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Medieval in LA: Sweet Spinach Tart

Posted on December 1, 2011 by DebbieN

My daughter’s middle school social studies class has been preparing for this all month: today was the Medieval Feast. Lords, ladies, jesters, knights–and she chose to be the master chef. Others brought bags of apples and peas.

We baked a big Tart of Spinnage (courtesy of The English Huswife, 1615, by Gervase Markham) with adaptations. 1615–that’s Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, the early modern era, not the medieval. Still, some of the recipes were probably conserved, and some of the styles of flavoring as well. The fact that sugar is added to this one is reminiscent of Elizabeth I’s infamous sweet tooth, but it also makes the normally savory spinach a dish more in keeping with the earlier recipe collections so favored by Renaissance Faire participants.

Medieval recipes from the 1300s and 1400s indicate heavy use of cinnamon, ginger, mustard, pepper, galingale, and grains of paradise for the aristocratic classes, at least for their feast dishes. Fruits were routinely added to both meat and fish “Parma” tarts–those tarts, full of eggs, were probably much like today’s quiches.

But the recipe my daughter’s teacher e-mailed me had no eggs. The binder, an interesting choice, was “cast cream” or sour cream. Sour cream bakes up well in cheesecakes–labaneh, a Middle Eastern/Near Eastern version, is a lot thicker and bakes up even more nicely. I’ve made mini-cheesecakes from nothing but labaneh, sugar and lemon rind stirred together and baked in cookie crusts, and they came out beautifully. So I wasn’t too worried about the tart filling firming up enough.

The original recipe also contained no spices other than sugar (maybe I mean “flavorings” rather than “spices”), pepper and salt. Spinach, sour cream, sugar, pepper, salt…bland? Odd? Would the signature combination of vegetable and sweet get lost in the mix? No knowing. But for a medieval version, especially for a classroom tasting, we were going to have to do something slightly different, more purposeful.

A spinach tart with sugar? It was going to be a gustatory challenge for the class and its guests, a flavor combination we no longer encounter very much. Might as well make it interesting, and preferably good.

Which is why I adapted it to a sweetened tart of greens like Swiss chard. Versions of this are still served today in Nice (tourte de blettes or Swiss chard tart) and parts of Italy (torta di verdura or tart of greens) as a dessert. The filling often contains raisins and pine nuts as well as Parmesan cheese, and the pastry is often sweet and dusted with confectioner’s sugar before serving. If it were awful, surely people like David Lebovitz wouldn’t be putting versions of it on their blogs. Novelty value can take you only so far. And his version contains a layer of apples on top of the chard…

The last thing I thought about was the learning experience for my daughter, the nascent (though not Re-nascent) master chef. The recipe her teacher sent home indicated “pastry shells”. As though you could go to the store and buy them.

No baking powder or soda allowed in the medieval era. No food processor. So my daughter cut up the butter and cut it into the flour with a pastry blender–once she realized the blades weren’t actually sharp–and then mashed it together with her hands, which was a lot more efficient. She made the spinach filling we decided on–very close to the assigned recipe, but with a bit of cinnamon and nutmeg, and a grating of lemon peel. In place of raisins, she put the extra bits of apple in the filling.

She fit the pastry to the pan, pricked it out, filled it, and topped the spinach with a layer of finely sliced Granny Smith apples–most apples were probably tarter in those days than they are now.

Dame Felidae demonstrates her knife skills

Then she placed the top layer of dough onto the tart, pinched it shut, slashed it in her own design and “endored” or gilded it with egg yolk/water glaze. We baked it in a (horrors! modern!) oven and thawed the “spinnage” out in the microwave before squeezing it, but other than that I think we were pretty much in the spirit. Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Desserts, haute cuisine, history, kid food, Odd food, Vegetabalia | Tagged: cooking with kids, medieval cookery, sweet spinach tart, Swiss chard tart, torta di verdura, tourte de blettes | Comments Off on Medieval in LA: Sweet Spinach Tart

Microwave Tricks: Getting more chocolate power from cocoa

Posted on November 6, 2011 by DebbieN

The infamous chocolate cauldron, image © Miramax

In the movie Chocolat, the riverboat captain tells the chocolatier that his favorite of all her confections is none other than the prosaic cauldron of hot chocolate she keeps on the hob to thaw out her customers. When she pours out a cup, it’s so thick it’s like hot molten chocolate bars. Hard to imagine how anyone could swallow more than a spoonful of it in reality, but you immediately believe it’s superior to the thin, miserly stuff that’s been passed off as hot chocolate in your childhood. And you’re right.

