The Omnivorous Fish

I ordinarily wouldn’t post comment spam, especially incorrectly coded comment spam, but I thought it was pretty funny that I got comment spam in Italian.

Besides, it’s not for porn, so here it is.

I have been unpacking a lifetime’s worth of kitchen this week, for the second time in less than a year. In some ways it’s exciting, some depressing, but mostly it’s disturbing, how much of this crap I own. Part of my problem is that I can’t throw anything away. I have dozens of old ice cream cans that will be great for sauce when I open a pizzeria someday. I have a 30 quart mixer bowl. I don’t own a thirty quart mixer. I have never worked in a place that had a 30 quart mixer. 5, 20, 60 and 80, but never 30. Why do I have this bowl? Your guess is as good as mine. Somebody gave it to me, and I might need it some day.

That said, when Noah heard the weather report, he asked me to handle the knives. Here is the little knife management system in place in my kitchen, holding maybe 8% of my knives.

Knives On Magnetic Strip

Notice the darker, stained-looking knives at the top. Those are 100% carbon steel. They turn black. They rust. They discolor acidic foods, especially if they’re not broken in. They require a lot of attention. They also take an edge that you could shave with. If you have to fillet fish all day, you can see the difference.

You’ll notice the difference compared to the more standard chef’s knives below them. The top 4 have slender, cylindrical bolsters (the part of the knife between the blade and the handle) that are all metal, which make you hold a knife in a different way than the knives below them. I find this shape very comfortable for repetitive work, which some people think I am nuts for. Those are all made by companies called Sabatier, (suh BAH tee ay, click that link if you’re into knives), which became a sort of brand for this style of knife: basically triangular with a barely sloping curve to the edge, cylindrical bolster, tapered handle. However, several companies originating in Thiers all made basically the same knife, thus Sabatier-K, Sabatier-Lyon, Sabatier-Elephante, Sabatier-Enfer, etc (that last one means ‘hell’ from the temperatures the guys who worked the forges had to deal with). These knives were all individually ground by hand by guys who literally worked lying on their stomachs so they could see up close what they were doing.

Want to know something crazy about these knives? They were my tools when I was pro. Yup. That’s right. The 12” on top was made 40 years before I was born, and I cut my teeth on those dinosaurs. Everyone thought I was crazy.

In my experience, there are 2 kinds of kitchens when it comes to knives: places where all the knives are provided, and places where there is a box of scary dull knives that even the dishwashers don’t want to use. I have worked in both kinds of places, and was happy to use Forschener or Dexter knives with all the other kids, and I was happy to bring my own. When everyone is using personal equipment, however- or in a meat shop where different guys are caring for their own provided equipment- it becomes helpful to have a little insignia on your stuff. Some people use a little stripe of colored tape. Some use a little stamp to indent initials or a mark on the handle or blade. Some people modify the handles in some way that’s unique, this last one being most common among butchers, who just walk over to the saw and take a slice off the handle or something.

Handle Cuts

Notice how the bottom knife has an additional notch cut into the back of the handle. That’s from moving into a shop where someone was already using the slice-off-the-end motif.

Handle Notches

This mark is a little more subtle, and if you look carefully on the middle knife, you can see my initials, JC, stamped into the handle (Fish is a nickname).

Something you may have noticed, none of these knives are Henckels and only one if Wusthof, and, the Wusthof is older than dirt, I don’t even think they make those anymore. It’s the first black-handled knife above the white-handled ones, and it has a very flexible blade that I used to use for fish a lot. I also almost took my thumb off with it when someone thought it would be funny to pick up and drop the end of the piece of ziplite I was working on (a giant cutting board) while I was cutting fish with it. You’ll notice a kind of awkward curve to the tip of the blade. That’s because it’s been ground down, since the original tip bent so severely when it hit the wall near the person who thought the ziplite dance would be funny. Asshole.

As I was saying, most of those knives are needlessly expensive, needlessly heavy and often have very wide blades that are awkward for doing fine work. Forschener is a division of Victorinox, of Swiss Army Knife fame, and you can get one of their knives that will take a frightening edge for 50 bucks or less. They are stamped, not forged, which means a knife-shaped piece of sheet metal gets sharpened, rather than a big piece of steel getting ground down. What does this mean? Not much, unless you’re doing really heavy bone work with them, and even then, I’ve broken Wusthof knives doing bone work, and the Forcheners come with a lifetime guarantee.

I was going to go on a tirade about ceramic knives, but you know, some people just really like them, so who am I to say anything about it? They’re not practical for restaurant or meat shop use, since they can break too easily, or for me, really, since I still treat my equipment like I work in a restaurant, but they get razor sharp and stay that way for a long time. I just think they look silly.

So there was this article in the Times yesterday that everyone saw, no doubt, about people freaking out trying to outdo one another at dinner parties. This is the kind of thing that is making me flee new york.

Having people over for dinner should be about fellowship and a decent meal. And while we should all have the presence of mind to be responsible omnivores, criticizing the ingredients people are nice enough to feed to you, or their provenance, is rude and counterproductive.

