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Farewell, Foie Gras: I’m Not Sorry to See You Go

On July 1, California becomes a zero–foie gras state. Senate Bill 1520, which Arnold Schwarzenegger signed in 2004, outlawed the force-feeding of birds to enlarge their livers, and what’s more, prohibited the selling of those livers—in short, a total ban on foie gras in the state that gave the world Stars (Jeremiah Tower's now-defunct restaurant) and the French Laundry. But the law came with a grace period expiring at the end of June 2012, to allow producers time to engineer alternatives to the feeding tube. They didn’t. And late last month, a star brigade of California chefs—putting faces to the recently formed Coalition for Humane and Ethical Farming Standards—fired off a Hail Mary pass to lawmakers in Sacramento, trying to score a stay after proposing a list of new ethical standards for foie production. So far, it looks like a fumble.

Meanwhile, whether defiant or resigned, chefs have mounted protest dinners, mournful farewells, $150-a-plate denials—Californians with the means to afford it have probably eaten more foie gras this year than at any time since the days of San Francisco’s robber barons. But now, fans of fatty livers are being forced to swallow what had seemed unthinkable even after SB 1520 became law: the French Laundry without foie. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2012

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Final Face-Off in Our Best Brewpub Bracket!

After three weeks and thousands of votes it’s finally down to two! The final matchup in our Best Brewpub in America bracket pits two towns famous for their universities in a bare-knuckle bar brawl. Over here, it's North by Northwest, purveyor of craft ales in the hometown of the University of Texas at Austin. In the opposing corner: Cambridge Brewing Co., whose barrel-aged beers and other brews have fueled more passionate discussions than the Harvard Speech & Parliamentary Society READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2012

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After Oniongate, Can We All Stop Timing Recipes?

Tom Scocca’s mini exposé in Slate wafted through food writers' Twitter feeds last week like the smell of a single rotting potato reek-bombing a kitchen pantry. The noxious charge: Recipe writers are liars.

In “Layers of Deceit,” Scocca began by calling bullshit on the New York Times food section and Melissa Clark, author of a recipe calling for taking onions from raw to soft, brown, and sweet in only 10 minutes. After taking a lot of other food writers out for making the same lie, Scocca got out the kitchen timer and proved the ridiculousness of the premise (in fact, caramelizing onions takes at least 45 minutes, if not a good, slow hour). In response, the Times garbled stuff about "unusual" secret shortcuts, the equivalent of looking down at your shoes and changing the subject. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2012

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Will Gruit Enhance Your Sex Life?

All you dudes pounding double IPAs, triple IPAs, wet-hopped beers, dry-hopped beers, black IPAs, white IPAs? Raise a glass, because that might be all you can raise. According to beer lore, hops cause impotence.

Is the lore true? No. The infamous phytoestrogenic compounds in hops are in too small quantities, even in the hoppiest beers, to affect male erectile function. That said, there are plenty of reasons to push hops out of bed: Their trendiness in the last 10 years has flooded the market with unbalanced, largely undrinkable beers that are overly bitter, cloying, and exhausting. Thankfully, the backlash has begun. Welcome gruit, an ancient style of unhopped beer that is suddenly making a comeback after being dead for hundreds of years.

Long before hops became brewers' favorite bittering and preserving agent, people used all kinds of herbs and spices in beer. Some of these were mildly poisonous, some even made you high, some were both mildly poisonous and made you high. (Read more about this in an interview with Stephen Harrod Buhner, author of Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers.) Among these types of beer was gruit, a hopless brew made with an herb-spice mix that typically included Myrica gale, yarrow, and rosemary. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Friday, May 4th, 2012

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It’s Down to 4 in Our Best Brewpub Bracket!

Clink your glass to the Final Four in our Best Brewpub in America bracket! The penultimate matchups: Cascade Barrel House in Portland versus North by Northwest in Austin, and Cambridge Brewing in Massachusetts toe-to-toe against Revolution Brewing in Chicago. Voting is open until May 7; on May 8, we big-reveal the final brewpub face-off. Don’t miss your chance to click-cast your ballot every day until the bracket closes! Vote now!

Photograph by Jennifer Yin / SF Beer Week

Edit Post / Posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

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The Best Drunk Fried Chicken in Austin

How many drinks did I have? Staggering down a dark and treacherous road in Texas, I’d lost count. My first night at Austin Food & Wine had been a booze crawl, over a topography land-mined with tasting plates of elaborate desserts. In another couple of minutes, I'd discover the best fried chicken I think I’ve ever had. Here’s how.

I'd flown in from San Francisco to practically land in a pint of beer at the New Taste of Texas, the Food & Wine event's opening party, set in a scrubby park in downtown Austin. After that I downed a Manhattan from a plastic cup. I needed to walk over to the Driskill hotel to pick up my press badge, and while there I paused in the lobby bar to order a shot of Willett rye. And when the waitress with the apricot-colored hair asked if I wanted the 20-year-old I said sure. “You’re gettin’ the good stuff, sugar,” she said as she set down the little snifter. When I looked at the bill it—shit!—said $35, which meant I’d squandered my dining per diem on booze, so if I wanted to eat I was going to have to mooch off trays at media parties. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

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Brewpub Bracket: Western Wrangle

To inform your voting in CHOW’s monthlong Best Brewpub in America Bracket, we’re throwing the spotlight on individual matchups.

If anyone should know exactly what makes a brewpub great, it’s the beer aficionados who post reviews on BeerAdvocate. In this fourth and final matchup in week two of our Best Brewpub in America bracket, the face-off pits Eske’s in Taos, New Mexico, against North by Northwest in Austin, Texas. Here’s how the BA reviewers handicap the race. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Monday, April 30th, 2012

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Brewpub Bracket: Clash of the Titans!

To inform your voting in CHOW’s monthlong Best Brewpub in America Bracket, we’re throwing the spotlight on individual matchups.

What makes a winning brewpub? Great beer: check. Pubby or otherwise beer geeky vibe: double check. Food that’s something more than a fusion of meat, grease, and carbs to keep you from getting too hammered too fast: triple check. With those criteria in mind, we turned to the user-reviewers of BeerAdvocate to see how they rate the third matchup in this second round of bracket voting: Appalachian Brewing in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, versus Chicago’s Revolution Brewing. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Monday, April 30th, 2012

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Brewpub Bracket: Brains vs. Barnyard

To inform your voting in CHOW’s monthlong Best Brewpub in America Bracket, we’re throwing the spotlight on individual matchups.

What makes a brewpub great is more than the measure of its beers. It’s also food, vibe, and overall pubbishness. What do the experts—the beer-geek reviewers of BeerAdvocate—have to say about our bracket’s East Coast, North-South stare-down between Cambridge Brewing Co. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Atlanta’s Wrecking Bar Brewpub? READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Saturday, April 28th, 2012

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Brewpub Bracket: Portland Sour vs. San Francisco Funky

To inform your voting in CHOW’s monthlong Best Brewpub in America Bracket, we’re throwing the spotlight on individual matchups.

Our bracket’s West Coast beer-off pits Portland against San Francisco, a city of drizzly perma-rain against a city of drizzly perma-fog. But wait, Portland is Beervana, right? Wouldn’t Cascade Brewing Barrel House have an edge over San Francisco’s ultramellow, Phish- and Grateful Dead–vibed Magnolia Gastropub & Brewery? Probably, except that this is a quest for the best brewpub in America, not just the best beer—criteria also include atmosphere, food, and overall pubbiness. READ MORE

Edit Post / Posted on Friday, April 27th, 2012

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