Smoked Pork Shoulder

We realized a small dream the other day.

Longtime readers may remember that I own a smoker, which I dubbed the Battle Droid for its black, tall, cylindrical body and its three squat legs. It was a wedding present from our friends Tom and Carol, but our friends Tim and Mitch have baby-sat it for the 4 ½ years since then. We lack any sort of outdoor area where we can set up a device that streams out clouds of smoke.

At least we did.

A few weeks back, we moved the smoker to the house. The other day, I practically skipped home with a pork shoulder. I cured it overnight with a dry rub of salt, dried oregano, pepper, and caraway, and smoked it the next day on our back deck. As we stripped bright blue paint from our kitchen walls, the Battle Droid puffed away, slow-cooking the meat in a cloud of light gray applewood smoke.

That night, I carved slices from the tender shoulder. Each had a deep pork flavor infused with a hearty smokiness. I served it simply, placing braised Brussels sprouts and carrots to the side. With a glass of wine in my hand (Dover Canyon’s “Alto Pomar,” a Rhône blend), I daydreamed about all the food our smoker will produce. (This week, I’ll be putting the shoulder on sandwiches with a persillade spread: parsley, lemon, and garlic.)

“No pictures?” you ask. My photographer is currently the general contractor on a major house renovation, so we’ll have to make do with me flying solo for a bit.

UPS Ruined My Christmas Eve Dinner

“The rabbit died,” wrote my mom’s husband. So much for that last hope, I thought. Three days of miscommunication and stress, and one rabbit’s life, all for naught.

A month ago, my mom and I brainstormed ideas for Christmas Eve dinner. I suggested rabbit — the soon-to-arrive issue of The Art of Eating has my article on the subject — and my mom lit up. It was something new, and it was a dish that her husband ate as a child: He loves rabbit. In fact, his memories of eating it prompted me to pitch my article.

I told my mom that I would hunt down Devil’s Gulch rabbit. Mark Pasternak breeds the bunnies you find on just about every Bay Area menu, and he raises them with care and atttention. But he also seems to turn the supply spigot on and off at whim. Taylor, at Fatted Calf, couldn’t get them. Bi-Rite Market, the upscale grocer in San Francisco, couldn’t get them. Even Berkeley’s Cafe Rouge, which uses a different, high-quality source, couldn’t get me rabbit for Christmas. Industrially-raised rabbits are available, but, as the meat buyer at Bi-Rite said, “Once you’ve had Mark’s, there’s no substitute.”

We decided to call D’Artagnan, the famous specialty-meat provider. The rabbit wouldn’t be local, but it would be delicious.

The calamity began on Friday, when my mom looked up the tracking number. Because of volume overflow, UPS had delayed the package. Don’t ask me why an item that requires refrigeration was held back, but that was the source of every subsequent problem. I called D’Artagnan and asked them to re-route the box to my mom’s loft because no one would be at the original shipping address on Saturday. The rabbit arrived in Oakland on Friday afternoon but sat at the warehouse until the next day, when UPS tried to deliver it to the old address. Had it arrived at my mom’s on Saturday, it might have been okay. But UPS held it through the weekend, and delivered it on Monday, three full days after it was supposed to arrive. The ice packs had thawed, and the rabbit’s internal temperature was 54°: well above the safety limit. My mom’s husband, who received the box, sent out the email we had all feared. I called D’Artagnan, and they resignedly reversed the charges: UPS messed up many of their orders this holiday season.

Of course, my mom put together a delicious dinner, but there was still a melancholy moment when her husband described the bunny as, “the prettiest rabbit I’ve ever seen.”

Sens And Super Natural Cooking

I don’t like to review anything whose creators are my good acquaintances or friends, though you could find counterexamples. If I don’t like something, I have to choose between damaging a friendship or being dishonest with you. If I like something too much, you may think I’m being overzealous to support a friend. So consider these next paragraphs idle thoughts instead of reviews.

I have a stack of books I use for meal planning for the week. Some of the books come and go depending on my mood, while some have taken up permanent residence. One of those is Heidi’s Super Natural Cooking. I’ve yet to explicitly follow one of her recipes, but her ideas inspire my creations. I don’t know how easy it is to find the less common ingredients in her book, but the closest good grocery store to my work is the same one she alludes to in her introduction.

Melissa and I can’t go out to fancy restaurants on our own, thanks to being house poor, but my mom took us to a knockout meal at Sens for my birthday. Shuna is the executive pastry chef, and her desserts were stellar, as was the rest of the food. And mad props to their wine director for his wine list, which features a tantalizing diversity of wines at reasonable prices.

2004 Parducci "True Grit" Petite Sirah, Mendocino, California

If you don’t read many other food and wine blogs, you may have forgotten about Wine Blogging Wednesday, the monthly, Internet-wide tasting event. I typically forget about the event until I see everyone else’s posts, at which point it’s too late for me to join in.

But this month, one of the wines I drank lined up with Sonadora’s “Que Sirah Sirah” theme, an homage to Petite Sirah; I’d have no excuse for not posting.

Parducci’s “True Grit” Petite Sirah from Mendocino ($25) has the intense black color and blueberry aromas I associate with this grape, but the strong whiff of star anise and toast smells more like the wine’s barrel. That star anise flavor continues on the palate, with a deep black cherry taste that finishes with a hint of cough syrup on the medium finish, perhaps a by-product of the 14.5 percent alcohol. Since I normally think of Petite Sirah as a tannic, robust grape — small grapes give a higher skin-to-juice ratio — I was surprised to find a lightweight wine with subtle, fine-grained tannins and a mouth-gripping acidity. This is a wine I’d serve with grilled magret de canard, the fatty breast of a foie gras duck, especially if I had garnished it with a dark-fruit sauce.

This wine was sent to me as a sample.

Next Berkeley Extension Class: Fundamentals Of Wine Studies II

I finished teaching my Fundamentals of Wine Studies I class just last night, but the new Berkeley Extension catalogs are out, which means you can sign up for my Fundamentals Of Wine Studies II class. You don’t need Fundamentals I to take Fundamentals II: In fact, there’s often debate about which should come first.

While Fundamentals I focuses on regions, so that students know what to expect from an Austrian white or a Southern Rhône red, Fundamentals II focuses on describing wine. The first of the six classes talks about acidity, sugar, tannins, and alcohol; the second helps you articulate the smells in a wine; and so forth. Here’s the syllabus I made for the last time I taught the class. Class starts in San Francisco on January 30 and meets six times, with no class on February 20.

On a related note, Dr. Vino’s Tyler Colman will teach a one-day seminar on organic and “natural” wines.

Recent Drinks Of Note

Martini & Rossi Prosecco IGT, Italy
When I covered Champagne in my wine class, one of my students asked why you don’t see crown caps — the toothed metal hats you see on beer bottles — on sparkling wine. (You do, incidentally, if you visit a Champagne cellar. The bubble-causing secondary fermentation happens in bottle, and Champagne producers put crown caps on the bottles during the riddling process that collects the spent yeast cells in the neck.) Another student theorized that the pressure in a sealed Champagne bottle — 88 pounds per square inch, according to The Oxford Companion to Wine — might make crown caps a risky venture. A slight flick of your bottle opener, he suggested, and the vented pressure might send the sharp metal disc flying through the air like a tiny throwing star.

I didn’t have a better answer, so when Martini & Rossi offered to send me a bottle of their Prosecco, sealed with a crown cap, a week before my class on Italy, I jumped at the chance to pour it for my students. How dangerous was popping the top? Not very: The wine lacked the voluptuous foam of a sparkling wine, showing instead a light fizz and leaving the class’s larger question unanswered. My students described the simple taste as “Martinell’s apple cider,” and we agreed that it would be a pleasant enough picnic wine. This is not a Prosecco di Valdobbiadene, the ne plus ultra of this simple sparkler, but a Prosecco IGT, which means — as I hope my students can now explain — that either it’s made from grapes from a wider area, or the winemaking varied from what the Valdobbiadene rules require. ($11, I think)

2007 Georges DuBoeuf Beaujolais Nouveau, France
Similarly, I couldn’t resist getting a press sample of Beaujolais Nouveau to pour in class on the day it released. We had covered the Beaujolais region, at the southern end of Burgundy, two weeks earlier, but I had focused on Cru Beaujolais, wine from the villages that act as subregions within Beaujolais: Morgon, Fleurie, Moulin-le-Vent, and so forth. Georges DuBoeuf singlehandedly transformed Nouveau from a quaffing wine meant to celebrate a successful harvest into a media event that dominates wine stores in the third week of November. He has given publicity to the region, but at the cost of associating it with a mediocre, industrial wine made from high-yield vines. My students quickly picked up the telltale aromas of fried banana that dominate DuBoeuf’s Nouveau, and some tried to figure out why anyone cares anything about this wine. (They enjoyed the better Beaujolais I poured earlier.) ($8-$10)

