Jamie Oliver: This Is Why You're Fat

Jamie Oliver apparently ate his $100,000 prize money

At the most recent TED Conference (technology, entertainment and design), celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver was given some kind of award for his work in food and obesity education. How that connects with technology, entertainment or design, I’m not quite sure, but he’s hip and telegenic so he fits right in.

To encapsulate his 18-minute talk: people are fat because they stopped cooking food and eat processed crap instead. Nothing groundbreaking, but the message is delivered with Oliver’s manic enthusiasm so it’s fairly watchable without being too sanctimonious. The presentation happens to coincide nicely with his upcoming TV show, “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution,” where he goes to America’s most unhealthy city and tries to get them to eat a green vegetable. He is so sucking in his gut.

He makes a couple interesting points: At the 11:15 mark he plays a clip from his show where kids in a kindergarten class are unable to identify beets, cauliflower, eggplants and even tomatoes and potatoes. He believes that people won’t eat food that they can’t identify and will therefore never eat healthily unless they’re better educated. Fair enough. A companion to Michael Pollan’s rule, “Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”

an ABC promo for the show

Continuing, Oliver maintains that for the past three generations, the family tradition of cooking skills being passed down has ended. His goal as an educator is to get every child to learn 10 recipes so that they can live independently, healthily and economically as adults. Neat idea. As a kid, I learned to make soup from a can of V8 juice – add Worcestershire sauce and Parmesan cheese from a green tube et voilà! In high school, I took Independent Living where I made an apron and learned how to make (bad) bran muffins. So by the time I turned 18 I could make really salty soup and greasy baked rocks. Two recipes - 20% of the way to an independent life according to Jamie Oliver’s vision.

Obviously, he doesn’t mean a specific list of exactly 10 dishes, but these are what I would choose:

• Spaghetti sauce – that just seems like a gimme. It’s cheap and easy and everyone likes it.
• Chili – Again, cheap and easy. Feed a family of 4 for a few bucks.
• Stir fry – I suppose this is more of a technique than a recipe but it’s healthy and has infinite variations.
• Rice – This could accompany the above two recipes, I suppose. Billions of non-Americans subsist on rice. We can, too.
• Roasted chicken – I’m not a huge chicken eater, but I like a good roast chicken. Plus, you can scale this up for a turkey and be the star of every Thanksgiving.
• Pasta – Here, I specifically mean the Italian method of sautéing a few ingredients and then adding pasta and some pasta water in the last minute of cooking. It’s one of the first things I learned how to cook well. Essentially the Italian version of stir fry.
• Steak – This is technique more than recipe, but good to know for cookouts and hot dates.
• Meat stew – Knowing how to braise is a cheap way to live well.
• Chicken soup – So people don’t waste their roast chicken carcasses.
• Macaroni & cheese – Yes, this is a dish that contributes to American obesity, but, come on, can’t we live a little? We have Chef Jamie's blessing.

Did I miss any?

Preparing for the Apocalypse (or Surprise Dinner Guests)

