Won't Ya Fly Free Verse

Congratulations to my brother, Carl Adamshick, on being named the 2010 winner of the Walt Whitman Award. In addition the prestige and major dollars, Carl's book Curses and Wishes will be published in 2010 by LSU Press.

There is a short bio of Carl here on poets.org. Either do to a Midwestern reticence to talk about one's self or a poetic belief that writing a short, interesting Press Release is some how selling out, the bio doesn't tell you all that much.

Instead I'd invite you to read some of the work Carl has done for this blog in the past.  Focusing on the etymology of the kitchen vocabulary, Carl's  5 posts might not be award winning poetry but they are good reads.
Metaphor 
Saute
Garnish
Consomme 
Reduction

Congratulations to Carl on all his hard work and the years he put in to get here - when you work in a room by yourself, never knowing what will become of your efforts, the days are rare when you get recognition for all that you have done.

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300th Post - Happy Blogtenial Saucyman

Last weekend, my friend Trudy, spent fighting a forest fire in the North woods. I spent the weekend lost in my own thoughts, even spending part of my time contemplating the immediacy of fighting a fire. Trudy is out there with a hose, making instinctual, reactive choices of where and how to knock down the flame. If I found myself in a similar situation, I might think of fire as a trope, meditate the thin line between the destructive and productive nature of fire and spend at least a little time affirming that yes, orange is my favorite color, not quite flame orange, even though it would make a great color for a shirt.

Mine is a contemplative life and these are some of the things I have been thinking about lately….

FOMP are vindicated: Friends/Followers Of Michael Pollan can now upgrade their views on corn syrup from opinion to fact - A Princeton study has found that rats, nay lab rats, who have access to corn syrup gained more weight than rats who had access to sugar even when their caloric intake was the same. At some point in the future, this trigger might explain how people can gain weight slurping diet soda.

Like fighting a forest fire, the productivity of a hive doesn’t leave much time for the quiet life of reflection. Last week, the hive-like NY City made beekeeping and hives a legalized activity. Today the NY Times opened its pages to an editorial to a couple of bee experts. Unlike past analysis about what is being called 'colony collapse; has been a tad hysterical – cell phone towers jamming the bees ‘radar’, this piece is sober and even-handed. It is worth the 5 minutes and can be read here.

Red light, green light, EU Stop. The European Union was doing its own bit of consideration – thinking about labeling food packages with a stop light system of coding to let consumers understand the relative healthfuliness of packaged food. Unfortunately, it was an EU set of regulations, so diet soda = green light, apple juice = red (due to calories). The official Saucyline is that individual foods are neither good nor bad, rather overall diets are what should be monitored for health. When regulators and nutritionist try to regulate eating habits one food at a time it makes veins on my forehead pop-out and I sign in relief that the regs were defeated. That feeling of victory is offset by the vigorous campaign funded in both the EU and the US to fight the adoption of these rules. It makes me nervous to side with Chamber of Commerce and trade industry types. Plus I really like visual information, a stop light system of coding would be like having The USA Today on every box of food.

Not really worth the read because nothing is changing but more info by following this link.


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Read These Leaves...

Vietnam, a land I have never been near, yet feel I have visited repeatedly through its cuisine, books and meeting or reading the stories about 1st generation immigrants to the US. As a high-plains, prairie born Midwesterner, it isn’t exactly a kinship to the delta culture that draws me to the land and people yet the bond is there; inexplicable, strong even if it lies beyond my ability to explain it. If I had to approximate what draws me to this country - part of this alliance is based on the tragedy of Vietnam - the colonial burden, the wars, the corruption...that armies, cultures and ideas arrive at its borders with force but the people endure and thrive – that I understand.

Tea, the commodity, seems to be the latest chapter in the way Vietnam engages the world. The same enduring characters are present - greed, ideals, exploitation and expert opinions, all forcing themselves on a country that has its own way of doing things. Despite everything that has happened up to this point, there is a small chance this time, the play will not end in tragedy. 

Tea, the leaf, has been grown and sipped in Vietnam, rather in the country now defined as Vietnam,  for close to 3,000 years. In the mid 19th century, the French established modern tea production on what could kindly be called plantations. In a century the industry had grown to 33,000 acres of tea under cultivation and 3 state sponsored agricultural stations. By 1946 the French abandoned their enterprise with the dual hardships of WWII and the encroachment of communist rule.

