Perhaps you saw an article in a recent BBC News magazine about how US craft beer is inspiring British brewers. The Americans say they’re not bound by tradition, with the clear implication that the Brits are. And yet it was insipid American beers — like making love in a canoe, we used to say — that triggered the rise of microbreweries and craft beers. Now very hoppy beers with all kinds of flavours are big there, and increasingly big in the UK, and one result has been a resurgence of interest in British-bred hops. One of these, OZ97a, is being hailed as a new star of British brewing, not least by Mark Dredge, an award-winning beer writer. I read about OZ97a at Pencil and Spoon, Mark’s blog. Of course I had to talk to him.

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The thing about OZ97a is that it isn’t a new variety. It was bred in the late 1940s or early 1950s, but when brewers first got a whiff of it, in 1960, they rejected it out of hand. Way too tasty, with all that fruitiness. Not what beer-drinkers want. But with the rise of intensely flavourful US beers, by 2012 OZ97a was ripe for a renaissance, and a couple of test batches confirmed it as a great hop. So how had it survived? In a field genebank, run by the British Hop Association.

It is quite common to hear that genebanks should be maintained as a source of breeding material to adapt to changing conditions. But this is the first time I’ve heard of the changing tastes of consumers being the conditions that need adapting to.

Notes

1. Mark Dredge’s book Craft Beer World will be available at the end of April 2013.
2. The Food Programme has reported on hops and on the rise of US craft beers
3. Another genebank beer in the news is about to be launched. It was brewed from Chevalier, a century-old barley in the John Innes Centre’s genebank, re-evaluated because it is resistant to Fusarium wilt.
4. Photo of a hop flower by Ronald Bunnik.
5. Music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.

Engage

The world of fine chocolate has seen some major change in the past few years, much of it focused on the rise of so-called “bean to bar” chocolate made by smallish producers with an eye on the distinctive qualities of different cacao beans. One company that’s been making a name for itself is Original Beans, which markets a package that tells “The story of cacao in four bars” that recently won a silver medal for packaging at the Academy of Chocolate awards in London. Last summer, I was lucky enough to sit down with Sudi Pigott, a consultant to Original Beans, and taste a couple of them.

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I came away from the interview with half a bar of one we didn’t taste, the Piura Porcelana. Typing the ID code into the Original Beans website took me lickety split to a page all about that chocolate. It’s an intriguing story, the Porcelana variety being characterised by beans that are a lot lighter in colour than most cacao. Porcelana, of which there are said to be 33 genetically different types, was apparently rediscovered by Original Beans in 2007, since when the company has been working with local farmers and NGOs to boost production. But there are some niggles too. It’s strange, for example, to be told:

The Piura Porcelana’s origin is located on the foothills of a mountain range reaching above 2000 meters, called the Sierra Piura. The area is part of the xxx biodiversity hotspot, with bears etc. . Much of the original forest has been cut down over the past decades, resulting in changing weather and water supply. Now it is being replanted and restored.

xxx biodiversity hotspot? Bears etc? Is somebody still doing fact-checking and research for the copy?

Original Beans is good chocolate, no doubt about that, although there’s also been a bit of a to-do in the rarefied world of chocosnobs about who exactly makes Original Beans’ chocolate. The packaging says Made in Switzerland, although the company is headquartered in Amsterdam. CEO and founder Phillip Kauffmann is quite open about it being made by Felchlin, at least when asked, but that information is not widely available. Is that a problem? Not to me. There are people who make chocolate, and people who make things from chocolate, and they’re often not the same people. Apparently at the fine end of the “beans to bar” world that matters. Original Beans does everything except make the bars; I think that’s acceptable.

Is the price equally acceptable? I don’t know; what should good chocolate cost? Fair prices for farmers, men and women alike, no child labour, environmental sustainability, conservation, all that … what’s it worth?

I’m not the first to ask the question What Is The True Cost of Chocolate? of Original Beans, and the answers given then, in 2009, certainly have a lot of feelgood about them. In truth, though, I don’t think we’re any nearer an answer, and we won’t be until we have independent audits and much more transparency than most businesses could survive. There’s a real dilemma here. Original Beans and many other topnotch chocolate makers can charge what they do in large part because they are making smaller batches. They’re competing with one another, not with the industrial giants. Industrial chocolate really is a rather ghastly business in all sorts of ways, and yet I don’t see the vast majority of its customers switching to more ethical products, and if they did, I don’t see the ethics surviving the onslaught.

