I got excited when I saw that Netflix carried a DVD starring famed British comic actor John Cleese in its food section. Arriving while I was sick in bed, it gave me a little ray of Brit humor, plus I actually learned some stuff from it. Wine for the Confused is an instructional video that covers wine basics—common grapes, tasting, how to deal with a sommelier, fermentation—in precisely the irreverent way you would expect from a Monty Python alumnus.
Wine for the Confused, $17.99
In my ongoing attempt to educate myself, I’ve been reading Matt Kramer’s book New California Wine: Making Sense of Napa Valley, Sonoma, Mendocino, and Beyond. If you don’t know Kramer’s books, they’re worth looking at. He writes in a very clear and straightforward way, cutting through complexity without cheapening things. The opening chapters on the history of winemaking in California intrigued me: Kramer does a fine job of describing how American ingenuity and Californian inventiveness and freethinking came to bear first on the problem of getting grape vines to produce huge amounts of fruit all over the state, and then on the problem of making those vines put out high-quality wine; and now on the challenge of making wines that aren’t just good, but also full of character and distinctiveness, like the wines of Europe. It’s a story of agricultural science, really, and Kramer compares the tradition-driven old-world way of winemaking to the more modern approach that emerged in California, based on endless tinkering with clones and cataloging and soil testing and sun-exposure quantification and various metrics for tracking the progress of the vines and the fruit development.
He describes experimentation with trellising techniques, and approaches to pruning and to various kinds of wood, and on and on. And for a guy like me, a relative newcomer to my role as an observer of wine, the book suggests something else: the possibility that I’ve been in a far more skewed and particular conversation than I realized. Here’s what I mean: I read a lot of product sheets about wines, and I meet various winemakers and enjoy asking about their work, and I talk to people in wine shops, and it occurs to me that in all of these conversations we are kicking around perhaps five or six winemaking variables, from a possible list of maybe 100. I’m making up this last number, but the point is just that it’s a lot—enough to merit multiyear graduate programs in the science of winemaking and grape growing. Now maybe that’s simply because these five or six are the big ones (soil, clones, age of vines, how much aging in what kind of wood, whether or not the wine is fined and/or filtered). Maybe it’s that they’re sort of fun to talk about. But I’m wondering if those five or six variables—the handful of variables that enter the everyday conversation about winemaking—aren’t also the variables that let us focus on the currently hot issues in winemaking, like the impulse to make California wines with the distinctive character people usually associate only with the best old-world wines. I guess I’m wondering how much of the marketing push is at work here, in presenting as dispassionate data the only data that lend themselves to a story about how traditional and naturalistic a given winery’s practices are. Nothing wrong with this—just life, commerce—but interesting. At least to me.
South Korea’s first astronaut, 30-year-old computer science engineer Ko San, is preparing to bring kimchi where it’s never gone before. On April 8, he’ll blast off into space with two Russian cosmonauts, but he’s bringing his own lunch. The International Herald Tribune discusses the national importance of this fermented food:
‘If a Korean goes to space, kimchi must go there, too,’ said Kim Sung Soo, a Korea Food Research Institute scientist. ‘Without kimchi, Koreans feel flabby. Kimchi first came to our mind when we began discussing what Korean food should go into space.’
Well, nobody wants a flabby astronaut, but it took years of research and millions of dollars to develop outer-space-safe, bacteria-free kimchi. And according to the Korea Times, once scientists figured out how to use radiation to kill bacteria while retaining optimum taste, they found out that they weren’t allowed to seal the stuff in vacuum bags:
‘The Russian space agency worried that the kimchi would ferment in space, causing the sealed bag to explode,’ Lee [Ju-woon, a researcher] said. ‘It can be dangerous if a bag of kimchi explodes in space, because no one knows whether the anaerobic bacteria in the kimchi is safe there or not.’
Now they’re packaging this space kimchi in cans, and Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo seems to think that kimchi will become a staple of future space travel:
Space kimchi is expected to be of great help in stimulating astronauts’ appetite with its zest and spices. In addition, it is effective in promoting the intestinal functions, which tend to be somewhat sluggish in space, with abundant fiber.
Let’s hope it’s a big hit with the cosmonauts, because if kimchi doesn’t get sent out to space again, South Korea just spent millions of bucks on some spoiled scientist who can’t get through a 10-day mission without his favorite snack. Not that he’s the first astronaut to feel that way.
The Grinder’s own Nicholas Day unpacks the growing minicraze for mead in a thoughtful piece in Slate.
Lots of people know someone who home-brews mead, an alcoholic drink made from fermented honey. It’s usually a guy who sports a longish beard, indulges in weed, and enjoys the novels of J. R. R. Tolkien. And therein lies the problem. Mead, according to Day, will never rival beer for popularity: “That’s partly because it has a horrible image problem—currency with the Society for Creative Anachronism is not exactly a signifier of great commercial promise.”
Still, despite the looming problem of Colony Collapse Disorder, our boundless appetite for artisanal food and drink has brought mead a lot of new fans. Its aroma of honey, herbs, and flowers has, as Day notes, a sense of terroir that beer just can’t match. And small producers are starting to pop up around the country.
Still, the one thing that could sink mead is its basic food-unfriendliness. It lacks the acidity of a good wine or the bracing bitterness of beer; mead’s own sweetness may be what’s holding it back.
March 1 is National Pig Day. And while some may celebrate by making a pig-ear headband, others have a more culinary approach to the holiday. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Georgeanne Brennan has fond memories of the “day of the pig” she spent on a farm in Mendocino County, California. “The plan was to bring together people who knew something about and were interested in the process of slaughtering, butchering, cooking and curing the meat,” she writes.