Your guess is as good as mine If you were to look at my freezer, you’d think I was a really sloppy Mormon . In truth, I probably don’t have food for more than a couple weeks, but in those two weeks, I’d live like a goddamned king. I’ve got lamb stew, veggie chili, various meat stocks, frozen scallops, bacon, and tomato sauce, not to mention the dried goods – the saffron, chiles, porcini mushrooms and fermented black beans. My only issue is that I need to be more vigilant in labeling my foodstuffs. Too often, what I thought would be spaghetti Bolognese turned out to be brisket on noodles. No matter what the caption, you'll think salted duck eggs are disgusting but they're not. Honest I think this hoarding behavior stems from my mother who used to keep stores of brandied fruit and salted duck eggs in the cupboards so us kids would never be wanting for (weird) food. The brandied fruit really sticks in my memory. It was stored in this very ‘70s smoky purple glass jar – a fermenting mass of various canned and fresh fruits every week by equal amounts of additional fruit and granulated sugar. We’d have it on ice cream or on pound cake; it was a convenient and handy way to make a pedestrian dessert instantly exotic. Or at least alcoholic. As an adult, as I developed more of a taste for the savory over sweet, I decided to try keeping a store of duck confit. Basically, these are cured duck legs, cooked in duck fat and stored for several weeks in the fridge in duck fat. When done correctly, they are luscious, salty and gorgeous, with a fantastic depth of flavor that comes only from meats that are cured, cooked in fat and stored for several weeks in flavorful fat.This isn't the actual spice mix (it's one for bacon), but it's a pretty picture, no? Recipes abound. But the key elements are: cure the duck for a day or so in salt and very aromatic herbs, cook the duck in duck fat for a couple hours at a low heat, then store in the same duck fat in the fridge for at least a couple weeks. In my herb mix, I used coriander seeds, pepper, bay leaves and Szechuan chili peppers known for their distinct flavor and tongue numbing qualities. In the final result, the numbing effect was deadened, but the distinct floral-herbaceous notes were very present. Duck cooked in duck fat now crisped in duck fat. Jon Cryer beware But the biggest obstacle was keeping the duck legs in the fridge without eating them. While most recipes say that the legs will keep for up to a month, I read somewhere that Nancy Silverton (or was it Alice Waters? How embarrassing, but seriously, all you white women chefs look alike to me) liked to serve duck confit after three months or longer, as the legs become more tender and complex in flavor. Alice Waters, Nancy Silverton, clearly separated at birth I managed to wait three months at which point I served mine over blanched Brussels sprout leaves with a really gummy and lousy mustard/blueberry sauce. But any flaws in the presentation were mitigated by the reheating of the duck legs – crisped in their own fat to a golden brown on both sides. In my mind, this is the best way to serve them though you can also use them in a cassoulet or shredded on pizza or in stuffed pasta or some other chi-chi preparation. In the crispy incarnation, the sauce and bedding become completely cosmetic and superfluous. It's hard to go wrong.Please ignore the gooey smudge in the background The crisped legs were truly gorgeous, if I do say so myself. I’m sure some native from the Dordogne would scoff at my Asian treatment of the duck, but that was my choice. I’m Chinese. Bite me, François. I’d encourage readers to ignore the Frenchies use their own spice mix. It's really not that hard yet it's something you'll never get in a restaurant because, in general, they can't afford to keep food that long. Your results may vary but if you find a combo that works, please post.

Street Food Thuggery

Yay, civilization! Several friends emailed me about the Los Angeles Street Food Festival that occurred this past Saturday. With the explosion of gourmet food trucks – gourmet fries, gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches, gourmet sundaes, etc. – it promised to be an exciting and trendy occasion. I had a friend visiting from out of town so I purchased us VIP tickets, which meant that we could enter all civilized-like through glass doors as opposed to a cyclone fence gate and use flush toilets instead of Port-O-Lets.

I picked up my friend, Steve, who did not have VIP tickets, but we stupidly figured it wouldn’t be a huge deal. As we neared the venue a few minutes after the event started, we started to worry as teams of hipsters swarmed in the same direction while sizable numbers of disappointed, but sensible looking people headed in the opposite direction. We found the VIP entrance first, a line 60-people deep and moving slowly. I waited there while Steve went to scout the loser line, but given the mobs of people, we figured it wasn’t likely he would make it inside before dinner time.

While I was waiting, I thought about why I was there. People told me, “I’m sure you’ve tried most of the food trucks already,” to which I laughed humbly and looked down at my feet. But the truth is, I haven’t tried any of them. O.K., awhile ago, someone brought me a plate from the Kogi truck, which started the whole craze in L.A., but they weren’t even at this event. If I were a 23-year-old out partying and needed a food fix, I might have made the rounds, but I’m not. I’m an old fart who likes to eat with metal flatware while sitting down. I like tables and napkins and not waiting in lines.

The other thing is, I can’t imagine that the food is that great. How can the slice truck produce pizza that is better than out of a wood burning oven at Mozza or Bollini’s? Putting kimchi on your cheese fries doesn’t instantly make them better. This isn’t to say that they’re not making good food, but I don’t want to wait in several lines in the sweltering February sun (um, yeah. It was really hot) to find out if I’m right or wrong.

