Fair trade? Direct trade? Shade grown? Here’s what it all means, and which of it is nonsense. (Spoiler: a lot of it is nonsense.)
Our Guide to Buying Ethical Coffee – Modern Farmer
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A Day In The Life Of Alan Benton, America’s Unofficial King Of Bacon
When food is made with love, you can taste it. So it goes with Benton’s Country Ham, a North Madisonville, Tennessee-based business that produces what many call the best bacon in the country.
via A Day In The Life Of Alan Benton, America’s Unofficial King Of Bacon.
The Miracle of Preserves – The New York Times
For as long as I can remember, I have had an unfathomably strong affection for pickles and potted meats and jellies and jams. I was thrown into the preserving pond early. I sat as a toddler, I am told, several summers running, in the cool shade of a tidy old trailer in Canaan, Me., playing with snails as the mobile home’s fleshy mistress, Louise, taught my mother to select cucumbers and beets and pole beans from a dense trailer-side garden — packing them into heavy glass jars and then gently heating them in a worn tin pot.
I don’t think I ever tasted any of Louise’s many preserves. (‘‘Oh, they were terrible!’’ my mother tells me. ‘‘Horribly sweet.’’) The omission might help account for my obdurately romantic view of what the British writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall refers to as the ‘‘extended family we call by the rather austere name preserves.’’ All preserves strike me as good. They reach me at such childish, religious depths that I have wondered if, even before Louise’s trailer and my rapturous secondhand consumption of jarred delicacies in books, some supernatural pickle pot or jelly didn’t offer me a miraculous taste of itself in a dream.
If cultivating soil was what let humans settle, it was harnessing bacterial cultures that let us unmoor.
I have felt lucky, as a grown person, to discover that this thing I loved in innocent abstraction had real importance. Salting and drying meat and fish helped human beings to last through long winters, sea voyages and treacherous overland trails. If cultivating soil was what let us settle, it was harnessing bacterial cultures and sugar, salt, acid, fat, sun and wind to paralyze microorganisms and save food from decay that let us unmoor, discovering all the world that was not visible from our cabbage patches. Basque cider allowed seamen to cross oceans. Dutch pickled herring fueled the exploration of the New World. Vikings spread cod in the riggings of their ships to dry and stiffen in the cold wind, then traded on it as they battled through Scandinavia, the Mediterranean and Central Asia. Cheese was first a way of preserving milk; wine, of grape juice; sauerkraut, of cabbage; prosciutto, of pork. In this sense, all preserved things are additionally miraculous, in that they all are also ways of storing other things: part vessel, part content
19 Things You Should Never Do In A Kitchen
Sometimes common sense is not so common
The kitchen, a wondrous place full of delicious possibilities, can also be a dangerous one. There are hot surfaces and sharp objects all around, and things can get ugly if one is not careful — from something as benign as a ruined meal to more serious outcomes like severe burns.
Folks, there are do’s and don’t’s when it comes to proper kitchen etiquette. We found the best reddit thread on the subject that has input from industry chefs and home cooks alike. (Who better to weigh in on the subject than those who are learning from their mistakes?) We fact-checked each brilliant piece of advice listed below, credited to the reddit user who wrote it.
Without further ado, here are things you should never do in the kitchen:
Seven Lobster-Buying Tips | Lucky Peach
In “Lucky Peach #13: Holiday,” Peter Meehan wrote about his annual Christmas party—where, among many other things, he makes the lobster rolls from Jasper White’s book Lobster at Home. The front matter of the book, about how to shop for and kill lobsters, is succinct, spot-on, and very useful! We’ve published his rules for purchasing live lobsters below. (And after finishing that, you can check out his recipe for lobster rolls here.)
The Science of Dry-Aging | Lucky Peach
A little something from Harold Mcgee, one of the foremost food scientists out there…
This feature comes from “Lucky Peach #2: The Sweet Spot.” Pick up a subscription here.
Proteins, carbohydrates, and fats are the building blocks of living things, but they don’t have much flavor in their natural state. They are bland to begin with. That’s why we cook them, why we season them, why we transform them—to make them more appealing to us.
But sometimes we can get our food to make itself more delicious, by treating it in a way that creates favorable conditions for the enzymes that are already in the food to work together in a certain fashion.
Enzymes are molecules that exist in foods—and in microbes intimately involved with food—that can transform those basic, bland building blocks. They’re nano-cooks—the true molecular cooks. Dry-aging, ripening, and fermentation are all processes that take advantage of enzymes to make foods delicious before cooking.
Most meat, by contrast, is prepared for the market very quickly. The animal is slaughtered, the various parts of the muscle system are separated and packaged, and then they’re distributed. That’s about it.