2004 Lassègue, Saint-Émilion Grand Cru, Bordeaux, France
This is a surprisingly floral and light Bordeaux, but it packs a lot of complexity into the glass. I picked up barbecued beef and bread aromas alongside the bell pepper I get off of most Bordeaux, and I kept writing down new flavors as I continued to taste the wine: mushrooms, plums, dark berry, smoke, and a splash of milk chocolate on the finish. Light tannins and mild acidity make this a wine to serve with light, lean meat dishes: The tongue and tail terrine from The River Cottage Meat Book comes to mind, as do brisket, beef sausage, and rabbit stew. ($50, sent to me as a sample)

2006 Pattiana Sauvignon Blanc, Mendocino, California

This wine divides my loyalties: I want to encourage you to support biodynamic wineries, where the grapes are raised in a holistic fashion. But biodynamic farming is more laborious than industrial farming, thus adding expense to the wine. Can I encourage you to pay $18 for this wine, which is at heart a straightforward Sauvignon Blanc, when it probably costs more because the winery isn’t relying on industrial cost-cutting techniques? The wine is delicious — refreshing grassy aromas and searing acidity mixed with light peach and guava aromas — but not very complex. I would encourage you to buy more expensive grass-fed beef and produce from careful growers, but there you’re getting extra flavor for your extra money. I love this wine for what it is, but I wish it were a little cheaper. ($18, sent to me as a sample)

Food Blog Awards

Menu For Hope is one end-of-year tradition in the food blogosphere; the Food Blog Awards are another. Go nominate your favorite sites for awards and virtual glory at Well Fed. As a former judge, I can tell you that this is a tough chore for the folks behind the scenes, so give a big thanks to Cate and all the judges for their efforts in keeping this annual rite alive.

Menu For Hope Approaches

Menu For Hope, the end-of-year food blogger charity drive started by Pim, is about to start. Bloggers around the world contribute gifts, and everyone buys raffle tickets for the prizes they’d like to win. The money — over $60,000 last year — all goes to the UN’s World Food Program. If you’re a food blogger and you’d like to contribute a gift, contact the appropriate regional host. Bidding begins on December 10, and I will once again be writing the program that does the raffle drawing, so enter your bribes as soon as possible — uh, which I will ignore, of course. Did I say that out loud? (Technically, I’ll just run the program I wrote last year, but I have some features to add.)

White Bean Hummus Crostini

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

This last summer, when we first entered negotiations for the house, I envisioned us hosting Thanksgiving in our new dining room. I pictured our friends and family warmed by our new-owner glow and an abundance of good food and wine.

Have I mentioned that our house needs some work? Or that the negotiations took longer than we expected? Scrap my vision of dinner, and picture instead the two of us driving to my mom’s house. (This is no hardship: I inherit my love of cooking from my parents.)

But I did cook for Thanksgiving. My mom asked me to bring an appetizer, and the result was one of those lucky combinations of simple ingredients and creativity that can produce memorable dishes.

I started with “white bean hummus,” which I've been pondering as a way to use leftover beans. I cooked cannelini beans until they were very tender and then scooped them into a food processor. I drizzled in olive oil as the high-speed blade pulverized the beans, which went from chunky and coarse to smooth and fluffy. (Though not as much so as regular hummus. I suspect the difference comes from garbanzo beans’ oil content — twice the amount of other legumes, according to On Food And Cooking.)

I seasoned the bean purée with salt and coarsely chopped sage from our “garden” — a few pots squatting in the new backyard. Salt gave the beans depth and sage balanced the earthy beans with a zingy, vegetal spice.

I thought that the salt-packed capers in my pantry, once desalted in a bowl of water for an hour, would add a complementary flavor, a visual focus, and a punchy little morsel to each serving. It just wouldn’t change the palette of the dish: an olive green caper on a beige bean paste that was flecked with gray-green sage, all sitting atop a brown slice of toasted baguette. The dish needed color.

It also needed acid, a mouthwatering component that would bring the eater back for more. I weighed the idea of pomegranate seeds sitting next to the caper, but then I discovered the last of the red onion quick pickles I made for our last dinner party.

At my mom’s house, I toasted the baguette slices — in small amounts in the toaster when I should have used the already-running oven — spread a bit of bean purée on them, fished thin onions from their sweet-and-sour brine, lay them on top in a rough circle, and finally dropped a succulent caper into the middle.

In a way, it’s probably a good thing that I took the slow approach to toasting the baguette. We scarfed down the bites so quickly that, had I made more at once, we would have had no appetite left for turkey.

Mouth Wide Open

I have a reputation for being a tough critic — I prefer “thoughtful critic” — when it comes to book reviews. But I’m actually easy to please: do your research, think about what you’re writing, and communicate your ideas clearly. You get bonus points for good imagery and rhythm, but they’re not necessary.

In the swamp of modern food writing, however, few authors poke above the miasma of mediocrity and deliver on my lean requirements. One of them is John Thorne.

I imagine many of you already know Thorne’s writing. His attitudes and beliefs are among those that form the substrata of my own. If you like this blog, you probably like him, and you won’t need my encouragement to buy Mouth Wide Open, the latest collection of excerpts from his magazine Simple Cooking.

If you haven’t yet found him, Mouth Wide Open is a great place to start.

Thorne is at his best when he writes long pieces about single dishes. He meditates on them, researches them, and cooks them. These are not Cook's Illustrated-esque diaries of adjusting a recipe by 1 tablespoon of this and 1 tablespoon of that until he arrives at some “perfect” rendition. These are thought-provoking and in-depth essays that reel in history and personal experience.

Consider his piece on the Piemontese dish bagna cauda, which I challenge anyone to read without experiencing a gripping need to make the dish as soon as humanly possible: “To get at the essence of bagna caôda, then, you must imagine yourself tired, famished, sitting in a field somewhere surrounded with comrades, a raw scallion in one hand and a tumbler of equally raw red wine in the other … your body glows in the warmth that comes from ingesting an overload of butter and oil. Life, for the moment, is nothing but unalloyed delight …” Discussing the role of anchovies in the dish, he writes, “These anchovies also satisfied something that reaches so far into the past that it predates humankind itself: the craving for salt.” How did the anchovies become so integral to a dish from a landlocked region? Thorne’s research points to the Jews who were booted from Spain in 1492. And as he outlines recipes from several decades of cookbooks, he notes how the ingredients have changed in recipes for this “traditional” dish — more garlic and less butter — and how it has moved from main course to appetizer. (He writes of bagna cauda’s evolution: “Which only goes to show that authenticity, slippery as an eel, can never be grasped for long … unless you’re willing to slam its head against the side of a table.”)

His long pieces on marmalade and on cod and potatoes will impel you with equal force into the kitchen. But even his short meditations will inspire you. In “The Cook Concocts His Midnight Snack,” Thorne writes about sweet corn and milk: “I blended the kernels and the pulp together, mixed in a cup of milk, a pinch of salt, and a dash of Jamaican hot sauce. Then I gently heated it up in a saucepan, just enough to have to blow on the first few spoonfuls to cool them, and served it up.” What a pity that corn season has ended.

Thorne invites comparison with Edward Behr, another of the food world’s greats, and indeed the two men are friends. (And one of the pieces in Mouth Wide Open first appeared in The Art of Eating.) But the two magazines have their own identities. Behr’s research combines travel and interviews with books and history, whereas Thorne’s focuses on books and the Internet. This is not to diminish Thorne’s work — you’ll find few publications with more thought behind them — but to say that his publication is, as Behr himself describes it, “close to home and kitchen.” As a happy side effect of this close-to-the-hearth position, the techniques and ingredients that Thorne describes are within anyone’s reach.

Gift-giving holidays are upon us, and bookstore shelves are about to groan with the weight of fluffy books rushed out for the season. Instead of some bland and middling food book, give your friends and loved ones a book that will open their eyes — and their mouths — to a universe of passionate writing and deep thought. Give them Mouth Wide Open.

This book was sent to me as a review copy.

P.S. For those of you who care about such things, I have reversed a long-standing style choice on OWF. Though most of my clients choose to drop the serial comma, the comma that appears before the last item in a list, I have decided to keep it in these posts. Since the only rule with style-guide decisions is that you apply them consistently, I thought it worth flagging this change to OWF’s style guide.

Around The Web

A number of you have asked about the survey I ran a while back. I’ll post the results soon. In the meantime, if you want a break from Thanksgiving prep, here are a few good links for your enjoyment.

The eloquent Mark Morford, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrestles with ethical eating in the face of yummy food. Avoiding all questionable food would be so much easier if so much of that food didn’t taste so good.

What does your Thanksgiving meal look like? Turkey on the table, cranberry sauce on the side? Wired offers a different view: through the lens of a microscope.

