Slow Food Fast

Smart Choices Labeling Program Falls Apart

Posted on October 28, 2009 by DebbieN

The FDA’s recent and surprisingly bold scrutiny of the Smart Choices food labeling program, coupled with wide public indignation over the program’s obviously inappropriate awards of healthy food status to processed foods without much actual merit, has left the industry-led nutrition rating effort in shreds. In a recent followup to his initial article in the New York Times, William Neumann reports that the Smart Choices program has been suspended only about two months after going live, and participants like PepsiCo have pulled out altogether. Kellogg’s, on the other hand, is “phasing out” its green checkmarked cereal boxes and announced that global marketing officer Celeste Clark is staying on in good standing after what has amounted to a PR fiasco over Froot Loops. Makes you think they were the ones with the highest investment in the program to begin with, or that perhaps they were the company least likely to admit how transparently flimsy the program’s nutrition criteria had become to the rest of the country.

It’s the first time in quite a while that the FDA has taken on a big household-name food industry target in public without a lot of hemming and hawing and backpedaling and dealmaking. It gives me hope that at least some of the federal government is shifting gears to start serving the public again.

The great surprise for me is how little real effort it took to shut down the food industry’s program. Three or four years ago it might well have prevailed, and the processed food industry might have been able to keep inserting its priorities into the debates over nutrition without any effective logical check. But at a time when the nation’s gotten sick of being lied to so brazenly for so long about so many things–many of them more serious–corporate food tampering and misrepresentation of food quality are becoming hair-trigger topics. Not least because food is the easiest for ordinary people to judge and to protest safely in the streets.

We can’t organize effectively enough to protect ourselves against the invasive, petty and obscene wastefulness of the Patriot Act as it has actually been applied. We can’t organize effectively enough to demand and get a proper, timely accounting of Guantanamo and the government’s use of torture there and abroad.

But we can talk food and nutrition and sustainability and corporate manipulation until the cows come home.

How else to explain the cult status of Michael Pollan? The rise of Fast Food Nation and Food, Inc.? The fights over school cafeteria vending machines and chain restaurant nutritional stats? The Smart Choices checkmark for Froot Loops, which people buy specifically for the artificial colors and know perfectly well is not really food, touched the match to a very big pile of sawdust.

And now the FDA is also on its way to strengthened oversight powers from Congress, including mandatory food recalls, not just recommendations for recall, to go after contamination of the food supply, and with any luck some extra funding to cover the actual field investigations needed.

It’s long overdue, but somehow it seems to me the FDA is being tasked with something the USDA should have been doing all these years and hasn’t. The USDA has more tools and resources at its disposal for doing food safety checks at the agricultural and manufacturing levels but because part of its mission is to boost agriculture, it has often dismissed these checks as unnecessary and even obstructed them, as in the case of routine meat testing for BSE and other infections.

The FDA is still supposed to protect the nation against food and nutritional claims fraud, though some of its targets appear to be of diminishing significance in comparison with preventing widespread salmonella and E. coli in the food supply. Smart Choices is obviously a big and publicly important target, but on the other hand, it seems to have been exposed and skewered satisfactorily already by public reporting of the Froot Loops fiasco. The FDA can ride the crest and put the final, perhaps critical, touch on it, but the agency’s gotten a huge boost this time around from public opinion.

Maybe that’s saved the FDA and the public some time and taxpayer dollars that won’t have to be spent going to court over it. Maybe it’s given them the nerve to work on the public’s behalf more daringly, knowing that the public actually does give a damn about its own well-being? Maybe things are really going to be different enough that they’ll go after the big offenders even when the public isn’t way ahead of them? We can only hope.

But frankly, I still want to see the USDA fulfill its responsibilities to protect the public and the food supply, and not abandon or subvert them in service to big agriculture and processed food firms. The FDA shouldn’t have to pick up after them.

