The Omnivorous Fish - reflection

Progress?

JoeFish — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 01:49:27 -0500

Food is the enemy.

When I was little, my mother came home one day with a canister that looked very much like the one salt came in. Look at this, she said, beaming. It was called “Salt Sense” and it looked and tasted like salt, but with 1/3 the sodium of nasty old Morton salt.

Wow, I said. What’s that mean? And my mother went on to tell me about the dangers of salt and blood pressure and heart disease. At the age of 11, I was whisked away to have my cholesterol tested: I failed. My mother began to obsess over the amount of cheese I was eating (which has always been a lot). I started reading “Eating Well,” a healthy cooking magazine with recipes like mousses made with gelatin and evaporated milk, and the phrase “canola oil” wherever you’d expect to find the word “butter.”

Even the great Jacques Pepin was counting grams of saturated fat back then. In fact, it may have been his healthy PBS cooking show “Today’s Gourmet” that started him on the path from being merely one of the best chefs and cooking teachers who ever lived to being the rockstar who took over for Julia Child. I wonder how cooking ever survived it.

Since then, of course, I’ve read Nina Planck’s book Real Food, not to mention The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and have simply made the unscientific but personal observation that people who eat whole, wholesome foods in balance with nature live longer, healthier lives than people who don’t. Every can and box in my mother’s house says “Low Fat,” “Low Salt,” “Tastes Great” or “Less Filling.” She’s had every ailment and has taken every medication you’ve ever heard of, major and minor: glands, growths, hormones, you name it. There aren’t any cans or boxes in my friend Anita’s house- who’s older than my mother- and she’s healthy as a horse. She’s eaten more or less only fish- in terms of animal flesh- and whole foods (philosophically, not the store) since before I was born. She gets her produce from a CSA in the next town over from my mom at a fraction of the cost of supermarket shopping. She’s no prude, though. We tore into lentil soup in a restaurant together once. I watched her with baited breath once I realized the soup was [deliciously] smoky and laden with ham. She laughed when she tasted it, and ate the whole bowl, only remarking afterward that she hadn’t had ham since the seventies. It was great soup!

People say they’re “misbehaving” or “getting away” with something when they eat butter or cheese. They then reach for something that was made in a laboratory, as if that’s the key to health.

I’m sick of hearing foods referred to as “decadent” or “sinful.” Real food is neither. What’s sinful is food that’s not food: it’s alimentary material made in a laboratory so that more people can profit from what we eat. The evolution of commodity processing has extended shelf lives beyond anything occurring in nature. In some cases, this has been a boon, for the poor and hungry both at home and in far off places, not to mention the ability to store for emergency or famine. But let’s face it, we’ve been processing food for these reasons for thousands of years: corn and lime, drying wheat, treating acorns. We’re no strangers to processing food. But never, ever, in history have these methods replaced fresh, wholesome foods in our diets. Only since World War 2 have we seen people spend their lives avoiding the things that humans have been eating since the dawn of our time.

At first, it was a matter of convenience. Look, asparagus in January! Of course, people have been canning since antiquity, but now you don’t have to do it yourself! Who needs a vegetable garden and canning party and root cellar, when you can pick up cans, ready to eat, at the new, exciting Supermarket? Jello! A sweet dessert ready in seconds with boiling water! Holy shit!

As our population reorganized itself out of denser urban centers and rural enclaves into subdivision after subdivision, supermarkets became part of the system. When a place has no history, its economic vacuum is easily filled by entrepreneurs from neighboring places expanding existing businesses. There’s no corner market to force out of business, because the corner hasn’t been built yet. The corner is now built with a Walgreens already in it. Centralized businesses want centralized supply chains. Centralized supply chains strive for uniformity and the longest of possible shelf lives. Have you ever seen an organic tomato plant? How uniform do the tomatoes look?

Honestly, I think these things happened by accident. A free market system in a country bathing in success, expanding rapidly and leading the world in development of technology, science and culture; who was looking at the changes philosophically? (I’m sure somebody was, but I don’t know whom.)

The problem, as I see it, really compounded in the 70s. A whole foods counterculture had sprung up, mostly on the coasts, as usual, but in little places here and there as well. There’s a 30+ year organic farm in Williamstown, NJ- a place you’d never to think to find one, even today.