Finally, Jason Haas, of premier Paso Robles winery Tablas Creek, gave me a heads-up about a recent post in which he discusses how the TTB’s decision to stop granting AVAs has impeded efforts to subdivide Paso based on soil and climate.

Vinography Book Review: Decantations

Vinography.com readers may have noticed that Alder has started to run book reviews written by guest contributors. When our mutual friend Tim Patterson, the book review editor, asked if I wanted to contribute, I decided to review the wine book I was reading at that moment. You can read my review of Frank Prial’s Decantations as of today.

Pardon Me, Turkeys

Want a safe topic for the family’s Thanksgiving dinner chatter? Snopes tracked down the history of the presidential pardon for turkeys. Who was the first president to issue a pardon for birds headed to the slaughterhouse? It may not be who you think.

And don’t miss their other Thanksgiving entries. Turkey doesn’t make you sleepy, and the day after Thanksgiving isn’t the biggest shopping day of the year.

The Elements Of Cooking

One of my biggest complaints about recipes is that they may inspire but they rarely teach. Just like any other craft, cooking requires core skills, and few cookbooks explain them to the novice.

There are counterexamples. In Judy Rodgers’ Zuni Cafe Cookbook, the recipes are garnishes on long essays about quality and technique. To this day, it sits atop my list of recommended cookbooks. But those kinds of books come around only a little more often than moon landings.

And then there’s Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking, which abandons recipes and glossy pictures altogether. Instead, Elements leverages Ruhlman’s time in culinary school and famous restaurants, and gives readers the building blocks to step above recipes and learn how to actually cook.

Give Elements to a friend who’s expressed an interest in preparing good food, and buy a copy for yourself. Even accomplished cooks will enjoy the essays at the beginning of the book that lay out the fundamentals of kitchen savvy. If you think of sauce as the liquid that pools on a plate around your dinner, read his long discussion of it and think again. He writes, “The mayonnaise that enriches and binds a tuna salad is its sauce; a quenelle of olive tapenade on a grilled duck breast can serve as its sauce.” Even if you already think this way, the book’s early chapters provide a good review of cooking fundamentals, much as its spiritual ancestor, The Elements of Style, reminds writers about the basics of their craft. Like that classic guide, you’ll want to revisit this book every so often to hone your culinary mind.

But if the essays are the soul of the book, the glossary is its body. Page after page gives concise definitions and short essays about common cooking terms and ingredients — at least the ones you’ll find in a French-influenced kitchen. I consider myself a knowledgeable cook, but I found a few terms that I had forgotten over time, if I ever knew them (à la ficelle, for instance). Though these definitions exist elsewhere, most notably in Harold McGee’s On Food And Cooking, Elements collects them into a small tome that can sit close at hand even in a crowded kitchen.

My conversations with friends about this book show me how useful such a reference can be. I spoke with one about Ruhlman’s admirable choice to use proportions instead of quantities. “For instance,” I said, “he writes that equal parts butter and flour in a roux thickens some amount of liquid.” But I couldn’t remember that amount (10 times the amount of roux, by weight). I spoke with another about how the book answers those little questions you sometimes have: I said, “Quatre épices is three parts pepper, 1 part cloves and cinnamon and whatever.” I couldn’t remember the fourth spice (nutmeg). Maybe your memory is better than mine; I’ll just use the book.

At times, though, I wish the entries offered more. For foam, Ruhlman writes, “While foam does have its uses (foamed milk in coffee is a good example), it can feel affected or gimmicky when used for the sake of itself rather than as an integral part of the dish.” What is it about the foam on coffee that makes it useful as opposed to gimmicky? And how would I as a cook know when a dish could benefit from foam? He never says. And inevitably, there are the questions about how one ingredient made it into the book while another didn’t: There was room for bladder but not for brisket?

If you’re as pedantic as I, you may find some nits to pick in this book. Under the entry for balsamic vinegar, for example, Ruhlman writes, “All true balsamics come from Italy, most notably Modena … and will say so on the bottle.” Unfortunately, so will all the industrial versions bottled in the same area; look for aceto balsamico tradizionale instead. Under the entry for generic vinegar, he blithely mentions that you can add wine to a starter without noting that most modern wine has too much alcohol for the vinegar-producing bacteria; dilute your wine to at most ten percent to keep your population alive. He describes cooking with wine, but fails to mention that oh-so-useful safety tip: Add the wine to the pan away from the roaring flame on the oven.

Only a few of you will probably care about the occasional muddled sentence — Does the description for quatre-épices, “A working ratio is three parts pepper to one part nutmeg, cinnamon, and clove,” mean that you should use 3 parts pepper and 1 part each of the others, or 1 part of the others combined? (The former, according to his previous book Charcuterie.) And probably even fewer of you will care about the inconsistent layout of the glossary items. I feel like the publisher should have set forth a style guide specific to that section and then double-checked each entry against it. For stock, you find “a flavorful liquid made by gently heating vegetables, aromatics, bones, and meat …”. For spider, you find “A large flat mesh ladle used for retrieving fried items from hot fat is called a spider”. For beurre manié, you find “butter into which an equal volume of flour has been rubbed and kneaded becomes ….” Capitalize sentences and not fragments, okay; but what of beurre manié’s full sentence? Variety in a reference text keeps the pace lively, but the stylistic inconsistencies kept snagging my eyes.

I’m hoping they stop bugging me, though; I intend to flip through this book often.

This book was sent to me for review.

Our Last Dinner Party

We hosted our last dinner party one week ago.

No, not really. But it was the last dinner party we’re likely to have in our apartment. Sniff. It’s held a fair number of parties, and it’s a nice space — the dining room is gigantic for an apartment — but I’m looking forward to smoking cuts of meat on the back steps, plucking preserves from the basement, and serving food fresh from my garden.

You might imagine that we would do a blow-out farewell in honor of our current space, but I decided to keep it simple.

Appetizers and Amuse
Just before our guests arrived, I put out an appetizer platter: olives; salumi; homemade pickled red onions; and layered strips of zucchini, carrot, and bell pepper that I marinated overnight in oil and herbs. I poured a nice Prosecco — I always like to greet people with sparkling wine — and we dug in.

After I read Harold McGee’s article about gelatin filtration, I decided to try a butternut squash consomme as an amuse-bouche for this party. I steamed the quartered squash until fork-tender — about 20 minutes — over a simple stock of squash pulp, butter, and seeds, and then I used that liquid to purée the soft, orange flesh. I added water until the soup had a thin consistency and then one package of gelatin for the six cups of soup. I froze it overnight and thawed it for a week in the refrigerator in a sieve. The liquid in the soup seeped through the molecular net and dripped into the bowl below. The result was decidedly strange: An almost clear, light yellow liquid that tasted like pure butternut squash. I made a sage gelée with the intent of plopping tiny balls of it into the consomme, which I served in a small glass, but the jelly was too sticky. Melissa came up with the brilliant idea of “salting” the glasses with the sage jelly by dipping the rim into a bowl of jelly. This sticky rim added just a hint of sage to each sip of squash essence.

As an aside, I tried making fruit leather from the quivering squash mass that remained after the filtration, but I didn’t spread it thinly enough in the dehyrdator. Fruit leather remains an ongoing experiment.

Opener: Fall Salad With Marrow Dumpling

I had a hard time deciding on an opener. I auditioned a tongue and tail terrine from The River Cottage Meat Book, but I decided against it. It was good, but it didn’t seem like a natural step in the dinner. Then I saw a dish in Art Culinaire that featured fried marrow dumplings, quail eggs, caviar, and lobster glaze. I played around with that concept, but I couldn’t find an adaptation that worked for me. The morning of the party, I finally concocted a simple salad: Three leaves of Belgian endive arranged in a Mercedes-Benz symbol and filled with roasted grapes. In one corner, I piled sautéed fennel and bacon; in the other two I drizzled balsamic vinegar. I placed a fried marrow dumpling (scoop marrow, season, refrigerate, cover with egg and bread crumbs, and deep fry) at the center of the plate. I poured a François Pinon Vouvray to accompany the salad, trusting in its acidity to counteract the rich marrow.

Main: Slow-roasted Pork Shoulder With Brussels Sprouts

This wasn’t the prettiest dish I’ve ever plated, but even my talkative internal critic agreed that these slabs of pork, which I rubbed with salt and oregano and slow-roasted at 250° for two hours, were juicy and flavorful. I de-leafed Brussels sprouts and sautéed the greens in duck fat before braising them, and I dressed the meat with a brown butter sauce (which caused a stir in the dining room when it foamed violently after I added vinegar to the hot fat). I served Cantillon’s Rosé de Gambrinus, a raspberry-infused lambic beer, which I joked was a regional pairing: Cantillon is based in Brussels.

Cheese: Montgomery Cheddar

Given that Eat Local queen Jen Maiser was one of our guests, I joked that I tried to source ingredients from as far away as possible, but I only picked up the Montgomery Cheddar, a true English farmhouse cheese, because my cheese shop was out of the much more local Fiscalini bandage-wrapped cheddar. I served a dry Lustau oloroso sherry to complement the rich cheese.