Filed under: Food Politics, nutrition | Tagged: Fast Food Nation, FDA, Food Inc., food labeling, food safety, Kellogg's, Michael Pollan, nutrition labeling, PepsiCo, processed food, processed food industry, Smart Choices | Comments Off on Smart Choices Labeling Program Falls Apart

Ag School: the New Farming vs. Big Agro

Posted on October 14, 2009 by DebbieN

The LA Times reports today that the chairman of the Harris Ranch Beef Co. has successfully pressured Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo, one of California’s few universities with a strong agriculture program, into converting what was to be an upcoming lecture by Michael Pollan into a panel discussion with a meat science expert and a representative from a large organic grower. How? By threatening to withdraw a $150K pledge for an on-campus meat-packing plant. The chairman’s threat letter to Cal Poly’s president also apparently criticized a professor who called Harris Ranch “unsustainable”.

Harris Ranch itself is more than usually well known to Californians. It’s a huge holding area for thousands upon thousands of cattle as they’re fattened for market. It’s an hour or so south of San Jose, a feedlot acres long, set right along the east side of the I-5, California’s main interior north-south highway between LA and San Francisco. You can smell it coming a couple of miles before you get there, even with the windows and vents shut and the air conditioning on. And the cattle–herds and herds of them, closely packed. Quite a sight. All kinds, with very little room to wander around, and there’s no grazing to wander to. Elsewhere, on side highways through the hills, you see small herds, calves, occasionally lone cows or bulls meandering along the slopes, picking their way between boulders and foraging for grasses. Once they’re trucked to Harris Ranch, that’s over. It’s Cow City.

The manure piles, as you might imagine, are vast, and provide a valuable sideline business because the rest of the highway, all up the San Joaquin valley, is lined with cotton, orchards, and a variety of other crops, and the land itself is flat, dry, and chalky.

But does that make Harris Ranch Beef Co. sustainable? Probably not. Does Harris Ranch’s size make it evil or exploitative? Also probably not, or not automatically. It just makes it big. Really big–and maybe too big to run without depleting or damaging the local environment. Unless, of course, you have a good resource for researching better ways to farm.

But threatening to withdraw a big-ticket donation just because Michael Pollan gives a talk at the university might not be the best way to convince the world of Harris Ranch Beef Co.’s intentions toward the public or of its ethical business practices. More importantly, it might not be the best way to present the beef industry to students at the Ag school.

It is probably too much to ask a big business like Harris Ranch Beef Co. to act intelligently rather than in panic when it comes to criticism over its sustainability. But I wonder what would have happened if the chairman had looked at the university’s sustainability research as an opportunity rather than a threat.

Ironically, big agribusinesses like Harris Ranch probably need the kind of fresh thinking and research on sustainable practices that Cal Poly-SLO and other agriculture schools are starting to produce. The next 20 years are going to see a lot of changes in food production because a lot of resources are either already being depleted or getting more expensive faster than anyone could have predicted 10 years ago. Even the next 5 years are up for grabs. These changes are already hard to miss.

All the big agro and food processing businesses that decry Pollan’s food journalism today are going to be changing something about how they do business. They’ll have to, whether or not he (and other credible researchers) gets to talk freely about the problems of the status quo at the Ag schools they support. The question is whether the Ag schools will have thought about the problems he raises and be prepared with some solutions when agribusiness finally realizes it needs a new approach.

Filed under: Food Politics | Tagged: academic freedom, agribusiness, agriculture research, agriculture schools, beef industry, Big Food, California, Food Politics, Michael Pollan, sustainability, sustainable food | Comments Off on Ag School: the New Farming vs. Big Agro

The Case Against Bologna

Posted on October 10, 2009 by DebbieN

(Beside the fact that I’ve never actually liked it, not even as a kid. Too flabby and bland.)

It would be so nice if once in a while, just occasionally–every other Thursday would probably be enough–the processed food industry judged nutritional value the way the CDC or NIH public health guidelines do. (The USDA and its Food Pyramid scheme, all versions, are too compromised toward the food industry for me to include.)

Take a small health column in today’s Washington Post—Jennifer LaRue Huget comments on Oscar Meyer’s claim that a classic peanut butter and jelly sandwich has nothing on a classic bologna sandwich for health. Their contention is that the bologna sandwich is healthier because it has only 4 grams of sugar, and somewhat less total fat than a sandwich’s worth of peanut butter, about 2 tablespoons.

