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Not Stone Soup

Posted on February 11, 2011 by DebbieN
Stone Soup Foodworks of Ottawa

Stone Soup Foodworks of Ottawa, which also uses the slogan "Slow Food. Fast"--what can you do?

If you’ve come to Slow Food Fast looking for the little green Ottawa soup truck, I have bad news and good–I’m not them. (Don’t know whether that’s good or bad, but I’m in Los Angeles, so it’d be a bit of a schlep.)

The good news is that I have found the link to Stone Soup Foodworks for the lost and hungry Canadians among you and it looks pretty good. Like David Ansel of The Soup Peddler in Austin, Texas, Stone Soup’s Jacqueline Jolliffe is getting on a roll with “soupscriptions” as well as on-the-spot takeout soups, salads, etc. made of real ingredients, mostly local and organic.

Why soup? Because soup made from real ingredients, not packets and cans, is more than most people want to tackle at home, I think. Good soup, as both Ansel and Jolliffe say, takes time to develop. And especially in winter, a cup of real soup at lunch helps you push aside the irritations of the day for awhile.

Both Ansel and Jolliffe are doing something entirely different from what I do here on Slow Food Fast–they cook complex and difficult soups in large batches and sell them to subscribing and loyal customers who only have to pay for takeout by the cup or heat up a delivered quart of soup to have something good. That’s their idea of “slow food, fast.”

My idea of slow food fast is to cook a week’s worth, say perhaps 8-10 servings’ worth, of decent, inexpensive, from-scratch vegetable or bean  soup in as little time as possible, preferably in less than 20 minutes all told, with as much help as a microwave oven can reasonably give (which turns out to be a surprising amount, so why not) and without relying on salt to build flavor. And I want it to taste good.

Mostly, I want you to be able to do that yourself at home without feeling like it’s too much work or time and too many steps to cook and eat fresh real food–particularly fresh, inexpensive bulk vegetables–on a regular basis.

If you like to cook slow (say, on the weekend), you can do the artisanal thing at the stovetop for an hour or two. But if you want to get done in a hurry without having to babysit your pots and pans, microwaving is a pretty good, mostly safe, and comparatively very energy-efficient way to go, if you play to its strengths. You can let the flavors develop overnight in the refrigerator (and they generally will) instead of cooking and cooking and cooking just to get to the point where the vegetables are cooked through and then cooking some more to get the flavors to meld.

Case in point: Jolliffe makes a Thai butternut squash soup for Stone Soup Foodworks that looks delicious on the newsroom interview–but she has to cook her onion base down for 40 minutes, and either roasts the butternut squash for an hour in a conventional oven or–this is what she did on camera–buys sacks of precooked and puréed organic winter squash from a local farm. Granted you can do that–in the US, we’d probably just open a can of packed pumpkin, which you can now get organic fairly cheaply in most places, especially after last year’s shortages at Libby’s.

butternut squash ready to microwave

butternut squash ready to microwave

I guess the decision rests on her storage accommodations for the soup truck. But if she were to use a microwave, she could cook a fresh butternut squash–a big one–in about 10-12 minutes and then decide whether to purée or chunk the flesh for her soups, maybe pan-roast Continue reading →

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AHA: Diet sodas and excess salt both linked to strokes

Posted on February 10, 2011 by DebbieN

The latest from the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association’s joint International Conference on Stroke 2011, which is going on in Los Angeles this week from Wednesday through Friday.

Diet soda may raise odds of vascular events; salt linked to stroke risk.

Two large studies on a mixed-race/age/gender/other health status population have just shown that:

1. Drinking diet soda every day increases your risk of a heart attack or stroke in the next 9-10 years. In the study, diet soda regulars had a 48% higher rate than nondrinkers even after accounting for metabolic syndrome and existing or past heart disease.

2. For every 500 milligrams of sodium you eat per day over the AHA’s recommended 1500 max, you have a 16% higher risk of getting a stroke–no matter whether you have high blood pressure or normal blood pressure.

