Hix is a big fan of the seasoning.
Source: Watch Chef Mark Hix Express His Undying Love for Salt – Eater
Watch Chef Mark Hix Express His Undying Love for Salt – Eater
Leave a reply
Tag Archives: taste
The Guide to the Chilies of Mexico | Lucky Peach
From ancho to pasilla, and everything in between.
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.
https://youtu.be/kGDLfF1mpu4
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 homeâs fleshy mistress, Louise, taught my mother to select cucumbers and beets and pole beans from a dense trailer-Âside garden â packing them into heavy glass jars and then gently heating them in a worn tin pot.
I donât think I ever tasted any of Louiseâs many preserves. (ââOh, they were terrible!ââ my mother tells me. ââHorribly sweet.ââ) The omission might help account for my obdurately romantic view of what the British writer Hugh Fearnley-ÂWhittingstall refers to as the ââextended family we call by the rather austere name preserves.ââ All preserves strike me as good. They reach me at such childish, religious depths that I have wondered if, even before Louiseâs trailer and my rapturous secondhand consumption of jarred delicacies in books, some supernatural pickle pot or jelly didnât 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
Seven Lobster-Buying Tips | Lucky Peach
In âLucky Peach #13: Holiday,â Peter Meehan wrote about his annual Christmas partyâwhere, among many other things, he makes the lobster rolls from Jasper Whiteâs 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! Weâve published his rules for purchasing live lobsters below. (And after finishing that, you can check out his recipe for lobster rolls here.)
How To Make Chocolate | Lucky Peach
Itâs easy to forget that chocolate is a fruit. Itâs born on a tree and undergoes several steps that transform the bitter, astringent seed into the rich, flavorful bars that we know.
Letâs 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 âfood of the godsâ), was classified in 1753 by Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus. The most recent genetic research points to the upper Amazon rainforests of South Americaânear present-day Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peruâas its origin. It grows only within a narrow latitudinal band, between 20ËN and 20ËS 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 worldâs 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 podâs worth of beans produces a 100-gram bar of chocolate.
via How To Make Chocolate | Lucky Peach.
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 âLucky Peach #2: The Sweet Spot.â Pick up a subscription here.
Proteins, carbohydrates, and fats are the building blocks of living things, but they donât have much flavor in their natural state. They are bland to begin with. Thatâs why we cook them, why we season them, why we transform themâto 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 foodsâand in microbes intimately involved with foodâthat can transform those basic, bland building blocks. Theyâre nano-cooksâthe 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 theyâre distributed. Thatâs 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 timeâoften 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 naĂŻve 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.
ââI understand,ââ he whispered directly into my ear, in slow and serious Italian, ââthat in America you cook … experimentally.ââ He paused. Our eyes met for a critical moment.
ââBut hereââ â he waved to include the table, the loquat trees shadowing the high balcony, the citrus air, the deep sea â ââwe do not cook in such a modern way.ââ
I admitted to him in honesty that I didnât understand what he was talking about.
ââMint!ââ he almost shouted at me. ââMint! Canât be served with pasta!ââ I felt horrible for him, watching him redden. ââMint is for fish!ââ And his wet head fell into his hands.
This is Where Your Salt Comes From – YouTube
A great piece on how some American entrepreneurs are making some pretty amazing salt right here.
This is Where Your Salt Comes From – YouTube.
https://youtu.be/um7QcI8-XiM
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.