Huget proceeds to tear that argument down with a simple look at the nutrition label stats for both and a smidgen of common sense–why would bologna have sugar in it anyway? The bologna has less total fat but somewhat more saturated fat and cholesterol, and it has only 3 grams of protein for peanut butter’s 8. And what about the salt–800 mg for a sandwich with a single slice of bologna, compared with a PBJ at 490 mg–which is still high by my standards, but I guess it’s salted peanut butter, and quite a bit of the salt is probably in the bread itself (incidentally, did Oscar Meyer include bread in its sodium count for the bologna sandwich? did it use the same kind of bread in the PBJ comparison? Hmmm….)

Well anyway, Huget doesn’t need to work too hard to make her case. Still, there are issues she doesn’t even scratch. Obviously Oscar Meyer is trying to play up its few nutritional points and hide its glaring weaknesses–most of the processed food players have been doing this aggressively for years now. We’re mostly inured to it, and frankly we expect bologna to be high-salt and kind of fatty. No big surprises there.

So let’s get back to the main strangeness of this comparison and ask the key questions: How could peanut butter possibly have more protein than bologna? Isn’t bologna meat? What’s going on?

I headed for the USDA Nutrient Database to find out. As much as I distrust the USDA’s dietary advice and its Food Pyramid, the nutrient database is pretty vast and pretty consistent, and its holdings aren’t branded.

The protein in bologna and most other processed sandwich meats–not just Oscar Meyer brand but others as well–is considerably lower than in the same amount of plain unprocessed cooked meat. We’re talking 3 grams of protein in a 28-gram (1-oz) slice.

Oscar Meyer’s bologna is made in descending order of “mechanically separated” chicken and pork bits and then a variety of corn derivatives, both syrup and starch, plus gelatin and other fillers.

Normally you look at the top two ingredients and think “Meat! That’s the main ingredient! It’s chock-full of protein!” Actual chicken and pork–the solid meat, not the skin or fat of the chicken, and not bacon–contain about 25 grams of protein per 100 grams of meat, according to the USDA nutrient database, or about 7 grams of protein per 28 grams of meat. Not 3 grams per 28. By the time you get to bologna, you’ve got less than half the protein of actual meat.

You have two possibilities here for how that happens:

1. The company’s definition of “chicken” and “pork” includes a hefty proportion of skin and solid fat most people trim away and throw out rather than eat when they buy actual chicken or pork. Fat doesn’t have protein in it but it does weigh something. Should it be allowed to qualify as “meat”?

2. The percentages of the chicken and pork bits in the bologna are just enough higher than those of each of the filler ingredients to qualify as leading ingredients on the label, but the actual proportion of chicken-plus-pork to the total filler is something under half.

So bologna leaves a lot to be desired even compared to an old standard like PBJ, especially today when you can get peanuts-only peanut butter without fillers, and fruit-only fruit spreads without added sugars or corn syrup. And you can look on the nutrition label to find out what’s in it and what it’s worth nutritionally.

But what disturbs me, even more than the clear and present need for Huget’s column to point out Oscar Meyer’s casual sophistry in this over-informed day and age, are some of the comments her column generated. The Washington Post has a pretty liberal comment policy on just about every opinion article.

I expected some type of Food Police accusations to crop up. I’m not sure they didn’t, eventually, but when I read the piece this morning, what struck me was just how many of the commenters waxed nostalgic about how much they loved bologna. How, even with all its and Oscar Meyer’s obvious flaws, they still craved bologna when they saw the word in print. Even when they’d actually read the whole article. Brought them right back to the good old days of the elementary school cafeteria. Worse, it brought them a specific craving for bologna with mayonnaise on white bread. That plus Velveeta to cap things off. I ask you, is there any hope?

Filed under: Food Politics, kid food, nutrition | Tagged: Big Food, bologna, healthy diet, healthy kids, nutrition labeling, Oscar Meyer, peanut butter, processed food industry, protein, public health, school lunch, USDA nutrient database | Comments Off on The Case Against Bologna

Food as Barometer

Posted on October 7, 2009 by DebbieN

The past week has seen a number of shock waves go through the food world.

Gourmet magazine’s announced closing yesterday is the latest and the one with the best PR. Gourmet‘s editor, Ruth Reichl, has turned what was once the flagship publication of foodie-ism into something more like Vogue for food–high-gloss, decorator restaurant food (the focus of her previous career) with recipes that ranged from routine to fanciful, from decadent but enticing to over-the-top, impractical, even wasteful and ridiculous, particularly in the last couple of years. A few memorable examples of the latter–lamb cooked with a stewing sauce that included something like a cup of whole coffee beans in an ingredient list some 20 or so items long, a chicken liver paté with a ton of added butter to simulate foie gras when that dish was outlawed in Chicago, and a chocolate and sesame butter tart with so many elaborate steps and so much extra fat in each layer–with nearly obvious clashes of flavor–you could practically choke.