Notes

1. Original Beans’ local partner in Peru made a video about Piura Porcelana.
2. Here’s another video, of Original Beans’ Phillip Kauffmann talking about Cru Virunga.
3. Most of the world’s chocolate is now grown in Africa, away from the pests and diseases of its home in Latin America. Here’s a long article about its first home in Africa, São Tomé and Príncipe.
4. Oxfam has been running a campaign to persuade industrial chocolate to do better; it may be starting to bite.
5. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.
6. Final music by Cécile Kayirebwa. No idea which track; it just started playing when I reached her site, and for once I am glad for autoplay.

Engage

Among the more miraculous edible transformations is the one that turns raw meat, salt and a few basic spices into some of the most delicious foods around.

Time was when curing meat, especially stuffed into a casing to make a sausage, was the only way both to use every part of an animal and to help make it last longer than raw meat. Done right, a sausage would stay good to the next slaughtering season and beyond.

The process relied on the skill of the sausage-maker, the help of beneficial bacteria and moulds, the right conditions, a great deal of patience, and sometimes luck. Luck is less of a factor now, because to keep up with demand the vast majority of cured meats are produced in artificial conditions of controlled precision. Here and there, though, the old ways survive. Jan Davison spent months touring the sausage high-spots of Europe looking for the genuine article, and shared some of her favourites at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking last year.

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The Sausages

Mortadella di Camaiore, from the Triglia family in Camaiore, Italy.

Corallina di Norcia, from I Fratelli Ansuini (The Pig Brothers? Surely not.) in Norcia, Italy.

Finocchiona di Suino Grigio, from Sergio Falaschi in San Miniato, Italy. I think the Suino Grigio is a cross between the Large White and the fabled Cinta Senese, which almost did for the latter.

Salchichón de Vic from Casa Riera Ordeix, in Vic, Spain.

The chorizo Jan mentioned in the interview we did not taste. She sent her notes:

Lomo iberico bellota – Señorio de Montana, Spain. Along with ham, lomo, cured loin of pork is the highest expression of the curer’s art; especially when it is made from Spain’s indigenous black pig, the Iberico, fattened on bellota – acorns. The loin, left as a single roll of meat almost a metre in length,  is seasoned almost imperceptibly with pimentón, (a spicy type of paprika), sea salt, fresh garlic and oregano, before being stuffed into a gut and left to cure slowly over several months. Lomo Ibérico bellota is a cured sausage is to be savoured … slowly; the lomo melts in the mouth releasing complex, nutty flavours.

Ahle Wurscht, from Thomas Koch in Calden, Germany. There’s a video of Ahle Wurscht being made, which I had subtitled, but WordPress does not yet permit embedding videos from Universal Subtitles, so you’ll have to just click the link. That video is not from Thomas Koch, although he does have some videos on his site.

Notes

1. Jan Davison is writing a book on English Sausages for The English Kitchen series at Prospect Books. All being well it will be published in 2014.
2. Food safety agencies have been very wary about meat cured in restaurants and at home, sometimes with justification. But there really is nothing to be scared of if you take reasonable precautions. A great place to start is at Michael Ruhlman’s blog, and one of his excellent books. I haven’t done so myself, but everyone says Ruhlman is the boss.
3. I am completely indebted to Ellen Pilsworth for translating the German video. Thanks Ellie.
4. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.
5. Final music by The Bavarian Oompah Boys.

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Peat diggers in Ireland and elsewhere have occasionally unearthed objects, usually made of wood, that contained some kind of greasy, fatty material with a “distinctive, pungent and slightly offensive smell”.

Butter. Centuries-old butter.

Who buried it, and why, remain mysteries that motivated Ben Reade, an experimental chef at the Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen, to make some himself. He brought some of his modern-day bog butter, still nestled in moss and wrapped in its birch-bark barrel, to share with the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery last year.

Notes

1. Ben mentioned two plants that have been found around bog butter, hypnum moss (Hypnum cupressiforme) and bog cotton (Eriophorum angustifolium).
2. The Nordic Food Lab research blog details all of their astonishing edible experiments.
3. I found Seamus Heaney reading his poem Bogland at The Internet Poetry Archive.
4. Caroline Earwood (1997) Bog Butter: A Two Thousand Year History, The Journal of Irish Archaeology, 8: 25-42 is available at JStor, which has a new scheme allowing you to read up to three items at a time online for free.
5. Music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.

Engage