But the biggest issue I have is that these cupcake/crepe/Asian-Latin fusion trucks don’t represent actual L.A. street food. I admit that’s a condescending thing to say and, in fact, they did have two Mexican food trucks at the fair, but neither of them represented the taco trucks from my life. For that, I recommend Daily Taco, which has a comprehensive review library of local taco trucks and I couldn’t find reviews of the two that were at the fest.

So when Steve reported back that it would be a 2-hour wait (two goddamned hours!) for the non-VIP ers to get in, I suggested that we abandon the lines and get some real food. I handed my tickets off to some friends I ran into and we went to Boyle Heights for some birria – stewed goat.

The restaurant was perfect: booths, beer, and an oral menu consisting of birria, quesadillas and cabeza tacos (made from cheek meat). That’s it. The goat was almost as delicious as the homemade corn tortillas and we were sitting down in Naugahyde booths, not like Neanderthals walking around eating out of flimsy cardboard trays. Sadly, a hungover Steve did not enjoy the talented table-side Mariachis as much as the rest of the clientele, but he enjoyed the meal otherwise.

Afterwards we visited El Mercado de Los Angeles, a three-story marketplace where you can buy everything from Disney knock-off toys to cowboy boots to exotic culinary ingredients. I got the stink eye when I took this delicious photo. Unfortunately, the vendors didn’t care for me taking pictures so I only have a few, but the moles looked just as delicious as the toys looked creepy.

Again, for some reason I got the stink eye when I took this photo. I appreciate that a sorbet truck arriving outside a night club at 1:30AM has a certain mystique but to me, a bakery that sells heart-shaped loaves of bread for Valentine’s Day has way more street cred. Can you feel the love? I'm interested to know what food trucks readers would like to see on their street. Thoughts?

Back in the Saddle

Many apologies for not being more vigilant in my postings. The new goal is to try to post shorter bits with more frequency with a weekly in-depth posting. Today's a shorty. Several years ago, I joined a cookbook club to expand my culinary knowledge and to help fill an appallingly empty bookshelf. This club has a great selection of famous cookbooks and so I stocked up and now I have a fair-sized library covering the essentials and a bunch of regional cookbooks and some celebrity chef tomes with pretty pictures. Problem is, I don't really read any of them. It could be because I'm not a big reader (ergo empty bookshelf) or it could be that I didn't pick the right books. I actually like his show, despite his sometimes cloying enthusiasm. Gastronerd, Alton Brown today listed his top five cookbooks. I thought I'd weigh in on them briefly to see if I could gain any insight on my own cookbook illiteracy.

1) Joy of Cooking - I remember my thumbing through my mother's tattered edition as a child. I used it a few times and it gave me the impression that all cookbook recipes involved condensed cream of mushroom soup and/or mayonnaise and could be made in either a casserole dish or a bundt cake pan. I might get it today but only for kitsch value. Does that make me sound like a snob? Yeah, well...

2) The Frugal Gourmet - I watched his cooking show once and it was about truffles. He boiled a batch of spaghetti and drizzled a bit of truffle oil and said, "That's all you need to do." I watched half an hour of PBS for that? He did not earn much kitchen cred for that. On the other hand, he did dedicate one of his cookbooks to my grandmother so I have to give him some props.

3) Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - This was one of the books I bought from the cookbook club but when I tried making Marcella Hazan's bread, I ended up baking flour bricks. She listed some weird technique of slamming the dough on the table which seemed scientifically dubious. I think the bigger problem was that there was a paucity of pictures. For me, cooking technique is better learned visually. But aside from technique, the recipes look tasty enough. I should try one someday.

4) Outlaw Cook - I'd never heard of this book, but it seems more my style. Its goal seems to be to stimulate curiosity in the home chef as opposed to guiding them with a series of instructions. It looks to be as much a book of essays as a book of recipes so because I'm a pedantic twat, I don't think this qualifies as a cookbook.

5) Ratio - This book looks right up my alley. Geeky and technical, where you learn the basic skills of cooking so that you can move beyond recipes. I should check it out. That said, in my previous experience with Michael Ruhlman, his recipe said that 8 grams of coriander was the equivalent to a tablespoon. He was off by a factor of over 2.5 so I can't help but scoff at the book's title.

