Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 038

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29 August 2016

Authentic food news

  1. Huge admiration to Becky Lawton at the British Library, for using the Great British Bake Off to share some delightful medieval observations on bakers and baking.
  2. A long and thoughtful piece at Civil Eats, on whether selling necessarily means selling out. Can the qualities that drive small-scale suppliers survive a takeover?
  3. The same question applies to iceberg lettuce, whether you love it, loathe it or can take it or leave it. I wonder, would the opprobrium heaped on iceberg’s crunchy head be applied if it were grown closer to home?
  4. The Movement to Define Native American Cuisine. Just the one? This isn’t going to end well.
  5. I’m resurrecting this one – Chemistry of Cast Iron Seasoning: A Science-Based How-To – because it remains important and useful, especially because I seem to be increasingly aware of cast iron around the internet.
Podcasts

Small-scale spirits Microshiners are big in craft distilling

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:32 — 24.1MB)

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microshiner-cover

I confess, I had no idea there was even such a thing as a craft distillery. Craft breweries certainly, and thankfully, because most mass-produced beer is just not all that good, at least to me. But I’ve never had a problem with mass-produced spirits, probably because I don’t drink them that much. Experts will tell you, however, that they suffer all the same drawbacks as beer: boring, standardised, uninteresting and the same wherever you go. And once I’d started to investigate – and taste – I was forced to agree. Craft spirits are really interesting, and in this episode I’ve taken only the smallest sip.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about craft distilleries is how fast they’re spreading, at least where they’re allowed. British Columbia has gone from 5 to 50 in about three years. The USA now has more than 1000 registered small distilleries, almost a third of which are so-called “seed to sip” farm distillery operations. The British Isles too have seen a mushrooming of small distilleries. This episode is just a taste of things to come.

Notes

So many people to thank:

  1. Cobey Williamson and Microshiner.
  2. Bill Owens of the American Distilling Institute.
  3. Jim Walter at Whiskey Acres.
  4. Tom Hills at East London Liquor Company.
  5. Kate at Off the Eaten Track in Vancouver.
  6. Gordon Glanz, founder and head distiller at Odd Society Spirits. I wonder if he’d be allowed to make Gordon’s gin?
  7. Also, though they didn’t appear directly in this episode, [1] Craig Harris at Yaletown Distilling Company, Don O’Driscoll at The Liberty Distillery and Mark Reynier of Waterford Distillery in Ireland.
  8. Banner photograph thanks to The Liberty Distillery, other images by me, music stolen from George Jones and Mark Knopffler.

microshiner-still

  1. Which is by way of a hint that there’s bound to be a follow-up; there’s so much more to say.  ↩

Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 037

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15 August 2016

Authentic food news

  1. Hot on the heels of my confession two weeks ago that “I may have to rethink” non-coeliac gluten sensitivity, I am re-rethinking. Again. The scientist who originally described non-coeliac gluten sensitivity did another study, and found “absolutely no specific response to gluten”. So, what’s to blame? FODMAPs! (Fermentable Oligo-Di-Monosaccharides and Polyols) For a laugh, I went to fodmapfree.com, and blow me down if it wasn’t already a thing.
  2. I tell you what else is often not real: Key lime pie. Not even in the Keys: “It’s not easy to find real Key limes. Most of what you find around here are not indigenous limes. Those were wiped out by a hurricane in 1926.” Epicurious went in search of the real thing.
  3. Manga is a thing, so is food. But food manga? “[A] young chef at a contemporary high-end hotel wakes up on a battlefield during Japan’s civil war in the 15th century. … His cooking is so powerful that he is able to lure enemy combatants off the battlefield with the smell of grilled meat.” Unreal.
  4. Ready for a real gusher? Taste Australia’s Weirdest Produce in Attica’s Mysterious Garden.
  5. The thoroughly modern (post-Pasteur) version of the Reinheitsgebot permits yeast in addition to malted grains, hops, water in real German beer. But I don’t think it says anything about which yeast, which is good news for Belgian beer yeast boffins.
  6. Really unreal bonus: Hampton Creek just can’t help themselves. They paid people to ask stores to stock their pea-protein stabilised emulsion and buy large quantities. Now they claim it was for “quality control” and nothing to do with artificially inflating sales. Oh, and the animation in Bloomberg’s report is the stuff of nightmares.
Podcasts

A visit to Elkstone Farm in Colorado How do you grow food when the growing season is less than three months long?

