Fire, Hot Burgers on the Fire

Fire, it vexes me.




I selected the music because it was half way between a 4th of July Sousa march and Benny Hill, thanks to theThe Swing Ninjas 

The Historical Hamburger

In the 6 months since I have visited a restaurant or food cart, I have really been missing hamburgers. Well cheeseburgers – blue cheese, sharp cheddar, melty jack - the specific cheese doesn’t matter as much as its very presence. I won’t cook hamburger indoors, it throws grease everywhere and makes my home smell awful for about a week. Bacon, which is fattier/greasier, somehow makes my house smell good (Like Duvall’s napalm, the smell of bacon in the morning is full of promise).

Burgers; Popular Before Warhol Popped them

Before the restaurant abstinence, I averaged about 3-4 burgers a year over the last 10 years, a far cry form the 100-140 burgers per year Americans average, I hate to think of the person who is offsetting my consumption – the shredded iceberg is more of a garnish than a legitimate source of fiber. Now with the 4^th, a holiday predicated on cookouts, around the corner my burger instinct is kicking in.

People like to think of the burger as a post WWII food, as realized by Richard & Maurice McDonald, but the hamburger or the Hamburg steak was featured on Delmonico’s menu as early as 1831. The first iteration of the burger would have been something more similar to Steak Tartare, raw, hand-chopped beef with onion juice and seasonings served sans bun.

Americans have a bipolar relationship with immigration - we are a nation of immigrants that by and large are contemptuous of those immigrating. There’ve been 6 major waves of immigration in the US (the current wave of Latino settlement is probably the 7^th). Of those 6 mass resettlements to the US, the German immigration in the late 19^th Century went the most smoothly. Germans were viewed as industrious and “clean” (and maybe not so coincidentally usually Protestant). A good portion of German émigrés were 2^nd and 3^rd sons who came to the US with money to start their own farms and businesses. Unlike the Italian or Jewish waves, the Germans and their cuisine, which seems like an oxymoron to our sophisticated millennial palates, was never as suspect as the heavily spiced foods of the Euro-brethren. Meat based items like frankfurters or hamburgers were more likely to be accepted in our Anglo based foodways more readily than pasta.

By the end of the 19^th Century, the hamburger sandwich was being advertised. Many stories surround the “invention” of the hamburger in a bun. Always be suspicious of origin stories: people all over the world had been eating meat out of bread long before the Earl of Sandwich. With Euro foods, the origin story generally involves nobility a duke/general/Hapsburg eating something and it was named after them. In America, the origin involves an enterprising person of humble background (sometimes an immigrant) invents a new way of doing something – in 15 minutes of research I found 8 different inventors of the Hamburger Sandwich. I find it hard to believe only 8 people thought to put beef and bread together. 

More on the Hamburger this week, including exclusive* video footage of me grilling and a continuation of the theme - the burger from the jazz age to the Drive thru.

* Not really exclusive at all

Year of the Sandwich

You don’t write a lot about restaurants, yet you live in Portland, the Mecca of fine dining, food carts, and hole-in-the-wall eateries. What gives? What’s the last meal you ate from a restaurant?

My New Year’s resolution was to see how little I could eat out in 2011. I really don’t even have a real reason for doing this – I’m not mad a restaurants, although there was a very rubbery, greasy to-go order of Pad Thai that made me question if 75¢ worth of ingredients was worth the 10 bucks I shelled out for it. But my goal wasn’t to save money or reduce caloric intake, it was more of a curiosity to see if it was possible in a society where 50% of all food dollars are spent at restaurants to not eat out.

Although I have been a typical American, spending half my food budget eating out, I wasn't anywhere close to 50% when I vowed eat in for all of 2011. Three years ago, coinciding with my earnings getting downsized, I quit getting coffee to go. A decision solely based on money, for daily black coffee I easily spent a minimum of $25 a week. That’s right $1200 a year. While making coffee at home is a conscious choice, the choosing to cook almost all my meals at home was more organic. I enjoy cooking, it is calming, occasionally challenging, possesses the perfect combination of action and thought, plus I'm good at it.