And on the other hand, how could anyone in their right mind want to down a cup of melted chocolate bars? Too rich, and for me, much too fatty. And with much too much cleanup–the last image that stuck in my mind from Chocolat was actually not the hot chocolate Juliette Binoche handed Johnny Depp and Judi Dench but the thickly encrusted cauldron that had been cooking chocolate all day long. Scary, and what a waste of chocolate for one scene!

So I don’t go for that myself, or at least not on such a grand scale. Though if you want that kind of recipe–go to David Lebovitz’s blog and look for Parisian (or worse yet, with even more chocolate, Belgian) hot chocolate. He’s got two kinds of Mexican hot chocolate drinks too.

Cocoa powder, the ordinary day-to-day stuff of American hot chocolate mixes, seems so much less potent and chocolaty than all the fancy recherché chocolate bars with the cocoa solids percentages, the exotic Latin American or African source names, the single-source, fair-trade, wine-label-styled descriptions. Cocoa powder is so prosaic (unless it’s Scharffen-Berger or Valrhona or another premium brand). How could it possibly be good enough for a high-class, French-style cup of hot chocolate?

Granted, cocoa powder–dutched, natural, either way–it’s pure cocoa solids. But it doesn’t really give you the full chocolate experience if you just mix it into things. Something’s missing.

Most professional chefs and chocolatiers will probably tell you it’s the cocoa butter that’s missing. And they’re not entirely wrong–fat does carry flavor and keeps the more volatile, delicate aromas in the chocolate from evaporating off too quickly or breaking down under heat.

But if that were the entire reason, cocoa powder, stripped of all its fat and stored in warehouses and supermarket shelves for months at a time, would be flavorless and dead by the time you got it home from the store, and we know that’s not the case.

When you make brownies or chocolate cake with cocoa powder, there comes a point in the baking when you suddenly smell the chocolate wherever you are in the house at that moment. Before you even realize you’re smelling it, before any Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Desserts, history, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes | Tagged: A Tale of Two Cities, Chocolat, cocoa powder, hot chocolate, microwave cooking | 4 Comments »

When life hands you sour cherries, pit them!

Posted on October 19, 2011 by DebbieN

Vishniak–I’m probably spelling it wrong–is sour cherries turned into a compote, a syrup, a soda (as in, Frank’s Cherry Vishniak from Philadelphia), or a cherry brandy.

How do I know, you ask. Ah–(and with the “Ah” I’m pulling a Dad and giving you the flavor of a particularly smug conversation he had explaining it all to me when I was 15 and had never heard of vishniak either). Because my mother’s father, as it turns out, had made a particularly fine cherry vishniak by accident, about 20 years before this story begins.

My Grandpa Abe came to the States in 1923 as a child from a harsh place whose main compensations were family, music, tea, Bessarabian grapes, and the cherry harvest. His family had survived the pogroms in the Ukraine, his father had survived being drafted into (probably the Tsar’s) army during the Bolshevik Revolution and decided that was enough already, and the family arrived on the last boat allowed to bring Jews into Ellis Island that year–sometime in August.

The family started out dirt-poor, with no English, stripped of everything by the old Russian and new Soviet border guards. And yet Grandpa ended up a doctor, head of internal medicine, energetic and cheerful, unusually beloved by the nurses in the ICU, and an avid world traveler in his later years (my grandmother was a little less thrilled, but a good sport and better at languages than he was).

Some time in the late 1950s, out on Long Island, a friend gave him a gift of sour cherries, which he quickly put up with sugar and vodka in a sterilized glass Mott’s prune juice jug (why, oh why did all four of my grandparents keep prune juice in the house? I never figured it out. They weren’t even out of their 50s when I was little, and I’m almost 50 now myself.)

But in any case Grandpa put the vishniak jug in a dark, quiet corner of the garage to mature for a couple of months and promptly forgot about it.

He and Grandma moved into a New York City apartment sometime in the mid-1960s, and then in the late 1970s, when I was 15, he retired and they moved back out to Long Island. My family came up to help them sort things out–and that’s where my dad started rooting around among the boxes in the garage and found a dust-caked jug with a faded Mott’s label and some dark reddish liquid and cloudy, lumpy slush at the bottom.

“Abe!” he said, horrified. “What are you doing keeping this old jar? And what the hell’s that stuff at the bottom?”