Before this movement could really take hold, though, we entered the age of modern illness. Cancer and heart disease began to spread like wildfire, and new diagnoses and research pointed the finger foodwards. By the eighties we knew some truths to be self-evident: Saturated fat gathers around the heart and gives you a heart attack; cholesterol gathers into plaques in veins that lead to high blood pressure and heart attacks; salt increases your blood pressure and gives you a heart attack; ditto booze and let’s not even discuss smoking. And rather than examine those relationships too closely, we took those observations and made them Cardinal Law, despite the fact that- for example- the cholesterol hypothesis is widely believed to only be relevant in terms of oxidized cholesterol- the kind you get from margarine. Conversely, it’s widely believed that natural, unoxidized cholesterol may not have any adverse health effects at all.

Despite that inconvenient fact- one of many- the food companies were back to the rescue. Mayonnaise went from something made entirely out of fats to being “low-fat.” Cakes suddenly had 50% less sugar, or maybe no sugar at all, thanks to aspartame or saccharine (which kills lab rats sometimes in minutes). Processed food went from killer to savior overnight. It was a new age of Better Living Through Chemistry.

This, people, is how you arrive at a terrified eleven year old boy who is convinced that he is about to drop dead of a heart attack at any moment because he ate too much cheese.

Do you know what my cholesterol count is now, that I’m nearing 30? I don’t know. I don’t know and I don’t care to know, because I don’t eat hydrogenated fats, and I don’t believe that net cholesterol has any effect on my health. Go ahead, ask your doctor to test your oxidized cholesterol only. He’ll look at you like you’re nuts. And you can bet your HMO doesn’t cover that test.

Likewise, if you think the government is looking out for us, let me remind you: The FDA is made up of people who came from the food and drug industries. Family farming isn’t really a part of that industry. The USDA is the same. When it puts together an advisory panel (like the one for NAIS) it selects people from the industry of farming, not the vocation of farming. Organic farming is often represented in USDA panels by entities like the Organic Trade Association, a group made up of national-brand producers and retailers: no one who has a stand at a farmers’ market, or who represents someone who does. USDA organic is a lie on its merits and has been from the start.

If you lived to be 18 in 1900, you’d most likely live well into your sixties, if not seventies. We didn’t have margarine, high-fructose corn syrup or statins, and people lived and lived, to within 5-10 years of their life expectancy now, in a world where cancer can be treated and infection can be cured by a trip to the corner store (in places where there are still corner stores).

You call this progress?

A cookbook, you say?

JoeFish — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 13:03:15 -0500

“Why don’t you write a cookbook?” people ask me. They ask me all the time. Some people in publishing have even mentioned it to me. I’ve even asked myself. In fact, one of the reasons I moved to California and started freelancing was so that I could do exactly that, or at least I could develop one.

But you know what writing a cookbook entails? Recipes. I hate recipes. When people ask me for recipes, I respond with a detailed explanation of the cooking techniques they need to know. After that, who needs a recipe? Poele recipe? For what? Guazzetto? A list maybe, but a recipe? I know recipes are helpful; I certainly read them all the time. But- of course with the exception of baking- to me they are lists of ingredients.

Maybe I need to write the No Recipe Cookbook…

Listening: “Mr Pushkin Came to Shove” Combustible Edison The Impossible World

Bread and the Failure of Parchment Paper

JoeFish — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:24:16 -0500

We’re naming the boy: P.

So P has me doing the Google thing: I switched to Gmail (which I like), we’re sharing a google calendar (awesome, since we both travel so much) and he’s got me into google reader. Before I used to say “Aw, I can go read the blogs I want to read, rar rar rar…” but you know, it’s a lot more convenient to find out when there’s a new post at a blog I like that doesn’t post too often (duh). Another thing it’s done is allowed me to get the news even when I’m not listening to the radio, which is important for me. I always feel bad that I’m not up on current events unless I’m baking a lot (ergo listening to a lot of NPR). I tried making Google News my home page, but I just blasted through it. This way, I get a little condensed NY Times… and I actually look at it. And you know what I saw today? An article about something that we hear about in Southern California all the time: the drug war in Mexico. I don’t want to go on a whole tirade about this, but it’s really REALLY naive to say that drug use is a victimless crime. If you’re growing weed on your windowsill, more power to you. But to contribute to this havoc to get high? F that S.

