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Over at the Gurgling Cod, there is yet another evaluation of the Philly cheesesteak. But this isn’t the same tedious back-and-forth between Pat’s and Geno’s Steaks that you’ve heard a million times before; nor is it the zillionth attempt to codify what makes a “real” Philly cheesesteak sandwich.
Instead, it’s a comparison of the classic cheesesteak shack with a Grub Street write-up of the Degustation “take” on a cheesesteak. The upscale version features a single square of pain de mie, a thinly sliced rib-eye that’s been cooked sous vide, and (of course) a foamy raclette-ricotta emulsion.
And rather than simply teeing off on the cuteness of the NYC haute cuisine version of the workingman’s sandwich, the author takes a step back and recognizes a common pitfall for many foodies: a rabid preference for authentic as opposed to delicious.
If you have read this far, you probably avoid the Olive Garden and its ilk, but if the pursuit of the authentic, (a common small-c chowhound preoccupation), becomes an end in itself, it can come at the expense of good eating.
This may be one of the finest lines between good taste and snobbery: a willingness to get past the fact that a place looks crummy and “local,” and accept that bad food can be found anywhere. Or that good food sometimes inhabits even the most middlebrow and accessible of establishments.
Cinnabon, anybody?
UPDATE: There’s a great thread on Chowhound that meticulously deconstructs the concept of “food snob” —it also digs into the question of authenticity.
Posted
on Monday, April 30th, 2007
by James Norton in Food Media |
More like this: authenticity, cheese steak, cheesesteak, gurgling cod, media, philly, the grinder
Edible weeds are everywhere these days, the plant-world analogues to once-reviled offal. While purslane and dandelion greens are standard fare in some places, Farmer Andy of the ever-fun Ladybug Letter (now a blog as well as an email newsletter) raises the new-to-me idea of cooking with tumbleweeds, those iconic symbols of desolation. As he explains, they’re also superinvasive in their native lands:
The tumbleweed plant is a tender herb when young, and grows into a stiff round ball of stems that breaks loose from the soil when the autumn winds blow, so that the plant can roll across the landscape, spreading seeds. The following spring the old severed roots sprout new growth, and the tumbleweed’s dispersed seeds sprout in new locations.
Using these weeds as food is not a new idea, Andy says. Young tumbleweeds “are often eaten back home on the steppes, cooked like spinach.” He’s now growing a tumbleweed relative called agretti, which Italians use in salads or omelets, for A16 in San Francisco. The next step: “I’m also going to drive out to the Panoche Valley, east of Hollister, in the fall and gather the seed of some tumbleweeds.”
I’m curious to try some, but alas, there aren’t too many rolling across the plains of Brooklyn.
Posted
on Monday, April 30th, 2007
by Christy Harrison in Food Media |
More like this: edible weeds, ladybug letter, media, offal, the grinder, tumbleweeds
Chip Brantley has a problem. It’s not a bad problem—it’s the sort of problem you or I would love to have. Lucky Chip opened his front door this week to a delivery of an entire box of Meyer lemons. Now, what to do with them?
As he explains on the blog Cookthink, the box comes from kind friends in California, who picked the lemons off their tree and sent them to him in Massachusetts (we should all have kind friends in California with Meyer lemon trees). According to Chip, “it was the single coolest piece of mail we’ve ever received.”
But what to do with a box of Meyer lemons? (Again, we should all have such a problem.) Chip opens it up to readers, who sent him suggestions—everything from limoncello and lemon granité to fried lemon slices (à la the DC restaurant Palena) and an intriguing-sounding salty Meyer lemon cake.
Chip has a couple of very fragrant and fun hours in the kitchen in front of him. I’m just wondering how I can manage to get to know his California lemon friends before next year’s citrus season rolls around …
Posted
on Monday, April 30th, 2007
by Tea Austen Weaver in Food Media |
More like this: chip brantley, cookthink, limoncello, media, meyer lemons, the grinder
“So if you’ve got a wedding to go to this year and you just don’t want to do the registry thing again, why not make the bride and groom a wedding cake?” asks the host of the short how-to video Wedding Cake, a guide for the amateur wishing to craft a sugary nuptial treat. Sure, because what bride wouldn’t rather have a lumpy, homemade cake than glassware? And what guest wouldn’t enjoy hours in the kitchen shakily crafting the centerpiece for someone else’s Big Day? Remember, everyone at the wedding will be critically evaluating your work—no pressure, now!