My dad had just spent at least an hour finding similarly dubious-looking treasures of neatly folded foil, rubber bands, wax paper, and other saved-up sundries that my ever-careful grandparents had paid good money to have moved back out of the New York apartment. Was this yet another such item meant to ward off the next Great Depression, or was Grandpa collecting surgical specimens for posterity?

My grandpa took one look at the cloudy jar and beamed–it had all come back. In true shtetl fashion, he uttered the magic word–“Ah!”–and with no further explanation, bustled around in the kitchen to find a couple of sherry glasses that weren’t too dusty. Dad wasn’t looking too thrilled.

In even truer shtetl fashion, Grandpa returned and promptly challenged my dad to a game of chess to celebrate. We kids were left baffled, but not for long–as the game was set out, we each got a tiny sip, and it was incredible.

It turned out that forgetting the cherry vishniak for 20 years or so was the best thing Grandpa could have done to it. When Grandpa opened the jar the vishniak aroma alone was so developed, so rich, that Dad just stopped kibbitzing in his tracks for a minute and inhaled reverently. The liqueur was a clear bright red–astonishing after 20 years–and at the bottom were all the brandied cherries. When it was time for us to leave, Grandpa filled us a little Paul Masson carafe (remember those?) with vishniak to take home.

Now, I don’t have the head for anything more than half an inch of wine–and that’s actually something I inherited from my dad more than my mom–but my local Armenian grocery was selling fresh sour cherries this summer and I managed to snag a box. What to do with them? I washed and stemmed them, then stuck them in the fridge until I figured it out.

This was not really a great move. They sat for at least 3 weeks in there–it’s a miracle more of them didn’t go moldy, but I lost quite a few when I finally opened the container today. The price you pay for dithering. I sorted them, washed the good ones really well and pitted them with a sharp little paring knife. But what now?

I have a bottle of vodka from years ago–still unopened, maybe I’ll use it next summer and put up some vishniak. But there aren’t enough cherries this time around. So I decided to try making a quick preserve the way I do with cranberries.

The raw cherries aren’t really that sour–they’re more bitter with a faint sweetness, like the wild unofficial and unrecognized variety that used to grow at the edges of the woods in the backyard when I was a kid in Virginia. But I decided to try them anyway.

I had a smallish bowlful–maybe a cup, cup and a half, of pitted cherries–and put a couple of tablespoons of sugar on them. Lemon–no lemons in the house. Citric acid “sour salt” I had in a shaker–you can get Rokeach brand in the Jewish section of your supermarket’s International Foods aisle, next to the Telma bouillon cubes and the unsold jars of Manischewitz gefilte fish from last Passover. But a little goes a long way–one modest shake was plenty.

Then–you won’t be entirely surprised at this, but I covered the bowl with a saucer and nuked it for 3 minutes on HIGH. It didn’t gel–I think you need a lot more sugar to make it gel without adding pectin–but it did make some liquid, and the smell–I’d taken all the pits out carefully before microwaving, but there was still a distinctly almondy smell when I moved the lid a little. Powerful stuff.

A tiny taste–heady and bursting with cherries. With more sugar, more cherries, and a bottle of vodka to add it to, in 20 years it might be worth talking about. But in my house it’s not gonna last that long.

I’ve learned my lesson–if you’ve got something rare like fresh sour cherries at a good price, get with it and use them right away. You can freeze them after you pit them, or you can cook them–or put them up with sugar and vodka, though I don’t think Mott’s is still issuing its juices in glass jugs, more’s the pity. The main thing is to act swiftly, and if anyone gives you trouble, threaten them to a game of chess.

Filed under: cooking, frugality, fruits, history, Microwave tricks, Oddities | Tagged: cherry brandy, compote, Russian Jewry, shtetls, sour cherries, vishniak | Comments Off on When life hands you sour cherries, pit them!

Stuffed Eggplants with Quince, A Vegetarian Odyssey

Posted on September 30, 2011 by DebbieN

I did it. It was 90+ degrees outside yesterday afternoon and felt a lot hotter inside when I started cranking the oven to try this dish right away rather than wait for the weekend, but I’m just no good with delayed gratification.

If I have the mini-eggplants and I have the quinces and I have the tamarind concentrate (homemade! two days ago! it’s practically crying out to be used already!) and I have the “hashu” filling for the vegetables sitting in the fridge smelling wonderful, then it just doesn’t matter that Rosh Hashanah dinner is in what, maybe 3 hours, and I still haven’t braided the challot, to say nothing of baked them. Obviously I’ve gotta try this extra-credit dish out RIGHT NOW.