By the time I decided to try home-cooked for a year, I had pretty much whittled away fine dining from my out of the house activities. Some of that has to do with money, but not all: I have no problem with splurging on a good meal. A meal is the whole endeavor – a magical triangle of ambiance, service and food. As good as the food is in Portland, the service is equally bad. Good service, fine dining to counter service at a Bbq is universal - eating a meal where music isn’t blasting, table conversation isn’t interrupted by staff or noise, where your wait-staff is confident and competent instead of servile, chatty, or only to be found when it is time for the check. Hell, the food could be bad and I would still pay for the experience of someone bringing me hot food and taking away dirty plates that I don’t have to clean – that never happens at home, and that alone is a treat. By in large, the quality of service in Portland pales next to the quality of food and ingredients.

At the close of 2010, the only food I was ordering out were the things I couldn’t produce at home for cheaper or better at home: Wings, burgers (and their attendant fries) and Pho. I haven’t gone out for breakfast in years; wait 35 minutes for a 9 dollar waffle, I can’t think of a more frustrating way to begin a relaxing weekend. Pizza, $20+ and an hour wait, no thank you. Despite the local Thai place having the strategic advantage of being 150 feet from my porch, they couldn’t make good food in under 30 minutes, so I started making my own Thai.

December 30, 2010, I ducked into Fire on the Mountain, horrible name, great wings, I ordered 9 wings, a side of deep fried tater tots and a pint of Rainer and haven’t had a meal in a restaurant since…to be continued.

Carb-a-nation Nation

Never too Soon

Soda has been dancing around the news lately. Researchers examining The Nurse’s Health Study, a long-term study that tracks data from over quarter million nurses over the last 35 years found new correlations between soda drinking and nurses. For the soda results they tracked 9,000 nurse participants for 8 years and found:

• Drinking a soda a day is going to add 2.5 pounds to you a year, that is 10 pounds each presidential election.

• A soda a day does not keep the doctor away, one or more sodas or sugared fruit drinks makes the drinker twice as likely to develop type 2 diabetes. 

• If you go up to 2 sodas a day, you are 40% more likely to suffer heart disease.

The study was unable to name soda as the culprit of all this activity, because people who drink sodas probably have some bad habits - like sedentary habits, snacking excessive Teevee watching and severe lack of exercise. On the upside, nurse-soda drinkers probably don’t spend their truncated life they have left scolding other people about drinking soda and claiming corn syrup is the devil incarnate.



In Atlanta, home to Coca-cola and the Center For Disease Control, some interesting facts were released this week: 1 out of 4 teens drink soda everyday. Even though water, milk and fruit juices are the most popular beverages, 63% owned up to drinking energy drinks, sugared sports drinks, and sweetened coffee.

Horrifying? My teen diet wasn’t exactly centered on kale, brown rice and Bragg’s Amino Acids. Plus that 63% is actually down from 84% in the 90s. A separate study finds that access to vending machines may influence beverage choices and some early evidence suggests removing vending machines from schools may lower pounds on the student body.



Finally, Philly is trying to enact a soda tax again. Philadelphia Mayor Nutter is back with his crazy tax the soda scheme. Last year when the sin tax went down in a fiery defeat, it was pitched as an anti-obesity bill. This time around its for the kids, a revenue for a school system that is over 600 million in the red.

The problems with the new soda tax: at 25¢ a can - a pretty serious add-on. The tax is for the municipality of Philadelphia, so people can and will go shop in the burbs, which will lower the city's revenue. The industry is up in arms, viewing the soda tax as class warfare, an attack against a small pleasure and an outright assault against the middle class and poor.  Cool; well-connected, right-leaning lobbyists are expressing concern about the nation’s poor. I'm sure the poor’s access to health care is next on their agenda as soon as they thwart the attack on individual freedom that is a soda tax.  