Dessert: Pomegranate Sorbet With Pistachio Tuiles

Since I like to make frozen desserts early in the morning of a dinner party, you can imagine my frustration when I realized the night before that I hadn’t bought enough pomegranates. I had enough time to assemble the sorbet, but the delay stressed me out.

For once, I had success using the whack-with-a-wooden-spoon technique for extracting the blood-red seeds from the halved fruit, and I used a food mill to extract the juice from the ruby drops. I combined the tart liquid with sugar, strained fig jam, vodka, and a bit of red wine vinegar to get the taste right. But even a deep red sorbet isn’t very eye-catching when served naked, so I made lacy pistachio tuiles that I could pose like a sail in the sorbet. A number of my recent dishes have combined red and green in unexpected ways: Maybe all the Christmas decorations in stores have influenced me.

Mignardise: Candied Buddha’s Hand And Pine Nut Brittle

I’ve already written about the pine nut brittle, a simple candy that I’ll make again and again. The candied Buddha’s hand, however, was a morning-of addition. I spotted a Cthulhu-esque Buddha’s hand at Market Hall, and I decided to try candying it. Of course, you have to chop all the pretty yellow tentacles into bite-size strips, but I hoped the unusual flavor would come through in the final product. It did, but I think next time I’ll only blanch it twice instead of the three times I do for normal candied citrus peel. There wasn’t enough bitterness to stand up against the sugary syrup and coating.

"Power Boil" Burners

We bought a nice, one-year-old stove off of Craigslist, and this weekend we hooked it up in the new house. This stove, like other modern stoves, has a “power boil” burner with more flame and a “precise simmer” burner with less. This drives me bonkers. Why not just make all the burners go from the lowest temperature of precise simmer to the highest temperature of power boil? Why force me to put stocks on my back right burner and stir-fries in the front?

It reminds me of the famous dialog between Nigel Tufnel and Marty DiBergi in This Is Spinal Tap:

Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...

Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?

Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.

Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?

Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty DiBergi: I don't know.

Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?

Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.

Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.

Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?

Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.

My friend meriko mentioned that they probably just have different sizes of pipes running into the burners, which prompts the question: Can I hack those pipes to install new, bigger ones to all the burners? I’m already planning to make a pizza oven by removing the lock that kicks in for the self-cleaning mode. Maybe I could swap in new pipes as well. Anyone know how to do that without blowing up the house?

Equator Coffee Responds

A few days ago, I posted about The Shot’s assertion that The French Laundry was using mediocre, expensive coffee in lieu of making a good cup.

Brooke McDonnell, the owner and master roaster for Equator Coffee, saw my post and commented in defense of her company. I know not everyone reads the comments, so I thought I should post her statement, unedited except for HTML friendliness, here for you all to read. As I said before, I don’t know anything about coffee, but I’m willing to let people defend themselves and correct misimpressions.

Brooke’s comment:

In response to the espresso critic quoted in this blog, a bit of clarification:

1. Equator coffees & teas does not supply, nor has it ever supplied, the espresso for the French Laundry which comes from Illy. (We supply their drip coffee). As a roaster I appreciate anyone who takes an interest in and promotes the crafting of specialty coffee in all its forms, yet, it is startling to read a review disparaging of Equator in the context of French Laundry espresso for the second time from the same critic.

2. As traditionalists we may have objections to the automatic espresso machines, however, in certain environments, where there are multiple servers, these machines eliminate inconsistencies and improve the execution.

3. Espresso preferences are subjective: Illy is just one style of espresso that when pulled properly has a strong constituency based on its balanced sweetness and moderate acidity. At recent barista competitions the trend was towards very tangy, citrusy, salty origin espresso. This is a big tent subject that leaves plenty of room to promote ones preference and appreciate other styles of espresso.

4. As any roaster knows, the key is always control over the variables that effect espresso, and, as any roaster knows, the same espresso can yield different results at different locations under different hands. The espresso critic's ratings confirm this. Even when there has been on-site training (which we do), the roaster has limited influence over the final espresso translation. Simply put, we cannot compel those on the front lines of retail to have a passion for the process.

5. Regarding the Panama Geisha served at the French Laundry: after visiting the Esmeralda farm, I arranged for one of owners to meet the French Laundry staff and provide background on the coffee varietal and microclimate prior to introducing this coffee. The staff took the time to educate themselves on the agronomy of this coffee farm. They also spent time evaluating different roast styles and brewing methods. I was impressed with their commitment to raise the bar on their brewed coffee program.

Chard Stem Pickles

When I cook chard, I take out the stems and cut across the leaf. I braise the dark greens, but I’m left with naked stems. The other night, I decided to transform chard stems into quick pickles, otherwise known as refrigerator pickles because that’s where you have to store them. I turned to Quick Pickles for inspiration, and though there are photos of chard in the book, that particular item never appears in the index. Odd.

But a bit of leafing through the book gave me enough examples to develop my own recipe: 1 part salt, 2 parts sugar and 4 parts vinegar. Bring to a boil, pour over chopped chard stems, and add dried chile and thin slices of lime. Let cool to room temperature; cover and chill. The chard stems taste mostly of their brine, but they do have a satisfying crunch and a pleasant vegetable flavor.

Tips From Art Culinaire

I’m always of two minds about Art Culinaire, the quarterly hardback food porn publication aimed at chefs. On one hand, the editing is slipshod and the recipes are unreliable. On the other, the photos are gorgeous and the ideas are inspiring.

A couple of ideas from the current issue grabbed me as I plotted out the menu for our most recent dinner party, probably the last one in our apartment. I tried them out, and I’ll definitely use them again.

Pine Nut Brittle

Swapping peanuts with pine nuts in crunchy caramel creates an odd candy. When you bite into it, there’s an explosion of pine nut flavor, but the nuts themselves disappear. You can see them, but you don’t feel them as your teeth slide through the sugar: I compared them to Rice Krispies. I didn’t bother looking at the Art Culinaire recipe; I just followed the peanut brittle recipe in David’s The Perfect Scoop, which is in turn our mutual friend Mary Jo’s recipe.

Extracting Marrow

Want to get marrow out of a beef bone to use as an ingredient? One recipe in this issue suggested putting the bones in a double boiler, but I don’t own a double boiler that can fit four big bones. Instead, I made a bain-mairie — which I view as a double boiler in different proportions — by placing the bones into an 8x8 glass baking dish, which I then put into a roasting pan. I added enough water to the roasting pan to come halfway up the side of the baking dish and covered the baking dish with foil. I cooked the whole thing in a 350° oven for 10 minutes. Then I scooped out the softened marrow with ease. (I put it into a dumpling and fried it; more on that later.)

Wine Gadgets The World Needs

Lore Sjöberg, who often writes humorous pieces for Wired, has put his satirical pen to paper and pondered the wine gadgets missing from the world. An automatic wine twirler? A tooth-mounted flavor sensor? A temporal acceleration device to age your wine? (He’s obviously unaware of the devices that purport to do this.)

How about his idea for a first-person Champagne shooter? I could combine my love of video games with my love of wine, though I’m not a big FPS fan.

I can’t help but point out that his use of the word “varietal” — to my mind, a misuse — illustrates my belief that we shouldn’t use the word except in its very specific meaning of a bottle marketed as being made from a single grape variety. Why use jargon incorrectly when there’s a perfectly good non-jargon term? That’s part of why culture views wine geeks as objects of derision.

Want: Dough-Nu-Matic Doughnut Maker

I like Krispy Kreme’s glazed doughnuts, but mostly because I like watching the massive machine that makes them. Shaped dough moves along a conveyor belt through a proofing chamber, an oven and then a seemingly solid sheet of white glaze. Eaten right off The Machine, Krispy Kremes are at their apex. The fat hasn’t quite congealed, the glaze hasn’t quite hardened, and the entire pastry has an almost liquid feel.

Our new house isn’t big enough for a Krispy Kreme machine — too bad, we could sell them out of our garage or something — but maybe I can find room for the Dough-Nu-Matic, a $130 device that churns out piping hot doughnuts.

via boing boing Gadgets

New, Out-There Cooking Tip

I’ve written about some bold cooking experiments here on OWF, but the other night I struck into new territory, even for me. As I thought about the cooking times and techniques for my fresh cranberry beans, diced ham, diced butternut squash and chopped escarole, I realized that I could toss them into one pot and cook them all together.

Crazy, I know. I’m sure that you assume, as I do, that even simple dishes require two pots. And the more the better, right?

But bear with me, because it worked. Simmered for about half an hour in just enough water to cover the ingredients, the fresh beans had a creamy texture and a beany taste; the firm squash had softened into tender, nutty cubes; the salty ham had rendered a bit of fat into the liquid, retaining a meaty texture; the fluffy escarole had wilted into gentle streamers of greenery.

