Tag Archives: sustainable

How To Make Chocolate | Lucky Peach

It’s easy to forget that chocolate is a fruit. It’s born on a tree and undergoes several steps that transform the bitter, astringent seed into the rich, flavorful bars that we know.

Let’s take a little time to ponder the botanical story of chocolate and retrace the journey from its tropical origin. The cacao tree (officially, Theobroma cacao; theobroma translates as “food of the gods”), was classified in 1753 by Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus. The most recent genetic research points to the upper Amazon rainforests of South America—near present-day Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru—as its origin. It grows only within a narrow latitudinal band, between 20˚N and 20˚S of the equator. From its origins in South and Central America, cacao cultivation now spans the circumference of the globe within its tropical range. West African countries, namely Ghana and the Ivory Coast, currently provide about 70 percent of the world’s cocoa supply.

The cacao tree is fairly small, commercially bred to grow roughly 9 to 12 feet high. Like grape vines, cacao must often reach six to seven years maturity before producing a full yield of fruit. Its fruit, the cacao pod, develops from flowers that blossom directly from the trunk and thicker branches of the tree, reaching maturity in five to six months (thus sometimes allowing for two harvests per year). Each individual bean is comprised of an outer shell, the germ, and the nib. Conveniently, one pod’s worth of beans produces a 100-gram bar of chocolate.

via How To Make Chocolate | Lucky Peach.

 

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.

 

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When You’re Eating Chilean Sea Bass, You’re Actually Eating Patagonian Toothfish

 

Have you ever heard of Patagonian toothfish? Well, chances are, you’ve eaten it — only when you ate it, it was called Chilean Seabass.

Yes, that’s right, Chilean Seabass is just a more “friendly” name for the Patagonian toothfish. The name under which it’s marketed was changed in 1977 by fisherman Lee Lantz , to make it sound more appetizing to the American market. Although the fish isn’t always caught in Chilean waters, and a toothfish isn’t technically even a bass, the term Chilean Seabass had “broad resonance among American seafood eaters.”

While the name change has certainly helped the Patagonian toothfish become more popular (there was a major Chilean Seabass boom in the ’90s), it has also led to overfishing of the species. Without strict government regulation, sustainability hasn’t been a top priority and many fishermen have been fishing in areas where they shouldn’t be. Had this fish not been renamed to make it more marketable, would the demand have been as high and led to overfishing? Probably not.

It may seem odd that a fish’s name was changed to make it sound better, however it is actually more common than you may think. Monkfish was originally called Goosefish, Sea Urchin used to be called Whore’s Eggs and Orange Roughy was Slimehead.

via When You’re Eating Chilean Sea Bass, You’re Actually Eating Patagonian Toothfish.

The Magic of Mushrooms | Lucky Peach

Even for people who don’t enjoy eating mushrooms, there is still intrigue in learning how they grow. There’s something mystical and magical—I mean I do get a lot of people asking about “magic” mushrooms but I always comment that I think all mushrooms are magical.

I really like being able to watch a culture start from a little piece of tissue. From one tiny piece you’re able to grow thousands and thousands of pounds of food. We start our cultures in petri dishes. To create that culture you can take a piece of a mushroom—you can take any mushroom out of a grocery store and put that into a petri dish—and it will grow an exact replica of the original mushroom.

Once I establish the culture on the petri dish, I put it into a test tube. The test tube is my master culture that I put into a refrigerator, and I can keep that for five to ten years. You want to keep track of each of your generations and how far you’ve separated it from the initial spawn; mushrooms, unlike plants, break down and cause genetic mutations really quickly if you don’t keep track. All of our bags are labeled.

We grow our mushrooms first in grain. I use barley or millet. We soak the grain in water then sterilize it in a pressure cooker for about four hours. After that it we cool it down and put it in front of hyperfilters that blow sterile air out at us so we can open up all the bags of grain without fear of things (i.e. competing fungi or bugs) flying into them. Then we take the mycelium—the fungal network of the mushroom from the petri dish—and add them to the sterile grain. That goes out on the shelves to grow. How long depends on the species; oysters usually take about two weeks on grain. Then from there, we break the mycelium back up into grain and put it into our next substrate, which is a sawdust mixture. That’s what will eventually produce mushrooms.

