Balsamic Blows

Traditionally, balsamic vinegar is made from boiled down grape juice. It gets its flavor as it ages in barrels made of various woods: cherry, chestnut, acacia, oak, ash, juniper and mulberry. Over several years, water evaporates so they keep pouring the vinegar into smaller and smaller casks. The finished product ends up tasting concentrated and raisin-y with woody, sometimes resinous, flavors. I have very generous friends who give me some fancy bottle of balsamic vinegar every year for Christmas. Not to sound ungrateful but I hate the stuff. Does this look appetizing? I think it’s so popular because it’s sweet and instantly recognizable. But it’s also incredibly overpowering. A sage-dusted apricot-balsamic glazed chicken breast is just going to taste like chicken dipped in balsamic vinegar. A microgreen salad with an herb raspberry-balsamic dressing is just going to taste like lettuce soaked in balsamic. It’s kind of like Adam Sandler – his movies are dominated by his semi-amusing schtick and there’s not a lot of variation from film to film. But you know what you’re getting so you’re not risking much by buying a ticket. Similarly, there’s not much mystery about what your balsamic dressing’s going to taste like. Me, I like my salads to taste like something more than just cloying vinegar. note that it says "gourmet" So my little trick is to add a tiny splash of seasoned rice vinegar in most of my salad dressings. Seasoned rice vinegar contains added sugar and salt and it has a neutral flavor with mild acidity. So it rounds out the sharpness of a red wine vinegar or lemon juice without adding the sledgehammer flavors of balsamic vinegar. It heightens whatever flavors you have in the salad. People could actually taste the nectarines I put in the salad. Just don’t add too much SRV (if Rachel Ray gets EVO, I'm taking SRV). A little sweetness goes a long way.

Nouveau Tater Tots

Bar Centro at The Bazaar My favorite meal of the year was at this fancypants restaurant, The Bazaar at the SLS. A Beverly Hills scene filled with emaciated model types who look like they haven’t eaten in weeks, it’s not really my scene. But the chef, José Andrés, trained under Ferran Adria at El Bulli and is fantastically talented. He manages to make molecular gastronomy satisfying as well as mind boggling. High-tech fare like spherified olives and foie gras cotton candy are counterbalanced by the more traditional tapas of sautéed mushrooms and Spanish tortilla. Every dish is gorgeously presented and more importantly, delicious. One of the standout dishes was the papas Canarias, potatoes in the Canary Islands style. Basically it’s baby fingerlings boiled in salty water with mojo verde. They look unimpressive, shriveled with a thin rime of dried salt, but they taste delicious.So when I had some friends coming over last night, I thought, how hard can it be? I tossed handfuls of salt into a pot of water until it tasted as acrid as seawater and boiled some baby potatoes from the farmer’s market in it for 25 minutes. I drained them and let the taters dry in a warm oven. Meanwhile I grabbed some various herb sprigs from the garden for the mojo verde – mostly Italian parsley, a couple sprigs of cilantro, a couple leaves of basil. I added a garlic clove, a teaspoon of lemon zest, a squeeze of lemon, a half a teaspoon of red pepper flakes with salt and pepper and then blended it with 3/4 a cup of extra virgin olive oil. close enough Despite perfectly cooked tuna and a grilled shrimp and nectarine salad, the potatoes were easily the hit of the night. Salty on the outside, sweet and creamy on the inside, the potatoes were almost identical to the Bazaar ones. They weren’t quite as salty which is probably a good thing. And I don’t quite remember what the mojo verde was like at the restaurant but my green sauce was tasty to the point where people were dipping tuna, bread and everything else in it. So I’m onto you, Chef José! Next, I’m ripping off your modern Caprese with spherified liquid mozzarella! I just need some sodium alginate

Summer Solstice is Carnage!