In less than 11 minutes the video, hosted by the YouTube-like food video hosting site REALMEALS.tv, whips through baking and decorating such a cake, making it look practically as easy as whipping up a bowl of oatmeal. But if you’ve had much pastry experience at all, you know that a tossed-off instruction like “Now cut the cake layers in half evenly” leads to an eternity of sweaty, nervous work in the kitchen. This video makes cake decorating look waaaay easier than it really is. Bake a wedding cake if you must, but, um, you may want to have that registry info handy if it doesn’t work out.
In other cake news, someone sent around a link to a fun Russian baker who makes cakes in the shapes of ATMs, athletic shoes, and other interesting things. Now these would be good wedding cakes! How about one of the bride and groom in the back of a cop car?
Posted
on Monday, April 30th, 2007
by Joyce Slaton in Food Media |
More like this: bake your own wedding cake, cake, diy, gardening, media, real meals, realmeals, the grinder, wedding cake
Gastropoda, Regina Schrambling’s blog chronicling the NYC food media’s swift trip to hell in a handbasket, wouldn’t be the first place we’d look for a write-up of The Wonder Bread Cookbook: An Inventive and Unexpected Recipe Collection. Nor would we expect Berkeley’s Ten Speed Press, publisher of Charlie Trotter’s oeuvre as well as the original Moosewood Cookbook, to be down with the bubbles.
True to form, Schrambling was not amused.
I would suspect it is a joke, but it includes balls — a formula for rolling the gummy gunk into them. Funny, I always thought a recipe was for something you would eat. And a cookbook involved food.
So, why does it exist, anyone? Seems Wonder wanted to commemorate its 85th anniversary with 50 recipes proving that there’s more to the white stuff than Fluffernutters, PB&Js, and throwing wads at your little brother. Hence the subtitle, trying hard for kitsch and legitimacy in equal doses.
Unexpected, sure. But inventive? Well, that’s one word for dishes like Wonder Beef Cups and Sweetened Tomato and Wonder Casserole.
Posted
on Monday, April 30th, 2007
by Stephanie Rosenbaum in Food Media |
More like this: gastropoda, media, ten speed press, the grinder, wonder bread, wonder bread cookbook, wonder bread recipes
After a spate of high-profile restaurant openings in the past four years (kicking off with Masa and Per Se and ending with Buddakan and Del Posto), the New York food scene has definitely gotten a lot less, um, scene-y. New York Magazine food critic Adam Platt argues on Grub Street that the problem can be traced back to a few key shifts in the landscape, including rising rents and “the end of haute cuisine.” In his (the “Gobbler’s”) words,
The French model that produced the last generation of super-chefs is dead. ‘If you’re under the age of 35 and paying your own money,’ says a chef the Gobbler knows, ‘do you want to sit down at La Grenouille? I don’t think so.’
Pair those changing demographics with sky-high rents and tough liquor-licensing restrictions, and there will naturally be fewer great, artful chefs entering the mix—they’re all in Chicago, Platt says. Except the ones who are in Vegas, taking their talents where the money is.
But wait. Aren’t a lot of the big Vegas names (Colicchio, Boulud, Vongerichten) the same chefs who continue to contribute to NYC’s not-hotness, its saturation with “steak-and-potatoes” places? On the surface Platt’s arguments are all familiar, and yet the more I think about them the more confused I get. Which I suppose is why trying to label a given city’s food scene as hot or not is such a futile exercise.
Posted
on Monday, April 30th, 2007
by Christy Harrison in Food Media |
More like this: adam platt, haute cuisine, media, new york, new york magazine, rent, restaurant scenes, restaurants, Restaurants and Bars, the grinder
With all the talk these days about organic/local/humanely raised/free range food, it’s easy to get confused about what we’re supposed to be eating and where we should be getting it. Food site Culinate features an excerpt from the classic book Stalking the Wild Asparagus that offers a novel, if ancient, solution: Forage your food.
Author Euell Gibbons’ words seem as apropos now as when the book was first published in the 1960s. With thrifty eaters talking about supplementing their diet through foraging, and a strong restaurant market in foraged mushrooms and greens, discerning eaters are thinking twice about those weeds growing down the street. A new generation of foragers is getting into the act.
As Gibbons writes:
I have collected 15 species that could be used for food on a vacant lot right in Chicago. Eighteen different kinds were pointed out in the circuit of a two-acre pond near Philadelphia. The hunter or fisherman may often come home empty-handed, but the forager, although he may fail to find the particular plant he is seeking, can always load his knapsack with wholesome and palatable food. … The fields and forests can always furnish something good to eat.