There was one other piece of really bad news announced:

The Centers for Disease Control’s analysts looked at hospitalizations for ischemic stroke (blocked arteries to the brain) between 1994 and 2007 and found that while strokes are decreasing in people over 65 (which is good), they’re INCREASING in children, teens and younger adults. Although older adults still have much higher overall risk of stroke than younger people, the trend toward higher stroke hospitalization rates for younger people is significant and needs to be explored further. Stroke hospitalizations increased by:

  • 31% among boys 5-14; 36% among girls 5-14
  • 51% in men 15-34, 17% in women 15-34
  • 47% in men 35-44, 36% in women 35-44

The CDC researchers didn’t have clear evidence of a cause for the rise in strokes among younger people, but said the rise in average body weight, blood pressure and diabetes, which are known risk factors for stroke, bore a closer look.

The fact that stroke hospitalization rates started rising in children over 5 (the researchers looked at younger children as well but didn’t find an increase under age 5) suggests to me that part of the trend may be due to a more processed diet with higher salt consumption as children head for school. All in all, it gives you the impression that we are the junk food generation, and it’s catching up with us as we speak.

Filed under: DASH Diet, Diabetes, Eating out, Food Politics, history, kid food, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on AHA: Diet sodas and excess salt both linked to strokes

Age, salt and the new USDA dietary guidelines

Posted on February 7, 2011 by DebbieN

Last Monday the USDA released its latest version of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (nominally dated “2010”). I was driving home and NPR carried USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack’s speech, in which he listed a few of the new highlights: eat less, eat less food with solid fats, eat less processed food, eat more vegetables and fruits, eat less sodium.

How much less sodium? About 2300 mg or 6 grams (1 teaspoon) of table salt per day, he said, is the recommended maximum for healthy adults, in line with the long-standing National High Blood Pressure Education Program’s guidelines, which are shared by the American Heart Association and many other professional medical groups.

There’s a second lower-sodium recommendation for anyone overweight, African-American, with heart or kidney disease or high blood pressure or diabetes, and anyone middle-aged or older. This year, as the more specifically heart-health-oriented professional organizations already recommend, the USDA guidelines set the lower maximum at 1500 mg per day, or about 3 grams of table salt.

And you’d think that was great, and I do, that the USDA guidelines have finally caught up with what the medical associations have been demanding based on the overwhelming weight of studies on dietary sodium intake as it affects blood pressure, cardiovascular disease including stroke, and kidney disease.

But there are two catches hidden in the midst of all this, and I’m not even sure Vilsack was aware of it. Smaller one first: Middle-aged? How old is middle-aged?

“Fifty-one and older,” Vilsack said. Whew, I thought. Four more years before I have to start thinking of myself as middle-aged. By the time I get there, I’m hoping the standard will have gotten fudged upward by at least another decade or so.

Because, you know, if you’re not 50 yet, 51 sounds reasonable–and comfortably remote for a lot of younger adults. Which I am, thank you very much. Don’t look at me like that.

So here’s Catch-51: When I was working at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute back in the mid-’90s, the general working recommendation for lowering sodium to 1500 mg/day was all the other high-risk groups Vilsack mentioned…and healthy adults 40 and up. Not 51 and up.

The choice of a cutpoint at age 40 for otherwise healthy people was based on the risk data from the first three National Health and Nutrition Education Surveys, which began collecting data across the nation starting in the 1970s. The latest version collected data around 2006 and its findings were just released last spring by the Centers for Disease Control. All the NHANES studies correlate  in-depth interviews about diet, exercise and lifestyle patterns, and cardiovascular history along with clinical health measurements (height and weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, urinary sodium excretion, blood iron, etc.) from thousands of ordinary Americans. Even early on, there appeared to be an independent higher risk and a greater need to lower sodium at 40 and older, all other health risk factors being equal.

But of course 40 seems too young to be middle-aged. And the USDA, which issues the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, tends to downplay certain elements of the risk statements so that no one, or at least not the agency’s chief constituents, gets upset. The no one in this case might easily be the Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Diabetes, Eating out, Food Blogs, Food Politics, history, nutrition, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Age, salt and the new USDA dietary guidelines

Soupe à l’oignon gratinée (or not)

Posted on December 22, 2010 by DebbieN

French onion soup without the gloppy gratin

Sometimes it pays to think out the recipes you read before you try them. For example…

I love and miss French onion soup from my pre-kosher days (that would be up to about age 19, long, long ago…) Can’t be helped, though–if you keep kosher, beef stock does not combine with Gruyère. And I’ve never actually tried making it at home before, because, if you go by a traditional, official kind of recipe like the one published in the LA Times below, it’s a 3-hour ordeal.