We set up fifty-pound barrels with stacks of forty sawdust bags each, and then steam-pasteurize them. We’re lucky to live in an area where there’s lots of wood substrate, so it’s easy to get cheap sawdust. We take the sawdust and mix it together with barley and oat flour, and that gives it the carbohydrates and sugars to make the mycelium happy. If we just put it in sawdust, it wouldn’t work—maybe it would produce one or two mushrooms. We go through three or four yards of sawdust every other week, and to see that sawdust turned into food for people, that’s really rewarding for us.

We have a regular greenhouse that we’ve tarped so we can control the sunlight and the heat. A lot of people think mushrooms need to grow in complete darkness, but that really isn’t true: they like a little bit of light. We just open up the bags in here and give them high humidity. They like 80 to 90 percent humidity. As long as they don’t get too hot, usually we can grow year-round. When the mushrooms are grown, we’ll do one long slice down the middle of the bag—then after a while, when the bag ages to about a month or so, we’ll do a second slice, just to try to get as much out of it as we can.

Every mushroom is different. Oysters usually take about four weeks from start to finish; shiitakes are about forty-five to sixty days. This is why the prices are different with mushrooms, generally; some take longer than others to grow. Maitake takes up to seventy days to get mushrooms, so that’s why they’re $18 a pound in the grocery store.

Ria Kaelin, Christian’s wife and partner in the business offers a concluding thought.

We so traditionally think of growing food as you put a seed in the dirt and nurture it and it will give you something. Whereas with this, you go, How does that even work? Almost like we’re not connected to that microbiological world. We are! But we don’t sometimes stop to see it.

via The Magic of Mushrooms | Lucky Peach.

Where to Find the Best Celery in the World | Lucky Peach

I was first clued in to the funny relationship some chefs have with celery a decade or so ago, when I worked for a summer at Chanterelle, the long-running and now-departed restaurant of David Waltuck. While there was certainly celery in the kitchen, Waltuck banished it from his stocks and braises—it was an outcast, an unacceptable aromatic. In The French Laundry Cookbook, Thomas Keller notes that he doesn’t use celery in stocks either, citing its bitterness. And Jacques Pepin has talked about being clonked over his jeune tete with a head of celery during his apprenticeship. (Or was that George Orwell while he was down and out in Paris and London?)

Either way, I think these guys may just have never met the right celery—that, of course, being the bleached celery of Lancaster County, PA. Unlike the stringent, vegetal stuff you find wilting in crisper drawers across America, Lancaster celery is feathery, delicate, and pale yellow—so sweet, so nutty, so tender that common celery pales in comparison. It is shorter and smaller than supermarket celery, and more or less string-free.

via Where to Find the Best Celery in the World | Lucky Peach.

I Think I Cran | Lucky Peach

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Jessika Tantisook of Starvation Alley Farms knows the image everyone has of cranberry farming. “Yes,” she laughs, when I ask about the Ocean Spray ads featuring guys in waders submerged to their chests, surrounded by floating berries. “It’s just like that.” For a few weeks each year, anyway.

In 2010, Tantisook and her partner, Jared Oakes, moved to Washington to take over ten acres of cranberry bogs from Oakes’s parents. They decided to turn it into the state’s first organic cranberry farm—despite all expert advice to the contrary.

Five years in, the farm is now certified organic. They produce their own raw, unsweetened cranberry juice, which has found devoted customers among health-seekers, craft-cocktail connoisseurs, and farmers’ market shoppers alike. And the pair is working with neighboring farms to help them make the same transition to organic. Tantisook estimates there are fewer than twelve organic cranberry farms in the country, totaling three hundred acres—compared with about forty thousand acres of cranberries grown nationally.

via I Think I Cran | Lucky Peach.