Reichl, whose memoirs I have nonetheless enjoyed a great deal, seems to have been in on the official food world’s migration to recipe titles–and restaurant menu listings–so long they owe more to Proust, or perhaps Balzac, than to James Beard. Then again, Proust called madeleines madeleines, not “little ridged pure butter genoise microcakes with microplaned lime rind, baked in the shape of elongated shallow clamshells”. Goodness knows what today’s foodie superstar chefs would come up with for a title.

And yet Gourmet, with its glossy ads for show kitchens and olive oils and edible vacations in exotic locales, has tried to broaden readers’ ideas and ideals on occasion, and that’s Reichl’s influence too. If the cover one month showed coveted seating at a prestigious Paris restaurant, the tablecloth and glassware sternly hushed in preparation for the pre-theater crowd, or the cliffside view of an Italian trattoria table with a glass bowl in the foreground brimming voluptuously with prawns, greens, oysters and a coral-hued or purplish octopus, other issues sent staff into the mountainous inner reaches of China to report on the poverty and generosity of villagers there.

It’s hard to imagine how Reichl and her staff pictured reconciling the ultra-affluent with the world-conscious, and perhaps their attempts failed to convince either luxe advertisers or Condé Nast this year in particular. But I can see how Gourmet‘s underlying spirit of foodie-ism has led to the explosion of adventurous, hands-on food blogs of a younger working generation as they discover both real food and the desire to learn to cook it.

But Gourmet isn’t the most important food barometer, particularly because it represents a shrinking target audience at the top of the food chain, as it were. Rumbles farther down the scale have been quieter but with any luck perhaps one hopeful sign will be more lasting and more influential.

Last Thursday, the L.A. Times reported that the federal WIC (Women, Infants and Children) food supplement program will now allow participants to spend their vouchers on fresh produce and whole grains. The allowance isn’t really big– $6/month per eligible child, $8 per pregnant woman or mother of a child under 5, and $10 per nursing mother, or about $14/month on average for a typical family, but it’s a start.

More promising is that the changes would push stores that want to accept WIC vouchers to stock fresh produce and whole grains. That might put at least modest quantities of decent foods within reach in lots of inner city neighborhoods, and it means farmers’ markets can also start qualifying to accept vouchers.

In the Los Angeles area and Orange County, the WIC program is especially important–out of more than 12 million people, something like 316,000 low-income people are enrolled in WIC. More than 8 million people are enrolled nationwide at a cost of slightly under $7 billion per year, with vouchers of about $60 total per family per month. Less than $1000 per family per year even counting the administrative costs of the program. It makes the Food Stamp program seem generous by comparison.

The new shift toward allowing fruits, vegetables, and whole grains under WIC isn’t adding anything to the total Congress allots–the cost for these vouchers has been taken from some of the dairy and juice allowance. But local WIC officers are still grateful and think it’ll make a big difference to their clients, some of whose children have never tasted fresh broccoli.

It’s a far cry from the fuss over the blight on homegrown heirloom tomatoes in the northeastern states this summer.

Filed under: cooking, Eating out, Food Blogs, Food Politics, frugality, nutrition, Vegetabalia | Tagged: farmers' markets, Food Blogs, Food Politics, Food Stamps, fresh produce, frugality, fruits and vegetables, Gourmet magazine, maternal nutrition, nutrition, poverty, Ruth Reichl, WIC program | Comments Off on Food as Barometer

Spaghetti Squash Too Many Ways

Posted on September 30, 2009 by DebbieN

Just half of a microwaved spaghetti squash makes 5 or 6 cups!

This week my local Trader Joe’s had crates of beautiful–and hefty–spaghetti and butternut squash for less than $2 apiece–on the order of 30 to 50 cents/lb. So of course I got two of each and wobbled out of the store unsure which bag was pulling me down further. And then came the task of cooking them.