Gibbons’ opinions feel particularly timely when taken in the context of the current debates on organics and local eating.
Some readers will claim that they prefer to buy their fruit and vegetables from a supermarket for reasons of sanitation and cleanliness. This is the most illogical prejudice of all. The devitalized and days-old produce usually found on your grocer’s shelves has been raised in ordinary dirt, manured with God-knows-what, and sprayed with poisons a list of which would read like a textbook on toxicology. They were harvested by workers, handled by processors and salespeople, and picked over by hordes of customers before you bought them. … Wild food is clean because it has never been dirty.
That overgrown vacant lot down the street is looking more appealing all the time.
Posted
on Friday, April 27th, 2007
by Tea Austen Weaver in Food Media |
More like this: culinate, euell gibbons, foraging, foraging food, media, stalking the wild asparagus, the grinder, wild food
Like the nation’s obesity problem, food-producing conglomerates in the United States are big and getting bigger.
In Grist, Tom Philpott explains why, even though the market for local and sustainable milk, veggies, and meat is expanding, small farmers are still having a hard time making a living. In an article titled “From Concentrate,” he tells an old story (but one that bears repeating), this time about pork giants like Tyson and Cargill:
They use their market might to squeeze prices, giving small, independent growers two options. They can get bigger, in hopes of making up in volume what they’re losing in price; or they can shut down. The result has been a nearly wholesale obliteration of small hog farms, and an explosion in the size and geographical concentration of operations.
And with that concentration comes a host of problems. More hogs in one place brings more pollution and thus a potentially more dangerous food supply.
Philpott reminds us that the free market and consumers’ desire for cheap food aren’t the only factors in the frightening consolidation of our food supply. He also implicates, like Michael Pollan, federal subsidies, as well as local and state governments turning a blind eye to corporate labor abuses and increasing environmental damage from feedlots.
Maybe we should replace the all-American mantra “Get Big or Get Out” with a new, food-friendly mantra like “Small Farms, Better Food.”
Posted
on Friday, April 27th, 2007
by Miriam Wolf in Food Media |
More like this: cargill, consolidation, farming, food supply, grist, hog farms, media, pollution, the grinder, tyson
Hold onto your pearls, all you obsessive dieters out there, because you might be packing on the ounces year after year and not even know why. According to a blurb in the May issue of Health magazine, the average woman ingests between two and four pounds of lip gloss over the course of her lifetime!
Never fear: Before you put yourself on a lip gloss diet, there is now some stuff that’s actually good for you. According to Health:
Tarte cosmetics has teamed up with supplements brand Borba to create a line of vitamin-infused glosses called Inside Out, which they say is good for your lips and complexion.
What a world we live in. First, drinking fruity cocktails is healthier than eating plain fruit, and now makeup is good for us!
Each of the three new pomegranate-scented shades from Tarte ($21) is chock-full of extracts: Acai and green tea work to clarify your skin, litchi is there for hydration, and chamomile soothes and decreases redness. (But hopefully not in your actual lips.)
Being an extreme cosmetics whore, I’m already clicking over to Sephora, because the Apple-A-Day shade might be just what the beauty doctor ordered.
Posted
on Friday, April 27th, 2007
by Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic in Food Media |
More like this: borba, chamomile, cosmetics, green tea, health magazine, lip gloss, litchi, lychee, media, sephora, tarte, the grinder
Is it summer yet? Some of us have been grilling out all winter (covered patio). But with the tangible approach of summer, others are beginning to crack open the charcoal, fill up the propane tanks, and mix up a batch of their secret homemade barbecue sauce.
But if you gotta pick just one, gas or charcoal, which will it be? The online advice ranges from the stripped-down to the expert. But just giving out advice isn’t what chews up column inches in a newspaper. We must also have manly humor articles.
The latest one appears in the Joplin, Missouri, Globe. Like other opinion-makers, Mike Pound comes down firmly on the side of charcoal, despite its drawbacks:
As those of you who have charcoal grills are aware, the whole lighting-the-fire process takes a while. That’s because most charcoal is made from substances that are impossible to burn. Some forms of charcoal are so impossible to burn that they are actually used to make children’s pajamas.
But Pound finds the wait for the charcoal to warm up meditative.
Myself? If I had a few extra dollars lying around, I’d forgo both gas and charcoal and go for one of these.
Posted
on Friday, April 27th, 2007
by Miriam Wolf in Food Media |
More like this: barbecue, barbeque, charcoal, chowhound, gas, grill, grilling, media, mike pound, the grinder, washington post, wood fired ovens
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