This Video Explains How So Much Food Gets Wasted In America

There’s a certain school of thought about sustainability that argues that the worst problem in the food system today is waste. The idea is that we expend a tremendous amount of resources — water, gasoline, fertilizer, pesticides, labor — growing food that never actually feeds anyone. Food waste advocates also argue that the world’s farms already produce enough food to end hunger for good, if only the food that’s currently thrown out could make it to the dinner plates of those in need.

The most obvious source of food waste is in the home. Who, after all, hasn’t had the experience of buying five or six bags of groceries at the supermarket, only to end up throwing out a good portion when it spoils before you have a chance to eat it?

via This Video Explains How So Much Food Gets Wasted In America.

What Is Quinoa? A Breakdown For Those Of Us Who Eat It But Don’t Truly Understand It

QUINOA

Second only to maybe kale, quinoa is the health food star of our time. The Food and Agriculture Organization named 2013 the International Year of Quinoa, after all. This tiny grain-like food is full of good-for-you nutrition and tastes great in just about anything: salads, omelettes and even cakes.

We’re willing to bet you’ve eaten a good deal of the stuff, but do you know what it really is? It’s okay if you don’t, because not many of us do. Today’s the day we change that with a few fun facts and photos that tell us about where quinoa comes from.

Here are 8 important things everyone should know about quinoa:

via What Is Quinoa? A Breakdown For Those Of Us Who Eat It But Don’t Truly Understand It.

 

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All in the Family Tomato | Lucky Peach

THE BEGINNING

My father is a farmer, and my Northern California childhood was spent being spoiled on the wonderful produce that he grew. (Even now, he’ll bring me boxes of blood oranges and avocados whenever he visits.) In the past, he’s worked with prestigious Napa wineries like Frog’s Leap, Fetzer, and Kendall-Jackson, and he’s gardened for Steve Jobs. He is also responsible for creating many beautiful and delicious tomatoes, and has a habit of naming them after things close to his heart. Like Burning Spear, named after the reggae legend. Or Marz Round Green, named after my half-brother. And Niya Belle, named after my half-sister. For most of my childhood, however, there was not a tomato named after me—a fact I liked to constantly remind him. “Where’s my tomato?” I asked him constantly. “Dad, when will I get my own tomato?”

Five years ago, my questions were answered: Dad presented me with “Jesse’s tomato,” a medium-sized—which made sense, since I’m the middle child—red paste tomato that tasted amazing. I needed to know about my tomato—its lineage, its family history—and I had no idea how all these tomatoes that my dad had bred had come to be. Tomatoes could be “promiscuous,” my father explained: they could mate with other tomato varieties to create new, Franken-baby tomatoes. Mine was a question that, at some point, all kids ask their parents: Where do babies come from?

via All in the Family Tomato | Lucky Peach.

The Jolly (Micro) Green Giant | Lucky Peach

It’s a sunny day at Windfall Farms in upstate New York, and Morse Pitts, the owner, is trying to explain to me one of the many reasons his microgreens cost so damn much: anywhere from sixteen to sixty-four dollars for a quarter pound, which barely enough to fill a bowl. But he tells me that’s still far from breaking even.

First off: every shoot sold comes from a single seed. A sunflower shoot takes up to three weeks to mature. New seeds are planted twice a week for the duration of winter—which, this past year, lasted four and a half months. To keep their stand at the Union Square Greenmarket sticked they had to plant over 750 pounds of sunflower seeds (at $185 per 50-pound bag)—and that’s one of the dozen-plus microgreens they sell. They also grow micro mesclun, mustard, pea greens, sunflower shoots, amaranth, buckwheat, Hong Vit radish, arugula, and an assortment of edible flowers. The flavor of these greens is intense (also, they’re cute), and they’re considered the gold standard by many New York chefs. But the real reason Pitts grows them is so that his dozen or so workers have something to do in the slow months.

via The Jolly (Micro) Green Giant | Lucky Peach.

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