Dry-aging beef means that once the animal is slaughtered and butchered, portions of the carcass are allowed to rest in very carefully controlled conditions (cool temperatures with relatively high humidity) for a period of time—often several weeks, and sometimes up to a couple of months.
A Philosophy of Herbs – The New York Times
There are two ways of seeing herbs in error. In my gastronomic memory, the blunt and mostly bald symbol of the first way is the altruistic Signore Giocondo Cavaliere, of the village Amalfi, region Campania, population 5,428 (or so). On a blue May day, three other naïve Americans and I invited him, along with Gennaro, the chauffeur; Giulio, who ran the fish market; Nino, who staked the peas; and an assortment of others to lunch in the white stucco villa we were borrowing.
Things went well through the crisp toasts with oiled acciughe, blistered friggitello peppers from the garden. But when handed a bowl of spaghetti with peas, pancetta, pecorino and mint, Signore Cavaliere allowed a look of mild distress to nest on his damp brow. He twirled a few polite noodles around his fork in silence until, after several minutes, the rattled man had to unburden himself.
‘‘I understand,’’ he whispered directly into my ear, in slow and serious Italian, ‘‘that in America you cook … experimentally.’’ He paused. Our eyes met for a critical moment.
‘‘But here’’ — he waved to include the table, the loquat trees shadowing the high balcony, the citrus air, the deep sea — ‘‘we do not cook in such a modern way.’’
I admitted to him in honesty that I didn’t understand what he was talking about.
‘‘Mint!’’ he almost shouted at me. ‘‘Mint! Can’t be served with pasta!’’ I felt horrible for him, watching him redden. ‘‘Mint is for fish!’’ And his wet head fell into his hands.
From the Farmers’ Market to the Freezer – The New York Times
When the Manhattan chef Marc Meyer opened Rosie’s in the East Village in April, reports focused on the Mexican restaurant’s upscale tortilla-making station in the middle of the dining room.
But the more interesting feature may be the one hidden in the basement — a walk-in freezer left behind by the building’s previous tenants.
“The minute I saw it, I thought, ‘I’ve got to be taking advantage of this,’ ” said Mr. Meyer, who over the next few months plans to fill it with seasonal fruits, tomatoes and tomatillos, all bought from local farmers at their lowest price and at their sun-ripened prime.
While dedicated home cooks buzz over pickling, canning and curing projects, Mr. Meyer has joined a growing number of chefs who are quietly employing another time-tested method of preservation: the freezer.
Other techniques rely on sugar, brine or bacteria to conserve foods, said the chef Paul T. Verica of Heritage Food & Drink in Waxhaw, N.C., but freezing doesn’t change the way things taste.
via From the Farmers’ Market to the Freezer – The New York Times.
Greek villagers’ secret weapon: Growing their own food – Business Insider
Ilias Mathes has protection against bank closures, capital controls and the slashing of his pension: 10 goats, some hens and a vegetable patch.
If Greece’s financial crisis deepens, as many believe it must, he can feed his children and grandchildren with the bounty of the land in this proud village high in the mountains of the Arcadia Peloponnese.
“I have my lettuce, my onions, I have my hens, my birds, I will manage,” he said, even though he can no longer access his full pension payment because of government controls imposed six days ago. “We will manage for a period of time, I don’t know, two months, maybe three months, because I also want to give to our relatives. If they are suffering, I cannot leave them like this, isn’t that so?”
The production of food and milk gives villagers in many parts of Greece a small measure of confidence — and a valuable buffer. But that doesn’t mean the financial cut-off doesn’t cause headaches. Some in Karitaina have to pay 40 euros in taxi fares to get to and from the nearest banks just to withdraw 60 euros, the maximum daily amount for those with bank cards.
The bus to Megalopoli, the town with the bank, was shut down — a victim of austerity. Many of those who used to drive are now too unwell to do so. The majority who live here are retirees, shrouding the town in eerie quiet broken only by the constant birdsong and the sporadic shouting of people arguing about the financial crisis at a vine-shaded café in the town square.
via Greek villagers’ secret weapon: Growing their own food – Business Insider.
’12 Things You Can Do With An Egg’ Video Is Truly Inspiring
Food hacks are always an egg-cellent way to start off your day. And thanks to a new video called “12 Things You Can Do With An Egg,” you can add a few more egg hacks to your culinary wisdom.
Chock full of yolk porn, this beautifully shot piece was created for the web series “Food, People, Places.” The tutorial features everything from Scotch eggs and Spanish tortillas to egg-infused whisky sours. There’s enough egg-spiration for you to get crackin’ on your next meal or drink in no time.
For even more egg hacks, check out this article for the best way to store them, and try some of these brilliant kitchen tricks to take your eggs to the next level.
via ’12 Things You Can Do With An Egg’ Video Is Truly Inspiring.
