Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:30 — 15.5MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More

Carol Deppe was a guest here a few months ago, talking about how most people misunderstand the potato, which is about as nutritious a vegetable as you could hope for. I found out about that because I was checking out her new book, The Resilient Gardener, which offers all kinds of advice for making the most of home-grown food. In that, Carol talks about having bred a delicata squash with a taste like a medjool date. That sounded intriguing, but in a way not all that surprising. If anyone could breed a squash – or pumpkin – that tasted like a date, it would be Carol Deppe. Her earlier book, Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, is a wonderful, informative and accessible book about the science of plant genetics. It is, in fact, better than all the text books I’ve ever read on the subject. Which is not surprising, as that’s what Deppe set out to write.

The whole business of squashes seems fraught with difficulty. First off, what do you call them: zucchini, pumpkins, courgettes, summer squash, winter squash? Is there any difference (in England) between a baby marrow and a courgette, or between an overgrown zucchini and a marrow? ((Questions to which I returned in 2016: When is a zucchini not a zucchini?)) And calling them by their Latin names doesn’t really help, because the same species can be used in different ways, and it is the usage that tends to determine what they’re called.

The idea of drying a summer squash for use through the winter is very appealing, and Carol says that costata romanesco, and old Italian heritage variety, is one of the few varieties suitable for treating in this way. Looking at pictures, it does seem to be very similar to the variety I see on the market here, so I’m determined now to see whether I can persuade my local vegetable seller to bring me an overgrown zucchini – a zuchone, or just a zucca? He’ll probably think I’m mad, when everybody else wants them as tiny as possible.

Notes

1. The Resilient Gardener is published by Chelsea Green Publishing.
2. A keen amateur breeder called Rebsie Fairholm was doing wonderful things breeding a purple-podded mange-tout pea, inspired and informed by Carol Deppe’s work. Alas, she seems to have stopped for now, although you can still read about her efforts on her website.
3. Banner photo by McBeth.
4. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.
5. Outro music, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn, is Tonight, tonight by the Smashing Pumpkins. Sometimes obvious is good.

Italy, land of fabled wines, has seen an astonishing craft beer renaissance. Or perhaps naissance would be more accurate, as Italy has never had that great a reputation for beers. Starting in the early 1990s, with Teo Musso at Le Baladin, there are now more than 500 craft breweries in operation up and down the peninsula. Specialist beer shops are popping up like mushrooms all over Rome, and probably elsewhere, and even our local supermarket carries quite a range of unusual beers. Among them four absolutely scrummy offerings from Mastri Birai Umbri – Master Brewers of Umbria. And then it turns out that my friend Dan Etherington, who blogs (mostly) at Bread, cakes and ale, knows the Head Brewer, Michele Sensidoni. A couple of emails later and there we were, ready for Michele to give us a guided tour of the brewery.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:40 — 25.6MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More

Mastri Birai Umbri is owned by the Farchioni family, which has become a powerhouse in basic agricultural products since the late 18th century. Farchioni olive oil is ubiquitous, and their flour only slightly less so, and while the quality of these products is high, they’re not the sorts of commodities I associate with a craft brewery. But I am starting to rethink the casual opposition between “industrial” and “craft” or “artisanal”. It’s true that industrial food processes are often soulless, repetitive and designed to serve only the bottom line, degrading the notion of quality about as far as it will go before people revolt. But my conversation with Michele showed me that it is possible to take an industrial approach to the production of a high-quality product. He insists on repeatability – that the brew should taste the same each batch and present the drinker with the same experience each time. That is probably the major distinction from a more artisanal or craft approach that instead of stomping out all the differences uses a different kind of skill to allow the product to vary slightly from batch to batch. The quality of Michele’s beer, however, is unimpeachable.

The other big distinction, I suppose, is quantity. When I asked him what the future might hold for craft beers in Italy, Michele thought it unlikely that 500 breweries could survive, because many are too small to compete. But why should that matter? If you’re big enough to survive at some scale, perhaps only in a local market, do you have to keep growing. This is one of those eternal business mysteries that I’ve seldom heard explained to my satisfaction. Why is perpetual growth necessary? Of course, demand may increase. But if you’re making as much as you want to and need to, and don’t want to regulate demand by increasing the price, that’s an opportunity for someone else to enter the market. You don’t have to do it yourself.

All of which is probably a bit deep for a consideration of well-made beers. In any case, I think I need to stop using “industrial” as a term of opprobrium and focus instead on the product, rather than the means of production.

Notes

1. Le Baladin is a somewhat strange enterprise, and I am not as familiar with their beers as I would like to be. Their design sense is definitely quite odd. As Dan says, “It’s kinda scrappy, cartoony, vaguely Keith Haring, vaguely hippy, like someone’s mate did it, someone who’s not a professional designer. But remember kids, don’t judge a beer by its label.”
2. No link to the Farchioni website, because it autoplays noise, and I hate that.
3. The whole pure yeast vs wild fermentation debate is fascinating. Here’s a recent account from Australia: Winemakers turn to wild fermentation.
4. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:01 — 12.2MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More

Bling, the Urban Dictionary tells me, is an onomatopoeic representation of light bouncing off a diamond. Or a Bob Kramer original hand-made chef’s knife, which goes for $2000 and up. Of course some people might be able to justify spending that kind of cash on what is, after all, one of the key tools of the trade … if your trade happens to be cooking. But my guest today, Peter Hertzmann, says he sees lots of knives, maybe not quite that expensive, hanging on the wall in people’s kitchens, unused. “Kitchen knives”, he told this year’s Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, are “the new bling”.