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:19 — 20.0MB)

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cover It’s all very well trying to eat local in a place like Rome or San Francisco, where the climate is relatively benign all year round and you can grow a great deal of produce without too much difficulty. But what do you do when you are at an altitude of more than 2000 metres with a growing season that is usually less than three months long? You do what you can, which in the case of Elkstone Farm, near Steamboat Springs in Colorado, means building four greenhouses, one of which is capable of ripening figs, citrus and even, occasionally, bananas. But it isn’t all greenhouses. Outdoors there’s a tangle of many different kinds of annual and perennial crops, which during the short growing season provide an abundance of fruits and vegetables.

What came as a surprise to me was that the area used to be famous for its produce, and not just of beef cattle. Strawberries were an important early export, pioneered by a farmer called Lester Remington, who grew a variety called Remington (of which I can find no trace). Remington apparently produced huge berries, which were shipped by rail as far as New York City. A short-lived boom, started in 1900, was bust by 1916, the victim of a couple of years of late frosts and rising wages for strawberry pickers. Other exports included lettuces – shipped to California, no less – and potatoes, all laid low by costs of labour and of transport.

Elkstone Farm is one of the places trying to revive local growing. I was lucky enough to visit this summer, and was shown around by Alex Berger.

hoophouses

hoophouse

algerian mandarin

Notes

  1. Elkstone Farm has a website, natch.
  2. That strange herb Alex mentioned is shiso, also known as Perilla. An acquired taste that, once planted, is hard to lose.
  3. The banner photograph is of figs in the greenhouse, and below that, Meyer lemons ripening too. The other photos show the three hoophouses, the inside of one of them, growing tomatoes, peppers and other goodies and, back in the big greenhouse, Algerian mandarins ripening.
Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 036

  0

1 August 2016

Authentic food news

I confess, I’ve displayed some skepticism towards people who are gluten sensitive but do not have one of the coeliac inflammatory disorders. I may have to rethink. There’s a bunch of new science being published, which I want to take a proper look at. In the meantime, here is some slightly lighter reading.

  1. Barbara Elisi Caracciolo is an Italian woman living and baking – and exploring alternative wheat varieties – in Stockholm. She’s profiled in two recent pieces, Jeremy Shapiro’s interview on his website and an interview in Bread Magazine, which has a link to her full article in the magazine.
  2. Still on bread, and the “mystery” of natural leavens, there’s a fine new website from Rob Dunn’s lab at the University of North Carolina. I’ve signed up to send a sample of my starters for analysis, and will keep an eye on progress.
  3. The Mediterranean Diet continues to keep people exercised. Is it even a thing? Or just a marketing tool? Xaq Frohlich examines how the story played out in Spain.
  4. If the Mediterranean Diet does exist, and if you’re a fan or practising adherent (rather than someone who happens to live and eat near the Mediterranean coast) this may come as a shock: Most Of Us Are Blissfully Ignorant About How Much Rancid Olive Oil We Use. If it isn’t actually bad for you, who cares?
  5. I quite enjoyed Tom Nealon’s irreverent romp through the history of almonds. He doesn’t talk about how price influences the number of almonds in any given package of, say, trail mix, but he did remind me to plug my episode on the price of pecans. It’s firm, as ag markets say.
  6. The big treat of the past couple of weeks was the arrival of June from Peter Hertzmann, a set of 12 thoughtful essays prompted by his time as writer-in-residence – and part-time chef – at the Edinburgh Food Studio. Kudos to EFS for having such a thing, and to Peter for discharging at least the writing part of his duties so ably. I can’t speak for his cheffing.