Actually, I figured the house was going to be heating up anyway once I started baking the challot, so why not get it all over with at once?

There was a more serious reason to try it. Today in services I was still thinking about Dweck’s book and her recounting of her parents’ horror in 1947, when, about to return from a vacation in Europe, they learned the government back home had started massacring whole Jewish communities in reaction to the announcement that the UN had accepted Israel as a Jewish state.

The Syrian Jewish community fled wherever they could–just as my family did under the pogroms in the Ukraine back in the 1880s and 1920s. Dweck maintains that the reception the Syrian Jews got in the US from those of us who were already here was so aloof–they didn’t speak Yiddish, they didn’t look the same, they did a few things differently for kashrut and prayers–that her community kept to themselves ever after.

I can believe it, unfortunately–the period right after World War II and the Holocaust was one of paranoia and circling the wagons for American Ashkenazim.

Eastern and Western Jews had similar discomfort with each other in postwar Europe. Reading between the lines a little in Claudia Roden’s and Colette Rossant’s memoirs, the two, who had just lost everything, thought their new Ashkenazi neighbors were cold and inhospitable and indifferent to their exile; the Ashkenazi neighbors and relatives, meanwhile, thought the wealthy young Egyptian arrivals were horribly spoiled and indifferent to the European disaster they had just missed. Altogether, the Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi communities were in closer touch before World War I than they were after the 1940s.

I can only hope that now, 60 or 70 years on, we have more in common and more regard for each other, no matter where we came from. Israel’s great mix of cultures has been a good influence, even though it originated in hardship, and perhaps today we are in better shape to appreciate what we have in common than we have been for nearly a century.

When I look through Dweck’s family’s photos, I see so many people who look astonishingly like several members of my family–my dad and my sister especially. The dignified lady presiding at the seder table on the front cover is a shockingly exact adult version of a girl I knew from my synagogue’s youth group–it’s the sturdy mouth and chin and the set of the eyes, certainly, but also the irrepressibly thick and curly hair (the 1920s formal chignon has it all over my friend’s 1970s braids, which took her hours to corral her hair into). The formal photographs of families in the 1920s, all the daughters dressed beautifully but in the same fabric the mother is wearing, sailor suits on the boys, stern dignified expressions all–I’m pretty sure each of my grandmothers had at least one of those in her collection. The 1930s-era engagement portrait with pearls and bobbed hair–so modern! Pin it up next to the one of my dad’s parents, who married in 1939 and looked so incredibly naive and young then. The family gatherings at Pesach, grandma presiding over the white lace tablecloth and all the seated cousins glancing behind them at the camera from over their shoulders–there’s probably one or two with my mother as a toddler on someone’s lap in Brooklyn and another of her as a teen, whipping her glasses off and blinking myopically for the photo. It could be any of our families. It could have been us in Syria and Egypt and Turkey, it could have been them in the Ukraine or Germany or Poland. We none of us have entirely safe histories, and none of us are entirely separate.

In any case, Dweck’s book is important to me not only for capturing her community’s traditions, tastes and history but for reaching out to the rest of us and giving us a chance to share it, compare it with our own, and reconsider what it means to be part of the Jewish world now.

So–and this is not to trivialize but to explain, since we sometimes live and remember through food, especially at the holidays–it was a great time to try out a challenging dish (challenging for me, anyway) from her book and serve it last night to my family for Erev Rosh Hashanah. I cook from scratch, I cook a lot, but I’ve never really done the legendary great-aunts-at-Pesach kind of slow cooking where everyone groans in pleasure and declares “nobody does it like this anymore” when they taste it. I’ve only once cooked a whole turkey, and I’ve rarely tried anything else that took more than an hour and a half to cook. It’s a transformative experience, one that teaches me a lot about my great-aunts and great-grandmothers, both in the shtetls with the wood-fueled pripitschoks and communal ovens, and here in America with modern kitchens and big lace-covered tables. Trying this long-cooked dish gave me the chance to experience both my family’s past celebrations and Dweck’s at the same time.

To my very great pleasure, her recipe worked the way it was supposed to on the first try and tasted like the effort was worth it, even though her instructions are pretty simple and brief. That’s a huge achievement.

