Word From the Kitchen

Along with Michael McGriff and Matthew Dickman, Carl Adamshick will be speaking at Wordstock as well. His newest contribution to Saucyman takes a look at reductions -

Reduction

As a culinary term, reduction came late. In French it means to restore, to be in a state of restoration. The process is easy. The theory simple: less is more. Like minimal music, reductions are pared to essentials. A few notes played in succession are a thickened flavor vibrating through the tongue, intense and lingering, a sustained bar, a chord resonating in the body of a piano, the mouth tasting a dying c-note, feeling the tone walk down the long hallway and enter the small door into silence.

One of the worst things is giving a dinner party and having a guest bring wine only the homeless purchase or college students giving it the old college try. The only way to better the situation is to wait a few weeks, dump the whole bottle’s content into a sauce pan and turn on the flame, let all the alcohol burn away, let the liquid reduce, retain its sugar, and become a sweet, syrupy few ounce that might have come from grapes. Then, spoon it on a scoop of vanilla ice-cream when you’re half-way through a good movie. You will find you can, silently and happily, go on in complete disapproval of your guest’s conduct. You can enjoy their gift and be satisfied in full contempt.

-Carl Adamshick

Bonus McGriff: OCD - Obsessive Coffee Disease

McGriff has an unnatural attachment to his espresso maker, the La Pavoni, even going as far to compare its beauty and disposition to an Italian Supermodel, giving the edge to the Pavoni on the basis its superior intelligence. Pavoni's have been mentioned before at Saucyman (here), but not to the degree of loving, obsessive detail McGriff has provided us. This was McGriff's response when I asked him about his favorite piece of kitchen equipment...

The Pavoni! It’s absolutely the glory of my kitchen, both in form and function. It’s pure eye candy, quintessential Italian design, a balance of understatement and flare. I own the La Pavoni Pro, which is the bigger of the two basic, fully-manual espresso machines that they produce. You really have to give yourself over to the Pavoni. With each new bag of beans you have to experiment with grind, tamping pressure, duration and force of the pull, etc. The Pavoni is deceptive and cunning—it’ll make a lousy cup of espresso if you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. But once you get it, you’ve got it. There is absolutely no way a semi- or fully-automatic machine can make a cup of espresso like a manual machine.

I can count the number of espressos I’ve purchased in cafés since buying the Pavoni: 4.

If you come to my house the first thing I’ll do is get an espresso or macchiato in your hand. I love the whole process—it’s a study in method and patience. You have to wait for the machine to build up pressure, then you have to bleed the machine to purge the false pressure reading, then you have to let it build up pressure again. I like to pull an empty shot to clear the water. I heat up my kettle so I can pour boiling water through the portafilter, thus heating it. Then I fill a demitasse cup with water and steam the water to heat the cup. When you get a well-pulled shot through a hot portafilter, which then finds its way into the heated demitasse, you know you’re about to enjoy the best espresso you’ve ever had.

A good shot pours like molten honey and stays hot exactly long enough for you to take your time with it. It might take 15 minutes to craft an espresso, but you’ll never forget it. It’s like building a ship in a bottle and then sailing the ship. I almost always use Blue Bottle Coffee—PNG, Three Africans, and Misty Valley are particularly fine roasts for the Pavoni. I use a good burr grinder and a wooden tamp. I have a beautiful Thomas E. Cara, Ltd. wooden knock box. My signature cold-weather drink is a Laphroiag hot toddy with clove, cinnamon, lemon, and honey.

The Sauthors feature continues tomorrow with a new contribution of word from the kitchen from poet and Wordstock speaker, Carl Adamshick. On Monday, we will be featuring an interview with another Wordstocker, Portland cookbook author, Ivy Manning - who will give exclusive tips on what you can make for Thanksgiving Dinner that is easy and will wow your dinner companions.

Sauthors: Sometimes a Very Good Notion

When trying to explain Oregon to people in other parts of the country, I use Ken Kesey as a metaphor/synecdoche. The author's personal history and body of work is tied to the state’s history of transplants who came west to work the traditional industries of lumber, fishing, farming and dairy. But it is the iconoclastic Kesey who represents a new Oregon - known for creativity, intellect, a quality of life, and the confidence that you don’t need to go east for recognition. If you are good enough, you can stay home and the world will look to you. (Well, all those things. And it could also be argued Kesey is the flag bearer for the dirty hippie contingency that is still an alarmingly large population of the state.)

Mike McGriff has a Keseyian quality to him--energetic, intelligent, curious and an Oregonian through and through. He was born and raised in Coos Bay on the southern coast of the state. Missing out on the middle-class life that the timber industry afforded his parents and grandparents, McGriff’s path took him toward a new world, leading him first through community college, then, like Kesey, to U of Oregon, and eventually to Stanford University where he is currently a Jones Lecturer and holds a fellowship named after another iconic western writer (and Kesey teacher), Wallace Stegner. He is the author of Choke (Traprock Books, 2006) and the translator of Tomas Tranströmer’s The Sorrow Gondola. His work has appeared all over, most notably on Slate and in The Missouri Review. His new book is Dismantling The Hills.

Using the internets, Mike and I talked about two of our favorite subjects – food and words. I asked what it was like growing up in an area of the state with a dying lumber and fishing economy, with people trying hard just to make it, and what part food played in his upbringing. Mike responded:

I grew up in a hand-to-mouth, working-class household. And the thing was is that I never knew I was growing up in a particularly dark economic period—I never knew that we were teetering on poverty, or that another sawmill closure was an apocalyptic event. Everyone around me was in the same boat, and that was that. I had a good and happy upbringing because my folks hid their stresses, fears, and social anxieties from my sister and me like two expert magicians. Year after year they sawed the lovely assistant in half, and we believed it every time. I had a 2-stroke dirt bike and tons of logging roads to tear around on, and my parents owned 5 acres of land, so I constantly felt like the explorer of some great frontier, a vast empire of clear-cuts and rain and endless summers. I never really had any sense of how other parts of the state—or the country, for that matter—had any correlation to the socioeconomic atmosphere I grew up in or the dinner table we sat around. We seldom traveled to Eugene or Portland. I think I can make a good stab at what I ate growing up: ground beef, seasonal fish, frozen peas and carrots, canned green beans, chicken, rice, turkey, spaghetti, broccoli, fish sticks, tater tots, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, instant ramen noodles, meat loaf, casseroles, grilled cheese sandwiches, salad, pancakes, and all the usual holiday eats. All of the food we ate came from Warehouse Foods, which was exactly what it sounds like.

