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Food Media

News, notes, and rants from the world of food.

Whole Foods’ New Stake in Artisans

What with the stuttering economy and credit in lockdown, it's a scary moment to start or expand a small food business. Heather Kennedy says that's exactly why applications for the loan program she oversees snowballed in 2011. Kennedy is senior administrator of the Whole Foods Local Producer Loan Program, the grocery chain's $10 million initiative providing low-interest loans to small food producers. Since 2006, Whole Foods has lent a total of $6.6 million to 110 companies. Loans range from $1,000 to $100,000 (the average is $50,000), and must be used to expand or improve a vendor's business, not fund normal operating costs. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Friday, February 17th, 2012

Food Media

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La Cotta, My Beautiful Mystery

Urban Ore is an enormous salvage warehouse in Berkeley, California, that’s cold and smells like cat pee. If you dig an item up that hasn't been priced, you’re at the whims of a guy who may or may not have just finished smoking a blunt, indifferent to your question if not to the fact of your presence there. The price he tells you is a number he makes up on the spot—well, all the prices at a thrift store are arbitrary. But the staff at Urban Ore often seems particularly hazy about the true value of their merchandise.

That was the case with this odd-looking pan I bought there four, maybe five, years ago. Its arbitrary price: $8. Its value in my kitchen: way higher than for pans I've dropped three figures on at Sur La Table. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Friday, February 17th, 2012

Food Media

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Have Food Magazines Lost It?

That was the question posed Monday on Chowhound by d8200, a longtime Food & Wine reader who wrote that in the last couple of years, "I'm not as excited when I find the latest issue in my mailbox. That day is far from the glorious and momentous occasion that it once was."

Citing recurrent quinoa salad recipes and "more b.s. about why Napa Valley is the greatest food/wine scene on earth," d8200 asked, "Has the quality and content been decreasing as of late, or is it that I'm just becoming more jaded or discerning in my expectations?" READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2012

Food Media

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New Job Requirement for Chefs: Hotness

Equal parts publicity stunt and high school popularity contest, Eater's Hottest Chef contest has become as much a food blog ritual as plywood reports and tabletop photography. The 2012 edition of the annual hotness bracket is now in its semifinal round. It's a little silly, a little demeaning, and generally harmless, food media's equivalent of a wall calendar plastered with half-naked firemen. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

Food Media

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Leopard Marrow Spread on Toast

Last week I asked my husband what he wanted to do for Valentine’s Day. Perry gave me a little sneer, as if I’d told him I was thinking about putting the house on the market so we could go be llama ranchers in Utah. “Are you kidding me?” he asked. “Since when have we ever done anything for Valentine’s Day?”

He’s right. In nearly 20 years together, we’ve never sat through a Valentine’s prix fixe, never looked into each other’s eyes over beef filet and chocolate lava cakes in front of a flickering Duraflame log. That’s how it is for a lot of people. Valentine’s Day feels somehow alien, a holiday trimmed in lace and chocolate truffle samplers, whose catalog of gifts includes pink satin tap pants embroidered with lavender hearts. It's always felt like a Hobson's choice between the embarrassingly gushy and the panderingly cute. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

Food Media

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5 Sex Liqueurs to Sip on Valentine’s Day

X-Rated and its better-known brethren Hpnotiq and Alizé are marketed as clubbin’ drinks that mix with anything. They’re fruity, sweet, and—just in time for Valentine's Day—pornishly named. CHOW.com staff recently tasted a handful of these sex liqueurs. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

Food Media

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Thrill-Seeker’s Guide to the Neo–Soda Fountain

Just as modernist cuisine introduced the world to weird-science compounds like sodium alginate and transglutaminase ("meat glue"), the current soda fountain revival has its own vocabulary of thrills. To get a primer, we turned to the people behind the country's latest entrant, San Francisco's Ice Cream Bar. The 1930s-style fountain serves G-rated sundaes up front, and in back, drinks made with ingredients that titillate in a whole bunch of really strange ways. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Monday, February 13th, 2012

Food Media

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The Meadow’s Mark Bitterman on Chocolate: Don’t Call It Candy!

For a chocolate-lover, walking into The Meadow in Manhattan's West Village is a bit like walking into a cathedral—one that also functions as a methadone clinic. Bars and bars of gorgeous, painstakingly crafted chocolate line the shelves, quietly demanding both reverence and the total abandonment of reason and self-restraint.

The intoxicating hybrid is the work of Mark Bitterman and Jennifer Turner Bitterman (pictured), who opened their first location of The Meadow in Portland, Oregon, in 2006. Four years later, they launched a second store in New York City. Their shops feature over 300 varieties of chocolate bars from around the world, with a particular emphasis on dark chocolate. The selection reads like a who's-who of the small-batch, bean-to-bar world: Dick Taylor, Rogue, Cacao Atlanta, and Olive and Sinclair, plus established European makers like Amedei, Valrhona, Bonnat, and Michel Cluizel. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Saturday, February 11th, 2012

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Colin Gasko Is Making Chocolate from Wild Cacao

Making bean-to-bar chocolate isn't for the faint of heart. In 2006, when a 21-year-old Colin Gasko began making chocolate in Minneapolis, he was lucky to have the hubris of youth on his side. “I just thought it was so obscenely crazy to be doing what I was doing,” says Gasko, who in person projects the detached, thoughtful demeanor of a computer engineer. In the years since Gasko founded his Rogue Chocolatier company, the bean-to-bar field has broadened, though with fewer than two dozen makers currently in the U.S., it’s still small. “It's crystallizing into a movement," Gasko says.

Gasko's latest project is equally ambitious: an $11 bar of chocolate called Silvestre, made from wild cacao harvested in the Amazon basin, along Bolivia’s Rio Beni. There’s only been one other attempt—by some Jesuits in the 16th century—to make wild cacao commercially viable, and that failed. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Friday, February 10th, 2012

Food Media

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Trans Fats Are Out! Sodium: Way In

This week, like most, has brought a familiar hodgepodge of good and not-so-good news about the American diet.

First, the good: A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association says that trans fats—which typically come from hydrogenated vegetable oils—are on their way out of the American diet. Researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that among white adults, trans-fatty acid levels decreased 58 percent from 2000 to 2009. The researchers, who are now studying trans-fat levels in the nonwhite adult population, call this statistic "astounding." READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2012