Here's what I think: Alton Brown listed the five books that were seminal in his personal development as a food lover but not his technical development as a food professional. I don't think any of these are necessarily essential for one's library. With the exception of the Hazan and Ruhlman books, I'll bet he hasn't cracked any of them open in the past decade. In my library, I consistenly refer back to two books: McGee, which I've written about earlier, and the CIA's The Professional Chef . Yes, I know On Food and Cooking is not a cookbook, but it's an essential guide to understanding the cooking process. The CIA cookbook, however, contains great recipes that thousands of CIA grads use on a daily basis. I've used it to make mother sauces, identify cuts of meat, make croissants, desserts, stocks, etc. The no-nonsense photos make understanding technique straightfoward and it's organized very intelligently.

The recipes are sized for restaurant service so you have to scale them down but that's easy to do with a spreadsheet, if not in your head. Also, they eschew volumes (i.e., teaspoons and cups) in favor of masses (grams and kilos), which results in greater accuracy ([shaking fist] Ruhlman!) so I'd suggest investing $20 in a kitchen scale, too. It's a chunk of money to invest along with the book, but it's a helluva lot cheaper than enrolling in the CIA.

I'd be interested in hearing about other people's thoughts on essential cookbooks, which is my subtle way of saying, "Please leave a comment."

My New Chili Standard

Chasen's Chili - a classic, but not historically accurate. There was a video made by my sister some time ago when I was maybe 11. You won’t find it on YouTube; it was filmed on Betamax and remains in that format. In it, I play a young fellow named Dennison who is a fan of canned chili. I eat a bowl of Hormel’s and the sounds of flatulence (and hilarity) ensue. As a fan of videography, my sister went on to become a successful director. As a fan of canned chili, I went on to become a successful glutton with a blog nobody reads. Back then, I knew of two types of chili: with beans and without beans. From those two cans, I formed my concept of what chili was. As my palate became more sophisticated in college, I learned to make my own chili, substituting fancy little black beans instead of vulgar kidney beans, and ground turkey meat instead of industrial grade beef. It’s a pretty basic recipe: ground meat, browned with some onions and garlic. Add some cooked beans, canned tomatoes, chili powder, cumin, maybe a little cocoa, more chilis, fresh peppers and some liquid (a beer and some bean juice) and after an hour of simmering, you’ve got chili. I was eating lunch at the school lab when a woman from Texas scoffed at my Tupperware bowl saying, “Real chili doesn’t have tomatoes or beans.” I shrugged through a mouthful of deliciousness, “So?” I kick myself that it’s taken me 20 years to get to the root of what she meant. As it turns out, the roots of chili are found in 19th century Texas, where it was made as a stew from cheap meat. Similar stews were made previous to that but it wasn’t until the 1850s that there were reports of a “brick chili” made of pressed mashed chile peppers, beef and spices that was often reconstituted and eaten on long journeys. This happened to emerge at the same time that there was an influx of Polish immigrants into Texas. Coincidence? I think not. Think of how paprika was such a big deal in Europe thanks to Columbus and subsequently, the influence of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. The immigrants came here and used the next best thing: Mexican chiles. The chili vendors of San Antonio To be honest, I’m totally talking out of my ass. I have no evidence to back up the Eastern European roots of chili but it kind of makes sense, right? Goulash? Chili? Both are bowls of red? I now continue with my out-my-ass history: Chili became popular in Texas and then traveled northward to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. In its six-month run, 27 million people attended the fair and witnessed firsts like the Ferris Wheel and alternating electrical current (yes, I read Eric Larson’s Devil in the White City). Those same millions also had the chance to try “San Antonio Chilley” at the Texas exhibit. From there the dish slowly gained in popularity. "Cincinnati Five-Way" or "Five More Reasons to Never Visit Ohio" In 1902, William Gebhardt began selling Eagle Brand Chili Powder (now owned by ConAgra. Yay!) and nine years later was the first to distribute canned chili nationwide. In 1922, the Empress chili parlor opened in Ohio, which helped popularize the Cincinnati style of chili, which is a tepid, blandish version served over mushy spaghetti. But there were other Midwestern versions that predated them, like in 1913, Chili John’s opened in Green Bay, Wisconsin where it still exists today. Their only other franchise is in Burbank, California, where they serve hot and mild ground beef chili as well as a bean variant. It's a slightly gutsier version of the Cincinnati style (as gutsy as a spicy dish from Green Bay could be). But the ground meat tastes so institutional. My guess is that the ground beef so popular today came out of laziness – it takes a long time to stew chunks of meat vs. ground meat. And beans came out of cheapness. These were lean times in American history and the spices married pretty well with beans. Why not add it to stretch out the beef? Gladwell on Moskowitz (if you haven't seen this, you should) Thus it’s no surprise that chili took off in the canned food revolution, from which, thanks to food expert, Howard Moskowitz, we have 12 varieties of Hormel’s chili, 12 of Stagg and 9 of Dennison’s. Not to mention all the other generic and froofy chilis. This explosion of made up varieties is when I entered the chili fray. But to me, the different cans all tasted basically the same – fine, but vaguely dog-foody. The Los Angeles regional fast food version of chili is a pasty goo slopped from a metal spoon glistening with bright orange grease on a shriveled hot dog. Maybe edible at 2AM while you’re trying to sober up, but it’s not what you would call “good.”