Her meditation encompasses the rise of nose-to-tail eating and the particulars of making porchetta. She delicately tiptoes past the slaughter, noting only that her host brought out a bottle of brandy to give a toast to the animal.
If you’re hungry, you might be interested to know that their end-of-the-day feast included the aforementioned porchetta, along with blood sausage and burgers of liver, kidneys, and heart wrapped in caul fat.
But Chris Shepherd goes whole hog in a different way. Instead of butchering the pig and breaking it into its separate parts before cooking, the Houston chef decided he wanted something in which he could roast a whole pig. What he found was la caja china, or Chinese box, an “unlovely contraption” that “looks like a wheelbarrow made from a cheap coffin.”
But the thing will roast: It cost a mere $300 and can cook a 50-pound pig in about four hours. “It’s a presentation thing,” Shepherd says. “You carry the pig through the dining room and people go, ‘Ooooooh, I want that.’”
The small-bites craze continues, with an article in the Los Angeles Times on zakuski, the Russian version of small snacks good with drinks. Regina Schrambling writes about the booze-food that Tolstoy would have eaten:
Anya von Bremzen, an émigré from Moscow who literally wrote the book on zakuski with her 1990 ‘Please to the Table,’ describes them as ‘another spin on meze, tapas and antipasto’ and says they are comparable to smorgasbord in that ‘for the most part you can make a meal of them.’ But you can’t do that without vodka—at least not in her birthplace, where they drink straight shots.
‘The main reason Russians love zakuski is that they can’t drink vodka without eating,’ Von Bremzen says. ‘It’s always: Toast, bottoms up, then eat zakuski, then have another vodka.’
Not a bad way to go.
Deb Perelman, mistress of Smitten Kitchen, was talking about zakuski more than a year ago, on NPR’s Kitchen Window (marrying a Russian puts you ahead of the curve on such things). Her recipe for Russian black bread has 20 ingredients (including vinegar, chocolate, and shallots) and looks fascinating. I’ll take a slice of that alongside my vodka any day.
Anthony Bourdain’s been getting a lot of flak for his Travel Channel “in high-definition” ad, which appeared in trade magazines and shows him crouched in Iceland’s steaming Blue Lagoon. Next to Bourdain’s 51-year-old face is the line, “Some things are meant for HD.” Oh, baby, that’s just asking for a riposte—and, of course, the bloggers have ’em. “Like the image of a hirsute Tom Colicchio, we find it discomfiting,” says New York mag’s Back of the House blog. “Presumably, if you have a hi-def TV, you’ll be able to see more of Bourdain than you’d ever want.” And asks Gridskipper (who’s apparently on a first-name basis with Bourdain): “What the hell was Tony thinking?”
What indeed, asks “Tony” himself, who responded on his Travel Channel blog:
[The ad shows an] old photo of yours truly—after a horrifying night of drinking in Iceland, huddled, near naked in the Blue Lagoon, pondering whether to throw up or simply sink beneath the surface and die.
Is this enticing? Does this make ANYONE—even longtime convicts—feel compelled to tune in? Some Things May Indeed Be Better in HD. My puffy, drink ravaged face and 51 year old naked torso would NOT be one of them. With all the beautiful places we’ve been on the show, THIS is an example of the glories of hi-def? Apparently, the price of crack must have dropped near HQ. There’s no other excuse for this shameful display of ugliness. What tiny, deeply disturbed demo were they trying to appeal to here? German Scat Porn websites likely attract greater numbers.
This is a brilliant bit of self-effacement on Bourdain’s part. What can we all do now but coo, “Oh, it’s not that bad! Here, have a towel.”
Working in a test kitchen has its upsides; eating constantly could be considered one. The downside? Eating constantly. In a recent blog post, the test kitchen team at Gourmet estimated that they eat about 3,000 calories a day. I’m not sure CHOW averages that high, but some days it certainly feels that way. To soothe my grumbling stomach, I end my workday with a cup of Mighty Leaf’s Ginger Twist tea. The ginger, a natural digestive, helps end the food fight going on in my stomach, and the peppery rush of ginseng and mint invigorates me for the rest of the afternoon.
Mighty Leaf Ginger Twist, $8 per box
Nothing promises a good article like the headline “Cook Accused of Stuffing Hair into Steak.” But at the risk of looking like a steak-stuffing amateur, I admit I was not sure how someone, specifically someone working the line at a Texas Roadhouse in West Bend, Wisconsin, would choose to stuff hair into a steak. I mean, there’s the stuffed flank steak method of cutting the steak almost in half horizontally and then rolling it up. Or there’s the time-honored Stilton-stuffed steak in which you only carve out a small pocket.
Sadly, the aggrieved 24-year-old cook at the Texas Roadhouse was short on either training or ambition, or both. Irritated by an overcooked steak that was sent back, he reportedly placed the new steak on a plate, then “cut a slit in the center of the steak and pushed something into the meat.” I’m sorry—“pushed something into the meat” is simply not a phrase that’s found in Jacques Pépin’s Complete Techniques. If it were, Kevin Hansen would surely not have shown up at the police station afterward “complaining of hair in his steak. ‘I started eating it,’ he said in an interview. ‘I noticed the hair after three bites.’” The criminal complaint notes that “several strands of what appeared to be hair [were] coming out of the middle of the steak.” Authorities found the presentation so déclassé that the cook now faces “a fine of up to $10,000 and up to 3 1/2 years of imprisonment.”
Food Media, posted November 25, 2009
New Finds, posted November 18, 2009
Trend-o-Meter, posted October 16, 2009
CHOW Tour: North America, posted March 05, 2007