I think I’ve created a new genre of cooking — certainly I’ve never encountered such a practice before — but I’m struggling to name it. Given that I used just one pot, I’m thinking of calling it “one stop” cooking. Catchy, eh? Go forth and spread the word about this revolutionary new idea.

The French Laundry's Mediocre Coffee?

I know nothing about coffee except that I don’t like it. But my friend Tim does: He owns a popular coffeehouse in San Leandro that does its own roasting and blending. He forwarded an amusing post arguing that The French Laundry is trying to cover for mediocre coffee by impressing guests with its price. Or as the author writes:

Yes, the man behind America’s most esteemed of restaurants … has proudly announced to his customers that they[sic] will now offer Panama Esmeralda Geisha coffee roasted by the consistently underwhelming Equator Estate Coffees. … rather than get educated, train staff, and elevate the craft (if not also chuck their superautomatic Schaerer espresso machine for something less suited for an assembly line), they take the lazy short cut of espousing the merits of “the most expensive coffee in the world” on their menus

Any thoughts on this from you all? (Other than the misuse of the word “compliment” in the original press release?)

Wine's Carbon Footprint

I make some effort to source local ingredients for my cooking, but I gloss over the fact that my favorite wines come from Europe. Tyler, of Dr. Vino, is less willing to brush dust under his carpet. He puts thought into the environmental aspects of wine production, and he’s recently published a paper about calculating the carbon footprint of wine. Pour yourself a glass from a local winery and give it a read.

Chicken Cycle

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

One of the easiest of my “cycles,” the cascades of dinners I make from leftovers, is the one I do with chicken. Roast a chicken at the beginning of the week, or take a raw one apart, and you've got a few meals for two at the ready.

I started on Monday with a roast chicken, purchased at Berkeley’s farmers’ market. I rubbed it down on Sunday night with salt and dried oregano so that it would be flavorful when I cooked it. I pulled the chicken out of the oven and chopped off the rear legs to serve with steamed carrots, mashed potatoes that I had speckled with carrot greens, and a gravy made from chicken broth and beer, the leftover cooking liquid from a nettle soup I had made the night before. I wrapped the rest of the bird and left it in the refrigerator.

Tuesday I carved off one of the breasts, chopped it into pieces, reheated those in a sauté pan, and served them on top of a salad of mixed greens, persimmon slices, carrots, and dried figs. Wednesday I carved the other breast away from the skeleton and added it to pasta with braised kale. Friday — I teach on Thursday nights — I made chicken pot pie with the wing meat and other scraps still on the carcass, store-bought puff pastry (even I use it when I don’t have time to make my own), peas, carrots, corn, and bacon; I served the pie with broccoli and garnished Melissa’s pot pie with a little puff pastry heart that I cut from the leftover dough. Everyone together: Awwww. (If you find yourself with leftover puff pastry dough in general, keep the scraps in the freezer and use them to make palmiers at some later date.)

We’re getting used to eating less meat now that we’re “house poor.” We’re not going vegetarian, but the kind of meat we support tends to be more expensive: We can’t afford a $12 roast chicken every night.

But a thrifty cook can use meat as an accent to add texture and flavor to a dish without using a big blob of protein as a crutch for delivering good food. Add a bit of meat at a time, and you can stretch expensive ingredients longer. That $12 chicken cost us, on average, $3 a night. And I haven’t even made stock with it yet. Some meats work better than others for this — you don’t need much ham or bacon to flavor a dish — but I think a little thought can stretch just about anything.

Around The Web

My bacon and egg risotto caused a little ripple in the food blogosphere. Check out elkit’s Flickr photo and Jen’s write-up to read about their versions. In a sort of culinary feedback loop, their versions may inspire me to make it again soon.

Tom Wark, whose wine blog Fermentations is a popular destination, has helped start a new blog named Wine Without Borders that aims to spread the word about American legislation that prevents a retailer in one state from shipping to a customer in another. Those laws give the consumer fewer choices and the retailer less opportunity to make money.

You can follow boring Twitter feeds like mine, but the 140-character recipes in cookbook’s feed are much more interesting. Here’s just one of her tasty tweets: “Jam: boil 3c berries, 2t grated ginger, 1/4c lemon juice. Blend 1pkg pectin, 1c sugar. Heat all to rolling boil. Fill clean jars & boil 15m.” I’ve done this from time to time with wine reviews, but maybe her stream will inspire me to do it more. (via Jason Kottke)

Barrel Alternatives In Today's Chronicle

Last week, one of my students asked me about a practice he had heard of where winemakers add chips to wine instead of putting it in barrel. I replied, “I’m pretty sure that the Chronicle will run a lead story about that topic next week.” How did I know? I’m the author. (My original title was “Staving Off Critics And Chipping Away At Costs,” but the silly puns didn’t make it all the way through.) Be sure to check out the photos.

Also, thanks to a tip from Jack, I submitted my first Sipping News piece about an oddly shaped wineglass. It’s not a big deal, but it was fun to do.

Epicurious Brings Rebecca Chapa On Board

One of my favorite wine teachers is Rebecca Chapa. I had her a couple of times as I studied wine, and I try to emulate her in my own teaching, especially since one of the classes I teach used to be hers.

So I was thrilled when I saw that she’s doing wine education for Epicurious. Her first topic: How to store wine, before you open it and after.

Belgian-Style Beers In America

Remember my not-very-subtle comment about a recent tasting of Russian River Brewing’s beers? Read all about them in this week’s Chronicle, where I write about American brewers who are pursuing complex Belgian-style beers.

Bacon And Egg Risotto

photo by Melissa Schneider

Two years ago, Melissa and I attended “The Second Most Momentous Meeting of Food Bloggers EVER.” We had dinner with the Amateur Gourmet himself, Adam Roberts. You can read the details on his blog, and that dinner makes a cameo in his book.

Two dishes stood out among the many we tried at New York’s Craft restaurant: crunchy, sweet caramel corn and creamy, rich bacon and egg risotto. Melissa told me to take note and make them at home.

But for whatever reason, neither found their way to my stove. Craft even sent us a Christmas card with the caramel corn recipe, and I have yet to make it. But that risotto popped into our heads this weekend, and I gave it a go last night.

Risotto is a snap to make — you can read my technique on SFist — but I thought over this version as I looked at Adam’s picture. How should I incorporate the bacon? How would I get an intact egg yolk onto the rice?

The bacon was easy: I cooked four chopped slices in the bottom of a pot and used the rendered fat to sautée one cup of carnaroli rice. After that, I followed my normal technique, moistening the rice with white wine and broth and finishing the dish with half-and-half and a pat of butter. The chunks of bacon softened without breaking down as they cooked with the rice.

The Egg

For the golden garnish, I decided to separate the yolk and poach it on its own, without the protective sheath of egg whites that I normally rely on to keep the egg together. As the risotto cooked, I filled a large saucepan with water and brought it to poaching temperature: to the point when visible puffs of steam escape from the pot but well before it boils. I chose a large saucepan so that the egg yolk would have time to cook on its way down. I worried about it breaking as it hit bottom.

I didn’t bother swirling the water or adding vinegar as I normally do for poached eggs. These techniques help the ghost-like billow of egg whites condense into a pretty envelope around the yolk. No egg whites? No need for tricks to make them look nice.

I held my breath as I dropped my two egg yolks, each from its own bowl, into the water. The yolks morphed into spheres and settled onto the bottom of the pot without breaking. I let out my breath.

Then I realized I had a problem. I cook poached eggs based on sight. When the whites look a certain way, the egg’s ready to come out. Oops.

In the end, I just took a guess about when to scoop out the yolks. I gently slid a slotted spoon into the water and under the yolk, slowly lifting it out. The yellow sphere flattened into a golden dome as buoyancy no longer held out against gravity, at first making me think that the entire yolk was about to whoosh through the slots. I wiggled the spoon to dislodge any water, and tipped the yolk onto a waiting bowl of piping hot risotto.

At the table, Melissa and I touched our forks to the yolks and watched them break open, sending yellow-orange liquid all through the bowl. She mixed hers in; I let mine pool and flow over the rice. It was a hearty, rich dish, but we each slurped down our portions. (I saved a little for mini risotto cakes.)

Maybe I should make that caramel corn soon.

The Rice And Beans Cycle

It’s been a while since I’ve had to think about a tight cooking budget. Five years ago, my company shut down and I hadn’t yet been hired by another one. I saved up money as I saw the gleaming axe hanging over my old company, but I didn’t know how long my savings would need to last (only two months in the collapsed economy of the time, it turned out). As the family cook, I spent my days figuring out ways to cut culinary costs.