RECIPE: Soupe à l’oignon gratinée – Los Angeles Times.

Total time: 3 hours  Servings: 8  Note: Adapted from Comme Ca.

  • 8 large yellow onions, halved and sliced lengthwise into 1/4 -inch strips
  • 1/4 cup unsalted butter
  • Salt
  • 2 2/3 cups water, divided
  • 2/3 cup dry Sherry
  • 5 cups chicken broth (with as little sodium as possible)
  • 2 2/3 cups beef broth
  • 8 sprigs fresh thyme and one bay leaf, tied together
  • Fresh ground black pepper
  • 1 loaf French bread
  • 1 pound Gruyère, grated

Pretty onerous just on the ingredients (lot of salt in them thar vacuumpaks of stock), not to mention the bread. The Swiss cheese, oddly enough, is a lower-salt cheese than most, about 120-150 mg sodium per ounce as compared with, well, anything else at 180-210. It makes up for the lack of salt with a huge OD of saturated fat–and 2 ounces per person’s got to be a lot, really, just for melting on top of soup. It would be another matter if this were a legitimate fondue, or a sumptuous grilled cheese on really good toasted pain levain, and you were actually going to eat it all, but if I recall correctly, you aren’t.

Because I never had French onion soup at home, I never had to face the task of scrubbing baked-on cheese off the rims of the bowls afterward. Maybe 1/3 of what was sprinkled on ended up stuck like Swiss barnacles to the bowl, which seems like a waste, especially if you shell out for real Gruyère.  The rest turned into goop that sank to the bottom of the bowl and stretched up for yards on the spoon only to stick to the front of your teeth. Or blouse.

Plus at home there’s all the rooting around in the cabinets hoping your soup bowls are the kind that can survive the broiler and that your oven mitts (and guests) can Survive The Gruyère.

But the real cruncher here is time.

The LA Times instructions don’t even include the time it takes to sliver 8 very large onions, but you should, because it’s not trivial: 20-30 minutes, plus crying time. Heat the oven to 400 degrees (15-20 min, they also forgot this bit, but maybe while you’re crying over the onions). Stew onions with butter and 1/4 t salt in lidded casserole in the oven until the onions are softened and a light golden-brown, about 1.5 hrs, during which you’re supposed to stir every 15 minutes (!) Take the casserole out and cook further on the stove top until the onions are a deep golden-brown and just begin to stick to the bottom of the pot to form a crust (10 min? 15? 20? more?–from the experience below, I’d say at least 20, maybe even 30). Add half of the water and cook until the water has evaporated, about 8 minutes (so specific?). Add the sherry and keep stirring until it has evaporated, 3 to 5 minutes. Stir in the remaining water, broth and the thyme bundle, bring to simmer (5-10 min) and simmer 40 minutes (why 40? who knows?). Slice and toast the bread. Fill 8 oven-proof soup bowls, lay the toasts on top of the soup, sprinkle the grated Gruyère evenly over the tops and place the bowls under the broiler just until the cheese is bubbling and begins to brown in places (5 minutes?). Serve immediately.

TOTAL TIME: At least 3 hours, probably more like 3 1/2.

KLUTZ FACTOR: HIGH–lot of hot transfers of heavy casserole dish, finding and broiling ovenproof soup bowls, transferring to the table without spilling…not to mention serving “immediately”.

Then there’s…(you knew this was coming)

Nutrition per serving: 490 cal; 27 g protein; 36 g carb; 3 g fiber; 26 g fat (15 g sat); 78 mg. cholesterol; 808 mg. sodium.

Wow! Am I wrong in thinking that almost no soup should be this much of a labor of love, not to mention love handles? For this much time, fat and salt, I’d demand at LEAST grilled marinated lamb. Or a good runny camembert, a perfectly ripe pear, some excellent sourdough toast and a half-glass of something complex and interesting in the way of wine.