I don’t entirely disagree with the industry on this issue, taxing an item isn’t going to prevent obesity or suddenly foster health, but there is something to be said for the honest argument for revenues, especially for schools. As long as the state is taxing my beer and booze, I can’t cry if another beverage, a beverage I enjoy from time to time (even if I don't live in Philadelphia) is subject to a similar treatment.

Taste Like

If the tomatoes are alright what is the most f [messed] up thing available in grocery store –

Kale. All bitter and green. Half leaf, half woody stalk it is one [messed] up veg.

Just kidding, chicken. Easily, the chicken.

There are more chickens in the world than there are people. The US produces 7 billion chickens annually, which is pretty good considering neither the domestic fowl, Gallus domesticus nor its wild cousin Gallus gallus, is native to the Americas. We made up for lost ground by developing the American Cobb, a bird, essentially with crosses and ‘improvements’ is what served up today.

Pacino Working His Magic

Trivial trivia: the Leghorn is an important breed for egg laying. Developed in Italy during the Mid-19^th Century, the Leghorn is still an important fowl because of its white eggs, high output and feed to egg conversion ratio. This means Foghorn Leghorn, cartoon rooster and inspiration for Al Pacino’s accent in his Oscar winning turn in The Scent of a Woman (Hoo-ha) (pretty ironic since that role is all ham). Foghorn had all the more reason to bluster since he could neither lay eggs or fertilize valuable eggs. He, Foghorn, not Pacino, should really be on the cover of a Susan Faludi book about marginalization.

Anyway, in the mid 19^th Century, ‘Hen Fever’ overtook the US, as amateur breeders took to improving the domesticated fowl, which up to that point, was a scrawny, slow growing bird. By 1849 an exhibition gathered over 1,000 different breeds. A century later, the post war economy worked to produce bigger, quicker growing breeds. Growers and producers were successful in their goal, breeding a bird that grew quickly 4 lbs. in 8 weeks.

They were also pretty successful in breeding most of the flavor out a bird that didn’t really have reputation for being all that flavorful to begin with. Added to the lack of flavor, industrial chickens are cooled in water adding about 12% water weight to of a supermarket chicken. European and Halal birds are air dried, intensifying the bird’s flavor.

On top of diluting the bird’s flavor, the water bath pretty much guarantees all chickens are exposed to all the germs of other birds and that is assuming that they hadn’t already picked up microscopic bugs from sharing such cramped quarters with other birds, conditions are so awful, I will not speak of them here. The USDA reports that most supermarket birds have been contaminated with campylobacter bacteria. Other reports most birds have been exposed to salmonella between shell and supermarket, a fact that has allowed lobbyists and such to claim salmonella is natural.

There are various urban legends about chicken – KFC dropped chicken from its name because the birds aren't legally chicken, because their breasts are so large chickens can’t procreate and eggs must be mechanically fertilized. It was actually the fried that KFC wanted to get away from and there aren’t too many domesticated animals that naturally copulate, of course large chicken producers aren’t going to leave reproduction to something as chance as bird on bird action. Despite what Foghorn Leghorn may boast. 

A Book I Won’t Be Reading

Wild tomato on right; let's return tomatoes to natural state

"Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit”, is a book that I won’t be reading. I could barely make it through a rather softball interview with author Barry Estabrook at Salon. I like Barry’s blog, politics of the plate and I check into see what Salon is thinking multiple times a week, so I’ll have to say we just don’t see eye to eye on this. I'd recommend Arthur Allen's Ripe for a better take on the same subject.

My problem  begins with the subtitle: Modern industrial agriculture. Well what other kind is there? Sure there’s small-scale farming and direct market sales (farmers markets) happening all over the US. With the average age of a farmer around 60 and the census doesn’t total the numbers of farmers anymore, small-scale agriculture is a vital training ground for the next generation of farmers. Culturally we need this type of farming to be successful but keep in mind there’re 5,000+ Farmers Markets in the US, 4000 Walmarts and nearly as many Krogers. Plus Safeway, plus Whole foods, Trader Joes and 1000s of co-ops. Working 15 to 150 acres of land just isn’t going to supply the modern industrial food distribution machine in the US.