So–if you’re ready for this, keep reading–otherwise, glance at the pictures and skip to the bottom…

The “Stuffed Eggplants with Quince” Experience

First of all, let me just say that I LOVE my local Armenian corner grocers for a lot of reasons, but the fact that they have all the ingredients for Dweck’s dishes (other than kosher meat, that is) is a big, big plus.

I would have tried microwaving–and I still will–instead of a 2-hour braise, but I wasn’t sure how it was supposed to taste, whether microwaving would cook the raw rice in the filling well enough, and how the sauce was supposed to interact with the stuffing and the eggplants. I knew from a previous hard-luck experience that quinces don’t do especially well (or even well at all) in the microwave and really need long stewing under conventional heat to get tender and turn bronzy pink and sweet. So all in all, I decided following the directions in Aromas of Aleppo might be the wiser course for a first try. Even though, from my usual 15-minutes-tops perspective on conventional-heat cooking, Poopa Dweck’s method is glacially, almost outrageously, slow.

Basically, you core the baby eggplants, stuff them with hashu (beef-and-rice filling, rice and tomatoes, or in my case lentils-and-rice), and layer them in a saucepan with quince slices. Then you dilute some tamarind concentrate and add a bit of sugar and salt, pour the sauce over the pan and heat for 10 minutes on the stove until the eggplants start to sweat, add water to come about 3/4 of the way up , simmer half an hour to reduce the liquid and cook the rice in the filling, then transfer to the oven to braise covered for about 40 minutes and then uncovered for another 30. It’s a lot like making brisket, actually.

Dweck gives two allspice-laden recipes for the filling, one for ground beef with rice, the other a rice-and-tomato filling that’s close to what I use for dolmas. I opted to follow the ground beef recipe but substitute an equal weight of cooked green lentils for the meat and add a little garlic. It would work, I was pretty sure, and in fact it turned out to be the best, most delicious part of this recipe–which, skipping to the punchline, was pretty terrific and worthwhile, even for the work Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, fruits, haute cuisine, history, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Aromas of Aleppo, Jewish cooking, lentils, microwave cooking, Middle Eastern cooking, Poopa Dweck, quinces, Rosh Hashanah, stuffed eggplant, stuffed onions, Syrian Jewish cooking, tamarind | 2 Comments »

The Birthday Project: New Year, New Food

Posted on September 28, 2011 by DebbieN

I was born halfway between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, so on any given year, I could be stuck eating honeycake or none at all on my birthday. I think I’ve had maybe two actual birthday parties in my life. It’s a concept my daughter, born in June, doesn’t get.

But occasionally I luck out–and this year was one of the best. My husband asked what I wanted and I had a real answer–a cookbook I’ve been lusting after at the library and that costs only slightly more than my probable library fines if I don’t return it.

So this is it–feast your eyes, I’ll turn the pages:

And this is the project that sold me on it:

Stuffed Eggplant with Quince

Poopa Dweck, a cousin by marriage to Claudia Roden, has edited the New York Syrian Jewish community’s version of a sisterhood cookbook (every synagogue in America’s sisterhood seems to have put out at least one of those) for something like 20 years, only people in her community actually used it frequently. My birthday gift is the 2007 culmination of Dweck’s experience, and it’s just a very beautiful cookbook to leaf through–visually but also for the possibility that when you try the dishes, they’re actually going to work.

It doesn’t take much reading for me to realize that despite the unfamiliarity of some of the flavors–allspice in meat stuffings, tamarind-based sauces–this is the best kind of traditional Jewish home cooking, the kind that has your favorite great-aunts outdoing each other for Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, and other big celebrations. So, somewhat exotic in flavoring but utterly familiar in spirit. (And actually, as I discovered in another Syrian Jewish cookbook, A Fistful of Lentils, by Jennifer Felicia Abadi, a few dishes, like stuffed cabbage with a sweet-and-sour sauce, and manti, a kind of ravioli, are pretty similar to Ashkenazi holishkes and kreplach.)

Like all Jewish great-aunt dishes for the holidays, this dish of stuffed eggplants and quinces comes with two required homework items: the beef and rice stuffing, and tamarind concentrate. The beef I’m not worried about–my first try on this is going to be vegetarian, because I’m not planning on heading out to the kosher butchers in the Valley. I can use a green lentil and rice filling that I already know will taste fine with those flavorings of allspice and cinnamon and onion. Maybe a hit of garlic too, and maybe a bit less salt than for the beef–as I discovered a few weeks ago, with the green lentil sausages, lentils don’t hide the salt flavor as much as beef might.

