Results tagged “food”

[T]he burger is omnipotent and irresistible. It can never be weakened. It can never be slowed down. It can never stop its ever-increasing growth in popularity. It's the single most powerful force in the food universe.... The hamburger is a way that people can experience everything that's great about eating beef—the flavor, the tenderness, and everything—in a way that's a affordable.

That's Josh Ozersky, quoted over on A Hamburger Today, from his appearance on Nightline. The great thing about the fact that I've been blogging for almost ten years is that I can definitively prove that I was blogging about burgers before it was cool. The second great thing is that I am sitting at my desk at work, and the Shake Shack is only a stone's throw away.

Last Friday was my birthday. Hooray! I have a fantastic wife, so she treated me to a pig-butchering class at The Brooklyn Kitchen. I like meat, and I like being educated about what I eat and respecting the animals I consume. So Tom Mylan was a fantastic person to lead the evening: Knowledgeable and passionate about his work as a butcher, and (as his blog demonstrates well) able to articulate that in a way that's approachable even to rank amateurs like me.

Even better, my wife posted a great writeup over on Serious Eats. There's lots more info on other Brooklyn Kitchen classes and on Tom there. And as I've mentioned before, I love displays of true competence, especially in regard to knives. And Tom has a stellar post about choosing knives which shows off exactly that kind of expertise.

There's a lot of cuts of meat in a pig, as the diagram here shows. (That's courtesy of the Wikipedia page on pork.) And if you, like me, want to see more examples of the process of breaking down a sizable animal, Adam Fields has a full photo set, and The Brooklyn Kitchen's Flickr account has a photo set on the making of head cheese. Both of those photo albums are probably not for those squeamish about butchering.

• Ask The Meatman offers an Interactive Pork Chart.
• Ben Trott went whole-hog as well.
• Chris Cosentino butchers a pig's head — with video!

I could ramble on about this forever, but we have about 15 pounds of fresh pork in the kitchen now, so there's work to be done.

Today's Blog of the Year Pick: Serious Eats.

I love food, but I could never quite put my finger on what was wrong with the food blogs I'd tried to read until Serious Eats came along. As it turns out, I like cooking and I like learning about restaurants, but what it turns out I really love is simple: Eating.

Ed Levine's assembled a team of extraordinarily talented food lovers (which, it should be noted, includes my wife), and they stay true to the site's mantra of being passionate, discerning and inclusive. I feel like an old-timer in the way I look at blogs, because I still think of them as being fairly static affairs consisting largely of text. But Serious Eats features a formidable video section with original programming from Mario Batali, a burgeoning recipe section and a guide to eating out that all complement the site's own editorial blog posts. Wrap it all up in an incredibly well-designed, beautiful aesthetic that combines elegant details with frequent fun illustrations, and it's an unquestionable winner.

Pick of the Posts:

• Talk: This Q&A section is the heart of the Eats, for me. I'm mostly a lurker here, but I never cease to be amazed how often I'm saying, "I wish I'd asked that!"
• Serious Eats Thanksgiving: Sure, the holiday's passed, but if you want a look at how the site does well-trod topics in a unique way, this is it.
• Extended Meatloaf Coverage: From recipes to National Meatloaf Appreciation Day to photos of dozens of loaves, I discovered this staple of mashed meat this year thanks to the site.

If you like this, try: Elise Bauer's Simply Recipes gets me every time -- not because of the recipes, though they're great. It's the photography, which is simply beautiful.

[P]erhaps the two best examples of how [religion-based food] bans have resulted in delicious and fascinating food are Jain cooking, with its ban on anything that remotely involves taking life, like root vegetables (little critters might get killed while you dig them up) or yoghurt left overnight (too alive), and Jewish cooking, with its complex set of Torah derived rules including bans on pork, on fish without scales (shark, shellfish) and on cooking milk and meat together. I'm not concerned at the moment with the logic of these bans, just their results.

That's from a fascinating article in India's Economic Times. As much reverence as there is in American culture for "thinking outside the box", I'm always fascinated by the things people cook up by rooting around inside the box.

Ryan Freitas, whose culinary wisdom I can personally vouch for, just shared some insights into his idea that designers can learn a lot from the discipline of a well-run kitchen.

The article in Ambidextrous magazine (download the three-page PDF, it should only take a minute) starts with a simple parallel between the two disciplines:

With careers as an interaction designer and a professional cook (sometimes simultaneously), I've noticed striking similarities between the design studio and the kitchen. Like their peers in design, chefs are under constant creative and competitive pressure to execute and innovate. Both professionals service an increasingly savvy customer base in a public landscape where only the tastemakers and trendsetters survive.

Though it's not mentioned in Ryan's article, the most relevant concept to me seemed to be the idea of mise en place, which is basically the discipline that good cooks have of preparing all of their requirements at the ready and properly placed when they begin to prepare a dish. From ingredients to utensils to preparation surfaces to oven temperature, getting everything lined up perfectly means a chef never has to pause to take care of preliminaries while in the midst of creating a meal.