Maybe it’s as delicious as promised. But all those hours, all that stirring, not to mention all that fat and sodium and cholesterol, just for a bowl of onion soup and a slice of toast with melted cheese? Is it any wonder Lipton’s is popular?

Still…Can we do better with the onion soup itself? Maybe as in, vegetarian but still opulent, and furthermore without the heavy-duty time and calorie burden? Let’s try, anyway.

The first objections I have are eight huge onions and 8-10 cups of salted broth. Do I want to make anywhere near that much onion soup? Do I have that many takers in my house? Unfortunately not. One huge onion just for me, then. Maybe my husband and daughter, but only if it’s obviously fabulous. In which case, I won’t really want to share with them.

The main thing here is getting the flavor out of the onions–you want to caramelize them thoroughly and evenly without breaking down their aromaticity too badly. But I personally think baking them slowly in a big oven for an hour and a half just to start to do that is insane. Even if we’re talking about eight big onions.

My first attempt at shortening this recipe did not go badly, exactly, but it didn’t get me soupe à l’oignon either. Continue reading →

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Speeding up Eggplant Parmigiana

Posted on December 12, 2010 by DebbieN

On the last night of Hanukkah, I fried some more–but only a little this time.

When my daughter and I went vegetable shopping at my favorite corner grocery that day after school, we found a bin of eggplants on sale for 25 cents apiece. And they were pretty good, so I bought four of the firmest ones and we lugged them home.

The moment I spied the eggplants at the store, I was already thinking about eggplant parmigiana, or at least about involtini (cheese-filled eggplant rolls with tomato sauce), which comes to much the same thing. It’s mostly a geometrical difference at that point–rolled eggplant versus flat, crosswise rounds versus loopy lengthwise slices.

I’ve loved eggplant parmigiana since I was a kid and my parents would take us to a local Italian diner run by a friend of my mother’s. A different Italian diner, this one during my student days, served it either screamingly hot in a fresh-from-the-oven baking dish with so much incendiary mozzarella on top that you were guaranteed to scorch the roof of your mouth, or else sandwiched into a grinder roll with the best tomato sauce in the universe. I loved them both.

But there’s no denying the fact: the traditional parmigiana is one heavy kind of dinner. It’s designed to remind you (an hour or so after eating it, or perhaps again in the middle of the night) that suffering is all around us and wants us to share, so be humble and don’t forget the Tums.

Why is it so heavy? The eggplant, the tomato sauce, the garlic, even the cheese filling–all fine. I decided the main problems with eggplant parmigiana come down to two things: 1) frying the eggplant slices to cook them, because that takes a lot of time and a lot of oil, and 2) breading the eggplant with eggs and flour or breadcrumbs.

In the kibbutz kitchen where I worked after college, I did more than my share of slicing and breading eggplants and dipping them in eggs and redredging and frying, the whole works, enough for several hundred people (the other several hundred were smart enough not to eat them unless they happened to be hanging around the kitchen side room where the fryer was going and could snag a slice fresh off the cooling rack).

It’s more than ok to eat breaded eggplant hot off the press, as it were. Almost essential, in fact. But let the slices wait around at all, layer them with cheese and tomato sauce and bake for half an hour or so under foil, and what started out as fried eggplant, deliciously crunchy with a creamy texture inside, ends up shriveled and spongy or stringy between no-longer-crisp layers of bready gunk, and more than that, the frying oil is starting to make itself known again. Continue reading →

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Couscous, its own fine self

Posted on November 27, 2010 by DebbieN

Fine-grained couscous made directly from farina

When I’d just come back from a year in Israel after college, I read through Paula Wolfert’s Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco several times. Her descriptions of the market stalls, the kitchens of the aristocrats, and the very down-to-earth cooks making tricky components like warka leaves for bistilla or rolling and sieving different sizes of couscous from farina and flour fascinated me. They filled in parts of the culture I hadn’t understood in the Moroccan Jewish community I’d just left.

Two of the dishes in the book, two only, have I actually made in all the time since. But if you get the right two, two is enough.