Anyhoo, I’ve been back and forth to Williamsburg, VA a lot lately (where P lives at the moment), and sadly since the economy has been in the crapper, there hasn’t been a whole lot to do. That means BREAD. I’ve been working with the baguette recipe from the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion, the online version of which is a little more comprehensive, and also has a link to the blog entry where they make it. Baker’s Banter, KAF’s blog, is AWESOME, and if you’re curious about baking, I recommend it highly. One of the neat things about reading a blog done by a manufacturer is that it often gets peppered with little technical tidbits about flour, like falling number or protein absorption, whatever. The downside is they are also a retailer, so they talk about things like acrylic proof covers, that nobody has, and you don’t need. Also, since they develop their recipes in a lab, things like potato flour and evaporated milk make frequent appearances.

Regardless, they are an awesome resource, and make THE best flour available in a store (some would argue anywhere).

This dough is essentially the dough I worked with at the French bakery (more on my bakery CV later…). It’s utterly traditional: a poolish (“polish-tyle” starter, about 12-14 hours old), made from equal weights of flour and water, followed by another weight of water and twice that weight of flour. The recipe goes back to antiquity. The yeast, obviously, is a whole other thing. At the bakery, the starters were made with wild yeast, and the doughs were then augmented with instant yeast (this is only in the French place, the Italians I worked with only used fresh (cake) yeast).

It’s a great example of the behavior of flour. This dough doesn’t get kneaded very much. It’s basically a quick mix, followed by a little kneading, then a series of rises, which do the same thing. Hydration can be hard on flour, (ever make pasta with semolina?), making its cells swell, so slow rises can accomplish most of the kneading (I’m sure you’ve read all about those no-knead breads).

It all depends on the effect that you’re going for. Tender, airy ciabatta needs a dough that’s practically liquid. A tall, proud braid of bread requires kneading to even its crumb and prepare it for it’s large diameter.

Speaking of, you can use this exact same dough to shape into boules or braids (though it will be a little, mellow braid, not a tall, proud braid- works great for crowns). For a boule, you pinch at the perimeter of your dough and bring it to center, going all the way around until you’ve shaped a ball. Then, you need to smoosh that joint you’ve made together, just like the seam on a baguette, so get the crook of your hand close to the base of the boule and nudge it across the table. When I can get pictures to work, it will make more sense…

I won’t give you a recipe since theirs is so good, but I will say this: I tried the recipe as written using 100% “white whole wheat” flour from King Arthur, which is whole wheat flour that’s been ground very very fine.

It performed ok, and the bread tastes good- very nutty- but ultimately it was a little heavy for this recipe; the loaves were quite dense. I would say half-and-half with AP flour would work, and I will also try it again with a longer rise time, maybe 24 hours, in the fridge, with 2 deflations. This might also make it a little more bread-tasting- whole wheat flour is sweet.

And- strangest thing- I broke my baking stone, so I was making some of these in a pan on parchment, and they stuck, even after baking. It’s never happened before, so I have to say don’t use “Natural Roll Parchment” from whole foods, stick to baker’s parchment.

I was going to attach some images… but it won’t let me. Not sure what’s up with that.

Listening: “I Only Want To Be With You” sung by Dusty Springfield

I'm back

JoeFish — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:54:12 -0500

So, as you might have imagined, I’ve been a little busy. Maybe I’m just not cut out for the commitment of blogging… I mean, 3 months… what kind of commitment is that?

Well, you fuckers all seem to come back, so I might as well keep writing.

I’m not making excuses, but let me bring you up to speed on where I’ve been.

My last report from the New York bureau is true: there’s a new man in my life. Unlike men past, this one sort of snuck up on me. I wasn’t trying to find him- like I have been trying to find a man my whole life- he just kind of happened. He cooks, he likes to eat, he loves restaurants… the only thing that makes me suspicious is that he likes me so much. I have been traveling for work and/or to see him for most of the last 3 months, and thus not cooking (much) and going to restaurants I’ve been to a million times, and even though I don’t need to be cooking to blog things I cook, I’m only interested in blogging them as I do them.

Also, as the economy has tanked, so has my work. I actually haven’t worked in over a month, and the horizon isn’t looking too great honestly. I’ve been busy, though. I spent every waking minute from the end of my last gig until midnight on election day working to defeat prop 8 in california. I’m sure you all know how that turned out. There is a huge movement developing to overturn prop 8, that I imagine will be successful, but I’m not likely to be directly involved in it. I’ve just been spending so much time away from home lately, and will likely to continue to, that I can’t, sadly. But, for what it’s worth, thank you if you voted no, thank you if you gave money, thank you if you volunteered. If you voted yes, you can go fuck yourself and close your browser right fucking now. I hope all your souffles fall, your braises dry out and your pizzas burn.