Last night my friends, Drew and Jenna, hosted grilled lobster night with me cooking. Truth be told, while I like lobster, I’m much more of a crab kind of guy. Better flavor, more versatile to cook with, blah, blah, blah. But it was the first hot day of the summer so grilled lobster seemed to be the appropriate plat du jour. I vaguely remembered seeing some cooking show where the guy split these live lobsters down the middle, slathered the insides with some sort of concoction and grilled them so I thought I’d do the same thing. It seemed to be a more humane way to kill them than dumping them in a pot. As I mentioned last week, it kinda sucks to deal with the crustacean death throes when you’re trying to entertain. I know some people will just have the fish monger steam their lobsters so they won’t have to deal with it, but the critters are still clanking around whether their in an industrial steamer or on your stovetop. Though I’ve never slaughtered a cow, my feeling is that anything you eat you should be prepared to kill. So I was mentally steeled to deal out some lobster death. Luckily, Drew, who had split lobsters before, offered to slaughter while I slathered. Thanks, Drew.

Lobster Slather 2 sticks of butter, softened 3 cloves of garlic, pressed or minced ½ onion, minced (or a big shallot) Juice of a lemon Chopped Italian parsley Chopped fresh thyme Salt and pepper Mash everything together.

It turns out that lobsters are hardy and obstinate creatures. Even split down the middle with their claws removed, lobsters continue to squirm. Their antennae twitch and their mouths flutter, as if gasping for air. It made slathering them with butter feel particularly savage. Post fact, I learned that some believe that lobsters are aware even when they are missing their appendages and cut in half. Oops. Between the initial carnage and me discovering that fact, I grilled the then unmoving lobsters and they were delicious, but I couldn't help but feel pangs of guilt in my lobster-filled gut. Later, I also learned that most lobsters go through this insane journey from Nova Scotia to Louisville (UPS’ hub city), where they are housed in a sort of lobster motel until they are overnighted to some restaurant or fish market where they flop around in a murky tank awaiting their torturous demise. I felt like the Hannibal Lecter of the ocean floor. I researched into other killing methods that were supposed to be "humane," but there was no definitive, painless way to murder a lobster. I even looked into the CrustaStun, a $4,000 gizmo that kills lobsters with 110 volts in five seconds. But then I thought, how big is the difference between five seconds of electrocution and 20 seconds of boiling water? It’s not like the lobster’s going to suffer from post traumatic stress disorder; either way it’s dead. And there’s even some debate whether lobsters even have a brain with which to feel pain. Sure they respond to physical stimuli, but, heck, so do plants. And wait a second - if I cut them in half, which half feels pain? I started to feel a little less homicidal (lobstercidal?). I mean, what's the big deal? While writing this, I’ve swatted three flies without remorse and isn’t a crustacean kind of like an overgrown underwater insect? Wait. By that logic, flies should be on my list of gastronomical treasures. Hm. On that note, it’s unlikely I’ll be eating lobster again any time soon.

On Fish

Here are my rules on buying seafood: 1) Don't buy farmed salmon. Never mind that farmers frequently dye the flesh pink and most practices are bad for the environment. Farmed salmon tastes like crap. It’s mushy and bland and good for nothing. Wild salmon, while not perfect for the environment, is a world apart from the farmed crap. Just look at Copper River salmon next to a fillet of pale and floppy farm stuff and you wouldn’t think they were from the same planet, let alone species. Don’t even get me started on the taste difference. Coho, Sockeye, Copper River, King – I’ll eat them all. 2) Never buy farmed shrimp. That’s just because of the environment. 3) Steaming your own live crab is far superior than buying the precooked stuff. It’s not even worth it to buy the precooked stuff. I’ll either buy the refrigerated canned crab from Southeast Asia or I’ll steam my own Dungeness crab. It’s a pain in the ass to shell it and it’s no fun dumping those poor little crustaceans into the Pot of Death but it’s one of my top ten foods. The sound of crab claws banging against the pot can be haunting. “Tell me, Clarice. Have the crabs stopped clanking?” 4) Buy fresh local stuff whenever possible (tough luck, Kansas) or, if not, buy flash frozen stuff. A lot of seafood is sold defrosted. You just don’t know when they did it. Could’ve been that morning, could’ve been last Tuesday. Luckily, recent USDA laws make it mandatory for sellers to specify the fish’s country of origin and whether it’s fresh or frozen. 5) Not all farmed seafood is bad. Farmed oysters are benign. Vegetarian fed fish like catfish and tilapia aren’t terrible, though they’re often fed corn. Is industrial corn worse than overfishing? Vegetarianism is sounding better and better. 6) Above all, avoid escolar. Why? I’m glad you asked. Now, I love the succulent fish. The kind whose flesh is on the fatty side; it can be like the Kobe beef of the sea. It tastes decadent and it’s easy to cook; it’s almost impossible to overcook. But since Chilean sea bass hit the top of the unsafe list and sablefish, or what my people call “black cod,” is kinda pricey, what’s there to eat? So when the dude at Fish King said that escolar was like Chilean sea bass and it was under ten bucks a pound, I pounced on it. I had John and Ole over for dinner where I served fillets with a watercress pesto. During dinner, we all were freaking out on how amazing the texture of the fish was and how odd it was that we’d never even heard of escolar before.