I first ate couscous in Ma’alot, up in the north of Israel in the western Galilee. On my first night in the volunteer program, my new roommates brought me to a tiny 4-table restaurant in the town center after a very miserable and cold trudge up to the top of the hill in a January downpour. The restaurant would have been a real hole-in-the-wall anywhere else, and even here it seemed to cater to the few single men who had neither hope nor prospect of a girlfriend, and whose mothers had finally nudged them out the door. Israel’s amenities–grocery stores and the like–are still often a grade or so down in appearance from what we’re used to in the US, and I’d been there half a year already, so I was used to ignoring it and discovering what was good. Still, even 25 years ago, most restaurants in the larger towns were not this dowdy. This was card tables and folding chairs. My heart sank. Where had I come to?

Not 5 minutes after we’d been seated, however, the lady who ran the kitchen fetched us out a huge platter mounded with couscous and chicken legs and vegetables, steaming hot and smelling incredible. The chicken was delicious (everybody sing; I’ve just been subjected to another showing of Sherlock Holmes’s Smarter Brother at our in-laws’ over Thanksgiving weekend) but the couscous itself was so light and fine it was like eating hot curried snowflakes. What was it? How do you do that? And in half a year of eating at Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, Eating out, Grains, haute cuisine, history, Pasta, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments | Tagged: , , , , , , | Comments Off on Couscous, its own fine self

Somewhat Scary Food

Posted on November 1, 2010 by DebbieN

Today’s topic is particularly revolting, because it’s never too late to start considering what lies ahead at the end of this month I mean, tonight–and yes, we’re already late for the door. Yes, buying bags of generically sorta-chocolate Hershey’s and Mars brand mini candies is the accepted, sterile, utterly safe way to go on Halloween. But really, it’s not very interesting. Especially not for kids. And it’s gotten a lot more expensive in the last year, as far as I can tell.

(Though if you’re going that route–or your kid is going out trick-or-treating elsewhere–check out the Buzzle.com comprehensive candy carbs list if you need to know about that kind of thing in detail, or the little rule-of-thumb chart at the bottom of my Carb Counts page. If nothing else, it’ll keep you away from the communal candy dish at work.)

When I was a kid we went out trick-or-treating with the exhortation to touch nothing, TASTE NOTHING, until we got home and my mother could inspect it all for razor blades or dimes or other nasties that might unimaginably (except to my mom; dimes are not something most people will part with these days except for a venti with extra whipped cream and a cherry on top) be stuck in things like apples. It was an annual ritual of paranoia that lent that unnameable something–a hint of danger and excitement–to the otherwise blatantly fake costume horror. Because, of course, we were usually walked strategically to the homes of families our parents knew, just as they walked their kids to ours.

Then there was the time a friend invited me to her church’s haunted house–the activities mostly consisted of blindly sticking our hands in bowls of cold spaghetti or reaching out for something that turned out to be grapes with the skins peeled off. We were getting too old for it, really, and it was more icky than scary. But still. Somehow the innocent days of bobbing for apples and sticking your hand in cold spaghetti have gotten lost in the too-adult fear of sharing germs or getting pneumonia from having to plunge your head into a bowl of cold water.

Kids don’t get to help set up anything but the store-bought decorations anymore, and if they have any say in what treats to hand out, it’s through the universally accepted point-and-whine technique at the supermarket Halloween aisle. Reading the teeny-tiny fine print on the ingredient lists for all those mini candies, spooky and mysterious as the 4-syllable chemical names may be,  just doesn’t cut it for scariness or adventure. Nor do the huge blowup animatronic decorations–the creepy hand, the dancing skeleton, the vampire rising from the coffin to a boogie-woogie soundtrack like so many Halloween versions of the Singing Trout–is this Robert Pattinson’s future?

Most kids can’t even make their own toast these days. How are they supposed to cope with creating pickled porcupine quills or tarred hornet brittle?

Fortunately, a number of cookbooks (from before the sterilized-and-wrapped-for-your-protection era) are available from the ether or at your local library with answers to just these sorts of dilemmas. If you have a stove and a freezer and possibly a food processor or electric mixer, you stand a good chance of rescuing your young innocents from the debilitating descent into middle-aged indifference, incapacity and accountancy.

I refer here, first and foremost, to the slim but venomous contents of Roald Dahl’s culinary imagination (and that of his widow, Felicity Dahl, who unearthed these books and made sure they saw light of day). To be absolutely sure I’m doing it right, I’m starting with Volume II, Roald Dahl’s Even More Revolting Recipes (Penguin Putnam, 2001), because Volume I, Revolting Recipes, clearly wasn’t revolting enough. Only the best for my child!