We seldom ate out, and we hardly ever ate fast food. Like most families, we went to the pizza parlor for special occasions. I don’t think I could ever truly express how much I loved going to the pizza parlor. We lived outside the city limit, and I attended a rural elementary school (Sumner Elementary), so going out for pizza was to enter the world of soda fountains, pinball, Joust, Centipede, and Ms. Pac-Man. And it was a time I got to see kids from “the city,” which is to say, those who lived within the city limit and had cable TV, those who didn’t have to use a party-line when they needed to make a phone call, those who rode their BMX bikes in grocery store parking lots. To this day, I view eating a slice of pizza as a decadent and triumphant experience.

My first taste of food-as-class came in high-school when everyone suddenly became a strict partisan about the beer they drank. To drink anything more complicated or dark than a Budweiser was to grow horns and sympathize with hippies and yuppies, and one certainly wouldn’t want to cross the picket line of the soul. It so happens that my first beer romance was Sheaf Stout. Then I fell for a bold and mysterious IPA. Had I become un-American? That was my first encounter with food-as-cool, and it certainly won’t be the last. It’s amazing how food is branded, and how the makers, keepers, and loyalists of style (whether Coos Baynians or Napa Valley wine guzzlers) are ready to throw you off the island for having conflicting tastes.

I was 19 before I ever tried any “new” foods. There’s a little sushi place in Coos Bay and this girl I was dating dragged me there. And I ended up loving it. Raw fish, sweet sticky rice, wasabi, and pickled ginger—I had never tasted any of those things individually, nor had any idea of how they might work in concert. There’s something so simple and perfect about the combinations involved in sushi. It’s funny to think of sushi as a food belonging to the category of the exotic or esoteric, but there you have it. I think of sushi as the perfect symbol for the culinary sublime—just a few basic ingredients prepared simply and simply balanced. It’s the way metaphor works in poetry. You put two things side by side—you say this equals that—and it’s not the two things you taste, but some third ineffable thing borne of that convergence.

Just as sushi altered the way Mike thought about food that had always been around him growing up, I asked how words changed him, and which writer made him want to try writing himself:

After high-school I attended the local community college in Coos Bay, Southwestern Oregon Community College. By some miracle I was given a tuition waiver in return for taking on editorial responsibilities at the college’s regional literary journal. Of course I accepted, and of course I had never read a book in my life. I had started several books in high-school but never got around to finishing any of them. I almost finished Zorba the Greek—that was probably my first encounter with any book that got me going. My new editorial duties included taking a year-long course in creative writing, offered by legendary local author John Noland. Somehow, John got Pablo Neruda’s poems into my reluctant and pessimistic hands—and it was curtains. I had never encountered an artist whose work spoke to me so directly, so passionately, so personally. Neruda drives his poems with images of the ocean, of manual labor, of physical human beauty, of animals, of rocks and trees and sand—and he does so by smashing images together until they become so surreal that a sort of alchemy occurs; the result is the formation of a new language that speaks directly to the way we imagine and empathize. It’s simple and so beautiful. He belongs to the army of the mundane and impure, the uneducated, the fouled, the passionate, the human. He’s all of us. For me, Neruda is the Big Bang, with all poetry spreading out from that singular point.

I asked Mike in particular how his food tastes have changed, first leaving the coast and now currently residing in San Francisco, the land of food fetishists:

I’ve never pretended to be more sophisticated than I am, certainly not when it comes to food or art, two areas driven by vast amounts of diversity and subjectivity. I was 20 when I moved to Eugene, Oregon to attend the University of Oregon. Moving to the Willamette Valley was, for me, like moving to Paris or Amsterdam. My defining food moment there was going to a food co-op for the first time. I was some sort of hillbilly kneeling before the altar of diverse and organic foods. I was hungry and broke so decided to buy a banana. It was a sizzling, smoggy valley day in the summer. I walked outside, sat on one of the store’s parking curbs, and proceeded to peel my lunch. It was one stubborn bastard of a banana, impossible to peel and as stringy as semi-petrified celery. When I finally bit into it I became horrified. There I was, sitting on the ground, trying to eat an uncooked plantain and cursing my misfortune. That story is a metaphor for something…

[In California] As a result of its close proximity to the Central Valley, the Bay Area is teeming with farmers markets. It’s wonderful. After you do some digging you can figure out where the inexpensive food stands are, figure out which farms gouge you and which don’t. There are times when you can pull off to the side of a city street and buy an entire flat of strawberries for a few dollars. People here are spoiled and blessed in that they can literally eat the food from their backyards year-round. If you get creative you can feed yourself exclusively from local food stands on a writer’s budget. I’m not a prime example of this, but I try. There’s a lot of snobbery surrounding food in San Francisco—you have to put up with it because the benefits outweigh the annoyances. In this way, food is like the arts—in order to retain your sanity and dignity you have to seek out the good and reject the subcultures of snobbery and partisan politics. I love organic produce and I love Reese’s Pieces. I’ve plenty of room for both.

Tomorrow: An Interview Bonus - McGriff responds to a question about espresso and his love of Italian coffee machines – An answer so precise, so lyrical and so loving that you shouldn't be surprised if it eventually ends up in a slim volume titled 20 Demitasses and a Song for Pavoni. For those in or near Portland, Mike McGriff will be at Wordstock on Sunday, November 9th. For those of you far away, you can learn more about McGriff from University of Pittsburgh Press. His new book Dismantling The Hills is available at Powells.com.