India and Taiwan were next to ‘help’. In the first years of India’s democracy, they lent technical expertise for the production of Indian-style black tea, a tea largely unfamiliar to the green tea loving Vietnamese. Taiwan, likewise altruistically set up Oolong production in the central highlands. Then came the Russians, a tea loving a culture, whose investments and machinery helped, well I hate to say modernize in conjunction with the backwardness of Soviet state, but that is the best my personal thesaurus can come up with, modernize production. The US-Vietnam conflict and a post war government that could be viewed both as corrupt and impoverished, definitely exploited by international powers and sanctions, did little to promote the tea harvest. 

In the mid 80’s the communist regime reformed its economic polices. The tea industry was part of this ‘renovation’, which included transferring land to individuals for private ownership and formation of VINATEA to promote and improve the tea industry. A government/private entity, VINATEA manages 60,000 acres of plants, 34 factories and is partnered in a half-dozen multinational ventures.

After 2 decades of investment, the export crop has doubled but there are still problems. Modernization has been difficult and expensive. Vietnam lacks some of the institutionalized knowledge that Sri Lanka, China and India possesses, which makes it hard to process tea leaves internally - adding value to the crop. Acting as its own worst enemy, some growers do not adhere to international grading standards and misrepresent the quality of their product. The country’s export crop is at the whim of both monsoon weather and countries, like Kenya, who dump its crop on the world market driving down prices. This wouldn’t matter so much if the industry was predicated on producing fine grade tea leaves, but it’s brutal if you are selling a lower quality leaves for tea bags or bulk tea that will end up in sugared or diet Snapple.

So international groups of investors and advisers are pushing the Vietnam tea industry to focus on growing premium tea for export. The carrot and stick here are loans and loan forgiveness. According to various sources tea production employs somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 million Vietnamese, so what will happen to these workers when the crop is exported for processing outside the country? Is everyone going to switch to making Nikes and flatscreens?

Are we witnessing growing pains of an industry that will supply tea to meet the growing demand or are we viewing something insidious, an exploitation of a resource and region by outside forces? Wish I had the answer, until then I am buying my tea leaves from Tao of Tea, an entity small enough they can bypass the curious intentions of the International Money Fund and buy processed leaves from small growers and producers. Well that and root for the country I have such an affinity for to forge their own path. 

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Camellia Interuptus

We’ll get back to tea in a day or so. Portland Farmers Market opened their 2010 season on the first day of spring this past Saturday.

There are days when it is easy to love Portland – Saturday, the first 70º day of the year, amazing crowd, amazing food and my first market meal of the year. I went with salmon and broccoli raab/rabe/rapini/rappini/rape. (Not to be confused with Chinese Broccoli) The salmon was cured for 8 hours with a rub of green tea, brown sugar, coarse salt. The raab, picked Friday, purchased Saturday and prepared on Sunday was the freshest, most local veg I have had since last autumn.

So what did I do with this farm fresh produce? Salt and fresh butter? Oyster sauce thinned with a little soy and water. That is right I took the freshest thing I had and combined it with the most processed substance I had in the house. Long time readers remember from the By and Bivalve post, that Oyster Sauce is to oysters as ketchup is to tomatoes, they're in there somewhere but they aren't the main component.

Yet despite being highly processed, it worked. Briny, sweet goodness offsetting a funny plant – a stem like an asparagus, a crown like baby broccoli and leaves that taste as bitter as anything a doctor might prescribe.

Meal 2 – was fresh pasta made with farm fresh eggs, spring morels and a duxelle of crimini mushrooms. Those yolks were so beautiful I nearly wept.  The morels, well tasty, their crowns a sharp contrast to the finely chopped crimini, It was a good food day.

The market will be back every Saturday throughout the year, stop by if you are in Portland.

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Turn it Down

Saucy, All the tea I make tastes really bitter, almost scorched. Am I doing something, or is that just the nature of tea.

Tea is astringent – the leaves are full of stuff that falls on the bitter side of the taste spectrum: A cup of tea contains caffeine, a bitter alkaloid, just one of the many bitter flavoring agents found in tea leaves. There are also bitter amino acids and chlorophyll along with astringent oxidation compounds like glutamic acid. All in all, brewed tea leans heavily towards pucker-inducing flavors.