In the salon dot com interview, Mr. Estabrook either scolds or cautions people against eating tomatoes out of season. Most tomatoes are grown for processing (sauces & ketchup), canning (canned tomatoes) and restaurants (burgers and salad bar). Those categories account for 93% to 95% of all tomato production. Processing and canning are by their very nature, seasonal. Restaurants, which account for 4% to 7% of tomato sales are the real culprit for creating a market for out of season fruits that are sold like a veg. Fast food burgers could live with out a fresh tomato in January, not that many people would notice.

As for the contention that we’ve collectively ruined the beloved iconic tomato, a few counterpoints: They weren’t always beloved, we are eating more fresh tomatoes than ever before and there is a huge investment in breeding and greenhouses to deliver tasty tomatoes. It took about 300 years before tomatoes were regularly grown in ITALY. In the early days of this republic, the tomato was viewed with suspicion – because of health dangers and because it was a food for foreigners. It wasn’t until after the Civil War that tomatoes became a common item in the American diet. Then as now, most tomatoes were canned and then as now, growers built greenhouses, relocated to warmer climes and worked to extend the season. Currently we eat 90 pounds of tomatoes per year, per person - most canned or processed, that still leaves about 10 lbs of fresh per US resident. That eclipses what we ate at a purported more idyllic time. If I need a tomato when there is snow on the ground - the greenhouse/hydroponically grown tomatoes are really good. And the tiny supersweet cherry tomatoes, bred and grown in Mexico, are always good any time of the year – And gasp! I trust their flavor to be consistently good more than a random ‘heirloom’ tomato grown locally.

At a time when growers and grocers are working to provide customers with more, better tasting tomatoes than at any point in the last 35 years, it’s just cliché to complain about tomatoes. As for industrial agriculture, yeah the system isn’t sustainable but do you really think by only eating seasonal tomatoes, you are going to decentralize distribution? Due to their sheer purchasing power, working with McDonalds to get them to use only tomatoes grown in season or within 500 miles of a franchise’s location is going to effect more change more rapidly. 

My visceral reaction to the book’s premise was also influenced by the finger wagging of the book’s blurbers, Ruth Reichl and Corby Kummer. Paternalism is alive and well. Overfed journalists who can most afford to eat any way they want are speaking out against ‘modern industrial agriculture’ rather than using their influence, affluence and intelligence to make sure everyone has access to healthy, affordable food. Now go cash your check paid for by advertisements placed by multinational processed food manufacturers. While you’re at the ATM, Mr. Estabrook can start his next work, “Damn kids: How their ipods and hiphop and playstations are ruining my buzz.”

Cherry Bomb

The appearance of the cherry crop at the grocery store marks a happy day in Saucyland. Easily the greatest day of the year unless its asparagus season and until peaches arrive: Short term memory and seasonal tastes equal many happy food days. Seasonal for sure, but the cherries at the store are Californian, not local despite being a welcome sight, local season is 2-3 weeks away when the Californians show up.

I tend to think of California as a Mediterranean climate and I don’t think of cherries as being part of the Greek-Roman-Ottoman-Egyptian history that dominates western thought. I just assume the fruit hails from the higher latitudes – the low countries and Germany. I am wrong on both parts, California is the 3^rd largest state in the US, its 770 mile length is home to dozens of microclimates, 45% of the land is covered by trees. And equally embarrassing, the wild cherry’s epicenter is around Greece and Turkey.

We’ve covered the cherry before here. And I wrote a recipe for my favorite summertime dessert, clafoutis here. So today is a few odds and ends and leftovers.

My idea of processing

The season is fleeting, 65% of sweet cherries and 99% of the tart cherries are processed and preserved. About twice as many acres are devoted to sweet as tart cherries, in part because sweets fetch 4x’s the price as the tart cherries. This is either because we collectively, culturally have a sweet tooth and are willing to pay for it or tart cherries can be mechanically processed, while the sweets are hand picked.