Stumble It!

Sauthors: Matthew Dickman

Matthew Dickman works with food for a living. It isn't Chef Dickman nor does he have desires to be the next Food Network star, but for the time being, you can get a slice of pizza or a sandwich from Matthew in downtown Portland. While he might not have Foodist aspirations, he is the only one on the clock at Whole Foods who can inscribe a book he authored while you wait for your order. Matthew's first book, All-American Poem is a body of work that was written and complied during his time spent as a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas. After completing his M.F.A. in Austin, Matthew wandered around the US before eventually ending up back in Oregon, his homeland and current residence.

As the winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Matthew was able to publish All-American Poem through Copper Canyon Press. His work has appeared in numerous journals and most notably in an actual magazine, The New Yorker.

Matthew grew up in the Lents area of Portland. Every city of any size has an area similar to Lents - closer to the airport than museums, it is the part of town where people go to get used tires, reconditioned car batteries, buckets of fried chicken, meth and/or prostitutes. It is a bleak area; made up of low-slung, post-war housing, often inhabited by less than blue-collar wage earners. The local commerce is a mix of the last outposts of once popular franchises interspersed with small businesses and dollar stores. The neighborhood could easily be the backdrop for a gritty independent film called The Land Before Gentrification.

I have known Matthew since his last days in Lents, the joy of a 14 year friendship is the degree of casualness in conversation – the downside to that familiarity is our interactions can be rough, profane and full of non sequiturs. And that is just asking how each other's family is doing. I asked Matthew if he thought it was odd having his graduate education financed by the infinitely readable and popular work of James Michener, while poetry; occasionally obtuse and is always the opposite of popular. A two-word response preceded a less than gentle chastising, as Matthew correctly pointed out that I should at least read some of his book before categorically dismissing it.

We started talking about food - by talking about what we loved to eat as children. When asked about kind of food was cooked in his house when he was growing up, Matthew responded, "A real staple was macaroni and cheese. My Mom added hot dogs and that would be dinner for a couple days" after naming a few other household staple of the crock pot variety, Matthew added "there were a lot of breakfasts for dinners – pancakes for dinner, waffles for dinner. Bisquick was inexpensive and filling.

"Part of it was economic necessity and part of it was energy. My mom worked all day and had three kids to deal with…[meals] were a lot of starchy, cheap-at-the-store foods. Not a lot of vegetables and salad."

In an election year where eating cheese steaks is a prerequisite on the campaign trail and arugula=elitism; Matthew and I spent some time discussing the point of pandering to the lowest level - wondering between ourselves what was the purpose of education, travel and reading if not to make your world, perspective and experience larger. I asked Matthew how leaving Lents/Portland had changed his diet.

At first he spoke generally about meeting different people outside of your community who eat differently and getting exposed to new foods, before confessing how a special someone got him to try a food she loved, "I had sushi for the first time at the age of 22. I thought it was amazing.

"Then, in Texas, there was going to Tex-Mex places but also getting to eat real Mexican Food; real tacos, not a bunch of meat in a crunchy shell smothered in cheese with iceberg lettuce but these small tastes of stewed meat, like braised tongue, sprinkled with radishes on fresh tortillas."

Lest one thinks Matthew has gone native - eating with chopsticks in one hand as he Twitters haiku to his dozens of fans on his iphone with the other, the food of his youth still has a powerful hold on him. "If I am having a really bad day - work, life, relationships; it is still mac and cheese. Granted it is an upgrade - Stouffer's microwavable, the family sized one, I mean I am having a bad day, you know. Stouffer's, a can of coca-cola and one package of rolos: It might not turn my day around but in my own way, I am eating biblically."

Even with an adulthood anchored by the comfort food of youth, there is another remnant of childhood meals that inspires happy memories, eating out. The dinner out, which after years of self-imposed hardship in graduate school is still a bit of a luxury but the act of treating oneself as an adult pales compared to the thrill of going to a restaurant as a child, especially when going out was BIG DEAL. Matthew explains, "For a middle-level triumph, it was The Artic Circle". A small dying food chain that could be kindly described as a low-rent Dairy Queen, "but" Matthew continued, "for important occasions it was the Monte Carlo (1), that was clip-on tie time, that was a luxury."

At the end of the night, Matthew responded to my less than gentle teasing about needing to find a job in a poetry factory with a rather reasonable explanation, "Listen, if you are in love with food, you don't need to run a restaurant. Same is true for poetry, I don't need an exact exchange between the art I do and the job I have, you have to do the things that move you."

For those in Portland who don't need lunch from Whole Foods, you can see/hear Matthew at Wordstock on the Mountain Writer's Stage #1- He will be reading with another Saucyman interviewee, writer Michael McGriff at 3.30 pm, Sunday, November 9.

1 - Before the Monte Carlo burned down, it was briefly a dance/Gentleman’s club, but before that incarnation, before the days of Olive Garden, the Monte Carlo was THE middlebrow Italian Restaurant, which fittingly produced burlesque versions of Italian food - over the top tomato/pasta/cheese dishes served on checkered tablecloths with a few other flourishes like candles in wicker Chianti bottles that would make the Italian stereotypes in Lady and the Tramp blush in shame.





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The Great Pumpkin

"All pumpkins are squashes but not all squashes are pumpkins". No, it isn’t how Tolstoy began his epic on gourds - it is the advice a nameless interviewee on KCRW’s Good Food used to explain the difference between squash and pumpkin. To use another literary cliché, what we talk about when we talk about pumpkins, is the Curcurbita Pepo. Pepos, as enthusiasts refer to them, are the orange fleshed squash we call pumpkin.

Believed to have originally cultivated in either Mexico or Central America about 6,000 years ago, the Pepos family also includes the rightfully maligned zucchini, acorn, spaghetti and crookneck squashes. But it was the highly adaptable pumpkins that had disseminated throughout the Americas and greeted Columbus when he arrived in the DR. Seeds made there way back to the old world were grown next to the familiar gourd, quickly adapted to their new environment. By the time the pilgrims had settled Virginia and Massachusetts 100 years later, the orange squashes were a familiar sight to the hungry but surprisingly neophobic English settlers - who were so happy to see a foodstuff they recognized from their homeland - they used pumpkins in everything - baking, frying, mashing, stewing, souping and most likely brewing the pumpkin during the early years of the Colonies.