This brings me to my next piece of news: The Omnivorous Fish is moving again. We’ve pretty much narrowed it down to Seattle or the Bay Area, and currently Seattle is ahead, but that call will get made in the next couple of months. Anybody want to weigh in?

OK, my battery is about to die, so I’m going to run, but I’ll be back with some recipes asap.

About a Boy

JoeFish — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 22:45:18 -0400

From the new york bureau:

So, there’s a boy. I guess we’ll call him Hot Pants. Anyhow, we went to the (in)famous Una Pizza Napoletana tonight for some $20 pies.

As you might be aware, I know a little something about pizza, probably enough to be dangerous. I can say that I liked it a lot, and I would go back, but it was not my favorite pizza of all time. Hopefully I’ll write more later on the subject, but for now Hot Pants and I are headed to bed.

Listening: “The Barnyards of Delgaty” Old Blind Dogs, from the Album Tall Tails

Observations

JoeFish — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 21:49:45 -0400

From early yesterday morning

Living in LA, I often arrive at work an hour or more early, so I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts, catching up on magazines and watching some movies. This morning I’m watching Oliver Stone’s JFK, and I can’t tell you yet if it’s any god or not, but during the beginning of the movie, I suddenly burst into tears. No, I haven’t reached menopause- I don’t think- but it was incredible to me to watch the nation and the world hold an American president so beloved. I’m sure Kennedy had millions of detractors, but his youth, exuberance and poise held sway over many who didn’t vote for him, my parents included. But today we have a filthy, lying, moronic scumbag running the country, destroying the country, and its people, destroying the principles the country was founded on. We barely live in a Republic anymore; our freedom is forever lessened, our reputation in the world annihilated. Had I been older when he was first elected, I probably would have left. Had he been re-elected this year, I can tell you for sure I would have moved to Vancouver. I wasn’t a huge fan of Bush 1, but he was a competent individual we could follow, someone we could be proud to be led by, disagreements aside. I cannot wait for the day I can be proud to be American once again.

Listening: hokey music from the JFK DVD.

From this afternoon

The movie wasn’t that good, but our president is still a mook.

Listening: Aqua Teen Hunger Force

A la Bastille!

JoeFish — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:12:46 -0400

Today I received an invitation to trade blogrolls with a new site called devour.tv. I declined to do so, but I will give them a free plug, because it led to an email correspondence that made me write up some feelings I have about the New Food Culture that I have yet to express much in the blog, despite how strongly I feel about it. Here is an excerpt:

Since you’ve read my blog, you know it’s mostly about cooking and empowerment of cooking. I try to put 20 years of professional and amateur cooking experience into each cooking post, so they’re meta-recipes, rather than lists of ingredients. Below is the list of “definitive pieces” I point people to.

So, the porn aspect. I’ll give you the long answer, since I think you’ll appreciate it. When I was a kid, I watched Julia Child and Jacques Pepin on PBS. They were educational shows, produced to teach the viewers about cooking. These were documentary: demonstrating a process. Modern cooking shows (IE, everything on Food Network) are pornographic: they are a wanton display of food. If you watch Paula Dean’s show, for example (who, unlike many TV personalities, actually knows how to cook) if she’s making a cake, she’ll start with her pre-measured ingredients laid out, dump them into a bowl, and no matter how skillfully she proceeds to mix them, the process is edited out. Two cuts and four seconds later, the batter is ready: nothing about gluten development, nothing about air content, nothing about leavening, nothing about batter structure, nothing about cooking. If they cut a recipe or two out of the show, or the ‘let’s set the table’ featurettes, or damn near anything they wanted to, there would be plenty of time in the format to include information about cooking. But that’s not the goal. The goal is heavy product placement (all-clad, oxo, kitchenaid, etc) and speedy delivery to languorous footage of finished products, interspersed by more advertising. Some of the content then says “ok let’s cook” but what they mean is “let’s open a package.” So then they’re further encouraging people to eat things that are not food. Of course, Food Network is not a public service. They are a business, in business to make money, not to steward the planet. It is also true that I don’t need to support them simply because I am interested in food.

Now, to give you specific examples in the devour.tv content, I looked at three things: The Telepan segment, the Dueling Foodies congee segment and Pied Piper Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic segment.