And for all those people who want to talk about organic this and biodynamic that, insisting that olive oil come from a conventional farm in far away Greece, when there are legion organic olive oils coming from (6000 miles closer) California is not only moronic, but hypocritical, and you don’t deserve to come to my house for dinner.

Coffee, generally, is served hot. I forgot that important point for a moment and slugged back a big gulp of fresh latte. Bad move.

Anyway, I was just listening to the radio where someone was making a point about how the professional music industry isn’t really in danger of extinction the way people say because someone sitting in their bedroom isn’t the same as a professional musician. What a concept.

Not every asshole with a stove is a chef. I am sick to death of the misuse of the word chef. I was looking at a resume today where someone had listed their position at one job as “chef.” If you look to the details, he was really the vegetable guy, or entremetier. At another place, he listed chef and was a commis, which is basically an apprentice. Not everyone who puts a pan on a stove is a chef. Rachel Ray is not a chef. Ditto Nigella Lawson. Neither, even, was Julia Child. A chef is a professional who runs a professional kitchen. The word is more like “Captain” than “engineer.” In German and French, and to a lesser extent Italian, the word simply means “boss.”

Having a white coat does not a chef make.

First, I’d like to apologize to people who I know have been checking the blog and not finding new content. I promise to keep the content coming more regularly, as I appreciate your patronage, especially my blogging heroes who stop by. I appreciate your time and your comments.

Second, to whomever has decided that boting my site with a bunch of porn ads is good for the world, I hope you get “Georgia Pacific” stamped on your head and dropped in a pit full of rabid beavers, you spineless, bottom-feeding turd. Everyone can thank this person for their comments having to be approved now.

Last but not least, I get home on Monday, and so hopefully the restaurant content will be supplemented with more cooking and agriculture comment. There are farming surprises in store, so stay tuned!

Sorry about the longtemps between posts, we have been really busy and there hasn’t been much to write about. This post has set off an idea for a book- The Agent may never forgive me.

I’m not going to talk about how much I dislike the website Chowhound; it doesn’t matter. What does matter- for our purposes- is my incomprehension that anyone who cares enough about food to write about it would write the article I saw on Chowhound yesterday. In it, the author lauds the strides made in the science of artificial flavors. This includes natural flavors, but in reality, everything is natural, and since it’s all made or extracted in a laboratory, it’s all artificial. Maybe what they should be called is extrapolated flavors. Extrapolate means taking a guess at something based on a known quantity, like how to make a monkey taste like a banana.

The point is, the whole notion of extrapolated flavors is disingenuous and works against everything good food ought to be. A great meal, almost by definition, is composed of foodstuffs close to their natural state, the furthest away being preserved with other edible items, like salt, vinegar, sugar or (breathable, if not eatable) air. What is good for us about institutionalized foods? What is good for us about stabilizers, chemical preservatives or other additives that merely mimic the taste of wholesome food? The author of the Chowhound article talks about the ethereal experience of unnatural coconut, almost as if the experience is impossible without scientific intervention. Has this person ever tasted a homemade tom ka? A Senegalese coconut flan? For god’s sake, has the man had a slice of German chocolate cake made with freshly grated and toasted coconut? Does that plastic coconut in the bag from the supermarket, covered with icing sugar taste like coconut? No, of course not. Crab meat made out of whitefish tastes like whitefish, not like crab. If you want to taste coconut, maybe you should try eating coconut.

I often hear people say ‘McDonalds has the best fries.’ McDonalds fries, admittedly, are pretty good. They have a team of scientist putting god knows what in them to make sure of that. Do you know how their fries got to be the standard that had to be recreated in a laboratory? Beef tallow. High-tech, huh? If you buy a dense, low-moisture potato, Idaho or russet, for example, and cut it one-quarter inch square by the length of the potato and then fry it slowly in half beef tallow and half peanut oil, until the potato is cooked through, and then drain them, and then fry them again at a higher temperature, you’ll have some of the best fries going right in the privacy of your own home. ‘But, beef tallow,’ you say, ‘that’s so unhealthy.’ Yeah, well, so is eating at McDonalds. Go for a freakin’ walk afterwards.

Processing food strips it of its vitality. It strips vegetables of their urgent greenness and meats of their wholesome character. A wet, paper-white, soft piece of pork, clad in styrofoam is a sad, unhealthy thing to eat, but in American supermarkets, it’s all you’re likely to find. Removing things from the context of where they are grown and the seasons they are grown in distances us from our food, contributes to pollution and the crisis/addiction we have with fossil fuels, reduces our foods’ nutritional value and makes us ready targets for bioterrorism and natural disasters. We simply cannot afford to continue to eat the way American business wants us to. McDonalds wants centralized processing of identical disease-resistant potatoes and fast, cheap slaughter and fabrication of meats that are byproducts of a cruel and hormone-ridden industrial dairy system. Monsanto (one of the world’s largest agritech firms, and member of my Agri-Axis of Evil, along with ConAgra and Archer Daniels Midland [even though they give money to PBS]) wants to give it to them. Sysco wants to distribute it and Aaramark wants to serve you whatever McDonalds doesn’t use at the stadium or airport or crappy hotel restaurant.