More valuable than the orange flesh of the fruit, which is culinarily treated like a vegetable, were its seeds, the pepitos. Pumpkin seeds - eaten as a snack throughout the world - are sold with unbelievable alacrity and availability on street corners in Mexico. Pepitos were valuable to early American civilizations as an easily stored, mobile, high-energy food: 50% Fat and 35% protein making them a pre-Columbian powerbar of sorts.

Here and now, the pumpkin is revered for its flesh. According to the USDA, which sweetly lists the commodity as ‘pumkin’, it isn’t often you see terms of endearment on government generated spreadsheets. The supply of pumpkin works out to about 4.8 pounds per US resident. Although the Department of Agriculture doesn’t separate from edible and ornamental uses, food wise most us are more familiar with the canned variety than the different varieties of fresh pumpkins.

Libby is the prevalent brand, the company contracts over 4,000 acres of prime Midwestern farm land to grow the ‘Dickinson’ pumpkin. Denizens of natural food markets might be more familiar with Corvallis, Oregon’s – Farmer’s Market brand. Either is fine, years ago, in a period of my life after I formally renounced all processed foods, I made my own pumpkin puree; dozens of dollars and hours of washing, slicing, boiling and food milling yielded a product - eerily familiar to the contents of a can, then available for about a dollar.

More iconic than a Libby’s label are the Halloween Jack-o-Lanterns, a tradition believed to have been inspired by Washington Irving’s headless horseman in the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The Halloweenie carve-able pumpkins sold in October belong to the CurcurbiaMoshchata, C. Mixta and the big ones usually are members of the aptly named C. Maxima family.

In the US most pumpkin is purchased and consumed in the fall, usually in the weeks leading up to Halloween and Thanksgiving. For cultures that don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, the pumpkin is used either in season or year around. For more information on how the pumpkin is used around the world, see the previous post.







Stumble It!

Pump(kin) It Up

Saucalot, What else can you do with pumpkin besides the standard pie?

There is so much to do with the orange squash - Soup is always a good way to begin. There is the Paul Bocuse’s baked pumpkin soup - a sugar pumpkin is hollowed out and lined with a double rich stock, heavy cream and slices of bread and baked whole. The soup is served by scrapping the side of the pumpkin with a ladle and filling bowls.

Equally soupy, pumpkin is occasionally combined with coconut milk to make a bright orange Tom Kha. Also, soupwise, the pumpkin popularly appears in bisque – technically, a pureed soup thickened with cooked rice, not cream. Although the rich soup can be vegetarian, both crab and shrimp are very popular additions in pumpkin bisque.

Pumpkin is routinely used in stews. Black bean, pumpkin, corn and tomato stew is a variation on succotash and even though it sounds like the title/characters in a Kingsolver novel, it is a tasty combination. Similar to and probably more original/authentic than Bocuse’s technique for soup - Argentineans make a stew by baking sliced beef inside a whole pumpkin. Though not traditionally thought of as a stew, despite the combination of broth and chunks; pumpkin is a common ingredient in red curry offered in many Thai restaurants.

Pumpkin is still a popular ingredient south of the US. In Mexico there is squash/pumpkin enchilada or throughout the Caribbean there are pumpkin filled empanadas but the flesh is not as popular as the seeds, which apparently have a purpose beyond baseball players spitting them out, they are used to thicken soups and stews, sauces and moles.

In Europe, the French use the pumpkin - la citrouille, in soups, stews and a tart – very similar to pumpkin pie but not as free. But Italian cooks love, amore, the pumpkin in the kitchen and table. Risotto, tortelli, gnocchi, tortellini and the moon shaped zucca agnolotti (very, very, so very good with a gorgonzola based sauce) all prominently use pumpkin. A Venetian might serve fried slice pumpkin with basil, garlic and vinegar, possibly to accompany veal. A little further south on peninsula, cubed garlic - cooked with lardo, onion and garlic is tossed with chili flakes and pasta.

There is of course pumpkin bread, a dense substitution for bananas and nuts but a considerable upgrade over zucchini for a quick bread. Pureed pumpkin is also added to almost any food that calls for baking powder, nutmeg and flour. Muffins, cookies, pancakes and waffles all occasionally, usually seasonally, feature pumpkin.

In a glass, pumpkin is used to flavor stout (with much better results than summertime lagers spiked with berries). Northwest fast-food chain Burgerville, uses Pumpkin as the base of their autumn milkshake, which brings us back to dessert. There is pumpkin cheesecake, sometimes served on a ginger snap crust. And like all cheesecakes it can be very good or if the baker lacks confidence in skill and ingredients - then it is only dense and rich, with little else to offer, as if that is enough. Pumpkin pot de crème is really good and it can be made by essentially following the recipe on the back of the can but instead of pouring the filling into a pie crust, fill up ramekins and bake in a hot water bath until the custard sets: Look for a more detailed post, including a Saucyrecipe as Thanksgiving approaches.

Personally, I still like pumpkin pie – The Saucykitchens version is made ½ as much sugar as normal recipes and uses heavy cream instead of sweetened condensed milk – the result is a savory rich custardy pie. The low sugar to vegetable ratio makes slice of pie seem like a reasonable breakfast choice.

The subject of pumpkins will continue in the next Saucyman – I know it is hard to wait for lessons in history and taxonomy but it will be up in the next post. Next week, writers and food will populate the digital pages of Saucyman.