Even with all those flavor components, it is too easy to enhance those bitter flavors by pouring boiling water over leaves and/or over-steeping. Most tea should be steeped between at low temperatures. The type of tea also plays a factor – white teas and green teas need even less heat than Oolongs and blacks. My fancy pants tea book tells me to brew between 160 and 200 degrees, the knowledgeable Tao of Tea recommends lower temps. Since I believe the number one problem facing the home cook is blasting foods with high heat, I would caution to steep at a lower temp, you can always add very hot water into the brewed tea to heat it to a desirable temp.

And for those who work only with a safety net…when using whole tea leaves, before firing up the kettle, pour 1-2 tablespoons of room temperature water over the leaves to ‘bloom’ the tea. This helps hydrate the leaves and insulates the tea if the water comes in too hot, keeping the steeping temperature an important 5 degrees lower.

Once the water temp is tamed, steeping times are the next important variable to conquer. 2 ½ minutes to 6 minutes depending on the tea, is not much of a guideline. Our friends at Portland’s Tao of Tea  have some pretty good rules of thumb for brewing a better tea. They like the lower water temperature, which I whole-heartedly endorse: A thermometer really helps out with the correct temp, a step most brewers, even the novice brewers who need it the most will skip, so it is better to be a little under than over.

A bonus issue – tea bags contain the shake of the Camellia sinensis harvest, all the stuff that couldn’t get sold as premium – twigs, small leaves, broken leaves it all gets bagged up. Extra surface area coming in contact with hot, possibly too hot water, does give all those bitter compounds a chance to be released into the brew.

I believe I will finish up my tea-cycle of posts next week with the teas of Vietnam. However, I might detour again and write about Kombucha, a word my dictionary defines literally as ‘tea-sponge’. Dirty hippies, fermentation, fungal cultures…I am surprised there isn’t an epidemic of botulism. Added to the mysteries of Kombucha is the Myth of Detoxing the body – BTW why do all these folks worry more about detoxing and not the toxing they are doing in the first place?


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Today is St. Patrick’s Day

We are heading back into the Saucy-archive for today's celebration. There are 2 pertinent posts – Corning Beef – apparently corn referred to a large granule, like a pellet of coarse salt. Last year’s post on cabbage with an implicit promise at the end of it would lead a person to believe that Guinness or green beer or even Jamison’s Whiskey would have been discussed this year.

And those would have all been good subjects – tonight will be a DUI fest, with troopers racking up more drunk driving arrests than any other day of the year. Is that because more people are drinking and driving or because more police are on the roads available to make arrests? A total chicken and egg breathalyzer conundrum.

Instead because I am in the middle of reading and writing about tea along with the fact most of my word-energy is being spent introducing Portland Farmers Market’s new vendors to the Market’s Facebook community. You can read these short pieces here if you Faceboook and these days, who doesn’t?

After this post, I will be writing about Kombucha – have you seen pictures of this stuff on the internets? Truly disturbing. And if everything Kombucha proponents say is true, tomorrow's St. Paddy's revelers might be gulping the stuff down. However, the thought of ‘good for you’, ‘healthy’, ‘detoxing my liver’ are all deeply fascinating food concepts and if I ever figure how to address them in a 500 word post, I will do so. 

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For all the Tea in Agentina

A friend wanted to wager me for “All the Tea in China”. Do I take the bet?

Depends if you can cover it, because it is a hefty amount – slightly over a million tons of tea, which come to think of it, might be a problem to store it if you won. So no, don’t take the bet.

According to the most recent statistics from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, China is still the largest producer of tea in the world, followed by India, Sri Lanka and Kenya. The latter two often fight it out for the title of largest exporter of tea – Sri Lanka, which grows premium tea, wins the contest when the export crop is valued in dollars, Pounds or Euros. Kenya, bests the former Ceylon when the tea is measured in small ‘p’ pounds, tons or tonnes – giving the country a second claim to fame, after being President Obama’s real birthplace.

Both India and China have large tea drinking population – Sure Turkey, the UK, Ireland, Morocco and even Poland drink more tea per capita, but the joy of having billion plus populations, you make up the difference in volume. It is impossible to know exactly how much tea is used domestically in either country but reasonable estimates conclude 80-90% of the tea crop is kept at home. Premium teas are exported to the west and inferior grade teas are imported to make up for the demand.