The other item, tamarind concentrate, turns out to be inexpensive but somewhat unlovely to make–though still something of an adventure. Especially for a blog called Slow Food Fast.

Here’s what’s on page 42 of Aromas of Aleppo for how to work the tamarind pulp into something that will give up its flavor to a sauce:

Poopa Dweck's Aromas of Aleppo--instructions for making tamarind concentrate

Working the tamarind pulp

Now, I’m not all that squeamish, but bleaaghhh. First ya gotta soak the stuff overnight, then ya gotta get in there and mish around–I dunno. I decided to speed it up where I could…

I thought about the little 1-lb. brick of pressed seedless tamarind pulp I’d bought from my Armenian greengrocers for this dish. It just seemed like a tougher version of dried prunes or apricots, which I usually soak up successfully enough in a few minutes by heating them with water in the microwave. Would it work here or would it ruin the flavor? I cut off a chunk, submerged it in water in a microwaveable bowl, and tried it.

Five minutes of microwaving, covered, plus about 20 minutes sitting time–it was definitely done. And really, really incredibly tart, a surprise given tamarind’s distinctly plummy aroma. Success! But no wonder they call it “ou^c” (pronounced OO-rgh, according to Dweck)–that was my immediate reaction when I tasted a tiny sip. It’s THAT sour. My second reaction was that I should probably say Shehekheyanu–the blessing for any new venture, especially for holidays and the first taste of a new fruit in the year.

I realized only afterward that I should have done the whole brick while I was at it–I was about to discover why Dweck calls for preparing three pounds of pulp at a time, not a couple of ounces.

Next step–squishing the pulp in the water to extract as much flavor as possible before filtering through cheesecloth and reextracting the pulp left behind in fresh water…no. Just no. I am not a cheesecloth girl–it never, never cuts neatly, even with Fiskars shears.

So, I was thinking, I have a microwave for a reason. I also decided I have a food processor for a reason, and this is definitely it. I stirred once with a fork first to make sure there really weren’t any pits in there, as advertised on the package front. Then I poured it all into the food processor, and gave it a whirl. That worked too. I seemed to be on a roll with the speed-it-up-immensely daydream.

Filtration–I’ve used overlapping coffee filters in a colander whenever I make paneer in the microwave, and it worked pretty well here too–maybe better than Dweck’s photos, which show a cloudy filtrate coming through the cheesecloth. Mine was clear and amber–maybe too clear? Was it going to taste authentic without the silty stuff? I could only hope. It sure was sour, even dilute as it was. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, fruits, haute cuisine, history, holiday cooking, meat and poultry, Microwave tricks, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Aromas of Aleppo, Jewish cooking, lentils, microwave cooking, Middle Eastern cooking, Poopa Dweck, quince, Rosh Hashanah, stuffed eggplant, Syrian Jewish cooking, tamarind, vegetarian cooking | 3 Comments »

Food that’s fit to print–but is it fit to eat?

Posted on September 12, 2011 by DebbieN

It’s the next “brilliant” thing. In the wake of Grant Achatz, Ferran Adrià et al, the now common your-photo-in-icing cake decorations made using an inkjet printer and soy-based and other edible inks have given way to 3D printable food–or at least that’s what the researchers at Cornell are calling it.

Hydrocolloid Printing: A Novel Platform for Customized Food Production (PDF)

Hydrocolloids are suspensions of fine particulates in liquids–in common terms, gels. Also pastes, like cake frosting or masa. Basically uniform goos. The Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF) unit squirts the stuff through a computer-programmable injector needle onto a platform based on the design you feed in, and it goes in layers so you get an engineered form. Cool, right? Food, any shape you want, and they contend it can be any flavor too.

But it has to be made of goo. And it can’t clog the needle. And it’s not all that new–the Italians have been extruding pasta shapes for over a century. French pastry chefs did all the heavy lifting with choux paste and fondant flowers even longer ago. And in modern times Wilton makes all those fancy-looking metal tips for pastry bags that they sell in the craft chain stores and that will likely be tried out once and then sit forever in the back of your kitchen drawer.

But pastas, pastries and frostings are all about goo as a starting material. These guys are talking about fish.

Most of all, it isn’t all that appetizing, particularly when you see that they’re trying to sell you on a machine that can make what they’d like you to think of as a tomato with a goo composed of 1% gelatin, 8% xanthan gum and some tomato flavoring. Haven’t we had enough of synthetic tomatoes? Isn’t that what the heirloom movement is all about?