Peter teaches knife skills, has written extensively on the topic, and one of the things he is adamant about is that you never chop, you slice. Even if you’re pretty handy with a blade, you can probably learn a thing or two from his video Three Aspects of Knife Skills. I know I did.

Notes

1. You can actually get a set of four Bob Kramer knives, plus a steel to ruin them with, for less than $2000.
2. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.
3. Outro music by Martin Simpson. And if I ever knew, I’d forgotten that the song was written by Cat Stevens.

Most dilettante foodies I know probably regard frozen beef as an acceptable substitute only when fresh is unavailable. Sure the fresh must be grass-fed, dry-aged, properly hung and all that – but mostly it must be fresh, not frozen. However, unless your climate is wonderfully mild, that grass-fed beef is going to be eating something else over the winter, and that’s not great for the meat. Ari LeVaux, a syndicated food writer, reckons that except at the end of the growing season, when the animals have just finished feasting on lush pastures, well-frozen good beef is a far better option than fresh. When we spoke last week, I started by asking Ari why most people – foodies included – have such a poor opinion of frozen beef?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:01 — 8.3MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More

In fact, I’d say there is a general misconception about “freshness”. There was a rage for fresh pasta in England a while ago. And to me it was unfathomable. Good dried pasta is so superior to the slimy industrial stuff that it is almost another food. Sure, fresh often is good. But with foods that can be preserved in other ways, and have been, a good product properly prepared is often superior.

As for the nutritional composition of grass-fed versus conventional beef, there clearly is a difference. A mega-review by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that milk and meat from grass-fed animals has lower total fat than conventional, but the fat is higher in what might loosely be termed “good” fats, things like omega–3 fats and conjugated linoleic acid. On the other hand, the evidence for health benefits is more mixed. Some studies on animals and people have shown benefits, but they are by no means absolutely conclusive.

So on its own, better nutrition is perhaps not enough reason to seek out grass-fed beef. On the other hand, if omega–3 fats are what you really want, you can do much better eating oily fish. But hey! It can’t hurt, and eating great beef less often is a win in so many other areas.

Notes

1. The problem with fresh beef, by Ari LeVaux, prompted this podcast.
2. The Union of Concerned Scientists’ review is Greener pastures: How grass fed beef and milk contribute to healthy eating by Kate Clancy. More recent research work, for example A review of fatty acid profiles and antioxidant content in grass-fed and grain-fed beef says much the same, adding that because feedlot cattle have more total fat, in the end the difference may not be as great because the conventional-beef consumer eats more total fat.
3. I drove through the Wind River Reservation, many years ago, and it is the most beautiful place. The rise and fall of the deal between Arapaho Ranch and Whole Foods is an intriguing story that demonstrates beautifully just how complex food systems can be.
4. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.
5. Outro music is, obviously, Get along little dogies, by Marty Robbins. But for a real blast from the past, you must see Arlo Guthrie do it for the Muppets.
6. Photo from Highland Cattle World. Podcast “cover” photo (used so far without permission, but I have asked) by Esther Perez.

Engage

The Fertile Crescent, the Yangtze basin, Meso America, South America: those are the places that spring to mind as birthplaces of agriculture. Evidence is accumulating, however, to strengthen eastern North America’s case for inclusion. Among the sources of evidence, coprolites, or fossil faeces. Fossil human faeces. And among the people gathering the evidence Kris Gremillion, Professor of Anthropology at Ohio State University. She was kind enough to talk to me on the phone, and I made a silly mistake when I recorded it, so please bear with me on the less than stellar quality. I hope the content will see you through. And I’ll try not to let it happen again.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:40 — 7.3MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More

A few words about the picture; after failing to come up with anything striking, I gave in to the inevitable and searched for coprolites. The guy in the picture is Dennis Jenkins, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon. In his forceps is a piece of dried human faeces dated to 14,300 years ago. The sample is not without interest, but it is also from way across the other side of North America. Still, it is a coprolite (or at the very least palaeofaeces), and it is the best I could find. In looking for it, though, I stumbled across The Cambridgeshire Coprolite Mining Rush. Wikipedia has the bare bones of the story – coprolites rich in phosphorus were discovered outside Felixstowe in 1842 and became the basis of a boom industry to extract the phosphorus as fertilizer. The man credited with discovering the coprolite deposits was John Stevens Henslow, the Cambridge botanist who gave up his place on HMS Beagle to his young friend and protégé, Charles Darwin. The coprolites came a decade or so after the Beagle set sail, and the company that extracted the fertilizer went on to become Fisons, a glorious name in British agrochemicals. Small world, eh?

Funnily enough, another account makes no mention of Henslow, and describes the coprolites as “phosphatised clay nodules”. I’m afraid that’s all the digging I have time for; I gave up just as soon as I struck this somewhat broken motherlode, which tantalisingly says coprolites were “thought by some at the time to be fossilised dinosaur droppings”. Thought to be? No doubt there’s a lot more to know.

Notes

1. If you know me from the other place, you know that I reviewed Kristen Gremillion’s book Ancestral Appetites there, and that’s what prompted this interview.
2. You want more coprolite stuff? And not just human? You need The Dung File.
3. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.
4. End music by Douglas Blue Feather, who might just possibly be from around the Kentucky area, which is a close enough connection for me.