One spaghetti squash–a good-sized 5-6 lb. beast–will feed a lot more people than you’d think. It’s got some serious advantages over standard pasta: more fiber, no sodium, some vitamin A and potassium, perhaps fewer calories and carbohydrates per ounce. And it’s incredibly versatile. And you can cook it in the microwave in about 10 minutes rather than spend an hour baking it and heating up the house.

But there’s one big disadvantage–if you cook the whole thing, you have to eat the whole thing. Cooked spaghetti squash doesn’t hold up in the freezer–the strings go flat and shrivelly. And reheating too long can make it wilt as well. So can very acidic dressings.

So the choices are (for a small, moderately but only moderately tolerant family unit):

Cook half at a time and store the other half raw and wrapped in the fridge for a few days
Cook both halves, use one right away, and store the other half in the fridge for a few days, either wrapped in its shell or else scooped out into a container (recommended)
Give the other half to a friend–but not too good a friend…
Cook it all and make it for a big potluck. Maybe people will think it’s innovative and exotic…depends on what you do with it (I don’t so much recommend marinara for this if you’re looking to impress–maybe a peanut-curry sauce or an Alfredo-style sauce with lemon peel, or something involving oyster mushrooms)
Cook it all and serve it a couple of different ways over the course of the week
Make a couple of the variations ones that taste good cold and eat the leftovers for lunch (recommended)

One important tip (learned the hard way):

The strands grow crosswise inside the spaghetti squash, not lengthwise. If you cut the squash in half the way you would a watermelon, you’ll be cutting the strands into shorter bits–not what you want. Cut the spaghetti squash in half across the middle of the SHORT side, NOT from the stem to the flower end.

If you have kids, let them count the seeds in each half of the squash–it’s a good lesson in plant survival strategies. My daughter and I counted about 80-90 seeds per half and decided to wash, dry and save them for her school’s garden. At this rate, they’ll have spaghetti squash for several years. Note of caution: out of 10 that we thought had been lost down the sink but actually got caught in the drainer, a full 9 germinated, so be careful what you wish for… even commercially grown, these things are very, very determined. But we’re not ready to name any of them “Audrey II”–yet. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Microwave tricks, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: fruits and vegetables, low-salt cooking, microwave cooking, Microwave tricks, Pasta, recipes, spaghetti squash, Trader Joe's, vegetables, vegetarian, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on Spaghetti Squash Too Many Ways

Can Better Nutrition Curb Violence?

Posted on September 25, 2009 by DebbieN

In the news section of the journal Science this week comes word of a new UK diet study that may have significance for the general population. Researchers have set up a large double-blind study at a prison in Scotland to test the possible effect of nutritional supplementation — vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids — on lowering the frequency of violence. Listen to Science news correspondent John Bohannon’s podcast.

It’s not the first study of its kind–about 30 years of studies in both prisons and schools suggest that diet can affect antisocial behavior–but it’s the biggest and best-designed one to date. Because the study is double-blind, neither the researchers nor the prisoners participating know which ones are getting vitamin supplements and which are getting placebos. The researchers are also conducting cognitive and behavioral tests and taking blood samples in the subjects both before and after the study so they can try to trace which of 12 essential vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids make some kind of a difference to behavior.

The researchers say that, at least anecdotally, incidents at the prison seem to have dropped from two per day to one per day in the few months since the study began, but it’s too soon to tell why or whether the new nutritional supplementation or the study as a whole has anything to do with it. Solid results from the study itself won’t be in until 2012.

If the study does show a real connection between malnutrition and violence in prisons, it may also have implications for school cafeteria food offerings and the fate of American civility under a massively processed diet (or am I reading in based on last week’s live and unscripted entertainments, all three or so, on national television?). It could also bolster current efforts to attract grocery stores to poor urban neighborhoods where fresh foods are scarce–such as the municipal zoning and tax incentives approved yesterday in New York City.

And that brings me to my reservation about this study–the researchers are studying improved nutrition, but they’re attempting to improve the prisoners’ nutrition with supplements–vitamin pills–and not with a better integrated diet.