Apparently not. Here are the last couple of paragraphs of the paper I linked to above. See what you think.

It should be noted, however, that even if subtle differences are perceptible, it is not necessary in all cases to perfectly reproduce the original food; there is still great value in simulating the original food.

Regardless of whether a hydrocolloid approach is taken to food-SFF, or some other molecular gastronomic platform is employed, the potential future applications of food-SFF remain the same. From culinary professionals to laypeople, individuals from all walks of life will be drastically affected by food-SFF. Artistic boundaries will be pushed in fine dining and industrial producers will explore mass-customization. Laypeople will have housework time reduced and benefit from direct culinary skill injections. Web 2.0 will tackle the next great frontier as people from all over the world experience food in new ways, while forming social bonds and mass-collaborating.

Now that major barriers have been broken, such as high printer cost and proprietary restrictions, the stage is finally set for tremendous growth of food-SFF. Few things are more central to humanity than food, and therefore [it] should come as no surprise when food-SFF gains prominence as one of the 21st century’s important domestic technologies.

excerpted from:

Hydrocolloid Printing: A Novel Platform for Customized Food Production
Daniel L. Cohen, Jeffrey I. Lipton, Meredith Cutler, Deborah Coulter, Anthony Vesco, Hod Lipson

http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/SFF09_Cohen1_0.pdf, accessed 9/12/11

Now tell me, is this future palatable to you? Or do you somehow, almost inconceivably, not relish the thought of a xanthan gum conglomerate taking over the world’s food supply and driving us fresh-food conspiracists underground? Dan Brown, where are you?

Filed under: cooking, Food Politics, history, Odd food, Revised recipes, unappetizing | Tagged: Cornell, molecular gastronomy, printable food, processed food, SFF, solid free-form fabrication, synthetic food, xanthan gum | Comments Off on Food that’s fit to print–but is it fit to eat?

Who the federal spending cuts are hurting: Food pantries

Posted on July 20, 2011 by DebbieN

The LA Times reported today on Southern California’s food pantries. Demand in Los Angeles and Orange County has gone up 70 percent since 2008. Between LA and OC, the food banks are reaching more than half a million people. The LA Regional Food Bank alone is serving something like 1.25 million pounds of food a week. They’ve received increased contributions in that time from the USDA and FEMA, quite a change from the shameful 50 percent cuts the USDA made to food bank aid in the mid-2000s during the Bush administration, but that’s being considered emergency funds, not standard support. Ripe for cutting the moment Obama decides to try and look flexible with the Republican House leaders once again.

And thanks to the repeated budget cuts to domestic federal spending while military spending and bank bailouts continue to be preserved, even that emergency aid is now down considerably from last fall. But the demand isn’t.

The shortfall has to be made up in private contributions. But a lot of the shortfall is just that–shortfall.

Filed under: Food Politics, frugality, history, shopping | Tagged: budget cuts, FEMA, food banks, Los Angeles, nutrition, Orange County, poverty, unemployment, USDA | Comments Off on Who the federal spending cuts are hurting: Food pantries

French Food with Jewish Roots (and vice versa)

Posted on June 10, 2011 by DebbieN

About…a month ago, already? Two? Oy! I decided my next serious food post was going to be a review of Joan Nathan’s current book, Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France (Alfred Knopf, 2010). And I’ve been looking through this book for much of that time, trying to figure out what to say first and what I’d want to cook from it that I haven’t tried before.

An initial read attracted me very much: Nathan, who worked as an aide to Teddy Kollek back in the 1970s, when he was still the gregarious and widely-admired–in fact the last widely admired and liked–mayor of Jerusalem, came back to the States as interested in people as in food, and has balanced the two focuses in most of her cookbooks ever since.

In this book, she starts out by visiting her French cousins and branches out to meet all sorts of people–deli owners, a gefilte fish maven, Holocaust survivors and one of the farm women who sheltered some of them during the war, the new wave of North African Jews from Morocco to Egypt who arrived in France after the mass expulsion from Arab countries in the 1950s; the Provençal Jews who trace their ancestry back to pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal, the Alsatian Jews whose dishes, despite coming from the heart of the original Ashkenazi community, are not as familiar as I would have expected.