Watercress Pesto 2 big handfuls of watercress 2 garlic cloves 1 squeeze of lemon 1 small handful of pine nuts Extra virgin olive oil Stuff everything but the olive oil with some salt and pepper into a jar. Slowly add olive oil while zapping it with a hand blender. Keep adding and mixing until it comes together.

So after dinner, I looked it up on the Internet and I read this article out loud about how some chefs call it the evil fish or something like that. Apparently one of the fats that makes escolar flesh so luscious is indigestible by humans which can lead to “intestinal discomfort.” An oceanic Olestra. We all laughed nervously. The article recommended that you grill it so the fat can drip away in portions no larger than three ounces. I baked 14 ounce fillets – extra juicy. Oops. Oh well. How bad could it be? CUT TO: MORNING. I woke up with a rumbling in my stomach. Hm. Gurgle. Uh. Oh no. Then something terrible happened. Something unspeakably horrific. And then I made it to the bathroom. This continued on and off for a couple hours until I gathered the strength to call Ole and John. Ole had no problems. John was fine. So I thought it was me. And then I got calls from both of them not two hours later. I was not alone. For three days, we suffered in ways that – well if you need a description, just read the side of a nonfat Pringles can from the ‘90s.

Vino a Vino

A few years ago, in my pre-blog days, I invited my friend, Phil, over for a taste test. The goal was to compare value vs. quality. The contenders: Charles Shaw and Opus One. A showdown of famous cabernet sauvignons (O.K., Opus One is a blend but it’s mostly cab). For those of you who have never been to a free art gallery opening or a fundraiser, Charles Shaw is a bargain wine known affectionately as “Two Buck Chuck,” as it sells for $1.99 a bottle in California ($2.99 elsewhere). The Bronco Wine Company purchased the label of Charles Shaw, a failed Napa vintner, and used his name on bottles of blended bulk wines that the company buys from bankrupt wineries. Fred Franzia, the founder of Bronco Wines, uses this tactic with many of his wines: buy the name of a defunct winery, blend surplus wines nobody wants with his own mass produced juice until the wine is palatable enough to sell for a modest profit. When you multiply that modest profit by the number of cases they sell per year – 20 frickin’ million – and you’re talking about some serious dough-re-mi. In addition to the purchased labels – Napa Ridge, Rutherford, Montpellier, etc. – the Bronco marketing staff works tirelessly to come up with new, sellable winery names. Almost every bucolic sounding name you see slapped on a bottle in the wine section of your local grocery store is a Bronco wine. Sea Ridge, Crane Lake, Forest Glen, Silver Ridge, Salmon Creek – it reads like the Ralph Lauren paint catalog. There was a great article about Bronco in the New Yorker a few weeks ago that delves deeply into all their shenanigans. On the other end of the spectrum is Opus One, the pretentiously named chez d’oeuvre of Robert Mondavi, produced in partnership with the Mouton Rothschild folks. It’s the type of wine that revels in how classy it is. Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” blasts out when you land on their home page just to remind you of their immense sophistication. For over $150 a bottle, their wine better wear white gloves and bring me watercress sandwiches. And then when you multiply that price times the 25,000 cases they produce annually – think of how much Two Buck Chuck you could buy! If you can’t tell from my snarky tone, neither wine appeals to me that much. Even though my father has no problems with Charles Shaw – “It’s good!” – I’ve always found their wines to be flabby and characterless and sometimes cloying. Yeah, it’s decent for the price, but for a few bucks more you can get something that’s actually good, regardless of cost. With the Opus One, it’s the opposite. It’s good but then you think about how much it costs and think, “Is it $150 good?” Or should I have spent that money to save starving children in the Third World? Then it becomes impossible to enjoy the wine. But for many, that price and the pedigree are shorthand for quality. I remember when a friend’s wealthy father had a birthday party and offered to let me pick out the first wine. I carefully perused the extensive wine list and picked out a modestly priced but respected Burgundy, thinking of how it might