Other leading tea producers include some surprising names – the need to google/consult an atlas countries such as the African democracy of Malawi, along with more familiar but nations such as Argentina, Iran, Georgia (former Soviet – not peach state), Nepal, Rwanda and South Africa, which due to climate or custom are surprising to see in the list of top tea producers.

Despite the fact that tea consumption grows about 1% annually and well, you know tea is either habit forming or addictive, as a commodity tea is still highly volatile. In the last few years demand has exceeded supply, driving up the price. However all is not good - Political unrest in tea producing nations, changing weather patterns, demands for reform and labor agitation in former plantation economies such as Sri Lanka and population/land use demands in Taiwan and Japan. Then there is the issue of usurpers such as Vietnam, Myanmar and a handful of African growers who don’t abide by international trading, grading and naming standards and will dump inferior teas on the market, driving down prices on the profitable premium teas. (I know, adulteration of teas or spices - who has ever heard of such a thing).

Despite all this, industry is strained enough that governing bodies and NGOs are advising traditional exporting countries to develop new industries to replace tea exports. I am not sure if all this means now is the best time to wager for all the tea in china or if the superior bet is for all the gold being hoarded by Glenn Beck followers.


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A Few on Tea

This week’s post has prompted a couple of tea specific questions, I will answer the questions before I finish up the tea cycle with a post on the tea of Vietnam…

A friend swears there is 10x more caffeine in tea than coffee, yet I am always told a cup of tea has fractions of the caffeine found in a cup of coffee. This paradox is confusing, please help…

Your friend is rationalizing his/her coffee habit: It isn’t 10 times - by weight, black tea has twice the amount of caffeine found in coffee – green tea has about 1.5 times caffeine total as coffee does, putting 8oz of green tea on par with a 12oz can of soda. And those are rules of thumb; Robusta beans contain twice as much caffeine as the connoisseur preferred arabica beans; drip coffee will extract more caffeine than French Pressing the beans. And espresso, whose serving potions are smaller typically use dark roasts that burns off caffeine and its brewing method leaves little time to extract caffeine, as a result your demitasse has about ½ caffeine as your standard cup of Joe.

Caffeine is a drug, hand’s down the worlds most used drug – sorry hemp enthusiasts. It is an alkaloid, like opium and cocaine, which has some researchers in the forefront addiction studies trying to piece where or how alkaloids belong in the addiction puzzle. The science, as we understand it now, tells us that caffeine travels to the brain via the blood stream and it displaces the neurotransmitter, adenosine – a chemical in our brains that slows down nerve impulses. It takes about 15 minutes for caffeine’s effect to begin, 30 to reach its peak and from there it takes over 3 hours for the levels to subside. Go over 350 mg per day and you run the chance of becoming dependant, 6 cups of coffee a day or 3 No-Doz puts a person at risk of heart palpations, insomnia and loss of calcium in your bones, but on the upside it does amplify the effects of the drug. 6000 milligrams at once should be enough to provide a horrible, frightening, hyper-aware death.

As a flavoring component, caffeine gives off a bitter taste. It is just one of 300 flavor compounds found in tea. Also present are chocolate’s narcotically good theobromine  – along with trace elements of fluoride, vitamins, minerals and proteins. Tea leaves also contain the amino acid theanine, which is believed to act as a neurotransmitter, allowing for a person’s relaxed state despite the presence of caffeine – there is a paradox that should [mess] with you. Brewed tea is rich in antioxidant phenolic compounds, materials credited with strengthening artery walls, protecting against cell damage and lowering the risk of cancer. 

Because of this, the taste or the social aspect of drinking tea, it is be the second most consumed liquid on earth after water. Deluxe, premium, rare coffee will set you back about $30 a pound. Good but not great tea will cost twice that - Again with the rule of thumb(s), a person can expect to get 200 servings out of a pound of tea (6,000 individual leaves), so tea ultimately ends up being about 1/3 of the cost of coffee.  



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Tea'd Off

With all the talk of the teabaggers, aka tea party movement, I get confused about their attachment to tea. Do they reject tea in a taxation without representation founding fathers sentiment or do they embrace tea because liberalism represents latte sipping intellectualism?

