Extra Matter

Millet matters

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If you heard July’s episode *Back to the future for the wheat of tomorrow*, you’ll remember that farmers in Italy are experimenting with evolutionary populations to select new varieties of wheat that are more adaptable to climate change. But it isn’t just wheat. Matteo Pettiti, my guide to evolutionary breeding then, recently reported on farmers further north who are adopting the same approach to pearl millet(*Pennisetum glaucum*) — a cereal even hardier than wheat. (([Drought-proofing crops in Italy: is millet the grain of the future? – Matteo Petitti – CCAFS MSc Research Blog](http://www.plantagbiosciences.org/people/matteo-petitti/2017/08/27/drought-proof-crops-in-italy-is-millet-the-grain-of-the-future/))) Italy has just been through one of the worst droughts on record, but Matteo says the millet did just fine:

> Despite the drought, all plants grew, and [on] 29th July, the same plants were flowering, whilst stunted maize plants were wilting in the surrounding fields.

Extra Matter

Breeding tomorrow’s heirlooms

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Interesting article in Modern Farmer, on Why We Need to Revitalize Organic Seed Farming. They rounded up the usual suspects, who offer the expected explanations, none of which detracts from the importance of what some breeders are doing.

“The heirloom boom of the nineties helped people see the value of preserving seed, but they don’t understand that it can get even better,” says Selman. “Public plant breeders are creating varieties that are more resilient and more appropriate for the future.”

Lane Selman was on the show last November, talking about her work with the Culinary Breeding Network.

Podcasts

1000 days of noodle soup Ken Albala shares his obsession and some of its lessons

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:30 — 20.1MB)

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In 2014, food historian and professor Ken Albala found himself stuck in a kitchen with no utensils. He headed for an Asian grocery store and bought a little saucepan and some noodles, to make something for breakfast. Thus started almost three years of home-made noodle soup for breakfast, practically every day. Out of that came some spectacular successes, some abysmal failures and a book.

Of course, I had to put pulled noodles to the test. Ken says to use a high-gluten flour. I checked scads of sources online, and many of them say the exact opposite. Some insist that in your kneading you have to go beyond building up a strong gluten net and actually break that network down. But none of them suggest allowing the dough six hours of rest and relaxation, as Ken does. Ken’s method, at least in his video, is a little too vague to follow exactly, as he insisted I must. When to start kneading? How often to dip your hands in water while kneading? Nevertheless, I did the best I could and was somewhat amazed that it worked. It really did. And the noodles were delicious.

Being the kind of person I am, I made some measurements too: 275 gm of flour weighed 395 gm when I started to knead, for a hydration of 44%. That’s stiff. And it weighed more or less the same after kneading, but maybe the water added equalled the starch removed. I do wonder whether you would reach the same end point by adding the water all in one go at the outset.

Notes

  1. The book – Noodle Soup: Recipes, Techniques, Obsession – is available for pre-order from Amazon.
  2. In the meantime, you can always search Ken’s website for “noodles”.
  3. Pocket soup, which Wikipedia calls Portable soup, was an early convenience food. I was surprised to find a recipe for a modern version. I haven’t tried it, but I do like instant miso soup.
  4. Cover picture is of Ken’s Hand Made Hybrid Noodles for Newbies.
  5. Banner picture is a video grab of me, amazed that I pulled a noodle.
  6. And those Lucky Peach links? Here you go.
    1. Homemade Ramen Noodles, but beware: as I discovered while hunting, there’s an error: “Apologies to Harold McGee and to all of you who tried to make alkaline noodles with 4 tablespoons of baked soda. Please only use 4 teaspoons. Damnit.” SI units FTW, dahling.
    2. Momofuku Ando and the Invention of Instant Ramen
    3. A Timeline of Ramen Development
    4. On Alkalinity
    5. The State of Ramen: Peter Meehan
    6. A Guide to the Regional Ramen of Japan

The Internet Archive is a truly valuable and important resource. I donate to it. If ever you find yourself in need of a copy of something online that has vanished, that’s where to start looking.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 061

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4 September 2017

  1. Although it seems like it has been around forever, Chez Panisse opened only 46 years ago. Alice Waters reminisces.
  2. And speaking of restaurants and white supremacy, here’s Rachel Laudan on Tunde Way on whiteness …
  3. … and Civil Eats on Detroit and restaurants and blackness.
  4. How soon before some fancy white restaurant appropriates choi jhal?
  5. Matteo Petitti (remember him?) reports on millet as a response to future droughts in Italy. And yes, you can make millet pasta, if you must.
  6. Which brings us to: Italian pasta labels test limits of EU law. There’s a lot more to this than meets the eye, and Politico does a good job of making it visible.
  7. That’s an example of what Michaela DeSoucey calls gastronationalism. Self-promotion: listen to her talking about foie gras
Podcasts

Pushing good coffee Beyond merely fair in search of ethical trade

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:18 — 24.0MB)

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

Walking down the supermarket aisle in search of coffee, I have this warm inner glow. If I choose a pack that boasts the Fair Trade logo, or that of any other third-party certifying agency, I’ll be doing good just by paying a little more for something that I am going to buy anyway. The extra I pay will find its way to the poor farmers who grow the coffee, and together enlightened coffee drinkers can make their lives better. But it seems I’m at least somewhat mistaken. Certified coffee is certainly better than nothing, but it isn’t doing as much good as I fondly imagine. And the price premium I pay could be doing a lot more.

In this episode I hear about coffee that’s more ethical than fair, and about some of the ways in which Fair Trade falls short.

Notes

  1. The Acteal massacre that prompted Chris Treter to get into coffee is a horrific story that continues to reverberate. Matt Earley, a friend and colleague of Chris, wrote about the struggle for peaceful existence through coffee.
  2. Chris and Matt also feature in a documentary film, Connected by Coffee.
  3. More about Higher Grounds coffee, including the latest news from Congo.
  4. Cooperative Coffees also shares some interesting stories on its website.
  5. A couple of cool additional listens: Episode 4 of Alexis Madrigal’s series on Containers is all about The Hidden Side of Coffee. And the podcast Start-Up recently told the story of probably the world’s most expensive coffee, at $16 a cup.
  6. It’s easy to fall into despair faced with details of how the foods we enjoy are produced, which almost inevitably involve the kind of power imbalance that makes exploitation and maltreatment not only possible but, apparently, inevitable, not only far away in former colonies but much closer to home. In Europe and in America, producers and consumers are thinking about third-party certification for local growers. What more could be done?
  7. Banner and cover photos of coffee cherries in Colombia by Neil Palmer (CIAT).

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