I had whole systems that I called “cycles,” though “waterfalls” might be a better term. I wouldn’t just pop leftovers into a microwave; I’d use them as ingredients for new dishes. A chicken cycle might start with a roast chicken. I’d shred the meat we didn’t eat and put it in pasta or in a pot pie. Then the bones would become stock. I’d use the stock for risotto. If we had leftover risotto, I’d shape it into cakes and pan fry those. And on and on.

Last week, I tried to step back into that mindset. What better place to start, I thought, then the dish we’ll come to know and love so well: rice and beans. Boo hoo for us, right? Don’t worry: the beans were from Rancho Gordo and the rice was from Massa. We’re not so impoverished that I can’t afford good ingredients.

The Dishes
On Tuesday, I cooked the rice and beans separately and combined a portion of each for dinner, adding in rehydrated dried cherry tomatoes to make a single, colorful dish but keeping the leftovers separate. When I tried this cycle before, I spent a long time picking beans out of the rice; I’ll pass on that task, thank you.

The next night I made rice cakes. I’ve perfected this dish with risotto, where the starch that leaches into the cooking liquid glues the grains together. With less starchy rice, I had to find an alternate method. I puréed about a cup of leftover rice with 1/3 cup half-and-half — breaking up the whole grains and releasing the starch within — and shaped the mix into patties. (If you use a cookie cutter to shape them, you can pack in the rice and it will stick better.) I left them in the refrigerator for two hours and then fried them in a stick of butter, flipping them to crisp each side. To go with these healthy snacks, I tossed mixed greens with a red wine vinaigrette and added chopped dried figs and a poached egg. Never underestimate the value of a poached egg in a salad.

On the third day, I transformed the leftover beans into a cold salad by adding feta, red onion, and lime juice.

If I were all the way back in my cheap eating game, I’d have saved the bean cooking liquid and the hot water I used to rehydrate the tomatoes. Both are flavorful broths that I could add to braising liquid or a pan sauce. But the rice and bean cycle was a good step back into that old life. With leftovers like this, who needs new food?

Mr. Manners On Dinner Parties

Many of you know that I’m a devoted listener of the Grammar Girl podcast. In today’s episode, she mentioned that Mr. Manners, one of the other podcasts in the same network, recently talked about dinner parties. There are transcripts for part 1 and part 2 if you don’t want to download the mp3s.

His points mirror ones I made in my SFist piece about hosting dinner parties, but he also covers polite ways to invite guests and get rid of ones that won’t leave. Some of his food suggestions wouldn’t fly in our house — I don’t put cheese on the appetizer platter and Melissa prefers to serve French press coffee — but his two posts have good, solid information.

Me at LitCrawl

Just a reminder to any Bay Areans out there: I’ll be one of the readers at Lit Crawl, this weekend in the Mission. I’ll be at the Laszlo Bar at the front of Foreign Cinema, 2526 Mission Street, somewhere between 8:00 and 8:45 pm. I’m one of a few food writers who will be there, so come out and say hi.

Tomorrow's Cooking Tricks Today

Popular Science has a fascinating slideshow of high-tech kitchen gadgets. From sous vide cooking to instant smoke flavoring, this gallery made me want to fill out my Christmas list early.

via Boing Boing Gadgets

Recent Drinks Of Note

Based on feedback from my survey — I will write about that soon — I’ve decided to change my “Weekly Wine Wrap-up” into a more irregular “Recent Drinks Of Note” with fewer items. The items left won’t all be good: If I’ve tasted a particularly unpleasant wine, I may mention it to steer you away.

As always, samples are marked with a *

Sparkling
I didn’t write tasting notes for the most memorable wine I drank in the last couple of weeks, the Roederer Brut Rosé Sparkling Wine ($25) from Anderson Valley. It’s a good sparkler, but what made this bottle so special was the setting: the empty dining room of the new house. We finally found a moment’s pause to celebrate this big, giant step we’ve taken. (But will we merge our libraries? That remains to be seen.)

White
Melissa and I had a string of corked white wines in the last couple of weeks. It got so bad that she called me on her way home one night and asked if I had put a corked wine in the refrigerator. Thankfully, that wasn’t an issue with the 2005 Les Jardins du Bouscassé “Le Jardin Philosophique” from the little-known Pacheran du Vic-Bilh Sec region in southwestern France. Too bad the name is so long that we’ll have paid the check by the time we finish ordering it in a restaurant, because this is the kind of white I like: searing acidity with a whoosh of rain-covered pavement. The “Philosophique” part of the name will hint to some that this wine was made biodynamically, a holistic attitude about growing vines that includes not only obvious agricultural cues such as phases of the moon but also more fringe beliefs such as magic potions buried in cow horns. (And speaking of our corked wines, one of them was from Clark Smith of wine technology company Vinovation, so I asked him why he doesn’t use screw caps. He answered.)

Red
Melissa and I love Vintage Berkeley. The owner, Peter, has a great palate — which is to say it lines up with mine — and he finds interesting and inexpensive bottles. The 2004 Mount St. Helena Charbono from Napa is a good, solid, food-friendly red wine: musty berries, pepper, mouthwatering acidity, and a nice body. I haven’t tried a lot of Charbono, which is the same as the all-but-extinct Savoie grape Corbeau, but it’s enjoyed a minor vogue at California wineries. I can’t remember the price, but it must have been under $15.

* I’ve been impressed by the (oops) wines. We tried their Cabernet Sauvignon with Carmenere (many “Merlot” vines in Argentina turned out to be Carmenere — oops), and it was a nice, relatively complex wine. Good blackberry aromas with just whiffs of smoke and mint expanded into a similar range of flavors. And its $12 price tag makes it affordable even to new homeowners.

* Do you remember when the Matrix II came out, and it got panned? Melissa and I went into it with such low expectations that we ended up not minding it. That’s how I felt when I found myself drinking a second glass of the Gallo Hearty Burgundy. This wine has nothing in common with real Burgundy, but it wasn’t horrible. I won’t say it was good, but there are worse wines to drink in this world.

Beer
* And you’ll see a piece from me about this in a couple of weeks, but I’m a big fan of the Russian River Brewing beers, particularly Sanctification and Temptation. These are tart beers, which some people don’t like, but if you can handle it, seek them out.

Not About Food: Rent To Own

Melissa and I have bought our first house.

It’s a simple sentence — compound subject, transitive verb and direct object — but I still have a hard time writing it. I'm not sure I fully believe it. Those of you who have heard the saga of this Berkeley house know how stressful it’s been. For the rest of you, I’ll just say that they accepted our offer three and a half months ago, we closed escrow today, and you don’t want to hear the rest.

Despite the public nature of this site, our private lives stay off of it. But a first house, particularly one in the Bay Area, requires some statement, some demarcation between there and here, then and now.

For one thing, the new house comes with a new budget that will force some changes: Forget restaurant reviews and foie gras for a while. On the other hand, I will focus on my beloved “thrift cooking,” the kind of cuisine that peasants have practiced for millennia: stretching ingredients and preserving food. I’m trying to view our new financial situation as a challenge, not a limit.

Oh, and did I mention gardening? Our house — what an odd phrase — has a yard. Throughout most of this adventure, whenever Melissa or I felt overwhelmed by the tidal wave coming at us, the other would paint a picture of our future garden. Window boxes and pots filled with herbs. Tomato plants. Legumes swirling and twirling around poles and nets. Squashes and corn. If you recommend any organic food gardening books, by the way, please let us know in the comments.

The kitchen — I’m sure you all want to know — is functional but run-down. We’re hoping to renovate in a couple of years, once our budget has returned to normal and other, graver problems have been fixed. I have been saving clippings of kitchen articles for years in anticipation of that day.

We’ll be sharing the food parts of this process with you, of course, and we welcome any advice from other housedwellers about gardening, budget eating, and kitchen thoughts. Because we can do anything we want to the house. It’s ours.

Sim McDonalds

I’ve been super busy of late, but I hope that posts will soon resume with their normal vigor. In the meantime, check out this satirical Flash game about running a McDonald’s. Go the ethical route, and you piss off upper management. Start making compromises, and you win loads of cash you can use to bribe Third World leaders.

via Play This Thing

Thomas Keller's Frozen Food. What the Puck?

Tyler of Dr. Vino just sent me an article about Thomas Keller’s empire that casually mentions his forthcoming frozen food line. Is Thomas Keller the Wolfgang Puck of the Noughties? Have I just ensured that I’ll never get a reservation again at The French Laundry? How would that be different than now?

Anyway, it doesn’t sound like we’ll see his face plastered throughout the frozen food section quite yet. So far there are just two products, and stores still need to buy them (because that will be a tough sell).

Early Trials With Gelatin Filtration

Harold McGee’s recent New York Times piece on gelatin filtration, where you clarify liquid with a molecular sieve, latched onto my imagination with a steely grip. I liked the idea of a fail-safe way to make consommes — I don’t make them often enough to be very good at the technique — and gelatin filtration suggests a world in which anything can be made into a clear, intensely flavored liquid. Besides, food science is neat.