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Beertarded

S-Man, My boyfriend of three months comes over to my apartment, opens the refrigerator and asks where the beer is. He is done this about a dozen times. I don't like beer or drink beer, actually I am not much of a drinker but should I just keep some beer around for him? This Chick is Without Beer

In their slim and enjoyable guidebook, A Gentleman Entertains, John Bridges and Bryan Curtis recommend that a host keep essentials like Whiskey, Vodka, Gin, Tonic, Mixers along with wine and yes, ample supplies of beer. I am not sure how applicable this is because it doesn’t appear that either one of you is much of a gentleman.

By not being a dude, you have a good excuse for not aspiring to gentlemanly niceties - Your boyfriend however is being kind of a tool on this issue. And by kind of, I mean, his behavior ranks between doltish to being decorumtistic; two words I am not particularly sure a gentleman uses to describe someone’s love interest.

Saucyman has no problems providing food or drink to guests a host wouldn’t necessarily keep around from him/her self: Despite not being a huge participant in breakfast, a meal whose importance is really overstated, I will make pancakes for preferred guests. I have cooked and enjoyed vegetarian and vegan meals for dinner companions who have different opinions/tastes/values ascribed to food than I do. Hell, I have a mostly full bottle of Kahlua left over from two dates 10 years ago; BTW, Does anyone know how long that stuff lasts?

Since he is the only one partaking, if your boyfriend wants beer, he should put some in the fridge. If he thinks, feels or expects you as a host, lover, love interest, should provide him with beer because he likes beer, you like him and he likes you - he needs to state his expectations rather than being all candy ass about it. Again not words I am really sure a gentleman uses.

The next time he does this – As playfully as possible - Bonus points if you can use Narnia and brewery in the same sentence – let him know he will be looking a long time since you don’t drink beer. Tell him you know so little about beer, you don’t even know where you can buy it legally. And even if someone did hook you up with a connection, you wouldn’t know what flavor to purchase. And you would hate to buy something that would just go bad in the fridge, like last week’s Thai. Let him know if he wants to keep a personal stash (of beer) at your house, you can make some room for that in your life and kitchen.

And who knows? Once you get familiar with what he wants and likes, there might someday just be a 6 pack there for him.

Well Seasoned Opinion

Saucyman – In a recent post you claim "[Seasoning] is a very simple process..." Care to elaborate? – Casting About

By simple, I mean that there is nothing complicated about seasoning. Seasoning a pan is like preparing puff pastry – Everyone thinks puff is this incredible application of artistry and knowledge but in reality making puff requires little in the way of baking skills (in reality, the only prerequisite is the ability to make a piecrust). Likewise, seasoning of a cast iron pan requires no mastery of cooking (or metallurgy); the only essential aptitude needed is the willingness to perform a repetitive, unimaginative task over a period of time.

To season a pan you will need an oven, canola or soy oil (Any product vaguely labeled Vegetable Oil - is soybean oil), a sheetpan (the kind you’d bake cookies on), a pair of tongs and paper towels.

Preheat the oven to 350ºƒ (180 C). While the oven is warming up, clean your pan to remove any debris. If the pan is new, odds are it has a thin layer of wax or machine oil coating it. The machine oil is probably mineral oil – food safe but an emollient, certainly not something you want to ingest. If your pan is from a thrift store or garage sale, well you just want to wash it, because you don’t know where it has been. In either case, scrub, scrub, scrub.

Take a paper towel and rub oil into the pans surface. How much oil? That depends on the size of the pan. Rub the inside and outside of the pan with a generous amount of oil. Once the oven hits 350, place the cast iron on the sheetpan, place both on the middle oven rack of the oven and shut the door. Now leave it alone for a half an hour. Set a timer for 30 minutes and walk away.

When the timer goes off, it is time to add a new coat of oil. The oven is at 350 which makes the pan HOT, hot enough for a good burn so, be careful. Pull out the oven rack, ball up some paper towels, grab the ball with the tongs – like an odd Q-tip of sorts, dip the towels in oil and coat the pan. Work both the inside and outside of the pan covering it with a layer of oil. This isn’t precision work, if this was painting instead of seasoning, it would be closer to painting the back wall of a garage than working on a fresco. Push the pan back in the oven and set the timer for 30 minutes.

Repeat the above instructions after 30 minutes. Now you are at an hour, in another 30 (Now 90) minutes, repeat. And finally, after 2 hours - repeat again. The big difference for the final time is when you push the pan back in the oven, turn the heat off and let the pan cool in the oven. This will take about a couple of hours – leave it alone until you can pick the pan up sans oven mitt.

Your pan is seasoned. Now every time you use your pan and cook with oil you will be lightly seasoning your pan. Conventional wisdom (CW) states that you shouldn’t even say “soap” in front of the pan, let alone use it. CW advice ranges from wiping clean with a paper towel or scrubbing a dirty pan with coarse salt. As far as cleaning goes, soap is not seasoning’s kryptonite, this isn’t like dropping dish soap into an greasy pan and watching all the oil retreat to the side, the oil wasn’t absorbed by the pan, it polymerized - the oil and the metal of the pan reacted with the heat of the oven forming a complex chain of molecules, similar to how plastic is hardened. The only way to remove seasoning is by using an abrasive cleaner or sticking the pan in a dishwasher.

Your Toddy is Hot

Saucyman, What exactly is a hot toddy? Is it supposed to be made with brandy or whiskey? - Mix Master B

Well there isn’t an exact definition - The three dictionaries I consulted agreed on the ancillary ingredients: lemon, hot water and sweetener (sometimes honey; sometimes sugar) but none come out and endorse one spirit over another. A survey of recipes in the Biblosaueca reveals Brandy is the most common alcohol listed, Bourbon whiskey second and Scotch whisky third.

Despite not medaling in this competition, rum seems to have started the toddy race. The hot concoction seems to have been born from the flip/sling/grog/punch tradition that dominated colonial drinking, or at least that is the way Andrew Barr reports in his book Drink; A History of Social Drinking of America. Flips were generally warmed by placing a hot poker – called a flip - into a tankard resulting in bubbling frothy drink, a forerunner of the modern cocktail. Rum, does occasionally warm up - leaving the blender to be mixed in a hot buttered rum, which unfortunately for the dairy and fat lovers, contains no actual butter.