I'm far from a serious cook myself, but I've found that keeping mise in mind when getting ready to cook something forces me to have to actually think through every step of the task I'm about to perform. So it's not merely that all the ingredients are chopped up, it's that knowing what to chop, and how much, makes it imperative that I'm keeping a mental image of the entire process in the front of my mind.

And good design mimics this process by giving you an experience that anticipates mise en place. You find, in the course of using a tool or performing a task, that a designed has thought through the entire process of your task at hand and placed the information and raw materials you need right where you'll need them. Delicious!

From CNN, a terrifying infographic showing the percentage of the population that's obese, on a state-by-state basis. The data shows the march of the obesity epidemic over the past 20 years.

And what the hell are they eating in Mississippi?

Former New Yorker Joshua Schachter's captured his New York Essentials, the short list of places you can't afford to miss when visiting NYC. Every single one of the places he lists is a restaurant; He correctly asserts that if you only have a short period of time to visit the city and you used to live here, the thing you truly miss the most is the food. I found it interesting that Joshua landed on "transcendent" as the best description of Shake Shack's burgers -- I always use the same word to describe them myself.

"The PB&J diagram has to be the most important food related item I have ever seen on the web."

Today's National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day, and the Serious Eats team covers the story in inimitable style. Complete with, yes, indispensable infographics.

It's worth taking the time to really enjoy this amazing recounting of an effort to duplicate the recipe for Patsy's pizza. It's great for a few reasons: Good food is always worth taking the time to explore, chronicles of geeky obsessiveness are what the web was created for, and of course the history of New York Pizza is a source of endless fascination.

The part that really got me, though, was how much of the quality of a pizza was determined by the yeast cultures used in the dough. Jeff covers this well:

There are lots of kinds of yeast in the air in your kitchen right now and one of them will set up shop eventually in your flour water and begin growing. What will it taste like? Well, it's like setting a trap for an animal and waiting for dinner. It could be a pheasant. It could be a rat. You have no way of knowing. Do yourself a favor and skip this part and just buy or obtain a known high quality starter...

I've seen many bogus things about the use of starters. A classic is that you can start a wild culture by setting out some flour, water and baker's yeast and the baker's yeast will 'attract' other yeasts. This is alchemy. It's like saying I put out dandelions and they attracted peaches. It makes no sense. Another myth is that you can get the same flavor out of packaged yeast as you can out of a sourdough culture if you handle it right. This is also alchemy. Can you get parsley to taste like thyme if you handle it right? These are distinct organism, like spices, that all have a different flavor. If you use a starter, and you should, then learn from Ed Wood.

The Ed Wood that he refers to is Dr. Edward Wood, a pathologist who realized while working in Saudi Arabia that he wanted to master the history and variety of sourdough yeasts that people all over the world use to make dough. sourdo.com is the home for his book, a source for buying starter cultures, and a fascinating testament to his passion for a subject most would consider arcane.

I've been trying to master a good New York-style pizza at home for years. It's been steadily improving, but still nowhere near the level of even the average brick-oven place in the city. So what did I take away from the recipe? The key to getting good results is understanding the importance of the variety of cultures available.

And naturally, I was going to send the link to Adam for Slice last night, but this morning it was already up on the site. That guy knows his stuff, too.

You want links? You got links.

• Seth Stevenson defends the word "sucks" in Slate. This seems relevant to me because my keynote at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference last week was callled Trying Not To Suck and because I used to get in trouble with my dad when I was a kid and said something sucked
• On the entitlement of fandom addresses the fundamental issue of people who try to kill the things they love. This an especially pronounced trait amongst crowds or groups of fans.
• Just randomly, this old Salon story about the acquisition and death of Webrings by Yahoo came up in a conversation today. I always loved reading Katharine Mieszkowski's stories back then.
• What's wrong with Social Software? Part one, part two, and part three. Greg Knauss is so smart I'm surprised The Man hasn't had him killed.
• I do a lot of public speaking, so I tend to be pretty critical of presentations. ("Steve Jobs is a fantastic presenter, but do people really find smugness that appealing?") However, I'm comfortable in saying this presentation a few months ago by Intel CEO Paul Otellini is just plain grim. If he's not a natural presenter, why not get someone who is? If he's excited about it, why doesn't it show? This stuff matters!
• We will unleash a swarm of 480 million tiny satellites to blanket the globe in a coppery ring of surveillance! Bwa ha ha ha! Except it actually happened. Project West Ford makes the looneys seem sane.
• Beaver Cheese, Cheese Reviews. Reviewing all 43 cheese from Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch, and a number of other cheese as well. I also admire CheeseReviews.org: "Cheese Reviews is still in it's vestigial stages. But it is envisioned as ultimately being a full featured cheese portal and community." I love cheese, and I love the web.