As appetizing as it looks In the face of all these less than tasty versions of chili, my recipe for black bean and pasilla chile chili became my ideal chili. Until I learned more about true Texas chili.

The basic recipe is take a few pounds of beef chuck (or sirloin or something similarly stew-friendly), slice it into 1 to 1 ½ inch cubs, season and brown them in batches. At the same time, toast 2-3 ounces of dried chiles on a hot pan on all sides. I used ancho, which are pretty mild. I might mix them with a couple hotter ones for a little more kick next time.Every braise starts with a good browning. Stem and seed them then toss them in a blender with some water, garlic, oregano, a bit of sugar and toasted cumin seeds. Back in the main pot, sauté a finely chopped onion, then add the browned meat, the chiles, some beef stock and a couple tablespoons of corn meal (for thickening) and simmer for a couple hours. After that, taste it, adjust the seasonings (add cayenne for more heat, or whatever) and add a tablespoon or so of white or cider vinegar to liven things up. Cook it another few minutes and adjust seasonings and thickness (add more water if it’s too thick). I usually cook it a day ahead of time to give time for the sauces to permeate the meat.

My new chili standard The result is stunning for such a simple preparation. Where my ground meat chili is all about secret spice blends, fresh peppers, exotic beans, outrageous hotness, weird meat mixes and other culinary obfuscations, this Texas chili is just about the beef and the chile. That’s all you can see and taste. This past weekend I made it for a campout and I spent most of dinner just sopping up the sauce with cheap white bread. It was a revelation.

Out-Chef Chef Boyardee!