What could such books possibly contain? Roald Dahl’s Even More Revolting Recipes is a fair mix of candies, sweet drinks, desserts and actual non-sweet food–this last is the real surprise. But no vegetables, unfortunately, other than a bit of decorative tomato and some oddly Martian-looking potatoes (I fervently hope they don’t sing).

In keeping with modern ideas about kids and cooking, a number of the recipes call for prefab products (the one for Tongue Rakers, a kind of onion-and-garlic-laced bread shaped like a pitchfork, calls for a “packet” of your favorite pizza dough mix rather than the basic flour-water-yeast-and-salt), and several involve the strategic use of food coloring (Hornets Stewed in Hot Tar, a black-dyed pumpkin- and other-seed brittle) or fluorescent paint Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, Desserts, Eating out, haute cuisine, history, holiday cooking, kid food, Odd food, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , | Comments Off on Somewhat Scary Food

Veg-phobia II: Summer Edition

Posted on August 8, 2010 by DebbieN

My daughter is at camp for two weeks, the longest she’s been away from home, learning to deal with meals and insulin on her own (with the camp nurse’s help). After six months of calculating and eight weeks of giving herself shots, I know she’s ready to do it, and the nurse is ready, and her counselors are ready. And I overprepared and brought more supplies than she’ll need (my daughter has nicknamed this “Mom-anoia”).

I brought everything and a little bit more–including carrots and celery sticks and low-fat cheese sticks, and a loaf of whole wheat bread for activity carbs. I felt like I was turning into my grandmother, who used to bring shopping bags full of real bagels and corn rye on the plane with her from New York whenever she and Grandpa visited us in small-town Virginia.

But really. The nurse laughed at first when I asked a couple of weeks ago if the camp kitchen had vegetables as an option for campers who needed a non-junk snack (I’d looked at the sample menus online and they looked a bit Boy-Ar-Dee to me), but then she admitted the camp doesn’t really serve a lot of vegetables and suggested I bring them for her to store in the infirmary fridge. They don’t have anything whole wheat either. I think she stopped laughing and started sounding rueful about a third of the way through her reply. “We have fruit,” she said half-heartedly, knowing immediately that it wouldn’t really do for a diabetic.

The food at camp is a smack in the face with the wet rag of reality: this is how the rest of the country eats today. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a great camp in every other respect, with a long track record all over the Americas and people of my generation who still feel immensely grateful to have gone as kids. We were very fortunate to get a scholarship for it.

So what’s gone wrong with the food? It’s like school cafeteria food in the ’70s, but without the kale or the stewed tomatoes, the half-hearted iceberg lettuce salads or the lima beans. Take all that away and you have spaghetti, turkey burgers, the occasional chicken or tuna fish, grilled cheese, pizza, some form of potatoes or corn, and fruit. Some protein, a surprising amount of fat, hidden and otherwise, highish salt and a lot of starches on top of starches. It’s also “all you can eat.” But what are you really getting that’s worth seconds? No fiber. No vitamins. Few minerals. Nothing green. Per the Sylvia cartoons, “We feature all-white meals.”

Vegetables? Salad if you’re lucky. Broccoli? Nearly unheard of. Tomatoes? only occasionally. Red cabbage, carrots, celery or any other noshing vegetable of worth? Um, not this summer.

And it is summer. Best time of year for greens. This is when it’s all happening at the farmers’ markets all over the country, and your local newspaper is probably exhorting you to get out there and try it. And did I mention this is California, prime place for vegetabalia all year round?

How did this happen? To a well-educated, professional and middle-class part of the population, no less? The nurse tried to explain to me, “This is what they’re used to at home. The kitchen figures the kids won’t eat them.”

Disheartening in the extreme. But she’s right about the way families tend to eat these days. We saw it firsthand when some dear friends of ours came to visit Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Eating out, Food Politics, kid food, nutrition, unappetizing, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Veg-phobia II: Summer Edition

I have GOT to see this

Posted on June 27, 2010 by DebbieN

Kings of Pastry

Kings of Pastry

“Kings of Pastry”, a new documentary about the Meilleurs Oeuvriers de France competition by D.A. Pennebaker (Bob Dylan documentary “Don’t Look Back”) and Chris Hegedus (“The War Room”). Unfortunately I missed it last night at the LA Film Festival–what can you do?

