'll let y'all know how these turn out.

Update: Turns out we were able to use coals after all, so I didn't get a chance to try out the above. Never fear, its on my list of things to do; I'll come back and update this when I get a chance to make them.

How To Proceed?

2007-08-20T16:11:00.000-07:00

We've carved out a fairly monumental task for ourselves, to analyze the whole of worldwide cuisine in an attempt to get at some common, underlying ideas. Of necessity we're going to need some sort of a framework, some way to extract order from the vast, glorious chaos that we call "cooking". A daunting task, to be sure, but not insurmountable.

Fortunately for us the art of cookery is a very physical discipline. It dwells not in a world of Platonic ideals but rather in the grubby reality of processes and foodstuffs. This intrinsic physicality is going to be of great help to us as we seek to impose a little bit of order on our glorious chaos.

Cooking, being a physical process, starts with what exists and, through the application of various techniques, produces a new product. This is the lowest common denominator, an immutable rule that all cultures must respect. It also serves as the basis of our organizational framework: if cooking is an art of transformation and composition then it can be best understood by looking at inputs and transformative processes. Or, in plain English, by looking at what ingredients are available and what you do with them once you have them.

To understand how this approach works let's return to the humble sandwich. A sandwich is a composite product, featuring a bread-ish product filled with something. Before one can make a sandwich one must have first made the bread and the filling. This deconstruction can be followed back to the fields and pastures: before one can make the bread one must first have flour, before there can be flour there must first be grain, etc.

So this journey is going to start with the fundaments of cooking, raw ingredients, and proceed from there. Raw ingredients are treated in various ways, combined (or not) with other ingredients and, through routes direct and circuitous, end up as a dish which is consumed. But just as interesting as the dishes themselves are the conditions under which they are consumed: which other dishes are present, who is eating them, and why. In the end we will have examined not only the foods which make up a meal, but the form of the meal itself, hopefully making us better cooks in the process.

Introduction

2007-08-13T00:44:00.001-07:00

I came up with the idea for "Food Forms" while I was eating a sandwich. I don't remember where or when, or even what kind of a sandwich it was, but I remember that it was topped with a red-cabbage slaw.

"Red cabbage slaw, huh? That's kind of cool. And tasty. Wonder where they came up with that idea?"

I went on to speculate about how you could riff on the basic sandwich, take what might be regarded as an ossified food and re-interpret it to make it interesting again. I realized that "sandwich" was an archetype, a template that the creative chef could fill in to interesting effect by varying the breads, the fillings, the garnishes, etc. That was followed by the (not entirely original) understanding that the sandwich is, to a large degree, a universal concept. Many cultures have their own variation of the sandwich, putting various fillings between sundry breads and bread-ish products.

Thus was born the concept of a "food form". There's a finite number of things you can do to/with food; the ingredients may change, but at a deeper level the cook is also following a meta-recipe, an overarching framework for the preparation of the dish. Some of these meta-recipes are familiar and obvious: sandwich, salad, stew. Some are less so: fermented product, emulsion, charcuterie.

The goal here is to examine these forms, see how they express themselves across time and culture. This will allow us to understand not only what is done to food, but also go deeper and find the underlying "why" behind the "what". Ultimately we'd like to be able to look at a dish and understand the role that each ingredient and technique plays, providing us with the ability to riff on the dish in the same way that that cook riffed on my sandwich.

What's Going On Here?

2007-08-13T00:43:00.000-07:00

Welcome, all, to Food Forms. Here I, and my co-conspirator L, are going to writing about food in various ways. Our primary purpose here is to explore the universal in food in a systematic fashion; if we're lucky we may get enough material out of this exercise to put together a book. So we're going to proceed in a somewhat bookish faction with a beginning, middle, and end. Along the way I expect there will be lots of random side-trips and interjections as we put in our $0.02 regarding current events in food. Enjoy.