How can anything tasty fit in those itty-bitty things? I almost never order filled pastas at restaurants. Growing up eating dim sum and xiao long bao I’m used to a large ratio of filling to wrapper. Comparing shiu mai to a dinky tortellini is like comparing…something really juicy and delicious and pork-filled to something that isn’t. A menu item like Asiago pumpkin ravioli always sounds yummy and flavorful, but inevitably it just tastes like a wad of pasta because of a paucity of filling and too-thick pasta. Mozza gets it right The exceptions – like Mozza Osteria’s Fresh Ricotta & Egg Raviolo, whose filling includes an entire oozy egg yolk – are reminders that the problem with most filled pastas is in the execution, not the concept. So when I make ravioli, I don’t mess around. I don’t make them obscenely large or overstuffed but I don’t want people to say, “Uh, I think I can taste the mushrooms.” Fillings-wise, I’ll occasionally do the ricotta-based ravioli. It’s ricotta, some Parmesan, a pinch of nutmeg, sometimes parsley, and then whatever sexy foodstuff I have in mind: minced mushrooms, roasted butternut squash, chopped prosciutto, ground meat, etc. But I’m more inclined to fill it with just the sexy foodstuff. I’m a big fan of braised meats in ravioli, like shredded short ribs, or I’ll do seafood. Last night, it was crab. I’ve steamed and shelled my Dungeness crabs before, but it’s a huge pain in the ass. I have to drive a ways to get the live ones, then I have to go through the ordeal of cooking the poor little things and then it takes me a good hour to shell two crabs. It’s so much easier to walk down the street to Trader Joe’s, grab a one pound can of Chicken of the Sea claw meat and pop it open. Plus, it costs less than half as much and tastes almost as good. Blue swimming crab ain’t no Dungeness and its sustainability is in question, but we can't all be Alice frickin' Waters. I forked up the crab, added some green onions, red pepper, lemon zest and a little egg white, which probably isn’t necessary but I had it leftover from the salad dressing. And that’s it. I suppose it really doesn’t matter how you season it so long as the crab is good. Some sort of vegetable is helpful to add texture.Make sure it's the refrigerated kind I’ve retreated to my Asian roots and used gyoza wrappers for my ravioli many times but last night I was feeling show-offy and brought out my pasta roller. I had that thing for a couple years before I actually used it. It seemed like such a messy headache. But it’s actually a pretty easy and forgiving process. And my mess factor was greatly reduced once I got a pastry scraper. If you don’t have one, you should get one. Remember Steve Buscemi’s leg in Fargo? I’m no pasta expert and there are probably a thousand better instructions for making it but here’s how I do it. The basic ratio is 3 large eggs for every two cups of flour. You make a little well in the flour, crack your eggs in it, mix it with a fork while doing a mad dash to keep egg goo from dripping out the well and onto the floor. Eventually, you get a doughy ball that you start kneading to incorporate the rest of the flour. It’ll be hard and rough looking but that’s fine.Cut it in fourths (with your trusty pastry scraper) and start feeding it one of the fourths into your pasta machine (set at 1, the widest setting). It’ll come out ugly, but after you fold it and re-feed it, it will knead into something smooth and manageable. At that point, you feed the pasta through the machine a successively higher numbers on your pasta machine. By the end, you should have a long, wafer thin ribbon of pasta. For once, not cut with a dog food can Time is of the essence as the pasta will dry out and crack within a few minutes so you should have your filling close at hand. I use a pastry ring whose diameter is half the width of the pasta sheet but I’ve also used empty soup cans, dog food cans or whatever works. I lay out a strip of the pasta, put out spoonfuls of filling on the bottom half, using the pastry ring to space them apart. Then I wet the pasta around the filling with water (not egg wash) and fold the top half over. Press to seal the ravioli and cut ‘em out with the pastry ring. At this point, I take each one to check the seal and ensure there’s no air in the ravioli. Air pockets are bad. Then I layer the ravioli with parchment paper and store them in the freezer to keep them from getting mushy. If you store them for longer than a couple hours, make sure they're in an airtight container or they'll dry out and crack. Two cups of flour should make around 60-70 ravioli, which should match a one pound can of crab. Let them eat kibble I rarely sauce ravioli with marinara because tomatoes are pretty dominating. Browned butter is delicious but in small doses. I usually stick with broths or cream sauces so that the flavors in the filling can stand out. For the crab ravioli, I sautéed some shallots, added some cream and saffron, cut it with a little white wine, and cooked it until it turned yellow and fancy. I suppose you could strain it but I think the orange saffron strands are cool looking plus it lets everyone know that you used the real thing. Note the exquisite and rare saffron stamens Boiling the ravioli is a critical step. Once you put them in boiling water, you want to make sure it doesn’t boil violently or your ravioli will rip. A slow bubble works just fine. It should only take a couple minutes and then you plate, sauce and garnish. Or...open a can of this.

On Authenticity

I have a subscription! During a summer dinner for friends I served gazpacho. It was a warm evening and I had tons of tomatoes, so it seemed like the perfect starter. It’s pretty simple: you chop tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onions and a bit of garlic, then add some vinegar and olive oil and mushed up bread and tomato juice. Give it a two second pulse from the hand blender et voilà. One of the more cosmopolitan diners looked at the chunky soup and said, “Oh, so it’s not real gazpacho.”