The Telepan segment had nothing to do with cooking, and very little to do with the dish itself. It was largely a much longer than needed discussion about the details of a dish that the reviewer had yet to taste, followed by a pronouncement that a dish is great without any true detail of its preparation. “Simple ingredients, done just right,” is the reviewer’s summation. How? What? Who? Tell us: the brioche was perfect, the crumb was just right, the butter flavor came through. The mushroom had this texture, this flavor, the egg. No, we are left with the comment “this is the afro of mushrooms.”

The dueling foodies was cute, but again lacked in depth. This congee is too brown this one’s too green, this one tastes like snails, which the editing taunts us to think is overwhelmingly exotic, which of course it isn’t, especially in New York. I have to assume this is a function of editing since we know that David Rosengarten was geeking out the entire time.

Finally, the Pied Piper, probably the best of them, again edited too much. Let’s calm down the electronic music and let the cook finish showing us the deboning process. He started out being very informative, and then all of a sudden we were somewhere else. Likewise the browning; If I didn’t know how to cook, I’d have thought he turned the chicken pieces over, then immediately added white wine, which of course he did not.

I don’t mean to pick on what you are doing. It is what the pop-culture food world is doing. You guys are absolutely typical in terms of ethos. Even though I’m 29, and I’m supposed to be part of the sound-byte generation, I simply don’t like it. I strive for a little PBS in the noise of the internet. If there are camps, I am securely barricaded in with Jacques Pepin and Lidia Bastianich, with the ghosts of Julia Child and MFK Fisher hanging around. The camp with Giada de Laurentis and Rachel Ray is distant and, to me, destructive.

List of definitive pieces:

Guazzetti:
http://omnivorousfish.com/node/265

Poeles:
http://omnivorousfish.com/node/176

Gnocchi:
http://omnivorousfish.com/node/199

Pasta:
http://omnivorousfish.com/node/209

Empowerment:
http://omnivorousfish.com/node/211

Listening: NPR: National. Public. Radio.

I heart the internet

JoeFish — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:18:30 -0400

Thanks to the internet, obscure 80s songs stuck in your head are no longer a problem.

http://www.warrenzevon.com/

Yes, he’s still recording.

Listening: Ahoooooooooooooooooooo, werewolves of London!

Market Report

JoeFish — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 01:55:35 -0400

Well, I’m in Vegas, but this morning I hit Santa Monica Farmers’ Market. A an old, dear friend’s mom is in town, and it’s criminal that I have yet to cook for this woman, so Monday we’re rectifying that. Here’s what I found that really blew my skirt up:

Celery- Yes, not usually much of a fan, but this was no ordinary celery
Nettles- Stinging nettles, but big mofo stinging nettles, perfect for soup
Fava beans- need I say more?
Strawberries- not good enough to kill for, but good enough to get down on the ground and vibrate for
Leeks- beautiful, tiny leeks from Rutiz Farms, home of the Orgasmic Arugula
Green garlic- what’s better about spring, exactly, than green garlic?
French fingerling potatoes- just a hint of chestnut in the flavor- excellent for composed salads
Citrus- holy shit I will never cease to be blown away by meyer lemons and blood oranges at the farmer’s market

So here’s what I have in mind for monday, criticism encouraged:

Mostarda of Celery (this is where celery [though usually fruit] is cooked in a syrup with spices to make a conserve) with fresh ricotta on crostini with my special olives: oil-cured sicilian olives macerated with blood orange juice and zest

Nettle and rice soup with bacon- a venetian style minestra-risotto

Panelle- Fried squares of chickpea flour polenta- palermo style- with a salad of favas, salame calabrese (spicy), ricotta salata and whole chopped (meaning pith and all) meyer lemons

Pork Butt Roast (the top part of the foreleg that I sometimes call shoulder, but is not accurate in English) with braised leeks and Sicilian potato salad (cooked potatoes, extra virgin olive oil, red wine vinegar, frsh mint)

Strawberries alongside Lebanese rosewater-flavored baklava. Yes, Rose, Danny Thomas was one, too.

I have several interesting pink wines laid in to help this process. Let me know what you think of the menu as a whole.

Quoting

JoeFish — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:01:41 -0400

Apropos of nothing, I read this at I Heart Farms today, and although the whole passage is moving, the following bit just struck a chord with me.

I’m sick of dynasty politicians and dynasty wealth. I’m tired of the rich getting richer. I’m sick of corporations ruling and brainwashing, and I’m sick of people having no reason to hope. I want to feel part of that greater America, and I believe we can do it with the “once-in-a-lifetime” leader that Barack Obama is.

I hope we prove you right, Tana.