After I drained the black water from a pot of cooked beans, I decided to give the technique a try. I dissolved a sheet of gelatin in the hot liquid, froze it, and thawed the block in the refrigerator the next day.

Actually, I tried to thaw it. I had added too much gelatin, I think, and I got not one drop of consomme.

A few days later, I made rabbit broth. I looked at the sloshy soup, gray from my lazy scum-skimming but still liquid in the refrigerator, and nominated it for my next experiment. I placed the frozen, quart-sized cube onto a tamis lined with cheesecloth, and then I put that assembly over a bowl in the refrigerator.

Then I waited. And waited. Though the article suggests 24 to 48 hours of thaw time, my stock had barely dripped a drop by then. I turned my refrigerator down a notch and waited some more. Six days later, I had a dirty, ugly ice block on top, and rabbit consomme on the bottom. (Midway through the process,I brought what I did have to a boil to sterilize it.)

How was it? The gold broth was the clearest consomme I’ve ever made. It may be the clearest one I’ve ever seen, though the chicken consomme at 2nd Avenue Deli in New York City came close. I could have reduced the result a bit for more flavor — my stocks tend to start out watery — but it made a delicious lake for ravioli, sautéed carrots, and minced carrot greens.

So I’m convinced. I’ve got some interesting liquid in the freezer that I’m going to thaw soon: This time, I kept the gelatin proportions consistent with the recipe in the article. I hope it won’t take six days to melt.

Egg + Olives = Eggola

“I’d like an eggola martini, dirty.”
Photo by Melissa Schneider

Last December, Melissa and I went to a holiday party/potluck at Jack and Joanne’s house. Among many great dishes, two struck my “reproduce at home” nerve: the bacon toffee that captivated the crowd, and the pickled eggs that cookiecrumb brought. As our teeth and lips slurped off pieces of succulent, earthy eggs — the result of a 3-day soak in Kalamata olive brine — Melissa and I thought of the large jar of home-cured olives in our refrigerator. As soon as we emptied that jar, we thought, we would salvage the brine.

There was only one problem: I made a lot of olives. We ate the last one only two weeks ago. But we hadn’t forgotten about cookiecrumb’s eggs. Indeed, every few weeks, Melissa would ask me how many olives were left, by which she really meant, when could we make the eggs? We fidgeted in anticipation as I prepared the brine for the eggs, straining it through cheesecloth to get rid of the vegetal debris that fennel, garlic, and olives had left in the orange-brown liquid.

There’s no real recipe here. Make hard-cooked eggs by whichever technique you prefer. (Mine, lifted from Cook’s Illustrated: Put eggs in pot and cover with an inch of water. Bring just to a boil. Remove from heat and cover. Let sit for 10 minutes. Ice bath the eggs.) Plop the cooked and peeled eggs into the olive brine and leave the jar in the refrigerator for a few days. (Forgot to make olives last year? No problem: Just follow cookiecrumb's lead and use the brine from a can of olives.) The salt toughens the whites, so you might want to snatch the eggs from their hot water a little earlier.

My eggs — Melissa dubbed them “eggolas” — lacked the deep flavor of cookiecrumb’s, but they combined a delicate green-olive taste with rich egginess and a snack-food saltiness. Top half a pickled egg with a dollop of homemade rabbit rillettes, however, and you’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven. (Given the fat-to-volume ratio of each bite, you just might.) We only lacked a glass of zingy Bandol Blanc to wash it down.

I made a second batch of eggs, but now I’m thinking of other uses for the salty, flavorful liquid. I've added a couple of mozzarella balls to see what happens, I could brine meat in it (once), and I might add acid to make a quick-pickle liquid. I just have to decide which route to go.

Mark Morford On The Baconator Ads

In Mark Morford’s latest opinion column for the San Francisco Chronicle, he rants about the new Wendy’s ads — and our culture of gluttony — in his typical stream-of-consciousness style. I guess everyone’s writing about food today, even if they’re not writing for a food section.

Paul Levy Opts Out Of Bad-Boy Writing

In Slate today, Paul Levy articulates the ennui that I feel about macho food writing, which is either derivative of or popularized by Anthony Bourdain. Everyone has to swear and shock. Neither of these are really problems, but do it all the time and you become tiresome. Is anyone shocked by a Bourdain tirade anymore? Good writers use any trick with care so that it doesn’t lose its effect.

Or maybe I’m just yelling “Get off the damn lawn!” to the neighborhood kids. What do you think about the “shock treatment” of modern male food writers?

Me In Public

Shuna’s post about her California appearances reminded me to mention that I, too, will be reading during the Lit Crawl event of Litquake. Come out to the Mission and say hi. We haven’t decided which of my pieces I’ll read, but there are a few options.

And if you’re a member of the Oakland Rotary club, or if you know someone who is, you can come and hear my lunchtime talk on wine manipulation and technology on October 4.

Sour Death Balls

My friend Joe sent around a link to this charming short film from 1993 of people eating Sour Death Balls. What do you look like when you eat one of these tart candies? Find out by watching other people’s expressions.

Batali's Blog

Some of you may recall Mario Batali’s June article about food bloggers. It caused quite a stir in our thriving community, even though he really vented about one non-fact that he wanted to clarify, changing a potentially interesting article into a portrait of misinformation.

But Regina at Gastropoda posted a note that Batali has started to blog at Serious Eats. I’m tempted to launch “snarky vituperatives from behind the smoky curtain of the web,” which is what his article suggested we all do, but I guess if he’s a food blogger now, he can do that himself. I’m sure he’ll show us veterans how it’s done, assuming he can sustain his blog for long enough.

(Note: Sorry for those who clicked on the earlier link only to find that it was an old, old blog. It just goes to show that when you snark about someone else’s misinformation, you always end up making a mistake yourself.)

The River Cottage Meat Book

In some ways, this is one of the easiest reviews I’ve done: If you cook meat, buy The River Cottage Meat Book. Author Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall engages and entertains the reader with solid information about meat cookery, sustainable farming, and kitchen economy, all written with an oh-so-British wit and charm. My goodness, he even has pictures of meat slaughterhouses. Try finding those in other meat cookbooks.

I would stop there, save for the tiny phrase included in the marketing materials that the publishers sent me. Though this book came out in the United Kingdom 3 years ago, this edition has been, according to the leaflet, “tailored for American cooks.”

Here’s where I get twitchy. The editors at Ten Speed Press worked hard on this effort. They didn’t only drop extra u’s and adjust the recipes; they changed some of the original text.

Just not enough. Or maybe too much.

I first noticed a problem when I read Fearnley-Whittingstall’s text on rabbits. I’ve been working on a rabbit piece for a while, so my eyebrow arched when I read his advice to only buy wild rabbit from your butcher. Have fun doing that here in America, where USDA laws prevent anyone from selling wild animals: Our meat inspectors want to see the animal pre-mortem, not post. (As an aside, not all farmed rabbits are raised in conditions akin to an industrial chicken farm, as he implies.)

Want a guide to American beef cuts? No problem. Want to know the best turkey breeds to buy as an American shopper? Good luck.

I wrote the publisher and the editors referred me to the copious endnotes that, in some cases, give the correct American information. Some of the main text has been changed, but some of the new information has been placed in the endnotes. They preface the section with a note that they balanced the need to give Americans good information while retaining Fearnley-Whittingstall’s charming prose. I think I would have preferred all the new information in endnotes, and I would want the endnotes divided up and put at the ends of the chapters, rather than tucked at the back where you have to hunt them down. As it stands, the book has some relevant information where the reader expects to find it, but it also has a lot buried near the index.

I’ll return to this book over and over again, both for its prose and its recipes, but I’ll look elsewhere when I want to know my options at the store.

This book was sent to me as a review copy.

OWF Survey: Just A Few More Days!

I’ll pull the OWF 5-Year Anniversary Reader Survey on Friday night, Pacific time. If you haven’t filled it out yet, please take a moment to do so; you’ll help me make OWF a better site for all of you.

Whence High Alcohol

Clark Smith, the head of Vinovation, has an Appellation America article about high alcohol levels in California wine. He looks at the complex array of factors that have led us to a world where every California wine has more than 14% alcohol. I see he’s listed as Appellation America’s technology columnist; it’s nice to see someone who knows all the ins and outs of wine technology across the state giving them content.

Weekly Wine Wrap-Up

Photo by Melissa Schneider

Call this a two-week weekly wine wrap-up: I never got up last week’s. Samples are marked with an *.

* 2004 McWilliams Hanwood Estate Merlot, Southeastern Australia - ~$9

One-dimensional jammy fruit and a raisiny character make for a decent but not memorable wine. Light tannins and a refreshing acidity make it food friendly, but there are better wines for the price.