It isn’t really clear when or why toddies and flips officially divorced from each other and became separate entities, but let's pretend toddies went there separate way because they didn’t like being getting repeatedly hit with a flip. Instead, toddies use warm to hot water, heated in a separate vessel, then added to both heat the drink’s contents and dissolve the sweetener.

A toddy doesn’t even need to contain alcohol, a hot cocoa is technically a toddy – containing hot water, sweetener and flavoring. Even less potent alcohols like wine and cider can be considered toddies, especially if they are spiced and sweetened, like mulled wine. Sometimes even using 80 proof bonded liquor, it is easy to make a drink a teetotaler would be proud of, well tolerant of anyway. Alcohol vaporizes at a very low temperature, depending on its concentration, alcohol disappears between about 173 to 200ºƒ (79 – 93 C). With water boiling at 212, it isn’t hard to reduce a toddy’s potency in the mixing process.

Many people recommend hot toddies for colds of the head variety, many more endorse the drink for cold of the temperature variety. For the former, there is no data suggesting toddies fight a viral infection any better than chicken soup, but some believe that the combination of relaxation, sleep and rehydration all help ameliorate cold like symptoms. For the latter, if you aren’t outside and a drink makes you feel warm and comfortable, one isn’t going to do harm.

As to a definitive answer to brandy or whiskey/whisky, I believe brandy is the preferred alcohol for today’s toddy but there is no reason a person couldn’t use Cognac, Bourbon or Scotch if that’s what they are into. I would avoid using spices in a toddy, just because spicing seems like an awful thing to do to a good distilled aged alcohol, even to a less than good brown liquor, but that is just me.

Some add Earl Grey tea, others recommend clove, cinnamon, and/or anise for the mix, I feel quite strongly, drinks should be simple to make - no more than 5 ingredients. More than that and you are going to wind up with something that is going to have 'on a beach' in the title. The most basic hot toddy mixture would go something like this:

2oz Brown Liquor
1-teaspoon honey
3oz boiling water
1 thick wedge of lemon

Choose a tempered cup or glass; coffee/tea mugs are good. Combine alcohol and honey and mix. Add water and lemon wedge, stir with teaspoon used for honey – drink as soon as it is cool enough.

Dine like an Egyptian

Saladman – Why is it the salad days of youth? I didn’t like salad that much when I was younger and considering my taste and budgetary constraints I feel the expression would have been the Taco Bell Value Menu of youth. – Greens

This one has always stumped Saucyman too – Were days of salad a nod to austerity, signifying better morsels will follow? If so, why isn’t the expression the rice and bean days of youth? Were the salad days in question linked to the new growth of springtime, the eternal promise of warmer days and more daylight after a long winter? What if you close your meal with a green salad? Shouldn’t the salad then represent the ability to appreciate the simple pleasures of life, a quality that often accompanies age?

Turns out after years of idle speculation – the best kind – the answer was as close as the bookshelf. The expression Salad Days comes from Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, where Cleopatra speaks of “my salad days, when I was green in judgment”.

The use of green to imply a lack of experience came into general usage a few hundred years before Mr. Shakespeare’s time. Not to get all medieval on you, but as early as 1150, green was being used to describe all things that were new and innocent. The word/phrase ‘greenhorn, green-horn, green horne’ is also loosely associated with food production: Originally used to describe soldiers new to the battlefield, these fresh recruits were named after the incipient horn of freshly slaughtered livestock - later the word came mean anyone lacking experience.

Certain varieties of both tomatoes and apples can be green in color and be ready to eat but more often than not when green is used to describe plants (and hopefully not meats), the word denotes the food is not quite ready for harvest - Specifically, fruit that is not yet ripe is referred to as 'green'. More archaically, green refers to plants or meats in an unpreserved – unsalted, unsmoked - condition as in “Dude, that Cod is green” or whatever the 17th Century Basque equivalent of dude is.

Currently, describing a something as green implies the person or product is earth friendly. Green is now the color of ecology, which is more a banner of conservation and preservation than renewal and freshness.

Later this week we have a new word from the kitchen and following up and the recent post about the joys of cast iron, Saucyman will get specific about how to properly season a cast iron or steel pan.

Not so Slim Picks

Why are Americans getting fat? This is the question that economist Eric Finkelstein and writer Laurie Zuckerman attempt to explain, if not answer in their book The Fattening of America.

It turns out 2/3 US residents are overweight and the number of obese citizens has doubled in a generation for a variety of reasons. So, if you were looking for some sort of Clue type mystery where Col. Transfats did it in the carbnasium with the high fructose corn syrup, this really isn’t the book you want to read.

Actually, despite the thin book being full of information about weight gain, food, diet and exercise, you might not want to read it anyway – The authors’ reliance on the choices fat Uncle Al or slovenly cousin Carl make end up sounding folksier than Sarah Palin trying to explain shades of lipstick for pit bulls or hockey moms - whichever one wears the lipstick, I never did understand the point she was trying to make. Information = good; Style = earnest but you can’t use anecdotes to explain complex theories before you start to sound like you are either dumbing down your findings or end up being a tad condescending. The anecdotal might work really well in lectures and presentation but in a serious book, not so much. Trust the reader, that is all I’m saying.

Anyway, exercise, genetics, diet, environment, affordable diabetes treatments and personal choice all play a role in the growth of the United States or at least its citizens. Finkelstein, the economist, is immersed in the current school of thought that people are rational decision makers, utility maximizers, as the economists like to call them: People make sane choices about what they do to themselves, in this case through their diet. This is true as far as, if I had 6 dollars, hadn’t eaten all day, was tired, ravenous and didn’t want to think about cooking - those 3500 calories from Popeyes start to look better than going to the store and trying to turn those 6 bucks into a filling meal with fresh vegetables.