Throughout the book she’s collected personal stories of all kinds, visiting home cooks, restaurant chefs, purveyors of spices and other specialty items that Jews initiated and led the European trade for–particularly chocolate and coffee. And she has dug up a few surprises as well.

Paul Bocuse, for example, is widely considered the grand old man of French haute cuisine, so much so that a major international competition is named for him. Nathan discovered that he keeps one stockroom Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, fish, haute cuisine, history, holiday cooking, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia, wine | Tagged: couscous, French Jewry, Jewish cooking, Jewish history, Joan Nathan, kugel, quiches, raito sauce | Comments Off on French Food with Jewish Roots (and vice versa)

The new MyPlate icon–fantastic or plastic?

Posted on June 4, 2011 by DebbieN

Everyone in the food press seems to be weighing in on the new replacement for the much-cursed USDA Food Pyramid in all (both?) its glorious confusion and obfuscation of real nutritional goals that might have (and should have) undermined the beef, corn, pork, corn, sugar, corn, and soy industries if they’d ever been presented honestly.

So where does that leave us? With ears of fresh corn that are more than 50 cents apiece in Los Angeles supermarkets, and the new…

Already, the USDA’s MyPlate web site is in a certain amount of branding trouble (and of course, that’s what counts most in America): the Texas DMV had already bagged “MyPlates.com” for its vanity license plate division (highly unappetizing), and Livestrong.com already has its own well-established “MyPlate” food calculator and fan base. And those items come up first on Google searches. As in, the whole first page or more. The government site ranks way down the list and had to water down the impact of its original name choice with “choose” just to get a URL. Can it elbow out the competition just by bolding the “MyPlate” part?

What really counts are the food and nutrition opinion maker comments, though. And a lot of those are detracting in a nitpicking way that I think kind of misses the point.

The first thing they all have to say is that the plate looks dumbed down. Forgive me, but wasn’t the Food Pyramid’s unreadable and unusable design a large part of the problem? The MyPlate icon is simpler and more direct, and it names real food groups, not “Big Mac” or, on the haute side of things, any of Ferran Adrià’s foams. No wonder foodies and populists alike are wondering what it has to do with them.

A small sampling of the main arguments:

MyPlate: The Food Pyramid for dummies? (LA Times): Dr. Andrew Weil and others discuss what’s still wrong with the new icon. Weil says “fruits” could still include fruit juice, which is usually a useless sugar bomb in comparison with whole fruit, and he worries that the protein section, which comes with a guideline to eat 8 oz. of fish per week, might encourage unthinking people to increase their mercury intake since swordfish is on the guideline menu, as are some of the generally overfished popular species of fish. Weil’s not wrong about the fruit juice vs. actual fruit, but his hand-wringing about fish is really geared for well-off readers who can afford to eat much of it. All the fishes he names are Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Diabetes, Eating out, Food Blogs, Food Magazines, Food Politics, frugality, history, kid food, nutrition, shopping, unappetizing, Vegetabalia | Tagged: chooseMyPlate.gov, David Cassidy, fast food, Food Pyramid, Four Food Groups, fresh produce, Livestrong, Marion Nestle, Michelle Obama, MyPlate, nutrition, processed food, public health, supermarkets, USDA, vegetables | Comments Off on The new MyPlate icon–fantastic or plastic?

They don’t learn, do they?

Posted on May 31, 2011 by DebbieN

The Washington Post reports this fabulous new piece of House Republican budget thinking:

Food safety advocates decry FDA cuts

Didn’t we have a half-billion-egg recall just last summer? And peanut butter contamination? And the spinach, and the tomatoes? And, from the Chinese pharmaceutical and foodstuffs contingent, melamine in quite a number of items, including pet food and infant formula, to fake a high protein level?

Didn’t everybody in the House get up on their hind legs and demand more FDA field inspections, more accountability, more food safety? And now the House majority are cutting the FDA proposed budget from a modest raise proposed by the White House to less than the FDA received for this year’s operations?

Filed under: Food Politics, frugality, history, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: eggs, FDA cuts, food recalls, food safety, melamine, peanut paste, salmonella | Comments Off on They don’t learn, do they?

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Medieval in LA: Sweet Spinach Tart

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Stuffed Eggplants with Quince, A Vegetarian Odyssey

The Birthday Project: New Year, New Food

Food that’s fit to print–but is it fit to eat?

Who the federal spending cuts are hurting: Food pantries

French Food with Jewish Roots (and vice versa)

The new MyPlate icon–fantastic or plastic?

They don’t learn, do they?

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