The prison study is kind of bare-bones in that the outcome they’re looking to measure is a drop in violent behavior. Certainly using vitamin supplements and placebo pills is a neat, controllable way to study nutritional supplementation–neater and more precise than testing whole-foods kinds of diets. I’m not saying it’s the wrong way to design this particular study, and if it’s a real improvement in nutrition over the usual prison diet, then it may actually work well enough. But it’s something that’s just begging for exploitation if it does work, because magic bullet-style remedies are so popular in the world of Big Food, government, and even the general public.

In poor neighborhoods, prisons, and other places where malnutrition is common, vitamin and other nutritional supplements may be the fastest, most efficient and inexpensive way to remedy the severe shortages of fresh unprocessed food. That’s what those pills were designed to do, back in the days when there wasn’t much junk food or fast food, and malnutrition walked with starvation, not obesity. And I would never begrudge anyone who needs them. But they shouldn’t become the end of the road.

I reject the idea that you can feed people any kind of processed slop, and as long as you dose it or them with vitamin pills, everything will be great. I know, I know, that’s partly because I like to cook actual food and think processed stuff tastes a lot more like the cardboard and styrofoam packaging it came in than the packaging itself.

I also know I’m out of step. The fact is that people have been eating this way for a generation or more. Vitamin pills have been around in both adult and children’s versions, heavily advertised on TV, since I was a kid. And they’re really cheap–cheaper than fresh food. And even so they’re very high-profit margin items.

In the larger context I would hope that for most people, the big take-home message from the study (if it proves a connection) doesn’t become, “Just add more processed vitamins to processed food–that’s eating twice as healthy!”

Outside of prison walls, I want to see vulnerable neighborhoods get grocery stores that sell fresh produce at affordable prices. Ironically, up to now, the only major grocery chain willing to take on America’s inner city neighborhoods (before the offer of zoning and tax incentives as far as I know) has been the UK’s Tesco, not an American chain.

Tesco has been trying to get its small-scale Fresh&Easy markets up to speed now for two years. In April, news tickers reported shortfalls for the Fresh&Easy stores, some of which were built, stocked, and then left shuttered–they’d expanded too quickly and US pundits at the time thought they hadn’t really tested their markets well enough ahead of opening.

But in fact since that time, most of the open ones have stayed open, and few have actually failed–maybe 15 percent. The new incentives should help attract American supermarkets, but so should the relative success of Tesco’s model in what everyone expects to be a high-fail zone. If they can hang on they might change the game and make inner city life more civilized and more livable. Who knows? Now Whole Foods is mulling it over.

Filed under: Food Politics, nutrition | Tagged: diet and violence, diet studies, diets in prisons, Food Politics, inner city neighborhoods, New York City grocers, nutrition, nutritional supplements, public health, Science, social justice, vitamin supplements | Comments Off on Can Better Nutrition Curb Violence?

Honeycake for a Sweet New Year

Posted on September 18, 2009 by DebbieN

Rosh Hashanah starts this evening and we need a honeycake–it’s traditional, plus I like it. Right. But traditional recipes call for boiling the honey with strong coffee (which takes a while), cooling it (which takes even longer), triple-sifting flour and baking soda and sugar and spices of various kinds, and then alternating between adding dry stuff and the honey-coffee mixture to some beaten eggs and oil. This is much more of a pain than it sounds in so few words. Picture wax paper and bowls all over the counter and the kitchen table, and a huge stack of stuff to clean afterward. All for one or two loaves of what’s essentially a rich gingerbread.

One year I got smart–I think it was the year I bought both Silver Palate cookbooks and found their gingerbread recipe, which is incredibly simple and calls for molasses–surely it would work with honey? And it does.

Then I took things a step farther–having made a bunch of box-mix cakes in the era when Duncan Hines started recommending applesauce instead of oil for a lower-calorie cake, I knew that worked pretty well, and it does here too.

Then I really got weird and microwaved the cake–you can, and it works, but my daughter and her friend are doing it this afternoon as a project (I’m tarping the entire dining table and floor) so this year I’m sticking with tradition. Even though the temperatures are back up in the low 90s. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Desserts | Tagged: baking, cakes, gingerbread, honeycake, recipes, Rosh Hashanah, Silver Palate | Comments Off on Honeycake for a Sweet New Year

Microwave tricks–When the peach doesn’t ripen

Posted on September 16, 2009 by DebbieN

What if you’re stuck with supermarket peaches or nectarines that looked good, were on an incredible discount, smelled like they had potential if you left them out on a counter for a couple of days, and then when you did, they somehow never really ripened? Just turned mushy or the texture of a pale yellow sponge inside, with a lackluster taste to match, and developed an ugly, gelatinous brown layer near the pit? And to make it worse, you’d enthusiastically bought five or more?