* N/V Cameron Hughes “Lot 25” Sparkling Wine, Carneros, California - $20

I pictured green apples served with shortbread when I tasted this light sparkler, but another taster at the table said it had a bitter finish and a grapefruit flavor. I paired this wine with the appetizer platter I served at a dinner party.

2003 Josef Ehmoser “Hohenberg” Grüner Veltliner, Donauland, Austria - (bought on clearance)

You can taste the blistering heat of the 2003 vintage in this wine: more stone fruit and dried apricot flavors than normal, lower acidity, and a heavy, creamy weight. In the end, that was a good match for the Meyer lemon papparedelle, zucchini, and squash blossoms I served, but it’s odd to taste a flabby Grüner Veltliner.

2001 Bürgerspital Zum HL. Geist Würzburger Stein “Hagemann” Riesling Spätlese Trocken, Franken, Germany - (price forgotten)

I bought this wine for its packaging: Franken wines come in a unique, round-bellied bottle called a Bocksbeutel, which translates to “goat scrotum.” Once that topic exhausts itself, you’ll find a rush of older Riesling character in the wine itself: petrol and pine and wax, oh my. This bottle also had a bit of the nutty character that comes with oxidation. The wine isn’t very complex, but it went well with roasted pork belly.

* 2006 Groth Sauvignon Blanc, Napa, California - $19

One of my favorite California Sauvignon Blancs, this wine combines the grassiness and green apple flavors of Old World Sauvignon Blancs with the heavier weight and hints of butter aromas more typical of the New World. The short finish gives a flare of heat, perhaps from the 14.5% alcohol. Drink it with shellfish and other types of light seafood.

2004 Domaine Germain Pére et Fils, Burgundy, France - (gift?)

Pretty flowers and spices dominate this aromatic wine, and I couldn’t get over the idea that it smelled like Pez candy. Lovely mineral flavors wash the palate, and a bit of cheese rounds out the medium-long finish.

* 2003 Bridlewood Syrah, Santa Ynez, California - $40

I didn't like cough syrup as a kid, and I don’t like it as an adult. So I wasn’t fond of this rich, berry-flavored wine and its scorching hot finish, but I was happy to find some of the smoke and meat aromas so often lacking in California Syrah. Oddly, I also found green notes: California growers ripen these grapes almost to raisins, so maybe it came from the oak.

N/V Saison Dupont - $9/750 ml

One of Belgium’s best and most approachable beers, Saison Dupont offers a whiff of vanilla, a burst of flowery hops, and a wave of tingly citrus. The creamy beer tastes a bit like lemon juice, with a little hoppy bitterness and a pleasant maltiness at the end. Drink with just about anything: This beer has enough weight and flavor to stand up to all but the most overpowering dishes.

2005 Adegas D'Altamira “Seleccion” Albariño, Rias Baixas, Spain - $20

Transport yourself to Spain’s Atlantic coast with this refreshing and simple wine. The green apples and minerality will fit right in with a tapas meal or a light dinner.

* 2006 Gascon Malbec, Mendoza, Argentina - $10

This well-balanced wine will seduce anyone who loves meaty, earthy wine. Bacon, thyme, mushrooms and a squirt of vanilla round out the taste, and searing acidity mixed with mild tannins make this a food-friendly drink. Pair it with roasts and rich pasta sauces.

Bonny Doon Tasting

Peter at Vintage Berkeley sent me an email to tell me that Randall Grahm, owner of Bonny Doon, was stopping by the store to pour some of his new wines. He’s converting the whole winery to a biodynamic operation, and I wanted to taste the results. (Also, I had spoken with him by phone three days earlier on a separate topic, and I wanted to give him a face for my name.)

In the end, we bought three of the Ca' del Solo bottles: the weighty and rich Albariño, the floral and crisp Moscato Giallo, and the earthy and intense Sangiovese. I’ve long been a fan of Randall’s attitudes, but I can’t recall his earlier versions of these wines. At any rate, the new batch is delicious. But the star of the day was the 1990 Old Telegraph that Randall brought as “something special.” Seventeen years haven’t dented this all-Mourvedre wine, which still has lively fruit and mellow tannins.

Chicken Feet Make Me Dance For Joy

Photo by Melissa Schneider

When I saw that Marin Sun Farms had chickens with the feet attached, I plunged into their farmers’ market stand to buy one. Imagine how delighted I was when I got home and discovered the head as well.

But I don’t know quite what to do with it. I could toss it in the stockpot along with the gelatin-rich feet that caught my eye, but there must be some more creative use. Pim suggested Chinese five-spice soup, but I thought I’d ask if anyone out there in OWF land has other ideas.

UCB Wine Studies: Fundamentals I Outline

I haven’t mentioned my upcoming UCB Extension wine class in a while, but today I made the final course outline. It seemed like a good time to remind any Bay Areans about the class, which starts on October 11 and gives an overview of the wines of California and Europe via lectures and lots of tasting. By the end of the class, students will be able to talk about a world of wines with confidence and aplomb. In a funny twist, this class got me hooked on wine five and a half years ago, so I’m looking forward to it. You can imagine my despair at only having eight weeks to cover the sprawling map of European wine regions — I’ve taught an entire six-week course on Eastern European wines, after all — but the short timeframe should focus me.

1. The Loire and Bordeaux


2. Champagne and Chablis


3. Spain and Portugal


4. Burgundy and Beaujolais


5. Italy (with a splash of Slovenia and Croatia, perhaps)


6. Alsace, Germany and Austria


7. The Rhône and Provence (with a splash of Savoie)


8. California

Sign up early; sign up often. Can’t make it? Fill out the OWF 5-year-anniversary Reader Survey to console yourself.

Superflavored Liquids

Please take a moment to fill out the OWF 5-Year Anniversary Reader Survey.

Harold McGee's latest New York Times article teaches the reader how to do gelatin filtration at home. I hadn’t heard the term until I saw the article, though the technique seems to be all over the avant-garde cooking scene. It’s a way to create high-flavor consommes without the finicky and time-consuming stovetop clarification. You add a little gelatin to the liquid, freeze it, and then thaw it in the refrigerator. The gelatin becomes a molecular sieve, and the melting water washes small flavor compounds through the net while the gelatin traps fat and other impurities. There’s even a recipe for brown butter consomme to get you started. You can do it with a wide range of liquids, and you don’t need any equipment besides a refrigerator and a freezer. I’ll be trying this as soon as I get a moment.

This Weekend's Dinner Party

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

Only 2 percent of you have sounded off in the OWF 5-year Anniversary Reader Survey, but common threads have already begun to appear. One says, in short, “Don’t you ever cook anymore?”

I do, and I’ll renew my efforts to get more cooking posts onto this site. There’s no time like the present: We had our friends meriko and Russell over for a casual meal I threw together after the farmers’ market.

I sliced Fatted Calf Umbrian salumi and Charentais melon for a small appetizer plate, which I finished with salt-roasted pistachios and the last of our homemade olives. I always like to have snacks on the table when guests arrive — not to mention a glass of sparkling wine — and I liked the slight riff on the classic ham and melon pairing.

I had ideas about the appetizer platter before we got to the market, but I hadn’t put any thought into an opening course until I saw Phoenix Pastificio’s Meyer lemon pappardelle, wide noodles with a bit of tang from the mixed-in citrus zest. I bought zucchini and big, floppy, orange squash blossoms, and I mandolined the squash into thin planks that mimicked the noodles. I tossed the zucchini strips with salt and left them to drain before lightly sautéeing them with small onion dice and adding them to the pasta with the raw blossoms. A glass of Austrian Grüner Veltliner, relatively low in acid thanks to 2003’s soaring temperatures, washed down the light opener.

Everyone forgot about the pasta, however, when the roasted pork belly came to the table. A while ago, I purchased a share of pig meat that included two sides of belly, and I cured one in salt and herbs for a day before roasting it as described in The River Cottage Meat Book: 425° for 30 minutes and 350° for one hour. I cranked up the heat at the end to transform the scored skin into hard, brittle, crunchy bits of crackling that I could use as garnish for the layers of fat and meat on the plate. Slivers of pears roasted in canola oil and rosemary complemented the pork, and Massa rice with chiffonaded watercress added a semblance of nutrition to what is at heart a big chunk of bacon. The fatty pork and sweet pears in this dish demand a German Riesling, and far be it from me to argue with my food. I served a trocken spätlese Riesling from Germany’s Franken region.

Elise’s pretty plum galette inspired my peach and basil version, a casual dessert that allows a rustic — don’t call it sloppy — crust. Peach with basil is one of my favorite “surprise” pairings to present to guests, but meriko uses it as much as I do, so she wasn’t startled by its appearance. I topped each slice with a scoop of homemade vanilla ice cream. I hadn’t chosen a dessert wine, but meriko brought us Jepson’s Viognier Mistrel as a host present, and I knew the peaches-and-cream grape would pair well with our peaches-and-cream dessert.

Photo by Melissa Schneider.