While I agree with the thought people make the good decisions for themselves, like the Popeyes scenario above, what researchers like Finkelstein never account for is why can you get heavily subsidized fast food but not reasonably priced good food or healthy food. His silent assertion you can’t do anything about the bigger picture, you can only decide to have fast food or not, is sad and defeatist. Even if you don’t think there needs to be a junk food tax like in the UK and EU, the US’s decision to heavily subsidize, corn, soy and wheat ultimately makes fresh fruit and veg more expensive and makes it harder to choose anything but the cheapest food available.

Gary Taubes didn’t try to solve the mathematical problem of the expanding waistline, but did take a look at fatphobia in Good Calorie, Bad Calorie. Taubes, a journalist, takes a look at all the data and makes a pretty convincing case that fat isn’t the cause for weight gain and saturated or not fat does not cause heart disease.

When insulin levels are elevated, we store calories as fat. Carbohydrates, especially the heavily refined fructose (sugar, corn syrup – possibly, maybe artificial sweeteners have a similar effect) raise insulin levels and cause the body to hoard energy. Carbs, not fat, seems to be the culprit.

Taubes’ thesis was controversial - in the bag for Atkins, unscientific, not a doctor - when it appeared excerpted in the NY Times Magazine a few years ago. Don’t believe the hype - That article, like his book is a sane (albeit intricate and detail ladened) tome of ‘just the facts’ which does a lot to explain how come I am hungry an hour after binging on sushi but a meal of a small steak, creamy- rich cauliflower gratin and a green salad keeps me sated for hours.

Gail Borden took a Lac(tic Acid) and gave his mother sweetend condensed milk

Saucetastic, What exactly is sweetened condensed milk, you know the stuff you put in pumpkin pies and what is a better substitute for it milk, ½ & ½ or cream? – Canned

Here is an example of truth in advertising; sweetened condensed milk is just that. Milk is placed in a vacuum (lowering the boiling point) and water is removed from the milk until the volume is reduced by half. This is also how evaporated milk is made – the difference between the two products is evaporated milk is homogenized, sterilized and canned at this point.

Sweetened condensed milk is well, sweetened. A lot of sweetening, sugar is added until the product is about ½ sugar – sweetened is the first word of its name. Heating, even at the low temperatures between 110-140º ƒ (41-50 C), changes the flavor of the milk, evaporated milk can taste a little off; scorched, burnt, curdled - rather than disguising it, adding sugar actually enhances this taste, making the flavor a more palatable - caramel and butterscotchy. That and the high sugar content retards microbial growth.

Both sweetened condensed and evaporated milk are old products. Gail Borden began experimenting with canning milk as early as 1852; going on to make a fortune supplying the Union Army with canned milk and rations during the Civil War. Shortly after the war in 1866, Borden was selling 300,000 gallons of his Eagle Brand Milk a year, the product’s popularity certainly didn’t grow from being an army ration.

Milk has a halo of purity but prior to railroads and industrialization; the advent of the milk carton and pasteurization; the pastoral/Little House on the Prairie image of Pa milkin’ Bessie is a far nicer thought than how milk was produced for urban markets. Before it was a business school concept, the ‘dairy industry’ was vertically integrated with the brewing industry: Cows were kept in urban lots to eat the discarded mash of brewers. Milk and beer were often distributed together and while beer was heated, killing microbes, milk had no such fortune. Animals were kept and milked in unsanitary conditions; milk was packaged without sterilization or pasteurization and distributed without refrigeration. Milk was dangerous, the supply line from udder to customer was the definition of cross contamination and that is when you could get milk, actual milk. These were days before purity laws and government monitoring, so a product labeled milk could have been adulterated with chalk, talc, molasses and flour or other fillers.

Shelf stable milk, even from a can, was an improvement over what was available to most consumers. Travelers who enjoy slightly exotic locales probably understand this a little better than most – milk from a can in southern Mexico or Southeast Asia is the safest option for coffee. In the States, evaporated and sweetened condensed milk remained popular until its peak consumption year in 1945.

Even though consumption has declined by half since 1980, sweetened condensed milk is still popular in cooking and baking. Besides being listed as an ingredient in the pie recipe on the back of a can of pumpkin, it makes a quick and easy flan/caramel custard – sweetened condensed milk caramelizes at a temperature below boiling. Many people peel the label off, simmer the can in water, let it cool and decant a crème caramel – Quick and easy, unless there is air trapped in the can in which case the ensuing explosion will be hard to clean, if it doesn’t cause a trip to the ER.

As far as pumpkin pie goes, although sweetened condensed milk’s fat content is closer to ½ & ½, substitute an equal amount of cream in your pie recipe, the consistency of the pie will stay the same and your pie will be less sweet filling and a far better tasting.

Cast Irony

Saucyman, I'm the proud owner of a beautiful All-Clad fry pan, I find myself using my tried-and-true cast-iron skillet for just about everything. Am I a bad person? --Iron Man

It is quite possible you are a bad person but it has nothing to do with cookware, so don’t get down on yourself (about that). Saucykitchens uses many different kinds of pans: There is a strange heavy pan I inherited from my granny that makes the best popcorn but does little else well; steel pans specifically for crepes; there is an aluminum sauté pan; ceramic coated pan for soups and slow cooked items; stainless All-Clad for sauces but the two pans I use the most are my pressure cooker and my cast iron skillet.

The cast iron pan gets used all the time for 3 reasons. First is my diet, I like bread toasted in olive oil, I enjoy grilled cheese and frequently make bean burritos - I have been on this omelet kick lately, so good, so often – each of my regular meals cook well in cast iron. Second, because the pan is heavy, a small pan weighs more than my lapdog/laptop (they are both light enough to carry and one is ambulatory), but the pan isn't and stays on the stove all the time making it accessible/convenient to use. Finally, because of how it is made and maintained, it cleans up really easy.

Cast iron is mostly iron (Fe) - iron is a very soft metal, to make cast iron, it is hardened with about 8% carbon. The two elements are heated and mixed together then poured/cast into a mold. (As opposed to wrought iron, which is shaped by hand or worked out by hammering and bending.) The pans are then removed from their molds and even though the mold lines are sanded down if you look closely at your pan you can find them.