Spongy peaches in need of rescue

I’ve discovered–the hard way–that all is not lost. As long as they’re only blah, not actually mildewed or spoiled, even failed peaches like these can be rescued and put to work.

Sugaring lightly before microwaving

Sugaring fruit and letting it stand is an age-old trick for bringing out fuller flavor–strawberries are the classic, but it works for peaches and nectarines too. It wasn’t enough on its own to make the peaches edible raw, but I figured if I nuked them the flavor might come up in the cooking, and the texture might be fixed too. So I tried it a couple of ways, one just the peaches on their own, and two other versions mixed with other more flavorful fruit.

[update ~ 2017: I have tweaked the raw peach method here]

Microwave Peach (or Nectarine) Compote or Jam

The first thing to do is wash the peaches well and cut as much usable flesh off the pit as possible. Take a small sliver and taste it–if it’s just bland or spongy but still has at least a tinge of fruit flavor, you can use it.

Chop up the peaches and put them in a pyrex bowl. Leave the skins on–this is where at least some of the flavor is going to come from. Sprinkle on a few spoonfuls of sugar and squeeze some lemon juice over them. Cover the bowl with a plate and microwave on high for a few minutes (3-4 min in a ~1100W oven). When you uncover the bowl, the fragrance should start coming up and the pieces will have turned translucent and produced a bit of pinkish-bronze juice. You can taste and see if that’s good enough for you, or cook another minute or so, perhaps with a sprinkle of cinnamon (very good) and/or a thin slice of fresh ginger. Maybe a star anise pod or a couple of cloves if you’re doing this as a compote and feeling really food glam that day, but I didn’t try these myself, so I can’t vouch for them. Cool, chill, and serve with yogurt or ice cream.

For jam, mash the peaches with a fork before the final minute in the microwave. Once it’s cooled, the mixture will thicken and the cinnamon and/or ginger will play off the peach flavor for a good chunky jam.

Microwave peach compote

Mixed-Fruit Compote or Jam

The second compote/jam strategy calls for mixing the fresh peach or nectarine chunks with another fruit before microwaving. I have two suggestions here that turned out reasonably successful–one is a handful of chopped dried apricots that have soaked up for about 1/2 hour in boiling water or orange juice, and the second choice, a bit odd perhaps, is sliced strawberries mixed in with the peach chunks.

In both cases I went extremely easy on sugar compared to what’s called for in traditional jam-making. I wasn’t making a lot, it was going straight into the fridge and I was going to use it quickly. Plus I’d pretty much always rather eat a jam that’s more fruit and less sticky stuff. I know, I know, technically that makes it a “fruit spread” rather than proper jam, but do I care?

For the mixed jam with dried/soaked apricots, I microwaved a handful–15 or so–chopped apricots in water to cover for 2 minutes and let stand covered for half an hour, then put them in the food processor with large raw peach chunks — in my case, the peach was oversized, like a softball, so maybe two normal tennis-ball-sized ones would be about right–and a couple of spoonfuls of sugar and pulsed them just enough to blend fairly well without losing all the texture. Then I squeezed lemon juice on the mixture and poured it back into the pyrex bowl to microwave a few minutes as above. I poured the hot mixture into a very clean hot 1-lb jam jar and screwed down the lid–the lid did suck in as it cooled, but I wasn’t counting on that so I kept it in the fridge and ate it over the next week or so.

Another peach I cut up and microwaved straight with some strawberry slices mixed in because they were the last ones in the pint. Again I don’t think I added more than a tablespoonful or two of sugar and a squeeze of lemon, but what happened was the strawberries, instead of going slimy, gave the warm compote a baked comfort-food kind of taste that I hadn’t expected and looked nicer as well. I’d been thinking cooked strawberries would look as bad as they do in strawberry jam, but they didn’t, and without too much sugar (or corn syrup, in the commercial jams I hate) they kept some of their bright flavor too.