Usually the tale of fruit is that its bred for transport and shelf life, not flavor. The cherry’s workhorse variety, the Bing, is actually pretty tasty. Its drawback? Rainfall close to harvest causes the skin to crack (at worst) or blemish making them useless for freezing and preserving, leaving only an orchard of bird food. BTW – sweet cherries are known as Prunus Avium, the avium refers our winged friends who love the crop more than I do. Looking out at a drizzly day so close to the local harvest and I worry the farmers might have readied their trees for bird food.

I like them out of hand but heating intensifies the cherry’s flavor. This isn’t an opinion but a fact, the 3 essential flavors benzaldehyde (almond flavor), linalool (floral components) and engenol all become more pronounced at low temperatures. Some argue the merits of leaving the pits in when cooking as to create a stronger almondy taste. I think such people hate teeth and want to see guests visit their dentists. Add Amaretto to boost the almond flavor, almonds are a distant relative to the cherry but Amaretto is flavored with apricot pits, a fruit that's a sibling to the cherry. Or possibly they’re cousins since they can be crossbred without icky results. Anyway it's a way to keep it in the family and not risk a trip to the dentist. 

We’ll have a few words on tomatoes next and then back to your questions.

   

Choke Point

Tell me about artichokes. How do you like to eat them? Choker

Artichokes are the spiny edible flower of a thistle that was originally native to the Mediterranean. They seem to have been available in antiquity but the plant probably would've been dramatically different than the globe shaped, scaly plant we would recognize today. Most likely they would have resembled its parent plant, the cardoon. More probable, the prized part of the plant would have been an edible stem. When the leaves were ingested, they were brewed into a liquid and ingested to stimulate bile – 1 of 4 humors that needed to be kept in balance for health.

The Ruffle Adds 10 Pounds

The artichoke, the globe, that we know and love or some of us love, was first documented 1520 in Sicily. Possibly brought to Italy by North African traders, possibly propagated on Sicily – Sicilians like to claim the plant as their own and there is a closely related wild thistle found on the Island. By the end of the century, the globe artichoke had traveled east to France with Catherine De Medici. Who apparently almost killed herself eating a combination of artichoke and chicken livers – the combination of rich, fatty food and a diuretic ≠ good. I don’t remember Catherine being a svelte woman, Sofia Coppola can reboot that image when she does the biopic, but that had to be quite the binge for the Queen of France.

Artichokes were never big in England, they gained some foothold as the French fled to the British Isles during various revolutions, but the fad left with the French. Surprisingly, they were big in the colonial and early US - a population made up mostly English émigrés or at least culturally English. And not just Francophiles Jefferson and Franklin; Martha Washington had recipes for artichokes in her household cookbook and wealthy Virginians enjoy artichokes until the epoch of the Civil War.

Although the crop lived on in the French influenced Louisiana, the plant was an oddity in the US until Italian immigrants began cultivating the plant in California at the turn of the 20^th Century. 1904 a train car full of chokes departed for NYC to supply the city’s artichoke lovers. By 1920, canning artichokes was an industry in Salinas, California, which is still artichoke central in the US – 100% of the commercial crop is grown, cultivated and packed in California.

Baby artichokes aren’t a special breed tweaked through selection to produce smaller heads, they are the secondary plants that mature after the main head is chopped off. Artichokes produce 2 separate crops a main spring crop and secondary fall harvest.

I like my chokes with Aioli. Gratin with baby chokes, potatoes and breadcrumbs is good, but anything with cream and broiled breadcrmbs is pretty satisfying. One of my references dryly understates “[The artichoke's] diversity of edible and inedible parts poses a unique challenge for a cook”. Even with a pressure cooker, I am sometimes reluctant to put the time in preparing a choke for dinner. Like mushrooms, the picking, cleaning and cooking use more calories than they restore. So canned chokes with goat cheese on a grilled cheese would be how I eat most of my artichokes.