There are those who claim that the country’s early problems with tea, made coffee the national beverage, but that overlooks some obvious truths - Rum was insanely popular in the Colonial and pre-constitutional periods and that tea in the States was a complicated issue. Yes, the Boston Tea Partiers, where prominent citizens dressed as Mohawk Indians and dumped some 90,000 lbs of tea into the Boston Harbor in December, 1773. Around the same time, tea was seized and it along with the barrels it was shipped in were burned in New Jersey across from Philadelphia. Back in Massachusetts, a crowd so outraged that Weston tavern was purportedly selling tea, they stormed the tavern and ignored the tea, and drank the tavern dry - a cautionary tale about the wisdom of mobs?

John Hancock, patriot and signer of the Declaration of Independence helped arrange credit and loans enabling tea trade for the reviled East India Company. Paul Revere, as a silversmith, was handsomely rewarded and somewhat famous for his hand crafted silver tea service. Robert Morris, who helped finance the revolutionary army, did so by smuggling tea during the war. After the war, Morris sent one of the first ships sailing under a US flag to trade with China – for tea.

By 1789, the US Federal Government was taxing tea – 15¢ per pound of black tea, 22¢ on green tea and the first luxury tax excised 55¢ on a pound of young Hyson, a premium green tea. In 1854, Commodore Perry’s gunboat diplomacy opened Japan for trade - tea and teapots, were 2 principal exports. In 1859, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea company was founded – although a former shadow of itself, A&P is still in business.

Americans still drink plenty of tea - a little under a 1/2 pound per resident - keep in mind you can get 100 servings out of that amount of tea, compared to 16-20 cups of coffee. Although the consumption of green tea has doubled in recent years, 90% of all tea brewed in the States is black and astounding 80% of it comes in the form of iced tea. The UK is the tea sippinest culture in the world, downing about 10 more tea than we do in the states. Coffee is still king, about 9 lbs on average per US citizen nearly 20 times more coffee passes through our citizenry than tea.

Not long ago, Tea Parties were the exclusive domain of little girls hosting their dolls for a sit down or an adult social event with aspirations and cucumber sandwiches. Now they are political rallies that occasionally featuring posters of President Obama sporting a Hitler mustache. I rather attend the little girls party pouring pretend tea out of a pot, the conversation appears to be better there.


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What we talk about when we talk about GMOs

Yesterday, at 5pm, the offices of the USDA closed at the end of their business day. Not particularly notable, the office closes 5 times a week, but March 3, was the last day the USDA was accepting comments on genetically modified alfalfa being proposed by Monsanto.

And of course for a complicated and extremely commonplace issue like Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO), as usual, the conversational tone was fact-based, science/result driven and stuck to the issue at hand. Rather - sarcasm works better in person than print - it was one near hysterical argument after another. To listen to the 2 most polarizing arguments – and there are only 2 sides (again sarcasm doesn't translate to the written word well) either the organics rules are about to be gutted, rendered meaningless or the dirty hippies are trying to make sure everyone starves in the near future.

What is at issue here as always is irrelevant, because the conversation is explosive. The discussion is always about Monsanto’s business practices; fatalistic theories about terminator genes, food allergens & butterfly genocide; corporation's ability to patent existing plants and life; and very little about what GMOs are and how they work.

GMOs are wide spread - Grocer’s Association estimates that 75% of all manufactured foods contain GMO materials. And lets just say that you make all your food from scratch, from raw ingredients that are certified organic (more on the importance of that in a moment). Still when you are out drinking your fair trade margaritas, those corn chips you dip into the heirloom salsa; 89% likelihood they GMO. The Ranch Doritos you, your spouse or child snuck at a party – double GMO – frying oil and corn. That just-add-water entrée you take out of your desk when you forgot to pack a lunch and need to eat, GMO. Yet, you are still alive.

Still want to rail against Frankenfoods? The Hawaiian Islands are the only place where papayas will grow in the US. Unfortunately, it is also home to an aphid that can spread papaya ringspot virus from tree to tree. It takes about a minute to infect a tree, so pesticides are useless. Worse the virus can’t really be detected until the fruit blossoms, then it is far too late for action. Between 1987-1992 a team of researchers used a type of genetic manipulation originally pioneered for soybeans, to a coat the papaya protein the ringspot attacked - preventing the virus from decimating the 50 million pound a year crop valued in the 10s of millions of USDs. By 2003 75% of Hawaiian papayas grown were genetically modified.

Here is another - In the early 1960s, a natural fruit was introduced to the US. Because it was the 60s and because the plant was natural, 1000s of years old as matter of fact, the Chinese gooseberry came with no allergy warnings. It turns out, people, especially those with existing intolerance to bananas, strawberries or latex, so someone who had never had been exposed to the fruit, could be severely allergic to the berries on their first bite. Better known as a kiwi, it is now a food along with natural peanuts that pediatricians caution parents to avoid feeding to their children in at least the first year of their lives.