None of these ideas is as satisfying as biting into a perfectly ripe, exceedingly juicy peach (or nectarine) at the height of summer, but all of them are pretty good in their own right, they don’t take long, and they’re handy saves for fruit that turns out to be less than you expected.

Filed under: cooking, frugality, fruits, Microwave tricks, sauces and condiments | Tagged: cooking, cooking with fruit, fresh produce, frugal living, homemade jam, microwave cooking, peaches, produce, recipes | Comments Off on Microwave tricks–When the peach doesn’t ripen

Canteloupe Ice or, I Conquer my Fridge

Posted on September 15, 2009 by DebbieN

Don’t exactly know what to call this–it’s something between a sorbet and a granita, and it’s got only three ingredients–an extremely ripe canteloupe (no spoilage though) that had been sitting in my fridge for more than a week, the juice of a fairly large lime, and roughly chopped leaves from a sprig of rosemary. I scrubbed the canteloupe before cutting into it (old lab habits and new salmonella warnings combined, I guess), seeded it and puréed the flesh with the lime juice and rosemary in my food processor until it seemed pretty well smooth, then packed it into a 2-quart microwave container with a lid and still-froze it. I guess if I thawed it enough to break it back into chunks, I could regrind it finer in the food processor–I’ve done it with other still-frozen ices, but this time I didn’t bother. It did need thawing in the microwave to be able to scoop it out for serving–about 2 minutes on defrost.

That’s it. So it’s roughly 97 percent canteloupe with about 2 percent juice of a lime and 1 percent or less chopped fresh rosemary leaves. Can I say it’s made with 100% real fruit, then? No fake fruit involved (unless it was a franken-canteloupe–is that the northern equivalent to the chupacabras? It’s the right color for a new halloween monster, anyway)

And may I register a complaint about the interloper spelling that seems to have taken over since my youth–cantaloupe isn’t the same. It just isn’t.

But the canteloupe ice is nothing to complain about. Ginger would certainly also be good in place of the rosemary. Next year, maybe.

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Desserts, fruits | Tagged: cantaloupe, canteloupe, cooking with fruit, granita, ices, rosemary, sorbet | Comments Off on Canteloupe Ice or, I Conquer my Fridge

A Bowl of Dough in a Book

Posted on September 14, 2009 by DebbieN

For anyone who’s read my previous post, A Bowl of Dough in the Fridge, a quick recommendation:

Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François, is gaining a big following among people who’ve tried out the recipes. This bread book, developed by an avid home baker and a professional pastry chef, uses the same basic strategy I do, but they’ve worked out quite a number of variations on a couple of master recipes, and they’ve come out with a general formula that works pretty well.

They have a basic white boule with a crunchy crust–something to shape a variety of classic ways, French through Italian, with or without olives or olive oil. They have several whole wheat and pumpernickel and rye versions with a thinner shiny crackled crust. They have challah AND brioche, and they have classic bagels AND Montreal sweet bagels. And they have chocolate babka. And they have demonstration photos and tips at the right points in the recipes to be helpful.

Among the differences between their basic white boule recipe and my typical dough are much more yeast for the amount of flour and water–they use a packet and a half for 6 cups of flour and 3 of water–and a lot more salt as well–a tablespoon and a half. The initial rise is faster–about 2 hours instead of 5 or so–but I’m not sure what the true effect of the salt is other than taste and reflexive habit–François is CIA-trained, and that school tends to emphasize salt, judging from the chefs who’ve graduated from there and gotten into print.

The other factor that’s different is they don’t call for kneading at all–once you’ve stirred the flour into the liquids and everything’s more or less uniform, that part’s done. Rise and chill.

That’s solid enough for the chewy hard-crusted no-knead bread style of bread, but will it work for challah, which usually calls for extensive kneading to develop the classic long feathery crumb? Inquiring minds want to know.

So I’m going to try their white boule and their challah (though here I’ll cut the salt back for my own taste) and let you know how it goes. I’m looking forward especially to see if the challah crumb can really be achieved without the 10-minute knead and multiple rises.

Filed under: books, breads, cooking, Revised recipes | Tagged: artisan breads, babka, bagels, baguette, baking, boulangerie, bread, challah, ciabatta, cookbooks, couronne, dough, European breads, foccaccia, pain d'epi, yeast | Comments Off on A Bowl of Dough in a Book

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