match well with the poached Arctic char. After that, the father flipped to the end of the thick wine list and explained, “I don’t know much about wine. I mostly just go by price.” He then proceeded to buy bottle after bottle of 1988 Chateau Montelena Estate cab that went for over ten times what my choice cost. I was happy to let him order for the rest of the night. Had Opus One been 10 bucks more than the Montelena, we would have drunk that all night. Why did I own either bottle of wines I apparently despise? The Charles Shaw I bought out of curiosity. The Opus One was a generous gift. When I had both in my hands, it seemed like I had no choice but to have a face-off. Phil brews beer so he has a good palate but knows nothing about wine which made him the perfect candidate. I let him know what the bottles were but poured them for him blindly. I wasn’t surprised when he insisted the Two Buck Chuck was the Opus One. It’s more fruit forward and what few tannins were there were uncomplicated while the Opus One, while the same vintage as the Shaw (1999), was probably a couple years too young to drink. He described it as being flavorless and harsh. Wine bigwig, Steven Tanzer, wrote that the ’99 Opus One was, “Rich, sweet and tactile, with complex, tangy flavors of crystallized blackcurrant, caraway seed and smoked meat.” Go figure. Meanwhile, the New York Times wine guy, Frank Prial, said the ’99 Charles Shaw was, “light, pleasant and easy to drink and has little varietal character…Nondescript would not be too harsh a characterization.” You can see why many would find the cheaper wine more drinkable. It requires very little thought to process what you’re tasting. It’s wine, it’s inoffensive, drink more. In fact, a Charles Shaw wine won a California wine tasting. But half an hour or so after being opened, our Charles Shaw’s one dimensionality and acrid finish became more pronounced while the Opus One started to open up beautifully. It was still fairly austere but its layers of berries and violets and minerals became more evident...not to mention that it was rich, sweet and tactile? Plus something about seeds and smoked meat. So what is the lesson to be learned from this? To gladly accept any Opus One that someone gifts you? Sure. For me it was that there is a threshold for things that are good “for the money.” I was already pretty sure that the Opus One was going to be delicious, just not $150 delicious. But on the low end of things, when do you stop compromising quality for the sake of cost? If your shampoo gives you a rashy scalp and causes your hair to come out in clumps, you can’t justify using it just because there was a 2-for-1 sale at the 99 Cents Store. The Two Buck Chuck wasn’t quite that bad but I want my wine to be more than “nondescript”; I want it to catch my attention and make me feel better about having drunk it. I’ll happily pay two dollars for that privilege but such a wine hasn’t yet passed my lips.

An Inconvenient Lunch

Tomorrow at the movie theaters marks the theatrical release of Food, Inc. This is a documentary directed by Robbie Kenner about the industrialization of food. It incorporates a lot of the subjects covered in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Fast Food Nation (Eric Schlosser is a co-producer) along with a bunch of stuff that’s happened since their publications. But before you nod off, this movie is will change the way you think about food. Take a gander at the visually dynamic and dramatically galvanizing trailer!

To be fair, I haven’t seen the movie yet and I don’t necessarily agree with all of what I’ve seen in the trailer (I’m not that worried about cloned livestock), but I believe this is an important film. Ugh. That sounds so pretentious. Le cinéma important. Full disclosure: I do know one of the film’s producer, but since I have a long-standing man crush on Michael Pollan ( the bald dude in the trailer), I’m pretty sure I’d have been first in line regardless.

They screened the film in Sacramento for agricultural lawmakers and it received a hugely positive response to the point where they were trying to organize screenings for the entire state legislature. I don’t know if that happened, but it should. And you should all see it, too. It opens in New York and Los Angeles tomorrow but it opens wider in subsequent weeks – depending on how well it does this weekend. Check here for the schedule. My friend promised me the movie won’t make you want to stop eating.