Iron is soft but heavy: Iron itself is denser than aluminum and structurally speaking, it takes a lot of it to maintain the integrity of the pan. So much metal means the pan can absorb lots of heat. Copper and aluminum dissipate heat rather than absorb it – these fancy pans heat up and cool down quickly, you have to constantly adjust the heat, while iron pans are a bit like a black hole - they just keep absorbing energy. This isn’t so good if you are trying to boil water quickly, but really good if you are cooking and want to maintain a constant temperature.

Even if you can live with the weight of the pan, not all is well with cast iron. Iron, like aluminum, is a reactive cooking medium, which means the metal from the pan interacts with the world around it, particularly food: Iron will leach into food, this is the same dietary iron that comes from red meat and spinach, so it isn't harmful, but you can taste it.

The bigger issue with reactive cookware is it does things like turn butter and cream a very unappealing gunmetal gray and for acidic foods like tomatoes, what is normally a slight metallic taste becomes very pronounced. To mitigate cast iron’s downside and still take advantage of the slow even cooking, manufacturers like Le Creuset coat their pans with an enamel shell.

The other benefit of an outer shell is that it doesn’t need to be seasoned. Seasoning, a misunderstood concept that strikes fear into hearts of novices, is a very simple process of applying a layer of oil over the surface of the pan so that iron, will not react with the oxygen and moisture and rust. The oil polymerizes, yes a word, a word that describes how metal, oil and heat react to form a hardened layer over the pan. This can be done by heating oil, any oil– olive, canola, Crisco, peanut, soy, corn – in the pan over moderate heat. In addition to protecting the iron from rust, seasoning turns cast iron into a virtual non-stick surface, making the pan easy to clean.

Cleaning cast iron pans also strikes fear into the hearts of the uninitiated, but short of going at the pan with an abrasive cleaner and a scouring pad you aren’t going to remove the pan’s seasoning. Contact with soap will not harm the protective coating on the pan, but some of the harsher cleaning agents used in the dishwasher can harm the pan’s finish. But you shouldn’t have to even think about putting the pan in a dishwasher, the joy of nearly non-stick surface covered by a hardened polymer is you don’t need to scrub; it cleans easily. I rub coarse salt into the pan with a paper towel to ‘wash-up’.

Different pans do different things; cast iron does high heat and even temperatures very well. When you are cooking your version of the omelet, the grilled cheese or the burrito, the meals you eat most often, it is good to have a pan that is predictable and easy to clean up each time you use it.

Quin and Tonic

Saucyman, What is quinine? -Ginned Up

Quinine is a white powder made from the bark of the cinchona tree, which is native to the Andes Mountains in Peru and Ecuador. The 25 to 50 foot tall tree would eventually be classified by Linnaeus himself, it was originally referred to as both ‘fever tree’ and ‘Jesuit bark’ - the latter due to its association with The Society of Jesus: The order promoted the bark as treatment for malaria, a disease endemic to Rome and the Vatican at the beginning of the Renaissance.

Malaria (from the Italianate mal aira or ‘bad air’) was believed to be caught by the breathing of humid, heavy air around the swamps of Rome. Malaria is not an airborne pathogen, the disease is actually transmitted by a mosquito, the female anopheles injects a parasite in the blood of the people she feasts upon – inducing a fever running 48-72 hours. Long-term effects of the disease are anemia, enlarged spleen and possibly death.

Quinine works by lessening the severity of the symptoms of malaria – it reduces fever and is a muscle relaxer - reducing the shakes which often accompany the fever. The ground bark also works as a prophylactic against the disease, which is odd considering malaria is not native to Peru where the Jesuits first learned about the healing properties of the tree from the locals.

Quinine is an alkaloid. On the Ph scale, alkaloids are the opposite of acids. And on the taste spectrum they are base, like toothpaste - chalky in texture, only not sweetened so they are bitter on the tongue – generally speaking alkaloids are not prized for flavor. Which is why quinine is often combined with other ingredients to make it more palatable. Mary Poppins was so sure about the alchemy of medicine and sugar she would literally sing its virtues. More stoic Brits, particularly those living in colonial outposts, non-musically added sweetened carbonated water and gin to help the medicine go down in a most delightful way, with the added bonus that a lime twist kept the scurvy at bay.

Despite the Jesuits encouraging people to plant 5 trees for each one they felled for medicine, by the start of WW II the cinchona tree had been over-harvested nearly to extinction in South America: Almost all the fever trees were grown on plantations in Dutch colony of Java, with the actual quinine extracted in laboratories in Holland. By 1941 the Nazis had moved into Amsterdam and Japanese forces had annexed Java, leaving Allied armies without a source of the anti-malarial febrifuge for troops fighting in the equatorial areas of Africa, the South Pacific and in Southeast Asia. After the war, Chloroquine and Mefloquine (Larium) became the preferred anti-malarial drugs, although side effects and disease resistance hamper the effectiveness of the synthetic replacements.

Now no longer used to fight malaria, quinine is pretty much a flavoring for tonic water, Campari and assorted bitters. As it has been for a while; in the 1880s the nearly 100-year-old manufacturer of mineral waters, Schweppes introduced quinine tonic water, later bottled and sold as Indian Tonic Water. When introduced to the US markets in 1953, the company agreed to drop the word tonic from the product since it implied therapeutic qualities.

The last decade has brought either a revival or a birth of improved tonic waters. While drinkers can be pretty particular about the type of gin they want to drink, they have been forced to take chemically harsh, corn syrup sweetened tonics with little choice. Thomas Keller’s Per Se makes its own tonic, as do a few bars here in Portland. Jordan Silbert makes, bottles and distributes Q Tonic – carbonated water mixed from quinine and agave nectar. Stirrings, a Massachusetts based manufacturer of upscale/FooFoo bottled mixers has introduced a triple-filtered tonic and the people who bring us Plymouth Gin are now distributing Fever-Tree Premium Indian Tonic Water made with the felonious sounding “pharmaceutical-grade” quinine.