Being for or against GMOs is a false argument – GMOs are ubiquitous, genetically modified is not a legal term and it is vague enough to include selective breeding techniques, cloning (like potatoes, not humans) and grafting. Organics Rules, which at the time of their adoption, were the most commented on set of rules the USDA ever took under advisement. The resulting standards clearly state GMOs cannot be called organic. By extension, livestock and their milk that are fed GMO alfalfa cannot be organic. Even if the GMO alfalfa wasn't planted or used by an organic farmer, instead their crop was contaminated by a different source.

Short of labeling all products as GMO ala EU standards, if consumers want one arena that is free of GMOs and they believe the organics standards are the safest haven, then make that argument. If Monsanto’s business practices are anti-competitive and brutal to growers who don’t use their seeds, address that issue specifically. Most of all, the issue of GMOs is complicated, nuanced and heavily scientific – read up, form an intelligent opinion not based on how you feel but what you understand. 

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Soup Du Jeer

Until fairly recently, France was the number one overseas tourist destination (The UK has displaced the continent as far as passported travel goes). A century ago it was, unapologetically the place to send young adults to become cultured, the language a necessity. From Truman through Cater Administrations - Paris was viewed as an avant-garde hotbed; the city of lights was thought of as a center of romance, culinary/artistic/intellectual leadership and sophistication. Historically, France was our nation’s first ally and one of our more consistent partners through the centuries, something has happened - now the prevalent view is that the French are a bunch of cheese eating surrender monkeys.

What changed? Maybe us. With our reverence for athletic, military and industrial might nowadays intellectuals, artists, style makers are thought to be the people who couldn’t cut it as CEOs and entrepreneurs. And there is this theory about the homogenization of American culture – the further we get away from our immigrant roots, the more the ideal of a far off culture becomes. 2 or 3 generations lacking a grandparent who spoke a native tongue, who grew up listening to stories about the hardships of the old country - with no direct connection to a homeland, the people, place and customs become mythologized – this idea does much to explain the popularity of Riverdancing outside of Ireland.

It also helps explain the animus of toward the French. Other than Chef Boyardee there just aren’t that many Franco-Americans around to celebrate all things French. There is something else – as the American culture races between both the high and low, The French appear to be quite satisfied with what aspires to be good. That ideal along with Nice olives, Dijon Mustard and the films of Danile Auitel is something I can revere. And whatever your feelings about the country, French Onion Soup is something we can all agree upon.

4 oz butter
6 large onions (red, white, yellow or any combo), thinly sliced
1 pinch of salt + 1 Tablespoon soy sauce

½ cup sherry or Madeira
6 cups stock – Chicken, veg, beef, mushroom all work real well here.

The leaves from 6 parsley stems
The leaves from 4-6 thyme stems
2-4 Bay leaves
¼ balsamic vinegar
Black pepper

Croutons – 6 Slices of bread – 4 oz of shredded Gruyère, Emmenthal or Swiss cheese.

Choose a pot with a large surface area. Slice onions and add to pot with butter and salt and soy sauce. Your heat is low. Thomas Keller of the French Laundry fame writes that it takes 4 hours to brown his onions. It takes time – not expertise, talent or even too much attention beyond the occasional stir, but it takes time to develop the rich dark color and flavor from the onions. Give this two hours, the payoff is worth the effort and once the onions are done the soup is pretty much all over.  

And much can be done in two hours – make stock, prepare the croutons by slicing bread, shred the cheese, placing the cheese on the bread and closely watching as you broil until the cheese gets all melty and fine. Chop the parsley and thyme leaves. Drink a beer, call a parent, be mindful- a watched pot will cook onions - just not excitingly. 

It is okay to deglaze the bottom of the onion pan with the Madeira or stock periodically. It helps get the fond up off the pan and on to the onions, keeps the temperature of the pan down and condenses the flavor of the onions. Just keep in mind you are sautéing the onions not poaching them – a little moisture, a little stirring.

When the onions have reached the desired brownness, add stock, stock bay, parsley, thyme, balsamic, and pepper. Simmer for 10 minutes – ladle in bowls top with jumbo cheesy crouton and eat.


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