Would does a Hershey’s bar cost less than a buck, and some fine chocolate cost hundreds of dollars for a pound? Writing for the Hungry Beast, cookbook author Mary Goodbody explains why luxury chocolates cost more:
“It’s a complicated process that begins with how the beans are grown, harvested, fermented, dried, blended, roasted, and then made into chocolate. All of these steps contribute to the final cost to the consumer, and because chocolate makers are an exacting breed, they tend to be demanding. They begin with the bean—much as coffee buyers do—and judge the quality of their product on the way it’s handled from there.”
So just like coffee beans, you have your crud and your cream cheese. More variations crop up in the way the chocolate is made, including the relative portions of sugar to chocolate liquor and cocoa butter:
“Finally, most chocolate is conched. The chocolate is put in large conching machines that spin it though whirling blades to knead it for hours. During this time moisture evaporates, volatile acids dissipate, the texture becomes ever silkier, and more cocoa butter and other emulsifiers may be added. The best chocolates are conched for as long as three days, while others are conched only for half a day.”
“Whoa! Look out! Gramps is loaded! It’s the whiskey that hits his Booze Tooth—all three of them!
“I love how the premise of doubled enjoyment is thrown out with no reason or explanation; it’s just a prima facie statement.
“Well, surely Hammered Gramps was an anomaly.”
But, of course, he is not. The site’s got plenty more similarly deranged ads to deconstruct. Overall, it’s good old, old, old fashioned fun in a Web-friendly format.
New-school faced off against old-school at this year’s hotly anticipated Vendys, also known as the New York street-food-vendor wars. For the first time, they had a dessert category. See all the action in our photo gallery.
Anyone who’s flown Virgin America knows it’s cool: the purple cabin lights, the cartoon in-flight safety video—they even pipe world music into the bathroom.
And so on a recent flight back from New York, I wasn’t too surprised to see that they’re also on top of food trends, as they’re now serving a banh mi sandwich. Unfortunately, by the time the flight attendants had gotten to 23F, they had run out, but here is the description from VA’s press release:
Banh mi flat iron beef sandwich: A traditional street-vended Vietnamese sandwich made of grilled Asian marinated sliced flat iron steak with shaved cucumber, green leaf lettuce, baby frisée, fresh sprigs of cilantro and topped with a Vietnamese slaw of julienne carrots, daikon radish and red onion. Asian ginger dressing served on the side.
One element they can’t be getting right is the just-toasted, crispy French-bread roll, and there’s no listing of hot peppers. But daikon, cilantro, julienned carrots—it sounds like someone has seriously upped the ante on airplane meals.
If you’ve ever wondered what’s wrong with the greater Boston metro area—and plenty of us have—consider that the suburban community of Somerville has a festival dedicated to Marshmallow Fluff, the sweet white goop that has somehow become a symbol of regional pride. Fluff is a Massachusetts staple and the source of not a little bit of controversy after Fluffernutter sandwiches on school menus led to a subsequent fight to either limit the amount of Fluff that could be served or celebrate the Fluffernutter as the official state sandwich.
Eaten shrimp recently? Planning on eating it soon? Ever hope to eat it again? Then you may want to avoid the antishrimp stemwinder on La Vida Locavore. After a lengthy windup, the blog presents a list of “nasty stuff that goes into [farmed] shrimp,” which includes:
In fact, it’s the sixth annual opportunity to celebrate commas, ellipses, colons, and parentheses. “There’s an epidemic of poor punctuation in the United States, much like the Swine flu. It’s too bad there’s no vaccine to prevent it,” says NPD founder Jeff Rubin.
And, much like the swine flu, it’s an occasion to bake. ;-)
So Rubin wants you to take a cookie, cake, pastry, doughnut, or bread and bastardize its natural shape in the service of your favorite punctuation mark. While I myself share the horror of “misplaced” quotation marks and plural’s misrepresented as possessive’s, I don’t mind celebrating new uses of punctuation, such as the emoticon. Would a cookie baked into the shape of a smiley be disqualified?
Someone’s got to try it: Recipes, samples, and photos of the baked goods must be submitted by September 30. Details are available on the NPD website.
Business site DailyFinance notes that “what was once a major convenience has become quite the opposite. With many customers using online banking to check their balances and debit cards combining the ease of credit cards with the reliability of checking, personal checks have become an unwieldy, annoying way to pay, and an impediment to easy recordkeeping.”
Over at Slate, Dan Mitchell cheers the move, noting of check writers: “You want to kill them, or at least say something nasty to them.” Time is money, apparently, particularly when you’ve got a stack of people grumbling behind you as you fill in the dollar amount for a second time, using words instead of numbers.
New Yorkers have lots of opportunities to sample artisanal food wares, whether it’s at the indoor Essex Street Market, at gazillions of tiny specialty stores throughout the city, or in one of the many outdoor markets, large and small. Here’s a slideshow of two markets that debuted earlier this month in Brooklyn and Manhattan respectively. One was casual, the other was fancier. Both offered lots of tasty things to eat.