True Andalusian gazpacho is mashed in a mortar and pestle (or at least a blender). It’s smooth and velvety; not like my coarse, vulgar slop. The thing is, I knew my soup wasn’t authentic and I even thought about introducing it with that caveat. But I didn’t because I don’t need another reason to be labeled a “foodie,” a.k.a. “food-douche.” I served it all chunked up because that’s the way my mother made it from some Sunset magazine recipe when I was a child. And I prefer it that way. It has texture. Each bite has a different ratio of tomato to cucumber. It looks more appetizing than the pink, pasty appearance of the “authentic” version. The current Sunset recipe but back in the '70s it was chunky. It was! Yet it still irked me that I was called out on my bastardization of a venerated Spanish tradition. Stuff like that bugs me all the time. Like how when I mention my affection for Abbot's Pizza, die hard New Yorkers will scoff, “They use bagel flour in their dough. It’s not real pizza.” To which I say, “It still tastes better than 95% of the pizza that I ever had in Manhattan. So suck it!” Maybe I don’t say those exact words, but I’ve thought them.

I've never eaten lutefisk nor have I wanted to Why is authenticity so damned important? I suppose it’s a connection to history, just like chunky gazpacho connects me with my childhood. But if not for culinary innovation, we’d still be eating charred meat, nuts and berries. At some point, we have to acknowledge that sous vide whitefish, a modern preparation, tastes better than lutefisk, a preserving method involving lye that dates back to the 16th century. Not surprisingly the editor of Cook's Illustrated There is a limit to bending tradition. If you read Cook’s Illustrated, you’ll know what I’m talking about. This is this pedantic culinary bi-monthly where they supposedly show the better way to cook. Their mission is, “to test recipes over and over again until we understand how and why they work and until we arrive at the best version.” Their definition of the “best version” is based on some borg-ian concept where they measure the amount of time it takes for a vinaigrette to separate. Their recipe held its emulsion for a whopping 1 ½ hours! But…can’t you just shake up the dressing right before you pour it? Who takes 90 minutes to eat a salad?

If you don't use unbleached organic parchment paper, it's not true en papillote This past spring they presented their improved version of cooking en papillote, a method where you bake vegetables and fish in a paper wrapper. The crack staff of Cook’s Illustrated contends that aluminum foil seals better than parchment paper and that the recipe works best if you parcook vegetables beforehand. But the whole point is that it’s a quick and easy way to cook fish with a dramatic presentation. If you have to cook the vegetables beforehand and serve it in foil, you’re spending too much time to serve what looks like a fancy TV dinner. Their complaints of too much juice or slightly undercooked vegetables are what I consider to be the characteristics of the dish.

Fold it in half and crimp the edges tightly in a semi-circle Basically you create a bed of small chopped vegetables for a lightly seasoned fish fillet upon which you add a little butter or olive oil. You wrap it in some parchment paper and cook it in a 375º oven for 20 minutes and then put it on a plate. Everyone oohs and aahs as they unwrap their gustatory gift. Maybe the kale is a tad crunchy or the zucchini juices accumulate on the plate but it still tastes really good and you only spent 15 minutes preparing the thing.

This was just for me on a Tuesday night so it's not as sexy looking as it could be So what’s my point? I dunno. Don’t make such a big deal of things? I mean, I have respect for authenticity and tradition; I’m more likely to buy a raw milk Brie de Meaux than some Wisconsin cheese product called “Bree.” But I’m also a huge fan of Rouge en Noir, a Sonoma cheesemaker who makes a perfectly delicious Brie that’s often cheaper than its Frenchy counterparts.

I’m also grateful to the nerds. I do get some value out of Cook’s Illustrated. They’re the dorks who will make scores of batches of biscuits to find out the perfect ratio of butter to lard. They are like the not-quite-as-smart cousin of Harold McGee who doesn’t know quite when to shut up. You kinda take the basic concepts from them and then tune out all their extraneous efficientizing bullshit. So, yeah. That’s where I stand. Thoughts? Anyone? Anyone?