This is the reality of the flavor industry. It isn’t a geeky guy with three housewives trying to perfect instant banana pudding. The author wants us to go along for the ride that preservatives and flavor agents are a natural part of the way we should be eating, but we shouldn’t buy it. This lax attitude that we should just accept what the industry puts in front of us disguised as food is no different from believing everything our government tells us about terrorism. It is absolutely not natural to tear open a package every time you eat. It is not natural to eat asparagus in January (in the US, anyway). It is not natural to have one variety of corn or rice or potato account for 95% of the crop in the country.

If you haven’t read the article, the weakness of the author’s arguments is no more annoying than in the following summation:

Additives, similarly, will allow the faithful conveyance of a chef’s vision to remote audiences. Much as live musical performance is now a premium experience offered by an elite cadre of musicians (as opposed to a century ago, when people made their own music), the chef’s physical immediacy will be optional. Of course, flavor is just one facet of cuisine; but it’s arguably the hardest part.
The classical culinary arts, executed by trained chefs, won’t completely die off. A few super-talented chefs will serve a small, discerning following (like aficionados who attend chamber music recitals). But the creative team at, say, McDonald’s, will find it easier to project their visions from afar without compromise or degradation. And as they do, chains may become bastions of deliciousness.

Yes, Mr. Leff, without even mentioning your dubious use of the semicolon, please explain to me chemical browning. Browning, you know, that thing you do in a heavy pan with a pure fat that has a high smoke point. Browning, that easy to understand, but difficult to properly execute cooking technique that is inherent to what we recognize as savory food. Oh, you can’t do that. Minimum wage automatons can’t handle that, can they?

Oh, okay, then, then can you give us the formula for seasoning? Oh, you can’t give us quantities for things like salt unless every other ingredient involved has been processed for mineral uniformity, I see. So, for example, a great tomato salad at McDonalds will be impossible.

So good cooking is not only more than flavor, it is an interactive process between ingredients, a cook and the people eating the food. It is, in other words, more than science alone.

The author does make an interesting argument that “molecular gastronomy” is a direct descendant of California and Nouvelle cuisines (close, but distinct relatives), and if you believe that, I have a bridge for sale in Lower Manhattan that you might be in interested in. He claims that “A thimble of frozen artichoke foam is just another way to get diners to appreciate — no, really appreciate! — the to-die-for glories of the artichoke…. The continued insistence that we open our supposedly clouded eyes to the banal has become strictly to-yawn-for.” He severely misses the entire point of nouvelle cuisine here, and, to his credit, takes a ridiculous notion and runs straight ahead with it, hindered neither by reality nor sense. I was unaware that good ingredients have become unpopular. Somebody let Oliveto know they can close.

If the flavor of what you’re eating needs that much help, maybe you shouldn’t be eating it. Scientific advances in food processing make it better for food companies, not for us.

Listening: “Strange Powers” by The Shins

And the Captain Obvious Award for Exceptional Arrogance goes to: Wine Spectator’s James Suckling. Somehow, WS has seen fit to give this nimrod a oped alongside those two excellent writers and wine crusaders James Laube and Matt Kramer. This is a recent development which is completely inexplicable given his utter lack of a gift for language and the pretentious, pedantic way in which he conducts himself in the world of wine.

Let’s look back for a moment on that embarrassing treatise he published in the “Great Cork Debate,” opposite a piece by James Laube that was both an invigorating piece of writing and a cogent argument for alternative closures for all but the most age-worthy wines. James Laube had necessary facts and figures about screw caps, technical corks, synthetic corks, natural corks and other media, like foil-lined boxes. He had scientific information- and industry conjecture- about each and their effect on aging and longevity and laid out the simple truth that TCA and brett contamination equal one thing to wine lovers: a waste of money.

James Suckling said cork was traditional, and that having a screw cap undermined the ceremony of opening wine.

Give me a break. The Agent and I crack open four or five bottles a week, twice that if we entertain. Does he really think I get excited every time I have to wrestle the cork out of a bottle (even though I do have a tortoiseshell Laguiole corkscrew)?

Back to the Award. The latest from this St-Emillon obsessed ignoramus is his oped this issue (WS 31 Aug 06) called “I Have Joined the Cult.” It’s a sleepy little article about how he went to a tasting of heavy-hit cult cabs from the nineties, given by Swiss collector Silvio Denz. He goes on to list all of his own misguided conceptions about California wines, like how they’re all high-alcohol fruit-bombs, and how he would never have put them aside the wines of Bordeaux. My personal favorite line is “I never thought they would age very well.” I’m glad I pay $50 a year to be told that Napa cab ages well. I’m glad he has the attention of an international audience, because we all sat around drinking our Jordans and Caymuses on release, because we could never get 5 or 10 years out of them. Thank you, James Suckling, for saving us.

Does he really think he’s informing us by saying that Araujo and Screaming Eagle are pretty good after all? He ends the article telling us he’s “now a full-fledged member of the California cult.”

Guess what, Mr Suckling, we don’t need you. Here’s your sign.