Food Media rss

News, notes, and rants from the world of food.
Food Media
1 Comment

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

Food Media
Add a comment

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
2 Comments

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

Food Media
6 Comments

Why Are We Eating Up Downton Abbey?

All over Britain right now, the underemployed and job-insecure are hunkering down with spotted dick and Bakewell tart. That’s the finding, anyway, of a report this week in the Mail Online. Just in time for the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens, recession-weary Britons are making like Cratchits, donning fingerless gloves and gathering before meager coal fires (I totally made that up) to eat “steamed treacle pud” and apple crumble. The Mail even trots out a food historian who implies a parallel between our own times and the boom/bust era of Dickens’s England, where “irresponsible bankers and businessmen” spoiled everybody's fun. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Food Media
7 Comments

Fruit Juice: Bottled Hype

As a lot of kindergartners these days could tell you, fruit juice isn't the healthy substitute for soda that Mott's and Welch's would like you to think. It's sugar in a more wholesome package, as capable of passing along liquid calories as a can of Coke. Manufacturers of bottled juices have gone to increasingly hyperbolic lengths to disguise this inconvenient fact, embellishing labels with healthy buzzwords: "antioxidants," "electrolytes," "Omega-3s," and that old chestnut, "fiber." READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Food Media
10 Comments

All That Menu Psychology Stuff Is Bull

For years, restaurant owners have hired specialists to design menus that exploit "menu psychology," the little mechanisms that entice customers to order more. But as the Huffington Post reported recently, at least one oft-repeated "fact" about the way diners read menus is nonsense. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

Food Media
2 Comments

Does Capital Grille Discriminate?

Olive Garden and Red Lobster are in the news this week, and it's not because inexplicably vast numbers of people are planning to patronize them on Valentine's Day.

Restaurant Opportunities Center United (ROC-United) has filed an employee discrimination lawsuit against Darden Restaurants, the corporation that owns the chains, charging that nonwhite workers at Darden's upscale steakhouse chain Capital Grille are routinely placed in low-paying kitchen positions while white workers are given more lucrative jobs as waiters, hosts, and bartenders (pictured). READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

Food Media
3 Comments

Jack in the Box Bacon Shake Is Bogus!

Last week Jack in the Box rolled out the Bacon Shake, a cultural identifier masquerading as a 773-calorie beverage. It’s part of Jack’s Marry Bacon marketing campaign, which includes a $4.99 BLT cheeseburger combo, a tuxedo T-shirt you can order (it's got a bacon bowtie), and recent updates to Jack’s rather lackluster bacon Tumblr. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Monday, February 6th, 2012

Food Media
Add a comment

Olive and Sinclair’s Scott Witherow Talks Southern Chocolate

In 2009, Scott Witherow did something no one in Nashville had ever done before: He opened a small-batch bean-to-bar factory that upended people's ideas of what Southern chocolate was, or could be. Called Olive and Sinclair, the company put a regional imprint on the beans Witherow sourced from Ghana and the Dominican Republic, thanks to traditional Southern ingredients. Even Witherow's technique takes a page from the past: He grinds cacao beans with the same kind of stone mill that has long been used for grits. Witherow recently took some time to talk to us about his life in chocolate on the eve of that annual surge in consumption, Valentine's Day. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Monday, February 6th, 2012

Food Media
5 Comments

Can Photos Make Kids Eat Veggies?

Dieters and Madison Avenue have long known that seeing a favorite junk food is the same as craving it. In fact, researchers have found that the yearning is both automatic and biochemical: For one group of research subjects, just looking at a picture of food increased their levels of the appetite-increasing hormone ghrelin.

Now researchers are speculating that the image-equals-appetite reaction could also make kids crave healthy foods. A study published in this month's Journal of the American Medical Association found that kids who were served lunch on trays lined with pictures of vegetables were almost three times more likely to choose carrot sticks or green beans from the lunch line. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Monday, February 6th, 2012

12345...403