See the trailer–looks like a good time.

Filed under: baking, Desserts, Eating out, haute cuisine, movies, Odd food | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on I have GOT to see this

Selling salt, one con at a time

Posted on May 30, 2010 by DebbieN

Michael Moss’s new investigative piece,   “The Hard Sell on Salt” at the New York Times, traces the strategies used by the processed food industry over the past 30 years or more to fight any regulation on the amount of salt they dump into everything.

I have wondered for years why TV chefs (Moss ticks Alton Brown on this for having shilled in an ad for Cargill, a major salt producer), the Culinary Institute of America, big-name restaurant chefs and their fans (prominently Michael Ruhlman), and the food processing industry have all pushed salt so hard and why the discussion about reducing salt always, always turns to “what can we substitute” rather than “why not just leave it out.”

It’s not as if any of these players, other than the actual salt production companies, have an intrinsic mission that requires them to sell salt.

Moss turns up a few of the answers. Not surprisingly, products like low-salt tomato sauce require actual fresh ingredients (vine-ripened tomatoes, fresh herbs) to make up the difference in flavor from the current formulas for salted jar sauces, which contain dried herbs and low-grade tomatoes and range from 450-700+ mg. sodium per serving.The low-salt sauces are more expensive to produce. On the other hand, they’re higher quality and they do actually taste good.

But that’s about the simplest case. Tomato sauce actually is made from tomatoes, whether high- or low-grade, and is therefore (if you discount the addition of starch or gum thickeners, sugar or corn syrup, spice “extractives” and preservatives in so many brands) about as close to the actual homemade product as processed food gets. Most of the major processed foods aren’t so recognizable.

Peanut butter should be in the same category as tomato sauce–something with a simple real main ingredient that tastes like what it is. And a number of smaller companies do offer unsalted natural peanut butter–peanuts-only, and it tastes just fine. But the major brands insist that if you take out any of the salt (notably, not “all”) from their formulations, you “have to” add sugar or something else to compensate for the loss of flavor. Read the major brand labels and you realize why: their peanut butters are already mixed with corn syrup sweeteners and solids, gums and emulsifiers and mono- and diglycerides and starches and fillers. The salt is there not so much to highlight the peanuts but to cover all of that extra gunk. You have to wonder whether the nutrition is reduced as well–something like the case of bologna vs. actual meat.

Particularly telling (and entertaining, from my point of view), are the taste consequences of cutting salt in some very popular products:

Even as it was moving from one line of defense to another, the processed food industry’s own dependence on salt deepened, interviews with company scientists show. Beyond its own taste, salt also masks bitter flavors and counters a side effect of processed food production called “warmed-over flavor,” which, the scientists said, can make meat taste like “cardboard” or “damp dog hair.”

I have to admit I really adored that one. My general reaction to things like Lean Cuisine, South Beach Diet, etc microwave meals-for-one is that, with so much sodium per serving (up to 1200 mg or worse) you’d be better off tossing out the “meal” and eating the box. Tastes about the same, salt’s gotta be lower, and at least you’d get some fiber. Now we know it’s true.

As a demonstration, Kellogg prepared some of its biggest sellers with most of the salt removed. The Cheez-It fell apart in surprising ways. The golden yellow hue faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was not merely bland but medicinal.

“I really get the bitter on that,” the company’s spokeswoman, J. Adaire Putnam, said with a wince as she watched Mr. Kepplinger struggle to swallow.

They moved on to Corn Flakes. Without salt the cereal tasted metallic. The Eggo waffles evoked stale straw. The butter flavor in the Keebler Light Buttery Crackers, which have no actual butter, simply disappeared.

Perhaps there’s a lesson here. Kellogg’s certainly not the only company that’s been selling Americans the food equivalent of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Perhaps all the food execs should be required to eat their own products, without “benefit” of salt, and preferably in front of an FDA regulatory panel or a Congressional committee?

Filed under: Eating out, Food Politics, nutrition, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

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