Now for a little business: Thanks to the few who are reading this silly blog. If you have any feedback, please lay it on me (thanks, Jenna, for the mac & cheese w/beans tip) or leave a comment. Topic ideas, criticisms and factual corrections are welcome. And if you like the blog or know someone who might, feel free to forward the link. I won’t complain.

Lastly, TOMATO UPDATE! The Earthboxes are going crizazy with fruit and growth. The Sweet 100s are living up to their name. A veritable fruit explosion. And I’ve got Yellow Pear, Big Boy, Roma and Early Girls coming up, too. They should start ripening in a couple weeks.

Sweet 100s on the left, Early Girl on the right

Coming along nicely

The DIY Earthboxes haven’t yet experienced the same bounteous growth spurt of the real ones, but I still think they are going to work out. They were planted a few weeks after the other ones and they are in a spot that receives less light. However, the other plants are sucking. They haven’t grown at all. No pictures of them. Too embarrassing.

To Toss or Not to Toss: Pizza - Part 2

If you made it through my first epic-length entry on pizza making, bravo. What can I say? I’m passionate about the ‘za. I will try to be more succinct here and in future postings. And I promise to never again use the term, "‘za."

So when I left off, I had made a bunch of dough blobs. Feel free to skip that step. It’s a bit of a production that is often hard to justify when you can just go to Trader Joe’s (or wherever) and get a sack of ready-made pizza dough for a buck and change. I will say that the premade stuff yields a harder, denser crust, but it’s oh-so-convenient. Especially when your backyard abuts the Trader Joe’s parking lot (as mine does).

Handling your dough – that’s a not a euphemism for something naughty – is not an easy skill to acquire. For me, it entailed a lot of pizzeria stalking. At Pizzeria Mozza, they have a guy whose only duty is to prep crusts for the toppings guy and I spent many a lunch at the bar parked right in front of his station watching his every move. “Hey, Joe. The creepy dude who stares at you all the time is back.” Honest Abe, my eyes were on the dough the entire time.

But seriously, watching pizza guys is a great way to learn the technique. I’ve also spent meals watching them roll out pizzas at Terroni where they do this weird finger pressing thing that gets the dough super thin, at Bollini's where they use a super fat copper rolling pin to get them to the DOC specifications, and at Lucifer’s where they toss wads of dough in a machine that spits out perfect round crusts. They all make good pizzas but I prefer the hand-tossed crusts that are thin in the middle and a little puffy and doughy on the outside. My experience is that rolling pins squish out the air bubbles in the dough, making a crisper, stiffer and more uniform pizza, so if that’s your thing, by all means do it that way. It’s way easier.

I have to confess that my preference for the tossed crust has less to do with taste and more because it’s so much fun to throw pizza dough into the air. Haven’t you seen that commercial?

The basic idea is to punch the center of your dough down relatively flat while keeping it fat on the rim.

My apologies for the blurry photos

I first squish down a ring with my thumbs

Then I flatten the middle part

When it gets big enough, you drape the dough on your knuckles, slowly working and stretching the outside rim to make it wider while rotating the dough after every pull to keep things even. The dough should feel loose and elastic as you stretch it to a size that’s tossable. I don’t really know what the tossing does – maybe it helps retain a round shape – but it’s really, really cool.

I'm not yet ready to join the U.S. pizza throwing team. Sometimes my dough will get lopsided where I’ll have to dangle and shake it like a bed sheet to even it out. The goal is to work it until it’s fairly translucent in the center part, so whatever it takes to get there, right? A 200 gram lump of dough should make a nice, thin 10-12 inch pizza. Little holes can be fixed at the end with a finger pinch. But if your dough is correct, it should be surprisingly elastic and strong.

Ta-da!

If things do go south and your dough is tearing or lumpy and you want to start over again, I’d advise against it. If you re-wad everything, it won’t be as elastic and even the second time through and you’ll have worse problems. At that point it’s better to bring out the rolling pin and fix your mistakes with it. Or use the rolling pin to start with and quit being such a showoff. Or you can just screw it all and call Domino’s.

Next up: Toppings